Dan had to mentally wrest his senses from the sight to stay on track. Helping was the feeling of Peter Conley’s hand back on his shoulder once again.
“Yeah,” Cougar whispered to him as he passed. “I had the same problem the first time I walked in here.” Then Conley moved on to the center of the space, which had been subtly designed as a figurative and literal focal point.
Above what looked like a table made from an ancient redwood tree trunk was a holographic image of a turning Earth. On the other side, his face seen through the slowly revolving planet, was Scott Renard, wearing what had come to be known as the “Steve Jobs look”—black shirt and pants.
Seated beside him was Lily Randall, wearing the same things the other Zeta operatives wore. Seated opposite each other at the three and nine o’clock positions were men who weren’t wearing the Zeta outfits. But they were men Dan recognized.
One was ex-military, nicknamed Hot Shot, and the other was the geek of all geeks known as Chilly. He made even Linc look like an investment banker. They were Renard’s best hackers and dressed accordingly—Hot Shot in olive khaki t-shirt and pants, Chilly in shorts and a Zootopia t-shirt.
“Hey guys,” Dan acknowledged them as he neared, but they didn’t react in the slightest. They only had eyes and ears and fingers for their laptops.
Dan glanced at Linc, who met his gaze as he sat next to Karen at the one and two o’clock spots. He pursed his lips, lowered his eyes, and minutely shook his head in a “don’t bother them” motion.
Dan noted his partner pulling out a chair at the seven o’clock spot, while motioning for him to try the five o’clock position. Again, Dan should not have been surprised that the chairs—which looked like they had been made from the same redwood—were extraordinarily comfortable.
With a single look at them all, he knew that he was back to being part of a true team. Not one leader and a bunch of subordinates. It was a group of eight leaders, all with their own specific areas of expertise.
“On the night of April twenty-sixth,” Lily began, “an unprecedented attack was launched on our organization. An attack of extraordinary scope, whose purpose, apparently, was to effectively destroy Zeta in a single stroke.” The young woman paused to look at the others. “In at least six instances, that attack failed.”
Then she focused on Dan. “We’ll fill you in on how we survived …”
“We were at a Comic Con,” Linc interjected. “As Link and Zelda.”
Although O’Neal slapped Shepard on the arm again, Dan barked out a laugh—the first laugh he’d had in days, for which he was extremely grateful. He could just see them as the lovers from the beloved videogame The Legend of Zelda, as well as understand why any of the hateful, short-sighted, tunnel-visioned Anti-Zeta wouldn’t have seen them.
To his pleasure, everyone, save Chilly and Hot Shot, laughed as well, although Dan thought he noticed the latter hacker give a small smirk …but that might have been at something he saw on his screen.
Dan looked back to Lily as she spoke again, but before he did, he noticed the hackers’ extraordinary rapid eye movement. Whatever the two were doing, it was intense and continual, explaining why they weren’t reacting to anything else.
“Okay,” Lily continued, “we’ll fill you in on more of how we survived, but the rest of us know that already.”
“Gotcha,” Dan interrupted, then filled them in on everything that happened since he’d arrived at his house, which seemed a lifetime ago. He spoke with excruciating but exacting detail, so they could glean as much about their enemy as possible. He also couldn’t help asking a question or two.
“I can’t tell you how they did it,” Scott Renard answered the first one. “I can only tell you how I would have.”
Dan pushed himself away from the table to get a better view of the man. This ought to be good, he thought. It was.
“Knowledge is doubling every year,” Renard explained. “For good and ill. The same research that went into developing, say, the Flying Fox aircraft or the medical advances we’re using to help your daughter heal, is also being brought to bear on weapons of war. Where, just a few years ago, you’d need dozens of explosive devices to bring down a building the size of Zeta HQ, now the same might be accomplished with one device per floor, or even just one device …if you understand the building’s structure.”
“How do you mean?” Dan wondered.
“Well,” Renard continued, “just like the human body, buildings have weak spots. A good, and terrible, example was the World Trade Center. Any layman watching couldn’t understand why a building that tall, with just one hole at the top, would collapse entirely. That was why some were so certain it was an inside job—a conspiracy that involved dozens, if not hundreds of devices secretly planted throughout. Now, while the new World Trade Center can’t be brought down by any one device short of a nuclear one, Zeta HQ might have been.”
“Might?” Dan pounced on the word.
“Might,” Randall interjected. “With the building already down, and the enemy still at large, it’s difficult to collect the necessary intel to know for sure.”
“Yeah, Dan,” Conley drawled. “Your Serbian frenemy was pretty obviously recruited by whoever we’re dealing with because she loves you so much.” Dan grimaced, but Conley ignored the reaction and continued. “But we think the others always stay helmeted because if we saw their faces, we might recognize or identify them.” He glanced at Lily. “Our guess is that they’re loose cannons from all over the world …and probably some likely suspects we’ve worked with, or worked against, in the past—like Amina.”
Conley turned toward Renard, who tapped the table, and Amina’s revolving head appeared, floating in the air between them. Dan noted that it was pre-scarred Amina.
“Amina Novakovic,” Lily said. “Five feet, seven inches tall, a hundred and twenty-eight pounds…”
“Of solid muscle,” Dan interjected, making Conley chuckle once more.
“Born in 1987,” Lily continued, “so she was four when the Croatian War of Independence started…”
Conley’s smile disappeared. “Just in time for the atrocities between Croat and Serb,” he said. “With the Muslims, and Amina, in the middle.” He glanced at Dan. “A lot of anger and hate there …to be taken out, apparently, on anyone she can get her hands on.”
“Lucky me.” Dan looked at the others around the table. “I mean that. Luckily, I have some guardian angels who went way out of their way to find me. And speaking of that, what did you do to her and her buddies? In New Mexico, I mean.”
Both Conley’s and Renard’s faces grew assured smiles.
“Oh, you mean what did Palecto do to them?” Conley replied, only to turn his head toward O’Neal. “You better explain, Karen,” he said. “It’s too much for this old gunslinger to fathom.”
“D.E.W.,” she said. “Morning dew.” She looked at Dan apologetically for her self-aware play-on-words, then translated. “Directed Energy Weapon,” she told Dan. “Uses invisible things we take for granted, like microwaves or particle beams, tightens them to their most powerful, and employs them as clubs or swords or whatever.” She continued with satisfaction. “But we like to use sound.”
“Okay,” Dan interrupted, holding up his hands in surrender. “You’re losing me.”
Renard tapped, then slid his finger across the table top, and a video of military and law enforcement tests appeared in the air between them. Dan watched as test subjects and objects were damaged or knocked down by …nothing he could see.
Dan cocked his head to the side. “Still lost.”
“Okay, Danny boy,” Conley chimed in. “Let me put it into words you might understand. Palecto took an anvil made up of solid sound, and dropped it on the Guardian MAX like it was an open accordion. Remember how it sunk and the top folded like a fan?” He waited until Dan agreed before continuing. “That’
s the sound of power.”
Renard’s forefinger tapped the videos off. “Yes,” he said, “hard to fathom, but believe it or not, you’re sitting in a great, and again, a terrible example.” He motioned toward his hackers on either side of the table. “Though Fox Burrow is both visually and electronically camouflaged, and appears, on the surface, to rest in one of the most beautiful and secure locations in the country, it is, even now, being bombarded by digital attacks, as if every hacker from Afghanistan to Zanzibar has been given one assignment, and one assignment only.”
He pointed at Dan Morgan.
“To get you.”
Chapter 19
Before Dan could react, Conley, Randall, and O’Neal had a race to see who could stand up first. Cougar won, but Karen got the reason why out of her mouth quicker.
“Alex is awake.”
The debriefing was adjourned just long enough for everyone—save Chilly and Hot Shot—to get to the intensive care unit. It then reconvened around Alex’s bedside.
As they entered the bright, friendly environment designed in white with turquoise accents, they saw Alex sitting up in a sleek robotic bed, wearing a U-neck t-shirt of the same material they all wore, save Renard. Dan glanced at two computer tablets that flanked her—attached by medi-pads at her wrist, throat, forehead, and chest—before turning his full, smiling attention on her.
“Looking good, Hot Shot,” he said with relief. That got a smile out of her.
“Looking hot, good shot.” Cougar said, coming up behind Dan. That got a laugh out of her. Then the others gathered around for hugs and welcomes.
When she stepped back, Karen noticed that Linc looked like he’d been thinking about saying the same “looking hot” line before he was beaten to it. But they both knew that Cougar was really the only one who could’ve gotten away with it.
Meanwhile, Dan opened his mouth to say more to his daughter, but then his eyebrows rose and he snapped his head to face O’Neal.
“Hey, how did you know she was awake?”
Karen merely tapped her earlobe with a forefinger.
“What?” Dan complained. “You got new ear-comms?” He turned to Linc. “Toss me one.”
The I.T. wiz looked sheepish. “Not that easy, Dan,” he said apologetically.
Alex proved she was fully awake by being way ahead of her father. “Zeta HQ was destroyed, remember?” she told him. She looked at all the over-the-cutting-edge equipment around her before returning her attention to him. “They probably got next-gen Fox-tech now, right?”
Lily smiled as her boyfriend approached Dan.
“We’ll install one in both of you before you leave,” Renard promised.
“Leave the mountain?” Dan wondered, not wanting to wait that long.
“Leave this room,” Renard corrected. “Unlike the Zeta ear-comms, which I always considered bulky, the next-gen R-comm needs a short procedure to install.” He waited a beat, then mentioned, “I didn’t name it, by the way.” He glanced at Lily, who by her proud expression, took the credit.
“Bulky?” Dan echoed. The last ear-comm they got looked like a flattened lima bean. “What does this R-comm look like?”
Linc gave Dan a sheepish look. “What can I say?” he conceded. “When he’s right, he’s right.”
“The R-comm looks like nothing, Dan,” Conley informed him, before reconsidering. “Actually, it might look like a blackhead …if you put it under a microscope.”
“But …R-comm?” Dan echoed.
Renard’s expression acknowledged it might not be the most elegant of names. “I wanted to call it ‘Entendre,’ which is French for ‘Understand,’” he explained, “but marketing said no way. They came back with ‘Extender,’ which I thought sounded like a male enhancement drug, so…”
“So,” Lily took up, “saner, more brand-conscious, heads prevailed.”
Dan looked at the others. “So it does everything the ear-comms did?” he wondered aloud.
“And more,” Lily added, in a softened tone that gave him the impression that she was trying to save an old man’s sanity. “It also translates every major first world language…”
“And many of the second world ones,” Linc interjected.
“…including multiple dialects of Mandarin, not to mention both the male and female idioms of Japanese.” She looked up, literally and figuratively, to her boyfriend, Renard.
He smiled down at her, then turned his head back toward Dan. “It can be adjusted to any country you visit.”
Dan’s expression told them they were wise to approach it in the way they did. “What?” he said. “How does that work?”
The others looked to Renard, who continued. “They speak their language,” he said, “you hear yours. Honestly, you’ll have to experience it for yourself.”
Dan was going to cut the conversation short before it degenerated into complete marketing speak, but then looked from Renard to Alex, and back again.
“Wait a minute. You hear a voice in your ear?”
“Dad…” Alex started.
“No, wait,” he told his daughter, then turned back to Renard. “You hear someone else’s voice in your ear?”
Renard put his hands up to signal patience. “While you were telling us your story in the salon,” he explained, “I texted the physician to thoroughly check Alex for any sign of anything like the R-comm anywhere in her body.”
He looked toward the head of the bed, to a tall woman in a lab coat who had a name tag that read “Dr. Whittaker.” She shook her head “no.”
Dan didn’t bother trying to get details of the equipment used. He was already certain it would be way beyond him.
“I’ll admit I’m as perplexed by Alex’s inner voice as you were,” Renard confessed. He held up an apologetic hand as Alex opened her mouth to remind them it wasn’t an inner voice. “Please forgive me,” Renard continued. “I meant to say Alex’s advising voice. But, in any case, the science of nanorobotics is advancing faster than almost anything else, while, at the same time, it’s far more secretive than anything else because of the weaponization potential. It’s possible that technology could explain what she heard.”
Dan didn’t want to parrot unfamiliar words yet again, but couldn’t help himself. “Nanorobotics?”
“The creation, and introduction into the human body, of absurdly small robots made of molecular components,” Linc told him.
Dan rolled his eyes at his I.T. friend. “And you think that makes it clearer to me?”
Alex laughed, and put her hand on her father’s arm. “Dad,” she said warmly. “Remember when we saw that movie Osmosis Jones when I was a little girl?”
“Yeah,” Dan replied. “I thought it sucked.”
“It did suck,” Alex agreed, “so you made me watch Innerspace, which didn’t suck, and then Fantastic Voyage, which was cheesy but also didn’t suck.”
“Yeah,” Dan said, more calmly. “I remember.”
“Well,” Alex concluded, “nanorobotics is like that, except real.”
Dan looked to his daughter, then Renard, then the others. “Okay, okay,” he said. “So she could have a little speaker inside her that someone can talk to her through?”
Even Linc looked skeptical, but he said. “It’s possible, I suppose.”
Dan threw his hands into the air. “Will someone give me something to shoot, please?”
Conley laughed, while Randall looked pensive, and Renard re-approached the field operative.
“Alex’s voice could be from a microscopic speck anywhere in her body,” he told him. “And manifest itself in such a way that it seems outside her ear…”
“Or from my subconscious guilt for not being there for Mom when she needed me most,” Alex interrupted regretfully.
Dan turned to her. “If that were the case, young lady,” he said with ste
rn kindness, “then she sure as hell would be talking just outside my ear, not yours.”
The others shuffled around, trying to figure out how best to assuage both their colleagues’ consciences, but Renard took the lead.
“Look,” he lectured them both, “the subconscious mind is an amazing thing, but I have yet to hear of one that is able to spy on approaching attackers…twice.” He looked at the others. “Someone is ahead of us, but someone is also after us, and the sooner we deal with that, the better.”
Turning from their expressions of agreement, Renard faced Alex. “As for your inner or outer voice, I can only advise one thing.” He took a second to include Dan. “Listen. Listen carefully.”
* * * *
The R-comm installation was as promised—short, and as sweet as Dr. Whittaker could make it.
As far as Dan was concerned, all she did was stick a thing that looked like a cross between a Q-tip and a tweezer into his audio canal, then stepped back so Scott Renard and Lily Randall could step forward.
Renard spoke in French. Dan heard it as a soothing rumble in the background, while in the foreground he heard, “The Guardian MAX was found. Or at least its charred skeleton.”
“Behind an abandoned gas station in Pecos Village,” Lily Randall told him in English as she stepped up. “Twenty-five miles west of Santa Fe.”
Dan was impressed. He could hardly tell one of those was spoken in a foreign language.
“Now all I have to do is learn every language, and I’ll be good to go,” he said to Renard. “I don’t suppose Amina or any known wanted terrorist was also spotted in the area,” he said to Randall.
Neither needed to answer. Instead, Renard sat on a wheeled stool and rolled between the two beds on which Alex and her father lay.
War of Shadows Page 13
