Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (20 page)

41

7:15 a.m.

“How…?” Before she could figure out exactly what she was trying to ask, a very different realization dawned. It had been right in front of her, nearly all her life, as obvious as her own reflection in a mirror. “Mercy, are you…like me?”

Mercy’s anxious glance at the older man was answer enough, but before either of them could elaborate, Cray’s partner gestured to an empty seat. “Better buckle up. This could get a little rough.”

The helicopter was tilted forward and accelerating, so the deck on which she lay was slightly askew.
Just like my life
, Jenna thought as she crawled to the chair.

She couldn’t help staring at Mercy, at the woman who looked so much like her, who was so similar to her in temperament and interests. Thirty-six-year-old Mercedes Reyes, a Cuban émigré—
Cuba? Of course. It makes perfect sense now
—had insisted that she couldn’t be Jenna’s mother, that she hadn’t even met Noah until Jenna was three…but then everything Noah had told her was a lie. Had Mercy been in the compound that night? Had she survived and come to America in search of her…sister? Daughter? Clone?

Mercy had known—known Noah’s secret, known the truth about Jenna’s mysterious past.
Why didn’t she tell me?

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

The helicopter dipped forward and Jenna’s stomach rose into her mouth as the aircraft made a roller-coaster steep plunge earthward. Cray pulled himself back from the doorway and slid it closed, blocking her view of the journey. Without looking, she could visualize the helicopter’s movements in the sky above Miami.

The second phony FBI agent gestured to the headphones that he and everyone else wore. Then he pointed over Jenna’s shoulder to a similar headset. She took the headphones and slipped them over her ears, blocking out most of the engine noise.

“Can you hear me?” the man asked. His voice, electronically reproduced, was eerily out of sync with the movements of his mouth, but she could hear him.

“Loud and clear,” she replied, and heard her own voice over the intercom, just a fraction of second later.

“Just hang on,” he advised. “We’re going to be flying pretty low to avoid radar detection. The last thing we need right now is for the Air National Guard to scramble a couple of interceptors. That would really spoil our day.”

The helicopter banked hard, then performed a series of rapid, stomach-churning maneuvers that made further conversation impossible. Jenna risked a glance through the side window, half expecting to see fighter jets streaking past, but she saw only the concrete and glass towers of downtown Miami.

“Nothing to worry about,” Cray volunteered, as if sensing Jenna’s anxiety. “We’re just trying to confuse anyone who’s looking for us.”

As promised, the helicopter soon leveled out, and Jenna’s stomach settled. A few minutes later she felt the craft descending, and shortly thereafter, the landing gear bumped against something solid.

Cray threw open the door to reveal the tarmac of an airport. A quick look around told Jenna that they were probably at Miami International or a nearby satellite airfield. The helicopter had set down a short distance from a hangar building, but as she stepped down onto solid ground, Cray guided her in the opposite direction, toward a waiting airplane. Jenna was not well versed in aircraft identification, but just a glance told her that the only thing this jet had in common with Carlos’s plane was wings.

“Gulfstream IV,” Cray said, as he followed her up the fold-down stairs, into the luxurious cabin. “It will get us where we need to be in about two hours.”

“And where exactly is that?”

“Somewhere safe. Where I can answer all your questions.” She had been expecting Cray to answer, but instead it was the old man’s voice she heard. His tone was soft, and he spoke with an almost musical cadence. He ascended into the cabin, walking with the aid of an ebony cane. He settled into a chair right next to Jenna. Mercy sat across the aisle.

We’re going to Cuba
, Jenna guessed.
Right back where it all started
. It occurred to Jenna that, by choosing to go with them, she had completely relinquished her independence. For twelve hours, the responsibility for her survival had been hers alone. Now, her fate was in the hands of strangers. Even Mercy was an unknown. She suddenly felt very helpless.

At least I won’t die ignorant
. She turned her gaze back to Mercy. “Tell me the truth. Are you my mom?”

Mercy glanced at the old man again before meeting Jenna’s eyes. “Honey, it’s a long story.”

The old man reached out and gave Mercy’s hand a pat. “She has a right to know.” He turned to look at Jenna. “Besides, we’ve got the time, and goodness knows you’ve waited long enough.”

Jenna blinked at him. “
Who
are you?”

The man’s eyebrows drew together in a frown of irritation. “My dear, I apologize for not making proper introductions. My name is Helio Soter, and I… Well, I guess you could say that I made you.”

Jenna got the sense that Soter expected her to be shocked by the news, but coming on the heels of everything else, his vague declaration was both unsurprising and woefully inadequate. “Cort said that I was a clone. Is that true?”

The old man chuckled. “A clone? Well, I suppose that’s not entirely inaccurate. But calling you ‘a clone’ would be like saying that the Mona Lisa is a painting. It’s strictly true, but hardly does justice to what you truly are.”

Jenna turned to Mercy, who nodded to confirm that Sotor was not exaggerating.

There was a brief interruption as the plane was readied for departure, and then Jenna felt motion once more. Just a few hours ago, she had never been on an aircraft. Now, she was about to embark on her third trip into the sky, yet somehow the experience had already lost its novelty. She was much more interested in hearing what Soter had to say.

A few minutes later, when they were cruising through the sky, Soter resumed speaking. “Cloning is a rather generic and dated term for duplicating cells from a sample of genetic material. Scientists have been cloning cells, tissue, even entire animals, for decades. A clone is nothing but a carbon copy, and most clones are imperfect copies at best.”

“Cort showed me pictures of people, men and women, who looked almost identical to me. And her.” She pointed at Mercy. “Was I cloned from you, Mercy? Is that how this works?”

“Jenna, you aren’t a clone,” Sotor insisted. He drew in an appreciative breath. “You are so much more.”

“I don’t understand.” That was not entirely true.
Smarter, stronger…dangerous
. “If I’m not a duplicate, what am I? A different version? Like Human 2.0?”

A faint smile touched Soter’s lips. “I couldn’t have put it better.”

Jenna stared at Soter, then at Mercy. She knew that Mercy was in her late thirties—thirty-six if she had been telling the truth, though that seemed pretty doubtful now. She would have been born in the late 1970s, back when cloning was definitely more the stuff of science fiction. She turned back to Soter. “I think I’ve got this figured out. You took some of Mercy’s DNA, spliced in the Mutant X gene, and started growing super-soldier test-tube babies for the Soviet Union.”

Soter’s smile broadened and then he started to laugh. “Those are some remarkable conclusions, my dear. Unfortunately, they are largely incorrect conclusions.”

Jenna felt her face reddening. She was rarely wrong about anything, and to have this man laughing at her…teasing her with the promise of information, like the candy in a piñata at a child’s birthday party, and then laughing when, blind and disoriented, she struck only air…

“Then fucking help me fill in the gaps,” she said in a tight cold voice.

The man’s smile faded some. “To begin with, I have never worked for the Russian government.”

Jenna wasn’t sure she believed him, but she had only Cort’s statements as evidence against him. Noah hadn’t written exactly where the facility was located. Cuba made sense, though it wasn’t the only island in Hurricane Alley. “Then who do you work for?”

Soter’s smile softened into a more thoughtful expression. “What a marvelous question. My research is funded by the US government, but the work I do is for the benefit of all humankind.”

Jenna considered this boast in the light of what Cort had told her. “From what I’ve heard, your genetically modified clones are about to start World War III. Is that part of the plan to benefit humankind?”

Soter winced. She had struck a nerve. When he spoke again however, he did not answer her directly. “I fear I may have given you the wrong impression of me. You see, I don’t actually know anything about genetic modifications. I’m not that kind of scientist.”

“Then what kind of scientist are you?”

“I dabble in this and that, but my formal training is in the field of mathematics.”

Mathematics? That didn’t make any sense. Despite some serious disagreements, Cort and Soter were in agreement on one point: Jenna and the others were the result of a genetic experiment, and Soter had already claimed to be the genius behind it all. “Why is a mathematician involved in a cloning experiment?”

“That, my dear, is the long story that I will tell you now.”

42

August 20, 1977

2:48 p.m. (local time)

It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t alone. He dropped his burden, a thick sheaf of accordion-folded computer paper, on his desktop and glanced over his shoulder at the man seated in the chair by the door.

The glance told him what the man was
not
.

Not a member of the mathematics department or even, to the best of his knowledge, a faculty member.

Not a student—he was too old and too well dressed.

Not a visiting professor—too young and too well dressed. The man’s clothes and bearing marked him as an outsider, not merely a stranger in the physical sense, but someone completely unfamiliar with the environment and culture in which he now found himself, unaware of just how out of place he was.

A lawyer
.

The man stood and extended a hand. “Are you Dr. Helio Soter?”

Soter was a little surprised to hear the correct pronunciation of his name. Most people meeting him for the first time mangled it—
Heel-ee-oh Saw-ter
being the most common. Sometimes he would patiently explain: “The ‘h’ is silent and the ‘e’ sounds like a long ‘a’. Ay-lee-oh. And Soter rhymes with ‘motor’ not ‘water.’”

He wondered if it was a bad sign that this stranger, who looked an awful lot like a lawyer, already knew how to say his name correctly, but the man had offered his hand. Soter took it. “I am. What’s this about?”

“You are needed for an estimate, sir.”

It took Soter a few seconds to grasp that the man was not asking for him to perform a mathematical task. “You’re from ONE?”

The man’s cheek twitched a little, as if Soter had spoken out of turn, but he nodded. “Please, come with me.”

“I’m giving a lecture in ten minutes. You’ll have to—”

“Cancel it.” The man’s tone indicated that further debate would be futile.

Ten minutes later, when he should have been introducing himself to a hall full of graduate students, Soter found himself in the passenger seat of a Ford Granada, the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shrinking in the rear view mirror. He made no inquiries about where they were going or what was expected of him. The driver seemed a very tight-lipped sort of fellow, and someone would answer Sotor’s questions soon enough. After all, he couldn’t very well give them an estimate if they didn’t provide data.

An estimate
. He found the euphemism rather amusing. He routinely used estimation in the course of his mathematical and statistical research, so it was almost ironic that the men from ONE—the Office of National Estimates—would utilize his expertise in formulating their predictions about world affairs. Indeed, the process of correlating intelligence and drawing probable conclusions was highly mathematical in nature, so all other things being equal, it was probably an appropriate term. Unfortunately, there were factors that always remained elusive in any equation—human variables—and that made all the difference between a well-founded estimate and a best guess.

ONE, a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been founded in the aftermath of the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor—the Communist invasion of the Republic of Korea in 1950. It had resulted in a two-year long open conflict, and an ongoing state of war that persisted nearly thirty years later. The problem had not been a failure of intelligence, but rather a failure to draw accurate conclusions—estimates—based on available information. In the three decades that had followed, ONE had broadened their scope of influence somewhat to include operations, which Soter supposed, was a way of making sure that inaccurate estimations could be steered back on track. But that didn’t concern the mathematician. His job was simply to deal with the numbers.

The Granada pulled up at the Hotel Eliot, and the driver let Soter out. “They’re waiting for you,” the man said. “Room 237.”

Soter nodded and headed inside. Clandestine meetings in hotel rooms were standard for ONE, even when the subject of the estimate did not seem to warrant extraordinary secrecy. The meetings weren’t that much of an inconvenience, and they paid him well.

He took the stairs to the second floor. A short walk down the hall brought him to the door, which opened before he could knock. A man he did not recognize—older than the driver, and wearing an even better suit—stood aside and motioned for him to enter.

The room was heavy with cigarette smoke, but Soter saw three more men seated at a small table. One of them stood up and gestured for Soter to take his chair. He did not recognize any of the men, and while that wasn’t unusual—he had never dealt with the same person twice—it was strange to see so many representatives of ONE in the same place.

A single sheet of paper lay on the tabletop in front of him. A cursory glance revealed numbers, or more precisely typed digits. There were a lot of 1s, but a few 3s and 4s. The arrangement looked like a scatter plot of statistical data, but without a context, Soter couldn’t begin to guess at their significance. Someone had drawn a circle around a vertical column of six digits…no, not just digits. There were letters as well, but only in the circle.

6 E Q U J 5

The same pen had also drawn circles around a 6 and a 7, and then to the left of the numbers scrawled a single word:
Wow!

Soter studied the characters in the circle a moment longer, then took another look at the paper itself. There were no indentations on the page from the ballpoint pen that had drawn the circles and written the exclamation. It was, he realized, a copy made on a Xerox machine.

“What is it?” he asked, looking up.

The man across the table took a long drag on his cigarette, then said, “You tell us.”

So that’s how it’s going to be
, Soter thought. He looked at the paper again, ignoring the handwritten modifications and focused on the printed values instead. “Okay. This is a computer printout. The digits probably represent numbers—”

One of them men at the table snorted. “No kidding.”

“Numbers have a discrete value,” Soter explained, “while digits or numerals are merely symbols that may indicate numbers, or something else entirely.” He pointed to the printout. “Here. Read left to right we have ‘111’ but does that signify one hundred and eleven, or is it three separate figures, each with a value of one? Or are the digits a substitution cipher? Perhaps we should replace 1 with the letter A…”

He trailed off, no longer caring about making his point. The circled column of numbers told him that the figures were meant to be interpreted vertically, and that each character was a separate value. Something about the circled string looked very familiar.

“Each character is a number,” he said again, this time with more confidence. “The use of letters would indicate numerical values greater than nine. The numbers in the circle are actually…give me a pen.”

A pen was passed over, and Soter quickly began writing an alphanumeric key.

A=10

B=11

C=12

D=13

…

When he had found a numerical value for each letter in the sequence, he wrote out a new set of numbers:

6, 14, 26, 30, 19, 5

“Okay, these are the actual values of the alphanumerical characters.” Soter hastily sketched a graph and plotted the points in order.

One of the men at the table shook his head and muttered, “Damn, that was fast.”

Soter met the gaze of the smoking man. “You already knew this, I take it?”

“We’re not trying to be coy, Dr. Soter. It’s important that we get your unbiased impressions.”

The other man—the one who had been impressed by his speed—added, “When you hear where this came from, it’s going to blow your mind.”

Soter thought about the hand-written note on the print-out and decided that the man wasn’t merely being dramatic. “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a frequency table.”

“Radio frequencies.”

It was an odd thing to say, and odder still, it didn’t sound like a question. “No. In this case, it’s the frequency of whatever event these data are recording. These numbers all add up to one hundred, so this is probably an expression of percentages. Most are in the middle…average. That’s the peak here. The sum of these two values in the middle is fifty-six, slightly more than half. Further out, you have two smaller groups that are slightly above or below average, and then out on the edges, even smaller groups that are extremely above or below average.” He shrugged. “This is a textbook probability curve.”

The smoking man’s face drew into a frown, and he snatched the paper. After studying it for a few seconds, he shook his head. “I’ll be damned. They do add up to a hundred. How did they miss that?”

Soter glanced at the assembled group. “Gentlemen, I can continue to make uninformed guesses if you’d like, but I suspect I’ll have better luck making sense of these data if you’ll tell me where they came from.”

The men in the room looked at each other for a moment, and arrived at a silent consensus. The smoking man spoke again. “Dr. Soter, the data here are radio frequencies, received at a listening station in Ohio. You were correct in pointing out that the digits are not precise numerical values. They are actually indicators of signal intensity. The highest value there—thirty—indicates a signal that is thirty times stronger than normal. So you see, it’s literally a frequency table, but not in the sense you thought it was.”

“I don’t think you brought me here just for some anomalous radio signal. What’s really going on?”

“The listening post I refer to is the Big Ear radio telescope, part of the Ohio State SETI project.”

SETI!
Soter recognized the acronym immediately. “This is a transmission from space? From
extraterrestrials
?”

“It is from space,” the smoking man confirmed. “It appears to originate somewhere in the constellation of Sagittarius. It’s too soon to say if there is an intelligence behind it, but it is remarkable for several reasons. To begin with, the peak intensity of the signal was about 1420.4 MHz. To give you a frame of reference, that’s in the Ultra High Frequency range. HAM radios operate in the 1300 MHz range. This signal—we’re calling it the Wow! Signal for obvious reasons—happens to fall at the precise bandwidth of hydrogen, which is the sort of thing astronomers look for as an indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence.

“The spike in intensity was caused by the rotation of the Earth. The signal was constant, but the telescope’s window of observation was only oriented toward the source for seventy-two seconds. That was five days ago. On successive passes, the Big Ear failed to detect the signal again.”

Soter digested this for a moment. “What do you want from me?”

“It is critically important that we determine whether or not this signal is a broadcast from an alien intelligence. If it is, we need to figure out what it’s saying. I don’t need to tell you that mathematics is a universal language. If anyone can decode this transmission, it’s you.”

Soter reached out for the paper, looked at it again, then shook it in the air. “This isn’t a transmission. There’s nothing to decode here.”