Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (27 page)

“She
is
my daughter,” Noah replied in a quiet voice.

He moved so quickly that even Jenna was startled. In the blink of an eye, he was behind Cort, gun drawn and pressed up under Cort’s jaw. Cort dropped his crutches in surprise, letting them clatter loudly on the floor.

Trace and the other two gunmen brought their weapons up, aiming in Noah’s direction. Jenna did not doubt that they were expert marksmen, capable of hitting what little of Noah’s form was visible behind his human shield, but doing so would almost certainly result in Cort’s death. She wondered if that mattered to them. Would they be willing to sacrifice their leader to make sure Jenna was dead?

As if reading her thoughts, Trace shifted his aim to her. “I’ll kill her.”

“Don’t do it,” Noah warned, moving his gun to cover Trace.

More shouted threats sizzled between the armed men, all of them talking but no one hearing. Somebody was going to pull a trigger, and once that happened, everyone in the room would probably die.

Jenna could feel the situation reaching a boiling point. She had to do something to stop the room from exploding into a storm of violence, but what difference could she make, unarmed, exhausted and helpless?

You have to live. They will fear you.

I have to make them fear me
, she thought, and she realized she wasn’t as helpless as she believed.

55

11:20 a.m.

“Stop!”

Jenna’s shout did not merely cut through the tension; time itself seemed to freeze. Then, one by one, guns lowered. The men fought against the command, with shaking muscles and disbelieving expressions. Their compliance was not voluntary. Jenna was as surprised as everyone else. Was this some newly discovered, genetically programmed ability, or an extension of the techniques Noah had taught her? Regardless of the explanation, she knew the effect would not last. She could already sense the window of opportunity sliding shut.

“Listen to me, all of you. Don’t you get it? If we don’t start working together, we’ll all be screwed.”

What are you doing?

She ignored the voice—the teacher’s voice, her voice. “The world is about to come apart. I can stop it, but I can’t do it alone.”

Stop it? Why?

Cort was the first to shrug off the shout-induced paralysis. “And just how are you going to do that?”

You can’t tell them
.

A lump of shame rose into her throat. Was she really going to do this? Betray everything she believed in just to save her own skin?

No!
The rebuttal was so forceful, she thought for a moment that she had spoken it aloud.
These aren’t my beliefs. Just something planted in my head by someone who doesn’t give a damn about me or anyone that I love
.

They don’t love you
, insisted the voice.
They fear you. They will kill you
.

No!
She had to grind her teeth together to keep from shouting it.
It’s not true
.

And it wasn’t. What had Noah just said?

She
is
my daughter
.

Despite everything he knew about her—things she probably didn’t even know herself—he meant it.

That was real. That was the truth.

And he
is
my father
, Jenna thought. Despite everything she knew about him—the lies he had told, the people he had killed—the realization filled her with a joy that was even more powerful than the guilt of her implanted memories.

She unclenched her jaw. “Everything that’s been happening is just the set-up. There’s something even worse coming.”

Cort nodded impatiently. “You’ve already said that.”

“I know, but something has to happen first.”

They will kill you. Then they will destroy everything. Humanity is the cancer that must be eliminated, or everything will be destroyed. You must not interfere
.

“The last part of the transmission, the part that contains the trigger, also has instructions. Before the final phase can begin, someone has to send a message back. It’s a signal that the final attack is about to start. Maybe it’s to let them know so they can send their invasion forces.” The last part was conjecture, but it made sense.

“How do you know that hasn’t already happened?”

“There’s a time-table for it.” She reached for the memory but it wasn’t there anymore. Suddenly, she felt faint and staggered to a nearby desk for support. “Damn.”

“Jenna?” Noah asked, then he returned his attention to Cort. “Tell your men to stand down, damn it. Guns on the ground.”

Cort glowered but nodded to Trace and the others. Only when the guns were put away did Noah step away from Cort. “Jenna, what’s wrong?”

“It’s gone,” she said, suddenly feeling helpless again. “Access denied.”

“A fail-safe,” Soter murmured, breaking his long silence. His voice sounded hollow, defeated. Jenna’s explanation had stripped away his illusions and revealed his duplicity in what looked very much like a bid by an alien intelligence to exterminate humankind. “A defense mechanism in the genetic memory to prevent you from turning against the programming.”

Jenna had to fight to catch her breath. What if there were other fail-safe mechanisms? Would all her memories slip away, leaving her a gibbering idiot, or worse, a brain-dead vegetable? Was she going to drop dead of a brain aneurism? “I can’t remember when. I just remember that it’s happening soon. Today, I think.”

“Today?” Cort scoffed. “That’s convenient.”

“It makes sense,” Noah countered. “It explains the escalation. You know it’s true. That’s why the agency panicked and authorized the sanction against us.”

Cort let that go without comment. “Well if you can’t remember anything about this signal, I don’t see how you’re going to be able to help stop it.”

“Wait. The message is in the transmission. We still have that.”

Soter shook his head. “But we still can’t decipher it.”

“I can.” She looked to Cort, asking for permission, but also asking for his trust.

Cort frowned, and for a moment, Jenna thought he was going to further ridicule her, but then he nodded. “Do it.”

The atmosphere in the room shifted. As Jenna took a seat in front of the computer, the others gathered behind her. Soter was poised over her shoulder. Mercy stood beside him, and Noah was beside her, so close that the events of the last two days seemed like a bad dream. Cort’s presence ruined the illusion, but he too seemed eager to see what Jenna would reveal.

The computer monitor still showed the final sequence of the message. It no longer confounded Jenna’s perceptions, but neither did its meaning become instantly apparent. “It’s encrypted,” she said. “The code is fairly simple. Each of these strings are individual numbers, like in the Wow! Signal, but they’ve been modified with a changing mathematical value.”

She didn’t know if she was explaining it correctly. Code-breaking was not a skill that Noah had taught her. Nevertheless, she faintly recalled the structure of the code. “It’s like those puzzles where you substitute a number for a letter, but the key changes with each number.”

“How does it change?” Soter asked, his earlier dejection replaced by an almost childlike enthusiasm. “What’s the progression?”

Jenna searched her memory. The answer was still there, she could feel it. “It keeps increasing,” she said slowly, as if stalling for time. “But always at a constant rate.”

“A mathematical progression? Logarithmic? Prime numbers?” Soter’s tone was becoming strident. “Think girl. What’s the pattern?”

Something familiar. A face remembered, a name forgotten. “Spiral?”

“Like the Golden Ratio?”

Jenna’s recall of that subject was picture perfect. The Golden Ratio—approximately 1.618, also called
phi
—was one of those remarkable examples of mathematical perfection in nature. She had learned about it in both math and art classes. It described the perfect spiral in conch shells and pine cones, and had been employed in both art and architecture for thousands of years. It was also, Jenna recalled, the exact ratio found in the Fibonacci sequence where each number was the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8 and so forth.

“That’s it! It uses the Fibonacci sequence. The first value is unchanged. The second and third increase by one, then two, and so on.”

Soter laid a hand on her shoulder. “May I?”

Jenna vacated the seat, and the older man took her place. He opened a new program and began typing, his fingers flying across the keys as if inspired. It took him just a few minutes to write a translation algorithm, after which he cut and pasted in the binary sequence.

Jenna held her breath as the start of a now all-too familiar phrase appeared.

This is th
…

The rest was a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers, but Jenna knew that she had been right about the key to the cipher. “It resets to zero after ten characters.”

Soter nodded. “That makes sense. If the progression continued to follow the Fibonacci sequence, it would run to more than twelve places.” He made a quick adjustment, and then he ran the program again.

“‘This is the way the world ends,’” Noah read aloud. “‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ That’s from ‘The Hollow Men’ by T.S. Eliot.”

Jenna flashed him a smile. Noah, it seemed, could still surprise her.

Cort harrumphed. “I’m supposed to believe that these aliens of yours are English lit majors?”

Soter shrugged. “I didn’t just make this up. It’s been clear from the start that the intelligence behind this understood our capabilities. They would certainly be familiar with our works of art.”

“I think the poem is part of the trigger,” Jenna added. “Like a hypnotist might use.”

Cort rolled his eyes, but said nothing more.

The rest of the message was mostly numbers, but Jenna felt certain that Soter’s program had correctly unlocked it. “Those are coordinates.” She recalled the emergency letter Noah had left for her. “Somewhere in the Southwest. New Mexico or Arizona.”

Soter recognized the rest of it. “I think this sequence is a Julian date. And I’d recognize these numbers anywhere. That’s the location of the Chi Sagittarii stellar group, where the Wow! Signal originated and this—1420—is the original frequency, the hydrogen line.”

He turned his chair to face Cort. “The VLA radio telescope is in Socorro, New Mexico.”

As she read it, Jenna felt her memory of the message stirring, but the voice remained silent. “That’s where we have to go. Someone—one of the clones—is going to send a signal into space. To those coordinates.”

Cort nodded slowly. “You said there’s a date?”

“A date and time,” Soter replied. He seemed suddenly ill-at-ease.

“When?”

He swallowed. “Midnight tonight.”

“Well that’s freakin’ wonderful,” Cort grumbled.

Something in Soter’s manner set alarm bells ringing in Jenna’s head. “You already knew this was going to happen today.”

Soter refused to meet her gaze. “For years, there was talk among the children of something important related to this date.”

“You knew,” Jenna repeated. There was no accusation in her tone. “That’s the real reason you sent Cray to get me, isn’t it? The deadline had arrived and you still didn’t know what the message meant.”

His silence was answer enough.

“So,” Cort said after a pause. “At midnight, something is going to happen at this place in New Mexico. We’ll get somebody there and shut the place down.”

Soter shook his head. “Julian dates start at noon Greenwich Mean Time. The date/time indicated in
the message is midnight GMT. Eight hours from now.”

“I need to be there,” Jenna said.

“That’s not going to happen,” Cort declared, making a cutting gesture with his hand. “The only way you’re leaving here is in my custody.”

“Like hell,” Noah growled, raising the pistol again. The other agents tensed but did not go for their grounded weapons.

Cort waved them off but kept his attention on Noah. “If you try to leave any other way, you will be hunted down. Even you aren’t that good.”

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we.” Noah turned to the others. “Jenna, Mercy, we’re going.”

Soter stepped forward. “Take me. I have a plane waiting on the tarmac at the Arecibo Airport. It could get us to New Mexico with time to spare.”

Noah stared back, his face an unreadable mask. “You heard what the man said. They’re going to be hunting us. You sure you want to take that chance?”

The mathematician nodded soberly.

“The more the merrier,” Noah muttered. “Mercy, be a dear and collect those guns. And while I’m thinking about it, let’s have your phones. If you’re going to be hunting us, it only seems fair to give us a head start.”

Cort signaled for his men to comply, this time without threats or taunts. Jenna understood that they were past that stage now. Noah was not going to change his mind, and Cort was already thinking ahead to what he would do next. Jenna realized with sick certainty that the running and fighting was not over, not by a long shot, but now there was a lot more at stake than just her own survival.

She moved closer to Noah. “There’s no way we can make it to New Mexico without Cort’s help.”

Noah glanced in Cort’s direction before answering in a low whisper that only she could hear. “We aren’t going to New Mexico, but Cort doesn’t need to know that. I know a guy that can get us to Cuba. They won’t be able to touch us there.”

“No!” The forcefulness of her denial surprised even her. She had spoken so loudly that everyone in the room looked at her. “I have to go to New Mexico.”

Noah frowned in irritation. “Jenna, you’ve done enough. Cort can take care of this with a phone call. You don’t need to be there.”

“But I do. I have to be there,” she repeated. “I’m the only one who can stop it.”

“Why?”

She had no answer. There was no rational explanation for the compulsion she felt, but if she revealed her uncertainty, Noah would never agree.

“There’s more to the instructions,” she lied, except part of her realized it wasn’t a lie. While the coded message did contain some specific instructions, its primary function was to activate the implanted memories. Although that door had closed, Jenna knew that there was a lot more that had not been revealed to her. “I think I have to go there to unlock the rest.”