Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (28 page)

“You think?”

She gripped his arm. “Noah, you have to trust me. I’m the only one who can stop it.”

Noah’s frown deepened. “I believe you, but I’m not the one you have to convince.”

Jenna turned to Cort. “If you get me to New Mexico, then I’m all yours. You can ship me off to one of your secret prisons, throw me in a hole and make me disappear forever.”

Noah stepped between her and Cort. “Jenna, don’t be stupid.”

Jenna pointed at the computer screen where the message was still displayed. “You see that? How the message ends?”

Nobody had commented on the last line of the transmission, the final marching orders for each clone. Four simple but ominous words in plain English.

Wipe the slate clean
.

“That’s what’s going to happen if I don’t get to New Mexico. What happens after that doesn’t matter, because if I don’t get there, there isn’t going to be an ‘after.’”

Noah stared at her for a long time, his expression twisted with emotions that he was no longer able to suppress.

It was Cort that finally broke the silence. “So I’m supposed to take you at your word? What, are you gonna pinky-swear to give yourself up when it’s all done?”

Before Jenna could answer, Mercy spoke. “I’ll stay. You can keep me as collateral.”

“Mercy, no.” Jenna heard Noah echoing her own denial, but Mercy just shook her head.

“It’s okay, Jenna. I believe you. I know that you have to do this. It sickens me that we were used like this.” Jenna knew what Mercy meant by ‘we.’ She wasn’t just Jenna’s sister or mother. All of the clones had been created using her DNA. “And this way, we’ll still be together when it’s all over.”

Cort just laughed. “What the hell? It’s a deal.”

56

Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico, USA

5:05 p.m. (Mountain Daylight Time)

The flight took six hours but to Jenna it felt like hardly any time had passed. Part of this was due to her anxiety about what would happen when they arrived. Time always seemed to drag when she was looking forward to something good—the last day of school or a birthday—and flew by when something bad loomed on the horizon.

She thought she would be able to spend at least some of the trip sleeping, but even though she felt dead on her feet, every time she closed her eyes, she had a vision of Mercy, flanked by Cort’s men, waving good-bye. She settled for a hot meal from the Gulfstream’s galley, washed down with several bottles of Pepsi, and she listened in as the rest of the group discussed strategy.

Cort had wasted no time asserting his authority, and Noah did not challenge him. Jenna sensed that her insistence on making the trip—and her decision to surrender to Cort at the cost of Mercy’s freedom—had taken the wind out of Noah’s sails. That, and the fact that he had been shot just eighteen hours earlier.

The wound wasn’t serious—the bullet had deflected off a rib, fracturing it and tearing up the surrounding tissue, but doing no damage to vital organs—but a gunshot was a gunshot. He bore the pain stoically, but Jenna saw how he winced a little whenever he changed position.

He had been taken to the hospital, along with the two deputies who—Jenna was pleased to learn—had also survived the shooting, thanks to their standard-issue body armor. Noah had managed to slip away but had arrived at Mercy’s trailer just as the police were showing up. With no way to track Jenna and Mercy, he had turned to his old handler at the Agency—Bill Cort—who had briefed him on the sanction and the reasons behind it. Noah had been as surprised as Cort when he learned of Jenna’s arrival at the safe house.

Jenna didn’t believe Cort’s assertion that he had been out of the loop on the decision to send the hit team, but they were well past the point where recriminations would make any difference.

Soter also seemed to have set aside his aversion toward the men who had killed his team and destroyed his lab fifteen years earlier. Jenna suspected that had more to do with the realization that he had been a pawn in the opening move in a war to destroy humanity. He spent nearly two full hours describing the history of the project. The account was more or less the same as what he had told Jenna during the flight from Miami, but the air of pride had faded. It was now a recitation of facts. When he was done, he gave what information he could concerning the whereabouts of more than a dozen clones—Jenna noted that he no longer referred to them as his children.

The conversation had come around to the transmission’s origin. Soter maintained that an extraterrestrial intelligence was the most plausible explanation, but Cort seemed reluctant to even speculate. “Let’s just deal with one thing at time,” he said.

It seemed to Jenna like textbook denial. An extraterrestrial explanation would not only mean a threat beyond comprehension, and possibly against which humanity would be powerless, but it would also invalidate a host of beliefs about the nature of life and the meaning of existence. It was no surprise that Cort shied away from the topic. Jenna had her own reasons for not wanting to discuss it. The entire conversation had been an excruciating ordeal, in which her very artificial origin was dissected and put on display. Her unique abilities—what her school teachers called ‘gifts’—had occasionally made her the target of ridicule from jealous classmates, but she had never felt the kind of embarrassment she now felt listening to this discussion.

She felt like a freak. No, worse than that: an illegitimate freak.

Noah sensed her discomfort, holding her hand, squeezing reassurance into her, but she endured without comment. The events surrounding her, past and future, were much more important than her hurt feelings.

The discussion turned to the question of how to proceed when they arrived at their destination. Cort tried to arrange for Agency assets from Texas and California to be sent in ahead of them, but the remote location confounded those efforts. He contacted the military, but was tight-lipped about the full results of that conversation, saying only that there would be no additional boots on the ground, meaning that the little group in the Gulfstream would be the sole defenders of the human race. If they failed, it would be game over.

“What should we expect?” Cort asked.

Soter turned to Jenna.

“How should I know?” she snapped, but then she realized why he had deferred to her. If anyone could predict what the clones would do, it would be her. Yet the truth was that she didn’t know. The door to the implanted memories remained shut. The only thing she really knew for sure was that the urge to go to the coordinates in the message was overpowering. Even now, with the memories ripped from her head, Jenna felt the irresistible urge. The other clones surely felt it, too. She wondered how many were on their way there? She did not share this insight with Cort, though, and he noticed the omission.

“I signed off on this little field trip because you insisted that only you could stop them,” he reminded her.

“I’ll understand it better when I get there,” she said.

They were nearly at their destination, and she still had no idea what was going to happen.

After landing, they headed out from Socorro on US Route 60. Noah was at the wheel of their rented Jeep Cherokee, maintaining a steady seventy-five miles per hour. Cort sat in the front passenger seat. Soter and Jenna were in the back. She could see distant mountain ranges on the horizon, but the foreground was flat and desolate. Florida was flat, but at least there were palm trees to break up the monotony. Here, there was nothing except the occasional herd of cattle, and—distant but growing ever larger—an irregular line of satellite dishes.

As they approached, Jenna began to appreciate just how extraordinary the Very Large Array was. Unlike the Arecibo Observatory, which made use of a single enormous dish, more or less fixed in place, the Very Large Array’s twenty-seven individual dishes—each more than eighty feet in diameter and arranged in a Y-shaped pattern with legs that extended more than thirteen miles in each direction—worked in unison to create a single antenna that could be extended to a maximum twenty-two miles across. A tourist brochure she had picked up in Socorro described how the 230-ton dishes could be moved as needed using a special transport vehicle running on railroad tracks that extended to the Y’s full limit.

As the full scope of the observatory came into view, Cort looked back at Jenna. “Why does it have to be here? Couldn’t this signal be sent from any radio telescope?”

Soter answered before Jenna could admit her ignorance. “We can only speculate about the reason, but my hypothesis is that the intelligence behind the message was very familiar with our capabilities and our potential. In 1977, when the Wow! Signal and the transmission I later received were sent, the VLA was the best radio telescope on Earth. The author of the transmission could expect that it would still be functioning thirty-seven years later. The same cannot be said for the Big Ear telescope, which received the Wow! Signal. It was dismantled in 1998 to make room for a golf course.”

“A golf course?” Noah echoed, glancing in the rear view mirror. “You’re kidding, right?”

Soter grimaced. “I wish I were. One would expect a better fate for the place that marks the first contact by an alien intelligence.”

Cort gave a sarcastic chuckle. “Maybe someday they’ll build a war memorial there.”

Nobody had a response to that.

57

5:31 p.m.

The VLA dishes grew larger until they stretched across half the horizon like a picket line. A rough map on the tourist pamphlet revealed that the highway passed through the upper leg of the array. Just before they reached it, Noah turned off the main route and headed toward the cluster of administrative buildings near the junction of the three legs. He drove past the visitors center—the parking lot was empty—and continued to the control building, a two story concrete and stone structure.

Jenna was struck by the profound differences between the VLA facility and the Arecibo Observatory. The landscape was open and featureless, unlike the lushly forested limestone hills in Puerto Rico. The buildings reminded her more of the structures she’d glimpsed at the abandoned Aerojet facility in the Everglades—big, open and scattered across the landscape. The enormous dishes sprouted from the plain like surreal white mushrooms in a Lewis Carrroll story. Strangest of all was the profound quiet.

“Sure doesn’t look like anything is about to happen,” Cort remarked, taking out his cell phone and glancing at the display. “Less than half an hour to go. I’m guessing you don’t just walk into a place like this and say ‘I’d like to place a collect call to the Andromeda galaxy.’”

Soter shook his head. “Scientists have to schedule their research months, even years in advance. And this facility is primarily a receiving station.”

“You mean it can’t be used to call out?”

“It can. There’s no fundamental difference between a transmitter and a receiver in terms of hardware. A transmitter like the one at Arecibo, is built to sustain a high-power transmission over long periods. A transmission sent from here wouldn’t be very powerful at all, but the focusing ability of the array would compensate for that. However, making the changes would require some technical knowledge.”

“Do any of your clones have that knowledge?”

This wasn’t the first time the subject had been brought up, but Soter’s answer was the same. “To the best of my knowledge, no.”

“Well, we’re here. I guess we should go and make sure nobody snuck in the back door.”

As they headed in through the main entrance, Jenna hung back, allowing the three men to take the lead. The urge to make this journey, that she had first experienced in Puerto Rico, had not relented, but she felt no sense of familiarity or attunement with this place. No new implanted memories had been awakened in her. She couldn’t tell whether the door to those memories had been shut or there was simply nothing there in the first place.

Signs for the self-guided walking tour pointed the way to the control room. Like the Arecibo Observatory, the room looked more like an office than a portal for watching distant stars. More than a dozen computers and monitors, each one displaying a graph or lines of text, sat atop a long horse-shoe shaped desk wrapped around the room’s perimeter. Anyone hoping to see spectacular pictures of black holes or nebulae would have gone away disappointed.

Three men were working in the room, hunched over their workstations, busily entering data. One of them looked up and offered a friendly wave, then went back to his task. The others ignored them.

Cort cleared his throat. “I need to speak to whomever is in charge.”

All three men looked up, and Jenna heard one of them groan. She scanned the faces—all were middle-aged Caucasian men. None of them bore even a passing resemblance to her. The man who had waved rose from his seat and came over to speak with them. He eyed Cort’s crutches—Jenna could almost see him leaping to the conclusion that they were going to complain about the ‘walking’ part of the walking tour, but he kept his smile in place as he introduced himself.

“I’m Dr. Jon Miller. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Are you in charge?” Cort asked. Jenna noted that he was being aggressive to the point of rudeness, asserting his dominance to ensure cooperation. It was one of the techniques Noah had taught her, but not one that she had ever practiced. In her experience, subtlety produced better results.

The smile slipped a little but Miller remained diplomatic. “Well, I’m in charge of a few things. If you tell me your concerns, I’ll have a better idea where to direct you.”

“We’re federal officers, investigating a possible threat against this facility.”

The news hit Miller like a bomb. The other two men sat up straighter, appearing almost poised to flee. “A threat? I…uh, can’t imagine what kind of…uh…”

Cort allowed the tension to build a moment, then his demeanor changed completely. “It’s probably nothing, but I’d appreciate it if you could go over a couple of things with us. Just to be sure.”

Miller swallowed. “Sure.”

Soter stepped forward. “Would you please show us the scheduled activity for the next twenty-four hours?”

Miller nodded and gestured to a laptop computer that was already displaying a spreadsheet. Soter scanned the document, scrolling down, then looked back and shrugged.

Cort addressed Miller again. “How easy would it be to change the orientation of the array to send a transmission?”

Miller gave a surprised laugh, but then he became somber again when he realized Cort was not joking. “Not easy at all. In the first place, we’re a receiving station. And we don’t change the schedule for just anyone.”

“You’re not hearing me, doc.” A little of the earlier surliness was back. “If someone came in here, pointed a gun at your head and told you to do it, how tough would it be to make the changes?”

Miller went pale. “Uh…is that what you are—”

“No. Just answer the question.”

“We could do it from this room. It would take a few minutes.”

Cort turned away as if Miller no longer existed and addressed Noah and Jenna. “That’s it then. All we need to do is secure this room and there’s no way that signal is going out. Not from here at least.”

Jenna did not share Cort’s certitude, but before she could offer a rebuttal, she noticed Miller staring at her. She felt a sudden rush of apprehension and took a quick step forward. “Dr. Miller. You recognize me, don’t you?”

He shook his head, embarrassed at having been caught. “No. I’m sorry.”

“Dr. Miller, this is important. Do I look like someone that you know?”

He feigned ignorance a moment longer before admitting, “You could be her twin sister.”

Cort was quick to grasp the importance of this revelation. “Who? Someone that works here? One of the astronomers?”

“Sophie isn’t an astronomer. She’s with the track maintenance team.”

“Sophia Gallo?” Soter asked.

“I…ah, don’t know her last name.”

Soter turned to the others. “Sophia is from Generation Six, the same as Jarrod and Kelli.”

“Wonderful,” Cort growled. “Track maintenance. That explains how we missed her. We were looking for brainiacs. Is she here right now?”

Miller shrugged.

“We’re going to have to sweep the entire site,” Cort said, directing his words to Noah.

Jenna knew that was no small undertaking. There was a lot of ground to cover, half a dozen buildings, and if the array itself was included, twenty-seven antenna dishes sprawled out on nearly forty miles of railroad track.

Noah nodded then turned to Jenna. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing we brought you along after all.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the other men called out. “Dr. Miller? Something is happening to the array.”

“What the hell?” Miller looked at the spreadsheet again. “There aren’t any adjustments scheduled.”

“Shut it down,” Cort ordered.

Miller and the other two men crowded around a different terminal and began tapping in commands, but after a few seconds, it was apparent that the array was not responding to their efforts. Jenna looked past them and out the large window, gazing out across the array. Even from a distance, she could see the inverted domes moving, swinging around and tilting toward a different part of the sky. It was beautiful to watch: a perfectly synchronized dance that ended only when all twenty-seven dishes were aimed at a group of stars known as Chi Sagittarii.