Immune (44 page)

Raul moved down the hallway to the bathroom. Nothing. No naked girl in the shower. Nothing.

In growing desperation, he swept into the master bedroom. On the bed, fully clothed, Mr. McFarland held his wife, who sobbed inconsolably on his shoulder, his face a mask of despair. The combination of the Heather’s empty bedroom and the looks of loss on her parents’ faces could only mean one thing.

The stunning realization hit Raul in the chest like a sledgehammer. Heather was gone.

The worm fiber collapsed. Hanging in the air of the Rho Ship’s inner chamber, Raul screamed. And as he screamed, the electrical energy built in the air around him until it arced outward, connecting the walls to his fingertips in one undying arc of lightning that failed to diffuse the shock of loss that drained his soul.

Without taking a break for lunch, Jennifer sat at the keyboard, working her magic. Five million dollars. That was the amount she had transferred from three Swiss bank accounts controlled by the Espeñosa drug cartel into a handful of separate Cayman Island bank accounts. If it had simply been direct transfers, Jennifer would have been finished long ago, but that would be stupid. Instead, she had moved the money through a web of transactions around the world, all recorded over the last week, deals that included arms purchases in the Middle East to commodities options on the Chicago Board of Trade.

She was a time walker. At least, Jennifer could make her data trail walk back through time, searching out all records of transactions and inserting new ones, careful to trace the entire audit trail. When in doubt that she had tracked down all the related computer records, she inserted a virus, corrupting records in a way that would make a trace of her activities almost impossible.

The Espeñosa Cartel was just the first of many such thieves’ dens she planned on inflicting financial pain upon in her need to establish a financial empire. A growing dread forced her to hurry. The new president had pledged to release the nanite formula for distribution to Africa on Friday, announcing that millions of doses were already on navy ships headed in that direction. He had chosen Africa because it, of all continents, was the most desperately afflicted by the scourge of disease, especially AIDS. It had also been the most ignored by past US administrations. Now it was to become the model for American humanitarian efforts.

Jennifer shuddered. Those poor people. So desperately willing to take any risk in order to survive. But what choice did they have? In their situation, she would probably do exactly the same thing.

Not all addictions were chemically based. How many people could get by without their cars or air conditioning or refrigeration or electricity? The truth was that mankind was addicted to technology. What Dr. Stephenson and the president offered was only the next logical step in that addiction. But it was a step that horrified Jennifer beyond words.

Hearing a knock, Jennifer pressed the key sequence that locked out her computer, then walked to the door.

“What is it?” she called out.

“Complimentary turndown service,” came the woman’s voice from the other side of the closed door.

“No, thank you.”

“Hello?”

“No, thank you,” Jennifer said again.

The key turned in the door. As it opened, Jennifer stopped it with her foot.

“I said, no, thank you!”

“
Perdón, señorita
,” the maid said, bowing her head. But when she raised it again, a spray of mist squirted into Jennifer’s face.

Before she could grasp what was happening, Jennifer felt her legs buckle. As everything faded around her, a redheaded man stepped forward to catch her.

“Hello, young lady. You have a lot of explaining to do. But first you are going on a little trip.”

Jennifer felt herself stuffed into the bottom of the maid’s cart. Then, as it rolled back out into the hallway, everything went black.

Janet slipped the end of the key device into the car ignition switch, pressing a button on the side that engaged the tumblers. With a twist of her wrist, the lock turned, sending the engine of the Ford Explorer rumbling to life. God she loved civilization, if you could call Santa Fe, New Mexico, civilization. The place felt like she had been swept back in time five hundred years, the narrow streets of old town Santa Fe certainly never designed for the modern automobile, much less two lanes of traffic.

She was tired, more tired than she had been in weeks. But Jack needed her and so sleep would have to wait. Her first priority was to get herself to a safe spot where she could establish an Internet connection. Then she could uplink the information that would give Jack what he needed to know. After that, well, she would think about that when she got to it.

The baby kicked in her belly. Her baby. Jack’s baby. Janet rubbed her abdomen and smiled. Life had certainly gotten more interesting. What sort of mama would she be? What sort of baby would she have?

There were certainly plenty of people out there trying to make certain that she failed to live to answer those questions. Her hand moved to her hairpin, the narrow spike spinning in her fingers, coming to a stop in her clenched fist, its razor tip glittering in the early evening sunlight.

Fine. She would be ready for them.

Jennifer coughed, opened her eyes, then closed them again as pain pounded her skull. The headache made it difficult to think. She just wanted to roll over, pull her covers up around her, and go back to sleep. Then she remembered.

Once again her eyes popped open and this time she kept them open. For several seconds her disorientation made the sights and sounds confronting her unintelligible. She was on some kind of couch, an uncomfortably narrow couch, and there was a loud thrumming in her ears, along with a babble of nearby voices, mostly speaking Spanish. As the fog in her brain cleared, she understood.

She was on an airplane—some sort of small jet. From the spacious layout, it seemed to be some sort of corporate aircraft, certainly different from the personal space afforded by a B-group ticket on Southwest Airlines. Jesus. What had happened to her?

Gently moving her wrists, Jennifer was surprised to find that she was not tied up. A quick personal inventory revealed that, aside from her throbbing head, she had suffered no apparent bodily injury. Indeed, someone had taken the trouble to cover her with a thin blanket.

Jennifer struggled to a sitting position. Seeing her looking around, the redheaded man she had seen as she passed out rose from his seat and moved to sit across from her. His intelligent blue eyes appraised her, simultaneously cold and curious.

“Can I have a drink?” Jennifer asked, her voice coming out as a hoarse croak she barely recognized.

“Certainly,” the man replied, signaling to a young woman who immediately brought a bottle of ice-cold water.

Jennifer drank deeply, finishing the small bottle in several long swallows. When she looked up again, she had managed to establish at least a small degree of calm.

“Who are you? Where are you taking me?”

The redheaded man’s eyes narrowed. “My name is not important. Your next stop is Medellín, but we won’t be landing at the José María Córdova International Airport.”

Jennifer’s eyes widened. “Colombia?”

The redheaded man smiled. “Good girl. So unusual for a girl your age to know her geography. But then you’re a very unusual girl, aren’t you?”

Jennifer worked to get her bearings, but her thoughts were foggy, her senses dulled.

“I don’t understand.”

“Maybe not now, but you will. Señor Espeñosa is very anxious to meet you.” The man smiled, but his lips held no mirth.

Jennifer felt her throat constrict as a growing terror gripped her. Dear God. What had she gotten herself into?

Heather and Mark stepped out of the FedEx Kinko’s twenty-four-hour copy center in Las Vegas with their new IDs in hand. With the right person creating the digital images, the right materials, and a good enough laser printer, it was amazing what you could create. And Heather was the right person. Add an empty copy center and a clerk weighed down with 3:00 a.m. sleepiness and she could work miracles.

Once outside, Mark looked at the driver’s licenses in the light of the bright neon signage. He had to admit that they were good enough to fool anyone who didn’t actually work at the Arizona Department of Motor Vehicles. Robert Foley, age twenty-nine, and his wife Rebecca Foley, age twenty-eight, from Tempe, Arizona.

“Not bad, Mrs. Foley.” Mark grinned, handing the Rebecca Foley ID to Heather. When he looked in her face, it was like looking at an older woman, something that he found strangely erotic. Well, come to think of it, it wasn’t all that strange or unusual.

“Thanks, Robby,” Heather smiled back at him, opening the passenger side door and sliding into the seat.

Mark climbed in and started the car. They had agreed that he would do the driving, since they needed Heather to do her white-eyed savant thing from time to time, an activity that tired her so that she needed sleep. It struck Mark as a little odd, since he no longer needed or desired to waste time in an unconscious state.

“How about that?” Mark asked, pointing to the Super 8 Motel down the block.

Heather nodded. “Looks good to me.”

Mark pulled to a stop under the overhang. “I’ll check us in.”

Although it took several rings on the bell to wake the sleeping desk clerk, he completed the check-in process with no difficulty. Once they had parked and carried their bags to the room, Heather flipped on the light, then paused in the doorway.

“A king-sized bed?”

Mark felt his face redden. “Sorry, he didn’t ask, and I thought he might be suspicious if I asked for two beds. After all, we’re supposed to be married.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll lie on the floor if you want.”

When Heather paused to consider it, Mark continued. “Even though it looks pretty darn uncomfortable.”

“Hey, wait a minute. You don’t even sleep.”

“No, but I rest and I meditate.”

Finally, she shrugged. “Oh, all right. Just make sure you stay on your side.”

“I can’t believe you even think I wouldn’t.”

“Right.”

Mark let Heather shower first before taking his turn. By the time he’d put on a fresh set of clothes and returned to the bedroom, Heather was fast asleep beneath the covers. Mark lay down atop the covers on the other side of the bed, rolling onto his side. As much as he knew he should be thinking about the next steps in their search for Jennifer, he just lay there watching Heather sleep beside him, her gentle breathing the most wonderful sound he could imagine. It was another of those moments he intended to record in his memory, down to the last perfect detail.

Garfield Kromly stared at the report on his desk. The brown double wrapping still lay on the floor where it had fallen as he removed the outer covering of the classified package. This was just one more piece in the puzzle, a jigsaw picture that had begun to resolve itself from the information on the disk he had gotten at Union Station. And as badly as he wanted to believe something else, anything else, it was looking more and more like Jack Gregory was right.

At this point, Kromly was sure that someone at the top level in the White House had assisted in the assassination of President Harris; he just didn’t yet know who that someone was. As for the connections to the Rho Project and the upcoming release of the alien nanotechnology, he had come up with little more than a string of very odd coincidences. He was going to need something much stronger than that to break this thing open.

Kromly glanced down at the computer disk that lay beside the package he had just received. Along with a host of circumstantial evidence, it contained the digital recording of a phone call from the White House, made just minutes before the president had been killed. It might just be the break he had been looking for. Unfortunately, the recording was encrypted using some of the most sophisticated hardware and software available to the United States government. Without the STU encryption key, his chances of deciphering it were practically nonexistent.

His hopes of at least getting a voiceprint from the scrambled data had proven fruitless. Perhaps the folks at the NSA could do it, but everyone who had gone that route had found themselves very, very dead. And although Kromly didn’t fear death, he had no intention of rushing to embrace it either. There was too much at stake for the country for him to get himself killed just yet.

Already, he’d been lucky. The man who had been killed at Union Station, not far from where Kromly had entered the parking garage, had turned out to be a mob hit man named Pauly Farentino. A more thorough check into Farentino had revealed that he had been seen following Natalie Simpson before she reached Union Station. It didn’t take much imagination to guess that he had seen the exchange outside Auntie Anne’s and had switched targets on the fly.

The public story that Farentino was killed by an angry vagrant was laughable. While Farentino wasn’t the smartest guy on the block, the man had earned a reputation as a vicious and dangerous killer. Unfortunately for him, in the middle of the crowd at Union Station, he had crossed paths with a much more dangerous predator. The knife work was too precise. Two quick cuts severing each side of the throat in a manner designed to produce the maximum spray of blood, something to shock the surrounding crowd, drawing their focus away from his face.