Immune (58 page)

Jack cut out a two-foot square section of the chain-link fencing, flapped it upward, and guided them through before dropping the section back into place. A thin crescent moon smiled upward, like the mouth of the Cheshire Cat, providing just enough illumination for Janet to see without the aid of the compact night-vision goggles in her backpack.

In front of her, Jack paused, examining what lay ahead with those strange eyes of his. Then he was moving again, down across the valley, toward the far tree line.

Her baby kicked in her stomach, but Janet ignored it. Jack needed her attention on the here and now, not on the impetuous child in her belly, no matter how wonderful it was.

Each military base had its oddities, and those could be exploited. Command and control centers were always heavily guarded. But the antennas that performed the actual satellite uplinks were largely ignored. Manned facilities required guards, unmanned equipment didn’t. It was an un-chanted mantra.

The main GPS uplink antenna was an excellent example. It was hardwired to the GPS control center by a cable that ran adjacent to the metal maintenance building two hundred yards from the base of the dish.

Keeping to the deep shadows, they moved around the back side of the building, opposite the antenna, pausing at a padlocked door. With a quick twist of the pry bar, Jack jimmied the lock, then pushed the sliding door open along its track, revealing a forty-by-thirty-foot interior space. The twin beams from Janet and Jack’s LED flashlights sizzled into the darkness, illuminating a largely empty room that housed an assortment of tools and equipment, including four large spools of cable and a small forklift. Just to the left of the doorway, a steel-case desk snuggled up against the wall, its office chair tilting slightly to the right, missing one of its four rolling casters.

Janet scanned the room, quickly locating the electrical panel along the left wall. As Jack closed the door behind them, Janet walked to the panel, pressed downward on the latch, and popped open the cover.

The building was fused for both 220 and 110 volt circuits. She smiled. They had chosen wisely. This was the perfect spot to set up their wireless access point. The heavy voltage circuitry drove the motors that directed the massive GPS antenna. With a door on the side opposite the GPS control antenna, the building gave excellent concealment for their computational needs. It allowed Janet to establish secure communications with Heather McFarland and the Smythe twins while Jack did the heavy lifting at the antenna itself.

Janet ripped the corner from a cardboard box, folded it three times, and slid it under the chair leg. Plugging her laptop’s power supply into one of the 110V outlets, she set it on the desk and sat down. As the laptop struggled to wakefulness, she glanced over at Jack. He held a backpack that contained another laptop, just purchased at a Colorado Springs RadioShack, along with an assortment of electronic supplies that would soon be put to good use splicing into the GPS control cable.

Jack pulled out his walkie-talkie. “Commo check.”

Janet extracted her own walkie-talkie from the laptop bag. It was amazing what you could pick up at RadioShack. A pair of 900 megahertz, frequency-hopping walky-talkies with over ten billion frequencies, all for just a couple hundred dollars. Certainly adequate for secure communications during the amount of time she was going to be separated from Jack.

Thumbing the press-to-talk button on the side, she lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips. “Ground control to Major Tom.”

“Very funny,” Jack said into his radio, his words coming through her speaker loud and clear.

“Time to test our link to Mother.”

Janet typed in her login password, letting the laptop finish loading its startup programs. In their magical fashion, the McFarland and Smythe triumvirate had uploaded a new program to her computer along with instructions for its use. It was a chat program, very similar to the Voice over IP, or VoIP, applications that had become so common these days. Only this was Voice over QT, the quantum twin components creating perfectly secure, delay-free conversation, irrespective of distance.

She launched the application, waiting as the image of a whirling maelstrom dissolved into the control panel. Janet had to admit. Even under extreme pressure, those kids had panache.

The user interface was elegant in its simplicity, an image of a speaker and microphone above a single large button marked
speakerphone
. Janet clicked the
speakerphone
button, its image clicking down and locking into position.

“Heather, Mark, Jennifer? This is Janet Johnson,” she said, using the name they had known her by. “Can you hear me?”

After a short pause, Heather McFarland’s voice played through the computer speakers. “We’re all here.”

“Mind if we ask where here is?”

A pause, some mumbling barely audible in the background. “Fair enough. We’re in Colombia, at the
hacienda
of Don Espeñosa.”

Janet glanced at Jack, whose left eyebrow had risen, crinkling his forehead.

“The drug lord?”

“That’s right. At the moment, he’s tied up in a chair across from Mark. He was our test subject for the nanite deprogramming.”

Jack held up a finger.

“One second, Heather. Jack wants to say something.”

Leaning in close, Jack’s voice was serious. “Pay close attention. We don’t have much time, but it’s critical that you do exactly as I say. You listening?”

A brief pause on the line, then Heather spoke again. “We are.”

“As soon as we’re done with what we have to do in the next hour, I want you to get out of that house. Get to the Hotel Caribe in Cartegena as quickly as possible. A man named Juan Perdero works at the front desk. Tell him these exact words: ‘Don’t fear the Reaper.’ He will reply, ‘Agents of Fortune?’ to which you respond, ‘1976.’ Have you got that?”

“Yes,” Heather replied.

“Good. He’ll arrange to meet you in a more secure location. Once there, tell him I said to get you the papers and transportation you’ll need to get to Santa Cruz, Bolivia.”

“Bolivia?”

Jack ignored the question. “Once you get to Santa Cruz, hire a taxi to take you to the Mennonite community called Quatro Cañadas. It sits on the far side of the Rio Grande, a couple of hours northeast of Santa Cruz. The Robertson family will take you in. Ask for directions to their farm.”

“I understand.” Heather’s voice carried a minor tremor, as if dreading what he might say next.

“There’s one more thing. It’s hard, but absolutely necessary. Before you leave the estate, you need to kill Don Espeñosa. If you don’t, you’ll have no chance of getting out of Colombia alive. Mark, do you understand me?”

Mark’s voice sounded stressed, but steady. “I understand.”

“Good. Remember, find the Robertson Mennonite farm. Stay with them until I come for you. Do what you can to fit in. They are good people.” Jack leaned away, turning the microphone back to Janet.

Despite her curiosity, Janet returned the conversation to the job at hand. “As much as I’d love to chat with you all, we’re a little tight on time. Jack and I have the supplies we’re going to need to splice into the antenna’s data cable.

“Right now we’re in a maintenance building a couple hundred yards from the antenna. It’s unoccupied and a good spot for me to set up this laptop. In a few minutes, Jack will take his kit and move on out to the antenna to make the splice. He’ll wire in another laptop with a wireless network card that I can tie into from here. Once he’s done that, I’ll let you know we’re ready.”

Heather answered, her voice shaky. “Okay. By then we’ll have run a complete analysis on the data link so that we’ll know the signals to feed back to the control center. We have to make them think the antenna and satellite downlinks are operating normally, even when Jack cuts the line.”

“Then he’ll get going.”

“Wait. On second thought, there’s no need for you to tell us when Jack’s ready. We’ll know as soon as he cuts the line. When we see that, we’ll substitute our own signal through the QT on your laptop and out through the wireless card at the antenna.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“Okay. Be strong. Talk to you later. Janet out.”

Janet clicked off the speakerphone button, briefly considering the possibility that the young savants were still listening. It didn’t matter. They could do that any time they wanted.

Janet rose from the chair, stepping up beside Jack as he opened the door. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she kissed him deep. “Watch yourself.”

“Always do.”

With that, Jack moved away around the side of the building and disappeared into the darkness. Janet closed the door behind her, set the Heckler & Koch 9mm on the desk beside her laptop, and sat back down.

She wouldn’t have long to wait.

In the past, Eduardo would have needed the artificial enhancement provided by night-vision binoculars to see the dark landscape stretched out before him. But the growth of his abilities since he had first placed the artifact upon his head had changed all that. While it wasn’t like looking out at daylight, this spectrum of illumination was almost as clear. Tonight, the darkness shrouding Schriever Air Force Base would not help conceal its secrets.

It was almost as if he could see into the Ripper’s head. The man had done exactly what he would have done, skirting the perimeter fencing of the air force base until he found the perfect spot, cut a hole in the fencing, and gone through, directly toward the GPS antenna visible in the distance. As pleasurable as it was to kill guards, dead guards attracted more attention than live ones, failing to respond to radio queries, failing to check in on required intervals. Best to bypass them, letting them cluelessly continue their ineffective patrols.

The man was good. But tonight, the Ripper was his.

Eduardo slid through the cut in the fence, the sniper rifle slung across his shoulders. In the distance, he could see the GPS antenna silhouetted against a number of lighted buildings farther away. Closer at hand, perhaps two hundred yards away from the antenna, a steel building jutted up from the ground, obviously a maintenance building of some type.

As Eduardo began to move forward, the door to the building slid open, causing him to sink down to the ground. A man moved into the doorway, paused momentarily as a woman moved to embrace him. As they separated again, the man paused, like an animal sniffing the night air, his gaze sweeping outward. Then he moved away rapidly, rounding the building toward the antenna. The Ripper.

Eduardo’s gaze refocused on the woman in the doorway, backlit by a dim glow from inside, something only he could see. Her extended belly told him all he needed to know. She was pregnant.

Why in the world would Jack Gregory bring a pregnant woman along on this mission? There could be only one reason. This was more than just a member of his team. This was his lover, and in her swollen stomach, his unborn child. Funny that Garfield Kromly hadn’t mentioned that. Had he known? Was it possible that he had taken that secret with him to his grave? A last, small victory?

Eduardo smiled. He didn’t think so, but it didn’t really matter. He now knew. And it was perfect.

Stepping back inside, the woman pulled the door closed. Immediately, El Chupacabra was up and moving again, covering the intervening distance in a ground-burning lope that kept the building between him and the antenna. Between him and the Ripper.

The metal building rose up before him like an ancient Sphinx rising out of the night, vainly trying to protect its Pharaoh. Eduardo paused just outside the door, a grin of anticipation spreading across his face. There would be no protection from that which had been summoned. Not here. Not tonight.

In the darkness just outside the door, Eduardo stilled his breathing, allowing the sounds within the maintenance building to caress his enhanced hearing. Inside, fingers tapped a computer keyboard. He increased his focus. There it was. A lone heartbeat. Wait. Two heartbeats, one at a steady fifty-six beats per minute. The other, much less distinct, raced along at a hundred-and-ten beats per minute. And this second was at a higher pitch, the volume of blood pulsing through a much, much smaller aortic cavity.

The mother and her unborn child.

The woman was close, sitting at a computer not more than ten feet from the door. El Chupacabra couldn’t have asked for anything better. What had started as a great night had suddenly gotten better. Much better.

With a pull that shot the door open along its track, El Chupacabra leaped into the room, racing across the intervening space with a speed that no mortal could match. Although surprised, the woman recovered immediately, her hand flying to the gun sitting beside the laptop. She was fast. But not nearly fast enough.

Eduardo’s blow knocked her backward out of her chair, sending the weapon flying into the center of the room. Landing in a tuck roll that brought her back to her feet, the pregnant agent-woman found herself too slow to deal with the onslaught that confronted her. Eduardo chopped into the side of her neck with a precisely gauged blow.

She pitched forward, face-first, but before she could hit the concrete floor, Eduardo caught her, tossing her over his left shoulder as if she weighed no more than a child.