The God Wave (33 page)

“Got your message,” was the first thing he said. “What happened?”

“Sara and her boys have taken over the Deep. Shut it down lock, stock, and computer system. And they've exiled the staff. All of them. And me. They've gone down into the core of the operation and are sitting in there like a trio of spiders in a web.”

“Did they say why they're doing that?”

“Oh, yes. No doubt about that. Howard and his crew are evil with a capital
E
. They are not to be allowed to unleash their horrors on the world. So the zetas shut 'em down.”

“Where are you?”

“Forward Kinetics. Howard's making do, I guess. He's taken over our offices. The zetas let enough vehicles go to transport the staff off the base. So we all loaded in and came here. They grounded all the aircraft, though. By the way, the Deeps were in
the middle of a state nature preserve, believe it or not. Under a damn mountain.”

“Makes a kind of perverse sense.”

“Definitely. So where are you?”

“Sorry. I can't tell you that. We just narrowly escaped an ambush. I don't know how they knew—”

Matt lowered his voice and said, “They took my phone, which of course they'd bugged. They didn't get anything from the number, but they got a shitload from the background sounds in the call. They isolated the flight announcements and figured out which airport you were calling from, then they winnowed through all the booking data until they thought they had you.”

“They almost did have us.”

“I thought you were the naïve one in all this,” Matt said quietly. “Looks like I was. Wherever you end up, do you have room for another defector?”

Chuck realized with leaden certainty that he didn't trust Matt.
Couldn't
trust him. “They're probably listening to this call.”

“They can't. They're cut off from all that. It's gone. All their high-tech crap is in their secret hiding place. Hell, they even left my phone.”

“And that doesn't seem suspicious?”

“Of course it's suspicious! But considering Sara and her guys have all their toys now, even if my phone is bugged, they aren't in a position to do anything about it now.”

Despite what Matt was saying, Chuck couldn't help but hesitate. “Matt, look, it's better for all of us if I don't tell you where I am, better if you stick close to Howard.”

There was a moment of silence on Matt's end. “You mean as a mole?”

“Something like that.”

Matt exhaled noisily. “There's something you should know, Chuck. Howard has allies in high places. I know he's got someone at the Pentagon who feeds him intel. He also said you'd call. That you wouldn't be able to let go. You'd worry about me and the rest of the team.”

“Howard was right. I need you there, Matt. I need to know what's happening with our people.” That last part, at least, was the truth.

“I'm not sure what their intentions are. Sara's last message to Howard was cryptic. She gave him a verse of Scripture to look up in the Bible. Something about swords and plowshares.”

“‘And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their swords into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore,'” Chuck recited softly.

“Yeah. That one. I should've known you'd have it memorized. Or is it tattooed on your bicep?”

“Forgive me if I fail to find humor in the situation. What's Howard doing?”

“Tearing what's left of his hair out and making top-secret phone calls. I have no idea who to. I think he's trying to raise a covert army to fight the zetas. But how do you covertly attack a national parkland?”

“The same way you dupe a bunch of scientists into building him unstoppable weapons. Do you doubt he'll find a way?”

“No,” Matt said. He hesitated before adding, “The thing is, if he can't get Deep Shield back, Chuck, he can't let it go. You realize that. If you're right about the nature of his operation, it would be better if it was wiped off the face of the earth than to let the world know what he was doing there.”

They parted on that somber note, and Chuck sat for a moment, staring out the window of their new little SUV. The call had been on speakerphone, so everyone else had heard it, too.

Lanfen glanced over at him from behind the steering wheel. “That goes for us, too, doesn't it? He can't let us go.”

“We could go public,” said Eugene. “We could—”

“What? The alpha zetas are holding the fort, Euge, but it's a fort that doesn't exist on any map. We have no real proof that anyone would understand. If we're going to call out General Howard, we need to contact Sara. Right now I can't think of any way of making that happen. Not if they're barricaded in the Deep doing God knows what.”

“Maybe they'll call him out,” said Mini. “Maybe that's the plan.”

“Maybe,” said Chuck. “But we'll worry about that once we're safe.”

“What makes you think we'll ever be safe?” asked Mini, finally putting into words what they surely had all been wondering. “They had us back there. But then they just ran. Why?”

It was a question none of them could answer.

THEY REACHED CALIFORNIA EARLY THE
next morning and went directly to the CalTech campus, where they deposited the car in a covered parking structure. The stress was numbing. Every other vehicle was suspect; every pulse of chopper blades made them hold their collective breath. They had kept the radio on, tuned to local news stations, listening for news of something that might have transpired back east. There was nothing. That, too, was nerve rattling.

Now, with the car well hidden and the team spread out within sight of each other between the garage and the campus core, Chuck hoped to be able to make it to his friend's offices in the Beckman Institute. The building was visible from the parking
garage—was the closest one to it, in fact. Just shy of entering the institute, Chuck looked back. Dice sat on a bench along the walk. Eugene hunkered cross-legged on the grass a bit farther on, apparently reading. Lanfen was stationed just outside the garage. Mini was with the car in case it needed a quick makeover. Students and faculty moved unwittingly past them, bestowing a glance, maybe a smile. None showed undue interest, though the girls garnered some admiring looks.

Chuck took a deep breath and dove into the interior of the Beckman Institute. Looking extremely nervous, Dr. Douglas Boston appeared from a hallway across the lobby, holding out his hand. He was tall, spare, and had gleaming black dreadlocks. He didn't look as if he'd aged a day since college.

“Dr. Charles.” He greeted Chuck using the name they'd agreed on and shook his hand before taking him down the first-floor hallway to his private office. Once inside, he motioned Chuck to a small conference table by a set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and sat down across from him, concern in every angle of his face.

“Thanks for this, Doug. For being willing to take us in.”

“Good God, Chuck, what's going on?”

“In broad strokes? As I told you earlier, a paramilitary agency I now believe is not part of the U.S. government hired us to do a project for them.”

“Relating to your research with brain waves?”

“Yes. We signed a contract that was supposed to limit what kind of work we'd do with them—and what they could do with
it
—but now they want it all. They want
us
all, willing or not, to provide them with training, technology, and material support for purposes I believe will ultimately harm rather than help our country.”

“Do you think the government is aware—”

“I don't know, but I think this is a worst-case scenario, Doug. This is an out-of-control group with incredible power.”

Doug studied him for a moment, then asked, “What sort of power are we talking about? The last I saw, you had people manipulating software and controlling some simple machines. Has something changed since then?”

Chuck considered what he was about to do. He hadn't shown anyone what he was about to show Doug. Not Dice. Not Eugene. Not even Lanfen.

Next to Doug's bookshelves was an antique orrery made of buffed bronze, with its sun and planets picked out in gleaming brass and silver. Chuck pointed it out for Doug and turned his head toward it, considered the joints, the pivot points, the weight. Then gave it a mental push. The orrery moved slightly, the tiny planets swinging about in their orbits, the central orb rotating on its axis.

“Jesus,” said Doug, twisting sideways in his chair to stare at the suddenly kinetic model.

“No. Not Jesus. Just me. Weird old Chuck Brenton. And trust me when I say I am by far the least skilled of anyone on my team who's undergone the training.”

“The training? You can
train
people to do this?”

“Yes. It requires working through intermediary agencies at first, but, yes, it's learned. Some people have more trouble getting it than others, but we've yet to have any complete failures.”

“How many?”

“Well, that's the thing. I'm not sure. I have two women with me who are adept. Back in Baltimore there are three more members of my team who didn't make it out. And there are the people this organization had us train in various disciplines. Dozens of them.”

Doug's eyes went back to the orrery, so Chuck gave it another
push. Too hard a push, as it happened; it wobbled on its stand, and the professor had to reach out and stop it from toppling over.

“Sorry,” Chuck said. “I haven't quite gotten the hang of it yet.”

Doug steadied the orrery, then looked back up at Chuck. “These other people who can do telekinesis—”

“Zetas. We call them zetas because they harness zeta waves.”

“These paramilitary zetas are after you?”

Chuck nodded.

“What do you need?”

That was the Doug Boston he remembered from college; any threat to the sanctity of intellectual freedom, and he became the watchdog of creativity.

“We need someplace to lie low for a while. Just until we can figure out what to do.”

Doug smiled, his teeth gleaming white in his face. “I've got just the place.”

“JUST THE PLACE” WAS A
beach house in Marina del Rey. It had belonged to Doug's parents and now served as his bolt hole when he needed to write. It had three bedrooms, all the modern conveniences, and—most important—a garage in which Chuck and his team could stash the SUV. Chuck doubted the Deeps had made the vehicle, but it never hurt to be cautious.

He called Matt once they were settled into the beach house, but couldn't reach him. He fretted and tried again several hours later from a second burner phone he'd purchased. Still no response. He hoped that only meant Matt was with company.

Eugene and Mini went out to round up food and additional clothing. They all made further plans over dinner. Chuck knew the beach house couldn't last. He couldn't do that to Doug. They needed a new start. They needed a complete change of identity. The problem was he had absolutely no idea how to go about that.
And while Dice and Eugene had some ideas—and both were better than competent programmers—neither was a hacker by any stretch of the imagination. Still, it was better than nothing.

At ten on their second night in the house, as the team sat around the living room making lists of assets and resources, Chuck got a message on his LinkedIn account. All it said was “Check the news.”

Chilled, Chuck made a mental grab at the TV remote where it sat on the coffee table. It shifted a little then fell to the floor. He took a deep breath. He was really going to have to work on that.

“Chuck,” said Eugene quietly. “Is there something you'd like to tell the rest of us?”

They were all staring at him. “Later,” he said. “Matt says we should check the news.”

Eugene fielded the remote and turned on CNN. There was a chemical leak in Arkansas. “I don't—” he started to say.

“Oh my God, the crawler!” said Lanfen. “Look at the crawler!”

Breaking news: Aircraft from all East Coast air force bases grounded. Pentagon says investigation is under way. Cites possibility of computer malfunction.

The next crawler was equally alarming:

Michaux State Forest and Game Preserve evacuated. Authorities cite potential terrorist threat
.

Dice turned to Chuck. “Matt said the Deeps were in a wildlife area, under a mountain. Could that be our zetas?”

“Must be. They screwed with the bases' computer systems so as not to be flushed out from above, and Howard's cordoned off the area to move in with a ground attack.”

“D'you think his recruits can get in?”

“Maybe. But only if they can move mountains.”

Sara looked around General Howard's command center with a sense of satisfaction that she'd never before experienced. They'd restored power to the core of the facility but kept a perimeter of defenses up—steel fire doors and airtight bulkheads. Their bunker was many stories beneath a mountain, they knew, having sampled the surveillance cameras, which they'd also restored to working condition.

Sara reached out through the network of computers and digital connections and savored the feeling of connectedness it gave her. She had tentacles of thought that reached far beyond this massive hole in the ground. She'd used those to good advantage when the air force had scrambled jets to fight a potential terrorist threat in the heart of this wild area. They'd been amazed by how quickly Howard had been able to effect that; he must have been prepared for the contingency of having to get the real military involved and had contacts he could call in. She'd asked Tim to see if he couldn't find evidence of that in his own travels through
the computer system. It would be useful to know the scope of Howard's network. So far all he'd been able to ascertain was that Leighton Howard was a security consultant to the Pentagon.

But they
had
discovered his first contingency plan in case the Deep was overrun: there were enough explosives planted in the labs to collapse the whole mountain. Mike had disabled most of these mechanisms of destruction along with the gun turrets dotted along the entryway, and Tim had cheerfully deleted any and all computer code that made remote triggering of the devices possible. General Howard (if he was really a general) could punch buttons and send pings until the sky fell, and the mountain would remain intact.

It was amazing how integrated military infrastructure was—and how archaic. Shutting down the air force bases had been easy, and it had made Sara think of that verse in Isaiah. She and Mike and Tim were in a unique position. They could literally force the beating of swords into plowshares. They could bring peace to the world. Or, conversely, they could start wars that would destroy it.

“Howard's trying to reach us again,” Tim said. “He wants to talk.”

“I'm sure he does,” Sara said. “I'll talk to him when we all know how to stop bullets.” She hesitated, feeling her way along the pathway they'd used to bring the bases to ground. “Did you know that these digital trails lead to all our international installations? I should have realized . . .”

Tim, sitting at a workstation at the core of the command center, looked up at the huge plasma screens that ran in rows across the curving front of the room. In a moment a map appeared on them, a tracery of lines running from the bright spot that was Deep Shield out to other hubs of activity, and from there . . .

“Hell, you're right. It's amazing. And they—” He broke off,
eyes half-closing, a frown creeping across his face. “They're rounding up jets from Ramstein, and . . . huh, well, that's not good.” His gaze flicked back to the map. On the dark bulk of Europe, several of the bright hubs of light dimmed. “That takes care of that. And I wonder what
that
is.” He stood and moved toward the big map, pointing to dimmer lines running to dimmer clusters of digital activity.

“Those,” said Sara, tracing the lines mentally, “are German facilities that share some connections with the U.S. ones.”

Tim glanced back and grinned. “Cool,” he said and shut those down, too.

“HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?” DICE
asked, shifting the laptop so Chuck could see the screen. “The UN Security Council is in complete meltdown. Just in the last forty-eight hours, military installations have been going dark all over the world. Governments are pointing fingers at each other, accusing one another of hacking and worse. It's nuts.”

“Is there any way we can reach them?” Lanfen asked. “The alpha zetas, I mean.”

“How?” asked Dice. “We don't have cell phone numbers for them anymore. We tried messages on social media. If we're going to talk to them, they're going to have to find a way to reach us.”

“In the meantime, though, we have to decide what
we're
going to do,” Eugene said. “We obviously can't squat here forever.”

“We need to find a place to set up shop,” Chuck said, “and a way to contact Sara and get real evidence against Howard. Our only hope is to expose him. If we go about it the wrong way, we'll end up in prison, and he'll be free to deploy his army. Whatever the alphas are doing, they're at least keeping that from happening. But you're right—we can't just sit here. We have to move soon.”

The house phone rang. Mini answered it and handed the receiver to Chuck. “It's your friend Doug.”

“Hi, Doug, what's—”

Doug cut him off. “Someone's looking for you, Chuck. Someone left an anonymous message saying you're going to have visitors, then some guy claiming to be from the CIA called to ask if I'd been in contact with you. Naturally I lied and said I hadn't seen you since the neuroscience convention a few years back and hadn't talked to you since last summer. Both of which were true until this week. They left me a number. Asked me to contact them if I heard from you. When I seemed hesitant, they told me it was a matter of national security.”

“It is,” Chuck told him. As he set the receiver back in the cradle, he realized he'd made a decision—some shadows were simply darker than others. He pulled Lorstad's card out of his pocket and dialed the number on his burner phone.

“What's happened, Chuck?” Lanfen asked, watching his face.

“We have to get out. Now.”

“How?”

“I don't know. But I hope I know someone who does.”

The call connected immediately. “Lorstad,” said the man on the other end.

“Mr. Lorstad, this is Chuck Brenton.

“I need your help.”