The Second Ship (33 page)

Chapter 74

Priest knew that in past lifetimes he had been a mighty warrior, a slayer of men, a ravager of women, just as he was now. After all, the old oak tree spread its roots in the soil, growing tall, hard, and strong. And when it died, it sprouted from its own acorn to live again. But it was still an oak. So it was with Priest.

His awareness of his prior existence was more than a belief. Priest often awoke from a dream, and in that moment of awakening, for a brief instant, he could almost recall the men he had been. He could almost hear the screams of the dying as they pleaded with him to spare their lives.

Just as Ms. California begged for her life right now. As he dragged her bound form from the house to the old well out back, she cried and pleaded with him. And Priest almost wavered. Not from any sense of mercy. Hearing her terrified cries aroused him, almost enough to take her back to his basement for a few more days of usage.

But he’d already snipped her fingers for his necklace. It was time for her to join the others.

In the concrete basement beneath a German Gasthaus, a wooden ball makes a unique sound as it rolls down an alley to crash into nine wooden pins. The sound is picked up and amplified by the enclosing concrete walls, sloshing back and forth like Pilsner in the drinking glasses of the red-faced rollers.

Something about the sound of a woman’s bound body falling down his well reminded Priest of that. Déjà vu.

As he walked back toward the house, Priest realized he was hungry, although not for food. The source of his hunger was one Janet Johnson, whatever her real name might be.

He didn’t know her real name. It was something that had only happened to Priest once before. Usually his sources could deliver a dossier on anybody in the world, a dossier that was thick enough to pop the hinges off a briefcase. But where Janet Johnson was concerned, there was nothing. Nothing real, anyway. There was plenty of stuff about her make-believe life. Birth certificate: Janet Donovan, Gaithersburg, Maryland, August 28, 1982. High School Diploma from Quince Orchard High, class of 2000. BA in history from University of Maryland, class of 2004. Marriage certificate to one Jack Johnson signed in Silver Spring, Maryland, September 2, 2004.

As he paused at the kitchen table to stare at the papers spread across it, Priest shook his head. Garbage. Every last scrap of it. The only other person he had ever encountered with a similar dearth of information was her pretend husband. But Priest knew some things about Jacky boy that put the lie to the false background. And they put the lie to all the information on Janet that lay spread out before him as well.

Deep cover. Part of Jack Gregory’s team. That told him all he really needed to know about that live little minx. And soon enough, he would have all the time in the world to encourage her to tell him the rest.

The sad thing about being a warrior of such high standards was that Priest bored of his conquests so rapidly. He didn’t think that would be the case with Janet Johnson. If she was acceptable to Jack, then she would be among the best. She would take a very long time to break. Priest couldn’t ask for more than that. That she was drop-dead gorgeous was merely icing on the cake.

Priest turned toward his front door. The day was drifting away from him, and he still had so many things to do. The drive to his hide position alone was going to take an hour and a half by the back roads, and then he had a hard forty-five-minute hike after that. And he wanted to be there well before the high school let out and Janet Johnson made her way home.

Normally he would have selected a hide that was more easily accessible. But this time that would not do. Not when Jack Gregory was involved. The man’s nose for trouble was uncanny, almost as if he had a sixth sense that warned him of danger. And Jack was not a man to trifle with. Priest had learned that firsthand.

The vantage point Priest had chosen was a brushy enclave in a crack in the cliff face across the canyon from the house Jack and Janet rented. It allowed entry along a trail hidden from the other side of the canyon. And the way the spot was shaded meant no stray glint from the lenses of his binoculars would betray his position.

He glanced down at his watch. 14:34. Perfect. Just enough time to get settled in before Janet got off work and returned home, provided she kept her routine. Whatever time she arrived didn’t really matter. Priest could wait.

As he adjusted his binoculars, Priest smiled. He had all the time in the world.

Chapter 75

“You won’t believe what that brother of mine is up to now.”

Heather glanced up from her book to see Jennifer’s spectacled face peering through her bedroom door.

“What?”

“You'll never guess in a million years.”

“But you’re going to make me try?”

Jennifer walked into the room and plopped down on Heather’s bed. “He joined a society.”

“You mean like the Moose Lodge or the Masons?” Heather shifted in her desk chair to keep facing her friend.

“Something like that.”

“Jen, are you going to tell me or not?”

“Mark is now a card-carrying member of POOTNAS, the Patriotic Order of the Needle and Spool.”

“The sewing circle? The old ladies whose ancestors sewed uniforms for the civil war? You’re kidding, right?”

“That’s what I thought when I heard it, but it’s true.”

“Is it some scheme to meet girls?”

“Not unless he’s really desperate. The youngest member of the Los Alamos Chapter, except Mark, is sixty-seven.”

Heather set her book down behind her on the desk. “So what’s his angle?”

“As far as I can tell, he likes sewing.”

“Since when?”

“All I know is, a couple of days ago he was watching a program on the invention of various stitches and he got very interested. You could just see his face light up. Since then he has been a fanatic on the whole subject. He even went to the library.”

“We are still talking about your brother, Mark, right?”

Jennifer shrugged. “At least it looks like my brother. Currently he’s deeply immersed in articles on slip stitches and the effects of temperature variations on threads.”

“Have you asked him why?”

“Of course. He was shocked that I could even ask. The Sisters of Mercy couldn’t have looked more innocent.”

Heather shook her head. “Well, there’s no making sense out of anything guys do.”

“Oh. Mark distracted me so badly I almost forgot what I came over to tell you. I wanted to tell Mark too, but he told me to quit interrupting him and to get lost. Sometimes he makes me so mad I can’t see straight.”

Heather grinned. “So what did you want to tell me?”

Jennifer propped up two pillows and leaned back against Heather’s headboard. “Something’s been bothering me for a long time now, something that I’d seen in the data the last time we were on the ship.”

The topic of the ship brought Heather to full attention. Though they had thoroughly swept her room for bugs, it still made her nervous to talk about it.

“Bothering you? Why?”

“At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. But this morning I was playing the whole thing back in my mind and I found it. Then I went on the Internet to get some data about the Aztec Crash back in 1948, and it all started to make sense to me.”

Jennifer paused, lacing her fingers behind her head. “The debris they found outside of Aztec wasn’t from the ship at the lab. The debris came from our ship.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Think about it. Both ships were involved in the Aztec Incident. They shot each other down that night, didn’t they? But the ship the government found didn’t have a hole punched through it. Ours did. I think when the Rho Ship’s weapon penetrated the hull of the Second Ship, the decompression sucked out some debris. I also wondered about the missing crew. I think they got sucked out through that hole.”

Heather nodded. “Like the imagery we saw. Sucked out into the vacuum of space.”

“You know what that debris means? The government knows there was a second ship, and Stephenson has probably figured out that both ships shot each other down. Our subspace hack into the NSA’s secure networks might put him onto us.”

Heather chewed her lower lip, the odds of such a thing working themselves out in her thoughts.

“Possible, but not likely. I still believe the NSA folks think they’re getting a warning from someone working on the Rho Project with access to its technology. I don’t think they would have tipped off anyone on the Rho Project while they are checking into it.”

“Let’s hope not. In the meantime, I suggest we be even more careful when communicating with the NSA.”

Heather stood up. “Okay. Let’s go interrupt Mark from sewing a Superman cape or whatever he’s up to. It’s time to bring that brother of yours back down to this planet.”

Chapter 76

Jack loved lightning. Sitting on the rock ledge looking at the approaching late spring storm across the high canyon country, the rain hanging from the thunderheads in dark veils, he could almost anticipate when the next bolt would rip the sky.

He had been in many storms, had felt the violence of the great American heartland storms, had ridden out a typhoon on a fishing boat in the South China Sea, had been drenched in the monsoon rains of Myanmar—a place the US government continued to call Burma, rest of the world be damned.

But somehow, there was nothing that compared to the high desert storms that rumbled through the mountains of the American Southwest. Thunder crackled through the thin air as if someone had dropped a boulder on a concrete slab, the sound echoing outward between the rock walls, one angry rumble supplanting the next.

It wasn’t that Jack needed to be out here at this moment. It was simply that the exertion of the rock climb in the clear mountain air facilitated his thinking. Out here, accompanied by the feel of the approaching storm, the pieces of the puzzle were assembling themselves in his head.

Sometimes luck helped you find the key thread, and as you plucked it, the security that cloaked your opponent's movements unraveled. In this case, the break had come from the incident at the state basketball tournament. The drugging of the water bottle had led Jack and Janet to focus their attention on Raul Rodriguez and, by proxy, on his father, Dr. Ernesto Rodriguez.

The information that Janet had provided this morning added to a growing pool of circumstantial evidence that pointed to the likelihood that Ernesto had taken his work beyond the confines of the lab. Although Jack still didn’t have any hard evidence that clarified the exact nature of what Dr. Rodriguez was working on within the Rho Division, he was beginning to develop a fairly good idea.

Not only had the scientist’s son made a miraculous recovery from terminal cancer, but he appeared to have remarkable healing powers as well. The school nurse, Harriet Lu, had told Janet that Raul had been rushed to her office a few weeks ago after having suffered a serious cut in shop class. However, by the time she had examined the hand that had slid into the buzz saw, except for a redness where the palm appeared to be mildly skinned, there was no indication of damage.

The shop teacher, Mr. Hendricks, had been certain that he had seen the hand cut open, but when confronted with the evidence of his own eyes, he finally decided that he must have imagined it. Perhaps what he thought he had seen had only been based upon his expectation of injury due to having observed Raul fall forward across the machine. Mrs. Lu would not have even spoken of the incident had Janet not mentioned what a lucky young man Raul was.

Finally there was the tabloid story of the rat. Jack had come across it in the supermarket; a front-page story in the Inquisitor about what a Los Alamos custodian claimed was the Rasputin of rats. It was exactly the sort of tale Jack would normally chuckle at and dismiss, had it not been for the name of the custodian.

Carlos Delgado was on Jack’s list of employees with access to the Rho Division, head of a cleaning crew for the building in which Dr. Rodriguez worked. So Jack had purchased the rag and read the story of how Carlos had found a rat that he couldn’t seem to kill. Not with poisoned bait. Not with a trap. Upon finding its head caught in the trap, he had stomped down upon it to break the animal's neck. But when he popped the catch open, it had miraculously run off, disappearing down a storm drain.

The story was almost certainly embellished, but had a ring of familiarity about it, considering what he had learned about Raul. Jack would have loved to have a conversation with Mr. Delgado. And he would have, had the custodian not gotten himself killed in an automobile accident the very day that the story appeared in the tabloid.

A late-night trip to the salvage yard had revealed an oddly shaped hole in the brake line, the type of hole that was characteristic of a shaped micro-charge. Mr. Delgado had been very unlucky indeed to bring himself to the attention of someone with the rarefied skill-set that included the construction and use of shaped micro-charges. No doubt, the person who had set it off had done so from a promontory overlooking this winding canyon road. Perhaps from the very one on which Jack now sat. The loss of brakes at just that point on the highway below had resulted in the two-hundred-foot plunge that had snuffed out the life of Carlos Delgado, a family man who left behind a wife and four small children.

As Jack studied the curve in the highway where the guardrail had been insufficient to arrest the flight of the Chevy Malibu, the first drops of rain spattered down onto his face. There was no doubt about it. Someone with a skill set with which Jack was all too familiar was nearby and interested in the same thing that occupied his and Janet’s attention. Who was it?

Jack stood up. Almost, it seemed that he sniffed the air. Then, like some great cat, he disappeared into the rocky crevice from which he had emerged.