Wormhole (12 page)

The message was clear. There was a new boss in town. And he was merciless.

Wind whistled through the rafters as Heather watched the first fat raindrops spatter the windows of the Frazier comm center. The outbuilding was laid out like a grid, simple rectangular tables formed into rows on the raised metal flooring. The tables themselves held computer workstations, laptops, and specialized communications gear, acquired by Jack over the last two years, but much of it now modified by Jennifer, Heather, and Mark’s electronic wizardry.

When they’d first arrived at the Frazier hacienda, reliable power had been a periodic problem, the power provided by a combination of wind and solar electrical generation. One of their first tasks had been to build a replica of their cold fusion device. What had taken them several months the first time, they’d managed to accomplish in a month, despite the vast majority of their time being devoted to Jack’s training regimen. And with
this version of the cold fusion device, they’d made a number of improvements, providing it with the capacity to supply all the hacienda’s electrical needs.

More impressively, their breakthrough on miniaturizing the subspace receiver-transmitter had allowed them to rapidly upgrade several computers with that capability. It was a capability they’d already put to good use. After all, what good did it do you to have the ability to perform untraceable subspace hacks of protected, classified networks if you didn’t use it? No worries there. Jack had guided them through the creation of a number of identities. Official passports, bank accounts, medical records, service records, family histories, credit histories, all a piece of cake when you could control the official systems that created and tracked those records.

They’d established identities in seventeen countries, not counting the United States, arranging for documents to be delivered to intermediaries and stored in lockers, long-term storage, and safe-deposit boxes around the world. Money was moved to offshore bank accounts and funded the establishment of companies, some of which had only a post office box as an address while others were legitimate small businesses purchased for umbrella corporations. Jack’s rule of thumb was that no single business they controlled should have assets of more than seventeen million dollars.

Heather had laughed at that number, but upon further consideration judged his logic sound. Governments zeroed in on even numbers and big companies. And although
big
was generally defined as companies having values of more than 500 million US dollars, that figure varied widely by country and market. Besides, if and when you ran into problems that compromised a particular operation, you wanted your loss to be isolated from the bulk of your assets. Completely separate entities of small size operating under different corporate structures in different countries.

The seed money for their operations they had taken from Jennifer’s raid on the Espeñosa cartel accounts. With Heather’s unique talent for spotting trends and patterns, their investments had quickly blossomed, especially since they could obtain the most detailed insider information on upcoming corporate events. Strictly illegal, but so was practically everything else they were doing.

Heather glanced across at Jennifer and Mark, both at their own workstations, completely engrossed in the task at hand. And the task at hand was to figure out what Dr. Donald Stephenson was up to.

She focused her attention back on her own LCD display, scanning through all the news stories surrounding Stephenson’s release from prison, the president’s apology, Stephenson’s appointment as the US representative to CERN, and his surprising elevation to head the scientific team at the ATLAS detector.

She blasted through all the English-language links and then started in on the foreign sites, specifically those closest to the Large Hadron Collider: Swiss, French, German, Italian, Spanish. And although Heather was proud of the language skills she and Jennifer had acquired over the last few months, they were nothing like Mark’s. That was why they’d left the Russian, Eastern European, and Chinese sites to him.

Problem was, the deeper she looked, the less sense everything made. Stories coming out of the US government and the major European governments about Dr. Stephenson’s appointment to the LHC matched too perfectly. Since when had the Europeans started knuckling under to the US on high-energy physics research? After all, they’d built the largest supercollider in history. Yes, the US had contributed, but this was truly a European-led effort.

And yet somehow the acclaimed French physicist Dr. Louis Dubois had calmly stepped aside to let Donald Jailbird
Stephenson take over his position, willingly accepting a lesser role on the project.

Two hours later she was no closer to figuring it out. Mark and Jen also reported no significant progress.

Heather rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, stretching in her chair to restart circulation to her lower extremities. Outside, the wind had died out, leaving the sounds and smells of a slow, steady rain to break the night’s silence. Nearer at hand, the click of keyboard keys rose above the hum of computer fans.

Rising from her chair, Heather walked to the door and stepped out into the night, sheltered from the rain by the overhanging eave. She inhaled deeply, letting the cool damp air fill her lungs as it cooled her skin.

Over at the main house all the lights were out, but Heather could make out Jack’s lithe form leaning back in one of the porch chairs, apparently regarding her as she looked back at him. What was he thinking about? As much as she liked and respected him, he remained a mystery. The deadliest man she could imagine often showed a lightheartedness that lifted the spirits of all those around him. At other times he drove them like a slave master on one of those old Roman battle ships. She could practically hear him yelling, “Ramming speed!” to the drummer.

Betrayed by his country, the world’s most hunted man relaxed on his dark porch, feet propped on a table, listening to the rain. He sat there waiting for answers from his team, not rushing them, just waiting.

Feeling the weight of that responsibility draped over her shoulders like a heavy wet blanket, Heather took another deep breath, then turned and walked back into the comm center.

The afternoon sun’s rays slanted in through the living room window, wedging into the gap between the curtains, painting a bright yellow spot on the floor. Little dust specks swam through the sunbeam like tiny fish in an aquarium.

Linda Smythe sat on the couch staring straight ahead, completely unaware of the sunbeam’s effort to brighten the dark room. If she had noticed, she would have walked over and dragged the curtains more tightly together. There was no room for light in the dark place in which she dwelled.

On the chocolate-brown coffee table, a tall glass beaded water into a ring at its bottom, a ring that had grown a stray finger that reached out toward the round white pill sitting to its right. Linda’s gaze flicked down, paused at the pill, and then returned to the empty spot above the television. Trazadone had lost its allure, impotent at relieving her dark misery. It just made her want to
sleep. But sleep was worse than waking. Sleep meant dreams. In dreams, her twin babies left her. In dreams, her twin babies died.

She knew they were dead. If they had lived, they would have contacted her. They would have contacted Fred, or Anna, or Gil. For whatever reason, Jennifer had run off and Mark and Heather had gone after her. Whatever horrible thing Jennifer had gotten herself involved in had killed them all. It was the only explanation for the months of silence. She knew her kids. No way would they have left their parents to suffer so long without word. No way.

The authorities had been no help at all, despite their canned “The investigation is ongoing” responses. They’d written the Smythe and McFarland kids off as they had so many thousands of other runaways. Linda could practically hear the officers she contacted wondering why they couldn’t just put three more faces on some milk cartons and call it a day.

Fred knew Linda was in trouble; he had known for some time. It tore Linda up inside to see how hard Fred worked at bringing some little bit of cheer back into her life. The sweet man smothered her in love, all the while raging at himself inside his head, as if will alone could do the impossible.

For that matter, Anna and Gil had done their best too. They were all so strong. Each suffering in his or her own way, somehow grabbing hold of an inner strength that Linda couldn’t find. She might have found it after Jennifer left. Given enough time and support, she thought she might have. But Mark too? It was as if someone had stabbed her in the heart, then reached through the gaping hole to rip out what little remained.

Linda rose unsteadily to her feet, turned, and made her way around the end table with its opened King James Bible. She stopped to stare down at the book, gold leaf on the edges of the pages, so lovingly made it felt good in your hands. Never religious, Linda had turned to the Bible in desperation. She’d read
the whole thing, found paragraphs that should have given her comfort.

And she’d prayed. God, how she’d prayed.
Lord, just give me back my kids. Take me instead. Anything, Lord. I’ll do whatever you want. Just let my kids come home safe
.

Lot of good it had done her. She picked up the Bible, dropped it into the small elk-embossed trash can, and then turned and slowly climbed the stairs.

The cold spring wind swept down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, whipping Tall Bear’s long black hair over his shoulders, an icy cat-o’-nine-tails stinging his face. Not that the wind would have been any warmer back home on the Santa Clara Indian Reservation. The bulk of New Mexico sat on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains, east of the Continental Divide, birthplace of the Chinook winds. In springtime it formed in the high country, a mighty raiding party, screaming down the steep slopes in a savage assault that sent everything in its path cowering behind available cover.

An image from his youth leapt unbidden to his mind. The sky had been gray, like this one, spitting sleet pellets driven horizontal by the icy wind. They stung his cheeks, ears, and neck as he rode, herding a sick cow into a pen. Tall Bear tilted his head hard to the left, his cowboy hat’s broad brim providing his only
protection. Then he’d seen it. Not ten yards away from him, his father, Screaming Eagle, sat atop a big bay mare, huddled beside a telephone pole, instinctively seeking shelter on the lee side of the tall stick of wood. It was one of the funniest damn things Tall Bear had ever seen.

Screaming Eagle had been one tough Indian. As Tall Bear forced his mind back to the present, looking at the gathering before him, he knew that if they were going to get through what was coming, they were going to need a lot of men like his father.

Constructed entirely of adobe, the Taos Pueblo was home to around 150 full-time residents. Other tribal members lived in more modern homes outside the walls, but still on the reservation. Because it was situated on 99,000 acres of tribal land at an elevation of over 7,000 feet, Tall Bear thought it was a perfect place for the celebration. The second such declaration of independence to be held on New Mexico tribal lands.