Geneva, Switzerland
H
ERE WE GO
again, Jake thought. I’ve been back in their lives for less than two days, and already Mario is critically wounded, the children are missing, and the rest of them have gathered around me to face down a challenge better suited for a world of armies.
They were spread out around the dining room table. Timmy was attempting to hack into the laptop that they’d grabbed from Victor’s residence. Marshall hovered over the other laptop. He’d taken on the task of isolating the location of Sarafina’s phone. Though nothing had been said between them, Jake sensed the underlying competition to see who’d be finished first. Their fingers blurred over the keyboards. Lacey filled cups from a fresh-brewed pot of coffee.
Francesca sat on one side of Jake, with Tony and Ahmed on the other. They listened intently while Jake filled them in on what had happened at the Palace of Nations. He told them what he’d learned about Victor Brun and the Order. Each layer of information added weight to the tension in the room. At one point Francesca felt compelled to get up and pace around the table, arms crossed, deep in thought. Jake lowered his eyes when he got to the part about his rage at the sight of her death. But he didn’t leave anything out, including the ease with which
he’d taken the lives of the men in the chair room. They deserved to know it all.
When he was finished, it was Lacey who spoke first. “Sounds like the son of a bitch has got his fingers in a lot of pies.”
“Sure,” Tony said. “Brun and his pals have had a thousand years to get ready. We already know he’s got plants at high levels in some governments. The Russians, for one.”
Timmy didn’t stop typing when he added, “The US, too. Remember, they didn’t have any trouble getting an assassin into our top secret facility in order to try to kill Jake.”
“Not to mention Interpol,” Francesca added.
Ahmed was looking out the window. “Something’s happened!” he said. “Everybody’s running.”
Lacey moved beside him. “He’s right. It looks like chaos just graduated to pandemonium.”
“Switch on the TV,” Jake said.
“Already done,” Marshall replied, holding the remote.
They gathered in front of the fifty-inch flat-screen.
The images and videos that filled the screen were horrific. It was an ever-changing slide show that depicted death and destruction on a massive scale: gruesome images of heaping piles of dead bodies, drawn from the archives of recorded history. There were battlefields ridden with the mangled ruins of life, and endless lines of victims being herded for slaughter, toward gas chambers, firing lines, or worse. There was no sound track. None was necessary.
Francesca and Lacey collapsed onto the couch. Francesca had a hand to her mouth as if to prevent some evil from reaching inside. Marshall shrank to Lacey’s side, pulling her close. Ahmed moved beside Francesca.
Jake couldn’t join them. His focus remained glued to the screen. He knew what was coming.
Marshall pointed the remote at the screen, switching from channel to channel. It was the same on every station: burned-out
villages and towns. Smoke-filled streets strewn with bodies. Dogs licking at the charred and curled remains of children. Gut-wrenching scenes of abuse and murder from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Several sketched images depicted the slow but steady slaughter of American Indians by US settlers. It went on and on. No deplorable secret was left uncovered. All was revealed for the world to see.
“Where are they getting all this from?” Lacey muttered, referring to the alien objects.
“If they can override broadcast signals around the world, it’d be a piece of cake for them to access our databases,” Marshall said. “Hell, they’re probably tapped into the Library of Congress.”
The sad truth was that it could stream for months and never show the same image or video twice, Jake thought. And that was the lesson of it. It was as if the lead prosecutor for the mother of all trials was laying out his evidence.
Jake felt hollow inside. Who was he in this macabre play if not the “inside man” who’d betrayed his people to the court?
The theme of the images shifted to wars. Embedded videos of modern battles mingled with artistic renderings of ancient conflicts. In either case, it was still violence on an immense scale, veiled in the name of country or religion, but motivated by greed and the hunger for power and wealth. The Crusades, the “Holy” Roman Empire, the Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan. The World Wars, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so many more. Chemical warfare, carpet bombs, napalm…
The nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The message was clear: No country on Earth had been spared the violence. And none could claim innocence from wielding it.
Judgment cast, Jake thought. Mankind has been found guilty.
As if to accent his conclusion, a digital timer suddenly appeared in the top-right corner of the screen. It glowed with the same color as the lines in the sky. It read
40H:00M:00S
.
They all held their breath.
A beat later, the clock switched to
39H:59M:59S.
Seconds continued to tick off.
The countdown to the annihilation of mankind had begun.
Jake walked to the TV and switched it off. He turned to face his friends. He crossed his arms, kept his mouth shut, and waited.
Eyes narrowed, bodies shifted. Francesca locked gazes with Jake. He sensed her probing his emotions, and he welcomed it. He had nothing to hide. The others respected the moment with their silence. Jake caught the subtle changes in her expression. Her lips tightened, her jaw jutted forward, and the fear in her eyes was replaced with fierce determination. She riveted him with a fervent stare.
Finally, she rose to her feet. “This changes nothing,” she said flatly. “I’m going to make another pot of coffee. We’ve much planning to do.”
Her unflinching reaction seemed to fuel the fire within them all.
Jake used his thumb to point at her as she strode to the kitchen. “That’s
my
girl,” he said with more than a little pride.
Ahmed mimicked the motion and said, “That’s
my
mom!”
“You go, girl,” Lacey said.
Tony nodded in agreement. “So where were we?” he said, making his way back to the dining table. The others followed. Marshall and Timmy resumed their work on the computers.
“Talking about Victor,” Lacey said. “He figures that his group—the Order—is going to be spared extermination. How is he going to make that happen?”
“Good question,” Jake said. “But he seemed real sure of himself on that score.”
“They’d need an isolated location,” Tony said. “To keep their population out of harm’s way.”
“You’re talking about a mass exodus,” Francesca said from the kitchen. “Entire families.”
“There could be hundreds of them,” Lacey said.
“More like thousands,” Jake said.
Marshall made a final keystroke entry. Then he sat back and clenched and unclenched his fingers. He watched the screen as if waiting for a program to load. He glanced up and said, “Which means they’d need an effective means of telling friend from foe. They can’t possibly know everyone personally, especially if they’re scattered across the globe.”
Timmy seemed oblivious to Marshall’s comment. His keystrokes seemed to grow more frantic. He was totally engrossed in the machine.
Ahmed said, “Sort of like a secret handshake?”
“Yeah,” Tony said, catching on. “But higher-tech. Facial recognition or something like that.”
Jake recalled how Victor’s men communicated. “They have some sort of embedded comm devices. I’ve seen them press a spot just beneath their ears when they communicate.”
“Military-grade implantable comm units,” Tony said. “Very high-tech.”
“They can do that?” Lacey asked.
“Are you kidding?” Marshall said. “Intel is working on a brain-implant chip that will allow you to enter data into a computer simply by thinking it. They expect it to be ready by the year 2020. It won’t be long after that until it’s adios, cell phones.”
The mention of a brain implant sparked a knowing look between Jake and Ahmed.
Marshall continued, “But for now, the communication implant you’re talking about is still a serious surgery. No big deal for the field operatives, but overkill for the families. They’d need something simpler than that for tracking and identification purposes.” His computer beeped. He made a quick entry and added, “Something that would provide each individual with a unique identifier.”
Lacey said, “What’s wrong with an ID card?”
“Too easy to forge,” Ahmed said, drawing on his recent experience.
“I’m in!” Timmy said excitedly. His fingers tapped in an organized frenzy on Victor’s computer. He paused a moment, his eyes scanning a document. Another entry, another document, then he started typing again. This went on for several moments. Finally, whimpers leaked from his throat, increasing in frequency with the speed of his keystrokes. Then all at once he lifted his hands in the air. His jaw was set, his eyes burned with intensity, and he pointedly dropped an index finger on the
ENTER
key. A beat later, he did a Tiger Woods–style fist pump and shouted, “Yes!” He spun the laptop around so everyone could see the screen. “And I know just how they’re doing it!”
Jake leaned forward to get a closer look. It was a satellite map of Geneva. There were several clusters of blinking lights overlaid onto the map.
“It’s a tracking system,” Timmy said. He placed the cursor over one of the lights, and a rectangular window popped up with an alphanumeric string. “Military-grade RFIDs. The same sort of thing that they use in consumer products. Except this is an active system, meaning it transmits a wireless signal. They have a limited range, but if they’re piggybacked onto the cellular system, then they can be tracked anywhere there’s coverage. They’re easily embedded under the skin using a modified vaccine gun.”
“Each of those dots is a person?” Ahmed asked, pointing to the screen.
“Yep.”
Tony pointed at a small cluster of four lights. “That’s Victor’s residence.”
But Jake was focused on the twenty or more blips bunched within the Palace of Nations. “This isn’t a live feed.”
“No,” Timmy said, pointing at the digital clock in the corner of the screen. “This was recorded about an hour ago. But I can fast-forward.” He made an entry, and the blips started to move.
They watched as the scene unfolded: Several blips of light at the palace sped northward toward a waiting cluster of blips at the airport. The four lights at the residence jiggled somewhat but remained on the property. Three more lights traveled to the residence, hesitated a moment, and departed on a track toward the airport. The remaining lights at the palace were starting to exit the complex, when every light on the screen suddenly disappeared.
“What happened?” Lacey asked.
“That’s gotta be just after the launch,” Timmy said. “When the cell system was overloaded.” He rewound to the point just before the lights vanished.
Tony said, “They were hightailing to the airport—”
“Oh, no,” Marshall interjected, staring at his own laptop. He looked as if the wind had gotten knocked out of him. “I located Sarafina’s cell phone,” he said softly. He slid his laptop around so that it was alongside Timmy’s. It depicted the same Google map of Geneva. He pointed to a glowing icon containing the phone number on the disposable phone. “This was her last location before the overload.”
There were gasps around the table. It was the exact same spot as that of the three blips that had departed the residence toward the airport.
Victor’s men had grabbed the children.
The room grew silent. Eyes turned to Francesca. Jake squeezed her hand, but the tremble he expected wasn’t there. He sensed the despair that boiled beneath the surface of her stern expression. But she pushed it aside like an army general planning his next move after a failed battle.
“So how do we find them?” she asked evenly.
Jake compartmentalized the swell of admiration he felt for her. He’d act on that later. For now, another part of his mind had already grasped the solution. He pointed at Timmy’s screen. “Zoom all the way out.”
Timmy placed the cursor on the minus-sign end of the zoom bar and clicked six or seven times. With each click, the satellite image zoomed outward to capture a larger view: the snowcapped Alps, Switzerland, Europe, Asia, and Africa, the world…
Blinking lights covered the globe.
“Son of a bitch,” Tony muttered.
“Holy crap,” Marshall said.
Jake tuned them out as he studied the icons representing the members of the Order. His brained captured, sorted, and analyzed the data. Nine hundred fifteen lights. Unevenly distributed. Fewer in the Americas. A higher concentration in Asia. Many of them over water—which meant aircraft or ships.
The exodus had begun.
He reminded himself that the freeze-frame he looked at was just before the lights had blinked off. “How far back can you rewind?” Jake asked.
“Twenty-four hours,” Timmy said.
“Do it.”
Timmy made the entry. The blinking icons repositioned themselves. The change was dramatic. They were evenly distributed across the populated areas of each continent. Only a small percentage of them were over water. But what Jake found most intriguing was the fact that there were 322 additional markers. That brought the total to 1,237.
“Now fast-forward at maximum speed.”
The lights jiggled and danced in place at first. Then suddenly, as if they had been activated by a simultaneous signal, they started to move in concert with one another. Like scattered fish gathering in schools, they began to migrate. Jake imagined them on trains and planes and ships, all heading toward the same destination—converging on a body of water near Indonesia. But as the lights at the front of the pilgrimage neared the destination, they disappeared. It was as if a spatial black hole were drawing the lights into its vortex.
“Zoom in on that point,” Jake said, pointing to the void.