Chapter 16
MONDAY 2:01 a.m.
Eilean Donan Asylum
Near Dornie, Highlands, Scotland
Arthritic fingers clutched a dull pencil and scribbled madly over the inside of a manila envelope. The old man drew tiny spirals, miniscule whorls that crashed together, some overlapping, all smudged with ashen lead that spread like exhaust as he dragged the edge of his writing hand back and forth across the paper. This continued until there were no blank spaces, just thousands of squiggling vortexes, imperfect in their curvature because his body shook with age.
Folding the envelope back into its original shape, he added glue to the edges and held the ends together. He wrote an address at the upper left corner on the sender line:
Dr. David Hyden
Denburn Court Apartments
Aberdeen AB25 UK
The addressee line was left blank.
SPECIAL DELIVERY - ROYAL MAIL - SAME DAY was printed in capital letters across the bottom of the envelope.
The old man rose from his seat and limped to the door. He placed one ear against the wood.
The monotonous drone of a television sounded down the hall. It was a football game. Ireland versus England. A classic rerun at least one decade old. The final minute in a tied second half.
He pressed his mouth against the door and yelled. His voice gurgled under the strain.
“Shut it!” an attendant shouted from a distance down the hall.
The old man banged his fists against the door. His yells became more outraged.
“Alright, alright!” The attendant shuffled up the hall and stopped beside the door.
Cheers echoed down the corridor as the winning point was scored.
“Bloody hell, you made me miss it!” he said.
The manila envelope slid under the door out into the hallway.
“What’s this?”
The old man listened as the attendant stooped to pick up the letter.
“You forgot the address, nutter. And there’s no stam—”
With his c
rippled hands balled into knobby fists, the old man drew his breath inward, creating a vacuum that swallowed every thought, impulse, and involuntary action, and transformed inertia into energy that could be contained and controlled. His respiration slowed. Silenced at the most basic level, the mitochondrial orchestration of his body stopped. Every joule was isolated for one purpose.
With sharp exhalation, his
consciousness exploded. Direct energy bombarded the attendant’s mind, twisting through synapses in a kinetic storm of confusion. Chaos was quickly replaced with a message:
Send the letter now
.
“Okay, okay.” The attendant stepped away from the door, sounding dizzy and discombobulated. “I’ll send your bloody letter.”
The old man smiled. This was child’s play. It had been easier than he thought, violating the attendant’s mind. Simple minds were effortless to control.
Recoiling into his cell, the old man hobbled to his bed. He sat on the mattress and massaged the muscles in his writing hand. After a moment, he lay down and stared at the ceiling. The escape from London’s underground, the message burned into the palm of Brenton’s eldest son, everything was coming together as planned.
All he had to do was wait.
Fortunately, the quiet of the vast asylum provided space large enough to entertain his welcomed hallucinations. He reached over, turned out the light,
and feasted upon the darkness.
Chapter 1
7
MONDAY 2:15 a.m.
Denburn Court Apartments
Aberdeen, Scotland
The elevator bell chimed and the door slid open. David stepped off the lift onto the sixteenth floor and walked down the hallway. All bu
t a few of the ceiling bulbs were burned out. It had been months since they had expired, but nobody bothered to complain to management. The walkway was mostly dark except for an occasional pocket of dim yellow light over the doorways of his more fastidious neighbors. The lackluster glow muted his already exhausted and blurred vision. Everything was harder to see under this light. Things would be better if there were no working bulbs at all. He stopped at the last door near the end of the hall, dug through his pant pockets, and removed his keys.
As he reached for the door handle, the brass knob caught his attentio
n. The metal was crushed inward. It looked like someone with a superhuman grip squeezed it out of shape. He touched the knob and quickly pulled back his hand. The metal was hot.
“What the hell?”
He crouched beside it to get a better view. He tapped it again. The handle broke off its base and fell to the floor.
“Come on,” he muttered
. This was the last thing he needed right now. He kicked the door open a few inches. Something heavy was blocking it. The door could only inch open with each blow. He threw his entire weight into the door. It budged a few inches as something broke apart inside with a loud crack. After that, the door refused to move any further.
Slipping one arm through the narrow opening, he reached along the inside wall and flipped the light switch.
The room stayed dark.
He tried the switch again.
Nothing.
Hips first, he forced his body through the cranny and edged along the wall toward the coat closet. The answering machine across the room on the kitchen counter blinked red. That meant the electricity wasn’t out. He tried another switch a
long the wall. That light didn’t work either.
Glass cracked under his sh
oe. He looked down to see jagged pieces of a picture frame. His shins met the corner of his overturned coffee table, and he toppled to the floor, landing on his injured knee. His kneecap exploded with pain. He grabbed his leg and pulled his knee to his chest. Warm blood seeped into his dirty pant leg.
The
pain was blinding. He felt along the floor to figure out what was going on. He closed his eyes—maybe if he allowed time for his eyes to adjust.
It worked.
After a few moments, he could see shards of glass glittering on the carpet from the dim outside hall light. Adding to the fray were splinters of wood and metal and billows of shredded cotton and fabric.
V
ertigo spun him in circles. He had to stare at one spot for a few seconds to regain his equilibrium. He stood up. His knee throbbed as he limped to the coat closet. There was a flashlight on the top shelf. He clicked it on.
The entire room was
ripped to shreds, crushed, shattered, obliterated. Not one item was left intact. Even the plaster walls and hideous shag carpet had been cut into fraying ribbons. Someone was looking for something.
There was a loud crash in his bedroom.
A dark figure ran across the living room into the kitchen. Beyond the kitchen, a small balcony overlooked the city, offering a suicidal 160-foot drop to the busy street.
David
scrambled over the debris to the kitchen. The explosion in his knee returned with startling vengeance. His knee buckled. Face met carpet, and he was on the floor again. He forced himself up and stumbled into the kitchen not sure of what he’d find. Across the room, the dark figure broke through the sliding glass door leading to the balcony. The window splintered in a waterfall of glass.
David
held himself upright by the counter. This was crazy. There was no way he could defend himself in this condition, but he had to do something. He pulled open the junk drawer and shuffled madly through papers, pens, clips, the phone book. Where the hell was the gun?
He grabbed a
knife instead and hobbled along the counter to the window. All that remained of the sliding glass door was its thin aluminum frame. He peered through the opening, ready with the knife.
The man was gone.
Chapter 18
MONDAY 3:40 a.m.
Stenness, Orkney Island, Scotland
“This can’t be right,” Marek said, looking up from his computer as Thatcher entered the tent.
She slumped in a chair between him and Bailey. Sitting was a luxury. Especially after an entire day of dissecting the Stenness remain
s. “What is it?” she asked.
M
arek gestured to his screen. The monitor displayed a map of Stenness. A small icon shaped like Sonja blinked at the lower right corner. Another icon labeled “Stenness” was positioned at the middle. “Ballistics and Donovon entered all of our testing data—the dates and times we fired Sonja, the precise pitch and frequency.” He skimmed over the numbers, performing logarithms in his head. “There has to be an error.”
“The numbers are right.” Bailey s
cowled.
“Well, according to our
data, there’s no way in hell we did this,” Marek said.
Thatcher sat up.
Marek pointed at the small Sonja icon on his screen. “This is our test site.” He moved his mouse cursor over the symbol. The Sonja symbol exploded. “Bam,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves 160 dB of low-frequency infrasound.”
A rippling effect of curved oblong sound waves moved outward from Sonja across the map and
into the village.
“That’s only enough noise to cause mild tissue heating, nausea,
intestinal pain,” Thatcher agreed. “It would have to be bigger.”
“W
e never fired anything bigger,” Marek said.
Bailey nodded at the screen as he chewed on his pen. “
What if our settings were off…take her up a notch.”
“Crank Sonja up to 200 dB and 2.5 kH,” Marek said. “That’s a whole lotta noise…”
“Enough to kill,” Thatcher said.
The Sonja icon enlarged and exploded, sending waves toward Stenness.
“Sound lessens in intensity the further it moves away from its source,” Marek said. “Sonja was 8 km southeast of Stenness, so…”
“W
e’re still not talking death,” Bailey said.
“J
ust a lot of discomfort Pepto-Bismol can’t fix,” Marek said. “Our test site is too far away.”
“What if we let her go at full power?” Bailey asked.
Thatcher turned to him, surprised.
Bailey leaned back in his chair. “Hypotheti
cally.”
Marek added the new configuration into the program. “If Sonja dumps payload…”
The map refreshed with the Sonja icon twice as big. It burst, unleashing a much larger acoustic wave.
“That’s 250 dB and 30 kH,” Marek said. “We’re mimicking a high yield, non-nuclear explosion. Pretty damn close to the power of an atomic “bunker buster” warhead.”
Thatcher watched the sound waves radiate across Stenness.
“The blast woul
d be lethal to a range of 50 km,” he said. “Instantaneous combustion, zero survivors.”
Her stomach knotted. “Exactly what I saw in the bodies I examined.”
God, could the whole bloody atrocity be on her head? She faced Bailey. “Tell me you and Golke did not fire that cannon.”
“What are you going on about?” Bailey still had the nerve to play dumb.
Thatcher put two and two together. Lee had mentioned Bailey and Golke were alone with the weapon at the time of the explosion. Were these idiots really daft enough to fire Sonja at maximum power? “Did you detonate at full capacity without my authorization?”
“I said hypothetically!” Bailey insisted, his face turning red.
Thatcher glared at him. Bailey was a bad liar.
“Nobody said we couldn’t fire her at threshold!” Bailey leaned further back in his chair, a juvenile effort
to appear defiant. His eyes betrayed him, and he suddenly looked very young.
Thatcher shook her head. Like Lee, Bailey had been an outspoken dissenter of her leadership fr
om the start. There was no question in her mind that he was capable of masterminding such a careless prank, but she couldn’t stomach Golke being involved.
“Hold on
a sec.” Marek pointed at his monitor. “This map isn’t topographical.” He moved the cursor between the village and their test site. “Stenness is in a valley, right?”
“There’s a hill between us,
” Thatcher realized.
Marek compensated for the landmass blocking the two
variables. “Guessing the size and location of the hill, erring on the conservative…”
The screen refreshed to show the bluff separating their test site and Stenness. Sonja exploded at full threshold. Sound waves
rolled toward the village but lessened in magnitude as they deflected off the hill.
All four legs of Bailey’s chair met the ground.
“There is no way that we did this,” Marek said. “Even at threshold.”
All three of them
stared at the monitor in shock.
Thatcher swallowed. It was
more comforting to think they were responsible.
Marek
turned to her. “You sure noise killed those people?”
She nodded, certain.
“Then who did this?” Bailey asked.
Ma
rek shook his head. “And how the hell did one man survive?”