Lethal Circuit (20 page)

Mobi rifled though the pockets of the coat finding nothing but a half-empty box of Tic-Tacs. He was about to eat one when he noticed something else — a bright green foot poking out from under the coat. Mobi could immediately tell that the foot wasn’t human, or even real for that matter. It belonged to a green alien balloon — the kind you could buy for five bucks from a vendor in Griffith Park. Lifting the coat off the floor revealed that the alien had the typical Roswell look. It wasn’t the first time Mobi had seen this particular toy. This alien was something of an unofficial mascot at JPL and more than one employee had one strung up in their office. What Mobi found strange, however, was the fact that Alvarez would have one in an office completely devoid of any other personal touch. Alvarez must dig her X-files, Mobi thought, or else....

Mobi examined the alien balloon carefully noting that it was a little heavier in one foot than the other, not much, but a little. The green tinted PVC plastic was transparent under the right light, and holding the little bugger up to the florescent tube, Mobi was able to see what looked like a black plastic wafer in its left foot. Feeling a surge of excitement now, Mobi placed his thumb on the sole of the inflatable foot and his fingers on the heel, pressing down on the black wafer inside. No sooner did Mobi feel a bubble switch in the plastic wafer click down, than a hum emanated from the rear of the office. Turning around, Mobi watched Alvarez’s entire rear wall slide open behind her desk.

“Nice,” Mobi muttered quietly to himself. Then, clutching the inflatable alien at his side, Mobi silently entered Alvarez’s inner sanctum.

32

B
Y
THE
TIME
Michael and Kate got back to Yangshuo, the sun had already set, casting long shadows across West Street. The same thought had been cycling through Michael’s head for the entire ride back. Another damn karst, he thought, picturing the engraving on the platinum disc. The same karsts that covered the landscape were apparently the solution to his problem. After all, a Japanese surgical team had chosen to implant one in a man’s head. That wasn’t the kind of thing you did without a very good reason. No, both the pitchfork karst engraving and the Kanji around the disc’s rim were significant. He just needed to figure out why.

 
Michael and Kate returned the rented motorcycle to its much relieved owner and climbed the Whispering Bamboo’s wooden stairs roofward. If there was a solution to their problem, it was here, in the inscriptions on the capsule. Kate latched the wooden door behind them to ensure they wouldn’t be disturbed, but it took only a moment to discover that they had a much bigger problem.

“Shit,” Michael said.

The capsule was gone.

There was no other way to put it. The cowling of the swamp fan stood open and the lock was snapped off, but the capsule was nowhere to be seen. All that was left were boot prints, lots of them, covering the tar and gravel surface of the roof. Michael crouched down and ran the gravel through his fingers, the rough crush warm to the touch. Then Michael’s eyes widened in the fading light. There was something else. A pool of something dark and sticky. Blood.

“Kate?”

“I see it,” she said, staring down at the blood.

“Not that.”

Michael was halfway across the rooftop by the time the words had left his mouth. The form had been just a dark mass in the dusk, but now as Michael approached it became clear that it was a body. And not just any body. It was Ted, lying there, face down on the roof. Michael locked his hand over Ted’s shoulder, preparing for the worst. But he didn’t get it. With a simple touch Michael could already tell that Ted was still breathing. He turned him onto his back to reveal the nasty gash on his friend’s forehead.

“Ted?”

There was no response.

“We need to get him out of here.”

Kate stood, but immediately froze, Michael following her gaze. The wooden door to the stairs had begun to rattle on its hinges. Kate reached behind her back, withdrawing her Glock with the smooth grace of a seasoned professional. Crouching down on one knee, she extended her arms, holding the gun at ready. They were in a decent enough position on the corner of the roof, out of the immediate angle of sight. Michael studied Kate’s hands. They were steady, her trigger finger icy calm.

Ted groaned. Now was not the time for him to come to, Michael thought. Then he groaned again and what happened next occurred very quickly. The door broke. It literally exploded off its hinges accompanied by a scream the likes of which Michael had never heard before. A dark figure burst though the door and rolled twice across the roof before taking cover behind the swamp fan. Kate tracked the figure with her weapon as an object, it looked like a box, or a bomb, came skidding across the gravel roof toward them. Both Kate and Michael dove behind the cover of a large water cistern. The rectangular object skidded to a stop, maybe twenty feet away from them. There was no way to get any farther away from it without literally leaping six stories off the roof to the concrete below. They waited a moment, then two, and in the dying light Michael thought he recognized a symbol on the object. Not a swastika this time, a cross. A red cross.

“Mates?” a voice said from behind the swamp fan.

Michael recognized the voice immediately. It took Kate a moment longer, but she got it too, lowering her weapon. It was Crust. He edged into view from behind the cowling, picking up the box with the cross on it, now clearly recognizable as a first aid kit.

“I heard voices up here and it got me worried.” He indicated the first aid kit and said, “Thought the old man might need this.”

Crust explained that he too had been looking for them. Instead he had found Ted unconscious on the rooftop, blood seeping from the nasty gash on his head. Fearful of moving him, Crust did the next best thing and went to get medical help. Unfortunately, the best he could come up with was the first aid kit.

“You nearly shot me, sister! What are you doing with a gun?”

“Defending myself from crazy Ninjas.”

“People,” Ted said groggily, “this is beside the point.”

“He’s right,” Michael said. “Ted. Tell us what happened?”

“Let’s just say I ran into a problem with your friends from the bridge.”

“The thing I wanted to show you?” Michael said, careful not to give away specifics in front of Crust.

“Gone,” Ted said, wiping the blood from his forehead. “Tell me you had more luck than I did.”

Michael cast a glance at Crust and then thought to hell with it. He reached into his pocket and removed the platinum disc revealing the engraving of the double-peaked karst. Ted was silent for a long moment.

“Are you sure it’s genuine?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then we need to find out where it is.”

“There are over ten thousand peaks in the immediate area,” Kate said. “Just like with the first engraving, it’s going to take time to narrow it down.”

“I don’t think so,” Crust said.

Both Michael and Kate looked over their shoulders. “What do you mean?”

“All you need to do is float, brother.”

“Float?”

“Snag yourself a tube, a kayak, a sheep’s stomach if you prefer. Just float.”

“Why?”

“Because mate,” Crust said pointing at the platinum disc. “This gnarly mountain is about eight clicks down our lovely Li River.”

•
 
•
 
•

H
UANG
AND
HIS
subordinates watched the LCD screen blip from their safe house. He and his men had easily taken the metal capsule from the rooftop. With the American tagged it had been simple enough to find it. But analysis would have to wait. What Huang hadn’t expected was that after so many years of searching, events would progress so quickly. The American was once again on the move and needed to be followed. Huang reminded himself that this was a good thing. His sources told him that progress was being made with the errant satellite. If the American actually found what he was looking for here on the ground, they would capture both him and the Horten. If not, Huang knew he had already netted sufficient gains to impress his superiors. Either way, the American would lose and Huang would win.

•
 
•
 
•

A
FTER
A
CHORUS
of thank yous and promises of yet another free meal, Crust, still a little leery of Kate and her sidearm, had gone happily on his way. Ted, however, insisted that he had recovered sufficiently from his concussion to continue on. As far as Ted was concerned, he may have been ambushed by the bad guys, but the game was far from over. After picking up several packs of equipment that he had procured after Michael had brought him up to speed the night before, they made their way down West Street to the Yangshuo river docks. The fishermen had already gone home for the evening so renting or bartering a vessel was out of the question. It was clear that if they wanted a boat, they’d simply have to take one.

Michael chose a blunt nosed, flat-bottomed riverboat of about twenty-five feet in length with a small cabin above deck. As a rule Michael didn’t like to steal, but given the circumstances, he didn’t see the alternative. He managed to get the boat untied and with Kate’s help they quietly poled it into deeper water where the current quickly took hold. Michael had some experience with engines thanks to the Yellow Bomber dune buggy project with his dad, but it didn’t take much to get the motor going. After manually connecting two wires to complete an ignition circuit with the battery, the engine fired after the fourth or fifth attempt. Though it seemed like the motor might be creating more racket than it was thrust, soon there was a tiny froth of water at the stern and more importantly he was now able to steer.

Looking behind them, Michael saw that they had already rounded the bend, any sign of civilization lost to the lush green karsts lording over the river. Ted poked his head out of the cabin and took a seat beside him.

“I take it we’re clear?”

“So far.”

“So what do you say we take another look at what you found out there?”

Michael cast a glance down at Kate below deck as he removed the engraved platinum plate from his pocket. He carefully dipped it in the river, rubbing it with his thumb to remove the dried blood from its surface.

“One condition,” he said.

“Name it.”

“You tell me the whole truth about my father.”

33

T
HE
SKY
DARKENED
quickly now, towering limestone peaks throwing black shadows over the landscape. The river was narrower here, maybe a hundred feet across, their tiny boat swallowed by the enormous gorge, the bases of the karsts themselves forming the walls of the winding waterway. The drone of the boat’s engine reverberating off the rock walls accompanied them like an old friend, and though he tried to write the thought off as just another bad memory from high school, Michael felt like they were sailing into the heart of an immeasurable and immense darkness.

“The truth is your dad was a complicated man,” Ted said, toying with the platinum plate between thumb and forefinger. “More than that, he was a driven one. He pushed the recovery of the Horten long after it had lost its luster with management.” Ted looked directly to Kate. “He pushed it even after they took him off the mission.”

“So you’re saying he wasn’t supposed to be looking for it?”

“He wasn’t exactly off the reservation,” Ted said. “The Company gave him some latitude, but yeah, they would have preferred if he’d left the Horten alone for a lot of those years. Until recently that is.”

Michael held the tiller firmly in hand as the hulking karsts sailed slowly past like watchmen to the great beyond. He knew Ted would go on even if he didn’t ask the next question. He asked it anyway.

“What changed?”

“People started dying, that’s what.” Ted took a breath as Kate took a seat a few feet nearer. She was clearly as interested as Michael, if not more so. “Management started to pick up independent reports of what your dad had been telling them all along: that the recovery of the Horten was about more than just finding an old Nazi airplane. That the Horten’s cold fusion reactor was a source of clean energy that could make oil obsolete. That certain fringe groups were not only actively after the Horten, but they were willing to kill for it. And they weren’t willing to kill just anybody. They were willing to kill Americans. The Uruguayan embassy bombing really put one group in particular on the map. They call themselves the Green Dragons. We think they’re an offshoot of an earlier organization that came to prominence in wartime Japan.”

“They’re thought to be an evolution of the samurai groups,” Kate said. “We’ve heard rumors that the group still engages in sword making and, on occasion, in the ritual seppuku suicide ceremony, but none of that really tells us much. Pretty well every social structure in Japan is traced to the samurai in one way or another.”

Ted nodded. “She’s right. Other than that we don’t know a lot. Are the Green Dragons a terrorist organization? A quasi-religious order? Some type of multi-national investment group? We don’t know. What the chatter out there does tell us is that through a series of shell companies they appear to have acquired massive energy interests across the globe. Hydroelectric, coal, oil, even nuclear. They’ve been active since World War II, but they really started to roll in the energy sphere in the eighties, back when Japan was flush with cash.”

“Chen was making snow globes at the factory,” Michael said. “Snow globes of the Earth marked by tiny lights. What do you think? Do the lights represent the Dragons' energy interests? Maybe their power plants?”

“They might. They might not. That’s what’s so frustrating about this group. We don’t know enough about them to know what their endgame is. It may be just to make money. Or to control the political landscape. Or it may be more. We’re not even sure about their interest in the Horten. The prevailing theory is that they have more of a negative interest in it than a positive one. That the Horten’s cold fusion reactor would interfere with business as usual, so they want it to remain hidden. It would certainly explain why your father was such a thorn in their side.”