Split Second (20 page)

He understood the significance immediately. They must
have signaled their ride to return. Which meant his time was running out. “
Move it!
” he demanded, now aware the man
was stalling.

Blake shot several rounds within inches of his captive’s
head to make his point, and the man’s pace picked up considerably. Seconds
after he was marched deeper into the house, Blake forced him to breathe the
invisible gas that had yet to fully dissipate, and he joined his friends on the
floor, unconscious.

Blake hurried to the kitchen and used a fireman’s
carry to haul Jenna, and then Walsh, back to their newly purchased car,
studying the sky periodically.

Just as he deposited both passengers into the backseat
and finished seat-belting them in as tightly as he could, he saw something far off
in the distance. It was as if a small portion of the distant sky was blurry,
and the blur was moving. He tilted his head in confusion, not sure what he was
seeing, when it finally occurred to him that it was the helicopter he was
looking for.

It was whisper quiet and somehow tricked his eye into
ignoring its presence for several seconds.
Unbelievable.

But Blake had no time to gawk. Astonishing or not, the
pilot had no doubt spotted him, and the aircraft was accelerating in his
direction with terrible purpose.

He started the car and tore down the hill toward the
crowded street as the helo swooped down from above, a hawk having spotted
helpless prey.

33

Joe Allen ran through options in
his mind as the pilot beside him streaked toward Aaron Blake below.

How the hell had Blake done it?

Allen had been texted less than
five minutes earlier that the targets had taken the bait, and he had been
certain Blake and his two companions would soon be in dreamland on the floor.

But for someone who was
unconscious, Aaron Blake sure could operate a car effectively. And none of the
three men tasked with capturing him were responding to his calls.

Blake was tearing down the road
at a rate that required massive balls and impressive driving skill, spurred on
by the terror anyone on the ground would be feeling when under the guns of a
military aircraft. He was approaching a portion of the drive that would be
partially hidden under a canopy of trees, and soon thereafter he would hit the
main road.

“Abort!” shouted Allen, his face
showing nothing but disgust that he had actually uttered this word. “I repeat,
break off.”

“Break off, sir?” said Jason Thompson,
pulling back on the yoke to slow his meteoric descent, but only a little,
unwilling to fully retract his talons.

“Yes, break off!” repeated
Allen. “Now!” he shouted, and Thompson finally pulled up into a hover.

“What would you have me do,
Captain,” said Allen miserably, “chase him along a busy shopping district in a
Black Ops helicopter that’s so futuristic it might be mistaken for a fucking
UFO? It tricks the eye, but not forever. How many more chances am I going to
take with technology that isn’t supposed to exist—in domestic airspace!”

He shook his head. “Even if this
were standard-issue equipment, I couldn’t make a spectacle in Orange fucking
County. And unless we want to kill him, we can’t stop them anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” said Thompson, who
had been gradually taking the helo to a higher altitude as his temporary CO was
speaking.

“Land at Soyer’s house again,”
said Allen.

He needed to learn what had
happened. See if any of the men were still alive. And he still needed to
conduct a more thorough search.

Allen clenched his hand into a
fist and his features hardened. “But mark my words, Captain, we’ll get this
guy. We now have photos of the car he’s driving. We can call in law enforcement
and satellites. He won’t stay at large for long.”

“You really think so, sir?”
asked Thompson.

Allen gritted his teeth. No, he
didn’t think so. How could he? Blake had proven himself too smart and
resourceful too often for Allen to believe standard techniques would snare him.
He wasn’t even sure why he had said something so stupid, and then realized it
was probably because he didn’t want Thompson to perceive him as impotent after
he had called off the attack.

So what would he answer? Would
he tell Thompson the truth, that of course he didn’t think they’d get him this
way? Or would he feign confidence, and thus appear to be even more the naive
idiot?

“Just land the helo, Captain,” said
Allen finally. “I thank you for your assistance, but in a short while, Aaron
Blake will no longer be your concern.”

34

Blake careened down the road as
though the car’s brake lines had been cut, now knowing how a field mouse felt
when under attack from above. Totally overmatched, and totally helpless.

He half expected to receive a
rocket-propelled suppository at any moment, but none came. He shot into the
main street, tires squealing, and risked looking back for the helicopter, since
his sense of hearing wasn’t the guide it should have been, ignoring the honks,
shouts, and extended middle fingers of motorists not pleased with his driving
etiquette and the burnt rubber he had deposited on the road.

The aircraft was no longer behind
him.

Blake blew out a long breath,
his heart still pounding away in his chest. He had hoped the men after him wouldn’t
pull a stunt like attacking him on a crowded road in broad daylight. But given
the resources of the group hunting him, he had an hour, at most, before they’d
be able to divert a satellite from other duties to attend to him. He had to
ditch the car, and every minute counted.

“Myla,” he said to his PDA. “I
need to know the largest parking structure within ten miles of here.”

Seconds later his phone provided
the answer to his question. There was a five-story structure four miles
distant. He asked his PDA to call out directions, and his phone did so in a
pleasant female voice.

His mood darkened as he drove.
Yes, he had managed to pull off a minor miracle at Soyer’s house, although it
could be argued that his own incompetence and hubris had put him in this
situation in the first place. But Nathan Wexler’s flash drive had been taken,
and Greg Soyer also. If he wasn’t already dead.

And Blake had been responsible.
It had been
his
decision to bring this
good man into the middle of a situation he had known couldn’t have been more
dangerous.

He let out a primal scream that
had been bottled up for some time, so loud and long he half-expected his two
passengers to regain consciousness.

Provided Greg Soyer was still
alive, Blake vowed to extricate him from this mess no matter what it took.

He made one stop at a
convenience store, where he purchased two oversized blankets, before entering the
busy parking garage. He was now hidden from satellites.

He parked in the farthest
reaches of the structure, his car an island in a sea of empty spaces, and turned
the front and back seats into couches for his two sleeping passengers,
stretching them out and hiding every inch of them with a blanket, while relieving
them of their money.

Jenna had two twenties, along
with the five hundred dollars she had withdrawn from the ATM the night before,
and Walsh had almost two hundred. Blake had five twenties, giving him a total
of just over eight hundred dollars to work with.

He left the parking garage on
foot and called a cab company, asking them to send a cab in fifteen minutes to
a location seven blocks away. After walking for five minutes he came to a small
grocery store, and used an ATM inside to withdraw five hundred dollars from his
account, pushing his total to thirteen hundred. This would be the last money
they would have for some time, as he was confident their accounts would be
frozen very soon, and any attempts to access their money noted with great
interest.

While he waited for the cab, he had
Myla
call up a list of cars for sale within a few
miles. This time he decided his car budget could only be a thousand dollars, so
they would at least have three hundred going forward. The kind of clunker he would
get for this price would have over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer
and make the dented Kia look like a
Ferrari
.

His goal was to buy a car and
return to the parking structure for his two companions within forty-five
minutes, hopefully even sooner. With luck, he could have them loaded into the
new vehicle and on their way in half an hour.

The clock hadn’t yet struck noon,
but it had already been a very long day. And he knew it was about to get
longer.

35

Jenna Morrison and Dan Walsh
finally regained consciousness at about four p.m., within five minutes of each
other, almost an hour after Blake had carried them inside the ratty motel he
had paid for in cash, the Best Border Inn, a name that was surely meant
ironically.

The motel was located in San
Ysidro, a San Diego district bordering Mexico to the south. No one would expect
them to remain in Southern California, and if they did, certainly not in one of
its least glamorous locales, home to arguably the world’s largest land border
crossing, where the highway branched into twenty-five lanes, each with a booth,
to accommodate almost twenty million vehicle crossings, and ten million
pedestrian crossings, into the United States each year.

Blake was playing a shell game, and
hiding his peas under a shell in San Ysidro was an unlikely move, and one that
should help keep them all alive for a little longer.

He brought his groggy companions up
to speed on what had happened after they had collapsed onto Greg Soyer’s
kitchen floor, and how they had ended up in a seedy motel in San Ysidro. Both
were duly grateful and expressed awe at the skills that had allowed him to slip
a nearly perfect trap.

Blake had walked to a nearby sub
shop while they were sleeping off the knockout gas and was able to offer his
two companions an assortment of sandwiches, chips, and drinks, which they
gratefully devoured. Being knocked unconscious apparently stoked one’s
appetite, although Jenna playfully complained that she was making too great a
sacrifice having to eat a meal that didn’t come out of a box of granola bars.

When they had been fed and had
recovered their clarity of thought, Blake said, “I’m not going to sugarcoat it.
We’ve lost this round big. The only positive news is that I checked, and before
they got to him, Greg did manage to copy the contents of Nathan’s file to a
cloud account, and I was able to access it with the password. So
they
got a copy, but at least we have
one too.”

“So where do we go from here?”
asked Jenna. “We could still have Dan study Nathan’s work and then make
decisions from there like we planned.”

“Not yet,” said Blake grimly. “Before
I do anything else, I intend to get Greg back. And I have to be honest with
you, I don’t care what it takes.”

“How?” asked Walsh.

“By talking to the bastard who took
him,” he replied, holding his phone out in front of him.

Jenna nodded appreciatively. “I
forgot about that,” she said.

“Forgot about what?” said Walsh.

“Sorry,” replied Blake. “I told you
about my run-in with a killer named Rourk. But I should have mentioned that I
recovered his phone. He had called his superior, and Jenna put this number into
my phone.”

“I see,” said Walsh.

“I didn’t want to use it just yet,”
said Blake. “I wanted to wait until we understood more about what we were dealing
with. The nature of Nathan’s discovery and some sense of the players and their
motivations.”

A dark, intense scowl came over his
face. “But this timetable has changed,” he growled. “They know who we are. And
they have Greg.”

Blake nodded at Jenna. “So let’s
call this guy. And do what we have to do.”

“Can he trace the call?” said
Jenna.

“No. When I first set up shop as a
PI, Greg modified my phone. I can put it in a mode that Greg guaranteed can’t
be traced.”

“That’s good enough for me,” said
Jenna.

Blake turned to the physicist. “Dan,”
he said, “I want you to listen in, but I don’t want to reveal that you’re with
us. They know Jenna hired me and that we’re together. They almost certainly
know you’re involved, but why confirm it? And they can’t be sure we didn’t
split up. So let’s not give them any more information than we need to.”

“I understand,” said Walsh. “I
won’t make a sound.”

“Okay then,” said Blake. “Let’s do
this. It’s time to find out what the hell this is all about.”

36

Blake set his phone to speaker,
audio-only, and had Myla tie it into the microphone and sound system of the
motel’s television set. This way, he and Jenna could speak normally in the
direction of the television and their voices would be picked up easily, and all
three in the room could hear and see audio or video coming from whoever
answered.

As expected, Blake was forced to
leave a message, since whoever they were calling wouldn’t recognize an incoming
call from the PI’s phone, and would let it go to voicemail. But also as
expected, Blake’s phone rang minutes later.

He had a feeling his call would get
attention in a hurry.

Blake and Jenna had taken up
positions sitting on a solid beige bedspread at the end of the king-sized bed,
facing the television, and Walsh sat to their side, at a small desk, facing the
same direction.

Blake glanced at Jenna, who nodded
her readiness.

“Aaron Blake here,” said the
private detective as he accepted the call.

“I got your message,” said a
baritone male voice. The video was also off at the other end, so this had
become an old-fashioned audio-only call. “I have to say the timing couldn’t be
more ironic, since we didn’t know who you were until about an hour ago.”

“Sure you didn’t,” said Blake skeptically.
“And who are
you
?”

“My name is Edgar Knight. Do you
mind if I call you Aaron?”

“How very polite,” growled Blake icily.
“Sure, call me Aaron. And while you’re being polite, I have an idea: stop
trying to kill Jenna Morrison and everyone she touches.”

“It was never my intention to hurt
Jenna or anyone else involved. Can I assume she’s there with you?”

“She is,” said Blake. “But let’s
cut the bullshit already. I’ll tell you why I called. You have Greg Soyer. Keep
the flash drive, which is all you’ve ever cared about anyway, for reasons that
escape me. But return Greg unhurt. You don’t need him. And I have a copy of the
information on that drive also. It’s stored in the cloud and rigged with a
fail-safe. If a week ever passes without both me and Jenna Morrison having
entered a code, it’s automatically released into the wild. And we can also
proactively trigger it at any time.”

He leaned closer to the television
and its microphone. “So I’ll offer an exchange. You give me Greg Soyer. And in
return, I won’t blast Nathan Wexler’s findings to every last corner of the
Internet.”

There was long silence. “I honestly
have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t play stupid!” thundered
Blake. “It won’t help you. You sent a team of Green Berets to retrieve Nathan
Wexler’s thumb drive, and to capture my friend Greg.”

“Oh shit!” said Knight, as though
he had just been informed he had an inoperable brain tumor. “You’ve got the
wrong guy. I had nothing to do with this. A man named Lee Cargill is behind
this. Which is exceedingly bad news,” he finished grimly.

“Who is Lee Cargill?”

“Look, Aaron,” said the caller,
“you’re right. It is time to cut the bullshit. It’s time for me to explain
everything. Because there’s a lot going on here, and you’re operating under
some very false assumptions. As a first show of good faith, I’m going to start sending
video from my end.”

A moment later the man’s image
appeared on Blake’s phone and the motel’s thirty-inch television monitor. He was
dressed casually and looked to be in his forties, with receding brown hair,
parted down the middle, and eyes that were an intense dark blue. He had the
look of a man long used to being in charge, and one who didn’t suffer fools gladly.
His narrow face showed the hint of several pockmarks, perhaps acne scars from
his adolescence. He stared calmly at the camera and didn’t speak, as if knowing
his audience would appreciate a brief pause to study his appearance.

“I trust you can see me,” said the
image on their television after a few seconds had passed. “Let me say again, in
no uncertain terms, that I don’t have your man, this . . . Greg Soyer. In fact,
I have no idea who that is. And while I do want Dr. Wexler’s flash drive, I
don’t have it.”

“Why should we believe anything you
say?” snapped Blake.

“Look, I understand how you feel,” replied
Knight. “And I have some sense of what you’ve been going through. Especially
you, Jenna.”

“No you don’t!” hissed Jenna, chiming
in for the first time. “Don’t even
pretend
that you do!”

Knight nodded gravely, but Blake
also had the sense that he was pleased to get this confirmation that Jenna was on
the call.

“I know it’s been a nightmare for
you,” said Knight, “and I apologize for that.” He paused. “But let me start at
the beginning and lay it all out for you. And hopefully you’ll begin to
understand the whys of the past few days.”

Dan Walsh remained perfectly silent
but quietly moved his chair forward a few feet so he could be in line with his
companions, see their expressions, and gesture to them if he felt this was
useful.

“To begin with,” said Knight, “I am
an experimental scientist. In my not-so-humble opinion, the best who ever
lived. I have an intuitive sense of how things should work—and what technical goals
might be achievable. Think of me as akin to an autistic savant, those strange
people able to memorize phone books or calculate square roots as fast as a
computer. Or a chess prodigy, able to see all the pieces as lines of force,
able to remember the positions of thirty games simultaneously and win them all
while blindfolded.”

“Okay already,” said Blake, rolling
his eyes. “We’ll stipulate you’re good at what you do. Is this going anywhere?”

Knight smiled, either not offended,
or doing his best to pretend to be affable no matter what was thrown at him. “By
the time I was thirteen, I had come up with inventions that netted me millions.
The media was calling me the next Edison. Long story short, the head of Black Ops
R&D got wind of my abilities and plucked me right up after I graduated MIT.
They made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Full access to a dizzying array of expensive
toys—many of them being kept secret from the public—an unlimited equipment
budget, and a chance to work on the most interesting problems in all of science
and technology. And royalties on any tech I developed once it was declassified
for commercial use, which could ultimately be worth billions. As I proved
myself over the years, I was eventually given unlimited freedom to pursue
whatever was of interest to me.”

He paused and then leaned in toward
his unseen audience. “Four years ago, I joined a group headed by a man named Lee
Cargill, who had a brilliant track record of assembling teams in such a way as
to produce extraordinary results. In this case, he was working on finding
practical uses for dark energy.”

“There are no practical uses for
dark energy,” said Jenna. “Nathan told me that repeatedly.”

“This was certainly the going
wisdom when I began, that this energy field could never be harnessed. Still,
with something this leading edge, I was eager to apply my particular genius to
the problem. As is sometimes the case with Black Ops projects, Cargill had
fabricated the footprint of a large tech company as a front, which he named Q5
Enterprises.”

“Is the Q for quintessence?” asked
Blake. Given what Jenna had told him about this being considered the fifth
force, Q5 seemed an appropriate name.

“Very good,” said Knight, nodding
approvingly at this demonstration of Blake’s knowledge.

“So I joined Q5,” he continued. “And
Cargill. If this were a
real
tech company,
you could think of him as the chief executive officer and me as the chief
technical officer.”

Knight sighed loudly. “I know most
people believe everything the government does, especially within Black Ops, is all
about war mongering, for military uses only. But this isn’t true. Yes, the
military gets first dibs and can elect to keep findings secret for a time, but
many of the greatest tech advances in history came about as military projects
that were initially covert. Secret research during World War II on radar spawned
numerous non-military applications, including the microwave oven, initially
called the Radar Range. Efforts to crack Nazi codes led to much of the
foundation for modern computers. Military rockets led to the space program. Jet
engine research led to . . . well, jets. And both the Internet and GPS were initially
developed by the US Department of Defense.”

“We
get
it,” said Jenna disdainfully. “Once the military skims off
anything that can be used to kill and destroy, they sometimes allow their
technology to be used constructively. So you worked in secret, on a Black Ops
team, but you gave your little speech just now so we would know that your giant
heart has always been in the right place,” she spat, her tone dripping with
acid.

“That was the point I was trying to
convey,” admitted Knight calmly, “although without the sarcasm. But just
because what I said paints me as more humanitarian than monster, this doesn’t
mean it isn’t true.”

“Sure it doesn’t,” said Jenna
skeptically. “But go on.”

“Let me cut to the chase. After
years of effort, I succeeded—almost two years ago. I won’t go into details of
how I cooked up the apparatus, or why my intuition told me it would work, but
it did. And not in the way anyone expected. Turns out I could safely harness
quintessence—but only to one end.” He paused for effect. “To send matter back
in time.”

The silence that seized the motel
room was profound, but only lasted a few seconds. “You mean to say you’ve
actually done this?” blurted out Blake in disbelief.

“I have,” said Knight. “Believe me,
it took some time for us to realize what was happening, and months for us to
gain enough understanding to apply this routinely.” He arched one eyebrow.
“Anyone want to guess how far back in time I’m talking about?”

Jenna’s mouth fell open, and she
was too stunned to speak.

“A little more than forty-five
microseconds?” whispered Blake.

“Excellent,” said Knight. “That was
a little test. It appears you
are
familiar with Nathan Wexler’s work. Yes, forty-five millionths of a second.”

“So what are you saying,” asked
Jenna, “that Nathan just stumbled upon work you had already done?”

“Yes and no,” said Knight
cryptically. “But allow me to table that question and get back to it later.”

“It’s your show,” said Jenna.

“So I could send matter back in
time,” continued Knight. “Whatever I could fit inside my device—my time machine
for want of a better term—which was about the size of a Rubik’s cube. But soon
I expanded this device to its theoretical maximum. The largest time machine
possible is about the size of your typical buried treasure chest from the
movies, or say a Coleman cooler you’d use to keep drinks cold at the beach.”

“Impressive scientific precision,”
said Jenna caustically.

“I could give you the exact number
of cubic inches out to five decimal places, but I thought I’d try to give you a
visual image that would give you a better sense of it.”

“So is that where you are now?”
asked Blake. “Anything you can fit inside your time travel suitcase, you can
send a fraction of a second into the past?”

“A little more complicated than a
suitcase,” said Knight, “but essentially correct. Forty-five microseconds.”

“So a split second in the truest
sense of the phrase,” said Blake. “You are, literally, splitting a second into
millions of pieces. But so what? Why is this information something you’re so willing
to slaughter innocents to protect?”

“I reject your use of the word
slaughter,” protested Knight vigorously, “along with your implication of just
how willing I am to hurt people. But I’ll wait to defend myself until I’m
through bringing you up to speed.”

“The question remains,” said Blake,
“how does sending something back an instant help you?”

Knight allowed the corners of his
mouth to turn up into the slightest of smiles. “Almost no one grasps the implications
right away,” he said. “It does seem useless to go back in time less than the
blink of an eye. But it’s not. You’re thinking about the effect the wrong way.
Don’t think of it as a
time
machine.”

He paused once again for effect.
“Think of it as a
duplication
machine.”