The God Wave (30 page)

“You're not going to suggest direct manipulation to them?”

“Why would I? As you said, they're buying the kinetic interfaces from us. Why would I screw up that deal? You just do what you do and keep a low profile. I'll handle Howard. Deal?”

Chuck let out a long breath. “Deal.”

Matt sketched a salute and sauntered out of Chuck's office, the very picture of an alpha male who had just counted coup on his opponent and subjected him to utter humiliation.

“No deal,” Chuck murmured to his partner's receding back.

“I quit the Boy Scouts.”

MATT WAS FAR LESS SANGUINE
about the Deep Shield mess than he had let Chuck know. He was willing to admit to himself, if not to his partner, that some of what Chuck had said bothered him. Still, there was no need to panic. So he didn't. Not even when General Howard called him at eleven that night and asked if he'd known that his business partner had called the Pentagon, trying to get information about Deep Shield.

He told the truth—sort of: that Chuck had told him just that afternoon about the call.

“You need to keep your partner on a tighter leash, Dr. Streegman. These are matters of national security. We can't have someone on our team who can't keep his head together.”

“Chuck just wanted to cover all the bases,” Matt told him. “He's a very cautious soul. Dots all the
i
's, crosses all the
t
's. You know the type.”

“My question to you, then, is if we really need him. How big a problem would his absence be?”

Matt felt a cold shock deep in his gut. The implications of the question were horrifying at first, but he shook off the feeling of
dread. Howard was only asking if they could fire Chuck—ease him out, not erase him completely.

“You're kidding, right? General, Chuck Brenton is at the heart of everything we do. He and Dice and Eugene are more important to this operation than even the most successful zeta. They're the ones who make zetas happen. Without Chuck you have inventory. You have whatever tech you've already got. Innovation, further development, troubleshooting—you can kiss that good-bye.”

“Does it ever bother you,” the general asked at the end of the call, “to be so dependent on such a squeamish wimp?”

Matt just laughed and said there was more to Chuck than met the eye. Hell, he'd just discovered that himself.

AT MIDNIGHT CHUCK'S IPHONE UTTERED
a sonar ping and lit up on his nightstand. He reached for it, half-groggy with sleep. It was a one-line text message from Matt.

“They know you called P.”

Dice was the first person Chuck told about Matt's text message. Or, rather, he wordlessly showed him the text. Merely relaying the information recalled that deep, visceral chill he'd felt when he'd read it. He hadn't fallen asleep until close to 5
A.M.,
when his eyelids had been unable to sustain the weight of their own lashes.

The pallor that swept Dice's tawny face when he saw the message was both a comfort to Chuck (
No, I'm not overreacting
) and the cause of a secondary jolt of fear (
We're in deep shit
).

“How about a house party?” Dice murmured. “Tonight?”

Chuck merely nodded.

“Shall we invite the usual suspects?”

“Sure,” Chuck said, forcing his voice to a false lightness. “Mini wants to pick the movie this time. She didn't take to
Transformers
very well.”

“Aw,” said Dice, “who doesn't like big, beefy battle bots?”

The party plans were completed in a matter of minutes, the information passed from one member of Team Chuck to another.
They couldn't get in touch with Sara's team, all of whom were already bundled off to the Deeps.

Chuck spent the morning ready to crawl or jump out of his skin. At any moment, he imagined, the phone would ring, and he'd be summoned to meet with General Howard, or Smiths would arrive to take him away for interrogation. It wasn't so far-fetched: when the usual driver arrived to pick up his charges, he had a tagalong—a Smith in a black suit who entered the main facility, flashed his ID at the front desk (now manned by his twin), and made his way into the lab area.

Chuck, who was just exiting the conference room after a meeting with their admin, saw the Smith striding up the corridor and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. He gasped in a breath and held it, feeling an icy sweat spring up between his shoulder blades. The impulse to run was so strong, he nearly bolted, but instead he faced the oncoming agent, clutching his coffee mug in one hand and his laptop in the other.

“Doctor,” the man said and nodded . . . then passed him by without breaking stride.

Perhaps a little far-fetched.

Chuck sagged against the wall of the corridor and watched the Smith stop to tap on Matt's office door. He tore his eyes away and returned to his lab, consciously avoiding the blind spot Mike had created for secret egress and turning off the jammer. This was one time he wanted his behavior noted.

Roughly five minutes later, the Smith reappeared with Matt in tow. Chuck saw them through the open doors of his lab as they headed out. Matt glanced at him across the width of the lab, his pale eyes cutting, his thin mouth set in a grim line. Again Chuck felt the impulse to run welling up inside him. Instead he left his office, did a few moments of busywork in the lab, and reentered
his private domain through the blind spot, flipping on the jammer as he stepped back into the room.

He then placed a call to a colleague in California and asked him for a very large favor.

THE MOVIE WAS
INDEPENDENCE DAY
—NOT
quite the romcom Lanfen had envisioned, but again, the movie wasn't the point. The agenda was, and in Chuck's mind, what they had to discuss was both simple and fraught: he had to get out of the situation he'd gotten himself into when he'd gone into business with Matt Streegman.

With full antisurveillance measures in place, the team gathered around Chuck in their lair. He scanned their faces. They all looked as scared as he was—something that brought him both comfort and unease. Propped on the edge of his desk, he looked each of them in the eye: Eugene, Dice, Lanfen, Mini. Then he spoke.

“Howard knows I've contacted someone at the Pentagon about his operation—I'm not sure he's aware about the CIA and FBI, but I'd have to think he is. Here's the thing. We have knowledge that I'm not sure we can divulge to anyone. I'd call my friend at the FBI—I can trust him, but not the people he works for. And it doesn't really matter anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Mini asked.

“The long and short of it is I can't live like this anymore. I've got to get out. As soon as I can make some connections and—”

“By yourself?” asked Lanfen at the same time Eugene said, “Me, too.”

Dice was nodding. “I'm in, too. Or out, as the case may be.”

Mini just stared straight ahead, her arms wrapped around herself. Her face was eggshell white in the dimly lit room.

Chuck leaned heavily on his desk. “You guys don't have to run. They can't know you're involved with my paranoia—”

“C'mon, Doc,” said Euge. “We're in this together. All of us. None of us wants to be involved in whatever sort of war machine they're building. None of us knows who to trust.”

“Except each other,” said Lanfen. “We know we can trust each other. I agree. I want out, too. What options do we have?”

Chuck thought about the all-white card in his wallet but once more dismissed it. “I have a colleague, a friend, at CalTech. He's a neurologist there, head of his department. He's always been a bit of a subversive when it comes to things military. I called him this morning and—without going into great detail—told him that a technology I'd developed was being manhandled by the military. He said he can help. He's willing to let me hide out someplace he feels is safe. But if all five of us go—”

“Safety in numbers,” said Dice. “If we're all in on the planning, there's less chance we'll overlook something important. We need to think of transportation, financial resources, that sort of thing.”

“What about the stuff in the labs?” Eugene asked. “We can't just leave all our notes and documentation behind. Dice has gotten the interface down to where it fits in a backpack. Do you think we might get one out of the lab somehow?”

Chuck shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. “We won't have to. I have one here at the house. I've been . . . practicing. It's best if we don't count on getting anything out of our labs.”

“Chuck's right,” said Lanfen. “You guys can rebuild the training units as you need to. I mean you are the team that designed and built them in the first place.”

That was when it hit Chuck full force: if they disappeared, Howard would move heaven and earth to find them because they were Forward Kinetics. They were the source of the technology he wanted to control.

A tiny noise to his right made Chuck glance over at Mini. She was crying. Huge, silent tears streamed down her cheeks. He and Eugene both moved to put their arms around her at the same moment. He let Eugene beat him.

“Mini, don't be scared.”

“I'm not scared,” she whispered through clenched teeth, almost shaking his arm off. “I'm mad. Frustrated.” She raised her eyes to Chuck's face. “Who are these people? Who do they think they are? We did all this with the best intentions. We wanted to help.” She looked around at her peers, who all looked so
helpless
. “We were creating something beautiful. They took our work and turned it around. And now what? We're supposed to run away? They can't be allowed to do this. We can't
let
them do this!”

Chuck stared at her pale, tear-stained face and knew she was right. They couldn't just run and hide. They had to fight. Secret for secret. Intelligence against force.

But first they had to escape—before Howard had a chance to deploy any of his machines.

“Okay, look. Is everybody in? Do you all want to get out?”

There was no hesitation. All four of them nodded.

Chuck felt a flush of raw emotion well up in his breast. He felt exalted. These people trusted him; he trusted them. Whatever they faced, they would at least face it together. He shoved the scientific curiosity aside and let himself savor the moment as a man who had just made a very dire decision.

“All right. Let's try to think of everything we're going to need to do and when we're going to do it.”

They made lists; they made plans; they drew up a timeline. The items on the lists would have to be finished by Saturday evening because early Sunday morning, they were leaving Forward Kinetics and Deep Shield far behind.

BY FRIDAY NIGHT THEY HAD
backed up their files and sent a great number of them to the cloud—nothing unusual about that. Dice had come up with a storage protocol that would allow the kinetic transceiver to be shut off when the bots were stored and turned back on using a custom kinetic key code that all bot drivers would design for themselves. They also knew they weren't expected to go in to work on Monday morning, ostensibly because it was a federal holiday. None of them believed for a second that was the real reason, but they were grimly pleased by the development. It gave them more time.

On Saturday they worked individually, each to put his or her life in order and pieces into place: acquire money, make travel connections, pack. They had a movie night on Saturday but didn't let it run late. On Sunday morning Mini, Lanfen, Dice, and Eugene met at Chuck's house with backpacks and picnic gear, dressed for a hike. Dice's girlfriend, Brenda, was absent; she'd previously made an appointment to get her mother's minivan serviced.

The weather was mild—sweater weather, Lanfen's mom had called it. They took Chuck's Volvo SUV and drove northwest to Prettyboy Reservoir. It was a serpentine, man-made lake with miles of uneven shoreline, so heavily wooded that the tree canopy was nearly impenetrable in places. They parked at Frog Hollow Cove on the eastern shore and rented a boat to cross to the opposite side of the reservoir, to the banks of a triangular peninsula that angled south. From there they hiked into the thickest part of the woods and headed north.

The whole thing had an air of unreality to it, especially since they hiked in silence, each one wrapped in private thoughts. It was almost, Lanfen thought, as if they figured Howard's bugging devices could hear them even out there. She found herself listening for helicopters or airplanes and frequently glanced up through the tree branches at the patches of sky.

They heard a plane once, and though they took cover swiftly it passed nowhere near their position. The only thing Lanfen heard other than the distant engine was the sound of Eugene's shaky indrawn breaths. She wasn't sure if it was due to the fact that he wasn't exactly the athletic type or if he was nervous as hell even though they hadn't done anything particularly dangerous yet. If Howard's guys tracked them down and intercepted them now, they could still fall back on the pretense that they were just out for a weekend hike and some boating.

So far, so good.

After just under an hour's walk, they came out into a tree-shaded parking lot where Spooks Hill Road came down close to the water and made a loop at the top of a sharp inlet. Pulled up along the verge of the woods, with its passenger side broadside to a dense grove of trees, was a silver Toyota Sienna that had been there since the night before, though it was supposed to be at a Baltimore Big O getting its tires rotated. It was stage two of their escape. And it was so close, they could almost feel it.

The group of hikers approached the van from the thick tree cover. The back passenger door slid open, revealing Brenda Tansy. Wordlessly she slid away from the passenger seat and got back behind the wheel. Lanfen couldn't help but notice that her eyes were underlined with dark circles, and her face was pale.

Silently they arranged themselves in the vehicle, with a heavily camouflaged Dice taking the front passenger seat, Chuck and Lanfen in the middle seats, and Eugene and Mini in the rear of the van.

“Everything go okay?” Bren asked as she started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. She glanced sideways at Dice and smiled wanly. “That's quite a look you've got going.”

Dice pulled off the stocking cap he'd been wearing all morn
ing and revealed a spiked shock of blond-streaked hair. With the mirror shades he had on, he looked nothing like their slightly nerdy robotics expert—and by the time they reached their first destination,
none
of them would look like their normal selves. Mini had straightened her hair and put on makeup; Lanfen had cut her hair and brought clothing nothing like what she usually wore; Chuck and Eugene had also changed their appearances.

Chuck's transformation had been the most remarkable, Lanfen thought. It was amazing to her how much dying his hair a darker color, combing it straight back from his forehead, and wearing contact lenses instead of glasses changed him.

I like it.

Theoretically no one would be following them now. Theoretically, if they'd been tailed to the lake, the surveillance crew would be watching Chuck's Volvo, still parked at Frog Hollow. Theoretically they had hours in which to disappear.

Lanfen trusted theories. She tried to relax, to tell herself this was going to work. She must not have been doing a very good job of it, though, because Chuck reached over and put a hand on hers. She only then realized that her fingers had tightened into a fist.

“It's all right,” he said, though he had no way of knowing whether it was all right or not. “They'll be waiting for us to come back to the car. If they even bothered to follow us out here. We're going to do this. We're going to be fine.”

She forced her fist to flex open. Chuck twined his fingers with hers and squeezed. She squeezed back and began to go mentally through her calming down routine. That made her think of Bilbo, still a prisoner of Deep Shield. He was an inanimate object except when she inhabited him. He was just a machine. Yet somehow, thinking of him surrounded by all those strangers made her intensely sad. It was entirely possible that she would never see him again.

THE NEXT STAGE OF THEIR
trip took them to Hagerstown, where they had booked flights from the regional airport to LaGuardia in New York City. Brenda dropped them at Hagerstown's single terminal, and after a tense and tearful parting from Dice, during which he swore this wouldn't be forever, she drove back to Baltimore. From LaGuardia they would fly to Omaha, Nebraska, and from there to Albuquerque. In New Mexico they'd rent a car and drive just far enough to get to a dealership where they could buy transportation.