The Second Ship (10 page)

Chapter 19

By the time the police arrived, the man was long gone. Heather’s parents had neither seen nor heard anything out of the ordinary. If it had not been for the note and the chewing gum, Heather doubted the two officers would have believed her account of what had occurred.

After taking statements, the officers took the gum and put it in a plastic bag. One of them examined the note.

“Looks like our man tore this out of a cheap Bible. The type you find in drawers at two-star hotels.”

Either the cop had some highly developed deductive reasoning or he had way more personal experience than Heather cared to think about. As she was about to settle firmly on the latter conclusion, the officer paused in his study.

“Isaiah 64:2. Six letters, the number six, then two numbers that add to six. Mark of the beast, isn’t it?”

Heather’s father raised an eyebrow. “Superstitious nonsense.”

“Oh, I agree with you, Mr. McFarland. I don’t put a bit of stock in it. The question is, though, what about our man out there? Does he? Anyway, we’ll let the boys back at the lab take a look at it.”

With a nod, the officers departed.

“Their ‘lab’ is going to ‘look at it,’” her father huffed. “Unless I miss my guess, that stuff is going into a shoe box on a shelf.”

“It’s all right, Dad,” said Heather. “I shouldn't have overreacted in the first place. I can’t believe I screamed.”

Her mother shook her head. “Baloney. Any time a man climbs up to a young lady's second-floor window and starts sticking threatening-sounding notes to it with chewing gum, it calls for a bit of overreaction.”

Her father’s eyes tightened. “If he shows up again, he’s likely to come down with a case of forty-five-caliber lead poisoning.”

“Dad, please. I’m sure he’s just some unhappy homeless person who needs help.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I hope he finds it before he threatens my family again.” With that, Heather’s father turned and left the room.

Heather turned to her mother. “Dad wouldn’t really shoot him, would he?”

“Don’t get paranoid, now, but pay attention, won’t you? At least until this guy is caught.”

That didn’t answer her question, but Heather nodded anyway. “I will, Mom. Don’t worry.”

Sleep seemed an unlikely possibility as Heather crawled back into her bed and pulled the down comforter up under her chin. But before she knew it, she found herself rising to greet the new day. Once again she had beaten the sun.

She glanced over at the pile of books that awaited her and then at the snow piled on the outside of her windowsill. Something about snow, especially when it was falling heavily and piling high enough to call off school, made Heather feel like goofing off. All that study, and she still hadn’t figured out a reference in the ship's imagery that would give them a key to understanding the tiny component they were studying.

They had tried to organize a good, specific query to the onboard computer system by coming up with a question about data transfer. Jennifer had gotten the idea, and Heather thought it a good one, that if they could get the ship to show them how it stored and transferred data, it would be a very basic starting point in understanding the underlying alien technology. But no matter how they phrased or visualized the question, the answering imagery was the same.

It looked like a simple pair of transistors or electronic microswitches. The problem was there were no wires or connections of any type between the switches the ship described, merely some symbols and mathematical equations that Heather did not understand.

It was frustrating because she thought they could probably build the switches themselves, given a good microscope, a computer, some small RadioShack stepper motors to accurately control the instruments, and an appropriate semiconductor material. But since it wouldn’t form a circuit, why bother? What was the point of a pair of tiny electronic switches that weren't connected to each other?

The really annoying part was that they had gotten this far a couple of weeks ago. Despite Heather pushing herself through as many advanced mathematics books as she could read, she was no closer to understanding the mysterious equations than she had been when she first saw them.

“Oh well,” she said to herself, sliding into her big, furry slippers and wrapping her flannel robe around her body. “It looks like a good cartoons and hot chocolate day.”

The morning slipped away in wonderful wastefulness, aided along its path to Lounge Lizardsville by a breakfast of homemade biscuits and honey, followed by a pot of hot cocoa set on a coaster beside the couch. The television was tuned to the Cartoon Network as huge, puffy snowflakes drifted down outside the windows. By ten, Heather still had not dressed and had no intention of doing so anytime soon.

At the moment, an epic battle of wits raged between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. Having just plummeted to the bottom of the canyon—where he kicked up a small mushroom cloud of dust—the coyote had come up with a bold new plan.

Heather had always related to the hapless fellow. After all, his plans were truly ingenious, sometimes awe-inspiringly so. Still, no matter how brilliant a scheme he put together, the stupid bird would somehow violate several laws of nature and leave the coyote to suffer the consequences.

Curled into a tight ball on the couch, sipping happily at a fresh cocoa refill—“Thanks, Mom”—Heather watched as the coyote finished painting a perfect picture of a black tunnel through a rock wall. The wall, which lay along the bird's projected path, completely blocked the road so that when the bird came running down it, he would speed directly into the trap, pre-tenderizing himself in preparation for becoming roadrunner stew.

It was really impossible to get too much of this stuff. Sure enough, as she and the coyote watched in anticipation, the roadrunner screeched down the road directly up to the cliff. Then—once again thumbing his pointy nose at the pile of physics books that lay upstairs on Heather’s desk—the bird passed harmlessly through the fake tunnel, continuing out the other side.

And, as could be expected, the coyote raced after the roadrunner, only to splat against the black paint on the near side of the rock wall. He stumbled around afterward in a dazed fashion until he fell off the cliff, generating another small mushroom cloud at the bottom.

Fire exploded in Heather’s brain as everything clicked into place. Of course. The wall had two sides.

She jumped up and raced for the telephone. Hearing a familiar hello on the far end, she barely managed to keep her excited voice low enough that her mother did not hear.

“Jen! Jen, you won’t believe it. I can barely believe it myself, and all because of a cartoon. Never let anyone tell you cartoons are mindless.”

“Heather, I have no idea what you’re talking about or where this is going.”

Heather paused and took a deep, gulping breath. “I figured it out. I know what the microswitches do. I know how they work. With Mark’s help, I think we can make them.”

Chapter 20

Abdul Aziz was not a religious man, although he often wished he was. How many years had it been since he had heeded the call to prayer, since he had even set foot inside a mosque? Allah would not look kindly upon his laziness in such matters, but perhaps his service for all of his Muslim brethren would rate some measure of reward in the afterlife. Egyptian born, Syrian trained, experience hardened in a way that few could have survived, Abdul could hardly believe the good fortune that had crowned him this day.

Direct action. Seldom in the world of international espionage were governments willing to take direct action to achieve their purposes. It was messy. It often left a trail. No, mostly they preferred to work slowly over a number of years to infiltrate and acquire the information they desired.

The now-defunct Soviet Union had been the master of this tactic, although the newly capitalistic Chinese Communists were giving the former Soviets a run for their money. Even his own government was reluctant to take direct action far from its own borders, although that reluctance certainly did not extend to his country’s immediate neighbors.

But this Rho Project declaration by the United States government presented such a grave potential threat to the entire Muslim world that there was no time for anything less than direct action. The potential threat was abundant justification that any and all means be used to attain knowledge of what the United States had learned over the last sixty years—information the United Sates still refused to share freely with the world.

Abdul Aziz was that means, and now he had what he had come for, although even his masters would be shocked at the import of the information. Perhaps Allah would make a place for him after all, despite his shortcomings.

He smiled to himself. Never had he crossed a border easier to penetrate than the border between the United States and Mexico. The desert was his home, and this desert might as well have been an oasis when compared to the great Arabian Desert in which he had lived a goodly portion of his life.

And once across that border, he had not paused longer than it took to highjack a car and dump its former owners beneath six inches of dirt, somewhere in the desert between El Paso, Texas, and Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Now, as he glanced around at the wet mess in what had been a comfortable living room in a quiet Los Alamos residential neighborhood, Abdul shook his head. Getting back across that border was not going to be so easy. Inshallah, God willing, it would happen. At this point, whether he lived or died made little difference. No one would stop him before he returned to his hotel room and broadcast the e-mail message that would change the world.

Unlike some of his associates, Abdul did not enjoy killing. He was merely indifferent to it. The reason he was so much better at it than most was because he had no more emotional response to carving up a child than to preparing a steak for dinner. Even less, since the steak at least made him hungry. All those who had lusted after the kill had not lasted nearly as long as Abdul had, allowing their lust to force them into mistakes that he never made. At least until today.

But this was no mistake of emotion. It was one required by his mission. Tonight there would be no time for cleanup, so he had not bothered to avoid the mess.

He glanced over at the armchair that held the body of Dr. Sheldon Brownstein, formerly the number three physicist working on the Rho Project. Beside him, bound and gagged with duct tape, were the bloody bodies of his wife and two children, a boy and a girl, ten and eight years old respectively. Tomorrow these bodies would be found and all hell would break loose, but tonight, Abdul Aziz had what he needed. He would deal with tomorrow when it arrived.

Abdul nodded at Dr. Brownstein with grudging respect. The man had been strong, unwilling to break until after Abdul had finished with his wife and started in on the children. But finally the information had come, flowing out of the man’s lips so rapidly that Abdul had to tell him to slow down, to ensure the digital recording was intelligible.

Switching on the television, Abdul swept the room one last time with his eyes, not that he thought he had missed anything. He merely wanted to remember this, the place where he had changed the history of the world. Perhaps one day even the Americans would thank him for what he had done. A thin smile spread across Abdul's hawk-like features. He would not hold his breath for that day.

Exiting through the kitchen door, the same one he had entered two hours earlier, Abdul moved into the backyard, then down onto the steep canyon slope that dropped off directly behind the house. His car was parked over a mile away, in the parking lot of an all-night grocery store, and he would not chance walking along streets to get back to it. It was full of gas for his run to the border, but that run would have to wait until he had returned to his hotel and sent the message.

A small sound brought Abdul to a sudden stop. It was impossible to move on the steep, shale-covered slope without making some noise, but the noise he had heard had not come from him. The light from the quarter moon created more shadows than illumination, but to Abdul's trained eyes it might as well have been daylight. In the shadows on the slope ahead, another shadow awaited him. In the shadow's hand, moonlight glinted from the blade of a knife.

Abdul glanced up the hill. He was much too near to the houses to risk the sound and attention a gunshot would produce, unless he absolutely had to. Apparently the shadow's thoughts were similar.

Aware he had been spotted, Abdul's adversary stepped out from his hiding place, moving at a steady walk toward Abdul. American Special Operations Forces agents, whether they were Army Rangers, Green Berets, SEALs, or Marine Recon, had a unique look and smell about them. Then there was Delta Force; most of the group had served in multiple types of special operations roles—cross-dressers, as Abdul thought of them.

Over his years of encounters with them, throughout the Middle East and Africa, Abdul had developed the ability to immediately spot which breed of the beast he was dealing with. Lean bodies, hungry eyes, the stink of reckless self-confidence, tattoos over large portions of the younger ones’ bodies.

They came home from their wars around the world, quickly became bored with civilian life, and went back to what they knew best, becoming mercenaries or, as they preferred to be called, security consultants.

This one had the ex-Delta stench about him. That was good. It meant there would be no backup coming.

The two men lunged at each other simultaneously. Abdul spun aside from the underhand thrust of the merc, his own curved knife barely missing his opponent's throat. Abdul reversed the arc of the blade, sweeping in low, a move that was blocked with a left forearm.

The merc was good, no doubt about that, but not nearly good enough. Abdul drove his body forward so the other man’s knife grazed his side but missed vital organs. With a rapid twisting motion of his wrist, Abdul dislodged his knife from the merc’s block, bringing it up flat, the tip sliding smoothly in through the man’s solar plexus.

Immediately, the merc grabbed Abdul’s knife hand in a grip of iron strength, but it was too late. The entire length of the blade had penetrated the man’s chest and lung. Still, Abdul had to marvel at his strength of will. Ever so slowly, the merc forced the blade from his body as his other hand pressed forward, locked in Abdul's grip.

As the knife jerked free of the merc’s chest, a small stream of arterial blood spurted into Abdul's face. There was no second spurt of blood. Abdul should be drenched in the slick, warm wetness of the merc’s blood, but he wasn’t. Instead, a slow, knowing grin spread across his opponent's face as the fellow's grip continued to strengthen, driving the merc’s knife closer and closer to Abdul's throat.

Apart from a great sense of sorrow, as the knife smoothly parted the skin of his neck, Abdul had only one more thought: “Now that is the correct amount of blood.”