The SONG of SHIVA (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Blind Justice and Her good intentions

Whispered prayers and answered questions

Science and its bold suggestions

The air reverberated with a drumroll of hoofbeats galloping madly across the exposed hilltop. Hearts racing, Nora and Lyköan drove their mounts over the saturated landscape into the teeth of a painfully needling sleet.

Wet and cold, they reached the meager protection of the moss-encrusted dolmen, now standing dark and solitary under an angry ceiling of low clouds. Lyköan dismounted first, caught Nora in both arms as she leapt from her horse, and dragged her inside. The horses refused to follow, pulling back on their reins, preferring the pummeling of a pelting storm to the darkness within.

“Okay, have it your way,” Lyköan grumbled, dashing out from under the capstone’s protection to tie both animals to the same scrub oak they had used the day before. Then he ducked back inside and huddled with Nora, both of them shivering in the darkness.

“This won’t last long,” Lyköan assured her, peering into the western sky.

“You a meteorologist?”

“No. But really, we shouldn’t have to wait much longer. Skycast predicted clear skies by five.” Looking at the luminous dial of his watch, he added, “It’s seven past now. Anyway, we’re out of the rain.”

“Explain again, why did I let you talk me into this?” Nora asked, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Exactly what’d we come out here to prove?”

“To find out what role this site may play in the larger conspiracy. Why does Innovac
need
such an enormous hidden transport location? Who else is involved? At this point there are more things we don’t know than we do ― plenty that just don’t add up. Since we ran into a dead end on the Innovac LAN this seemed like the logical next step. If my hunch is right we’ll find a local signal, maybe even tap into a live transmission.”

“And that’ll help us ― how?”

“You want honesty? I’m not really sure. Who knows? We may discover government complicity.”

“Oh great.”

“Turning to the authorities right now ― if they’re involved ― would be suicide. This might help us avoid that.”

“How about blowing the whistle at the CDC or HHS? I still don’t think any of
our
people are involved. Or they would never have sent me to Thailand in the first place.”

“You sure about that?” Lyköan shot back. “Even if you’re right, how fast are they going to react? Forgive me, but aren’t we talking about two agencies of the biggest and notoriously slowest bureaucracy on earth?”

Nora didn’t reply.

“What makes more sense,” Lyköan continued, “sending the stolen Innovac files to the CDC and vetting everything
through channels
or presenting our evidence when we have a more complete picture ― and a better chance of avoiding those who might be involved?”

He was on a roll. “You’re assuming it’s strictly an Innovac plot, but this site suggests much more to me ― some bigger operator. Until we know who that might be ― the full dimensions of what we’re dealing with ― I’d feel better if we just kept everything to ourselves ― at least for now.”

Nora had remained silent during the passionate oration, but now found her voice. “It could be a tin ear you’re playing by here, handsome. Ever think of that? If we get caught while we’re trying to learn
everything
― well, we already know other people are dead, people who knew nothing.”

“How about this? If you’re still feeling the same way tomorrow and we’re not hanging by our thumbs, or worse, we contact whoever you want. I won’t argue with you. Right now though ― since we’re here ― let’s test
my
hypothesis first, okay?”

Nora’s eyes caught a glimpse of the exterior greyness. “Fine. Fire her up, chief. But if it doesn’t stop raining soon, I swear, we’ll be swimming back.”

Reaching into a thigh pocket, he pulled out a plastic pouch, unzipped the bag and carefully withdrew the yíb.

“Should’ve brought a towel or something,” he said, disappointed with his lack of foresight.
Wonder what other little details I’ve missed.

Drawing his free hand back across the side of his head, he pressed the cold water until it ran like an icy stream down the back of his neck. Wiping the wet hand against the seat of his pants, the driest spot he could find, he switched the yíb to the other hand and repeated the process on the other side of his head. Still shivering, he sat down with his back against the inside surface of the pylon farthest from the angle of the rain. Nora came and knelt beside him.

Lyköan’s bravado belied more doubts than the one Nora had raised. With no formulated plan, he was reacting to events viscerally, which couldn’t be healthy. But he didn’t know what else to do. Like a paddle blade inserted into a placid lake, the familiar straight angles of reality had become dramatically deflected. The result of a normal paddle stroke was no longer certain.

The yíb screen came up in brilliant blue, illuminating their faces in a ghostly pallor. Looking at Nora, he thought
, If nothing else, at least we’ve got the atmospherics right
.

Adjusting the MIMO seek-n-lok for multi-wave networking, he launched Sun Shi’s reverse-encryption app.

“Bingo. There
is
a wireless link transmitting in the area.”

He submitted the wildcard access query that had opened the Innovac LAN. The crack-app stalled, reconfigured and resubmitted.

After a few seconds he shook his head. “Something’s wrong. It’s not accepting the stolen password sequencing that worked back at the mansion. We’re rerunning the stealth-entry initializing protocol ― like it’s never encountered this LAN before.”

“Meaning?” Nora asked.

“You got me. Maybe this is an entirely separate system.”

Innumerable lines of code scrolled dizzyingly down the tiny screen, feinting and parrying in hexadecimal with its unknown adversary. Every so often a single image would flash static for an instant and be gone:
Retinal Scan
:
OK
…
Voice Recognition
:
OK
…
Alpha-Numeric Sequencin
g
:
OK
. Lyköan didn’t catch them all, but it appeared to be a much more sophisticated and exhaustive authentication protocol than the one used at Cairncrest. What was he witnessing here? Dueling programs came to mind.

Was it possible that Sun Shi’s quacking duck had met its virtual hunter’s blind? After an eternity of cascading lines of code and audible musical flourishes, a rainbow flash of color produced an unadorned
Shiva Gamma Node
welcome screen.

“Submit your query,”
an eerily familiar feminine voice requested from the yíb’s tiny speakers.

“That sounds like Julie Prentice!” Nora gasped.

Lyköan smiled at her. “Or simply an interface program using her speech algorithms. It sounds cold ― kind of robotic to me.”

“You mean more robotic than the
real
Julie Prentice?” Nora asked.

Brushing the remark aside with a shake of his head, Lyköan raised the unit to his mouth and pressed the receiver input button. Enunciating in crisp, short phrases, he said, “Cairncrest, Laboratory, Floor Plans and Architectural Drawings.”

“Sounds like you’ve done this before,” Nora whispered.

“Hardly. Just a logical shot in the dark. Before you congratulate me let’s see if Ms. Prentice responds.” As the progress icon whirled on the screen he wondered whose identity the program was mimicking to gain this access.

I hope it’s yours, Pandavas. If this works, maybe your compulsive record keeping will hand us the rope from which you ultimately swing.

“Guess you chose the wrong profession, bright eyes,” Nora whispered in his ear, disrupting this grim reverie.

“What? I should have gone into espionage?”

“No. Weather forecasting. It’s stopped raining.”

At almost the same instant, the yíb screen flicked with a three-dimensional rendering of an enormous complex, wire-like threads stretching from a central node to smaller ganglia across large topographical stretches. Lyköan tried to get his bearings.

“Damn it, this screen is too goddamned small for this.” Removing and unfolding the keyboard, he slid his finger across the cursor pad and enlarged the screen’s central node, then enlarged it again.

At last, a three-quarter perspective of the Cairncrest manse became recognizable in wire-string dark blue architectural lines on a pale background. Maneuvering in this environment required key combinations that Lyköan was having difficulty mastering. After some experimentation he was finally able to zoom in at the structure from an oblique angle and insert the cursor into the interior of the building. As it entered each room a small text window would open with the name and detailed data about the space. The first area identified was the great banquet hall of the previous night’s celebration.

“I think I’ve got it now,” he said as the coordination of keystrokes, cursor pad movements, and screen response all came together.

Slipping below grade, he located the isolated WHO laboratory. Then, following the second elevator Nora had mentioned, he moved down one level at a time until he had reached the lowest basement.

“
BSL-4 Clinical Research Biohazard Environment
,” Nora read as the information window opened. “I saw them only once ― our first day at the lab. They’re as good as anything we’ve got back at CDC, I can tell you that.”

The lowest floor was divided into two subsections by a broad hallway. At one end of this bisecting corridor stood a wide set of reticulated rolling doors. Behind the doors four freight elevators dropped another ten meters into a large open space from which exited a thin, tubular element, tracking off the screen into the virtual distance. When the cursor entered this space the new info window read:
Null-Lev Terminus - Cairncrest: 20 X 10 X 7.5 meters
.

“I think this might explain our vibrations ― that hum you heard?” Lyköan said, then whistled through his teeth. “Want to take a ride?”

Nora was sitting close against his side, holding his left arm tightly. She was shivering almost convulsively. He could hear her teeth chattering.

“Here, let’s get out in the sun,” he suggested, “see if we can dry off a little.”

They emerged from the capstone’s shadow on the hillside facing Cairncrest, which stood miles in the distance, invisible now in the low-lying clouds. The intermittent sun felt joyously warm as it burned through the thinning cloud cover passing eastward overhead. Lyköan shielded the screen with his hand and showed the output rendering to Nora.

“See where that tube exits the terminus?”

“Right under Cairncrest’s veranda.” Nora understood immediately.

“And heads out below the patio and gardens straight towards our dolmen here. Running fifty meters underground it probably makes little or no noise, but it must produce a very low frequency vibration that passes through the earth ― something you’d feel rather than hear ― if you noticed anything at all.” Looking at Nora, he added, “You must be more sensitive to low frequencies than I am.”

Traveling down the midpoint of the tube’s locus, Lyköan continued following the null-lev tunnel for some distance. A tracking counter in a small window at the bottom of the screen soon registered 5.93 kilometers.

Shiva Incubator Terminus
. They had come to the end of the line. A large multilevel complex, rivaling the Cairncrest labs in size, spread out from here. Lyköan moved the cursor through the multitude of rooms rapidly: Genomic Computing, Nucleocapsid RNA Cleaving and Casting, Protein Expression Insertion, Hemagglutinin & Neurominidase Enhancement.

“This isn’t a research lab,” Nora gasped. “It’s a manufacturing facility! These assholes aren’t just studying microbial pathogens ― they’re producing them!”

“A helluva lot of them,” Lyköan added.

The cursor had been left at the far end of the underground complex. Lyköan didn’t need the small window to identify the multi-bayed hangar, nor the
Hangar Portal
descriptor that opened when the cursor fell on the enormous door in the base of the hillside upon which they sat.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Something I thought about earlier.” He spoke into the yíb’s receiver, “Surveillance ― Hangar Portal.”

A quartered split-screen flashed on the display with a separate cardinal compass point identified below each view. All four landscapes were quite similar. Only the direction of shadows differed noticeably from one view to the next. Each individual camera slowly panned smoothly back and forth across its field of view.

Two of the screens, North and South, were not immediately identifiable. Lyköan instantly recognized the West camera, however, as it unsettlingly swept across the very same panorama he had watched at dawn as the camouflaged hangar door had opened. Even more disturbing, the final East view quadrant, as it panned slowly across the hilltop, showed the dolmen in stark relief against the eastern sky.

“Oh shit…” he whispered. “Stay right here. Don’t move.”

“What’s wrong?” Nora asked.