The Second Ship Read online

  The halftime score showed that the Hilltoppers still led, but their twelve point lead had dwindled to a mere two.

  “What’s up with your brother?” Heather asked.

  “No idea,” said Jennifer. “Maybe he’s taking my warning about playing too well to heart.”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t look like he was trying to mess up.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “You’ve got me. Let’s go get some popcorn.”

  By the time they made their way up to the concession stands, conquered the impressive line, and returned back to their seats, the second half had started. If anything, Mark was playing worse than he had at the end of the first half. His movements seemed sluggish, even awkward.

  To Heather’s surprise, Coach Harmon even yelled at him during a timeout, sitting him on the bench for the last two minutes of the third quarter. Mark just sat there beside the coach on the bench, shaking his head. He even refused the water that George Delome brought to him, despite the portly manager’s attempts to get him to drink.

  The fourth quarter opened with Mark still sitting on the bench, as his team gradually fell farther behind. Finally, with just over six minutes left in the game and the Hilltoppers trailing, sixty-six to seventy-eight, Coach Harmon called a timeout and signaled for Mark to get back in the game.

  Whatever the cause of his sloppy play for the last two quarters, the benching seemed to have helped clear Mark’s mind. His ball-handling sharpness was back, perhaps not to his normal level, but impressive nonetheless. And as he played, the Hilltoppers clawed their way back into the game.

  With thirty seconds left on the clock, the fans in the stadium were on their feet, screaming their lungs out as Mark brought the ball up the court, trailing by one point. Even Jennifer was screaming so loud that Heather thought she might cough out a tonsil.

  With the clock ticking down under ten seconds, Heather held her breath as Mark drove into the lane. It seemed that every one of the Goddard Rockets swarmed over him, slapping at the ball as he moved among them.

  Mark dived forward, launching a pass between two Rockets to a wide-open Bobby Kline, who caught it cleanly at the top of the key. As the clock ticked to one, Bobby launched a jump shot that seemed to leave his hands in slow motion, arcing up toward the basket as the horn sounded, ending the game. The shot hit the rim, looped around the inside twice, and then rose back up to the balance on the edge before finally dropping through.

  If the stadium had been loud before, the sound that filled it now was deafening. People rushed onto the court in a swarm, lifting Bobby on their shoulders and patting Mark and the other players on the back until they disappeared into the throng.

  After the hubbub subsided, the rest of the evening passed very slowly. The team stayed to watch the 5A championship game, after receiving their own trophy and hitting the showers, and the Smythes and McFarlands stayed to watch that game too. The question on everyone’s lips was asked of Mark again and again throughout the evening.

  Finally, Heather got her turn. “What happened in the second and third quarter?”

  “I don’t know. I was just out of it for a while.”

  “Yeah. Well, it’s a good thing you got it back together. It sure was looking bad for our side.”

  Mark grinned. “It’s a good thing Bobby hit that shot or I don’t think I could have lived it down.”

  “You still played the best game of anyone out there.”

  “Somehow I don’t think the team and the fans would have seen it that way if we had lost that game. I’m just glad Bobby pulled it off.”

  By the time the last game ended and the McFarlands pulled into their own driveway, Heather was exhausted. At least they had gotten home before the Smythes. Poor Jennifer would have to wait for the team bus to make its way back to the high school before they could pick up Mark and make their way back home. Heather was just glad it wasn’t her.

  Awakening bright and early Sunday morning, Heather felt more rested than she had in days. Apparently, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion was good for her. By the time she had showered, eaten breakfast, and gotten into the car to head to church, a sense of well-being enveloped her. A quick stop at the convenience store put an end to that.

  As she waited for her mother to make her way through the checkout line, Heather’s eyes spotted Mark’s picture on the front of the National Inquisitor. It was a close-up of Mark’s glassy stare as Coach Harmon leaned in nose-to-nose yelling at him. But it was the headline that almost made her drop her soda.

  High School Prodigy’s Pre-Game Drinking Binge Almost Costs Team Championship

  Not good, she thought. Not good at all.

  73

  A cold draft swirled across the floor, sweeping dust bunnies from hidden nooks and chilling Jack’s feet as he leaned forward, scanning the papers occupying the center of his desk. That was the thing about drafty old attics in wintertime. No matter how many space heaters you strategically positioned, the draft won.

  Janet’s head emerged through the trapdoor, followed immediately by a very shapely, black-leotard-clad body.

  “So what have you got for me?”

  She shrugged. “Just as we thought. Mark’s water bottle was drugged. It had been emptied, but traces of the Mickey were still present. It’s a good thing he didn’t drink any more of that stuff or he would have had more pressing problems than an off night on the basketball court.”

  “And the fat team manager kid?”

  “One of the school nerds. The interesting thing is that he’s one of a small group of outcasts that have joined a Bible study group headed up by Raul Rodriguez.”

  “Rodriguez? The son of the Rho Project scientist?”

  “Yes. He’s an interesting story. Two months ago he was dying of terminal brain cancer. Then, on his deathbed, his cancer suddenly went into complete remission. Looking at him now, you’d never guess he’d been sick.”

  “So you think Raul got this other kid to drug Mark’s water? What’s the connection?”

  “Heather. Raul has the hots for her, and from what I can tell, she likes him back. Mark doesn’t even try to hide his distaste for that friendship. It’s obvious that Raul doesn’t like Mark either.”

  Jack nodded. “The name Rodriguez has been popping up a lot this morning. But before I get to that, did you get a chance to read the secure fax from Riles?”

  “No.”

  “The NSA has gotten four new messages from the Rho Project informant. All of them originated on different parts of the SIPRNet inside the Puzzle Palace.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It isn’t. Riles had every one of the associated subnets taken off-line, people polygraphed, the works. Nothing. Even more interesting, they traced each of the messages. All of them seem to have just appeared on the network.”

  “Has someone managed to physically tap the cables?”

  “No. And more than half of the messages seem to have originated on fiber-optic cables.”

  “So I guess Riles is freaking.”

  Jack laughed. “Absolutely. He’s not the type to tolerate unexplained intrusions on his security systems.”

  “So they don’t have any leads?”

  “Not anything they can lay their fingers on. There was one very interesting anomaly. What do you know about the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a big, two-million-pound bottle of heavy water over a mile below ground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario. The whole thing is surrounded by a sixty-foot-thick array of photomultiplier tubes and is suspended in a huge tank of light water.”

  “Why do they need such a big detector, and why put it so far below ground?”

  “Neutrinos are very hard to detect. They can pass through almost anything, including the Earth, and give off almost no sign that they were ever there. They put the detector way below ground to block out other types of cosmic radiation. It lets them focus on the Cerenkov radiation that the neutrino and he
avy-water interactions produce.”

  “So what’s the point of measuring them?”

  “That’s what gets interesting. The neutrinos are a side effect of certain high-energy interactions. The reason Riles got interested was that his team monitored reports of unusual neutrino flux measurements.”

  “Let me guess. The times corresponded to the times of the SIPRNet hacks.”

  “Bingo.”

  “So what technologies would cause that?”

  “As far as we know, nothing on the planet could produce that kind of neutrino flux.”

  “Can its source be traced?”

  “No.”

  “So we’re dead-ended.”

  “Not quite. There’s the content of the message itself. It contained exactly the same five words on each transmission. Rho Project Nanite Suspension Fluid.”

  Janet moved over to look down at the fax. “So we know the message appeared on an un-hackable secure network, that at the same time, a fancy detector picked up signals that cannot be produced by anything on Earth, and that the message talks about a Rho Project technology.”

  “Specifically nanites. Three guesses as to the name of one of the nanotechnology specialists working on the Rho Project science team.”

  “Dr. Ernesto Rodriguez?”

  “Bingo again.”

  “And his son has just made a miraculous recovery from terminal cancer.”

  “Too many miracles for my taste.”

  Janet was pacing now, weaving her way through the sparse furniture, letting her fingertips trace around its edges like a feline. God, she was sexy.

  “One thing doesn’t make sense. If the next Rho Project technology to be released is some sort of nanotechnology, then why is someone warning us about it? It’ll be reviewed when it’s released.”

  “Apparently our mole on the project thinks it’s dangerous enough to go to extraordinary lengths to make sure he gets our attention.”

  “What about the direct approach? Can’t Riles just inquire through black-ops channels about the research?”

  “It’s so compartmentalized that none of the normal channels are working. He’s afraid that if he presses, someone will put a stop to his little inquiry before he has anything to back up his suspicions. Despite everything, that is still all we have. Suspicions.”

  “You want me to focus some extra attention on Raul?”

  “While I look into his father. Find out everything you can about his illness, his recovery, any medical history after he got well, his friends. Everything.”

  As Janet began climbing down the ladder, she paused to look back.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How a sweet young girl like Heather McFarland can be such a weirdo magnet.”

  Jack only nodded.

  74

  Priest knew that in past lifetimes he had been a mighty warrior, a slayer of men, a ravager of women, just as he was now. After all, the old oak tree spread its roots in the soil, growing tall, hard, and strong. And when it died, it sprouted from its own acorn to live again. But it was still an oak. So it was with Priest.

  His awareness of his prior existence was more than a belief. Priest often awoke from a dream, and in that moment of awakening, for a brief instant, he could almost recall the men he had been. He could almost hear the screams of the dying as they pleaded with him to spare their lives.

  Just as Ms. California begged for her life right now. As he dragged her bound form from the house to the old well out back, she cried and pleaded with him. And Priest almost wavered. Not from any sense of mercy. Hearing her terrified cries aroused him, almost enough to take her back to his basement for a few more days of usage.

  But he’d already snipped her fingers for his necklace. It was time for her to join the others.

  In the concrete basement beneath a German Gasthaus, a wooden ball makes a unique sound as it rolls down an alley to crash into nine wooden pins. The sound is picked up and amplified by the enclosing concrete walls, sloshing back and forth like Pilsner in the drinking glasses of the red-faced rollers.

  Something about the sound of a woman’s bound body falling down his well reminded Priest of that. Déjà vu.

  As he walked back toward the house, Priest realized he was hungry, although not for food. The source of his hunger was one Janet Johnson, whatever her real name might be.

  He didn’t know her real name. It was something that had only happened to Priest once before. Usually his sources could deliver a dossier on anybody in the world, a dossier that was thick enough to pop the hinges off a briefcase. But where Janet Johnson was concerned, there was nothing. Nothing real, anyway. There was plenty of stuff about her make-believe life. Birth certificate: Janet Donovan, Gaithersburg, Maryland, August 28, 1982. High School Diploma from Quince Orchard High, class of 2000. BA in history from University of Maryland, class of 2004. Marriage certificate to one Jack Johnson signed in Silver Spring, Maryland, September 2, 2004.

  As he paused at the kitchen table to stare at the papers spread across it, Priest shook his head. Garbage. Every last scrap of it. The only other person he had ever encountered with a similar dearth of information was her pretend husband. But Priest knew some things about Jacky boy that put the lie to the false background. And they put the lie to all the information on Janet that lay spread out before him as well.

  Deep cover. Part of Jack Gregory’s team. That told him all he really needed to know about that live little minx. And soon enough, he would have all the time in the world to encourage her to tell him the rest.

  The sad thing about being a warrior of such high standards was that Priest bored of his conquests so rapidly. He didn’t think that would be the case with Janet Johnson. If she was acceptable to Jack, then she would be among the best. She would take a very long time to break. Priest couldn’t ask for more than that. That she was drop-dead gorgeous was merely icing on the cake.

  Priest turned toward his front door. The day was drifting away from him, and he still had so many things to do. The drive to his hide position alone was going to take an hour and a half by the back roads, and then he had a hard forty-five-minute hike after that. And he wanted to be there well before the high school let out and Janet Johnson made her way home.

  Normally he would have selected a hide that was more easily accessible. But this time that would not do. Not when Jack Gregory was involved. The man’s nose for trouble was uncanny, almost as if he had a sixth sense that warned him of danger. And Jack was not a man to trifle with. Priest had learned that firsthand.

  The vantage point Priest had chosen was a brushy enclave in a crack in the cliff face across the canyon from the house Jack and Janet rented. It allowed entry along a trail hidden from the other side of the canyon. And the way the spot was shaded meant no stray glint from the lenses of his binoculars would betray his position.

  He glanced down at his watch. 14:34. Perfect. Just enough time to get settled in before Janet got off work and returned home, provided she kept her routine. Whatever time she arrived didn’t really matter. Priest could wait.

  As he adjusted his binoculars, Priest smiled. He had all the time in the world.

  75

  “You won’t believe what that brother of mine is up to now.”

  Heather glanced up from her book to see Jennifer’s spectacled face peering through her bedroom door.

  “What?”

  “You'll never guess in a million years.”

  “But you’re going to make me try?”

  Jennifer walked into the room and plopped down on Heather’s bed. “He joined a society.”

  “You mean like the Moose Lodge or the Masons?” Heather shifted in her desk chair to keep facing her friend.

  “Something like that.”

  “Jen, are you going to tell me or not?”

  “Mark is now a card-carrying member of POOTNAS, the Patriotic Order of the Needle and Spool.”

  “The sewing circle? The old la
dies whose ancestors sewed uniforms for the civil war? You’re kidding, right?”

  “That’s what I thought when I heard it, but it’s true.”

  “Is it some scheme to meet girls?”

  “Not unless he’s really desperate. The youngest member of the Los Alamos Chapter, except Mark, is sixty-seven.”

  Heather set her book down behind her on the desk. “So what’s his angle?”

  “As far as I can tell, he likes sewing.”

  “Since when?”

  “All I know is, a couple of days ago he was watching a program on the invention of various stitches and he got very interested. You could just see his face light up. Since then he has been a fanatic on the whole subject. He even went to the library.”

  “We are still talking about your brother, Mark, right?”

  Jennifer shrugged. “At least it looks like my brother. Currently he’s deeply immersed in articles on slip stitches and the effects of temperature variations on threads.”

  “Have you asked him why?”

  “Of course. He was shocked that I could even ask. The Sisters of Mercy couldn’t have looked more innocent.”

  Heather shook her head. “Well, there’s no making sense out of anything guys do.”

  “Oh. Mark distracted me so badly I almost forgot what I came over to tell you. I wanted to tell Mark too, but he told me to quit interrupting him and to get lost. Sometimes he makes me so mad I can’t see straight.”

  Heather grinned. “So what did you want to tell me?”

  Jennifer propped up two pillows and leaned back against Heather’s headboard. “Something’s been bothering me for a long time now, something that I’d seen in the data the last time we were on the ship.”

  The topic of the ship brought Heather to full attention. Though they had thoroughly swept her room for bugs, it still made her nervous to talk about it.

  “Bothering you? Why?”

  “At first I couldn’t put my finger on it. But this morning I was playing the whole thing back in my mind and I found it. Then I went on the Internet to get some data about the Aztec Crash back in 1948, and it all started to make sense to me.”