They’re coming for the stone.
Were they his thoughts or a voice?
Run. It was an urging, not a physical sound. Run!
McCarter couldn’t help it. He dropped the trinket from his hand and ran for the street.
Yuri had awoken screaming but had calmed down as soon as the MRI machine was shut down. He clung to Danielle as Dr. Vasquez did a number of other tests.
“There’s no sign of swelling to his brain,” she said. “His neurological responses are good.”
Thank God, Danielle thought.
“What about the blood from his ear?”
“It looks as if he had a cyst inside his ear canal that ruptured during the seizure,” she said. “But he can hear okay. So, no damage.”
The doctor smiled. “He’s a lucky child,” she said, then seemed to realize better. “In some ways.”
Danielle stood, holding Yuri protectively.
“What will you do with him now?” Dr. Vasquez asked.
“Try to get him to somewhere safe, where he can receive help,” she said.
“You could leave him with us,” she said. “I’ll make sure he’s cared for.”
Danielle hesitated. There was an undeniable attraction to the idea. Let Yuri disappear, no Kang, no Russia. No more problems for him. But she couldn’t be sure it would turn out that way.
She shook her head. “There are people looking for him, people you won’t be able to protect him from. If they found you, they would kill you and anyone who stood in their way.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story,” Danielle said. “When we leave, you should call the police. In case these men come here.”
The doctor nodded, looking nervous. She glanced at Hawker still holding the gun. “I’ll give you five minutes before I call. Don’t come back.”
Danielle turned and left the room carrying Yuri. Hawker followed a second later.
“Should I call security?” Ricardo asked.
“No,” Dr. Vasquez replied.
“You’re going to let them go?”
She nodded. “I think it’s best,” she said. “If they are who they say they are, then there is no need getting mixed up in the situation.”
“And if they’re not?”
“Better they be far from here when the police find them,” she said.
Ricardo nodded reluctantly and then looked past her to a small device beside the door. A bright green LED was flashing rapidly.
“Was the intrusion in the child’s head radioactive?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Dr. Vasquez said. “Why?”
He pointed to the LED. “The waste alarm. One of them has been exposed to radioactive materials.”
McCarter tried to run in a controlled fashion, but he knew it must have looked bad. His leg was hurting and his mind was spinning, and he reckoned his pace was that of a man in a three-legged race, even if he was tied to no one but himself.
He continued across the street, thinking he had to get away, away from the police, away from whoever was chasing him, away from Hawker and Danielle.
The last thought hit him hard. Why had he thought that? They were his friends; they were protecting him. Was his subconscious mind trying to tell him something?
He saw a bus stop in front of the hospital and a city bus coming down the crowded street. He ran over and got in line. The bus slowed, releasing a great blast of air from its brakes.
“Professor?”
He turned to see Danielle and Hawker coming out of the hospital. Yuri was walking with them. He was thankful for that.
“What are you doing?” Danielle asked suspiciously.
His mind raced. “Ahh, I’m hiding,” he said. “Trying to look inconspicuous.”
He gestured at the police, both in the park and on the street corner.
“The police aren’t after us,” Danielle noted.
“Can’t be too sure,” he said defensively.
Danielle looked at Hawker, then nodded toward the bus. “What do you think?”
“Time to let the old jeep go,” he said, agreeing.
“We’re getting on?” McCarter asked, surprised.
“Yeah,” Danielle said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 36
Arnold Moore sat in the permanent darkness of the Yucca Mountain tunnel holding a cold compress to his temple while technicians buzzed around him, connecting cables and moving equipment, turning a double-wide trailer into their new laboratory.
He watched them work, fighting the urge to throw up as he had every ten to fifteen minutes since the incident and listening to Byron Stecker bitch so extensively that he’d actually begun looking forward to the next episode of vomiting.
With the first of the lab’s flat-screen monitors now operating, a review of the energy discharge event had been arranged, but there wasn’t much to see.
Moore stared at the screen. The playback, which was now frozen, had been paused with a line of distortion running through the left side of the frame.
It showed the pockmarked desert floor, the smoking eighteen-wheeler, and the Humvees scattered about randomly. It also took in the two Black Hawk helicopters that had crash-landed on separate sections of the route. One seemed to have come down almost normally, but the other was smoking and crumbled over on one side, its rotor blades in dark pieces all around, shattered like old LP records.
In the freeze-frame image, the shape of a man could be seen jumping from the burning hulk.
Byron Stecker, who had been waiting at Yucca for Moore to arrive, spoke. “We have no video depicting the actual event. Nothing prior to this. Despite the fact that there are cameras all over the base — including cameras designed to catch nuclear blasts — all the data feeds are blank from a moment four minutes and nineteen seconds prior to the blast until this point approximately one minute and thirty seconds after.
“But we have one eyewitness describing it as a shock wave rolling across the desert floor, a nuclear blast with everything but the mushroom cloud.”
Moore stared at the display. He’d been unconscious until several minutes later.
“At least fifteen commercial airliners were affected,” Stecker said, “including nine that lost complete electrical power and had to make emergency landings. Nellis radar and communications went down and we have extensive grid failures all along the West Coast. Vegas, Henderson, and Tahoe are completely blacked out.”
Moore tried to ignore it.
“And worst of all,” Stecker added, “both the Russians and Chinese are accusing us of breaking the test ban treaty or of creating some new superweapon. The UN is even convening a Security Council meeting on it the day after tomorrow. And it’s the damned weekend.”
Moore rubbed his head. The interest of the foreign powers certainly complicated things.
“What’s your point?” he asked, too exhausted to wait for the DCI to get around to it.
“I’ve been telling you,” Stecker said, annoyed. “This thing is dangerous.”
“Anything that has power can be dangerous,” Moore said. “A car, a gun, a bomb. Even you. The question is how you use these things and negate the dangers.”
“That’s just the point, Arnold. We don’t know how to use this thing. We don’t even know what it does. All we know is that after two years of studying it you got caught with your pants down.”
No doubt Stecker had already commissioned similar findings and sent them to the president. Moore would have to get off a response quickly and hope that the president could remain rational in the face of such a strong attack.
In the meantime, the scientific effort would kick into high gear. New equipment would be flown out to replace what had been lost in the blast and the new power-sharing arrangement would be tested.