Danielle seemed to relax a bit. She gazed out toward the storm.
“Why’d you come for me?” she asked quietly.
“Moore paid me to,” he said. “How do you think we can afford this luxurious lifestyle?”
She took the glass from him, had another taste, and held it. “I’m serious. The last time I saw you was two years ago. I promised I’d try to help clear your name, but I couldn’t get anyone to move. And then instead of sending someone to bring you back into the fold, CIA sent some guys to haul you back in chains.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” he said. “I knew how that would play out. It means a lot that you tried.”
She sighed, took another sip of the rum, and put the glass down. “I didn’t lure McCarter into this,” she said, defensively. “I didn’t want him to be out there alone. I thought I could protect him.”
“I know that, too,” he said. “It sucks to know you can’t protect everyone, no matter how hard you try.”
She nodded as if the words held some deeper meaning. But she didn’t offer it up.
That was too bad, Hawker thought, because here for the first time since they’d known each other she’d begun to show an openness that he found endearing.
“So that’s why you came to get me,” she said, smiling. “To protect someone you care about.”
“When I met you,” he said, “you were this immaculate, type-A corporate woman. You walked around with a kind of energy that I honestly can’t ever remember having. And all I could think was, here’s a gorgeous woman who can help me get what I want.”
She laughed. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended.”
He guessed that his statement could have been taken a number of ways.
“But then, when we were out in that jungle, you made a lot of hard choices. You did the right things, and by the time we left that place you seemed different. I thought, maybe here was someone who could help me find what I need, a way to believe in something, a way to find some kind of hope again.”
She looked over at him as if he’d said something strange. “I don’t know you as a person lacking hope. You don’t give up. You don’t give in.”
“I don’t like to lose,” he said. “And if I have to go down, I’m going down swinging. But that’s a long way from believing there’s anything out there to win.”
“Defiance,” she offered.
“I guess. But it’s not the same as belief.”
She stared at him quietly for a moment, her brown eyes locked on his, the candlelight bathing her face and her lips glistening from the rum. They were close now, looking into each other’s eyes.
He reached for her, but a shrill chirping interrupted them. It was the satellite phone.
“It’s Moore,” she said, standing up.
She went for the phone.
Hawker slumped back into the lounge chair, propping one foot up dejectedly and grabbing the rum-filled glass once again. “Great. Half the Western Hemisphere is blacked out and I get a girl with a solar-powered phone.”
Danielle took a last glance at Hawker and the storm brewing on the horizon, then picked up the phone. Moving to the next room, she typed in her code, confirming the lock to receive the transmission.
“Sorry it took me so long to reestablish contact,” Moore said. “I know you tried to initiate several hours ago. Things have been a little busy up here.”
He went on to explain how badly the move had gone and how the CIA had seized on the incident as a moment to attack.
“You were out in the open?” she said, surprised.
“Unfortunately,” he said.
“Were you delayed or something?”
“No,” he said, sounding aggravated by the question. “We were on time; there was no reason to expect a spike for hours. It came off early, and a lot stronger than it should have been.”
Her mind raced, going over what had occurred on the boat. It sounded identical. Both stones had discharged unexpectedly. And seemingly random events now made sense to her.
“I think I know what happened.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“We’ve found another stone,” she told him. “We pulled it out of a sunken temple eight miles offshore.”
“That’s damn good news,” he said.
“Thanks,” she replied. “But the thing is, this stone spiked also. I don’t know if you have access to the news up there but half the Yucatan is blacked out — just like Vegas from the sound of things.”
“I thought we caused that,” he said.
“Nope,” she said. “That one’s on us. And it sounds to me like the timing was identical.”
“What are you saying?”
She gathered her thoughts. “The stones sent out a constant signal, right? A carrier wave that cycles like a beacon or a searchlight, rotating over and over again. What we’ve never known is what happens when that wave bounces off something,” she said.
“You think the stones found each other,” he said.
“One stone queried and the other answered. Like our computer networks.”
“Sounds like a possibility,” he said. “How come they haven’t found each other before?”
“You had that one buried underneath Building Five,” she said. “We found this one eighty feet beneath the gulf, shielded by a thousand tons of rock and coral. But we happened to bring it up to the surface at the same time you were transporting that one.”
She expected Moore to be skeptical but he was with her.
“That makes a lot more sense than you know,” he said. “We’ve been studying the buildup of the energy wave, what we were able to record anyway. And the main signal showed a sudden divergence from its prior, constant pattern. A change in the carrier wave that we could only account for in two ways. Either the stone was having some type of internal malfunction, or the divergence was the result of the two separate waves merging.”
“It has to be,” she said.
“It would help explain some other things, too,” he added, sounding relieved. “To begin with, the burst we had up here was more powerful than normal by a factor of ten. That’s easier to understand if something new was amplifying the signal.”
“These stones were meant to do something in concert with one another,” she suggested confidently. “They might even be connected now, like some kind of network.”
He hesitated. “Maybe they were for a moment, but not now. Once we got the Brazil stone into the tunnel, the carrier wave reverted to normal.”
She considered that. Apparently Yucca Mountain would work as a containment site after all.
“I’ll have a workup done on your theory,” Moore said, “but I think you’re on the right track.”
“So what’s the next move?” she asked. “I hope you have some plan for getting this stone back there. Because I doubt I can get it through security in my carry-on. Not that I’d bring it on a plane.”
“Don’t even try,” he said. “Just keep it with you. At least for now. Find some way to shield it or you’ll be causing blackouts every seventeen hours and thirty-seven minutes.”
“I can do that,” she said. “But I need you to arrange travel for Yuri.”
“Why?”
“He was injured by the pulse. He seems to be okay now but I want to get him out of here. Whatever the Russians did to him, it seems to have made him vulnerable to harm from this thing.”
“What exactly are you talking about?”
“He has some type of implant embedded in his brain,” she said. “He had a seizure during the event and was unconscious for thirty minutes or so afterward. I got him to a hospital and they did an MRI.”
She took a breath. “Bottom line is this: He needs more care than I can give him, and we’re endangering him by keeping him with us. We’ve already been attacked once and even though we’ve moved, we’re not safe by any means.”