“Which is where he’s going to be,” Alvarez said, pointing across large room. “Right behind that door, watching space traffic in Secondary Ops while you get the prime real estate here in Mission Control.”
Rand considered. He might still need Alvarez. No need to piss the lady off for nothing. “If I need him,” he said, “I want him stat.”
“You’ll have him.”
Rand eyed his two operations engineers, both comfortably ensconced in front of their terminals. “How long until we’re in range?”
“If the current orbital degradation holds?”
“Ballpark,” Rand said.
“Thirty-nine, forty minutes.”
Rand looked to Alvarez and said, “Keep him close.”
Mobi immediately understood he was being offered a reprieve and stepped across the room, moving to pull the door to Secondary Ops open. But as he laid his fingers on it, Alvarez’s hand touched his, opening the door for him. Mobi’s eyes met Alvarez's for a split second as he felt her fingers on his palm, but he quickly looked away. Once in Secondary Ops, Mobi kept right on walking out the door on the other side, buoyed by the keycard he felt hidden in the palm of his hand.
Mobi knew what the keycard meant. Thankfully, the rigorous biometric security protocols of JPL’s secure level entrance were behind him. He swiped his way back down to the lower lab and within a couple of minutes he was inside Alvarez’s office. Alvarez had a pair of louvered blinds on the glass window to the corridor which he promptly closed. He checked the multi-line phone on the desk. It had an internal configuration. Then he examined the keycard. Alvarez had scrawled an eighteen digit number on the back of it which Mobi guessed included a contact number for Quiann. But Mobi knew he wouldn’t be able to make a call out without going through the JPL operator. Not the best plan under the circumstances. He tried the desk drawers, but found little of note: a few pencils and pens, a ream of paper, and a pack of batteries. Mobi began to question his assumptions. Was her office where Alvarez had intended he come? With the exception of her long mohair coat sitting rumpled in the corner, the place was empty.
Mobi rifled through the pockets of the coat finding nothing but a half-empty box of Tic-Tacs. He was about to eat one when he noticed something else — a bright green foot poking out from under the coat. Mobi could immediately tell that the foot wasn’t human, or even real for that matter. It belonged to a green alien balloon — the kind you could buy for five bucks from a vendor in Griffith Park. Lifting the coat off the floor revealed that the alien had the typical Roswell look. It wasn’t the first time Mobi had seen this particular toy. This alien was something of an unofficial mascot at JPL and more than one employee had one strung up in their office. What Mobi found strange, however, was the fact that Alvarez would have one in an office completely devoid of any other personal touch. Alvarez must dig her X-files, Mobi thought, or else....
Mobi examined the alien balloon carefully noting that it was a little heavier in one foot than the other, not much, but a little. The green tinted PVC plastic was transparent under the right light, and holding the little bugger up to the florescent tube, Mobi was able to see what looked like a black plastic wafer in its left foot. Feeling a surge of excitement now, Mobi placed his thumb on the sole of the inflatable foot and his fingers on the heel, pressing down on the black wafer inside. No sooner did Mobi feel a bubble switch in the plastic wafer click down, than a hum emanated from the rear of the office. Turning around, Mobi watched Alvarez’s entire rear wall slide open behind her desk.
“Nice,” Mobi muttered quietly to himself. Then, clutching the inflatable alien at his side, Mobi silently entered Alvarez’s inner sanctum.
Chapter 32
By the time Michael and Kate got back to Yangshuo, the sun had already set, casting long shadows across West Street. The same thought had been cycling through Michael’s head for the entire ride back. Another damn karst, he thought, picturing the engraving on the platinum disc. The same karsts that covered the landscape were apparently the solution to his problem. After all, a Japanese surgical team had chosen to implant one in a man’s head. That wasn’t the kind of thing you did without a very good reason. No, both the pitchfork karst engraving and the Kanji around the disc’s rim were significant. He just needed to figure out why.
Michael and Kate returned the rented motorcycle to its much relieved owner and climbed the Whispering Bamboo’s wooden stairs roofward. If there was a solution to their problem, it was here, in the inscriptions on the capsule. Kate latched the wooden door behind them to ensure they wouldn’t be disturbed, but it took only a moment to discover that they had a much bigger problem.
“Shit,” Michael said.
The capsule was gone.
There was no other way to put it. The cowling of the swamp fan stood open and the lock was snapped off, but the capsule was nowhere to be seen. All that was left were boot prints, lots of them, covering the tar and gravel surface of the roof. Michael crouched down and ran the gravel through his fingers, the rough crush warm to the touch. Then Michael’s eyes widened in the fading light. There was something else. A pool of something dark and sticky. Blood.
“Kate?”
“I see it,” she said, staring down at the blood.
“Not that.”
Michael was halfway across the rooftop by the time the words had left his mouth. The form had been just a dark mass in the dusk, but now as Michael approached it became clear that it was a body. And not just any body. It was Ted, lying there, face down on the roof. Michael locked his hand over Ted’s shoulder, preparing for the worst. But he didn’t get it. With a simple touch Michael could already tell that Ted was still breathing. He turned him onto his back to reveal the nasty gash on his friend’s forehead.
“Ted?”
There was no response.
“We need to get him out of here.”
Kate stood, but immediately froze, Michael following her gaze. The wooden door to the stairs had begun to rattle on its hinges. Kate reached behind her back, withdrawing her Glock with the smooth grace of a seasoned professional. Crouching down on one knee, she extended her arms, holding the gun at ready. They were in a decent enough position on the corner of the roof, out of the immediate angle of sight. Michael studied Kate’s hands. They were steady, her trigger finger icy calm.
Ted groaned. Now was not the time for him to come to, Michael thought. Then he groaned again and what happened next occurred very quickly. The door broke. It literally exploded off its hinges accompanied by a scream the likes of which Michael had never heard before. A dark figure burst through the door and rolled twice across the roof before taking cover behind the swamp fan. Kate tracked the figure with her weapon as an object, it looked like a box, or a bomb, came skidding across the gravel roof toward them. Both Kate and Michael dove behind the cover of a large water cistern. The rectangular object skidded to a stop, maybe twenty feet away from them. There was no way to get any farther away from it without literally leaping six stories off the roof to the concrete below. They waited a moment, then two, and in the dying light Michael thought he recognized a symbol on the object. Not a swastika this time, a cross. A red cross.
“Mates?” a voice said from behind the swamp fan.
Michael recognized the voice immediately. It took Kate a moment longer, but she got it too, lowering her weapon. It was Crust. He edged into view from behind the cowling, picking up the box with the cross on it, now clearly recognizable as a first aid kit.