Sara looked at the older man sidelong. She couldn’t quite figure out just what his role was in all of this.
“You need to run this past Brainstorm,” Fulbright declared, clearly unhappy about what Sara was demanding.
“And that’s the other thing I need,” Sara broke in, quickly. “I’m tired of dealing with lackeys…I’m tired of dealing with him.” She pointed an accusing finger at Fulbright. “If you want me to do this, I need direct access to Mr. Big himself. I need to be able to talk to Brainstorm.”
Graham gave an odd smile. “Done.”
# # #
After the meal, she was taken to the laboratory facilities, which were she surmised, in a basement level beneath the villa. The lab was accessible only by elevator, and she was pretty sure that it had gone down, not up, but the spacious windowless area could have been almost anywhere.
Graham showed her a computer workstation and logged her in. “This terminal is linked to a pair of Cray supercomputers which you can use for gene sequencing, and any other applications that will help you design a vaccine. And this icon here-” He clicked on a tab on the desktop display-“This allows you to send instant text messages to Brainstorm.”
“I don’t want to text Brainstorm,” Sara countered. “I want to talk to him. Face to face.”
“Good luck with that,” Fulbright remarked.
“All communications from Brainstorm are via text messages,” Graham explained, “but I’ll activate the text-to-voice translator. I’m afraid that’s about as close as you can get to actually having a conversation with Brainstorm.”
Sara stared back at him. “So it’s true. Brainstorm is just a big computer-artificial intelligence.”
Graham spread his hands equivocally, and then stepped out from behind the workstation. “Dr. Carter is in the isolation room. It’s equipped with Level A hazmat protection, if you feel the need for such measures. On the other hand, if you feel that she poses no threat, I’ll arrange guest quarters for her later.”
“Do that. I’ve got it from here. I’ll let you know if I need anything more.”
The two men lingered in the lab a while after she dismissed them, but as far as Sara was concerned, they were already gone. She gave Felice an anti-narcotic injection then sat down and waited for her to stir.
Despite her confident demeanor, she was very worried about Felice’s transition from drug induced sleep to wakefulness. Indeed, as the sedative in her bloodstream was bound and rendered inert by the anti-narcotic, Felice came awake as if emerging from a night terror.
“Felice, it’s okay.” Sara risked physical contact, gently holding Felice’s forearm. “You’re safe.”
Felice’s eyes darted back and forth as she tried to take in the unfamiliar surroundings. “Where am I?”
“I wish I knew. But we’re safe for now. You need to relax and stay calm. I’ll explain everything.”
The roving gaze finally settled on Sara’s face. “I know you. You’re the CDC doctor.”
“That’s right. I’m Sara. I feel like I know you well, but I guess we only got to meet for a few minutes. A lot has happened since then, and I’ll tell you when you’re ready to hear it.”
“Where’s Jack?”
The question caught Sara off guard, and emotion welled up in her throat. After a false start, she managed to croak: “That’s part of what I have to tell you.”
“Tell me now.”
Sara started with Fulbright’s act of treachery. She only gave the barest of details about what had happened to Sigler, and it was evident from Felice’s reaction that she understood why it was so painful; she had, after all, witnessed their affectionate reunion.
Once Felice understood that they were both being held hostage, Sara turned her attention to the contagion-if a contagion it indeed was. Sara wasn’t convinced of that. “We need to understand exactly how this…effect…is being spread. I’m thinking that maybe it’s linked to a pheromone.”
Felice shook her head. “Sara, I need to tell you a story; a story about elephants.”
25.
Somewhere over Africa
A black wraith-like shape tore through the sky high above the dark continent. Anyone looking skyward would have immediately recognized the tiny speck as an aircraft by the long contrail-the product of water vapor in the jet exhaust instantly freezing into ice crystals high in the stratosphere-but such sights were common almost everywhere in the world. Anyone watching a radar display would have seen absolutely nothing. The stealth transport plane, code-named Crescent because of its unique, radar-scattering half-moon profile, was for practical purposes, invisible.
King sat in Crescent’s communication center, just aft of the cockpit, where two pilots from the USAF Nighthawks special operations wing, were waiting for their next destination. Unfortunately, King didn’t yet know what that would be.
One of the two computer screens on the workstation showed photographic imagery from a satellite in a geostationary orbit above northern Africa. Deep Blue had accessed the feed from the National Reconnaissance Office and cued it up to approximately the moment where King’s helicopter had been shot down by a missile from one of the Ethiopian fighter jets. King wasn’t interested in the crash though; he already knew how that ended.
With the realization that he would not be able to fool another missile attack, King did the only thing he could: he cut the engine and let the helicopter fall from the sky. The plunge was only about sixty feet, and the helicopter was engineered to withstand hard landings, but even so, the impact was like getting hit by a bus. Battered, bruised, but thankfully not broken, he had half-fallen out of the crumpled cockpit and taken off across the scrubland in search of cover. A few moments later, a second missile had homed in on the helicopter and blown it to smithereens. The concussion wave had sent him tumbling, adding a few more bruises, but the ploy had worked. The Sukhoi fighters had turned for home, satisfied that, even if he had survived, the elements would finish him off.
Fortunately, King had his Chess Team phone. Rescue, in the form of Crescent, traveling halfway around the world at Mach 2, had arrived a few hours later. Now, he was tracking the other helicopter, the one that had borne Sara and Felice Carter away.
“That’s where they landed in Addis Ababa,” Deep Blue observed from Chess Team headquarters in New Hampshire. His face was visible on the second computer screen and his voice was a tinny electronic reproduction in King’s headphones. “That compound belongs to Alpha Dog Solutions, a private security firm that’s doing counter-terrorism operations under contract for the CIA.”
“Sara told me that Fulbright might be a CIA officer.”
“I couldn’t verify that. If he really is with the Company, then he’s probably NOC, and information on that is too closely guarded for me to root out with just a discreet inquiry.” The acronym stood for “non-official cover” and was reserved for intelligence operatives working deep undercover espionage missions. “Or it could just be an alias,” Deep Blue added.
King rubbed his eyes. Despite his ability to thrive under the worst conditions, fatigue was finally starting to take its toll. “What else do we know about Alpha Dog? Do they have other clients?”
“In that region, they also do site security for a number of petroleum companies. Curiously enough, it looks like they received several payments, all from different clients and all in the last three days. If I had to guess, I’d say someone was trying to hide the actual size of a very large payoff by splitting it up… Oh.”
“What?”
“The men who attacked you on the road from the airport, when you first arrived, were Alpha Dog contractors, not Gen-Y.”
“I guess they knew I’d make trouble, and wanted me out of the way.” King glanced back at the satellite feed, where a group of tiny figures moved between the now stationary helicopter and a small private jet. A few frames later, the jet taxied for take-off. “Do we know who owns the jet?”