Shah however seemed oddly pleased by Professor’s display. “That’s okay. I’m rather used to that sort of ignorant prejudice.”
“Ignorant?” There was strange gleam in Professor’s eyes. “I guess I have more experience with your so-called ‘religion of peace’ than you realize. Not as much as the friends I’ve buried, mind you—”
“Hey!” Jade said sharply. “Enough!”
Professor offered a tight smile then let go of Shah’s hand. “Looking forward to working with you.”
“So much for the happy reunion,” Jade growled under her breath. “I hope you got that out of your system. We’ve got work to do.”
“Something I have to take care of first.” He looked past her, settling his gaze on a convoy of black vans rolling toward the flight line.
Jade’s forehead drew into a crease. “You told someone you were coming here?”
Professor’s travel arrangements — hers and Shah’s too — had been shrouded in secrecy. With no way of knowing who could be trusted, it had been necessary to create several different itineraries and modes of travel, with multiple decoy destinations, and even then, there was no way of knowing if they had covered all their bases.
“Tam sent them. Of course I told her. Who do you think set everything up?”
“Well what are they doing here?”
“I brought Tam a souvenir.” He waved to someone in the interior of the aircraft, and two people emerged, moving slowly down the metal deck. One was a tall, muscly guy, wearing jeans, a Harley Davidson T-shirt and cowboy boots. Jade thought the second person might be a woman, but it was hard to tell for certain since she wore a shapeless orange prison jumpsuit with a high-collared bullet-proof vest and a burlap sack over her head.
“Whoa. You caught a live one?” Although they had spoken several times over the phone to coordinate this rendezvous, there had not been time to catch up on the details of their respective misadventures. Jade knew only that Professor had been imprisoned by the Changelings and had eventually escaped on his own.
“The big guy there is Billy Sievers, one of Tam’s new hires. He rode with me from Sydney. I guess as the low man on the totem pole, he got stuck with escort duty.”
“I do have some experience with it,” Sievers said in a deep Texas drawl.
“Used to work for an escort service, yeah?” Jade asked with a mischievous smile.
Seivers winked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Jade turned her grin on Professor. “He’s cute. Let’s keep him.”
“Sorry, ma’am. I’ve already got a date.” Sievers gestured to the prisoner. “Not sure where I’m takin’ her yet, but it’s bound to be a good time. For one of us anyway.”
There was a hint of menace in his tone, and Jade decided that maybe Sievers wasn’t so cute after all.
The vans rolled up close to the cargo doors, forming a tight horseshoe with no gaps through which an observer might be able to see what was happening inside. Each of the vehicles opened, disgorging a contingent of men in army uniforms — the combat variety, replete with body armor, helmets, and assault rifles. They took up defensive positions all around the inner perimeter, as if anticipating an immediate attack.
Sievers turned to the prisoner. “Our ride’s here, honey.”
The woman did not respond to the sound of his voice but at a none-too-gentle nudge from Seivers, she began walking straight ahead. He guided her toward the second van in the line and then helped her step up into the vehicle. When she was back inside, he raised a hand to his forehead as if tipping the brim of an imaginary hat to Jade. “See you round, darlin’.”
Jade smiled, but muttered under her breath. “Not if I see you first.”
The soldiers broke formation and piled back into the vans. When they were gone, Jade gestured to the waiting rental car that would bear the three of them away. Once inside, with Jade behind the wheel, Professor riding shotgun and an eerily quiet Shah in the back seat, she asked, “Where will they take her?”
“A black site. A secret detention facility for enemies of the state too dangerous to be put into the criminal justice system.”
“Isn’t that illegal? Especially on American soil.”
“She’s one of them,” Professor said. “A Changeling. Leaving aside the fact that she deserves anything we could do to her, she’s part of a conspiracy that runs so deep, there’s no way of knowing who in our government is already compromised. Tam is going to play this very close to the vest. It’s the only way to root out the Changeling infiltrators.”
As Jade drove off the tarmac and navigated roads leading out of the base, Professor launched into a quick recap of everything that had happened, beginning with his capture in Sydney and ending with the crash on the Murchison Highway, a few miles outside of a remote Tasmanian mining town called Rosebery. When he told her about the uncertain but almost certainly terrible fate of the passengers on Flight 815, Jade was a little less inclined to worry about the prisoner’s civil liberties. If even half of what the woman — Eve — had revealed was true, then she and her Changeling brethren were beyond the reach of ordinary justice.
Jade almost interrupted Professor when he recounted his conversation with Eve regarding the Changelings’ true objective, but managed to contain herself until he finished his story, just as Jade turned east onto California state highway 58.
“There’s no trace of them now?” she asked.
“None. The fire is being investigated as a possible arson but it will be weeks before anyone can get in there to sift through the ashes. They covered their tracks pretty well. The investigator I met in Sydney, Sousa, supposedly went missing when the search plane he was riding in went down in the Pacific. According to the news reports, I was on that plane, too.”
“Wow. So you’re officially dead?”
“Officially missing,” he corrected, then added in a somber tone. “Like Flight 815.” He looked away, staring out at the barren landscape outside the car. “Where are we going?”
“The Vault,” she announced triumphantly, grateful for a chance to change to topic and share her discoveries. “It’s not what Roche thought it was.”
He returned a blank look.
“I sent you a text about this.”
“Somebody stole my phone, remember?”
“Oh, right.” She launched into her own account of recent doings, carefully glossing over the repeated attacks by Shah and his minions, focusing instead on what they had discovered with each successive stop along the way. When she mentioned infrasound, and related what had happened in the underground chamber in Peru, Professor sat up straighter. “You should have told me about that.”
She frowned. “You were supposed to tell me how clever I was for figuring it out on my own.”
“Well, obviously. But you shouldn’t keep things like that to yourself. I could have helped you figure it out.”
“At the time, I didn’t know what was happening. I only put it all together when we went to the Hypogeum.”
Professor rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “The chamber in Paracas and the Hypogeum have two things in common. Unusual acoustic properties and deformed skulls.”
“You think there’s a connection?”
“Let’s just say I don’t buy into Roche’s theory about artificial cranial deformation as a defense against the Changelings. But it would be interesting to compare the frequency shifts in a regular round human skull versus a flattened one.”
“Flat skulls can pick up more channels?”
“Actually, I was thinking the opposite. A lifetime in close proximity to those resonance chambers would probably drive an ordinary person insane.”