“Meghan!”
His immediate thought was that someone had shot her, but a quick check revealed only a jagged cut above her ear from a piece of debris that grazed the side of her head. Using the first-aid training they’d all received, he pulled off his shirt and pressed it against her wound. A check of her breathing and pulse revealed that both were steady.
“Meghan, can you hear me?”
She was out cold.
Forgetting all about the second part of their mission — firing at anyone trying to get out via the rear of the facility — he used some gauze from their kit to secure his shirt to her head and then picked her up and carried her out.
Though he didn’t know it, that little piece of concrete saved their lives. When the blasts began, a two-man Project Eden patrol had been returning to the station and was working its way up the other side of the hill, hoping to get a good vantage point to see what was going on.
When the patrol reached the rocks Pieter and Meghan had hidden behind, they found the used remotes and Meghan’s discarded rifle.
What they didn’t find were Meghan and Pieter.
4
Celeste Johnson, member of the Project Eden directorate, had returned to her rooms less than thirty minutes earlier in hopes of getting some sleep.
It had not been the best of evenings. Something had happened at the survival station in Los Angeles. All communications with it had stopped abruptly after its personnel reported a large group of survivors heading their way.
In an unrelated event, a group of survivors had escaped the station in Chicago. The most troubling part of this incident was that a member of the Project had aided the prisoners from the inside, while another group of people had waited outside and attacked the base with explosives and gunfire as soon as the survivors had fled.
Her office phone rang.
“What is it?” she answered.
“Director Johnson,” Carl Reynolds, NB016’s operations director, said. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”
“Did we hear from Los Angeles?”
“Not Los Angeles, ma’am.”
“Chicago?”
“Ma’am, I think you should probably come to the control center.” He paused. “It’s…not good.”
“Just tell me, dammit!”
After a false start, he said, “Attacks.”
“More?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Where?”
“Miami, Rome, Madrid, Cairo, Shanghai.”
“What?” She pushed out of her chair. “Five attacks?”
“Um, no, ma’am. Twenty-seven so far.”
That stopped her. “Say that again.”
“Twenty-seven. A mix of survival stations and Project bases.”
“We haven’t lost any, have we?”
He hesitated.
“Jesus. How many?”
“We’ve lost contact with eight.”
She disconnected the call and headed for the door.
Nearly eighty percent of the Project’s bases were built underground. NB016 in New York, however, was not one of these. It took up the top seven floors of a twenty-two-story office building in Brooklyn. Celeste’s office and attached living quarters were located on the top floor, with a multimillion-dollar view of distant Manhattan. The operations center, also on twenty-two, was at the other end of the floor.
On most occasions, the room was filled with calm, whispered conversations and the tapping of keyboards. Such was not the case when she entered this time. There were people rushing between communication stations, comm operators talking loudly into microphones, and others shouting across the room to one another.
She spotted Reynolds in what appeared to be a heated conversation with four other staffers. As soon as they noticed her marching toward them, they fell silent.
“Director,” Reynolds said, stepping toward her. “Thank you for coming.”
“Please tell me you’ve been able to reestablish contact with those eight bases,” she said.
Reynolds exchanged a look with the others in the circle, then looked back at Celeste. “It’s actually ten now.”
“Ten?”
“We’ve been unable to reach the stations in Cairo and Tokyo.”
She stared at him. “How in God’s name did this happen?”
“It appears to be a coordinated effort.”
“Oh, really? You think so? What kind of idiotic statement is that? Of course, it’s coordinated! I want to know who the fuck is coordinating it!”
“We…we aren’t sure,” he said.
A woman in the group frowned at Reynolds.
“What?” Celeste said. “You don’t agree?”
The woman hesitated a moment, then said, “There’s only one group it could be, ma’am — the same one that’s been pecking away at us for years. The word is they call themselves the Resistance. I’m positive they’re also the ones who took out Principal Director Perez and NB219. For all we know, they could be responsible for whatever happened at Bluebird, too.”
“With all due respect to Ms. Dalton,” Reynolds said, visibly angered that the woman had inserted herself into the conversation. “There is no proof of that. Besides, their headquarters was destroyed on Implementation Day. It would be impossible for them to regroup quickly, let alone pull something as widespread as this.”
“Think about it, Carl. Do you really believe taking out a building in Montana would cripple them?” the woman countered.
“Cheryl, that’s enough.” He turned back to Celeste. “I apologize, Director. Unfortunately, at this point there is no way for us to—”
“You,” Celeste said, pointing at Dalton. “What’s your position here?”
Dalton’s eyes widened. “Um, I’m the, uh, assistant op manager in charge of—”
“Not anymore,” Celeste said. “You are now operations director.”
“What? Wait,” Reynolds blurted out. “You can’t do that.”
“The hell I can’t. You are relieved of your duties, Mr. Reynolds. Return to your quarters and stay there until I decide where you’ll be a better fit.”
“This is ridiculous! I haven’t done anything wrong!”
“You haven’t done anything right, either.” Celeste looked around until she spotted a guard stationed near the door. “Take this man to his room and see that he doesn’t leave.”
It had been a rash decision fueled by anger, Celeste knew, but that didn’t mitigate the fact Reynolds was too resistant to others’ ideas. What the woman had said made sense to Celeste.
“Ms. Dalton,” she said. “I want you to assign a team to find out exactly who’s behind this.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dalton said, still looking stunned.
“And have someone get the rest of the directorate on the line right now. I’ll use the op conference room.”
It took nearly five minutes to get Directors Yeager, Kim, and Mahajan patched into a video call.
“I assume you’ve all heard about the attacks,” Celeste began.
“Heard of them?” Mahajan said. “It’s happening here!”
“In Jaipur?”
“Yes! There have been several explosions along our walls.”
“Any ground forces?”
“Not yet. But the last blast was only a few minutes ago.”
“Director Kim? Director Yeager?” Celeste asked. “Any problems where you are?”
Both men reported that their bases, too, were under fire, but felt confident their security teams would get things under control. Unlike most bases, the four with directorate members also housed a specially trained Project Eden strike team.