He nodded slowly, almost reluctantly. His eyes darted away for a moment, but she waited until he was looking at her again to resume speaking. “Helio, it’s just that anything you can tell me about what’s really going on would help. A lot.”
She watched Mercy in her peripheral vision, wondering if the woman—my sister? Mother? Clone? Double? — would recognize what she was attempting to do. She thought it unlikely. These were tricks Noah had taught Jenna. Not some manifestation of mutant-alien superpowers.
“Yes. Of course. I’m not trying to withhold information, my dear. It’s just that it will be easier to explain once you’ve seen the signal.”
“The signal? The message with the DNA sequence?”
Another nod. “It may be that seeing the message for yourself might have a stimulating effect on that part of your brain where the genetic memory is stored.”
His eyes darted ever so slightly away as he said it. He wasn’t being completely forthcoming, and yet what he had said was, at its core, truthful.
“Is that all?” The message was the key component to all of this, but why did he believe that seeing her own genetic code would have any kind of effect? Maybe there’s more to it? “What about the rest of the message?”
His look of surprise confirmed that she had made the right guess. “You are every bit as remarkable as I had hoped, my dear. Yes, there is a portion of the message that we have not been able to make sense of, even after all these years of research. It’s a long binary sequence. Coming at the end of the message as it does, it may simply be normal background radiation, but it might also be a sort of signature, the sender signing off, as a HAM radio operator might do.”
All these years of research. The words triggered a cascade of questions and Jenna had to fight to maintain her pleasant demeanor. “That’s right. You’ve been working at this for a long time. I know you told me, but why didn’t you have Mercy or one of the others do this?”
Something changed in the old man’s expression, like a curtain falling over a stage in the middle of a play. “With each successive generation, we were able to fine-tune the DNA sequence. The early generations…lacked something…but you, my dear, were the most perfect expression of the message, thus my hope that you will be able to unlock its final secrets.”
This time he was lying, but not about his intentions. What had he said earlier about Kelli Foster and Jarrod Chu? Generation Six, cultivated in 1984…an almost perfect match to the genome code. He was holding something back, something that concerned him enough that he was dodging her subtle manipulations.
She decided not to press him too hard just yet. “Oh. I figured it must be something like that. I’m surprised you didn’t come round me up sooner. I mean, since you knew where I was.”
“I was sorely tempted. Thirty-seven years is a very long time to wait for an answer. But it was important to allow your abilities to fully develop. If not for this threat to your safety, I would have been content to wait a few more years.”
Once more, she sensed an omission, but before she could figure out where to probe next, the car pulled to a stop and Cray shut off the engine. Over the steady drum of rain on the roof, Jenna could hear a loud rumble like an industrial generator.
Soter peered through the rivulets of water streaming down the windows, then threw the door open. “I’ve forgotten my umbrella. I fear we shall all get wet.”
“Won’t be the first time today,” Jenna replied. Mercy gave a good-natured groan.
Outside the car, the noise was even louder, making conversation impossible. “That’s the transmitter,” Soter shouted, waving for them to follow.
A second car pulled up beside theirs. Four men wearing rain slickers got out and joined their procession. Jenna guessed they were part of Soter’s security force. They certainly didn’t fit her stereotype of what astronomers were supposed to look like.
Cray hurried ahead to the front door of the building and held it open for the others. As Soter had warned, the brief trek from the car to the structure left them all soaked, but the downpour didn’t dampen Soter’s enthusiasm. After shaking off as much water as he could, he took the lead, guiding them inside with child-like eagerness. His cane was all but forgotten, tucked under one arm, as he moved. Cray and Markley brought up the rear, while the other four men remained outside.
The mechanical noise was dulled, but Jenna could feel vibrations rising through the floor and emanating from the walls. The transmitter was inside the building. Soter ushered them into a dimly lit room that reminded Jenna of the signal room in Cort’s safe house, but on a much larger scale. Computer servers lined the walls, along with a variety of other electronic devices and their blinking red and green LEDs. A few of these were no bigger, and looked no more sophisticated, than a citizen’s band radio, while others looked like the sound controls at a rock concert. Soter moved past these, his wet shoes squeaking on the black and white checkerboard tile floor. He led them to an area that had been partitioned into smaller workspaces. Each desktop held no less than four computer monitors, and each screen displayed incomprehensible graphical and textual data. A broad window, looking out at the metal-frame structure Jenna had glimpsed from the road, stretched across the wall beyond the workstations.
Soter approached one of the men working in the room and shook his hand. After a brief exchange, the man turned to his co-workers and said simply, “Lunch time.”
After the events of the last two days, Jenna didn’t trust her internal clock, but she was fairly certain that it was only about ten in the morning. That the men were ceding the room to Soter bore testimony to his influence, and made Jenna wonder again about the source of his funding. Cort’s assertion that the project had been run by the Soviet Union, and then later by the Russian government, seemed less likely here on American soil, but she couldn’t rule it out completely. Foreign or domestic, Soter would have had to cover his tracks very well, especially with the CIA gunning for him.
When they were alone, Soter gestured for Jenna to join him at a desk near the window. As she approached, she caught a glimpse of the panorama that lay beyond the glass.
“Whoa. Now I see what all the fuss is about.”
Soter grinned. “Quite impressive, isn’t it?”
Impressive was one word for it. Spread out before them, directly below the hanging structure, and hovering next to and above the surrounding treetops, was a vast bowl-shaped depression, silvery-gray like exposed concrete, stained a darker shade in some places, presumably from long years of exposure. Jenna knew there would be a satellite reflector dish of some kind, but nothing on this scale. “It looks like God dropped a contact lens.”
“An apt simile,” Soter said, “since it is a lens of a sort — our lens for gazing back into the heavens.”
There was something familiar about it, and Jenna recalled Soter’s comment about the observatory being featured in several movies. The dish, or something very nearly identical to it, had appeared in a James Bond movie, one of Noah’s favorites from the series, though as was his custom, he found plenty to complain about. Noah had been a real James Bond, after all.
“The reflector is a thousand feet across, and the antenna assembly is suspended four hundred and thirty feet above it. The dish itself comprises almost thirty-nine thousand aluminum panels, all perfectly machined to create a spherical reflector. The location was chosen because of a naturally occurring sinkhole crater, but the dish is suspended above it.”
Jenna looked at it more closely and could just make out the square lines where the individual panels were joined — not solid concrete like in the movie. They totally got that wrong, she thought, and then realized that it was exactly the sort of thing Noah would have said.