As if reading her thoughts, Trace shifted his aim to her. “I’ll kill her.”
“Don’t do it,” Noah warned, moving his gun to cover Trace.
More shouted threats sizzled between the armed men, all of them talking but no one hearing. Somebody was going to pull a trigger, and once that happened, everyone in the room would probably die.
Jenna could feel the situation reaching a boiling point. She had to do something to stop the room from exploding into a storm of violence, but what difference could she make, unarmed, exhausted and helpless?
You have to live. They will fear you.
I have to make them fear me, she thought, and she realized she wasn’t as helpless as she believed.
55
“Stop!”
Jenna’s shout did not merely cut through the tension; time itself seemed to freeze. Then, one by one, guns lowered. The men fought against the command, with shaking muscles and disbelieving expressions. Their compliance was not voluntary. Jenna was as surprised as everyone else. Was this some newly discovered, genetically programmed ability, or an extension of the techniques Noah had taught her? Regardless of the explanation, she knew the effect would not last. She could already sense the window of opportunity sliding shut.
“Listen to me, all of you. Don’t you get it? If we don’t start working together, we’ll all be screwed.”
What are you doing?
She ignored the voice — the teacher’s voice, her voice. “The world is about to come apart. I can stop it, but I can’t do it alone.”
Stop it? Why?
Cort was the first to shrug off the shout-induced paralysis. “And just how are you going to do that?”
You can’t tell them.
A lump of shame rose into her throat. Was she really going to do this? Betray everything she believed in just to save her own skin?
No! The rebuttal was so forceful, she thought for a moment that she had spoken it aloud. These aren’t my beliefs. Just something planted in my head by someone who doesn’t give a damn about me or anyone that I love.
They don’t love you, insisted the voice. They fear you. They will kill you.
No! She had to grind her teeth together to keep from shouting it. It’s not true.
And it wasn’t. What had Noah just said?
She is my daughter.
Despite everything he knew about her — things she probably didn’t even know herself — he meant it.
That was real. That was the truth.
And he is my father, Jenna thought. Despite everything she knew about him — the lies he had told, the people he had killed — the realization filled her with a joy that was even more powerful than the guilt of her implanted memories.
She unclenched her jaw. “Everything that’s been happening is just the set-up. There’s something even worse coming.”
Cort nodded impatiently. “You’ve already said that.”
“I know, but something has to happen first.”
They will kill you. Then they will destroy everything. Humanity is the cancer that must be eliminated, or everything will be destroyed. You must not interfere.
“The last part of the transmission, the part that contains the trigger, also has instructions. Before the final phase can begin, someone has to send a message back. It’s a signal that the final attack is about to start. Maybe it’s to let them know so they can send their invasion forces.” The last part was conjecture, but it made sense.
“How do you know that hasn’t already happened?”
“There’s a time-table for it.” She reached for the memory but it wasn’t there anymore. Suddenly, she felt faint and staggered to a nearby desk for support. “Damn.”
“Jenna?” Noah asked, then he returned his attention to Cort. “Tell your men to stand down, damn it. Guns on the ground.”
Cort glowered but nodded to Trace and the others. Only when the guns were put away did Noah step away from Cort. “Jenna, what’s wrong?”
“It’s gone,” she said, suddenly feeling helpless again. “Access denied.”
“A fail-safe,” Soter murmured, breaking his long silence. His voice sounded hollow, defeated. Jenna’s explanation had stripped away his illusions and revealed his duplicity in what looked very much like a bid by an alien intelligence to exterminate humankind. “A defense mechanism in the genetic memory to prevent you from turning against the programming.”
Jenna had to fight to catch her breath. What if there were other fail-safe mechanisms? Would all her memories slip away, leaving her a gibbering idiot, or worse, a brain-dead vegetable? Was she going to drop dead of a brain aneurism? “I can’t remember when. I just remember that it’s happening soon. Today, I think.”
“Today?” Cort scoffed. “That’s convenient.”
“It makes sense,” Noah countered. “It explains the escalation. You know it’s true. That’s why the agency panicked and authorized the sanction against us.”
Cort let that go without comment. “Well if you can’t remember anything about this signal, I don’t see how you’re going to be able to help stop it.”
“Wait. The message is in the transmission. We still have that.”
Soter shook his head. “But we still can’t decipher it.”
“I can.” She looked to Cort, asking for permission, but also asking for his trust.
Cort frowned, and for a moment, Jenna thought he was going to further ridicule her, but then he nodded. “Do it.”
The atmosphere in the room shifted. As Jenna took a seat in front of the computer, the others gathered behind her. Soter was poised over her shoulder. Mercy stood beside him, and Noah was beside her, so close that the events of the last two days seemed like a bad dream. Cort’s presence ruined the illusion, but he too seemed eager to see what Jenna would reveal.
The computer monitor still showed the final sequence of the message. It no longer confounded Jenna’s perceptions, but neither did its meaning become instantly apparent. “It’s encrypted,” she said. “The code is fairly simple. Each of these strings are individual numbers, like in the Wow! Signal, but they’ve been modified with a changing mathematical value.”
She didn’t know if she was explaining it correctly. Code-breaking was not a skill that Noah had taught her. Nevertheless, she faintly recalled the structure of the code. “It’s like those puzzles where you substitute a number for a letter, but the key changes with each number.”
“How does it change?” Soter asked, his earlier dejection replaced by an almost childlike enthusiasm. “What’s the progression?”
Jenna searched her memory. The answer was still there, she could feel it. “It keeps increasing,” she said slowly, as if stalling for time. “But always at a constant rate.”
“A mathematical progression? Logarithmic? Prime numbers?” Soter’s tone was becoming strident. “Think girl. What’s the pattern?”
Something familiar. A face remembered, a name forgotten. “Spiral?”
“Like the Golden Ratio?”
Jenna’s recall of that subject was picture perfect. The Golden Ratio — approximately 1.618, also called phi—was one of those remarkable examples of mathematical perfection in nature. She had learned about it in both math and art classes. It described the perfect spiral in conch shells and pine cones, and had been employed in both art and architecture for thousands of years. It was also, Jenna recalled, the exact ratio found in the Fibonacci sequence where each number was the sum of the two preceding numbers: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8 and so forth.