The Espionage Effect(76)
I flipped open Alec’s laptop and hit the space bar with the side of my thumb, hoping he’d left it on and I didn’t have to navigate any encryption or passwords to reach basic Internet—the good old regular kind, where search engines and email and online retailing nirvana existed for the rest of us plebeians.
Success. I grinned as his screen’s background appeared, featuring a transparent white waterfall that sprayed over rock covered in lush moss and lichen. Even his computer exuded serenity. “Do you seek balance in your life, Alec?” I murmured into the comforting quiet. He had the Zen-thing going on in his private space while chaos threatened just outside his doors.
I quickly located his Web browser. His home page opened to the Google search engine. As the cursor blinked in the data-entry box, I tapped my fingernails absently on the keys without depressing them as I rifled through the whirlwind of information fragments spinning in my head.
Where to start? The DNA structures hanging on the bulletin board on the laboratory wall.
In rapid succession, I searched through the most well-known viral DNA. None matched exactly. Then I surveyed the lessor-known subsets. Nothing.
The screen faded to black as I stared ahead, vision unfocused, diving deep into my thoughts. My eyes drifted shut, blocking out all external stimuli until the rhythm of the gentle breakers on the beach outside vanished, the hardness of the ergonomic chair under my legs fell away, my steady breathing dissipated into the background.
Utterly relaxed, the landscape of my mind unfurled into a multidimensional data-stream, sorting through pieces of random information at lightning speed, a biological supercomputer. Surfing the Internet had nothing on riding this internal wave of analysis, ebbing and flowing, cresting, falling, then rising yet again in rich color and texture: my version of a meditative state.
Every clue passed through a focused lens in pathways of both relation and disconnection. Escobar. His son. Anna. The party. The hospital. The lab. The prisoners. The dignitaries. A detailed image of the cruise ships floated by again. The pattern of lights replayed in Escobar’s windows. Facts about the guards and their patrols.
The labs came into view again. The clean room. The centrifuges. The DNA sequencing. The…
“A hybrid!” The sudden intensity of my voice startled my eyes open to bright light. My brows snapped together, and I blinked at the fiery orange sun hanging high in the middle of a blue sky.
“A hybrid what?” A low voice asked.
I spun around in the chair.
Alec stood in the doorway, shoulder propped against the frame, arms casually crossed over his chest. A pair of those thin black lounge pants barely clung to his hips.
“A hybrid what?” he repeated as he pushed off the doorframe and stepped toward me.
“Damn. How long have I been sitting here?” The last time I’d blacked out while analyzing had been my first year of college. And it had been thoroughly unsettling. Traveling to the deep reaches of my mind occasionally resulted in time gaps. According to Anna, the longest one had been three hours.
“Don’t know. I discovered you over an hour ago. Thought you were meditating. Or sleeping.”
“A little of both, I guess.” I scrubbed a hand down my face, clearing my head of everything but the one thing I needed to pluck free.
“A hybrid virus.” I tapped the space bar with my thumb again, awakening the dormant computer. Then I quickly retrieved bookmarked pages of the viruses I’d scanned through earlier. “They spliced two viruses together.”
“Which two?” His warm hands smoothed down my arms as he watched from over my shoulder.
I expelled a heavy breath, recognizing the pretzel-shaped virion. “Ebola.” After a few more keystrokes, I pulled up a mottled, bumpy spherical image matching one of the diagrams in the Escobar’s lab. “And rhinovirus.” The common cold.
“Fuck.” His hands tightened on my upper arms, then released them altogether.
“Exactly.” I spun around to find him pacing. Legs cramped from sitting for what I now realized had to be four hours or more, I stood and stretched my body, allowing blood to flow back into muscles sore from a good workout yesterday—and an amazing one last night. But I refused to dwell on anything happy for me. Not when lives were at stake—and not merely for a couple dozen college students. The threat could impact millions.
In a flash of movement, Alec sat in the chair I’d just vacated and began typing furiously. Seconds later, the Shadow Network where EtherSphere operated appeared.
“What are we going to do?” I was ready.
“We are doing nothing.” He didn’t turn away from the screen as he completed one short missive, hit send, then drafted another. “I am updating ESO on your suspicions.”
“It’s more than suspicion.”
He gave me a short nod. “I’m not doubting you or your mental abilities, but ESO won’t act without confirmation. They’ll have all they need to decide.”
“And we don’t act without orders.” I understood hierarchy and forced myself to respect theirs, no matter how badly I itched to act now. If I wanted to be a part of their organization, I needed to prove I could honor their rules.
“There are bigger forces at play here. Timing is critical, strategy everything. We need to make sure we don’t pinch out the battle only to lose the war.”
Made sense, but didn’t soothe the anxiety boiling up from the pit of my stomach.