The Rising(51)

Gave us you, Alex.





50

THE DANCER

ALEX REALIZED HIS EYES hurt; his head too. He’d been staring so intensely at the screen that his neck had knotted. It cracked audibly when he stretched, unable to resist returning his eyes to the screen. His mother’s story had brought her back to him during the course of those moments. Alex felt he was with her in Laboratory Z, witnessing her brave actions as they unfolded. Rescuing the baby fate had not allowed her to have with his father.

Both gone now.

And Alex was starting to realize why, the pieces falling together. His eyes had misted up. His lips were trembling and he suddenly felt very cold. He sat in silence, the world narrowed to the scope of the computer and no more.

But that was enough.

Who am I? What am I?

Thus far, the flash drive had offered more questions than answers. Something either terrible or wonderful, maybe both, had been going on inside Laboratory Z. On the day of his rescue, the day of the explosion and fire, his mother had been unable to provide much detail as to the cause.

And there were so many secrets contained in his mother’s words. Except his family was gone. Every other relative he had lived in China, and besides an occasional e-mail and rare Skype call, the Chins had maintained no contact with any of them. They were, after all, Americanized and likely thought less of by the folks back home.

So who was the person who’d thrust him at An Chin through the thick mist that had enveloped the lab?

It might have been an obvious question, but no obvious answer was in the offing. Someone trying to protect baby Alex seemed the soundest explanation, but that didn’t explain how baby Alex had gotten there or if he was somehow connected to Laboratory Z’s ultimate destruction.

Alex felt the rigors of all this thinking making his head throb again, the shards of pain that seemed to radiate out from inside his skull.

I’ve got a football game to play Friday night.…

He tried to distract himself with that thought, but it only made the pain worse. The throbs lasted longer this time, resonating like a dull echo banging up against the sides of his skull. He couldn’t bear to listen and look anymore at his mother for now and decided to try one of the other files, focusing on one labeled PICTURES.

Alex opened the file and clicked on the first photo, watched it sharpen on the screen before him.

“Sam,” he called, toward the front of the FedEx office, “you need to see this.”





51

PING

RATHMAN HAD THE BIG SUV’s driver cross up and down the street a few times, looking for any changes in the parking lot that fronted the FedEx Office. In his experience, variance was the indicator that set alarm bells ringing in his head more than any other. Two or three cars appearing where there had been none just moments before. So the first order of business, bred by that experience as well as instinct, was to make sure the scene was stable, with no unexpected threat that might catch his team unprepared and waylay their plan.

Plan …

Right now he didn’t have one. He needed to get a lock on the position of the targets first. Confined spaces like this could be tricky. Too easy for bystanders to get in the way and too easy for witnesses to get a good look at the proceedings. So Rathman’s team would go in shooting. Nothing sent potential witnesses dropping for cover and eliminated their seeing what they should not more than gunfire, no matter where it was aimed. His men would shoot upward initially, take out some lights, turn chunks of the cheap drop ceiling to particleboard rain to further discourage those hugging the floor with heads covered up.

This was the place to which the desk clerk had provided directions to his targets. That’s what had brought him here, but the rest of the night, his first exposure to the reach and power of Langston Marsh stuck in his mind more.

“Something amiss,” in Marsh’s words, referred to a “ping” his quantum computer had come up with. The unseen machine was like a technological insomniac, forever scanning police frequencies, wire services, cellular telephone calls, e-mails, and a host of other sources for incidents that stood out for reasons that rendered them inexplicable. Crimes, mostly, perhaps indicative of Marsh’s Zarim targets behaving in desperate fashion. Emerging from their anonymity because pursuit was closing in, choice bled out of their lives.

Rathman couldn’t say if he entirely believed the man’s spiel about the aliens he was committed to exterminating, because he didn’t care. The man was giving him free license to do what he did best: inflict pain and kill, not necessarily in that order.

According to Marsh, his supercomputer had pinged a crime in a suburb of San Francisco, something the police were calling a home invasion. But the computer had also found that the dead couple’s son was missing from a hospital and a doctor there was dead as well.

Connections, Marsh had explained. His computer was an expert at making them.

The computer was expert at something else as well, that being the capability to process incoming information from over ten million security cameras scattered across the country. One of those ten million had provided the picture of Alex Chin climbing into a canary-yellow Volkswagen Beetle not far from the hospital he’d fled. The driver’s face was grainy, mostly obscured, and barely clear enough for Rathman to be certain it was a girl, likely the same girl the motel clerk had told him was with Alex Chin now.