Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(107)

~



With a flash like an electric shock, Heather sat straight up in bed.

“Mark!”

Almost before the word was out of her mouth, he was on his feet beside her, his hands clenched into twin fists.

“What’s the matter?”

Heather scrambled out of bed, grabbed her backpack, and pulled the laptop out onto the table.

“We’re going to be leaving. Jennifer’s in trouble.”





113


The wireless Internet connection at the Day’s Inn on Macon Cove was the best Janet had been able to get since she had left New Mexico headed east on I-40. Not being an Elvis fan, she’d never actually stopped in Memphis before tonight, but she was dead tired and damn glad to see the hotel room.

Janet stared down at the news story front and center on her laptop screen, stunned by the realization that hammered her. She had been checking news out of Los Alamos when she saw the article on the disappearance of three Los Alamos High School students, Mark Smythe, Jennifer Smythe, and Heather McFarland. Apparently, Jennifer had run away several days ago, followed shortly by Mark and Heather, the conjecture being that those two had gone in search of Jennifer. Both sets of parents were horribly distraught, begging the public to come forward with any information on their missing children.

As disconcerting as was the news, it was the date of Mark and Heather’s disappearance that slapped Janet in the face. November 13. The exact day her connection to her secret Los Alamos source had gone off-line.

Everything snapped together in her head. All this time she had been looking for a person she had assumed to be a scientist working on the Rho Project. Instead, it was one or more of those kids, operating right under her nose all along. Hard as it was to believe those three wonderful young people were capable of hacking into the world’s most secure computer networks, that they had somehow managed to gain access to highly classified Rho Project information, suddenly it all made sense.

All those times Heather McFarland had been in the middle of deadly situations had always struck Janet as odd. What had Jack said about the psycho who called himself The Rag Man? Something about the way his speed and strength seemed supernatural. Then there was Heather’s involvement with the family of Raul Rodriguez, whose father had been a top scientist on the Rho Project. Dr. Rodriguez was dead, Raul Rodriguez missing, Raul’s mother insane.

Then there was Mark Smythe, an abnormally gifted young athlete. Mark had been at Janet’s house the day when Priest had attacked her. Somehow, he had survived his encounter with that killer. As far as she knew, Priest had only kidnapped women for his sick pleasures. Why hadn’t he killed the boy? Something about his encounter with Mark must have raised Priest’s curiosity to a level that he couldn’t ignore.

Another thing Janet had never understood was why Heather, Mark, and Jennifer would plagiarize a top scientific team in their entry in the national science contest. Everyone had just assumed that three kids could do work that advanced on their own. Apparently, that was another in a long chain of bad assumptions, the type of assumptions Janet would never have made if she had been observing adults.

No. There was something very, very special about those kids, something that Jack had to know about. Janet had already posted the encrypted information Jack needed about the Colombian assassin known as El Chupacabra onto the Internet. But the identity of their secret Rho Project source was too sensitive and important to be posted on the net, no matter how good her encryption and data hiding. This was something that had to be delivered to her partner in person.

Janet looked over at the bed, thinking back to a dingy youth hostel outside of Paris, another time she and Jack had been on the run. When she had asked Jack why they didn’t keep moving, he had laughed and thrown himself down on the bed, eliciting a puff of dust and an angry squeak from the worn box springs.

“Even sleep is a weapon.”

As she made her way to bed with the image of Jack burning brightly in her mind, Janet smiled. It was a weapon she intended to put to good use.

D.C. could wait for one more day.





114


Marine Captain Josh McFadden fingered his sidearm and stared out across the mass of humanity that snaked between the warehouses and along the loading docks of Durban Port. In all his life, all the combat missions across Southwest Asia and Africa, he’d never seen anything like it. An entire Marine Expeditionary Force deployed alongside the South African police and military, just to keep order in a line of waiting people. Three times he had been in charge of units distributing food to starving masses, and yet he had never felt this naked, as exposed as the rangers trying to protect that downed Blackhawk pilot in Somalia.

Amazingly, the order of the lines was holding, in part due to the massive police and military presence, but mostly due to the loudspeakers continuously broadcasting threats that distribution would be halted if order was not maintained. The sheer numbers in the crowd were incredible. How many? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? The logistics of sanitation alone boggled the mind. All were desperate to reach the inoculation pavilions, anxious to have their own screams mingle with the others receiving The Treatment. And this was only one of the distribution sites set up around Africa.

Captain McFadden turned to look out toward the fleet and the merchant ships they escorted. He couldn’t imagine the top-secret production effort that must have been running at full capacity for months in order to fill those holds with the cargo. He only prayed it would be enough. God help them if they ran short.