Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(110)
As the servants cleared the dessert plates, leaving them alone to sip their after-dinner coffee, Don Espe?osa hardened his voice.
“Now that you’ve had a chance to enjoy your dinner, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me why I shouldn’t kill you here and now.”
For the first time all evening, Jennifer Smythe allowed her eyes to lock with his. Never in all his life had Jorge seen anything like them. The way they reflected the candlelight made him dizzy, as if he were standing on the edge of a great precipice, looking down into depths no living soul had ever seen.
And as Don Espe?osa stared into those eyes, he answered his own question.
117
From the place where Raul floated in the stasis field, high up on the far northeastern wall of his wounded home, he stared down at the one who had just entered the room. No matter how much he hated the man, he had to admit, Dr. Stephenson had balls. Not the standard brass ones either. Knowing the kind of mastery Raul had achieved over the alien systems, the man must have juevos of tempered steel.
Raul let his mind roam the neural net, manipulating the lighting until it formed a virtual starfield, a simulation of the starship hurtling through space as it exited a wormhole. The effect made it appear that Raul was a god, hurtling through the heavens as he levitated high above the strange platform of alien equipment.
“Having fun?” Stephenson’s voice was as flat and unimpressed as if he was watching a child playing hopscotch on a chalk-marked sidewalk.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” Raul responded, amplifying his voice so that it boomed through the room, the reverb level shaking some of the instruments hard enough to produce a rattle.
“Then I suggest you get serious and come over here where we can discuss something of importance.”
The anger that bubbled up inside Raul could not be contained. He knew he needed Stephenson, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t hurt the man, just a little. Just to let him know who he was talking to. Just to teach him to show a little respect.
As if it were a part of his own body, Raul grabbed control of the stasis field, amplifying the lines of force so that they solidified into an invisible net, dropping it from above so that it draped Dr. Stephenson’s body. Then he began to squeeze.
The corners of Dr. Stephenson’s mouth twitched in what Raul at first thought was a grimace, but which spread ever wider until he recognized the expression for what it truly was: a grin. With no more effort than it took him to step from the shower, the deputy director stepped forward, passing through the force field as if it weren’t there.
What the hell? Raul lashed out, smashing an empty metal case beside Dr. Stephenson and then throwing his full will into a wall he erected directly in front of the man. Once again, Stephenson stepped through the stasis field, his eyes locked on Raul as he moved along the narrow walkways between the machines that filled most of the floor space.
Raul scanned the neural network, running a full set of diagnostics on the equipment that powered the stasis field generator, on the generator itself, and on the computing systems that he used to control it. All were operating normally. Then how in God’s name was Stephenson moving through something that would have contained a full-blown fusion reaction?
The physicist stopped almost directly below Raul and then began slowly rising up through the air until they stared directly into each other’s eyes. Raul’s disbelief at what he was seeing almost made him miss the cause. But there it was in the data stream that swam through his neural net.
It wasn’t that Stephenson was unaffected by the stasis field. Somehow, he was overriding Raul’s control. That particular shipboard system was responding to both of them, and where their wills were in conflict, Dr. Stephenson was winning. It was responding to a higher master.
“Are you ready to hear what I have to say?”
Dr. Stephenson’s grin departed, leaving his face as cold as the machinery behind and below him. As Raul’s anger and frustration gave way to amazement, he felt himself nodding in affirmation.
“Good. As much as I appreciate what you’ve been able to accomplish so far, I have a new project for you.” Dr. Stephenson paused, his eyes studying Raul like a rat in his lab. “I think you’ll get a thrill from what I want you to do.”
Raul recovered his equilibrium enough to speak. “Like what?”
“Let’s just say that if you can do this, you’ll be able to reach out and touch someone.”
A sudden light dawned in Raul’s mind. “God in Heaven!”
Stephenson repeated his earlier question. “You ready to listen?”
Raul was.
118
Mark glanced across the car at Heather, the age lines of a thirty-year-old lightly etched in her perfect face, her hair cut fashionably short, her beautiful brown eyes hidden behind the dark sunglasses that she now wore whenever they were in public. The precaution against being observed in one of her white-eyed fugues had become so habitual that she now often forgot to take them off. Mark knew that if he reached over and removed them right now he would see those eyes gone white.
The last two weeks had taken a toll on both of them. Thanks to Heather’s power and her relentless speed reading of every piece of news and rumor on the Internet, they now knew where Jennifer was. Medellín, Colombia. They had confirmed it by performing a complicated subspace triangulation to the signals from the missing alien headsets.