Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(141)

“Robby?” she called, her voice barely rising above the children’s laughter.

“Robby!” Her voice held an edge of the terror only a mother can know. “Where are you, baby?”

As she rose to her feet and took a step forward, she felt the sand shift between her bare toes, small fingers closing around them.

Looking down, she saw the familiar little hand slip away beneath the sand.

“No! Robby!” Janet screamed, dropping to her knees, desperately scooping at the sand.

Her fingers touched a headful of soft, curly hair, then a bare cheek. Another scoop revealed her baby boy’s face.

“Mama! Help!” Robby’s terrified scream was cut short by the sand as he once again slipped beneath the surface.

Suddenly, she felt it. The tiny hand gripping her own. Janet redoubled her efforts, sending great double-handed scoops of sand arcing into the air behind her as she dug with her other hand.

Robby’s head and left shoulder were now clear of the sand. Another few scoops and she should be able to pull him free.

Something metallic glinted in the sand just beyond her baby’s shoulder, shimmering in a way that attracted his gaze. Mesmerized, Robby freed his other hand and reached for it, his small fingers closing around the shiny object with a surprising strength.

Janet felt the tug pull her child away from her as the object disappeared beneath the surface,

“Robby! Let go of that! Give me your other hand!”

But Robby didn’t hear her. His little face turned away as he struggled to free himself from her tenuous grip in his efforts to retrieve the thing. With a sound almost like a slurp, the sand sucked him down, his tiny hand sliding from her grasp.

“Somebody! Help me!” she screamed. “My baby’s under here.”

But the other parents just sat on the nearby benches, pointing and laughing as if she was playing some sort of game.

There it was again, the touch of small fingers beneath the sand. Janet grabbed for the little hand, but she could only get the fingers, and those were slipping away, pulled downward by a suction she could not overcome.

As the little hand slipped away for the last time, her scream warbled out past the tape that gagged her mouth, carried away on the brisk night breeze.

Eduardo’s face was back, his smile having widened since she last remembered seeing it. “Good girl. I think we’ve found it.”

The Colombian grabbed her swollen belly in both hands, not exactly squeezing, but feeling very deeply. Janet coughed into her gag, her eyes watering so badly she could barely see. The vision of her unborn child filled her mind with more clarity than any sonogram could provide. And although it should have been a hallucination, she knew this was real.

Somehow, El Chupacabra had formed a three-way loop, piping the feelings of her unborn child through his mind and into hers. Her stomach writhed, the child curling into a tight ball, kicking out with both feet.

A terror worse than any she could have imagined formed in her baby’s mind, its small mouth working as if it was trying to form a scream. It rolled in the womb, twisting the umbilical cable around its throat, then again, tightening the fleshy noose.

“I’m gonna kill you, you sick bastard!” Janet screamed into the muffling duct tape, the white heat of hatred overriding her fear. “I swear to God!”

The baby rolled in her stomach again, twisting the umbilical so tightly that all blood supply was blocked off. Worse, its terror had risen to the point that its movements had become suicidal. But still, Eduardo increased his focus, steadily turning up the volume on her unborn child’s fear.

As Janet screamed her terror and frustration, Eduardo thumbed the microphone on the walkie-talkie.

“Ripper. Do you hear your lover’s muffled screams? If you hurry, she and your baby might still be alive when you get here. Come to me.”





146


“What’s happening?”

The edge in Mark’s voice relayed the stress produced by having to watch the two girls work. Jennifer’s fingers danced across the keyboard as Heather talked her through the satellite downlink algorithms.

“I don’t know,” Heather said. “Jack finished the splice for the downlink, but we don’t have our uplink connection.”

“Which means?”

“It means we can spoof the control center to make them think they’re still talking to the satellite, but we can’t send any commands. We can’t uplink the code.”

“Maybe Jack is still working on that connection.”

Heather turned toward him, her eyes just clearing from one of her trances. “I don’t think Jack’s going to finish the connection. I think something’s gone terribly wrong.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

Jennifer lifted her face to stare at them. “I started the fake downlink, but without that last connection we’re dead in the water. And the control station will only be fooled for so long.”

“Shit!” Mark began pacing back and forth across the room. “There has to be something we can do. Can we hack another system?”

Jennifer shook her head. “That’s just it. Jack cut the cable on the uplink side. Even if I could hack the control center to override their uplink, the commands wouldn’t get to the satellite.”