Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(42)
The impact of the story left Heather numb. “Oh God. We’re…”
Mark nodded. “We’re screwed.”
39
“Heather. Hey, Heather. You all right?” Mark’s voice sounded as if it came from a great distance.
Heather shook her head to clear away the sequence of clear visions within which she had been wandering, each of them playing out different outcomes to their current situation. As her eyes refocused on Mark and then Jennifer, there was no doubt in her mind what they had to do. The time for crying was past. They had to take action and soon. She flipped off the television.
“Where’s the cell phone number of that contest judge? Never mind, I remember it.”
“Dr. Caldwell?” Jennifer asked. “Why?”
“Because we’re going to call him right now and cut a deal.”
Mark stepped closer. “Are you out of your mind? He wants us to give away our cold fusion device.”
“It can’t be helped. We have to get this damped down or we’ll have mobs camped on our doorstep.”
Mark shook his head. “No way. Without the cold fusion device, we can’t run our subspace transmitter. We won’t be able to hack into secure networks anymore.”
“Mark’s right,” Jennifer chimed in. “We’ll be completely blind. And right now, I get a very bad feeling about that.”
“Look,” said Heather, “I know it’s bad, but I don’t see any other way out. Even if we didn’t worry about getting into college, I think the press will start following us. Think about it. We’ll be watched twenty-four seven.”
For several seconds silence filled the room.
Finally, Mark looked up from his study of his hands. “I’ll go along with this on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You let me try to contact Jack Johnson using the quantum twin device I implanted in Janet’s laptop.”
“Jesus, Mark! How’s that going to make things better?” Jennifer asked.
“You know Jack and Janet are on the run or dead,” Heather added. “Even if they’re alive, they probably scrapped the laptop.”
“Then it won’t hurt to try. Anyway, that’s my offer. If we don’t all sign the release papers, then Dr. Caldwell isn’t going to agree to the deal.”
“But how can it work out?” Jennifer continued. “The last thing we need is Jack finding out about us. At this point he’s a hunted terrorist.”
“I don’t believe Jack’s a terrorist and neither do you. We won’t let him know who we are, just that we are the ones who originally contacted the NSA. Right now, he’s cut off. He needs to know he has a powerful source of information he can contact.”
Heather shook her head. “Even if we can come up with a way to convince him of all that, after we give away the cold fusion device, we won’t be able to snoop classified networks anymore.”
“I’m sure you two little geniuses will come up with a solution to that.” Mark turned and grabbed the wireless telephone, holding it out to Heather. “Do you want to make that call to Caldwell or not?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Heather took the telephone from his hand and began to dial.
40
It had been two nights since Freddy had dug up Billy Randall’s empty coffin in Wickenburg. As soon as he’d pried the lid open with a crowbar and shined the flashlight inside, Freddy had hopped in the rental car and done his best impression of a NASCAR driver, hauling ass back to Barstow. A brief pause at a truck stop to dump his dirty sweats, tennis shoes, and shovel into a dumpster had been the only delay in getting back to the Desert Inn. Since he’d never checked out of the Barstow motel, Freddy had stuck the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the outside door handle, stumbled into bed, and slept the day away.
Now Freddy found himself looking over the top of his hamburger, watching the setting sun shimmer in the heat that radiated up from the diner’s asphalt parking lot. The waitress had stopped by to ask if he wanted coffee, and he’d laughed at her. What he wanted was water with enough ice to frost up the outside of the glass. Every time the diner door opened, it felt like he was sitting beside a blast furnace.
Freddy wanted to talk to Dr. Bertrand Callow, the Barstow medical examiner who had signed off on the Randall report, but at home and after dark. Only a couple of things could make a man like that falsify an official report. Either he was one of the key conspirators in this whole mess or someone had scared the crap out of him. Freddy was pretty sure that it was the second, but if he was wrong about that, getting fired was going to be the least of his worries. Actually, now that he thought about it, he probably wouldn’t live long enough to have many worries.
Dr. Callow’s house wasn’t difficult to find. You just got off Old California 58 and headed north on Camarillo Avenue until it stovepiped into Palermo Street. It was one of a handful of nice homes on the far north side of the street, backed up against desert open space. By the time Freddy walked up to the front of the house and rang the bell, the sky had taken on a dark shade of purple with a few wisps of burgundy still licking the horizon. At least the Western skies gave these poor desert rats something worth looking at. You damn sure couldn’t watch the grass grow.