Paul McEuen - Spiral

Vlad dropped a cuvette, cursed in Russian.

Jake watched them, outwardly calm but inside twisted up with worry. “What’s the problem?”

“Something went wrong,” Harpo said. “All we got was a fragment. But I think I know what the problem is. We just have to lower the cycling temperature.”

“How long?”

“Another hour. At least.”

FRUSTRATED, JAKE PACED THE HOUSE. HE STOPPED AT THE back window, looking out at the forest that picked up right behind Harpo’s yard. A dog loitered, a handsome old hound with huge ears and black eyes. He stood in front of a fancy doghouse with the name DUKE over the door, his tail raised and watching Jake. He started barking, then thought better of it, sat down, and scratched his ear.

Jake wondered whether the NSA people were looking for him. They had made reservations for him on a flight out of Ithaca that had left hours ago. Jake guessed that if he called his voice mail at home, there would be messages asking what the hell had happened. He decided to leave those messages unchecked. At least a little while longer.

To his right, behind a glass case, was Harpo’s collection of guns. Mostly hunting rifles but with a few military pieces thrown in. Jake recognized the sleek lines of the M16 and, below it, an M9 pistol in a black holster. It was the civilian version of the sidearm Jake had carried when he was in the service. He still had it, tucked away on a high shelf in the closet of his apartment. He took it down, cleaned and oiled it, every few months, not because he thought he’d ever use it but out of a sense of respect. The special burdens of soldiers.

Three days.

Three days ago, life had been normal. Three days ago, he would’ve been grading papers, looking for an hour to sneak away to the gym. He might’ve gone over to Liam’s lab. Maybe Dylan would have been there, and Jake and the boy would have tried to teach the Crawlers some new trick. Now Liam was dead, tortured by those very same Crawlers. Jake was in a backyard bio lab, waiting for a guy named Harpo with fright-wig hair to decipher Liam’s final message. A message Liam had left hidden inside the genome of a fungus under a pile of rocks in a forest.

He pulled out his phone and called Maggie. Six rings, then voicemail. He left a message and tried again. Same result. What the hell? He’d talked to her a half-hour before—she said she was making progress, had found an entry in Liam’s field notebooks that was almost certainly about the Uzumaki. So where was she now?

He called information, got the number for her work. It rang four times, then clicked to voice mail: a woman’s voice, not Maggie’s, saying he’d reached the Cornell University herbarium, offering a phone tree of options. Jake chose “0” and left another message, telling Maggie to call him right away.

Damn it . Where was she? And if she had left the herbarium, why didn’t she call? The only thing he could think of was that something had happened, maybe something back at home.

He called Rivendell.

The phone rang and rang and rang. No answering machine. No voice mail.

What the hell was going on? Maggie’s roommate Cindy was supposed to be there, watching Dylan.

He thought about calling the police, then glanced again at Harpo’s gun collection, to the Beretta M9. Jake could be at the herbarium in fifteen minutes. He took down the M9 and unholstered it. Range of maybe fifty meters. History of slide problems but a good weapon. Checked the magazine. Full. Fifteen rounds.

He sought out Vlad and Harpo, the M9 in hand. “Harpo, I need to borrow this.”

“You plan on committing a felony?”

“No jokes. I can’t get Maggie on the phone.”

“Did something happen?” Vlad asked.

“I don’t know. Call my cell the minute you have the rest of the sequence. And if you don’t hear from me in the next half-hour, call the cops.”

ONCE OUTSIDE, JAKE CALLED LIEUTENANT BECRAFT AT THE Cornell police department. Becraft sounded surprised to hear from him. “Professor Sterling? Where are you? The Detrick people—”

“Can you do something for me? Can you send someone out to Maggie Connor’s place? No one’s answering the phone. A woman named Cindy Sharp is supposed to be there. Watching over Dylan. Maggie’s son.”

“Jake. Where are you? Is there some kind of problem?”

“I’ll be in touch. Send a car out to Maggie’s.”

“What’s going—”

Jake hung up.

ORCHID CHECKED THE PHONE NUMBER WITH A FEW QUICK taps of her fingers. The heads-up screen in her glasses gave the response: LT. BECRAFT. CORNELL UNIVERSITY POLICE.

She listened to the conversation between Jake Sterling and Becraft. Orchid had taps on both Jake Sterling’s and Maggie Connor’s cells, allowing her to hear all conversations, control all functions. She’d installed the modified SIM cards in both phones weeks ago, long before she had taken Liam Connor hostage. She had wanted complete control of the communications environment. The taps had proven invaluable. Minutes before, Maggie had tried to call Toloff at Detrick. Orchid had shut her phone down.

Orchid checked the latest GPS location from Jake’s phone. He was moving, driving away from the address on Buffalo Road.

Toward Maggie, she was sure.

Good .

Orchid backed the FedEx van up to the front door of Rivendell, thinking it through. The police would likely be here in minutes, but she still had time. She went inside the house and dragged the dead woman, Cindy Sharp, through the front door. She threw Cindy’s body in the back of the FedEx van. Orchid had stolen the van a week before from a storage garage in Pennsylvania. She closed the door carefully, locked it, then walked around to the driver’s door.

She got in, started the engine, and checked Jake’s location again. He was retracing the path he’d taken, heading back to the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium. He was fifteen minutes away from his destination. Orchid was five.

She turned the FedEx van around, started down the gravel road. She heard a squeaking sound in the back of the van.

She glanced over her shoulder into the storage area. Dylan Connor was cuffed to the wall, tape on his mouth. He’d started to write HELP in the dust of the tinted back window with the tip of his shoe.

Clever boy. Just like his great-grandfather .

She pulled to a stop, then took a length of rope and secured his legs. “No more tricks,” she said. She wiped away the boy’s message with a brush of her fingers.

She turned onto the main road. Maggie’s call to Toloff still worried her. What if Maggie had used another phone? What if she had gotten through?

Orchid typed a series of commands on her leg.

Time to make sure everyone at Detrick was very, very busy.

XINTAO LU WAS EXHAUSTED. HE’D BEEN UP ALL NIGHT, working his way through the final part of the processing run. He was a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, but he was pretty sure he was going to switch to electrical engineering.

He dipped the wafer cartridge into the etching tank, letting the hydrofluoric acid perform the final step in the fabrication of his device. The little silicon chip he was etching had an array of microscopic holes, each barely larger than a virus. When superfluid helium passed through the holes, it would exhibit coherent oscillations that were sensitive to the absolute motion of the earth with respect to the stars. That’s what his thesis adviser said, anyway. But he was beginning to wonder about that. It all seemed too wild. Etch some holes in a piece of silicon, cool it to near absolute zero, and you would detect your rotation relative to the entire universe.