Death Cry, page 16
Kane reached for the satchel he had left on the desk pushed against the wall with the bronze Cheka shield on it. “A roll of bandage weave, needle and thread,” he explained. “Probably enough for this,” he added as he looked at Brigid’s battered face again, dread welling inside him.
“Kane,” Grant said, then repeated it louder, grabbing the man by the shoulder and turning the ex-Mag to face him. “There’s a medi-kit in the Mantas. I’ll go get some antiseptic and see what else I have. I’ll be five minutes, okay?”
Kane nodded gratefully. “I’ll time you.”
With that, Grant turned and headed for the ventilation shaft once again, wishing he could offer Kane some kind of reassurance.
A RESTLESS DOMI PROWLED into the Cerberus ops room as the members of the afternoon shift took their positions at the monitoring equipment. Lakesh was dozing, stretched out on three seats that he had pushed together at the side of the room, determined to be nearby if there was any change in the status of the Russia field team. Reba DeFore, the Cerberus medic, had taken her place monitoring the computer display that showed the data feed from the subcutaneous transponders.
On the far side of the room, Donald Bry, Skylar Hitch and two other computer jockeys were working through pages of printouts, examining the material line by line as they searched for a way to break the hack that had infiltrated the Cerberus satellite feed.
Domi saw that Brewster Philboyd had taken Bry’s usual spot at the communications desk, and she walked silently across the room to speak with him. “Any word from Kane?” she asked, startling Philboyd from his monitoring work.
“Domi.” The big man gulped, nervously adjusting his glasses as he looked at her. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“No shoes.” She smiled, lifting one of her shapely, white-skinned legs from the floor and pointing her bare foot at his face, toes outstretched. “Good and stealthy!”
Philboyd smiled at that. “We heard from Grant an hour ago, but I haven’t heard anything from the field crew since then.” He glanced at the clock. “No big deal—we don’t expect a report for at least another hour,” he assured the albino woman before turning back to the satellite feed and adjusting the monitoring filters.
Domi leaned across the desk, catlike as she took in the changing feed from the Vela-class satellite. “That’s the same picture,” she told him.
“What?” Philboyd asked, confused.
“I saw that picture.” She tapped the glass of the monitor where a small window showed the overhead surveillance feed of the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. “About an hour ago when I brought Lakesh tea.” She looked across the room and saw that the cup of herbal tea sat, untouched, beside Lakesh where he dozed.
“Yeah,” Philboyd said, “this is where Kane’s team is, the Caucasus Mountains. We’re keeping a close watch in case anything approaches. Hopefully we can get a message across if anything does happen.”
“But this is the picture from an hour ago. Look,” she said, pointing to the dark shadow close to the Mantas, “that’s Grant when he spoke to Lakesh. He was just wrapping up when I came in last time.”
“That’s just a shadow,” Philboyd assured her, but he expanded the window to look more closely.
“The picture is moving,” Domi told him as she watched the wind rustle the leaves of the trees in the image, “but it’s been looped somehow.”
Philboyd frowned, pushing his nose close to the screen. “How can you be sure?”
“I can’t,” she said, “but if that’s Grant it means that something is very wrong with the feed, and the rest stands to reason.”
“I still say it’s just a shadow,” Philboyd grumbled, “a branch or something, maybe a rock.” He tapped keys and enhanced the picture, drawing the dark blemish into focus. It was indistinct, but it certainly looked like a man seen from overhead. He turned his head, realizing that Domi was right beside him, close enough to kiss.
“Grant,” she told him, her red eyes burning into his like flaming embers.
Philboyd turned away from her and pushed himself up out of his chair. “Dr. Singh, Donald,” he shouted, “you really need to come look at this.”
Chapter 16
General Serge shook his head. “I’m sorry, kitten,” he told Brigid, “but your story is beyond ludicrous. A trick, a fairy tale to fool us into unchaining the Death Cry for the use of the enemies of Russia.”
Dr. Djugashvili spoke immediately after the general had finished. “I disagree,” he said. “Miss Baptiste’s story is eminently plausible. Incredible, certainly, but plausible. To my mind, General, this fits with the facts.”
“What facts?” Serge bellowed. “Three hundred years in stasis? No contact with the outside world? I see no evidence of this. You said yourself, Doctor, that the year is 1929.”
“No,” Djugashvili argued, “I said that I thought it was 1929 but that, upon reflection, the salient points of my memory and my sense of time’s passage seem to be incomplete or unreliable. This facility was placed outside of normal reach, and we have nothing to go on, no objective, scientific facts with which to verify the woman’s story.”
“And that is all it is,” Serge insisted, his fingers playing ominously with the catch on the pancake holster at his belt, “a story. A story to trick us into handing over the Death Cry to our enemies.”
Stalemate, Brigid thought. They could go in circles forever, arguing the same basic point. And unfortunately, forever was about how long it would take if what Djugashvili had told her was true, all the while her believing perhaps a few hours or days or weeks had passed when in fact it was another three hundred years.
“Would you like to know how the Annunaki started the war in 2001?” Brigid asked, addressing General Serge.
The general scoffed. “This race of supraterrestrials that you speak of? Do tell, how did they start the war?”
“There were a lot of smart men in power,” Brigid told him, “men like you, General, who believed in national pride and the importance of defending their integrity as much as their borders. And every last one of those smart men, on both sides of the iron curtain, was so damn paranoid that he was all too willing to press the button that launched the missiles and bombed the whole planet back to the Stone Age.” Brigid fixed him with her stare.
General Serge visibly swallowed as he absorbed her words. After a significant pause, Serge finally spoke once more. “Paranoid, you say?” he asked and Brigid nodded. “You are cunning, exploiting our fears in this way, but ultimately I choose not to fall for your deception, Brigid Baptiste.” As he spoke, Brigid saw General Serge flip open the holster’s flap and withdraw his Tokarev pistol.
“Don’t do that,” she told him, glancing at the gun.
“I think it would be for the best, don’t you?” He smiled that awful, humorless smile once again.
Dr. Djugashvili gasped as he watched the general raise the pistol at Brigid on the other side of the desk. “General,” he stated, his voice quavering, “this is madness. You cannot follow this course of action without—”
“Without what?” Serge snapped, handgun held firm and his eyes not leaving Brigid.
“Evidence,” Djugashvili replied. “Science demands that you disprove her contention before you execute her.”
“I am a military man,” Serge dismissed, “not a fool scientist.” With that, he placed the barrel of his Tokarev between Brigid’s eyes. She felt the cold steel push against her forehead, her mind racing as she tried to come up with another solution.
LAKESH YAWNED AND stretched the kinks out of his muscles as he studied the image from the Vela-class satellite feed. Brewster Philboyd had transferred the picture to the biggest screen in the room, blown up to full size. Every thirty seconds, a caption flashed up in the bottom left of the image reading “Live feed,” but Domi’s observation had now put that contention into question.
Lakesh turned to Donald Bry. “What do you think, Donald?”
Bry gazed intently at the image on the screen. Philboyd and Domi waited for his response, Philboyd sitting at the keyboard that operated the large screen. “I’m not sure,” Bry admitted after a few moments’ thought. “There’s definitely movement—you can see the wind catching the leaves, and there’s no obvious join where the image has been looped. If it has,” he added, turning to face Lakesh. “However, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility.”
Domi grunted in disgust. “Stupid tech-heads, never good at making decisions. No instincts, have to analyze everything.”
“I just don’t want to be jumping at shadows because of a paranoid notion someone’s put in my head,” Bry explained reasonably to Lakesh, casting a significant look at the albino woman.
“It’s not paranoia,” Domi assured Lakesh, dismissing Bry’s implication. “That feed is on a fixed loop, repeating itself every minute plus.”
“If that is the case,” Lakesh announced, acting as mediator between the opposing viewpoints, “then we would need to decide on a course of action.”
The voice of Skylar Hitch, the computer expert who had been seconded into Donald Bry’s investigation team, cut through the room. “It is the case, Dr. Singh,” she called, waving a sheet of computer printout above her head as she stood up at her desk. Everyone in the Cerberus ops center stopped what they were doing to hear what Hitch was about to announce. She moved across the room to join the group at the satellite monitor feed, feeling increasingly self-conscious.
“Um,” she began, her voice nervous and loud, “I’ve isolated the hacker’s coding. He’s in the comm network, in the satellite feeds, and it looks like he’s taken control of the transponder relays, as well.”
Reba DeFore, currently monitoring the transponder feed, gasped and turned her attention back to her monitor, tapping several keys to bring up the enhanced details for Brigid, Grant and Kane.
Lakesh quickly scanned Skylar’s printout before handing it back to her. “Well,” he said levelly, “this certainly puts an interesting spin on things.”
All around him, the crew in the ops room began asking questions and discussing the implications, but Lakesh ignored them and addressed DeFore at her terminal. “Anything?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “As far as I can tell, this is a normal feed,” she admitted. “There’s no indication that anything’s being tampered with.”
“Our hacker’s probably looped a sequence from earlier,” Lakesh concluded, “the same way he’s dealt with the surveillance feed.”
The rest of the room was quiet now, looking to Lakesh for instructions. Donald Bry, a man who always wore an expression of worry, had gone visibly pale. “Lakesh?” he asked.
Still looking at DeFore’s screen, Lakesh took a deep breath and turned to address the ops room. “Okay, people,” he said in a loud, commanding voice, “we are officially deaf and blind. Our ability to track our own people has been compromised, and we can no longer rely on the data that we are receiving. We have a field team out there that requires our support and assistance and that may well be in more danger than we realize.
“What we do know is that, though tapped, our communications to the field team still appear to be in working order,” he continued.
Bry held up his hand, stopping Lakesh in midflow. “Couldn’t those communications have also been faked?” he proposed.
Lakesh looked to Skylar, who was still holding her printout and looking slightly uncomfortable at having been the center of attention. “Miss Hitch?” he encouraged.
“It’s possible,” she acknowledged with a grim nod. “I don’t know what the likelihood of that is, though.”
Sitting just behind Skylar, Brewster Philboyd attracted Lakesh’s attention with a raised finger. “Wouldn’t we know if the Mantas had been moved?” he suggested.
Lakesh replied, addressing his answer to the audience in the ops center. “Let’s not assume anything. From here on in we are to act in complete isolation. Line-of-sight confirmation on everything.”
There was a brief rumble of contention from a few people in the room, and Lakesh heard the audible mutter of “impossible” from off to his right.
“Is that understood?” he asked, and was greeted by a lackluster assent from everyone in the room. “Donald, Skylar—I need you to purge the whole system of this hack. I don’t care what it takes, and I don’t care what we lose.”
“But, Lakesh…” Bry began, and Lakesh cut him short.
“No buts,” Lakesh told him. “If we built it once we can build it again, if we programmed it once we can program it again. Just get this thing out of the Cerberus mainframe.”
Bry nodded, and Hitch followed him back to the desks where his team members were already discussing the problem as they brought up program data on their terminals.
“Brewster, Reba,” Lakesh continued, “for the present, your feeds are useless. If you can come up with any possible ways of working around this, let me know.”
“We might be able to piggyback off the Keyhole satellite and create a secondary feed for the transponders,” Philboyd theorized.
“Then look into that,” Lakesh told him. “For the present, monitoring duty is suspended with the exception of communications.”
Lakesh strode across the room, taking another look at the bogus satellite feed showing the Caucasus Mountains. He felt suddenly very vulnerable as he saw the flashing “live feed” indicator pop up for a few seconds.
Domi stepped across from her position leaning against one of the desks and placed an arm around his waist. “Is it the end of the world again?” she asked Lakesh, and he saw the mischievous smile play across her lips.
“No, dearest,” Lakesh admitted, “I guess not.”
Domi kissed him lightly on the cheek then pulled away, giving him a significant look.
“What is it?” Lakesh asked. He had known Domi for a long time, as first a friend and later his lover. He knew that look.
“I’m going to join Kane,” she told him firmly. She saw that Lakesh would protest, and she shushed him. “No, I’m going. Someone needs to tell them what’s happened. ‘Line-of-sight communications’—that’s what you said.”
“The effort that has gone into this,” Lakesh warned her, “means there’s a good chance there’s going to be a wealth of trouble there in the mountains.”
Domi offered a broad smile. “All the more reason to send backup,” she told him, letting go of his waist and heading for the exit. “I’ll go to the armory while you figure out the closest operational mat-trans point on your big map here. Okay?”
Lakesh nodded. “Since when did you start giving orders?” he asked her as she walked through the doorway.
Domi turned back and showed him a coquettish grin. “Oh, you love it, really,” she told him.
Lakesh smiled as the door closed behind the petite frame of his lover. She was right. It wasn’t the end of the world. Not for them. But he couldn’t speak for Brigid, Kane or Grant.
“CONTACT HEADQUARTERS,” Brigid ordered, the Tokarev still pushing against the bone between her eyes. “Speak to your superiors.”
General Serge shook his head ever so slightly. “No, Miss Baptiste, I don’t need their permission to execute a counterrevolutionary dog like you. I am the ultimate authority in this facility. I have no need to verify my actions with my superiors.”
“I understand that, General,” Brigid told him, holding her nerve as the cold steel pushed against her head, “but in speaking to them you will disprove my story and be able to shoot me in good conscience.” She knew it was the wrong thing to say the very second that the words passed her lips. This man had no conscience.
Serge spoke quietly then, looking Brigid firmly in the eye. “It has been nice meeting you, kitten.”
Dr. Djugashvili spoke up before Serge had finished the sentence. “Do not pull that trigger, General,” he insisted. Brigid looked hopefully over the general’s shoulder, imagining that perhaps Djugashvili had a pistol of his own stored in his desk, but he was empty-handed. “I am of the firm opinion that we should contact the KGB and confirm the situation in the corporeal world before we execute the woman.”
“And why is that, Dr. Djugashvili?” Serge snarled.
“Because if what she tells us proves to be true,” he responded, “then your counterrevolutionary is the only link we have to the outside world.”
Silence followed the doctor’s statement, and Brigid felt her heart leaping in her chest as she waited for the next move. Finally General Serge relented, lowering the Tokarev from Brigid’s forehead but still training it on her. He rose from his seat and walked across to stand beside the open doorway to the white-walled room, the weapon still pointing in her direction.
“You have friends on the outside world, Miss Baptiste?” Djugashvili asked, and Brigid nodded. “And they will be sympathetic to our situation?”
“My friends are one of the few bastions of human resistance to the alien threat, Doctor,” Brigid assured him. “If you and the general are courageous enough to use the Death Cry weapon in battle against the Annunaki, then you will be hailed as heroes. I promise you that.” She had used the word courageous deliberately, hoping to appeal to the military man’s pride.
Djugashvili looked to General Serge for a decision, and hesitantly Serge nodded. “We shall contact headquarters,” he explained before turning and exiting the room.
Brigid caught Djugashvili’s eye and whispered, “Thank you,” as they waited together in the office.
She heard Serge’s voice giving instructions to the two sentries just outside the door. “I have a brief errand to attend to. Chain the woman up until I return.”
Brigid’s heart sank. The two sentries marched into the room and took her by the elbows back to the room with the crisscrossing pipes. She was back precisely where she had started.
LAKESH TURNED AS DOMI entered the ops center at a fast trot.
She had changed her clothes and was now wearing a parka coat with a faux-fur collar over a cream blouse and dark, full-length trousers and boots. The parka was a muddy leaf color, all the better for blending into the background trees of the Caucasus Mountains. With the coat open, Lakesh could see that she had her trusted Detonics Combat Master .45 holstered in a shoulder rig along with a viciously sharp blade in a leather sheath on her belt. She hefted a compact Uzi in her hands, feeling its weight for comfort.
