Nikko growled at the growing commotion outside.
She waved him silent, knowing that their only hope of surviving was to stay hidden.
As she slunk lower, the last man—a true giant—hopped out of the helicopter and strode a few steps away. He carried a long muzzled weapon. She didn’t recognize it—until a jet of fire shot out the end, lighting up the meadow.
Flamethrower.
It took her a moment to understand the necessity for such a weapon. Then her fingers tightened on the sill of the barn’s window, noting the dried and warped wood. She was hiding in a veritable tinderbox.
Outside, the cluster of armed men spread wide, preparing to circle the small outcropping of buildings.
They must know I’m here, hiding somewhere in the ghost town.
Their plan was clear. They intended to burn her out into the open.
Beyond the men, the toxic sea swirled around the hill’s crown. There was no escaping this island. She sank to her heels, her mind feverishly running through her options. Only one certainty remained.
I can’t survive this.
But that didn’t mean she would stop being a ranger. If nothing else, she would leave some clue to her fate, to what really happened out here.
Nikko sidled next to her.
She hugged him hard, knowing it was likely for the last time. “I need you to do one more thing for me, buddy,” she whispered in his ear.
He thumped his tail.
“That’s a good boy.”
3
April 27, 11:10 P.M. EDT
Takoma Park, Maryland
When it rains, it pours . . .
Gray Pierce sped his motorcycle down the wet suburban street. It had been storming solidly for the past week. Overtaxed drains left treacherous puddles along the road’s edges. His headlamp cut a swath through the heavy drops as he aimed for his father’s house.
The Craftsman bungalow lay midway along the next block. Even from here, Gray spotted light blazing from all the windows, illuminating the wraparound porch and the wooden swing that hung listlessly there. The home looked the same as it always did, belying the storm that awaited him inside.
As he reached the driveway, he leaned his six-foot frame into the turn and rumbled toward the detached garage in the back. A harsh bellow rose from behind the house, heard even over the roar of the Yamaha V-Max’s engine.
It seems matters had worsened here.
As he cut the engine, a figure appeared from the backyard, stalking through the rain. It was his younger brother, Kenny. The family resemblance was evident, from his ruddy Welsh complexion to his dark, thick hair.
But that was the extent of the similarities between the two brothers.
Gray tugged off his motorcycle helmet and hopped off the bike to face his brother’s wrath. Though they were the same height, Kenny had a beer gut, a feature well earned from a decade living the soft life of a software engineer in California, while nursing a drinking problem. Recently Kenny had taken a sabbatical from his job and returned here to help out with their father. Still, he threatened to head back west almost every week.
“I can’t take it anymore,” Kenny said, balling his fists, his face bright red with aggravation. “You have to talk some sense into him.”
“Where is he?”
Kenny waved toward the backyard, looking both irritated and embarrassed.
“What’s he doing outside in the rain?” Gray headed toward the rear of the house.
“You tell me.”
Gray reached the yard. The single lamp above the kitchen back door offered little light, but he had no trouble spotting the tall man standing near a row of oleanders that bordered the fence. The sight stopped Gray for a moment as he tried to comprehend what he was seeing.
His father stood barefoot and naked, except for a pair of boxers, which clung damply to his bony physique. His thin arms were raised, his face upturned to the rain, as if praying to some storm god. Then those arms scissored together in front of the bushes.
“He thinks he’s trimming the oleanders,” Kenny explained, calmer now. “I found him wandering in the kitchen earlier. It’s the second time this week. Only I couldn’t get him back to bed. You know how stubborn he can be, even before . . . before all of this.”
Alzheimer’s.
Kenny would rarely say the word, as if fearful he might catch it by talking about it.
“That’s when I called you,” Kenny said. “He listens to you.”
“Since when?” he muttered.
While growing up, Gray and his father had had a tumultuous relationship. His father was a former Texas oilman, rugged and hard, with a personal philosophy of grit and independence. That is, until an industrial accident at a drilling rig sheared one of his legs off at the knee. After that, his outlook soured into one of bitterness and anger. Much of which he directed at his eldest son. It eventually drove Gray away, into the Army and finally into Sigma.
Standing here now, Gray sought that infuriatingly hard man in the frail figure in the yard. He gaped at the ribs, the sagging skin, the map of his spine. This was not even a shadow of his father’s former self. It was a shell, stripped of all by age and disease.
Gray stepped over to his father and gently touched his shoulder. “Dad, that’s enough.”
Eyes turned to him, surprisingly bright. Unfortunately it was old anger that shone there. “These bushes need to be cut back. The neighbors are already complaining. Your mother—”
Is dead.
Gray bit back a twinge of guilt and kept a firm grip on his father’s shoulder. “I’ll do it, Dad.”
“What about school?”
Gray stumbled to match the old man’s timeline, then continued smoothly. “I’ll do it after school. Okay.”
The fire dulled in his father’s bleary blue eyes. “You’d better, boy. A man is only as good as his word.”
“I’ll do it. I promise.”
Gray led him to the back porch and into the kitchen. The motion, the warmth, and the brighter light seemed to slowly help his father focus.
“Gr . . . Gray, what are you doing here?” his father asked hoarsely, as if seeing him for the first time.
“Just stopped by to check on how you were doing.”
A thin hand patted the back of his arm. “How ’bout a beer then?”
“Another time. I’ve got to get back to Sigma. Duty calls.”
Which was the truth. Kat had caught him en route from his apartment, asking him to join her at Sigma command in D.C. After he had explained about the situation with his father, she had given him some latitude. Still, he had heard the urgency in her voice and didn’t want to let her down.
He glanced to Kenny.
“I’ll get him up to bed. After episodes like this, he usually sleeps the rest of the night.”
Good.
“But, Gray, this isn’t over.” Kenny lowered his voice. “I can’t keep doing this night after night. In fact, I talked with Mary about this earlier today.”
Gray felt a twinge of irritation at being left out of this conversation. Mary Benning was an RN who watched over their father during the day. The nights were mostly covered by Kenny, with Gray filling in when he could.
“What does she think?”
“We need around-the-clock care, with safeguards in place. Door alarms. Gates for the stairs. Or . . .”
“Or find a home for him.”
Kenny nodded.
But this is his home.
Kenny must have read the stricken expression. “We don’t have to decide right away. For now, Mary gave me the numbers for some nurses that could start covering the night shift. I think we could both use the break.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll get it all arranged,” Kenny said.
A twinge of suspicion rang through Gray, wary that his brother’s sudden resourcefulness was driven more by a desire to wash his hands of their father and escape back to California. But at the same time, Gray recognized his brot
her was likely right. Something had to be done.
As Kenny led their father toward the stairs and the bedrooms above, Gray pulled out his cell phone and dialed Sigma command. He reached Kat almost immediately.
“I’m coming in now.”
“You’d better hurry. The situation is growing worse.”
Gray glanced toward the stairs.
It certainly is.
11:33 P.M.
Gray reached Sigma command in fifteen minutes, pushing his Yamaha to its limits on the nearly deserted streets, chased as much by the ghosts behind him as he was drawn forward by the urgent summons to D.C. He could have begged off on coming in, but he had nothing but worries waiting for him at his apartment. Even his bed was presently cold and empty, as Seichan was still in Hong Kong, working with her mother on a fund-raising project for impoverished girls in Southeast Asia.
So for the moment, he simply needed to keep moving.
As soon as the elevator doors opened onto the subterranean levels of Sigma command, Gray strode out into the hallway. The facility occupied long-abandoned World War II–era bunkers and fallout shelters beneath the Smithsonian Castle. The covert location at the edge of the National Mall offered Sigma members ready access both to the halls of power and to the Smithsonian Institution’s many labs and research materials.
Gray headed toward the nerve center of the facility—and the mastermind who ran Sigma’s intelligence and communication net.
Kat must have heard his approach and stepped out into the hallway to meet him. Despite the midnight hour and the long day she’d had, she was dressed in a crisp set of navy dress blues. Her short auburn hair was combed neatly in a boyish coif, but there was nothing boyish about the rest of her. She nodded to him, her eyes hard and focused.
“What’s this about?” Gray asked as he joined her.
Without wasting a breath, she turned and headed back into Sigma’s communication center. He followed her into the circular room, banked on all sides by monitors and computer stations. Normally two or three technicians manned this hub, and when an operation was in full swing, there could be twice that number. But at this late hour, only a single figure awaited them: Kat’s main analyst, Jason Carter.
The young man sat at a station, typing furiously. He was dressed in black jeans and a Boston Red Sox T-shirt. His flax-blond hair was cowlicked and disheveled, like he’d just woken up, but more likely, the exhaustion on his face was from not having slept at all. Though only twenty-two, the kid was whip-smart, especially when it came to anything with a circuit board. According to Painter, Jason had been kicked out of the Navy for breaking into DoD servers with nothing more than a BlackBerry and a jury-rigged iPad. After that incident, Kat had personally recruited him, taking him under her wing.
Kat spoke to Gray. “A little over an hour ago, a military research base out in California had some sort of disaster. There was a frantic mayday.”
She touched Jason’s shoulder.
He tapped a key. An audio feed immediately began to play. It was a woman’s voice, stiff but plainly winded, struggling to maintain composure.
“This is sierra, victor, whiskey. There’s been a breach. Fail-safe initiated. No matter the outcome: Kill us . . . kill us all.”
Kat continued. “We’ve identified the caller as Dr. Irene McIntire, chief systems analyst for the base.”
On the computer screen, an image of a middle-aged woman in a lab coat appeared, smiling for the camera. Her eyes twinkled with excitement. Gray tried to balance this image with the frantic voice he’d just heard.
“What were they working on?” Gray asked.
Jason interrupted, cupping a Bluetooth headphone more firmly to his ear. “They’ve arrived. Coming down now.”
“That’s what I’m hoping to find out,” Kat said, answering Gray’s question. “All I know is the research station must have been dealing with something hazardous, something that required drastic action to stop. Satellite imagery showed an explosion. Lots of smoke.”
Jason brought up those photos, too, flipping through them rapidly. Though the images were gray-scaled and grainy, Gray could easily make out the flash of fire, the billow of an oily black cloud.
“We still can’t see through the smoke to evaluate the current status of the base,” Kat said. “But there’s been no further communication.”
“They must have razed the place.”
“It would seem that way at the moment. Painter is looking into matters out west, tapping into local resources. He’s tasked me with discovering more details about the base’s operations.” Kat turned to Gray, her eyes worried. “I already learned that the site is managed by DARPA.”
He failed to hide his surprise. DARPA was the defense department that oversaw Sigma’s operations—though knowledge of this group’s existence was restricted to only a few key people, those with the highest security clearance. But he shouldn’t have been so shocked to learn this base was tied to DARPA. The military’s research and development agency had hundreds of facilities spread through several divisions and across the breadth of the country. Most of them operated with minimal oversight, running independently, tapping into the most unique minds and talents out there. The details of each operation were on a need-to-know basis.
And apparently we didn’t need to know about this.
“There were over thirty men and women at that base when things went sour,” Kat said. From the stiffness in her shoulders and hard set to her lips, she was furious.
Gray couldn’t blame her as he stared at the monitor and the billowing black cloud. “Do you know which specific DARPA division was running that place?”
“BTO. The Biological Technologies Office. It’s a relatively new division. Their mission statement is to explore the intersection between biology and the physical sciences.”
Gray frowned. His own expertise for Sigma straddled that same line. It was dangerous territory, encompassing everything from genetic engineering to synthetic biology.
Voices echoed down the hall, coming from the direction of the elevator. Gray glanced over his shoulder.
“After getting Painter’s permission,” Kat explained, “I asked the director of the BTO—Dr. Lucius Raffee—to join us here to help troubleshoot the situation.”
As the new party drew closer, their voices expressed tension at this midnight summons.
Two men appeared at the entrance to the communication hub. The first man was a stranger, a distinguished black man dressed in a knee-length coat over an Armani suit. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a neat goatee.
“Dr. Raffee,” Kat said, stepping forward and shaking his hand. “Thank you for coming.”
“It was not like your man offered me much choice. I was just leaving a performance of La Bohème at the Kennedy Center when I was accosted.”
The doctor’s escort, Monk Kokkalis, pushed into the room. He was a bulldog of a man with a shaved head and the muscular build of a linebacker. The man cocked an eyebrow toward Gray as if to say catch a load of this guy. He then stepped over and lightly kissed his wife’s cheek.
Monk whispered faintly to Kat. “Honey, I’m home.”
Dr. Raffee glanced between the two, trying to comprehend them as a couple. Gray understood the man’s confusion. They made a striking, if odd, pair.
“I assume my husband filled you in on the situation in California,” Kat said.
“He did.” Dr. Raffee sighed heavily. “But I’m afraid there’s little concrete information I can offer you concerning what went wrong . . . or even the exact nature of the work that might have resulted in such drastic countermeasures at that base. I’ve telephoned several of my key people to follow up. Hopefully, we’ll hear from them shortly. All I know at the moment is that the head researcher was Dr. Kendall Hess, a specialist in astrobiology with an emphasis on investigating shadow biospheres.”
Kat frowned. “Shadow biospheres?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “He was searchi
ng for radically different forms of life, specifically those that employed unusual biochemical or molecular processes to function.”
Gray had some familiarity on the subject. “Like organisms that use RNA instead of DNA.”
“Indeed. But shadow biospheres could even be more esoteric than that. Hess proposed that there might be some hidden suite of life that uses an entirely different set of amino acids than what is commonly known. It was why he set up the research station near Mono Lake.”
“Why’s that?” Gray asked.
“Back in 2010, a group of NASA scientists were able to take a microbe native to that highly alkaline lake and force it to switch from using phosphorus in its biochemical processes to arsenic.”
“Why is that significant?” Monk asked.
“As an astrobiologist, Hess was familiar with the NASA team’s work. He believed such a discovery proved that early life on earth was likely arsenic-based. He also hypothesized that a thriving biosphere of arsenic-based organisms might exist somewhere on earth.”
Gray understood Hess’s fervor. Such a discovery would turn biology on its ear and open up an entire new chapter of life on earth.
Raffee frowned. “But he was also investigating many other possible shadow biospheres. Like desert varnish.” From their confused expressions, he explained in more detail. “Desert varnish is that rust to black coating found on exposed rock surfaces. Native people in the past used to scrape it away to create their petroglyphs.”
Gray pictured the ancient stick-figure drawings of people and animals found around the world.
“But the odd thing about desert varnish,” Raffee continued, “is that it still remains unresolved how it forms. Is it a chemical reaction? The by-product of some unknown microbial process? No one knows. In fact, the status of varnish as living or nonliving has been argued all the way back to the time of Darwin.”
Monk grumbled his irritation. “But how does researching some grime on rocks end up triggering a frantic mayday and an explosion?”
“I don’t know. At least not yet. I do know that Hess’s work had already drawn the attention of the private sector, that a portion of his latest work was a joint corporate venture, a part of the federal Technology Transfer Program.” He shrugged. “That’s what happens when you have so many budget cuts in R&D.”