path to conquest (21 page)

“I could have you arrested right now. Y’know that, son.” Neville rubbed the back of his neck, trying to squeeze out the tension wound into his muscles. “Yes, sir, I do realize that. But let’s cut right to the heart of the matter, shall we? You lock me up—”

Morrow spread a cautionary hand. “Don’t forget the possibility of execution for treason.”

Pete grinned to himself. He’d noticed that Neville was just about to break free of Morrow’s dominating spell, like a football running back about to escape a tangle of would-be tacklers. But Morrow’s passing reminder was just enough to cut the Englishman off at the knees.

“Uh, yes, well, as I was saying,” he stammered. “If I am incarcerated, you lose your only means of destroying that drilling platform Diana’s set up in the Persian Gulf.” Settling back into the soft cushions of his easy chair, Morrow aimed an unblinking gaze at Neville. “What makes you so sure that’s what we plan to do?”

“Because you know as well as I do that Diana
will
make use of it sooner or later. And I’m the only one who can crack the computerized security system on that platform.”

“Another project of yours?” Lauren asked.

“I created it, I can break it. I know things about that system Diana doesn’t.”

“Now hold on a minute,” Pete said, looking like he’d just bitten into a sour grapefruit. “Your chiseling into an already existing system like the one on the Mother Ship and learning to play with it, that’s one thing. But I can’t believe Diana didn’t have an eye on you all the time you worked on the computers and programming for the drilling rig.”

“Oh, I didn’t say I wasn’t under scrutiny. I even let her catch me three or four times, just so she wouldn’t think I'd been unbelievably well-behaved. But it doesn’t take much for a clever fellow like me to program in a few back door entries. I even sifted in their very own computer virus. I guaranteed myself access to the system, and I guaranteed myself final control. Only you, Mr. President, can keep me from stopping Diana’s little oil game.”

“Okay, cut the horse manure, Mr. More. You’ve obviously given this some thought before y’all came up here. Let’s hear it.”

“The only way to stop Diana is for me to go to the Middle East and climb aboard that drilling platform.” Neville leaned forward, intensity rising. “I’ll need that Visitor shuttle I appropriated, and I’ll need a free hand, without any interference whatsoever.”

Morrow leaned across the space between them, extended one powerful arm, and stabbed Neville More in the chest with his finger. “You’ll do what
I
tell you to do, son. You’d do real well to recall that you’re in the custody of the United States government. Pete and Lauren are my personally designated agents, and they’ve got my authorization to do whatever is necessary to keep you in line.”

Reaching for the shiny coffeepot on the table, Morrow poured himself a cup, adding milk and a packet of sugar. “You made your pitch—here’s mine,” he continued. “You don’t cooperate with us, I’ll turn you over to Diana. What d’ya wanna bet she’s discovered that her prize prisoner’s flown the coop by now? And, son of a gun,
you’re
not aboard her ship anymore either! Who d’you think she’s blaming about now? Who d’you think she’d love to have for dinner—and I
do
mean for dinner.”

In the shadows of her darkened cabin, Diana slouched in her overstuffed chair, legs curled under her and a bowl of white mice in her lap. She felt a transient impulse to tip the bowl up and gobble the furry creatures as swiftly as her gullet could swallow them. Instead, she demurely selected a single mouse—true, it was the largest of the lot-—and bit into it, killing it before it could squeal. No sounds of distress at all, just the crunching of tiny bones.

The door chimed and she ran a fretful hand through her hair, arranging it as best she could before touching the toggle switch and allowing Lydia and Dr. Stavros to enter. Diana assumed a more formal posture when she saw that Lydia’s lustrous blond hair was carefully coiffed in attractive ringlets and she was wearing a sleek black gown cut daringly low off one shoulder and slit high up the opposite thigh.

“You needn’t have gotten dressed up to give me your report, Lydia. ”

“Don’t worry, Diana, I didn’t,” Lydia snickered. “I have a dinner engagement with a young lieutenant.”

“Becoming predatory in your old age, darling?”

“Is that how it was for you, Commander?”

“Don’t be insurbordinate. Just give me your report.”

“I’d be glad to. Dr. Stavros examined the computer records. He found a dead human body with Dr. Donnenfeld’s ID card in storage hold four.”

“That’s impossible.”

Stavros bowed shortly. “There was a switch made without anyone’s knowledge. Donnenfeld was tagged as Sylvia Newton, deceased, and removed from the ship.”

“We know she was removed. To where and by whom, Lydia?”

“The deck officer in the docking bay said three medical personnel escorted the body, claiming they were taking it to the San Diego Experimental Center for food-perservaiion studies.”

“That deck officer was lying,” Diana snapped.

“That’s what I thought, but I checked the authorization codes. The order was in fact logged properly,” Lydia said.

“And who was given the authorization?”

Lydia tried not to smirk. “A Dr. Neville.” She paused for Diana to consider that bit of information. “I warned you not to trust him.”

“I didn’t trust him,” Diana snarled. “He was under constant surveillance.”

“Not constant enough,
Commander,”
said Lydia pleasantly.

Diana’s lips spread into an arrogant smile. “Evidently not. I’ll plan to start an investigation into why
your
security team failed so miserably in that simple duty. Dismissed.”

Lydia spun on one high heel and stalked out. The befuddled Stavros stood in place.

“You, too—
out.”

When the hatch slid shut and she was alone again, Diana raised the glass bowl to face level, fiery eyes locked on the mice. They were the eyes of a hunter, unblinking, angry, yet certain. She tipped the bowl. One by one the mice slid over the rim and down her throat.

She’d lost her primary prey today. She’d suffered betrayal. But there’d been some consolation as well. Just before Lydia and Stavros gave their report, she’d received a message from her science staff. The lab chief relayed news of a breakthrough. They’d found the flaw in the oil bacteria. A reformulated specimen would be ready within forty-eight hours. Soon after that, Earth’s largest known undersea oil deposit would be the target of her grand experiment. And that would be just the beginning. Within weeks three-quarters of the humans’ precious oil cache would become toxic waste.

The war would be over, and Diana would be much more than Supreme Commander. She would be conqueror—and queen.

It hadn’t taken Neville More long to agree to the President’s terms. He’d had little choice. He, Pete, and Lauren repaired to the Brook Cove Lab to stock their Visitor shuttle with supplies. Not that the supersonic trip to the Middle East would take all that long—no more than four hours—but they wanted to be prepared just in case their flight was forcibly terminated short of their eventual destination. Pete had planned a route far to the north, as distant from alien-held territories as possible, so the danger of attack by marauding skyfighter patrols was limited.

The President saw to it that World Liberation Front defense forces were made aware of the grave and urgent mission so they wouldn’t mistake the overflight of this lightly armed shuttle as an enemy foray.

There was another reason for the stop at Brook Cove—to see how Donnenfeld was recovering from her ordeal and to be briefed on her conclusions about Diana’s deadly bacterial weapon. After that, they were off on their journey, given a solemn farewell by the lab staff gathered on the windswept bluff overlooking Oyster Bay Harbor.

Hannah had been allowed out of bed for the occasion, sitting in a wheelchair, sullen as a recalcitrant cat stuffed into a travel crate. As she waved after the retreating aircraft, Doc Stewart stood behind her. He had one hand on the wheelchair and one on Donnenfeld’s shoulder.

“That for moral support?” she inquired acidly.

“No. It’s to keep you from jumping out of that chair, lady,” he shot back.

“I hate being trussed up in this contraption, George. And I don’t need you pushing me around. Slavery’s been abolished, or hadn’t you heard?”

He made a gallant attempt to match her surly glare, but his dark brown face broke into a grin as he wheeled her back to her cabin.

“Oh, no, you don’t, George Stewart. Flashing those pearly whites isn’t going to get you oif the hook,” she railed.
"I’m
the one who’s supposed to do the mothering around here. I’m the perpetrator, not the victim!”

Sari James skipped alongside the traveling complaint show, with Mitchell approaching from the other side.

“Serves you right, Hannah,” Mitchell mocked.

“Hmph!” Sari snorted in humorous derision. “I always said she could dish it out but she couldn’t take it.”

Hannah yanked her Red Sox cap low over her brow. “I come back from the dead, and all I get is abuse.” She waved her hand like Queen Victoria signaling her coachmen. “Take me back to the Visitors!”

The flight was the longest Pete had piloted a Visitor vessel since he’d swooped Lauren off the roof of the United Nations building and romped to Hawaii for a vacation not long after the resistance had wrested their planet back from the aliens the first time around. He and his two companions had been quiet for most of the trip, and the computerized controls of the shuttle required Peter to do little more than steer.

As a result, he’d found himself with plenty of time to look out the windows and think about the perils of their mission (not a cheering topic) and about the natural beauty of the planet below. They passed over the tundra of Greenland, the expanse of ocean between North America and Europe and the intricate coastal carvings of the fjords of Scandinavia. Now they turned on a southerly course, over the jagged spine of mountains where Europe and Asia were joined.

“Hey, you awake up there?”

It was Lauren’s voice from the aft cabin. Pete turned in the pilot seat. “Wide awake. Just thinking.”

“About what?” Neville asked.

“Lots of things,” Pete shrugged. “Mostly about how incredibly peaceful the earth looks from the air. Especially up north where the Visitors aren’t.”

“How much longer do we have to go?” Lauren asked.

Pete glanced at the digital readouts. He’d learned to read that much Visitorese by mentally plugging decimal numbers in where little alien squiggles appeared. Gauges were gauges, pretty much. “About a half hour—late afternoon Israeli time.”

“Have you ever been to this part of the world?” said Lauren.

Pete shook his head. Then he chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I was just thinking how many times I said I didn’t want to go to the Middle East as long as the Arabs and Jews were killing each other, that it was too damned dangerous. Too much risk of getting blown up by terrorists.”

Lauren gave a knowing nod. “Uh-huh. And here the whole world’s at war, and we
are
the terrorists who’re going to blow things up.”

“I guess it’s true what they say then—eh, mates?” said Neville.

“What’s that?” Pete wanted to know.

“Variety is indeed the spice of life. Well, I’ve never been there either.”

“Whoa,” Pete exclaimed. “What about that drilling rig?”

“That was built while I was at Brook Cove, Forsythe. I did all my work aboard the Mother Ship before I started touring the country. ”

“Spreading good cheer and computer viruses,” Pete growled. “How ’bout you, Laur?”

“I was here once on assignment with Olav Lindstrom. We stopped off in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. I always wanted to come back as a civilian.” She looked out the window and sighed. “There’s something strangely compelling about the Middle East—the place where our civilization started, where the three Western religions were bom, where all those biblical legends took place.”

Neville nodded ironically. “Yes, also one of the places where bloodshed seems to be an inextricable part of existence.”

“That’s part of what makes it so compelling,” said Lauren. “It’s like some mythic cross between a book of fairy tales, a history text come to life, and a macabre horror story.”

“Where are we landing, Forsythe?”

“At Masada. There’s a resistance base there.”

“How will we know when we’re there? Isn’t it just a spot in the desert?”

Pete and Lauren both turned to look at the Englishman. “You’ve never seen a picture of Masada?” said Lauren in disbelief.

“Nope.”

“Oh, we’ll know it when we see it,” Pete assured him.

The understatement in Pete’s phrase became apparent as soon as the shuttle entered visual range of Masada.

As if the Judean desert were an ocean, dust its water, and rocks, gullies, and dunes its waves, the great mesa rose up like some colossal ark cresting the rolling sea. The flat-topped mountain was indeed boat shaped, narrowing to a knife edge at its northern prow, angling out along both flanks and tapering again at the stem. The shifting sands of centuries curved steeply up Masada’s sides as if being cut by the bow, while rugged cliffs sculpted by time, by wind and grit and water, stretched out behind the rock like the wake of a ship.

Normally a bleached tan, the desert had been painted fiery russet by the late afternoon sun, and as Pete flew in from the northwest, Masada stood stark and majestic against a cruel blue sky.

The summit towered 1,300 feet over the desert floor. Rhomboid-shaped, it was nearly a half mile from end to end and two football fields across at its widest point. As they drew closer and dipped in altitude, they could see Masada was not quite flat—more like a moonscape, with hillocks casting rounded shadows. Scattered across the surface of the mesa were the squared-off ruins of structures dating back two thousand years, mixed oddly with three camouflage field tents of modem vintage and netting that hid resistance helicopters.