Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (31 page)

“David!” Jess tugged on his arm. “Move!”

A wash of sounds from enameled tiles, cinder-block walls, and exposed metal structural supports assailed David as he and Jess thundered down shallow steps to the subway concourse. The last three stairs they jumped, sprinting for the ticket booths and turnstiles.

“Orange Line.” Jess raced to her left. David kept pace with her.

She slowed for a few steps as she reached inside her jacket and pulled out a plastic card. “That one!”

David ran where she pointed, to a tall turnstile of interlocking metal bars—impossible to jump, no room for even a child to squeeze through. Jess slid her card through a reader. Something clicked.

“Go!” she cried, and David pushed the bars forward and the turnstile moved like a revolving door, delivering him to the other side.

A moment later, she joined him from a second turnstile. “Southbound,” she commanded.

They ran again to another set of stairs heading down. David looked back in time to see one of the black-clad men stopped by the turnstiles, digging through his pockets.

Another level down, the walls were smudged and cracked. David smelled wheel grease and ozone. The distant rumble of an approaching train danced off unforgiving surfaces, smooth tile and rough concrete all combined.

For just a moment on the platform, they stopped to catch their breath. Here the concrete pillars were painted glossy orange. The safety zone at the platform’s edge was yellow, chipped and streaked with dirt. The only light came from rows of old fluorescent tubes that buzzed. A breeze was building from the tunnel.

A distinctive bass note grew stronger in the distance. David automatically recognized it. A Hawker Siddeley engine, electric. Less than a minute away.

“Let’s go,” Jess said.

“Where?” By now, the two bodyguards would have bought their tickets. They’d arrive about the same time as the train.

“The tunnels.”

“They’ll know exactly where we’ve gone.” David pointed out three cameras. One at each end of the platform, another above the entrance corridor

“You have a better idea?”

David suddenly saw himself from above, on the platform. The sound of the train rushing from the tunnel made ripples over the scene. They interfered with other emanations from the cameras. Like watching a secret passage open in a solid wall, he saw the three dead spots where the emanations didn’t reach. Where the cameras couldn’t see.

One was down the platform to the left of the third last pillar.

“Yeah, I do.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her past the handful of people on the platform, to the third orange pillar. Jess looked startled but didn’t resist.

He stopped on one precise spot, positioning her shoulder to shoulder with him.

“Cameras can’t see us here.”

“They’ll know which train we’re in.”

“We won’t be in one.”

The first car of the subway appeared at the end of the platform. The car’s upper half was white; its lower, orange. The station banner above the motorman’s windshield spelled out its destination:
OAK GROVE
.

“We’re going in the tunnels?” Jess looked confused.

“Nope.”

The train huffed to a stop; the second to last car was right before them.

The doors puffed open. Two riders exited. None entered. The car was empty.

“David?” Jessica whispered.

David suddenly turned to her and cupped his hands. “Up on top!”

Once again he was relieved she didn’t hesitate, no matter how bewildered. She put both hands on his shoulders, her foot in his hands, then leapt up as he gave her the needed extra momentum.

She rolled onto the car’s roof, braced her feet against the concrete overhang that divided the lower ceiling of the platform from the much higher one in the tunnel, and kicked off, pushing herself farther up along the roof’s curve.

A warning chime sounded, cautioning riders that the train doors would be closing in five seconds.

Then came the sound of running boots in the entrance corridor. The bodyguards.

The doors were sliding shut as David tossed the hard drive to Jess. Then he jumped as high as he could, hands up to—

Jess grabbed at one of his hands as his other found the edge of the car’s narrow rain gutter. Just enough to give him leverage. David’s sneakers squeaked against the glass window as he swung halfway up, one foot catching the curve of the roof. Then the train lurched into motion, quickly gaining speed, and with a pull from Jess, he heaved himself onto the rooftop.

Immediately, he flattened down, as Jess already had beside him. The concrete tunnel ceiling supports whistled past, inches overhead.

David risked turning his head to see a narrow strip of the platform shoot by.

On it two black-clad figures looked left and right at the passing train, but neither one looked up. Then they were lost from sight as the train car plunged into a dark void lessened only by light streaming from its windows over blackened walls.

David was immersed in the rhythmic clack of wheels against steel, the electric whine of the engine, the complex interplay of all the sounds echoing in the closed space as the train rushed on.

A patch of daylight flashed over them, and just as quickly disappeared. But not before David caught a strobelike image of a wall-mounted metal stairway, and an overhead grate, twenty, thirty feet above the track. If there were more of those staircases, and he and Jess could lift the grate . . .

Jess’s hand reached out to his as she spoke up over the rumble of the train and the tunnel. “We make a good team.”

David agreed, but for a reason she was the first to hear. “Those genetic clusters, the ones linked to your temples. The same markers are in me, Jess. I think we’re family.”

Merrit was in the South Tower high-roller suite that was still set up with Weir’s computers. Gratifyingly, his prey had conveniently provided the means by which he could be located and eliminated without subterfuge.

It was obvious that Ironwood’s researcher had been in the observation area above the Red Room. It was equally obvious what he’d been doing there. One of the overhead cameras was still trained on the nine-foot computer screen.

Weir might have erased the results of Ironwood’s search, including the parts of the database allowing it to be repeated, but the overhead camera had recorded what had been found.

Half of what Frank Beyoun mumbled as he worked to re-create what the overhead camera saw, Merrit didn’t understand. The image the camera had recorded was what the mathematician called “keystoned,” and apparently he needed a special program to correct that. He also needed another program to improve the focus. Even then, when it did, the image revealed a string of numbers at the bottom of the screen so blurred that Merrit couldn’t read them.

Helpful as always, Frank explained that since he knew that the string of numbers consisted of one group of eight numerals and one group of seven numerals, and he also knew the first four numerals in the first group and the first three numerals in the second, he could teach the program how to resolve the other numerals. Or something like that.

It took two precious hours, but Merrit’s new best friend finally delivered. Frank wrote the numbers down for him: the longitude and latitude of Ironwood’s fourth outpost, to a precision of ten feet. It was the site where the MacCleirigh Foundation and Weir would be going as quickly as they could.

So would Merrit.

First, though, he’d have to thank Frank. Personally.

Agent Roz Marano had worked a miracle. Again.

“He must’ve had a really huge image file on the hard drive.” She pointed
to the computer Weir had used in the quick print shop located less than a mile from Harvard University.

Ten hours ago, she and Lyle had given up the foot chase from Faneuil Hall—just in time, as far as Lyle’s ruined knee was concerned—when the police radioed they had the fugitives on camera. They weren’t kidding. In Boston, those cameras included the police’s own network, as well as the even more extensive system installed and run by Homeland Security to protect the city’s unique historical landmarks.

Nine hours ago, Lyle had used Roz’s laptop to review the recordings of the chase. Street cameras showed Weir and the red-haired woman fleeing into a subway station. A few seconds later, the MTBA concourse cameras had picked up the pair as they’d passed through the turnstiles. The woman had used a fare card bought the previous day with cash in a store without surveillance cameras. Impossible to trace.

More transit cameras tracked the two to the southbound Orange Line platform. As a train had arrived, they’d run in full view toward the end of the platform, only to duck behind a pillar. Coincidentally—though Lyle was not at all convinced that it was a coincidence—that particular pillar was one of three small areas on the platform that the cameras couldn’t cover. It was from that spot that they’d simply vanished.

That had left the RFID tag as the last hope. Weir had still been carrying the tagged hard drive when he’d run into the subway station.

From the kit of equipment that filled half the trunk of their AFOSI unmarked car in a custom Kevlar-lined bin, Roz had retrieved radio-tracking gear that let her listen for the RFID’s signals.

She picked up nothing.

That was when she’d started transmitting a coded pulse that would, she claimed, reset any changes Weir might have programmed into the tag.

Four hours later, two Boston police surveillance vans, one FBI van, two Homeland Security command post vehicles, and four air force staff cars had cruised through Boston and the surrounding regions following a precise grid pattern, using equipment similar to Roz’s, transmitting the same reset-and-respond pulse.

His own effort to assist them had been to ask Andrews Air Force Base to launch an uncrewed Global Hawk drone. They’d done so only after his request had ascended the chain of command to the Pentagon and the Air Force Chief of Staff. Even so, a mere nine hours after Weir and the woman disappeared, the Global Hawk began transmitting Roz’s reset-and-respond pulse over the Greater Boston area, and the sensitive antennas of the drone’s EADS electronic intelligence system began listening for the tag’s reply.

Within forty minutes, the tag was detected, stationary. The location was the print shop where he and Roz were now.

Two police cars had been there within eight minutes, but they were twenty minutes too late. By then the tag was no longer responding. A print-shop clerk confirmed that two people answering the descriptions of the fugitives had been there and paid with cash for half an hour of computer time and for a poster-sized print from the shop’s largest printer. The small shop didn’t have security cameras in the parking lots front or back. There was no way to tell what Weir and the woman were using for transportation.

When the police called to report, Roz instructed them to keep everyone away from the computer Weir had used. She and Lyle arrived forty minutes later.

The computer was now protected by a web of yellow police tape on a small gray desk that reminded Lyle of a library carrel.

“He needed this computer,” Roz reasoned, “because he had to convert the file into something he could print out. Which he did.”

“Any idea what he printed?”

Roz typed on the computer’s keyboard, then frowned as she read the text that appeared on the screen. “Whatever it was, he wanted to keep it to himself. He overwrote all his work files a bunch of times. There’s nothing to recover.”

Lyle was about to move on but saw Roz hesitate. Very encouraging. She typed again. Grinned. “He sanitized the computer, but not the printer.”

“So we can get a copy?”

“Maybe not the whole file, but depending on how big the buffer is, at least a third of it. Maybe two-thirds.” Roz did something, and the screen changed to show yellow text against a black background. “Give me five minutes and we can print out whatever data are left in the spool file.”

Five minutes later, Lyle stood by a large machine through which a sheet of heavy paper moved like a cloth through an ancient wringer washer. Lyle didn’t mention the similarity to Roz. He wasn’t about to sound even older than he was.

The image forming on the paper was like a wildly colored piece of abstract art, random except for a string of numbers that ran along one side, and a few strange collections of letters that appeared here and there.

“Any idea what that is?”

“False color of something,” Roz said, “but it’s definitely some kind of map.”

Lyle was a big fan of maps. They showed locations. Locations meant destinations. Journeys to destinations could be tracked.

The page finally rolled out from the printer—two-thirds complete. In
the middle of a field of splotchy, garish colors was a three-dimensional line drawing of a building of some kind.

Roz handed it to him for a closer look with a reminder that Ironwood was always talking to Weir about using his data to find alien outposts. “Maybe that outline is what they look like.”

Lyle frowned. “That would mean all those lunatic conversations were legitimate.”

“Truth and fiction, huh?” Roz took the awkwardly sized sheet back. “I’d say this is a shoreline. Somewhere. What do you bet Geospatial can figure out exactly where it is?”