Supersymmetry (21 page)

Jean stared off into space, her eyes focused on some distant point far beyond the walls. Alex remembered her as a friend, a beautiful and energetic woman, always cheerful and kind, with a mind like a knife with an atom-thick blade. Now her face was gaunt and deeply lined, giving the appearance of a much greater age. Her face was loose and expressionless. She didn't acknowledge Alex's presence.

The warden left the room. “Knock when you're finished, and I'll escort you back,” she said before closing the door.

Alex turned back to Jean. “I'm Alex Kelley,” she said. “You knew my father, Jacob.”

Jean registered this information with a quick flick of her eyes toward Alex's face, and then returned to her thousand-mile stare. Alex felt intimidated. She hadn't anticipated the possibility that Jean would be completely uninterested. Surely after fifteen years in prison she would welcome a conversation about physics? Perhaps it was too painful a subject.

“The varcolac is back,” Alex said.

That earned her another look. “I never understood why you called it that,” Jean said.

“It's what destroyed the stadium in Philadelphia. It killed my dad.”

Jean shrugged, a slow and barely discernable gesture. The empty expression on her face didn't change. “You expect me to weep for him?”

“I thought you could help me understand it. Specifically, how it changes things in the past. I know you once used a Higgs projector to do that, but we don't know the principle behind it. I need to stop the varcolac before it kills any more people.”

“Are you a physicist?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “I work for Lockheed Martin, but I'm assigned to a project that runs in the NJSC's High Energy Lab.”

Jean sniffed, an ambiguous expression that could have been grudging respect, but was probably disdain. “In that case, you already know more than I do. I've been out of the field for fifteen years. I spend my time washing laundry and scrubbing floors now.”

Alex leaned close to the table. “Are they treating you well? Where in the prison do they have you, right now?” She assumed their meeting would be monitored, but it seemed an innocent enough question.

Jean smirked, the first actual facial expression Alex had seen her make. “You didn't come here just to ask questions. You came here to break me out.”

Alex jerked up. “What are you talking about?”

“If the creature is back, that means there's a Higgs projector. You knew you might need to barter for my help. You mean to offer me my freedom.”

Alex was disconcerted by the woman's perceptiveness. Surely there would be someone listening to their conversation? Or did they just record them for later review?

“So where is he?” Jean asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The real physicist.
You
didn't create the projector.”

Alex was astonished. “How could you know that?”

“You're too young and stupid to have invented it yourself. Bring him, and maybe we'll talk.”

“Excuse me,” Alex said. “I'm not the one who's in prison.”

Jean raised her hands mockingly. “Well then, get me out of here, if you can. What are you waiting for?”

Alex glanced at the door, which remained closed. Were they just letting her talk, to see if she would incriminate herself? Or was there truly no one listening? They could hardly imagine the technology she had available, so perhaps they were just biding their time.

The network that was feeding her the image of Jean was simple enough, just a standard web protocol. Alex could trace it, and get a location for Jean. She could teleport to her, and then all she would have to do was touch Jean's arm and teleport away again.

Her presence—as Sandra—would be on all the surveillance tapes, and so would her disappearance. It would make Sandra a felon, and place her squarely in the conspiracy in the minds of law enforcement. It would be the end of her police career. But she wouldn't have much of a police career if she died. It was the best option Alex had.

The door opened, and instead of the friendly warden, a tall, official-looking man came through, followed by four armed guards with pistols drawn. “Sandra Kelley?” the official said.

Alex sat alert, ready to teleport away at any moment. “That's me.”

“We have been instructed to detain you for questioning. Please come with us quietly. The checkpoints you entered through are locked. There's nowhere to go.”

Alex was surprised to feel a small smile form unbidden on her face. She hadn't wanted to stain Sandra's reputation; now she wouldn't have to. “Actually, my name's Alex,” she said. “Sandra had nothing to do with this.” She teleported. Jean's room was identical to hers, so from her point-of-view, the five men disappeared, and Jean solidified into a real woman instead of a computer image. “Come on,” Alex said. “We're getting out of here.” She flicked her eyes to choose the coordinates for the peak of Hawk Mountain, seized Jean's arm, and teleported.

Only she didn't. Nothing happened. She was still in the prison.

Jean laughed. “I told you. Stupid as dirt.”

Alex couldn't understand it. “It worked the first time. Why won't it work now?”

“You can't get any signals out of here,” Jean said. “You think they want their inmates making calls on contraband cell phones? The whole place is shielded.”

“But the projector doesn't work on—”

The door crashed open, and three guards rushed in. Two of them trained their weapons on her, while the third advanced.

“On any electromagnetic bandwidth?” Jean said. “Of course not. It's extra-dimensional quantum tunneling on a large scale. You can't stop that with a bit of copper shielding.”

The third guard turned Alex around and yanked one arm up painfully behind her.

“But,” Jean continued, “I'm willing to bet the software driving it assumes the presence of a network connection, or at least GPS, for accurate targeting,” Jean continued. “But of course, you didn't write it. So you don't know.”

Alex didn't answer. She wasn't worried about getting Jean out anymore. She just wanted to get away herself. It hadn't even occurred to her that she might not be able to teleport out. She cursed herself for not reviewing the code, or at least for not interrogating Ryan about its limitations. She had no doubt that, given an hour with the source code, she could have modified it to allow teleportation to known locations, even without external network connectivity. But it was too late for that now.

She could still teleport line-of-sight, though. And she still had other tricks up her sleeve.

Through the open door, she could see a corridor. She focused on the place she wanted to be, and the eyejack automatically measured the distance. She initiated the teleportation module, and in a moment she was there. She heard sounds of consternation and shock from the guards, but she didn't dare pause to look. She initiated the invisibility module and disappeared.

At the end of the corridor, she saw a light and teleported toward it. This was not the way she had come in, so she had no idea what direction to move or how far she was from an exit. She found herself in a central room, from which a series of cells branched like the spokes of a wheel. The arrangement allowed a guard to see every inch of the cells from a single vantage point. The cells were full, two women to a room.

It was a dead end. She jumped back the way she had come. Which way was out? She didn't know how thoroughly they could lock down the facility, or to what lengths they could go to capture her. Her main advantages at this point were that she couldn't be seen and that she could move faster than the guards, but they would have procedures to completely lock down sections of the prison in case of escape attempts or riots. She had to get out fast, if she was going to get out at all.

A few more jumps, and she reached a guard station separating two sections. The guard sat behind a pane of glass, and controlled another gate of interlocking steel bars. She could see through to the other side, which meant the bars were no barrier. In an instant, she was through. A klaxon blared suddenly, hurting her ears. She wondered if the station had sensors that had detected her, or if someone had manually sounded the alarm from elsewhere in the prison.

She teleported again, halting when the corridor ended in solid metal doors topped with flashing red lights. She threw herself against them, but they wouldn't open. Her heart hammered, and she felt cold, trapped. Of course, she could estimate the distance and jump to the other side of the doors, but she didn't know what was there. If there was another set of doors, or a person, or just a stairway, she would kill herself by jumping into it.

Teleportation, however, was not her only trick. They couldn't do this to her, not with the power at her disposal. She spotted a trashcan, a large metal one, against the wall. It would do. She backed away and teleported the trashcan into the center of the metal doors. The doors tore apart with an explosion of rending metal, and she jumped through to the other side.

A guard blocked her path, aiming a pistol at her and shouting for her to stand down. He could see her! She realized he must have an infrared sensor, possibly on his gun, probably synched to his eyejack lenses. He was certainly communicating with the other guards, so now they would all know how to see her, too.

From ten feet away, she ripped the gun out of the guard's hand and snatched it out of the air. Caught up in the moment, she almost shot the man, like he was a generic character in a first-person shooter video game. A chill went down her back at how easily it came to her, and she took her finger off the trigger. She had almost forgotten that her other adversaries had been varcolac puppets, empty shells controlled by their host. This man had a name, a life, a family, and she had almost shot him for no good reason, just because he stood in her way. Without his gun, he was no longer a threat. She didn't have to kill him.

The door beyond him was glass, and she teleported beyond it just as she registered a sharp jab of pain in her back. On the other side of the door, she looked back and saw that two other guards had run up behind her while she hesitated. In the seconds she had delayed, they had shot her with something. Her vision blurred. They had hit her with some kind of tranquilizer. She had to get away,
now
.

The noise of the klaxon was relentless. She could hardly think. She spun, her balance wavering, and saw that the décor had changed, from institutional cinderblock to stone and paneling. She was back in the original prison building. A glass window revealed a view of the outdoors: maple trees, the road, a high external fence. All she had to do was make it out there, and she was free. One more jump.

She teleported out into the open air, but this time the shift in perspective threw her completely off-balance, and she fell to the ground. She was beyond the shielding now, and her system was connected; she could teleport anywhere she wanted. The blare of the alarm was muted now, but it seemed to be spinning all around her, to be inside her head. She tried to navigate the eyejack menu, but her eyes wouldn't focus, and the menu options slipped away. The klaxon was her heartbeat, pounding through her veins.

Footsteps thundered on all sides, and she was surrounded, men shouting at her, weapons aimed. All she had to do was one more thing, but she couldn't remember what it was. It was tremendously important, but she was so tired. She would remember what it was after she slept.

CHAPTER 19

L
ess than two hours after Alex walked into the prison, the news feeds gleefully announced her capture. She was the perfect news story—it was hard to beat a young female assassin for ratings—and they had hardly stopped talking about her since Secretary Falk had died. Now, there was fresh grist for the mill, and the talking heads could barely contain their delight. A female murderer caught visiting another female murderer! And both of them physicists! Was there a conspiracy? Had the older one trained the younger? Old footage of Jean Massey's trial and conviction were replayed, and the speculations were as varied as they were ridiculous.

Sandra didn't know what to do. All her friends were policemen, likely to side with law enforcement and the justice system. But Sandra wasn't about to trust the courts with this; there were too many witnesses who had seen Alex pull the trigger. For her to be exonerated, she would have to prove the existence of the varcolac, and prove that Falk and his agents had been killed by it not by her, and there wasn't much likelihood of that. No, the only way for Alex to get out of prison was for Sandra to break her out. But none of her cop friends would help with something like that. The ones who had been most likely to support her—Danielle and Nathan—had come to her dad's funeral, and now they were dead.

Her phone chimed. It was Ryan Oronzi. She thought about ignoring him, but he might know something. “What is it, Ryan?” she said.

“Alex isn't picking up.”

“She's a little busy right now, being captured and interrogated. Don't you watch the news?”

“Not much. I guess I have to talk to you then.”

“I guess you do, then.”

“I just wanted to let you know . . . the varcolac is out again.”

“What?”

“I just thought you should know.”

“What do you mean, it's out? You mean it's loose? I thought you said you could control it!”

“Not indefinitely. It defeated its protocol and escaped.”

“Ryan, this thing is trying to kill us. You have to capture it again!”

“It's not an animal. It's a thinking being. We can't just keep it caged up forever.”

Sandra took a deep breath. “It's a killer. If you can't control it . . .”

“It's not my fault. I'm not a miracle worker.”

“Not your fault? Are you kidding me?”

Ryan's voice took on a childish whine. “I'll do what I can, okay?”