Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4) Read online

  “Hardly. My daughter might be blind, might be in custody, or worse, she’s all alone. I’ve been kidnapped by my bodyguard, and apparently I’m somewhere under the ocean on a private submarine. Booker has his own sub?”

  “Six of them,” Kruse said. “He rotates them in and out of the area.”

  “Why?”

  “Just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “For just such an event as this,” Kruse said, as if it ought to be obvious. “To evacuate you, Rip, Cira.”

  “Well, he missed a couple of us.”

  “Look, Gale, cut me a break here. I’m doing my job. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

  “Shoot the messenger? You drugged me! You could have refused the order.”

  Kruse nodded. “I saw no other solution.”

  “The NSA is going to find us.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kruse said. “Not today. It’s a good plan. The crash was planned. They’ll find just enough wreckage to know it was real. They can check the satellites, but they’ll see no boats or planes nearby.”

  “Won’t they think of a rescue sub?”

  “Even if they do, it will be dismissed because how could there be one in the area? Too coincidental.”

  “But it was here.”

  “They don’t know that.”

  “He’s had subs here all these years?” she asked, skeptical, but very impressed.

  “We have contingency plans upon plans for every eventuality, and—”

  “You didn’t have one for Cira.”

  “No one expected a severe playground accident. That was a regrettable mistake, but Harmer is with her. Resources are being brought to bear. We’ll keep her safe, Gale. I promise.”

  “I hate you.”

  “I know.”

  She looked at Kruse, a man she had previously trusted and come to love like a brother. She didn’t really hate him, in spite of his betrayal, because obviously he’d been doing what he thought would best to protect them. He was a surrogate for a man she did despise though, and until she could scream at Booker, she could find no forgiveness, or even kindness, for Kruse.

  “They will think you and Cira died in the crash,” Kruse continued. “This is the most remote ocean on Earth. People are lost here, no bodies found, just fragments of the wreckage. There’s security footage of you leaving the hospital with Cira and getting into the plane. We took a dummy, roughly the same size as Cira, its head fully bandaged, IV attached to its arm.”

  “So they won’t know she’s still at the hospital?”

  “No,” Kruse said, smiling proudly.

  “But they’ll check the records. They’ll talk to the doctor.”

  “All handled.”

  “Money?”

  “Naturally.”

  “But they’ll search.”

  “She’s in a secret room. They won’t find her. Harmer is right there with her. They’ll believe she’s gone. Escaped with you on the plane.”

  “They won’t believe another crash, another death. We’ve used up that trick.”

  “That’s why they will, because no one would be crazy enough to do it again. Even if they don’t, you know this is all about buying time.”

  “And time is a funny thing.”

  Kruse nodded.

  “But what about Rip?” Gale asked. “They’ll look for Rip.”

  “Rip is already at El Perdido.”

  She closed her eyes at the thought of returning there, then opened them and stared directly into Kruse’s hard face. “If anything bad happens to Cira, I will kill you.”

  “If anything bad happens to her, I’ll let you.”

  Chapter 13

  Once the security guard got Harmer’s Eysen-INU tapped into the hospital’s surveillance camera network, Harmer relaxed a little. Now at least she could see for herself what was happening. She wished she could smoke one more cigarette before the action started, but it was not to be.

  Sooner than expected, people came looking for Cira and her parents. Harmer watched with a combination of relief and confusion as police filled the hospital. They swarmed and quickly covered all the exits. It didn’t take long for the man-in-charge to discover that Cira had already been discharged.

  Harmer could see him speaking into his Eysen-phone, a smaller, oval-shaped object about the size of a traditional cell phone. The phone linked to a person’s Eysen-INU over the internet, and was about the only accessory needed. Many people just kept their Eysen-INUs with them all the time and didn’t bother with a separate phone. One day, Booker’s company, Eysen, Inc., predicted they would be able to make Eysen-INUs as small as marbles.

  Harmer’s remote hope that the police might quickly leave was dashed. Obviously, whomever the man-in-charge spoke to on the phone had ordered a search.

  Still, the regular cops would be less likely to find Cira’s hiding place than the CIA, the NSA, or the military. As Harmer counted more than twenty officers, it became obvious this wasn’t just a local operation. Clearly one of the “big guns” had enlisted the police, but which one? The inflated numbers of the police meant serious trouble, and Harmer started to consider options for escaping. Even if they weren’t initially discovered, the police could just hold the facility until their paymasters arrived. It might help to know who was coming first.

  Harmer reviewed their enemies. US Intelligence, the Israeli Mossad, the Foundation, and Scarlet, a fragmented group of former Vatican Cardinals who declared that the Eysen-Sphere had been a fraud meant only to destroy organized religions, particularly the Catholic Church. She figured it was the US government that was the most likely to have had the assets—CIA, NSA, DIA, the military, etc.—and networks in place near enough to pose the biggest threat. However, any of the others could have found a way to influence the local police.

  Harmer eyed the video feed of the hallway they were on as two police officers checked each room. They were four doors away from the phony supply closet which concealed their room. The nurse and orderly watched nervously as Harmer readied her weapon. The orderly was particularly jittery. He was one of only five people in the building who knew the girl had not really been discharged, and with so many cops, any of them could crack. He wondered why so many police had come to arrest the six-year-old’s parents. Who were they really?

  “They’re going to find us,” he blurted.

  “No,” Harmer whispered firmly.

  “The wall isn’t even properly finished,” the orderly said, pointing to the backside of the sheetrock.

  “Quiet,” Harmer hissed.

  The police were now two doors away. Harmer looked at the wall. It was true that if they spent too much time in the supply closet, even more than a cursory glance, they would likely notice something—untaped seams in the sheetrock, no paint, the tiny panel at the end, not even a correct mix of supplies—and all it would take was a few minutes before Harmer would be dead and Cira in custody. She knew there was no way to defend the room.

  A wing and a prayer, Harmer thought to herself. Counting steps, she momentarily met eyes with the nurse. With a slight look at the faux wall, then at Cira, and finally back to the nurse, Harmer conveyed a list of instructions in half a second. The nurse nodded and asked the orderly to help move Cira’s bed to the corner. The three of them would be safest there when Harmer engaged the police.

  Two police officers entered the room next to Cira’s. Unfortunately, there was no camera in there. Patient rooms were not part of the hospital visual monitoring system. Harmer had noted that the cops were spending an average of about ninety seconds in each room. She looked at the time on her Eysen-INU, and waited.

  The nurse and the orderly were barely breathing, but Harmer worried that at any second the orderly would shout out. She never should have brought him in there, but maybe it was better than having him out there on the loose. Harmer could feel the tension coming from him, but didn’t dare turn around. She didn’t want to do anything to disturb the desperate hush, which seemed
to be the only thing holding the room together. The nurse, “a cool customer,” had muted all of Cira’s monitors. Perhaps her stoic presence could also somehow keep the orderly calm.

  Ninety seconds had passed and Harmer felt the dampness on her trigger. She was sweating, not typical for her. The camera on Harmer’s Eysen-INU was on. Thousands of miles away, Booker silently watched the wall with the rest of them. Frustrated, he switched his gaze between screens showing the situation around the world – Gale’s plane over the Indian Ocean, Rip on El Perdido, various AX teams, and tracking any number of mobilized groups in pursuit of them all. Not since the days following Gale and Rip’s death had their mission been in this much jeopardy.

  Booker communicated with an AX team already in the air over Fiji. They were ready to parachute down and take the hospital by force and evacuate Cira, but that was not an option Booker wanted to use. Even if they could get the six-year-old safely out of the building, she would most likely permanently lose her eyesight, and they would still need to escape Fiji undetected. That was not a promising scenario since the NSA now had the island nation under every form of scrutiny. They would know when a butterfly landed on a new flower, or which seagull caught the most fish. Still, if the police, or anyone else, discovered Cira’s room, AX would go in. They would have to try, if for no other reason that to be able to show Gale and Rip that Booker had tried to save their daughter.

  Two and a half minutes. The police were staying in the room too long. Harmer’s mind raced. Were they in there preparing an assault? Had the patient seen something while they were constructing the wall? Harmer clearly remembered closing all nearby doors while the work on Cira’s room was being done. The patient couldn’t have seen, so what the hell is taking so long?

  Three minutes.

  They must know! Harmer heard the orderly sigh behind her, almost more of a wince. Damn it, he’s not going to last much longer. Suddenly, two more officers entered the hallway. What’s this? Harmer took a deep breath and scanned the rest of the cameras, looking for any other signs of an impending build up to an attack.

  Three minutes, twenty seconds. Booker saw the new cops and relayed a command to the AX agents in the air. “Be ready on my signal.”

  Chapter 14

  Taz and Stellard had discovered enough about Gaines and his Sphere that the entire Foundation was on high alert. All of its many assets —money, connections, control, power—were being mobilized, but the Foundation’s most powerful tool—a young, brainy woman and the object she studied—were secreted away in a highly secure, yet unassuming office park in northern California.

  Savina, thin, beautiful, and brilliant, commanded the attention of everyone who shared the same room as her. It didn’t matter if it was filled with men, women, scientists, billionaires, or dogs. With long brown hair, dropping below her shoulders, and an affinity for wearing blue jeans and striped tee-shirts, she looked eighteen instead of thirty. The Foundation had paid a lot of money to retain her.

  As one of the brightest physicists in the world, she’d been extremely sought after. No one would have guessed by her parents—her mother a librarian, father a plumber—that she would turn into a child prodigy, but even in her crib, as she counted and organized toys, the signs were obvious. Savina was reading by two, and at four she’d devoured a couple of years’ worth of National Geographic magazines from the family bookshelf. When her mother gave her some advanced math and science books, the spark really ignited.

  Savina looked into the smooth, highly-polished dark ball in front of her, and waited as it cycled through the Sequence. Watching it always made her smile, not because of the remarkably impossible show it displayed, she was long over the dazzle of that, rather her smugness came from the advantage she had over her adversary. Savina now knew there was another Eysen-Sphere on Earth, but the newly no-longer-dead Dr. Ripley Gaines, she believed, did not know another Eysen-Sphere remained.

  Each day for nearly five years she’d begun her studies of the ancient object watching the Sequence, trying to decode the universal depths of knowledge contained within its infiniteness. Every one of those days had been an adventure, expanding her already genius mind.

  As recently as two weeks ago she’d requested a larger staff, but as always the Judge said no. “The Judge,” as she called the wealthy man who’d hired, and inspired, her out of grad school, was not truly a judge, at least not in the legal sense. His philosophy of what the world ought to be had changed her life, and in turn, she had changed his. With this new information that the other Eysen had not been destroyed, she was certain he’d give her the staff she needed.

  The Judge’s denial of her request had nothing to do with cost. He’d given her everything else she’d ever wanted. The facility in which she studied the Eysen-Sphere was among the most advanced in the world. No, it was a matter of security. Savina and her two assistants had been vetted, investigated, and triple-checked in every manner available. Unbeknownst to them, he also kept them under around-the-clock surveillance, monitoring their phone, email, mail, Internet, and their physical locations and actions.

  Savina would not have been surprised if she’d known, nor would she have cared. She knew the future was at stake—everything—and she believed the Judge knew what was right. If anything, her work had proved his prophetic genius even more. The future she’d seen inside the Sphere showed a potentially humanity-ending plague emerging soon. The views changed radically when the Phoenix Initiative was added to the equation, and the closer they came to the launch, the higher the survival rate became.

  “Hello, Dr. Ripley Gaines,” she said into the Sphere as her two male assistants looked surprised.

  “He’s alive?” one of them asked.

  “Apparently,” she replied, adjusting her large tortoise shell eyeglasses. “And we’re going to track him down.”

  “Is that possible?” the assistant asked. “I mean to find him inside the Sphere?”

  “Remember the research? The Eysens can connect to other Eysens.”

  “Yes, I remember the theory based upon the time, centuries ago, when there were multiple Eysens still floating around out there . . . no pun intended,” he said, glancing at the Eysen-Sphere levitating above the table. “But we looked, and we found nothing. Maybe Gaines is alive but the Eysen didn’t survive?”

  “Possible, but doubtful,” Savina replied in such an assured manner that her pronouncement seemed indisputable. She’d been homeschooled, finished high school level at age twelve, and graduated from MIT at sixteen. Next was Harvard, and in between then and the Sphere, she’d worked at a number of universities, research labs, CERN, including time at the Large Hadron Collider, and even NASA.

  “So why didn’t we find it?”

  “We didn’t try hard enough,” she said absently as she peered into the center of the Sphere.

  “We spent months,” the other assistant countered.

  “I didn’t say we didn’t spend enough time, I said we didn’t try hard enough. We didn’t understand two things back then,” Savina explained, pushing her glasses on top of her head. “First, we only half believed that the other Eysen might still exist.”

  “That shouldn’t matter,” one of the assistants interrupted.

  “Oh, but it does,” she said, a subtle hint of awe in her voice. The assistants didn’t completely believe Savina’s long held theory that the Eysen was “in tune” and able to understand and react to one’s thoughts. “That’s why we didn’t get the second part,” she continued as projections of light beamed from the Eysen, showing cross-sections of the Earth, spinning, divided by levels of color in a manner they still did not comprehend. “We didn’t understand that we were not looking for something separate.”

  “What does that mean?” one of them asked while checking on the video recording equipment. They tracked and recorded the Eysen from multiple angles whenever it was “on.” The system was automated, but a few years earlier they had lost hours of crucial data to a glitch. Ever since, they co
nstantly inspected the gear to make sure it was working. In spite of being meticulous, about once every few weeks they would discover it had inexplicably stopped.

  “The Eysens belong to the same source,” she said, as if it should be obvious. “We were looking for another one because it isn’t here, and therefore we see it as separate, but just as two particles can react when separated by great distance—”

  “Action at a distance, quantum entanglement?”

  “Yes . . . sort of.”

  “But that’s a murky area of disagreement.”

  “And the Eysen isn’t?” she asked rhetorically. “I’m saying they are one. If the Eysen-Sphere has taught us anything, it’s that it is connected to some kind of undying, recharging, enormous energy that we don’t understand. It may even be incomprehensible given the limitations of current human intelligence.”

  “And yet here we are.”

  “Right, but what did I tell you each on your first day in this lab?”

  “And you’ve told us again at least a thousand times since,” one of them said. “In fact, we should make a sign so you could just point to it.”

  “‘You cannot think of the Eysen in terms of anything you understand because it is too far beyond our knowledge to apply the limitations of our understanding,’” they recited in unison.

  “Right,” she said. “It must show us. We’re all simply wanderers in the universe trying to find our way home.”

  “A home we don’t remember.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Whenever you hit a wall and aren’t sure what to do, stop thinking and unleash your imagination. Instead of trying to answer the question you’re working on, try to answer the question you’re about to ask. This relates to the other Eysen because it’s a piece of this Eysen.”

  “Then how many pieces are there?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, rubbing her eyes and staring off into nothingness, as if contemplating that question for a moment before shaking it off. “But I do know that there’s at least one other piece, and Ripley Gaines has it.”