Split second, p.10
Split Second, page 10
At this point, Blake saw no reason to lie. So he told him that he was a PI representing her, and Rourk didn’t bother demanding to see Blake’s wallet as Argent had done.
Rourk punched a number into his cell phone, by hand, which was almost unheard of, and waited for an answer.
“Rourk here,” he began when someone came on the line. “I’m still on Palomar Mountain. But Jenna Morrison hired a PI and he was snooping around out here. I have him, but I was forced to kill Mark Argent.”
Rourk listened to a brief response from whomever he had called and then continued. “I’m alone with the PI. For now. But the rest of the team will be checking up on us in no time. I doubt my cover will hold for long under the circumstances. I recommend leaving the area and using my captive to get to the girl. And we’ll still have one of our men on the inside, in case we need him.”
There was a pause of several seconds as Rourk listened intently. “Roger that,” he said finally, ending the connection.
He nodded to Blake, still holding the phone in his left hand while his gun hand remained extended. “Let’s go. Take me to Jenna Morrison right now.”
Blake had no idea who this man was or what was going on. He had seen that not even the key players themselves knew what team anyone was really on, not without a scorecard. So if Rourk threatened to kill him, this could well be a bluff. By the same token, if Rourk pretended to be his best friend, this could be a ruse as well.
There was no way to know.
What he did know was that Rourk was willing to kill in ice-cold blood, as he had demonstrated minutes earlier. So while Blake had been prepared to play it out a bit further with Argent, whose blood was now nourishing the trees, he needed to make a move on Rourk, no matter how risky. And the sooner he did so, the more likely he could catch him off guard.
Blake took a deep mental breath. “I can take you to Jenna. But I’m betting you don’t really need her.”
“Yeah? And what do you think I need?”
“It’s better if I show you.”
“Show me what?”
“I’m going to reach into my pocket. Very slowly. I’ll bring it out with two fingers. Just don’t shoot me.”
Not waiting for permission, Blake reached into his front pocket with great care and removed his decoy flash drive, watching Rourk’s body language as he did so. The man’s reaction wasn’t subtle. If he had been a dog, there would be a puddle of drool beneath him.
“I see you recognize this,” said Blake. “It has the only copy of Nathan Wexler’s work in existence. Jenna gave it to me. She also told me the password. Interested?”
“And if I am?” said Rourk evenly.
“I just want your word you’ll leave the girl in peace. We both know you don’t really want her. Just this thumb drive. So let’s go to a computer. I’ll tell you the password. You verify that it works and then let me go.” Blake paused. “Deal?”
Blake waved the memory stick back and forth as he spoke and noted with great interest that Rourk never once took his eyes from it. If it were a stopwatch the man would have been hypnotized by now.
“Deal,” said Rourk. He motioned up the mountain. “Lead on.”
“As a show of good faith, I’ll even let you hold on to the drive.”
Without waiting for an answer, Blake flung the memory stick in Rourk’s direction as hard as he could, so forcefully it landed a full ten yards behind its presumed target. Rourk couldn’t help but turn and follow its path, focusing on where it would land so he wouldn’t risk losing it in the dense undergrowth.
The instant he turned to follow the drive, Blake rolled to the ground, pulled his backup gun from his ankle holster for the second time in minutes, and came up firing, hitting Rourk in the left forearm just moments after the flash drive had landed behind him. Rourk’s phone went flying and he dived behind a wide trunk for cover.
“God-dammit!” he thundered as he hit the ground, further aggravating his wounded arm.
Blake could have shot his adversary in the head, but refused to kill him, even though it was arguably justified, until he knew all of the players and their motivations. The man had killed Argent, but Argent could have been the devil in disguise for all Blake knew, and Rourk’s action could well have saved his life.
But now he had forced Rourk to make a choice, as he had intended. The man could retrieve his prized flash drive lower down the slope. Or leave it and go after Blake, who was armed and clearly lethal.
It was as easy a choice as he had expected. Rourk still had his gun, but had little chance of hitting Blake, who was now planted behind a nearby tree trunk. Instead, Rourk picked his way toward where the flash drive had landed, taking a pinball path between trees to shield him from further fire as he worked his way toward his goal.
As soon as Blake was sure of Rourk’s intent, he retrieved the man’s fallen phone and beat a hasty retreat up the slope, putting distance and as many trees as he could between himself and his prior captor.
16
Aaron Blake was in excellent shape but was still out of breath by the time he reached the car, having sprinted uphill for eight minutes over uneven terrain.
“Duck down,” he instructed Jenna as he entered and took the wheel.
“What happened?”
Blake told her as he began driving down the mountain, clinging to a speed just a few miles over the limit, fighting back his adrenaline-fueled need to break the sound barrier. The fight-or-flight instinct perfected by evolution demanded that flight take place at the fastest possible speed, not at a veritable crawl. But the people after him didn’t know what car he drove, and screaming down the mountain like he was on fire would give them a giant hint.
Jenna shook her head in dismay after he had finished recounting what had happened. “Why am I having a déjà vu experience?” she said miserably. How many times was she going to be racing down Palomar Mountain, fearing for her life?
“So what are the chances we get off this mountain alive?” she asked.
“Excellent,” said Blake, his breath and heart rate rapidly returning to normal.
“How do you figure?”
“The parties after us are in conflict with each other. And I’ve seen that their loyalties are questionable. It’s a messy situation, which is good for us. We’re up against a boat filled with quality oarsmen, but they’re not all rowing in the same direction. I don’t think—”
Blake stopped abruptly as they shot around a turn and approached the stretch of road at which the men with Forest Service patches and hard hats were lurking. He took in the scene in a few practiced glances. Two of the men remained where they had been, but four others were now on the other side of the road, climbing up the slope and fanning out.
“Duck down lower,” he instructed, not wanting to risk that one of the four might happen to glance down at the road and into their car. He then relaxed his own features, turning himself into the picture of calm contentment for anyone observing.
“Okay, we’re clear,” he said less than a minute later, signaling Jenna that she no longer needed to fold her head into her lap. “I think we’re out of the woods now.”
Jenna thought about pointing out that this idiom probably wasn’t ideal when one was actually very much in the woods, but decided not to.
“As I was saying,” continued Blake, glancing at his rearview mirror every few seconds, “I like our chances of getting off this mountain alive, and even slipping away without incident. These guys will find their fallen comrade soon, but only Rourk knows we were here. And when it comes to the murder of Mark Argent, Rourk is in possession of a smoking gun, almost literally, so he has to get the hell out of here and avoid his former comrades. Since he also thinks he has the real thumb drive, there’s no way he’ll try to come after us right now. He’ll be racing to bring the memory stick back to his boss.”
Once again, Jenna was impressed with the speed and quality of his analysis, especially given the pressure they were under.
“How long until they break the password and realize the flash drive is a decoy?” asked Jenna.
“First he has to get it back to his boss, which could take a while. The password isn’t all that solid but will still take some time to break. I’m guessing we’ll have several hours, at minimum, before he cares about us again.”
Jenna nodded.
Blake removed a phone from his pocket and handed it to her. “This is Rourk’s phone. Copy all the names and numbers you can from it, and then throw it into the woods so we can’t be tracked.”
Jenna examined the phone for several minutes. “I’ve never seen a model like this. Must be disposable, because there is no data of any kind here. It’s not that his contact list is encrypted, it’s that I’m pretty sure it doesn’t even exist.”
Blake frowned. “Before Greg Soyer set up my phone to be untraceable, I used these burner phones myself. But I’ve never seen this exact breed before. Probably custom. I’m not entirely surprised, since Rourk entered the number he called by hand, which he wouldn’t need to do with even the most basic conventional phone.” He paused. “But if it’s like most burners, it will at least automatically save the last number dialed. See if you can find it.”
Jenna bent to this task immediately. “Got it!” she said less than a minute later.
“Outstanding,” said Blake. He handed her his own phone. “Enter the number in here for me.”
She worked his phone for a brief period and then announced that she was finished, handing it back to him. She then lowered the window and sent Rourk’s phone flying into the trees.
Blake checked the time on the car’s dash. “We don’t have as much cushion as we did, but we still should be able to make it to UCLA in time to get Dan Walsh.”
Jenna sighed. “True. Unless missiles start to, you know, rain down from the sky toward your car. Or there’s a division of tanks waiting for us at the bottom of the mountain.”
“Right,” said Blake with a tight smile. “If either of those things happen, it might make us a minute or two late.”
He turned toward Jenna and caught her eye. “One purpose in coming up here was to verify your story. Well, I can now say, without a doubt, that this has been accomplished. So I believe every word you’ve told me. You are not crazy, Jenna Morrison. This entire situation is absolutely batshit crazy, but you’re not.”
Even though these words had been a show of support, they served to bring back feelings of depression and loss. “Yeah. I only wish I were crazy. I wish I could wake up from a temporary insanity to find that the past twenty-four hours never really happened.”
Jenna looked away for several seconds and gathered herself. “I’d love to know if Greg has managed to bypass Nathan’s password yet,” she said.
“Yeah, me too. I wish there was a way to find out short of visiting him again, which we really don’t have time for now.”
Jenna nodded. It was impossible not to take instant communications for granted, but this was a relatively new development in human history. With Blake refusing to call or text Soyer, she was being given a taste of what the Dark Ages must have been like. If you wanted to learn the status of a friend who lived a hundred miles away, the only way to do it was to walk, run, or hope you had a horse.
Blake checked the time once again. “We’ll need to stop at my apartment. I’ll have just enough time to shower and gather a few things I’ll need before we’ll have to leave again to get Dr. Walsh.”
“Are you sure we should go forward with this? Why contaminate anyone else?”
“He’s already a part of this.”
“Yes. But you said yourself that if they wanted to kill him or take him they would have already done it. And I’m like Typhoid Mary. The kiss of death. If he ends up dead because of me, I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”
Blake sighed. “It’s possible you’re right. It’s possible contacting him will change his status, will suddenly make him a target. But if we ignore him, don’t warn him, he’s at their mercy. He won’t even know they’re out there. And what if he takes what’s in Nathan’s e-mail and works on it himself? He is a top physicist, right? So they could decide at any moment to take him out. At least if we bring him into the fray, he’ll have a chance.”
Jenna’s eyes narrowed in thought, but she didn’t respond.
“Also,” continued Blake, “we’re going to need someone to explain Nathan’s work to us once Greg Soyer uncovers it. And probably its significance. When Einstein came out with general relativity, I heard that even a lot of the world’s top physicists didn’t understand the math, or the full implications. But you know more about this than I do. Do you think you’ll be able to grasp what’s on that drive? Because I know I won’t have a clue.”
Jenna frowned. “No. You’re right. I’ve seen some of the papers Nathan wrote, and I’d understand them better if they were in Sanskrit.”
“So we’ll ultimately have to bring somebody in. Endanger someone. If we don’t, we’ll never truly understand what this is all about. And how do we know failing to get to the bottom of this won’t jeopardize thousands of other lives? Since Dr. Walsh is already endangered, it makes sense to go to him.”
“You’re right,” she said begrudgingly. “I don’t like it, but you’re absolutely right.” She blew out a long breath. “Let’s go pay a visit to UCLA.”
17
Dan Walsh walked the short distance from his office to Kendall Hall, where his quantum electrodynamics class met from seven thirty to nine. He only taught one night class, on Mondays, but he didn’t mind it. Most of the time he would just hang out on campus, have dinner with colleagues, and get some extra work done beforehand.
Besides, he liked the early evening. The air was cool, there wasn’t the usual kicked-anthill frenzy of students to dodge—a health hazard for someone often lost in thought—and the noise from the ever-present heavy construction equipment was finally quieted.
UCLA was the second oldest college in the California system, founded in 1919, and it had been growing ever since. It now had the largest enrollment of any school in the state, at well over forty thousand students, and the eclectic mixture of architecture reflected different periods of expansion and construction, and included faded red brick buildings, elaborate parking structures, an extensive sculpture garden, modern fountains, and stunning sorority and fraternity houses. In fact, the Westwood campus was so often in a state of flux, some joked UCLA actually stood for Under Construction Like Always.
Walsh had just turned thirty-four, and while his career was going relatively well, he had grown worried. Unlike wine, physicists and mathematicians tended to get worse with age. This wasn’t always the case, but often flashes of true, dazzling insight required young, daring minds, not hampered in their attempts at thinking outside of the box by having been inside the box too long. Not overly poisoned by conventional wisdom or fear of peer ridicule.
Einstein was the classic example. Unable to get a job at a university, at the tender age of twenty-six he published four papers that formed the basis of much of modern physics, shattering previous conceptions of space, time, mass, and energy: four papers so important they had been dubbed his Annus mirabilis papers, from the Latin for extraordinary year, which most English speakers preferred to translate into miracle year.
Walsh was beginning to resign himself to the idea that he would produce solid work and have a successful career, but he would never do more than polish and extend the insights of the truly great. He hadn’t given up yet, but he also had to be realistic about it.
But if you couldn’t be Einstein, being a close friend and colleague of the great man wasn’t a bad fate. And if Walsh’s sense of Nathan Wexler’s potential was accurate, he would be able to tell his spellbound grandchildren someday about his friendship with the leading thinker of his century.
On the other hand, if he wanted to have children, let alone grandchildren, he had some work to do. He was still single, but this was something he was hoping to change within a few years, at the latest. In fact, there was a girl in one of his graduate classes whom he really liked, and he sensed she liked him back. They really seemed to click.
And while this might just be the cliché attraction that many students were fabled to feel toward their professors—although this seemed to work better for literature professors than for those teaching physics—he didn’t care. She was twenty-five, so it wasn’t as though he was robbing the cradle, and he wouldn’t make the slightest overture toward her until she was no longer in his class.
But this didn’t stop him from fantasizing about her. It never ceased to amaze him the power of the sex drive. No matter how intelligent and rational a person was otherwise, the sex drive was controlled by more primitive regions, and could turn the most brilliant man on Earth into an animal, flirting with disaster in pursuit of physical gratification, even when he knew in his rational mind that this was nothing but a trick played on him by his incorrigible limbic system.
Walsh entered Kendall Hall and passed a dozen locked doors, including two lecture halls with a seating capacity of many hundreds. In the corridor in front of one of the lecture halls a student in his thirties was sitting with this back to the wall, reading a book, but Walsh didn’t recognize him and didn’t feel the need to interrupt.
He was fifteen or twenty minutes early, as was his habit. He entered the room that would house his class of twenty-two graduate students and made his way to the front, where a chalkboard spanned the entire wall.
He set his backpack down on the long table and prepared to fill the board with equations prior to the arrival of his students.
Walsh spotted a tablet computer someone had left on the table at the front of the room. It was hard to miss, as it was still on and very bright. Given that this must have been left by someone in the previous class, which had ended an hour earlier, he was surprised it was still glowing, having not gone into hibernation or run out of juice.
As he walked over to scoop it up, he was startled to find the top half of the screen displayed a photo of Jenna Morrison, Nathan Wexler’s fiancée. It was unmistakably her.
