The Roswell Conspiracy

FIFTEEN

Starbucks hadn’t yet opened a franchise in Alice Springs, so as he steered the rented Jeep out of the city, Tyler drank a cup of truck-stop coffee strong enough to be used as an industrial solvent. He supposed that made sense, given the vast stretches of outback drivers would have to cross to get anywhere else.

Alice Springs was the largest town for eight hundred miles, and in the short time he’d been there, Tyler had sensed an independent nature that was likely characteristic of the 27,000 inhabitants. Despite its geographic isolation, the town was no stranger to strangers. Visiting ranchers, miners, explorers, and truckers making the long haul between Adelaide to the south and Darwin to the north were the lifeblood of the city.

Still, the group he was with surely stood out. Grant was next to him, with Jess and Fay in the back. The four of them together wouldn’t go unnoticed for long, which was why they’d kept a low profile coming into town.

Tyler involuntarily glanced in the mirror at Jess and she caught him looking. They’d had no time alone to talk during the trip, and maybe that was for the best. He was still attracted to her, still felt the pull between them, but trying to start something up again after all this time, under these circumstances, was a ridiculous thought. In any case he didn’t get the sense that she wanted anything from him except help in solving their mystery. He would approach this job as a professional, nothing more.

Right. If that were true, why couldn’t he stop looking in the mirror?

To distract himself, Tyler focused on the upcoming meeting with Jeremy Hyland at the CAPEK facility. With no inkling to how CAPEK might be connected, they thought it safer to use Tyler’s status as chief engineer at Gordian to arrange a nine a.m. meeting with the student, without mentioning his tip to the New Zealand police.

Because the flight from the US to New Zealand was so long, Tyler hadn’t used one of Gordian’s Gulfstream private jets for the trip, which meant they’d had to fly commercial to Alice Springs. With the connection, the flight from Queenstown had taken seven hours, and during that time they’d rehashed the events of the previous day and the possible meaning of Fay’s artifact with no further insight.

The only new information they’d gleaned during the stopover in Sydney was that Billy Raymond had been struck by a pickup in a Phoenix shopping mall parking lot. There were no witnesses to the hit-and-run. The pickup, stolen earlier that day, was eventually found, but the police had no further leads. They believed the culprit was a car thief or joyriding teenager who got scared and fled the scene.

Nobody in Tyler’s group, however, thought Raymond’s death was coincidental. For some reason, Blaine, who’d traveled all the way to New Zealand to steal a seemingly worthless artifact, kill Fay Turia, and burn down her house to cover the evidence, had been at a high-tech experimental research facility in the middle of Australia less than a week before. And his likeliest connection to Fay was Billy Raymond, now lying in an Arizona grave.

Though Tyler didn’t believe in alien visitors to Earth, he did think Fay’s relic had some significance that they hadn’t yet divined. They were obviously missing crucial information that would shed light on why the wood engraving was so important, and they were all hoping Jeremy Hyland could point them in the right direction.

“I’m coming in with you to see Hyland,” Fay said.

A night’s sleep in the local motel obviously hadn’t changed her mind.

“Fay,” Tyler said, “we don’t know how CAPEK figures into this.”

“Blaine’s partners could be watching the place,” Grant said.

“I’d feel better if you stayed in the car until we check them out. In fact, I’d rather you stayed back at the hotel.”

“I didn’t come three thousand miles to wait in the car like a little girl. If this Hyland kid knows something, I want to be there.”

Tyler looked in the rearview mirror at Jess. “Your call. Blaine’s friends might still be around.”

“If that’s the case, then they probably saw you on that tourist’s video of the jet boat dock,” she said. “We’ll all go in.”

Tyler shook his head. “All right.”

The trip from Alice Springs to the project headquarters north of the city took fifteen minutes. They turned onto a dusty road labeled with a small sign saying, “Charles Darwin University — Transportation Research Center”.

Though CDU had an extension in Alice Springs, the newly created research facility was located outside of town so that its vehicles could access the Northern Territory highways more easily during road testing. A half-mile down the road, Tyler saw the low-slung building rising from the scrubby desert. Because it was a Sunday, only a few cars were parked in the lot.

Tyler was about to park in front of the entrance when he noticed that a garage door was open on the side of the building. He wheeled the Jeep around and stopped next to it. He could see a man hunched over the hood of a car.

The four of them got out. The clear blue sky was cloudless all the way to the low mountain ridges to the south. The winter air was cool but pleasant, requiring nothing heavier than a windbreaker. Grant would have been sweltering in the parka, which meant Tyler was spared another day with Sergeant Traffic Cone.

The man inside the garage heard the doors slam and looked up. He couldn’t have been older than twenty and had grease stains on his sunburned cheeks. Tyler recognized him as Jeremy Hyland from the bios and photos posted on the CAPEK project’s website.

“You Dr. Locke?” Hyland said with a heavy Australian accent.

“I am,” he said and introduced the others, eliciting a round of g’days. “You must be Jeremy.”

“That’s right. I’d shake your hand, but I’m not very presentable at the moment.”

“Thanks for taking the time to meet with us.”

“No worries. Any chance to meet the chief engineer from Gordian.”

“You’ve heard of his company?” Jess asked.

“Heard of them? Any engineer would give their right arm to work there. Say, would you put in a good word for me at the Sydney office?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Tyler said.

“So what can I help you …” All of a sudden, Hyland’s eyes went wide with recognition. “Hold on! You three were in the video!”

Tyler nodded. “That’s actually why we’re here.”

Hyland grinned. “Wait’ll I tell my mates. I couldn’t believe it when the jet boat rolled over onto the beach. That was bloody bonzer!”

“We understand you recognized one of the men chasing us.”

“I emailed the Kiwi police about it, but I suppose they thought I was some kind of nutter.”

“You sure it was the same guy?”

“He was sitting in the driver’s seat of a car right where yours is. I was walking by and only saw him from the side. That’s why I wasn’t sure it was him in the video. But that mess of an ear was hard to forget.”

“What about the man he was chauffeuring around?”

“I never spoke to his boss. I went back to work while my professor gave him a tour of the place. Said he was some kind of corporate sponsor.”

“Do you remember the boss’s name?”

Hyland shook his head. “Some gray-haired bloke. Wasn’t old, though. Looked like he could wrestle a croc and win.”

“How about his company?”

“Sorry. You’d have to ask Professor Stevens.”

“Where can we find him?”

“Don’t know. CAPEK and the van were gone when I got here this morning. He left a message that he was taking it out for a run.”

“You mean the robotic truck?”

Hyland nodded. “Beautiful piece of work, if I do say so myself. Gonna revolutionize shipping in Australia, although the truckies won’t care for it.”

“The truck drivers?” Fay said. “Why?”

“Well, it’s a robotic truck, you see. We’ve got thousands of miles of desolate roads running through the outback. CAPEK is the first step in making them autonomous vehicles. Operating in remote regions to start with, of course. Private mines. Sheep stations. Like that. But eventually they could travel all the way from Darwin to Adelaide using GPS and on-board cameras.”

“How close are you to becoming operational?” Grant asked.

“We’re there now if the government would certify us. We’ve put forty thousand miles on CAPEK so far, though we’ve had someone in the driver’s seat the whole time in case there’s a problem. Haven’t had a single incident.”

“Did you have a test today?” Tyler said.

“It wasn’t on the schedule. I imagine Professor Stevens wanted to do some fine-tuning.”

“How does it work?”

“The truck can be driven normally, but once the robotic system is activated, the driving functions are totally autonomous. We have a chase van used for control and monitoring. The truck uses sensors, GPS navigation, and computer-controlled servomechanisms to stay on the road, and the person monitoring in the van gives it commands to start, stop, and turn. Eventually you’ll be able to plug in a destination with no further input. While we’re testing, you usually need three people to operate it: one in CAPEK, one to drive the van, and one in the back of the van monitoring.”

Hyland frowned.

“What’s the matter?” Tyler asked.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just that I was surprised they took it out without me. It being winter break, the only other student around is Milo Beech.”

“So it’s just the three of you? Isn’t it odd for you not to go with them?”

“I suppose it’s not that unusual. The professor must have had his reasons. And it’s easy enough for two people to do. They find a stretch of road, park the van, and drive the truck up and down to collect data.”

“Can you call the professor?” Tyler asked. “We’d like to talk to him.”

Hyland shook his head again. “When he left me the message that they’d be taking it out this morning, he told me he’d be turning off his phone so he wouldn’t be distracted during the testing. But he should be back after lunch.”

“What time?”

“Two o’clock should do it.”

“You sure we can’t contact him sooner?”

Hyland looked to each of them in turn as if he were making up his mind about something, then nodded.

“I suppose it’d be all right to tell you where you can find him.”

“You just said he’s not answering his phone,” Fay said. “How can you find out where he is?”

“I’ll show you.” He beckoned for them to follow him into the garage.

Hyland sat at a computer terminal and everyone gathered around him. He talked while he clicked through the screens. “Of course, when there’s a fleet of robotic trucks in operation, we’ll need to know where they are at all times, so we have a system to track their GPS signals.”

The map on screen was scaled to one inch per hundred miles, so the blinking dot representing the truck didn’t tell them much. Hyland blew up the map by a factor of ten.

“That’s weird,” he said.

“What’s weird?” Tyler asked.

“Well, I expected them to be out the back of beyond, but they’re in Alice Springs. The truck’s not moving. Wonder what he’s doing there.”

“Can you overlay a satellite map on that?”

“No worries.”

A few clicks later, an overhead view of Alice Springs appeared.

If the satellite map was up to date, the truck was currently parked next to a warehouse, right in the middle of town.

SIXTEEN

While the C-17 taxied to a remote area of the Alice Springs airport’s tarmac, Morgan called Dr. Kessler. Vince was already standing; Josephson was busy checking the moorings to make sure none of the equipment had come loose during the flight.

“Yes?” Kessler answered.

“Are you ready?” she said.

“I saw you land as we were driving in. We’ll be there in a minute.”

She hung up.

“I hate flying on planes with no windows,” Vince said. “I wanted to see Ayer’s Rock.”

“That’s over a hundred miles west of here,” Morgan said. “You wouldn’t have seen it anyway.”

“Still. Where’s Kessler?”

“On his way.”

The cargo plane lurched to a halt. The loadmaster scrambled down the stairs from the upper deck and opened the side door. Per procedure, he wouldn’t open the rear doors until the cargo was ready to be unloaded.

Morgan followed him out to see two local police cars guarding the street entrance. They’d stop anyone who tried to get within a hundred yards of the plane.

Vince stretched his arms and put on sunglasses as he peered at the sparse trees dotting the red landscape.

“That is a whole lot of nothing,” he said.

“You’re from West Texas.”

“So I know what I’m talking about.”

So did Morgan. She grew up in Ohio, but her pilot training had been at Laughlin Air Force Base in Nevada. The terrain here looked familiar to her, except there were no tall mountain ranges surrounding the airport like they did in Vegas — just a few ridges in the distance.

The sound of a truck’s engine made her turn. A nondescript white two-axle truck was stopped by the police, and the driver flashed his identification. The policeman waved him through. Morgan walked toward the back of the plane to meet the truck at the cargo door.

Kessler got out of the passenger side, and three men emerged from the rear of the truck.

“Welcome to Australia, Agent Bell,” Kessler said. “Agent Cameron. Have a good flight?”

“Peachy,” Vince said.

“Have there been any new developments while we were in the air?” Morgan asked.

Kessler shook his head. “We’re all settled in and ready to get prepped for the weapon test.”

“I’ll need to see your IDs,” she said to the men with Kessler. All of them were carrying pistols. She peered in the back of the truck and spotted three automatic rifles.

They looked at the scientist as if to ask if she were for real. Kessler nodded that she was, and they showed her their IDs. All of them were NSA agents on the Pine Gap security team.

“All right,” she said to the loadmaster. “Let’s go.”

He lowered the ramp and released the clamps on the crate carrying the Killswitch. The four security men kept watch as Josephson and the loadmaster used a hand truck to move the crate off the plane. It took only a few minutes to lash it securely to the truck’s floor.

Once Kessler was satisfied that it was in place, two of the security men and Josephson climbed inside with it.

“Are you staying here or going with it?” Morgan asked Kessler.

“Josephson can take care of it. I’ll stay here to supervise unloading the most delicate equipment. You may ride back with me.”

“How long will you be?”

“No more than ten minutes.”

Morgan nodded as she watched a semi pull into the airport entrance, where the police allowed it to enter. It stopped next to the C-17. At the same time a forklift motored over to the plane.

“Are we cleared to go, Dr. Kessler?” one of the security men said.

“Yes,” Kessler said. “Close it up. Collins will meet you at the base to unload. Make sure you stay with the crate until it reaches the lab.”

“Yes, sir.”

The rear door of the smaller truck was shut, and the two other security team members climbed into the front seats. Morgan watched them drive off.

While she waited for Kessler’s men to load the semi rig with the rest of the equipment, she called back to the office to see if they’d made any progress tracking down the origin of the Internet videogame forum message.

Tyler parked the Jeep down the street from the unmarked warehouse where the CAPEK truck was located. He’d driven slowly past it and they had seen the robotic semi and chase van next to a dozen white trailers, four of which were backed up to the warehouse loading bays. Cars and trucks passed them periodically, so the Jeep’s presence wouldn’t be noticeable.

“Hyland thought this was an odd place to bring the truck,” Tyler said. “I agree.”

“What do you think it’s doing here?” Grant asked.

“Only one way to find out.”

“If you’re going inside,” Jess said, “we’re going with you.”

“That would be no,” Tyler said. “Something about this doesn’t feel right. Until we know it’s safe, you’re staying in the car.”

“Should we call the police?” Fay said.

“We don’t have any reason to just yet.”

Grant pointed at the warehouse. “We’ve got movement.”

Two men walked quickly from the warehouse. One of them, a powerfully built man in his forties, had steel-gray hair. They climbed inside the van.

“Neither of those guys looked like students to me,” Grant said.

“Looks more like our mysterious sponsor.”

“And the other one wasn’t Stevens. He must be in the warehouse.”

“We’re going to see if we can get a better view of the place from the other side,” Tyler said. “We’ll also try to snap a photo of our mystery man’s face. Jess, you take the wheel. Drive us down past the next warehouse. We’ll hop out and you continue on.”

“Where?”

“Drive around the block and come back here to keep an eye on the place. We’ll turn off our cell phone ringers but leave them on vibrate. If you see anything suspicious, text me, then call the police. We’ll call when we’re ready to be picked up.”

“I don’t like this.”

“Neither do I,” Tyler said as he backed the Jeep up the street until they were out of view of the warehouse. “But we need to get some answers, and I’m not ready to put Fay in harm’s way again.”

Getting shot at and having her house burned down was bad enough. If it was the same guys, they might want to finish the job. Tyler was already queasy about putting her in this much jeopardy.

“You don’t even have guns,” Jess said.

“This is just a recon mission. If we see any weapons, I’ll text you to call the cavalry.”

Jess reluctantly nodded. “All right. But be careful.”

“What do you think?” Tyler said to Grant. “Should we be careful?”

Before Grant could answer, Jess punched Tyler in the arm. “Okay, wiseass. Out of the car.”

As he passed her outside, he said with a smile, “That’s Doctor Wiseass to you.”

“Tell me when it’s on your business card.”

Tyler and Grant got in the back and put their phones on vibrate. Jess drove to the empty warehouse next door as if she were delivering something in back. When they were on the opposite side, Tyler and Grant jumped out. Jess made a U-turn and headed back to the street.

Grant peeked around the corner at the warehouse and switched his cell phone to camera mode. “There’s a Dumpster thirty feet away. We’ll be able to see him if we hide behind it. I think that’s about as close as we can get.”

Tyler smiled. “We could always bust into the warehouse unannounced.”

“Going into a warehouse potentially full of gunmen with no intel and armed with whatever large rocks we can pick up from the dirt? Even a rookie lieutenant would think we’d be nuts going with that plan.”

“And so instead we take pictures.”

“Then we’ll text the photo to Hyland,” Grant said.

“Right. If he positively identifies the guy as Blaine’s cohort, we’ll ask the police to come on down and knock on the front door.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

A woman spoke from behind them. “No, it’s not.”

Tyler turned expecting to see that Jess had ignored his instructions. Instead, a blonde woman walked toward them flanked by two serious-looking men.

All three of them were aiming pistols at him and Grant, who raised their hands to show they were unarmed.

“What?” Grant said. “They have cameras that can see all the way over here?”

“If you mean the men inside that warehouse,” the woman said, “I’m not with them.”

“Who are you?” Tyler said.

“Nadia Bedova. Russian intelligence.”

Tyler looked at Grant, who stared back at him with the same astonished look he must have had on his own face.

“What the hell is going on here?” he said.

“Dr. Locke, you and Mr. Westfield are going to help me disarm a bomb.”

SEVENTEEN

“Search them,” Bedova said.

While she and one of the men kept their guns trained on Tyler and Grant, the second man frisked them. He found their phones and Tyler’s Leatherman multi-tool. She held on to the phones but tossed the tool back to Tyler.

“I can’t have you attempting to make a call, but you may need that for your task,” Bedova said, nodding at the Leatherman. “You can lower your hands.”

Tyler narrowed his eyes at Bedova. “How do you know our names?”

“When I saw you driving down the street casing the warehouse,” she said with the slightest accent, “I used our facial recognition software to identify you.”

“You have us on file?”

“Do you really think you could stay off our radar after finding Noah’s Ark and the tomb of King Midas?”

Grant raised a hand. “My first question, and, I think, most relevant: uh, bomb?”

“The silver-haired man you saw going to the van is Vladimir Colchev,” Bedova said. “According to our intelligence, he’s been trying to acquire explosives from mining companies around the country for months, apparently unsuccessfully. But we know that this week he procured forty tons of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosive and had it shipped here. We think he’s planning to use it. Today.”

Grant whistled. “That would put a nice dent in Ayer’s Rock.”

“Who is Colchev?” Tyler asked her.

“A Russian national wanted by my government. He has a highly trained team ready to follow his orders. Now a question from me. Why are you here?”

“Concerned citizens.”

“You’re not even Australian. I already have a potential international incident on my hands, so either you cooperate or I’ll shoot you both now and take my chances without you.”

Tyler cleared his throat. “Well, that seems like a fair trade. Two of his men attacked a woman in Queenstown, New Zealand yesterday. Burned her house to the ground and tried to kill her.”

“Did they succeed?”

Grant shook his head. “They’re both currently resting comfortably in the morgue.”

“Do you know why they attacked her?”

“Haven’t a clue,” Tyler lied without hesitation.

“Then why are you here?” Bedova asked.

“We got a tip that one of the assailants had been seen in Alice Springs,” Grant said, “so we came to do a little private detective work and ran into you lovely people in the process.”

“Did you talk to the man before he died?”

“Fay did,” Tyler said. He saw no reason to hide her name since it was all over the news.

“Did he say anything about Icarus or the date July twenty-fifth?”

“Not that we know of. What’s Icarus?”

“How about the Baja drug cartel or Wisconsin Ave?”

Tyler was confounded. A rogue Russian spy is willing to kill for a relic from Roswell, then buys enough explosive to depopulate central Australia, and now the agent after him is asking about Mexican narcotics gangs and Greek mythology? If Tyler lived through this, he was going to love to hear the explanation behind it.

He shook his head in answer to her question. “Never heard of them. Maybe a little context would be useful.”

Bedova stared at him. “I need you to look at the bomb he’s built and tell me if it can be disarmed.”

“Why do you want our help? Why not just call the police?”

“We obtained a layout of the warehouse, so we have our assault planned out, but we’re waiting on our bomb expert. When you showed up, I saw an opportunity to keep this quiet. He’s coming from Singapore and won’t be here for another five hours. From our observations, Colchev is getting ready to make his move sooner than that. Are you going to help us or will you let him detonate a truck bomb in the middle of the city?”

“What you’re really saying is that you want us to save you the trouble of an international incident started by your rogue agent.”

“Will you do it?”

Tyler looked from the pistol to Grant. “What do you say?”

He could see that Grant was thinking the same thing. The odds were that she was sharing so much information with them because she was planning to get rid of them right after she did away with Colchev. Still, they had little choice, and if a bomb that size exploded, it could kill everyone within a quarter-mile, including Jess and Fay where they were parked.

Grant nodded and regarded Bedova with a dead-eyed gaze. “I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about assisting you.”

“Good,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm. “If you try to get away, I will shoot you both and then kill your friends waiting for you in the Jeep.”

Tyler mirrored her unflinching stare. “We’re not going anywhere.” Yet.

“The plan is that we wait for Colchev to come out of the van. As he’s entering the building, my two men on the other side of the warehouse will move in. We won’t kill him until we’re sure that there’s no danger of someone detonating the bomb. We think it’s in one of the four trucks backed up to the warehouse.”

“What if he’s divided the explosives among the four trucks?”

“Then you’ll have to assess all four and tell me if you can disable them.”

“And if we can’t?”

“Then we’ll call the police,” is what Bedova said, but Tyler didn’t think for a second that she actually would.

“All right,” Tyler said, furiously trying to think of a way out of their predicament. For now, going along with her was the only choice. “Lead the way. It’s your party.”

Bedova looked at him, perplexed. She obviously didn’t understand the idiom, but let it go. She tilted her head. Tyler guessed that she was listening to an earpiece hidden by her hair.

“He’s on the move,” she said. “It’s time. Stay behind me.”

With no one in sight, Bedova sprinted toward the warehouse. Tyler ran crouched next to Grant, with Bedova’s two men bringing up the rear. In the Army when he’d done this kind of thing, Tyler usually had a helmet, body armor, and M4 assault rifle, so now he felt practically naked. By the way Grant clenched his fists, Tyler could tell that his friend also missed the heft of a weapon.

They reached the door of the warehouse. Tyler could hear the shouts of men working inside. Bedova picked the lock and pulled the door ajar. She paused as she scanned the interior, then nodded. They all kept low as they crept inside.

Now Tyler saw why Bedova had chosen this entry. This door must have served as the entrance to the warehouse office. Its interior wasn’t visible from the main warehouse floor.

She kept below the level of the windows and went to the open door on the other side of the room. Tyler and Grant followed. Without speaking she pointed toward the front of the warehouse.

Tyler could see into the cargo area of the closest trailer. The shadows hid most of the contents, but five feet inside he could barely make out four oil drums with wires leading from them.

They’d found their bomb.

With a series of hand gestures, Bedova indicated for one of her men to take Tyler and Grant over to the trailer and keep an eye on them while they examined the device. At the same time, she’d make her assault.

She and the first man dashed out of the office. Tyler and Grant crabbed over to the trailer with the operative assigned to watch them. The two of them entered the trailer while the Russian stayed nearby and kept a lookout.

Tyler’s eyes were still adjusting to the dark as he moved past the barrels. He stopped when his foot bumped into something pliant.

Grant pointed behind one of the drums. A body. Tyler recognized the face from a photo at the research center. It was Professor Stevens. Another limp figure lay next to him. He didn’t recognize the man, but it had to be the student, Milo Beech.

Tyler knelt and felt for a pulse. They were both alive. He lightly slapped Stevens’ face, but the professor didn’t move. Same for Beech. Tyler put two hands together at the side of his head to indicate to Grant that they were out cold, probably drugged.

Now that his eyes had adjusted, Tyler could see the truck’s interior past the drums. Stacked floor-to-ceiling were twenty-five-pound bags full of pink ANFO pellets. Enough space to hold all forty tons of it.

Grant examined the wires from behind one of the barrels so he wouldn’t block the dim light coming from the warehouse.

“Doesn’t look like it’s booby-trapped,” he whispered. “But I don’t see a timer or receiver for a radio-controlled detonation.”

“When Bedova’s got the place secured, we can—”

Shouts inside the warehouse interrupted Tyler. The man who’d been guarding them took cover behind a forklift. Tyler and Grant edged out the rear of the trailer where Tyler spied Bedova and the rest of her men surrounded by Colchev’s operatives.

She spoke to Colchev in soothing Russian that suggested a history between them. Colchev shook his head and answered in English.

“Remember what my note said, Nadia?”

Bedova nodded, but she didn’t lower her gun. “I can’t let you do this, Vladimir.”

“And I can’t let you leave.”

“You can’t go back to Russia. Not ever.”

Colchev slowly shook his head. “In four days they will welcome me with open arms after they see what I’ve achieved.”

The operative behind the forklift, the last of Bedova’s men still hidden, stood to shoot, but one of Colchev’s operatives spotted him and hit him with a three-round burst to the chest. The man fell backward, his finger on the trigger of his weapon. Automatic fire spewed toward the ceiling, the suppressor muting the shots so that they weren’t much louder than the pings of the bullet impacts.

In response silenced gunfire erupted from every direction. Bedova’s team scrambled for cover, blasting away as they ran, but they were caught in a crossfire. Two of Colchev’s men had perfect sightlines on her team and cut down their targets with lethal precision. Within seconds, Bedova’s three other men were dead.

Bedova showed no fear as she returned fire, dropping to one knee and taking aim at Colchev in a textbook stance. She got off three rounds, but Colchev was too quick. He rolled to the side as bullets pinged off the metal walls behind him. He came to rest in a prone position and pulled his trigger just once. Bedova’s head snapped backward, and she crumpled to the floor.

“Cease fire!” Colchev shouted. He got to his feet and walked over to Bedova’s corpse, where he knelt beside her, softly caressing her hair. Tyler saw no satisfaction, only remorse.

Tyler was about to suggest they make a break for it when Colchev stood and started to turn toward the open trailer. Tyler and Grant scrambled behind the barrels before they were spotted.

“Close everything up and take the bodies into the office,” Colchev said. “We are leaving now.”

Footsteps pounded toward the trailer, and Tyler and Grant tried to make themselves as small as possible. Any attempt at escape would be suicidal.

Still, the alternative wasn’t much better. The trailer door was slammed shut and latched from the outside, leaving Tyler and Grant in total blackness with an 80,000-pound bomb.

EIGHTEEN

Jess checked her phone again to make sure it was getting a signal. Tyler still hadn’t called. She wasn’t worried just yet, but she thought it shouldn’t have taken this long to do his reconnaissance.

“What do you think they’re doing in there?” Fay said. Since the gray-haired man walked back from the van to the warehouse, they’d seen no movement at all.

“I don’t know. Maybe Tyler and Grant will be able to tell us.”

They went silent, waiting for the cell phone to buzz.

Fay turned to Jess. “You haven’t spoken to Tyler much since we left New Zealand.”

Jess sighed. “Not much to say.”

“Did you talk to him about Andy?”

Jess shook her head. “Not yet.”

“I’ll leave that to you.” Fay took a deep breath. “Are you ready to tell me why you broke up with Tyler?”

“We didn’t have the same priorities at the time.”

“Were you in love with him?”

Jess hesitated. “I suppose I was.”

“And now?”

“Of course not.”

“Liar.”

“I haven’t seen him in over fifteen years.”

“I can see it when you look at him. The chemistry is still there.”

“Well, I can tell you this is just a job for him. He’s a professional and it’ll stay that way. I wish you’d told me you were going to call him.”

“You are a pill, Jessica,” Fay said.

“I know.”

“I just want to see you happy before I die.”

Jess’s heart sank. She squeezed Fay’s hand.

“I know, Nana. But you’re a tough lady. You’ll be around for a long time.”

Fay smiled with a tinge of sadness. “I only wish your parents could see what a lovely woman you’ve become.”

Jess was about to reply when she saw movement in the parking lot of the warehouse. Two men went to the CAPEK truck. One of them got in while the other stood behind it.

They watched as the truck backed up to one of the trailers and was hooked up by the man behind.

“Is this what Tyler wanted to see?” Fay asked.

“I don’t know.”

When the tractor and trailer were attached, the rig moved around until it was directly in front of a second trailer. Then the rig backed up, and the second trailer was hooked up. They continued this choreographed hookup process for ten minutes until all four trailers were attached in a line.

“What did Tyler say that was called?” Fay said.

“A road train.”

They’d seen a dozen of them on their way out to the CDU facility and back. Tyler had told them they were the longest street-legal trucks in the world. With minimal rail service in the Australian interior and huge distances to cover, road trains were the most economical means to transport goods between remote outposts.

The two men who’d been attaching the truck got into a white Ford sedan and sped off. Jess and Fay ducked so they wouldn’t be seen. When they sat up, Jess saw the gray-haired man and a companion getting into the van.

Jess was surprised to see the CAPEK truck start and rumble forward. She gawked at the sight of the massive vehicle roaring off with no one in the driver’s seat.

The truck turned at the end of the road. A few minutes later, the van drove off, leaving the warehouse lot empty. All the loading bays were open.

“What in the world is going on?” Fay said. “Where are Tyler and Grant?”

Jess called Tyler’s phone but got no answer. She started the engine. “We’re going to find out.”

She sped over to the warehouse. It was unlikely anyone was still inside with all the vehicles gone and the warehouse interior exposed.

She got out but left the Jeep running. Fay joined her.

Jess pushed herself up onto the raised loading platform and stood. Fay, who was an experienced rock climber, clambered onto the ledge without assistance.

The cavernous space was still. Surely Tyler and Grant would have called by now if they were watching the warehouse from outside.

“Hello?” she called. No one answered.

As she tiptoed into the open space, her heart thudded. She hoped the worst she’d discover would be that Tyler and Grant couldn’t respond because they were tied up and gagged. But then something Jess saw in a side room made her freeze.

Two boots. A woman’s. Jess could only see the lower part of her legs. They were motionless.

“Wait here,” she said to Fay.

“Why?” Fay spotted the legs. “Oh, my God!”

“Stay here!”

Jess moved forward until she was standing in the doorway. Now the whole body was visible.

The woman was dead, her eyes staring unfocused at the ceiling, a dime-sized hole in her forehead.

The sight was made all the more horrifying by the bullet-riddled bodies of four other men piled behind her, the smell of blood thick in the air. They couldn’t have been dead for more than fifteen minutes.

Jess only got close enough to see that none of the corpses was Tyler or Grant. She ducked out and caught her breath, trying not to hyperventilate or vomit.

“Call the police,” she gasped to Fay.

“Is she dead?”

“Yes. Tell them there’s been a murder.”

As Fay made the call with her cell, Jess took out her own phone and dialed Tyler.

He didn’t pick up. She was about to hang up and try again when she heard the buzz of a vibrating cell phone coming from the office.

Jess steeled herself to walk back into that charnel house, phone in hand.

At the door Jess listened for the sound and her stomach lurched when she realized why Tyler hadn’t picked up her call.

The buzz was coming from the pocket of the dead woman.

NINETEEN

Rummaging around in the pitch-black through an unconscious man’s pockets was not Tyler’s idea of fun, but it was the only reason he was now holding a cell phone, courtesy of Professor Stevens. Colchev must have been expecting it to be incinerated in the blast. Unfortunately, the phone was more useful as a meager light than as a communications device.

While Tyler focused the light on the C-4 explosive in Grant’s hands, he checked the phone for a signal. No bars. The few times he’d gotten a signal, it dropped before he could complete a call to the police. Tyler didn’t know Jess’s email address or phone number, so he’d sent a short email to Fay: This is Tyler. We’re in the truck that just passed you. Call the police. Bomb inside the truck. He could only hope that it would be sent in the miniscule gaps in the blockage.

Grant, cursing under his breath, pressed the plastic explosive into the door panel where the external latch would be.

“How’s it coming?” Tyler said.

Grant glanced up at him. The whites of his eyes were like beacons next to his brown skin. “You know, when I said I was looking for some thrills during our trip, this wasn’t what I had in mind. More light, please.”

Tyler angled the phone so that Grant could see while he inserted the detonator.

“Just be thankful it’s not summer. It’d be a hundred and twenty degrees in here by now.”

“It’ll be two thousand degrees if you don’t give me some more light.”

Tyler shifted the phone closer. “Better?”

Grant nodded and unspooled the wire to attach it to Milo Beech’s identical phone. “If we die, just remember that this contraption was your idea.” He deftly crimped two wires together using Tyler’s Leatherman. “Any signal yet?”

Tyler looked at his phone’s display. “Still nothing. And we could be only a few minutes from the target.”

“Yeah, but what’s the target?”

That was the million-dollar question. They had no idea where the truck was headed, so there was no way to know how much time they had left.

When it had been clear they weren’t going to get a signal, Tyler decided that they’d have to take matters into their own hands to stop the truck. And the first order of business was making an exit for themselves.

With the rear door locked from the outside, the C-4 they’d scavenged from one of the barrels had been the only option for escape. The truck-bomb design consisted of detonators inserted into four blocks of C-4 buried in the barrels full of ANFO. The blast from the plastic explosive would set off the barrels of ANFO, causing a chain-reaction that would blow up the whole truck. Cutting the wires had disabled the bomb, but they’d found no timer or receiver to set off the weapon. It had to be somewhere on the truck, but tracing the wire to its source proved impossible.

Although they had dealt with the bomb, they still needed to find a way out of the truck. When the explosive didn’t detonate, Colchev would open the trailer to find out why.

“That should do it,” Grant said. He gave the C-4 putty one last pat and stood. “You sure you can’t think of something better than this?”

Tyler forced a smile. “Would you rather wait in here until the truck comes to a full and complete stop?”

“Not really. But it feels like we’re going about sixty. Gonna be a bumpy landing if we jump.”

“Then we’ll have to stop the truck.”

Grant raised a finger. “One teensy problem with that plan—”

“It’s more of a goal than a plan.”

“The guys operating this thing have guns and we have persuasive verbal skills. Oh, and they have enough ANFO to divide Australia in two.”

They both turned toward the stacks of explosive. Tyler estimated that the truck carried a destructive power equal to the payload of a B-2 bomber. The Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, used seven thousand pounds of ANFO to take out half of the Alfred P. Murrah building. A truck filled with eighty thousand pounds of the same material would level a city block.

To make an exit out of the trailer, Tyler and Grant would have to blow up four small wads of C-4 within five feet of the truck’s deadly load. Grant had taken the C-4 and detonators from the ignition barrels to form the crude breach charges. Because Stevens’ and Beech’s phones could also function as walkie-talkies, Grant rigged one unit to send the detonation signal when it was contacted by the other. He’d attached two arm’s-lengths of wire from the phone’s speaker to the detonator so that the cell wouldn’t be destroyed by the explosion.

“We’ll be okay,” Tyler said as much for himself as for Grant. “As long as we don’t get any fires started in here, the ANFO should be stable.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Look on the bright side. We should be out of the city by now. If it does blow, we’ll only take out a few kangaroos at most.”

“And us.”

“And some terrorists.”

“You are just a positive guy, aren’t you?”

Tyler grinned. “I try. Now let’s do this before I decide it’s moronic.”

He followed Grant behind one of the barrels and crouched down. Even if the load didn’t detonate, the shrapnel from the blast could be deadly.

Grant nodded that his phone was ready to receive. Tyler closed his eyes, covered his ears, and hit TALK.

The explosion sucked Tyler’s breath away and assaulted his nose with the signature smell of burnt tar he always associated with C-4. He held his breath to wait for the smoke to dissipate through the new hole in the truck door.

He opened his eyes to see sunlight blazing into the trailer. He peeked over the barrel to look at Grant’s handiwork. The charge blasted a perfect hole in the bottom of the door, taking the external latch with it.

“Nicely done,” Tyler said.

Grant stood. “Well, we’re still here.” He went to the rear of the trailer and pushed the roll top door up on its tracks until it was wide open. Wind swirled into the truck, but the turbulence did little more than muss Tyler’s hair.

Except for the occasional scrub brush, the rusty outback consisted of nothing but dirt and rocks, with low mountain ranges in the distance. The rapidly receding asphalt pavement disappeared to a point at the horizon. Tyler didn’t like the idea of leaping out onto it. Unless they could clad themselves in bubble wrap, the impact wouldn’t be fun. Without helmets, they’d be lucky not to bash their heads in.

“They’re not slowing down,” Grant said. “They had to have seen the explosion from the chase van.”

“They might be guiding the truck by GPS. I know I wouldn’t want to be this close to a truck full of ANFO.”

“I’ll see if I can find any landmarks.” Grant poked his head around the corner on the passenger side. When he pulled back, his expression was even grimmer than before.

“It’s worse than we thought.”

“Why?”

“Take a look.”

Tyler exchanged places with him and peered around the edge, squinting as the wind lashed his face. At first all he noticed was the white side of the trailer pasted with the name “Western Lines.” Then he blanched when he saw the source of all the bumping and clashing metal they’d heard before heading out on the highway.

They weren’t on just a conventional tractor trailer. They were on a road train. Instead of just a single trailer, there were three more identical ones hitched in front of it. That explained why the detonator’s receiver was nowhere to be found. It must have been in one of the other trailers.

Bedova was wrong about the amount of explosive Colchev had acquired. If the other trailers were as chock full of ANFO as this one, the road train was hauling 320,000 pounds of the stuff, enough to destroy not just a city block, but an entire downtown.

TWENTY

After the car carrying Kessler, Morgan, and Vince was cleared through the front gate of Pine Gap, it was just a short drive to the main part of the facility. Although Morgan had been expecting the dazzling white buildings she’d seen in the photos, the six spherical radomes housing the satellite uplink equipment were far larger than she thought they’d be.

They came to a stop in front of a two-story building that would have looked right at home in an American office park. The semi following them continued around the building.

“Welcome to Pine Gap,” Kessler said as he got out.

Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, run by both the US and Australian governments, sprawls across a dusty plain eleven miles southwest of Alice Springs. The National Security Agency station, shielded by mountains on all sides, is so secret that it’s the only facility in Australia designated as a “prohibited” flight area, meaning no aircraft flying lower than 18,000 feet are allowed within 2.5 miles of the base.

Speculation about the facility’s true purpose has been rampant. Morgan knew that its widely believed function as an ECHELON listening post was correct. The NSA ECHELON program samples cell phone, email, and text messages from around the world for any specific keywords deemed critical to protecting US interests, and Pine Gap is important for communicating with satellites orbiting over the southern hemisphere. But few knew of the facility’s other role in preparing weapons to be evaluated at the Woomera Test Range.

“When can we start the briefing?” Morgan said.

“Follow me and I’ll show you to an office you can use while you’re here. Then I’ll need to instruct my people where the equipment from the truck should go. It ought to take about ten minutes. When I’m done, we’ll begin the briefing.”

He took them inside the structure and guided them to a small room with two desks and chairs. After giving them the security password to the internal WiFi system, Kessler walked out.

Vince leaned over to Morgan. “What’s your secret?”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been in the air for twenty-four hours, and you look like you’re ready to run a marathon. I’m about to keel over.”

Morgan shrugged. “I don’t need much sleep.”

“That’s it? You don’t need much sleep?”

“Right.”

They both sat and started setting up their laptops to securely access the OSI network when the door opened and Collins poked his head in.

The technician scanned the room. “I thought Dr. Kessler might be here.”

“He just left. Is there a problem?”

“No, I just need to let him know that we’re ready to receive the Killswitch.”

Morgan looked at Vince in confusion, then back to Collins.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Wasn’t the Killswitch coming separately from the semi?”

“Yes,” Vince said. “Kessler said you were expecting it.”

“I am,” Collins said with a puzzled look. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”

“Isn’t it here already?” Morgan said. She and Vince stood. Something was very wrong here.

Collins looked as if he were being asked a trick question. “If the Killswitch was here, I wouldn’t be telling you we’re ready to receive it.”

“The truck left ten minutes before we did,” Vince said. “Josephson was with it. He should have been here by now.”

“Are you sure the Killswitch truck isn’t somewhere in the facility?” Morgan said.

Collins nodded slowly, his face dawning with horrified comprehension. “I’m absolutely positive. The truck with the Killswitch on board never arrived.”

While Zotkin drove the van, Colchev sat at the control station in back. Although they were six miles behind the road train, the video feed from the cab allowed Colchev to monitor the truck’s progress on its suicide mission. He had a driver’s eye view of the road, only eleven miles of which were left before it reached its destination. More cameras on either side gave him panoramic views to the left and right. When the truck blasted through the Pine Gap gate, which would prove no match for the massive protective steel bullbar frame over the engine bay, he’d be able to see it wend its way into the center of the complex before the contents of the four trailers blew the facility off the map. Then his plan to bring victory to Russia over America would be inexorably underway.

Colchev’s training kept him from shaking with anticipation, but his muscles ached from the tension he forced himself to contain. There was no going back now. Either he would succeed spectacularly or he would compound the failure that had brought him to this desperate position in the first place.

But that desperate position gave him strength. Nothing would stop him because he had nothing to live for if the mission was a failure. He had warned Nadia not to pursue him, but she had always been stubborn. He once thought he’d loved her, but he realized long ago that a man like him had no use for such feelings. Then she had shown up at the warehouse, just as he’d suspected she would but hoped she wouldn’t. It had been disappointingly easy for his men to catch her team in an ambush.

That had always been Bedova’s weakness, thinking she was better than Colchev was.

Now that he’d been forced to wipe out her team, he would become enemy number one to his former masters. But a successful mission would convince them that the deaths had been necessary, that they had resulted in a greater good. He would be able to return to his Mother Russia with honor. Any other outcome was unacceptable. Then he would remain an embarrassment to his country, a pariah consigned to a fate worse than death.

Colchev pushed those thoughts aside and focused on the present. The only thing that mattered was making sure the road train reached its destination. Once it did, the rest of the mission would be relatively easy, and he would have free rein to carry out the ultimate attack with impunity.

Through the windshield of the truck cab, he could see the white Ford sedan a half-mile ahead of the road train, providing escort until the truck exited from the public highway. Two men inside the car were on the lookout for any potential interference, primarily from the police. Once the truck made its turn, there would be no reason for the car to accompany it onto the private road. Colchev would then guide it the rest of the way.

He noticed on the GPS map that the gap between the truck and van was growing.

“Speed up,” Colchev said to Zotkin. “You’re falling behind.”

“Yes, sir,” Zotkin replied.

Colchev felt the van accelerate and turned back to the monitor. He was annoyed to see that his men’s pace car was decelerating.

He leaned forward. “Escort One,” he said into the mic to the car’s driver, Gurevich, “why are you slowing? Keep the interval at five hundred meters.”

“Sir, I don’t know how it happened,” Gurevich said, the concern in his voice evident. “We’ve been watching the entire time, and no vehicles have approached.”

“What are you babbling about? Is there a police car there?”

“No, sir. There’s a man on top of the truck.”

Colchev adjusted his earpiece. “What are you saying?”

“I can see someone walking along the top of the trailers. He just jumped from the second trailer to the first.”

Colchev shook his head in shock. This was not happening. If he was hearing Gurevich right, someone had stowed away on the truck. But when? All the trailer doors were locked, and the professor and his student had been injected with enough sedative at the CAPEK facility to knock them out for hours. The two men hadn’t been shot during the abduction because telltale blood splatters might have raised alarms at CAPEK. But Nadia Bedova and her men had come along and forced him to leave a mess behind.

Colchev suddenly realized the stowaway must be one of Bedova’s men. She was smarter than he gave her credit for.

“Send the order to stop the truck,” Gurevich said, “and we will kill him.”

“No. That truck stops for nothing. You will have to take the intruder out while it’s in motion.” The road train was only fifteen kilometers from the target, and with the bodies they’d left behind in the warehouse, they were committed. Any delay would make it easier for authorities to intercept the truck if the stowaway had called for help.

“Will we set off the explosives with a stray shot?”

Colchev thought that scenario was extremely unlikely. ANFO was a stable explosive, and a bullet impact would have no effect. Colchev was more worried about an errant round disabling the robotic truck’s control system.

“Do not shoot unless fired upon,” Colchev said. “Escort Two will have to get on the truck and eliminate him. You will not deviate until the task is accomplished. Understood?”

There was a pause on the other end. The Ford was now close enough to the road train that Colchev could see the men on his monitor, conferring in the car. The passenger, Lvov, didn’t gesticulate or get upset. He knew his job. Gurevich was just outlining the plan to him.

“Understood,” Gurevich replied to Colchev. “We’ll pull alongside the cab and Escort Two will climb on.”

Colchev saw the sign for the coming intersection a kilometer in the distance.

“You’re approaching the turnoff. The truck will slow to turn. Your best chance will be right before it speeds up again.”

“Acknowledged.”

The road train began to slow, and the nose of the cab dipped as the brakes were applied more abruptly than Colchev expected. It must have also been more sudden than the man on the truck expected because he fell onto the hood of the vehicle, filling the windscreen and blocking Colchev’s monitor view with the back of his leather jacket.

The man flipped over and clutched at the lip of the hood to keep himself from sliding off, bracing himself with his feet against the tubular bullbar, the Australian version of a cow catcher. At first all Colchev could see was the top of the man’s head, his brown hair whipped by the wind. To stretch the length of the hood, the man had to be at least six feet tall — big enough to pose a problem for Lvov.

The stowaway looked up, and Colchev saw blue eyes peering back at him through the video camera. Colchev stared in stunned disbelief when he recognized the man as Tyler Locke.

How had Locke had ended up here? Colchev wanted to reach through the screen and throttle him, but he was six miles away, helpless to do anything himself.

He leaned forward, his own eyes never leaving Locke’s. He spoke slowly and distinctly into the microphone so that Gurevich would have no doubt that dying would be preferable to failure.

“I don’t care how you do it,” Colchev said, “but get that bastard off my truck.”

TWENTY-ONE

Even as he was trying to keep himself from sliding off the hood and getting crushed by the road train’s eighty tires, Tyler couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the truck’s empty cab. Invisible hands made minute adjustments to the steering wheel.

I guess it’s getting harder to find suicide bombers these days, he thought.

Tyler marveled at the engineering involved in creating a two-hundred-ton remote-control truck. Then the howling wind reminded him he was in danger of becoming outback roadkill, and he looked for a way off the hood.

The situation hadn’t turned out exactly as he’d planned. It had been Tyler’s bright idea to jam the pliers of his Leatherman multi-tool into the trailer’s rear door track to hold it open while he gripped the door’s handle to pull himself onto the roof. Although Grant steadied him as he scrambled up, the abrupt encounter with the airstream nearly blew him onto the asphalt. Once Tyler was safely up and found his footing, he’d run along the trailer roofs, leaving Grant to implement their backup plan.

Tyler intended to climb down next to the cab’s door, but while he was still on its roof, the road train had unexpectedly slowed, tossing him onto the hood instead.

Tyler swiveled his head to see why the truck was slowing. He squinted at a white car that turned off the highway just in front of him. It looked like the truck would follow.

As the road train made its turn, Tyler used the momentum to swing his legs over to the side and down onto the running board. With one hand on the mirror, he maneuvered over to the door handle. He pulled on it and realized he shouldn’t have been surprised to find it unlocked. Colchev wasn’t expecting stowaways on board.

He got into the cab and searched the interior for a simple DISENGAGE button, but he couldn’t see one. In the middle of the dashboard was an LCD screen the size of a laptop’s. He touched the dark screen, and a window lit up with the CAPEK logo.

Having successfully negotiated the turn, the road train accelerated again. A sign flashed by.

Tyler had never heard of Pine Gap, but it sounded like the kind of place a terrorist would want to target. He had no doubt security cameras along the road had already spotted the truck, but they might think it was just a shipment to the base that hadn’t been properly recorded on the schedule. Guards would try to wave him down at the front gate and only realize their mistake when it barreled through. Stopping the truck before it got there was Tyler’s best option.

Tyler scanned the screen hoping for an obvious solution to his predicament. A button at the bottom said MENU. Tyler tapped on it, and an inscrutable list of acronyms and commands filled the screen. It would take some study to figure out what series of commands led to the STOP command, so Tyler did what he thought would shut down most any cruise control.

He jammed his foot on the brake pedal.

The truck began to slow, but he could feel the accelerator fighting him. Either the auto-shutoff had been disabled or Colchev was in the van countermanding his efforts.

Tyler tried turning the wheel to jackknife the truck, but it spun freely in his hand. Normally a truck’s steering was controlled by a rack-and-pinion mechanism, but the CAPEK vehicle’s steering was drive-by-wire, controlled by a computer that sent commands from the steering wheel to a motor adjusting the position of the front wheels. The drive-by-wire system had been disengaged.

Tyler looked for an ignition key but found only a red START button. Pressing it had no effect. He pushed the brake pedal as hard as he could, and the road train slowed to ten miles per hour.

The walkie-talkie on Tyler’s cell phone squawked.

“Tyler,” Grant said. “You there?”

“I’m here and inside the cab.”

“So you’re stopping us?”

“Not exactly. We’ll have to go with plan B. Get Stevens and Beech out of there.”

“Will do,” Grant said. He’d have to drop them off the back of the truck and hope the speed would be low enough to prevent serious injury.

“Is the device ready?” Tyler said.

“Almost. I just wanted to let you know I’d be incommunicado momentarily. I’ll be out of here in thirty seconds. Can you keep us crawling for that long?”

“Will do. Should give us plenty of open space.”

“And remember. Do not call me.”

“Got it,” Tyler said and hung up.

A face popped up in the driver’s side window. Tyler had been so distracted that he’d lost track of the white car. The man outside with the thin nose and hideous underbite had climbed aboard to expel Tyler.

Colchev’s man ripped the door open, and Tyler gave him some assistance. Tyler pushed the door wider, slamming it out of the man’s hand and throwing him off balance. But he recovered easily and lunged inside, grasping Tyler in a chokehold.

Tyler kept his foot on the brake pedal as long as he could, but with his neck lodged in the crook of his assailant’s arm, his vision tunneled at a rapid pace. He threw an elbow backward with little effect, and he couldn’t use his other hand or he’d lose his grip on the cell phone. With only seconds before he blacked out, Tyler twisted in the man’s grip and launched himself through the driver’s side door, landing on the hood of the white sedan.

The surprised driver swerved and slowed as he brought a pistol to bear. Tyler rolled so that he would land in the dirt and not on the blacktop where he’d be drawn under the truck’s wheels. Bullets blasting through the windshield missed him as he tumbled off the car and onto the hardpan, shielding his head from the impact, but subjecting his arms and legs to a multitude of bumps and bruises. He winced as he sat up and opened his palm to see that the phone was still intact.

The car accelerated away to catch up with the cab. Tyler turned and saw Grant fifty yards behind him waving. Two limp forms lay next to him.

Tyler sprinted toward Grant and pointed at a boulder the size of a Volkswagen beside the road.

“Get to cover!” he shouted.

Grant gave the thumbs-up and picked up one of the men as if he were no heavier than a feather pillow. Tyler ran to the other man and saw that he was the smaller of the two, Professor Stevens. Tyler threw the dead weight onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and hustled behind the boulder.

When he reached the relative safety of the rock, Tyler lay Stevens down and gasped for air.

“Glad you could join us,” Grant said, and looked at the car driving alongside the cab of the accelerating truck. “They with the Auto Club?”

Tyler nodded. “And they’re very upset about what we’ve done to their truck.”

“So we’re not too excited about seeing them again?”

“I think they’d let their guns do the talking.”

The man who’d jumped Tyler was now perched on the running board, looking for a graceful way back into the car. Colchev obviously wasn’t planning on stopping to let him off.

“How much distance you figure we need?” Grant said.

“I’d like two miles, but I don’t think we’re going to get it.”

The man leaped onto the top of the car, which immediately began to slow down. The truck, which was now more than a mile from Tyler and Grant, sped away from the sedan.

“It’s now or never,” Tyler said. They both crouched behind the boulder, covering Stevens and Beech. If this didn’t work, they’d only have seconds to warn Pine Gap before those men returned to finish them off.

Tyler waited for Grant to cover his ears, then pressed the TALK button on the phone and covered his own.

Grant’s phone was now hooked up in an electrical circuit with one of the detonators sitting in an ANFO barrel in the back of the truck. It received Tyler’s signal and sent a current through the detonator.

The world ripped apart as if a volcano had erupted in the middle of the desert. The deafening blast, louder than a thousand sonic booms, shattered the air and transformed the earth into an undulating ocean of dirt and sand.

Even with the boulder protecting them, Tyler could see the reflected glow of the gigantic fireball through his closed eyelids. His bones rattled from the overpressure wave, and the heat from the explosion singed his hair.

Shards of metal rained down around them. Tyler covered his head with his arms, but it would do little good if any large engine parts were flung this far. He just had to hope the boulder would do its job.

After what seemed like an eternity, the reverberations of the blast subsided. Tyler opened his eyes.

Tyler checked Stevens and Beech. Both were breathing and uninjured.

Grant blinked like he was coming out of a coma.

“You all right?” Tyler said.

“Definitely two miles next time,” Grant replied.

They stood and staggered from behind the rock to survey the damage.

As the dust settled downwind, they could see that the road train had been wiped from the earth. In its place was a crater a hundred feet wide. The car had vanished, reduced to mere fragments by the explosion. Any remains of Colchev’s men would be microscopic.

Grant handed Tyler his Leatherman without taking his eyes off the wreckage.

“Thought you might want this back,” he said.

“Thanks,” Tyler said as he mechanically replaced it in his belt holster.

“So,” Grant said, “shall we call the police now?”

“I doubt that’ll be necessary,” Tyler said as he gazed in awe at the smoking hole in the ground. “I imagine we’ll have plenty of company in a few minutes.”

TWENTY-TWO

Thirty seconds after he lost the video and data signals from the road train, Colchev felt the shock wave from the immense explosion shake the van like a paint mixer. He tried reaching the men in the Ford, but all he got was static in return. He tore his headset off and smashed it against the console, swearing a stream of Russian curse words in violation of his own directive.

Locke had somehow caused a premature detonation, literally vaporizing his carefully designed plan. At least the man was likely dead, but his operatives were also gone.

Colchev sat back in numbed silence to consider his next move. If someone at the base had discovered the Killswitch didn’t arrive from the airport, the explosion of the truck bomb was intended to bring any investigation to a dead stop. But with Pine Gap still intact, the Americans would act quickly to track down the weapon. That meant he had to act decisively. Quitting just as they were starting was not an option. He’d never get a chance like this again, so he could not waste time hesitating.

The van slowed.

“Keep driving,” Colchev said, moving to the van’s passenger seat. “Head to the rendezvous.” A mushroom cloud rose in the distance.

“What the hell happened?” Zotkin said. “Wasn’t that early?”

“We lost the truck,” Colchev said.

Zotkin’s grip on the steering wheel tightened until his knuckles were white. “How?”

“An intruder got on board and blew it up. It was Tyler Locke, the engineer who killed Golgov and Popovich in New Zealand.”

Zotkin gaped at him. “Locke is here?”

“He must have been with Bedova.”

“Did he survive?”

Now that Colchev thought about it, there was a chance Locke was still alive. He had to operate under that assumption.

“He may have made it,” Colchev said, “but there’s nothing we can do about that now. The site will be crawling with police before long. Gurevich and Lvov are dead, too.”

Given how soon the explosion happened after Gurevich got out of the CAPEK cab, they had to have been caught in the blast.

Zotkin’s jaw clenched. “The US government will put every resource they have into finding the weapon.”

“We have a solid plan for getting the Killswitch back to America. Our larger concern is retrieving the xenobium to power it.”

“Can we still accomplish our mission?”

“Absolutely,” Colchev said, betraying not a flicker of doubt in his voice. He did, however, have grave doubts. Without the xenobium, the Killswitch was just a regular bomb, and not a very powerful one at that. With the xenobium, the Killswitch could change the world.

Colchev’s phone rang, and he answered the blocked call warily. Other than his operatives, only his mole at Pine Gap had this number.

“Yes?” Colchev said.

“It’s me,” a man’s voice said. They didn’t risk using names. The call was forwarded by a VOiP service, so there would be no way to trace it to Colchev from the source. Still it was a risk they’d avoided until now. His mole was desperate.

“What do you want?”

“I want to know what the hell happened!”

“The package wasn’t delivered as planned.”

“I know that! Don’t you think I heard? What am I supposed to do now?”

“Can you get out?”

“No. They put us on immediate lockdown.”

“What about the trigger?”

“I can’t smuggle it out now, for God’s sake! You’ll have to wait.”

“We can’t. I’ll have someone check the drop in Sydney tomorrow. If the—” In his anger at the ruined scenario, Colchev almost said “xenobium”, but mentioning the word would raise alarms. “If the trigger isn’t in the planter box by midnight, our business is concluded.”

“You can’t leave me hanging out to dry! It’s only a matter of time before they realize I helped steal the weapon.”

“You knew the risks, and you were paid a lot of money to take them.”

A long pause. “I’ll tell them everything.”

“What will you tell them? You have no idea where we’re taking the package. I will be fine. You, on the other hand, will be executed for treason. So keep your wits about you and figure out another way to get me the trigger. And don’t bother trying to call me again.”

Colchev hung up and opened his window. He erased the phone’s contents, removed the battery, wiped both parts clean of fingerprints, and tossed them into the desert.

“Do you really think he can do it?” Zotkin asked.

Colchev shook his head. “Doubtful, but there’s nothing we can do to help him at this point.” Without the truck bomb to divert attention from the theft, it would be almost impossible for his mole to get the xenobium out of Pine Gap undetected. Colchev massaged his forehead to ward off the headache he could feel coming on.

“If he gets caught, he’ll reveal the location of the dead drop.”

“Which is how we’ll know if he was caught.” His capture wasn’t a concern because he couldn’t tell the authorities anything useful. Colchev had led him to believe he was stealing the Killswitch weapon for some American mercenaries planning to sell it on the black market.

“What about the xenobium?” Zotkin said. “We can’t use the Killswitch without the trigger.”

“We have proof that there’s more xenobium in Peru. And now we know how to find it, thanks to Fay Turia.”

Zotkin opened his mouth to voice further concerns, then thought better of it when he saw Colchev’s icy stare.

Five minutes later, Zotkin turned onto a dirt path and drove for a half-mile until he parked the van behind a rocky tor. He opened his phone.

“We’re ready.” After a moment, he hung up. “They’ll be here in four minutes.”

Colchev nodded. They wiped down the van and jogged back to the highway. The van would eventually be found, but their trail would go cold here.

They reached the road just as two cars arrived. Both were beige sedans, the first with only two men inside, the other with four. The contents of the stolen Killswitch crate had been divided between the trunks.

Colchev and Zotkin got in the back of the lead car, and they sped away.

“Buran,” Colchev said to the driver, “you and Vinski will wait at the dead drop tomorrow. Be aware that the location may be compromised. If the delivery is made, pick up the trigger and rendezvous with the package in Mexico.”

“What about us?” Zotkin said.

“We’ll follow the trail that Fay Turia led us to in case we need a backup source of xenobium.”

The cars stayed at the speed limit as they headed south. In ninety minutes they’d be at the remote airfield where they’d parked a chartered PC-12 Pilatus prop plane. Four hours after that, they’d be at Bankstown airport on the west side of Sydney.

Using Zotkin’s phone, Colchev called the pilot of their private jet and told him to be ready to leave Sydney’s main airport by eight a.m. the next morning. Because of today’s setback, they had an enormous amount of work to accomplish. There were only four days left until zero hour.

TWENTY-THREE

Sitting in the back of the unmarked black van, Grant worked his jaw trying to get his hearing back. The buzz in his ears was now down to a dull roar, and since they weren’t bleeding, he assumed he hadn’t ruptured the eardrums. His clothes were caked with dirt from his tumble out of the truck. His shoulder got the worst of it when he hit the ground, but he seemed to be intact, the benefit of learning how to take a fall during his wrestling days.

Tyler sat across from him, rubbing his elbow. Dust cascaded from his jacket.

“You okay?” Grant asked.

“Just a little impact with a car hood. Nothing that a beer won’t take care of.”

He nodded at the stoic security officers in the front seat and smiled at Tyler. “At least they didn’t handcuff us.”

Tyler shot him a grin. “Considering what we did to their nice road, I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had.”

Within minutes of the explosion, police, firefighters, and ambulances descended on the site like locusts and cordoned it off from the local press. When Tyler mentioned Jess and Fay during questioning, they got even more attention from the police. They were told that Jess had discovered the five bodies of Bedova and her men at the warehouse.

The police had been about to bring them in for further interrogation when a Pine Gap security team took custody of them and swept them into the security van.

“Do you have any idea why they’re taking us to Pine Gap?” Grant said.

Tyler shrugged. “You got me.”

“They probably want to give us a medal. Thank us for stopping a major terrorist attack.”

“I doubt they were terrorists. If they’re rogue Russian operatives like Bedova said, it’s more likely that they’re mercenaries. Besides, they weren’t the sacrificial types.”

“Because of the robotic truck?”

Tyler nodded. “They went to a lot of trouble to steal the CAPEK prototype and put together a hundred and sixty tons of ANFO. Do you know anything about Pine Gap?”

“One of the cops said it’s some kind of NSA listening post. The people stationed there mix with the locals, but no one ever talks about what goes on inside.”

“Whatever it is, the people who put this road train together knew what they were doing. They had a definite plan, and it wasn’t to make a political statement. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been after Fay’s artifacts.”

“But all this having something to do with Roswell? I know we’ve seen some funky stuff in our time, but that’s just crazy.”

“I don’t believe in little green men any more than you do. But there’s something big going on here.”

“Must be, for them to bring a couple of civilians into a spook palace.”

Not that they were typical civilians. Because Gordian did so much work with the Pentagon, Tyler and Grant had secured Top Secret clearances. But that didn’t mean they could just stroll into the most secretive US base in the Southern Hemisphere. Someone with juice had to make that happen.

They reached the front gate of Pine Gap. Though the security was formidable, the road train had been so massive that halting its momentum would have been impossible, especially with no driver to shoot.

The guard checked the passengers’ credentials, including Grant’s and Tyler’s, while a second one used a mirror on the end of a stick to check the underside of the van for contraband or bombs. After a lap around the van, the guard waved them through.

A minute later the van screeched to a halt, and one of the security men got out and yanked the side door open.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Tyler climbed out and Grant followed, putting on his shades to shield his eyes from the harsh midday sunlight. He breathed in the clean air, unsullied by the smoke that was downwind and just visible over the ridgeline.

He rotated to get a lay of the land. Low white buildings were spread out over a ten-acre area. To the north were ivory-colored domes that protected sensitive communications equipment from the outback sand that billowed through the site. Nothing else distinguished the facility from an office complex you’d see on the outskirts of any US city.

Grant imagined the road train making it to the spot where he was now standing. If it had detonated here, every building would have been reduced to rubble.

A slender woman strode toward them, her thick auburn hair swaying with each step. Dressed in stylish gray pants, matching suit jacket, and tailored green blouse, she didn’t cut the figure of a scientist, but the sensible rubber-soled shoes didn’t peg her as an administrator, either. She would have been a knockout if she weren’t scowling.

She stopped in front of them. “Dr. Locke and Mr. Westfield, may I see your IDs?” She inspected their passports dispassionately and handed them back. “I’m Special Agent Morgan Bell, Air Force Office of Special Investigations.”

“Nice to meet you, Agent Bell,” Grant said. “Call me Grant. And you are welcome, by the way.”

She didn’t take the bait. “Anything you see, hear, or read on this base is classified at the highest levels. You shouldn’t even be standing here.”

“You wouldn’t be standing here if it weren’t for us,” Grant said.

“That doesn’t change the fact that you are a security risk that we don’t need right now.”

Grant looked back pointedly at the plume of smoke still rising to the east. “Seems like the security risk has already occurred.”

“Are we suspects?” Tyler asked.

Morgan shook her head. “We checked you out after the police identified you. Because of your security clearances, we felt it was prudent to debrief you here since you may have information vital to US national security. You should feel lucky that our position here kept you from being investigated for the murder of seven people.”

“Hey!” Grant protested. “We only killed two of them. And that was so we could save your butts. Not to mention those of Professor Stevens and Milo Beech, who I understand are doing just fine.”

Morgan took one step closer, so that Grant could feel her breath on his lips. “Mr. Westfield, I will let others bestow whatever honor you think you deserve for this morning’s actions. But I have bigger problems right now. You are here at my discretion, and you will do as I say when you are on this base. Follow me,” she said, and turned on her heel.

Grant leaned over to Tyler and whispered, “Oh, I like her.”

“You would,” Tyler replied. “Because she definitely doesn’t like you.”

“What’s life without a challenge?” Grant caught up with Morgan and matched step with her.

“What?” she said.

“I just thought maybe you’d feel better about us being here if you knew more about us.”

“I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I hadn’t read your file.” Morgan opened a door and led them inside the building. “I know everything I need to know.”

“Oh yeah? What do you know about me?”

“Electrical engineer from the University of Washington. Performed for professional wrestling’s meathead fans who think it’s a real sport before gaining a conscience and becoming a combat engineer. Thinks he’s some kind of badass for subsequently joining the Rangers. Now works for Gordian and is currently annoying me.”

“I also love hot cocoa, Shetland ponies, and moonlit walks on the beach. So tell me about yourself.”

She wasn’t buying. No smile. “No,” she said, and sped up.

“Well, I tried,” Grant said to Tyler.

Morgan stopped at a door and nodded at a series of small cubbyholes.

“You’ll need to put any communications or recording devices you have in there. Although the room is completely shielded, no cell phones or PDAs are allowed inside.”

Tyler took Stevens’ phone from his pocket and put it in one of the empty slots. Morgan looked at Grant, who raised his arms.

“The one I had was turned into dust particles by the truck bomb. Oh, and I’d appreciate your getting mine back from the warehouse when you have a chance.”

Morgan rolled her eyes and went through the door. Grant smiled, thinking this was the most fun he’d had all day.

Tyler followed her, then Grant. He entered an immense laboratory filled with testing equipment, some of which he was familiar with, some that was new to him. Two men in lab coats were having an animated conversation with a guy in a dark blue suit. They stopped talking when they saw the newcomers enter.

Morgan introduced them quickly. The suit was her partner, Vince Cameron. Dr. Charles Kessler, the older lab coat, seemed to be in charge of the place. The intensely uncomfortable-looking younger lab coat was technician Ron Collins.

“I must reiterate my protest,” Kessler said as he sneered at Grant and Tyler. “These men are a security threat to the entire project.”

“The Secretary of the Air Force himself vouched for them,” Morgan said.

Grant wasn’t surprised about that. Tyler’s father had been a two-star general in the Air Force and was a friend of the secretary. A quick call would have verified Tyler’s credentials.

“Besides,” Morgan said, “they may be our only hope for finding the crate quickly.”

“Protecting the weapon is your job. If you were doing it correctly, we wouldn’t need them.”

Morgan stepped forward until she was nose to nose with Kessler. “Dr. Kessler, I don’t give a damn what you think of me. I care about my country’s national security. If you endanger it further, I will arrest you for obstructing my investigation. Am I clear?”

Grant chuckled. Even if Kessler couldn’t see it yet, there was no way he was going to win.

“What was in the crate?” Grant asked.

Kessler glared at Morgan for a moment, then said, “Fine, you win.” He turned to Grant. “She’s talking about the Killswitch weapon systems. They were stolen from right under Agent Bell’s nose.”

For the first time, Morgan’s stoic demeanor dissolved. “What do you mean ‘they’?”

“I didn’t tell you before because it wasn’t relevant. As we do with all our testing programs, we built in redundancy in case we had a malfunction. When the terrorists took the crate, they didn’t steal just one Killswitch. They stole two.”

TWENTY-FOUR

While Fay rested in the SUV after talking with the police for over an hour, Jess stood outside with the Alice Springs detectives and finished detailing the events leading up to the discovery of the bodies in the warehouse. When she’d presented her credentials as a New Zealand police consultant, they’d been forthcoming in what they’d learned so far about the case and the contents of the road train.

It wasn’t until after the police arrived that Fay had received the email from Tyler saying he and Grant were inside the road train. As they were conveying the message to the officers, a massive explosion from the truck bomb detonated south of town. Jess and Fay were in shock at losing them until the police received word that Tyler and Grant had gotten out safely, saving the lives of the professor and his student as well.

As to the bodies inside the warehouse, those five had been traveling under Russian passports and had arrived only this morning. It would take a while to verify the identities, and federal authorities were on their way to take over investigating the biggest terrorist attack in the country’s history.

Jess had tried to convince them that this wasn’t just an act of terrorism, but once they learned that Pine Gap had been the target, she’d gotten nowhere. The secret base had been the site of numerous demonstrations in the past, so the police felt it had been only a matter of time until some wacko took a more drastic step like this.

When Jess was finally released, she returned to the Jeep to find Fay lying in the front seat with it tilted as far back as it would go. She opened the door as quietly as she could, but Fay sat up immediately, then fell back with a moan.

“How are you feeling, Nana?” Jess said as she shut the door.

“Oh, just a little tired. I shouldn’t sit up that quickly.”

“You shouldn’t be out here at all. I’ll run you back to the hotel so you can take a nap.”

“No, I’m more hungry than anything. Any news about Tyler and Grant?”

“They’re fine. Apparently they’re still being detained for questioning.”

Fay looked worried. “The police don’t think they had anything to do with this, do they?”

“I doubt it.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know. I gave the police my phone number so Tyler could call us when he and Grant are ready.”

“Did they tell you anything about those poor dead people?”

Jess put the Jeep into gear. “Just that they were Russian nationals.”

“Russians? I am so confused by all of this.”

“So am I,” Jess said. “As far as we know, the men who attacked you in Queenstown were Americans. They were part of a group who hijacked an experimental robotic truck that they used to pull four trailers filled with explosives to blow up a secret American base in the middle of Australia.”

Jess kept an eye on her rearview mirror. Although she thought the hijackers would be miles away by now, she was still worried they would make another attempt to get the relic from Fay.

“Maybe they thought my piece of the wreckage or the wood engraving might be valuable,” Fay said. “Maybe they needed the money to fund this attack.”

Jess shook her head. “An attack this complex had to have taken a long time to plan. And there are a lot of easier ways to finance the operation.”

“What if they were planning to sell it for some other reason? What if the Russians thought it was some kind of alien technology?”

They entered the central business district. There were several restaurants to choose from.

“Nana, I don’t think they came all the way to New Zealand for an artifact that they’d never even seen, just because they thought it might have some alien—”

A sudden realization popped into Jess’s head. Her skill with codes included recognizing patterns where there didn’t seem to be any. Now that she had more info about the men who’d attacked Fay, the link became clear.

Those Russians were killed by associates of men who had come all the way to New Zealand based on what Fay had revealed in the video. Because of something she said.

Jess slammed on the brakes and pulled to the side of the road.

“What’s the matter?” Fay asked.

Jess turned to her. “What exactly did the creature on the spacecraft say to you?”

“You mean the alien language? Why?”

“I don’t think it was an alien language.”

“Jessica, I know you don’t believe that it happened to me, but it did. I’m not going to lie just because it makes me sound crazy.”

Jess smiled. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Nana. I think everything happened to you just the way you said it did, and someone else knows it did. That’s why they came for your artifacts. Specifically the wooden engraving.”

Fay embraced her granddaughter with delight. “I’m so glad you finally believe me. The US government has always been so successful at covering up the incident, I didn’t think anyone ever would.”

“I don’t think that the US government is behind the attack.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. Any time someone has gotten close to revealing the truth about the Roswell incident, the US has hidden the evidence and labeled the person a nut or worse. Mac Brazel — remember the foreman of the ranch in Roswell? — he got the worst of it.”

Until the events in Queenstown, Jess had never given much thought to Roswell except when Fay would retell the story about the alien or her trips to Peru to decipher the engraving’s clues. Jess would listen politely because she knew it was important to her grandmother, but it wasn’t something she took seriously. As long as the travel kept Fay busy and happy after her grandfather’s death, that’s all Jess cared about. Now she wished she’d paid more attention.

“I didn’t tell you this morning,” she said, “but I stayed up last night researching the Roswell incident. Did you know there was a book out recently about Area 51? The author claimed a source told her that Stalin created child-sized people with grotesque features. They were sent over to the US in a top-secret Soviet airplane to crash and cause hysteria in the populace.”

‘That sounds more ridiculous than an alien spacecraft landing.”

“I know. It sounds insane, but we just heard that the men who attacked you killed five Russians. Could there be some link between Roswell and the Soviets?”

“But I saw the alien with my own eyes!”

“Maybe you were supposed to think it was an alien.”

“Well, it wasn’t child-sized, I can tell you that for sure. It picked me up and put me on Bandit like I weighed nothing.”

“Even outlandish stories have a kernel of truth to them. What if the Russians are involved? We won’t know until we figure out what that piece of wood from Roswell means and why it depicts the same figures found in the Nazca lines. And I think the key is what the creature told you. Can you repeat it?”

“Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um.”

Jess opened her cell phone and dialed a number in her contact list.

“Who are you calling?” Fay said.

“Michael Silverman. He’s a professor of Russian at the University of Auckland, and a well-known authority on its different dialects. I confer with him from time to time when I need something translated.”

He answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Mike, it’s Jess McBride.”

“Hey! How’s my favorite codebreaker?”

“I’m fine. Listen, I don’t have much time and I need to ask you a favor.”

“Find another Russian virus on your system?”

“No, but I do need something translated.” Jess put the phone on speaker. “Mike, I’ve got you on the line with my grandmother, Fay Turia.”

“The one who does all the adventures around the world?”

“The same.”

“Hi, Fay. Jess talks about you every time she calls.”

Fay smiled. She leaned over and talked loudly into the phone. “Nice to talk to you, Michael.”

“So what do you need translated?”

Jess nodded for Fay to speak. “Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um.”

“Say that again?”

Fay repeated it, and they heard typing. The phone went silent for a minute.

“Mike, you still there?” Jess said.

“I’m here. You sure that’s Russian?”

“That’s what we were hoping you could tell us.”

“Well, the pronunciation is way off if it is. I parsed the sentence into its syllabic components. The only part of it that could be remotely Russian is pree vodat kah. If I’m hearing it right, it means ‘leads to’.”

“So if it’s Russian, it means ‘rah pahnoy leads to zay nobee um’?”

“The last part might be a single word. Zaynobium. Don’t ask me what it means. I just tried plugging several different spellings of it into Google and got nothing except a link to a video of your grandmother.”

The word was meaningless to Jess. She looked at Fay, who shrugged back at her.

“What about the first part?” Jess asked.

“That’s interesting. The first thing that popped into my head was a slightly different pronunciation. Rapa Nui.”

“As in Easter Island?” Fay said, her eyes shining with revelation.

“It’s just a guess,” Silverman said. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.

“No, Mike,” Jess said. “You’ve been very helpful. Thanks.” They said goodbye and hung up.

Jess was mesmerized by the chain of events. A supposed alien crash-lands at Roswell, hands Fay a wooden engraving showing figures from the Nazca lines, and utters a phrase implying that the map on the other side depicts Easter Island.

“What do you think Zaynobium is?” Fay said, but Jess couldn’t even hazard a guess.

Fay thought about it for a moment and then bounced in her seat with excitement. “Maybe that’s the alien home planet!” She took the wooden tablet out of her bag and looked at it again with new eyes.

“Let’s talk about it over lunch.” Jess moved to get out of the car, but Fay put her hand out to stop her.

“Where are you going?”

“To that restaurant.”

“But we have to find Tyler and tell him what we found out.”

“Nana, you need to eat.”

“I can eat later. Do you realize this is what I’ve been searching for the past five years? Rapa Nui could be the missing piece of the puzzle!”

“But how could Easter Island be linked to both Roswell and the Nazca lines?”

“Some anthropologists think the Nazca people could have migrated from South America to Polynesia.” Fay removed the ancient engraving from her bag and reverently ran her fingers over the grooves etched into the wood. “The person who made this map might be a descendant of those voyagers. If he left clues to the lines’ true purpose, it would mean that somewhere on Easter Island lies the answer to one of the world’s greatest mysteries.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Tyler and Grant had spent the last hour seated at a conference table, reciting to Morgan, Vince, and Kessler the sequence of events over the past two days that led them here. They included everything, including the cryptic items that Nadia Bedova asked about outside the warehouse.

“Do you know what Bedova meant by Icarus?” Morgan asked.

Tyler knew the myth to which it referred: the boy who escaped Crete only to fly too close to the sun, which melted his waxen wings and caused him to fall to his death. “Sounded like a code name to me,” he said. “Maybe it’s a Russian spy.”

“Or a secret project,” Grant said.

“And you don’t know what’s happening on July twenty-fifth?” Vince said. His eyes had flinched noticeably when Tyler had told them that part. It obviously struck a nerve.

“No idea,” Tyler said.

“What about Wisconsin Avenue or the Baja cartel?”

Tyler shook his head. “Perhaps if you shared some information about the Killswitch, we could be of help.”

Kessler straightened in his seat. “That is my project. And its real name is Lightfall. ‘The Killswitch’ is Collins’s nickname for the device, and everyone on the team started calling it that.” He was obviously unhappy about sharing this information.

“I’ll bet it’s not a new kind of blender,” Grant said.

“You are an idiot,” Morgan said. “This is a DARPA black project. Lightfall is a weapons program.”

“What does it do?” Tyler asked.

“I don’t have time for this,” Kessler said, jumping out of his seat. Tyler could imagine how shaken the scientist must be, knowing his life’s work had been stolen.

“Dr. Kessler,” Morgan said, “this is more important than anything else you could be doing right now. Please sit down.”

Kessler looked at the door and grumbled, but he took his seat, massaging his temples as if he were soothing a headache. After a few moments, he said with a tired voice, “You, of course, know what an EMP is.”

Tyler nodded. “When an H-bomb explodes at high altitude, it blasts out an electromagnetic pulse that fries anything with a computer chip.”

“So the Killswitch is a nuke?” Grant said.

“No, it is much more sophisticated than that,” Kessler said. “Under Project Lightfall, we designed the bomb to emit the pulse without a thermonuclear explosion. The weapon has the capability to penetrate hardened bunkers and vehicles, even at low altitudes, and it leaves no residual radioactive fallout.”

“So it could be used in conventional wars,” Tyler said.

“It’s not my place to say where or how it’s used. That’s for military commanders and politicians to decide.”

Grant grunted.

“I suppose you have a problem with me being a weapons developer,” Kessler said.

“Not at all. When I was in the Rangers, I wouldn’t have minded setting one of those babies off over a tank division that I was about to engage. Would have made my job easier.”

That seemed to calm Kessler. “We were planning to do our first test next week at the Woomera range south of here.”

“Why Australia?”

“The Australians have material critical to operation of the weapon. It was a joint development.”

“What material?”

“You don’t need to know that.”

Tyler was confused. “If the weapon was stolen, then why the truck bomb?”

“A cover-up attempt,” Morgan said. “If that truck had made it through the gates and blown up Pine Gap, everyone here would have been killed. The ensuing investigation would have come to the conclusion that the weapon was destroyed in the explosion.”

“How powerful is the bomb?”

Kessler rubbed his mouth. “It depends on the yield of the trigger. That’s what we were hoping to find out with the tests. But my estimate says that an airburst at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet would disable everything within a thirty-mile radius.”

Grant leaned forward, slack-jawed at the weapon’s destructive potential. “That’s the size of Washington.”

“Or Paris. Or Beijing. If the Killswitch is used to take out a major city, the effects would be catastrophic.”

“Now you see why we need your help,” Vince said. “You can identify the thieves.”

“How did they steal it?”

“We’re still tracking that down. But it looks like it was done in transit, on the way here from the Alice Springs airport. The truck never showed up. With the police investigating the warehouse deaths and the explosion, we’re stretched thin looking for it.”

“What about the airport?” Tyler said. “Roadblocks?”

“The Alice Springs airport is tiny, so we’re checking every plane flying out. Roadblocks are more difficult. We can’t have the police stop every car and truck leaving the area to do a thorough search without telling them what they’re looking for.”

“You can’t exactly put out an all-points bulletin advertising that the US military lost something that could send Sydney or Melbourne back to the Stone Age,” Grant said.

Vince nodded. “The press would get hold of it in no time, and then we’d have a panic on our hands.”

“But it can’t be set off,” Kessler protested. “Not without the trigger.”

Morgan sat with a mixture of sigh and growl. “Dr. Kessler, it’s about time you tell us exactly how the Killswitch works. And I mean everything.”

Kessler stood and glared at Morgan. “I reiterate my protest. These men are not properly vetted—”

“Your protest is noted,” she said. “Continue.”

He seethed for a long minute before finally throwing up his hands in defeat. “All right,” he said, pacing as he spoke. “Do you know what hafnium is?”

Tyler didn’t hesitate. “It’s a metallic element. It doesn’t have many uses, but it’s important in the cladding of nuclear fuel rods to control the reaction.”

Grant tapped the table. “Wasn’t there something about a bomb that used a hafnium isomer? I read about it a few years ago. DARPA was developing it, but there was some controversy over whether it actually worked.”

“How do you know that?” Kessler said in amazement.

“Well, we are experts in explosives. Reading the literature on the subject is kind of a job necessity.”

“After those articles came out, all future press communication on the process was halted,” Kessler said.

“Let me guess,” Tyler said. “Because it works.”

Kessler nodded. “It’s called induced gamma emission. And yes, it works. Hafnium-3, the isomer you mentioned, is the most powerful non-nuclear explosive in existence. One gram of it has the explosive power of three hundred kilograms of TNT.”

Grant whistled in appreciation. “Good things come in small packages.”

“The Killswitch uses an isomer trigger. Without it, the weapon is nothing more than a very expensive bomb. All other EMP weapons with an effective range of more than half a kilometer are either nuclear or the size of a house, making them impractical in battle situations. Using a hafnium isomer to generate the gamma radiation necessary, we were able to shrink the weapon to only fifty kilograms, and half of that weight is for the plastic explosive to set off the isomeric reaction in the trigger. Most of the design expense went into compacting the weapon into such a small size.”

“So the Killswitch is triggered by hafnium-3?” Tyler asked.

“No. Production of hafnium-3 is prohibitively expensive. It would cost a billion dollars for just a few grams. We have something even more powerful. A hafnium isomer called xenobium. It’s more stable than hafnium-3 and twice as powerful.”

Tyler chewed his lip. “You glossed over the fact that both hafnium-3 and induced gamma emission weapons emit gamma rays. How deadly is this xenobium?”

“It can be carried safely in a shielded lead container.”

“And the gamma rays from the explosion of the Killswitch?” Morgan said.

Kessler looked around the table and cleared his throat. “At low altitudes the explosion would produce a lethal dose of radiation for anyone within a mile or more depending on the size of the xenobium trigger.”

“Sounds like a nuclear weapon to me,” Grant chuffed.

“It is non-nuclear in the sense that it is not a fission or fusion device, and as I mentioned there is no lingering radioactive fallout. Beyond the immediate region around the explosion, the effects are not fatal.”

“Supposedly. Didn’t you just say that you haven’t tested it yet?”

“Of course. All our calculations are purely theoretical at this point.”

Everyone went silent at the potential catastrophe if the weapon was set off in a populated area, possibly on July twenty-fifth.

“Do the hijackers have this new isomer?” Tyler finally asked.

“They don’t. All one hundred grams are stored ten stories under Pine Gap, locked in a hardened vault. We had been planning to divide it into five-gram fragments to use in the Killswitch, but right now it’s still secure and in a single piece.”

“Could they have made their own xenobium?”

“As far as we know, no one else is even close to obtaining the capability to manufacture it. The problem is that they might have found another source of the isomer.”

“From where?”

Kessler took a breath and wiped his brow as he sat. “From outer space.”

“Excuse me?” Grant said with a laugh and looked at Tyler while pointing at Kessler. “I thought he said outer space.”

“That’s what I heard,” Tyler said.

“I did say outer space,” Kessler replied, not getting Grant’s sarcasm. “The sample at Pine Gap was found in Western Australia ten years ago. In 1993 a few truck drivers and gold prospectors reported a bright light and a series of thunderous booms. The explosion was so large that it registered 3.9 on the Richter scale. Because the area was so remote and because no one was injured, nobody went to investigate it for years. Some theorized it was a nuclear blast set off by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.”

“Come on!” Grant said incredulously. “The group that gassed the Tokyo subway system?”

“I didn’t say I agreed with such ludicrous speculation. No one ever detected radiation, so the likelihood of an atomic weapon was minimal. However, the impact of an iron meteorite like the one that created the Barringer Crater in Arizona was also ruled out because no crater was found at the site of the seismic event.”

“Leaving what?” Tyler said.

“We now believe it was an airburst explosion of a meteor above twenty thousand feet. With no trees in that part of the desert to be blown down by a shockwave, it’s possible that the evidence would be hard to find. When geologists went to investigate the mystery long after the event, they conducted a careful search of the area around the seismic event and came back with a single sample from the location’s epicenter. After extensive testing, it was determined that the material was an unusual isomer of hafnium called xenobium.”

“Is that the only sample in the world?” Vince asked.

“To our knowledge it’s the only one that still exists. The first known sample was discovered a century ago by a Russian scientist named Ivan Dombrovski.”

Grant snorted. “He sounds like an offensive lineman for the Green Bay Packers.”

Kessler ignored him. “Dombrovski escaped from Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. He claimed to have recovered the material from the area of the Tunguska blast and used it to buy his American citizenship.”

“The Tunguska blast?” Tyler said. “So we know if was caused by an exploding meteorite?”

“No one’s ever been able to definitively prove what caused the blast. Explanations include a meteorite, comet, or even black hole. And some crackpots theorize it was an alien spacecraft that crashed and vaporized in the explosion.”

Tyler and Grant exchanged looks at the mention of aliens. The subject did seem to keep coming up in the last few days. Tyler felt his ironclad skepticism cracking just a bit.

“You’re saying that this xenobium could be an alien artifact?” Grant said.

“Don’t be absurd,” Kessler said. “It could have easily been part of the meteorite or comet that exploded. Dombrovski just found the remnants that didn’t detonate. And so did the Australians.”

“What happened to the sample Dombrovski brought to America?” Tyler said.

“For the next thirty years, he experimented with it. He established a project to take advantage of xenobium’s unique properties and named it Caelus for the Roman god of the sky. Dombrovski was also trying to figure out how to produce more xenobium, but he never was able to.”

“What was the goal of Project Caelus?”

“We don’t know,” Kessler said. “In 1947 his lab was destroyed in a fire set by Soviet spies, taking Dombrovski and the xenobium with it. Most of the records about Caelus were lost as well, but there were enough surviving files to confirm that his xenobium was the same material as the specimen found in Australia.”

Collins entered and nodded at Morgan and Vince. “The Australian police need to talk to one of you.”

“Why?” Morgan said.

“They found the bodies of the men who picked up the Killswitch from the airport.”

“I’ll take it,” Vince said.

“Find out where the crime scene is,” Morgan said. “Tell them we’ll head there in five minutes.”

Vince nodded and left.

Kessler stood. “While we’re taking a break, I need to take my own.” He left at a trot, as though he were barely going to make it to the bathroom.

Grant grinned at the quick exit. “When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

“They’ve been looking for xenobium ever since,” Tyler said under his breath.

“What was that?” Morgan asked.

Tyler suddenly stood when it clicked. “The Russians. They’ve been looking for more xenobium for almost a hundred years.”

“But if that’s what Colchev’s men were looking for,” Grant said, “why did they attack Fay?”

“Maybe they thought she had a sample of it. She said they were asking about a multi-hued metal object, colored like an opal. Hafnium becomes opalescent when it oxidizes, so I’m guessing xenobium does, too. But why did they think she had some?”

“Xenobium!” Grant said, slapping the table. “Remember? It was in the phrase Fay said in the video.”

Grant was right. Tyler wanted to smack himself for not making the connection faster. He wheeled around to Morgan. “Can we get to the Internet from in here?”

“No. Every computer in here is cut off. Why do you need it?”

“We need to see Fay’s video. Take me to a computer with Web access.”

Morgan was dubious but led Tyler and Grant back to the office where her laptop was, passing Vince speaking on his phone in the hallway. She opened the computer and let Tyler find Fay’s video on YouTube. He dragged the slider until he got to Fay’s appearance and the phrase she was told by the creature she’d encountered.

“Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um.”

“My God,” Morgan said.

“She must have gotten the pronunciation wrong. Whoever or whatever spoke to Fay was trying to tell her something about xenobium.”

“Where is she now?”

“The last we heard, she was with Jess McBride at the warehouse where Colchev locked us in the truck.”

Vince burst into the room, breathless, as if he’d been running.

“Morgan,” Vince said, holding out his phone. “You have to look at this.”

She took it. From his vantage point, Tyler could see it was a photo of five men, three white and two black, lying on the ground, each with a bullet in his forehead.

“What is this?” she said. “I recognize Josephson, but who are the other men?”

“A private pilot spotted them in the desert south of town. The police found them next to a Pine Gap truck. They’re the men from the security detail who were sent to pick up the Killswitch.”

Morgan looked back at the photo, first with a puzzled expression, then with dawning horror.

“Are you sure?”

“They all had their Pine Gap IDs on them.”

“What’s the matter?” Tyler said.

Vince looked up, his eyes clouded with dread. “The men we saw at the airport were all Caucasian. That means the hijackers had to have taken out the men before they reached the airport. The men we met were the impostors.”

“So?” Grant said.

“So,” Morgan said, her jaw clenched, “Kessler arrived at the airport with them.”

TWENTY-SIX

Morgan didn’t waste time on self-recrimination for not detecting Kessler’s treachery earlier. There would be plenty of time for that when her superiors found out. Her priority was to hunt him down and make him tell her where she could find the stolen Killswitches.

“We’ve got a major security breach,” she barked into her phone to Herman Washburn, Pine Gap’s chief of security.

“What kind?”

“Charles Kessler. He left Pine Gap with your security team and arrived at the airport with the hijackers. He must have been there when your men were killed.”

“But Kessler was at Pine Gap when the truck bomb was supposed to hit. He would have been killed.”

“When we check the records,” Morgan said, “I’ll bet we find out that he was in the underground vault at the time. It would have been the only safe location during the blast.”

“Dammit! All right. I’ll post guards on every side of the facility to keep him from escaping.”

“He can’t be far. He left the lab just a few minutes ago. He may be trying to steal the xenobium sample.”

“His badge isn’t showing up on our internal monitoring system. We’ll do a room-by-room search. He won’t get away.”

“Make sure he isn’t harmed. We need him for questioning.”

A voice came over the intercom. This is a security alert. All non-security personnel are instructed to remain where they are. This is not a drill. The message repeated.

“Wait a minute,” Washburn said. There was an excruciating pause. “Agent Bell, I’ve got Kessler. He’s in the vault with the xenobium. He’s asking for you.”

“All right, I’ll head down there.”

“No, he wants to talk to you over the intercom. You’ll have to come to the security bunker.”

Morgan grimaced. “I’ll be right there.” She hung up and turned to Vince. “Kessler’s in the vault. Head down there and make sure any escape routes are cut off.” She pointed at Tyler and Grant. “You’re both with me. I don’t want you out of my sight.”

Grant put up his hands. “Whatever you say.”

“Let us know if we can do anything to help,” Tyler said.

“Come on.” She sprinted for the security room with Tyler and Grant keeping up behind her.

When they arrived, the room was bustling with activity.

Washburn, a grizzled veteran, eyed Tyler and Grant. “Who are they, and what are they doing here?”

“Locke and Grant. They blew up the truck bomb.”

Washburn appraised them, then grudgingly nodded.

“Where is he?” Morgan asked.

Washburn pointed at the center monitor. “I’ve got the vault sealed.”

Kessler was looking up into the camera.

“Can he see me?” Morgan said.

“No.”

She leaned into the mic. “Dr. Kessler, this is Special Agent Bell. I know you are involved with the hijacking.”

“I want safe passage out of Pine Gap, and I’m taking the xenobium with me.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“You will do that or I blow it up.” Kessler held up an object the size of a grapefruit.

Morgan put her hand over the mic. “Can he do that?” she asked Washburn.

“How the hell should I know?”

Morgan looked at Tyler.

He nodded slowly. “Given that I just learned about this stuff, it’s hard to say. But if that thing he’s holding is a detonator with the xenobium inside, I’d say it’s possible.”

“How much damage would it cause if it went off?”

“Kessler said they had a hundred grams of it and that it was twice as powerful as hafnium-3,” Grant said.

She could see Tyler doing the math in his head. “That gives it the explosive power of over sixty tons of TNT. How thick are the vault walls?”

“Twelve feet of concrete on the sides,” Washburn said. “The door is two feet of hardened steel.”

“That’s not enough to contain the blast. The vault is ten stories underground?”

Washburn nodded. “At the edge of the facility.”

Tyler glanced at Morgan. “You’ll get some serious foundation damage if it goes off in the vault. But if Kessler gets topside, it would take apart half the buildings in Pine Gap.”

“What if that’s his plan?” Grant said.

“We can’t risk letting him get out,” Morgan said. She removed her hand from the mic. “Kessler, disable the device and we’ll talk.”

“No.” He tapped on the device in his hand. “I’ve just set this for sixty seconds. If the door doesn’t open in one minute, it goes off. Starting now.”

Morgan checked the clock on the wall. “Kessler, if you did this for money, we can work something out. We can get you help.”

“Let me out! Now!”

“Maybe someone kidnapped a loved one. Tell us and we’ll figure out how to solve the problem.”

“I’ve got nobody. I dedicated my life to this project. And for what? Two divorces that milked every cent out of me, a pitiful pension, and an empty apartment. Why shouldn’t I be able to retire in luxury?”

Forty-five seconds.

“Kessler, I’m not letting you out of there.”

“Then I have nothing to live for.”

“Yes, you do. We can work this out.”

“So I can sit in a cell in Guantanamo for the rest of my days? I don’t think so.”

Thirty seconds. She could tell he wasn’t bluffing, but there was no way she could let him leave with the xenobium.

She put her hand over the mic and turned to Washburn. “Get your men out of there right now.” He scrambled to call his men. Vince would be with them. She tried not to think about it.

Speaking to Kessler, she said, “The Killswitch is useless without the xenobium. You said so yourself.”

“I’m sure they have a backup plan.”

Fifteen seconds.

“Kessler, I’m not bluffing. That door will not open.”

“I know.”

“Then don’t do this,” Morgan said, desperate to convince him to give up.

“There’s no alternative.”

Five seconds. Kessler began to mumble to himself.

“Where are Vince and your men?” she said to Washburn.

“Headed up the stairs. I don’t know what lev—”

The screen went white and a massive tremor shook the ground. Morgan held onto the console as the floor rattled beneath her. Mugs, headsets, and books clattered to the ground.

After a minute, the trembling subsided.

“Is everyone all right?” Washburn said. A few people said yes. Others who were more shocked just grunted.

Morgan was already running toward the stairwell to see if Vince made it out alive.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Even from outside the entrance of Pine Gap, Tyler could easily see the depression caused by Kessler’s detonation of the xenobium. It had been an hour since the blast, and all non-essential personnel had been told to evacuate the premises. Only the emergency crews who had been pre-screened for security clearances were allowed into the facility to scour the rubble for survivors.

Grant was helping Morgan search for her partner while Tyler waited for Fay and Jess to arrive. He knew they wouldn’t be permitted inside, so he paced along the outer fence.

He recognized the Jeep as it sped toward him. He waved it over and saw that Jess was driving.

She threw the door open, jumped out, and launched herself at Tyler in a tight hug. “I’m so relieved you’re all right.”

Tyler savored the embrace for a moment, then extricated himself and saw that Fay had joined them. “Are you two okay?”

“Other than being psychologically scarred by finding five dead bodies in the warehouse, we’re fantastic.” Jess gestured at a passing emergency vehicle. “What the hell is going on here?”

“There was another explosion, this one inside Pine Gap. That’s all I’m allowed to say about it.”

“What happened at the warehouse?” Fay said. “We thought the worst when we found those bodies.”

“That’s a long story. I’ll have to tell you later.”

“We heard about the truck bomb,” Jess said. “Actually, we heard the truck bomb.”

“People in Adelaide would have heard the truck bomb.”

“What’s this all about anyway?”

“We think Fay may have stumbled onto a terror plot accidentally.”

“Because of the artifacts from Roswell?”

Tyler nodded.

“Well, we finally found out what the phrase that alien told me means,” Fay said. “‘Rapa Nui leads to zaynobium.’ We know that Rapa Nui is the Polynesian name for Easter Island, so we think the map on the wood engraving marks a particular spot on the island. But the other part of the phrase is still a mystery. Do you know what zaynobium is?”

Tyler ignored the question because even correcting her pronunciation would require breaking about twelve laws. He focused on Jess as he shook his head. She would understand that meant he did know but couldn’t discuss it.

“Whatever it means,” Fay said, “we’re getting on the first flight we can find to Easter Island.”

“Nana, you’ve seen what’s happened here today. It’s too dangerous.”

“Dear, do you think I care about the danger? This is the greatest adventure I could have possibly imagined. I’m this close to finding the solution to a puzzle that’s tormented me for sixty-five years. But I’m going without you. I don’t want you hurt.”

Jess objected. “The hell you are. I’m not letting you go anywhere without me. We go together or you don’t go at all.”

Fay paused for a moment, searching Jess’s eyes, then smiled and patted her granddaughter’s hand. “That settles it.” She turned to Tyler. “Are you coming with us?”

Tyler looked from Fay to Jess. He wouldn’t be able to persuade them to change their minds, and Morgan Bell had no legal authority to keep them from going.

“I’m in,” he said. At least he knew what they were looking for.

Fay clapped her hands. “Excellent!”

“Where’s Grant?”

“He’s helping search the wreckage.”

As he spoke, an ambulance hurtled out of the front gate, followed by a car with Morgan driving. She pulled to a stop next to them and got out. Grant hopped out of the passenger side.

“Did you find Vince?” Tyler said.

Grant nodded. “He was in the stairwell when the bomb went off. A concrete archway kept him from being completely crushed, but he broke both his legs and punctured a lung.”

“Mr. Westfield heard him before anyone else did,” Morgan said. That looked like the closest she’d get to saying thanks.

“It’s not the first time I’ve seen this kind of damage, so I just knew where to look.”

“The medics said he could be back in action in a few months.”

“That’s good to hear,” Tyler said. He introduced Morgan to Fay and Jess.

“The government again,” Fay said. “I knew they were behind this.”

“It’s all right, Fay,” Tyler said. “The US had nothing to do with the attack in New Zealand. Rogue Russian agents are responsible for all this.”

“Russians?” Fay said with awe. “That explains why the alien spoke to me in Russian.”

Tyler told Morgan about the translation of Fay’s phrase.

“Rapa Nui as in Easter Island?” Morgan said.

“Yes. And these two are going whether we want them to or not.”

“When?”

“As soon as possible,” Fay said. “Tyler’s right. You can’t stop us.”

Morgan pursed her lips as she thought for a minute. Finally, she said to Tyler, “Do you think more xenobium could be there?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

“Is that how it’s pronounced?” Fay said. “What is xenobium?”

“That’s classified, ma’am. All I’m allowed to tell you is that the Secretary of the Air Force has received clearance from the President to declare this situation a national security matter. The information you have may be critical to keeping a dangerous item from being used as an instrument of terror.” Morgan took a breath. “I am authorized to use any and all means to bring this matter to a close, and since you are going anyway I’m requesting your help.”

“We don’t even know what all this is about,” Jess said.

“Dr. Locke does, but he’s bound by Executive Order 13292 from disclosing it, and I expect him to adhere to it. Therefore, I want him to accompany you.”

“Yeah, we’ve already decided on that. You know, we’re in Australia, so while we may choose to help you, we are under no obligation to.”

“Ms. McBride and Ms. Turia, I checked your status. You’re both dual citizens of New Zealand and the United States. I’d hope you’d have a sense of patriotism in the matter.”

Tyler put up his hand to stop Morgan. This kind of heavy-handed approach wouldn’t work, and she didn’t need to use it. “We’re all on board here, Agent Bell. Fay, Jess, I can tell you that whatever is on Rapa Nui may have global implications. If we don’t find out what’s there, millions of people may be at risk.”

Jess set her jaw, still miffed at being bossed around, but Fay nodded with satisfaction.

“If the US government wants to help me solve the Roswell mystery, then I’ll go along with it.”

“Okay,” Jess said to Tyler. “We’re trusting you.”

Tyler hoped he was doing the right thing including Fay and Jess and putting them in more danger, but he didn’t really have much choice. They were too involved to exclude now, and Fay could have information crucial to solving the riddle on the artifact.

“By the way,” Grant said, “I won’t be coming with you.”

“Why not?”

Grant tilted his head, a signal that he wanted to speak in private. He, Morgan, and Tyler took a few steps away from the Jeep.

“Morgan has a lead that the Killswitches may be in Sydney,” Grant said.

“After we sent Vince to the hospital, I searched Kessler’s office and found a burner cell phone,” she said. “Kessler didn’t know it, but all communication signals coming in and out of Pine Gap are intercepted and recorded. He called Colchev right after you blew up the truck bomb. Colchev instructed him to deliver the xenobium to a dead drop in Sydney tomorrow by midnight. It’s possible he’s unaware that Kessler was killed.”

“Do you know where the drop is supposed to take place?” Tyler asked.

“I went back to two Internet discussion board messages that we suspect were sent between Colchev and Kessler. One of the messages was posted under the false name George Hickson and mentioned a black box cheat code. It took only a simple Google search of “George Hickson” and “Sydney” to discover that there are two intersecting streets in Sydney named George and Hickson. There’s a black flower box on the corner sidewalk. It’s in a neighborhood called The Rocks near the opera house.”

“Because I saw Colchev’s men in the warehouse,” Grant said, “Morgan wants me to go with her to see if I can spot someone checking the drop spot.”

“If we can keep a lid on Kessler’s death, they won’t know he’s not coming. We might be able to stop this whole thing there.”

Tyler nodded. “That makes sense. But if they don’t show, they’re going to be looking for another source of xenobium.”

“That’s why you need to find it before they do,” Morgan said.

“Agent Bell,” Tyler said, “given all that’s happened, don’t you think some protection for us would be prudent?”

“It’s already been arranged. Four NSA agents from Pine Gap are going with you. They’ll be fully armed.”

“I don’t think Qantas will let them carry assault rifles on board.”

Morgan shook her head. “You’re taking our plane. The discussion forum message also hinted that July twenty-fifth was an important date, and Nadia Bedova seemed to confirm it. Whatever Colchev is planning will happen four days from now. That’s why we’ve got the C-17 on the runway fueled and ready to go. After it drops me and Westfield off in Sydney, it’s taking the three of you directly to Easter Island.”