Spiral

He thought about calling the police, then glanced again at Harpo’s gun collection, to the Beretta M9. Jake could be at the herbarium in fifteen minutes. He took down the M9 and unholstered it. Range of maybe fifty meters. History of slide problems but a good weapon. Checked the magazine. Full. Fifteen rounds.

He sought out Vlad and Harpo, the M9 in hand. “Harpo, I need to borrow this.”

“You plan on committing a felony?”

“No jokes. I can’t get Maggie on the phone.”

“Did something happen?” Vlad asked.

“I don’t know. Call my cell the minute you have the rest of the sequence. And if you don’t hear from me in the next half-hour, call the cops.”

ONCE OUTSIDE, JAKE CALLED LIEUTENANT BECRAFT AT THE Cornell police department. Becraft sounded surprised to hear from him. “Professor Sterling? Where are you? The Detrick people-”

“Can you do something for me? Can you send someone out to Maggie Connor’s place? No one’s answering the phone. A woman named Cindy Sharp is supposed to be there. Watching over Dylan. Maggie’s son.”

“Jake. Where are you? Is there some kind of problem?”

“I’ll be in touch. Send a car out to Maggie’s.”

“What’s going-”

Jake hung up.

25

ORCHID CHECKED THE PHONE NUMBER WITH A FEW QUICK taps of her fingers. The heads-up screen in her glasses gave the response: LT. BECRAFT. CORNELL UNIVERSITY POLICE.

She listened to the conversation between Jake Sterling and Becraft. Orchid had taps on both Jake Sterling’s and Maggie Connor’s cells, allowing her to hear all conversations, control all functions. She’d installed the modified SIM cards in both phones weeks ago, long before she had taken Liam Connor hostage. She had wanted complete control of the communications environment. The taps had proven invaluable. Minutes before, Maggie had tried to call Toloff at Detrick. Orchid had shut her phone down.

Orchid checked the latest GPS location from Jake’s phone. He was moving, driving away from the address on Buffalo Road.

Toward Maggie, she was sure.

Good.

Orchid backed the FedEx van up to the front door of Rivendell, thinking it through. The police would likely be here in minutes, but she still had time. She went inside the house and dragged the dead woman, Cindy Sharp, through the front door. She threw Cindy’s body in the back of the FedEx van. Orchid had stolen the van a week before from a storage garage in Pennsylvania. She closed the door carefully, locked it, then walked around to the driver’s door.

She got in, started the engine, and checked Jake’s location again. He was retracing the path he’d taken, heading back to the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium. He was fifteen minutes away from his destination. Orchid was five.

She turned the FedEx van around, started down the gravel road. She heard a squeaking sound in the back of the van.

She glanced over her shoulder into the storage area. Dylan Connor was cuffed to the wall, tape on his mouth. He’d started to write HELP in the dust of the tinted back window with the tip of his shoe.

Clever boy. Just like his great-grandfather.

She pulled to a stop, then took a length of rope and secured his legs. “No more tricks,” she said. She wiped away the boy’s message with a brush of her fingers.

She turned onto the main road. Maggie’s call to Toloff still worried her. What if Maggie had used another phone? What if she had gotten through?

Orchid typed a series of commands on her leg.

Time to make sure everyone at Detrick was very, very busy.

26

XINTAO LU WAS EXHAUSTED. HE’D BEEN UP ALL NIGHT, working his way through the final part of the processing run. He was a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, but he was pretty sure he was going to switch to electrical engineering.

He dipped the wafer cartridge into the etching tank, letting the hydrofluoric acid perform the final step in the fabrication of his device. The little silicon chip he was etching had an array of microscopic holes, each barely larger than a virus. When superfluid helium passed through the holes, it would exhibit coherent oscillations that were sensitive to the absolute motion of the earth with respect to the stars. That’s what his thesis adviser said, anyway. But he was beginning to wonder about that. It all seemed too wild. Etch some holes in a piece of silicon, cool it to near absolute zero, and you would detect your rotation relative to the entire universe.

It made his head hurt to think about it, especially after twenty-four straight hours in his white bunny suit in the cleanroom. The dust-free environment was kept so by a ceiling full of HEPA filters constantly chugging away, creating a low roar that crept into your bones.