Implacable Alpha Read online

  I glanced down the mirror-polished length of the table, past the others, to where Dr. Maxine Kaplan sat taking notes on a legal pad. She was an attractive woman in her late fifties, her graying hair pinned up, face thin and intense. For the meeting, she wore an expensive gray wool suit finely tailored to her slender body. She had been in charge of Scientia’s entangled particle physics experiments. She had been trying to attract entangled organic molecules from the past. Imagine her surprise when the woman we call “Alpha” suddenly appeared in her lab.

  “Dr. Kaplan? Now that we have three months’ worth of data from the monitors in Lab One, is there anything that hints that Alpha’s return is imminent? Any rise in energy? Some clue?”

  She raised her eyes, giving me that evaluative look a superior imparts to a menial. One she believes to be hopelessly incapable of understanding even the simplest of concepts. She’d made it clear that compared to her experiments in physics, psychiatry was little more than make-believe medicine practiced by masked dancers pounding drums.

  “Maybe Virgil could field that,” she suggested, dropping her gaze to the legal pad where she continued to scratch out notes with an expensive golden pen.

  Virgil Wixom—also a PhD—was her second. But for having to gasp for oxygen down in the darkness cast by Kaplan’s shadow, the guy would have been considered world-class brilliant. Where Kaplan’s talent lay in spitting out the theoretical ideas, Wixom was the nuts-and-bolts guy. He was the one who designed and then built the machines that would produce, collect, and analyze the entangled particles. He’d been Alpha’s go-to guy who’d helped to build the machine that had allowed her escape.

  Wixom—also with an old-fashioned notepad—sat at Kaplan’s left. He scratched at his ear and said, “Currently, we’re not picking up any meaningful increases in photons or emitted particles. I guess you’d say the fields remain boringly consistent.”

  “Nothing’s changed?” I asked.

  Kaplan raised censuring eyes. “As we stated in the last report. Assuming anyone read it.”

  I wondered if she’d used the same flippant tone with her Skientia bosses. One of them, Peter McCoy, had been left on the lab floor, shot through the heart. The other, Tanner Jackson, was missing, caught in the field generated by Alpha’s time machine and whisked away to the future. Neither had been known for having anything resembling the milk of human kindness running even by a milliliter in their veins.

  In his chair, Eli shifted, his gaze taking Kaplan’s measure. He didn’t trust her. Not that Eli trusted anyone. Along with being a two-star, the general is a high-functioning psychopath. There’s not an ounce of remorse in the man’s body. Eli does what’s best for Eli, which generally boils down to survival and power. All of which were at risk after Alpha’s untimely arrival.

  Maybe placing the survival of our timeline in the hands of a psychopath wasn’t such a bad idea. Eli would, of necessity, have to save the world and the timeline in order to save himself. And he wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever it took to make that happen.

  I glanced next at the anthropologists. In charge was Yusif al Amari, the Egyptologist. Yusif was a broad-shouldered man, early forties, with a coal-black beard. Along with a PhD from Cambridge, he’d been excavating his entire life. He’d helped Reid Farmer open Fluvium’s tomb. And now—with a death sentence awaiting him back in Egypt—he was key to unraveling Fluvium’s hidden messages.

  “Ah, Doctor Ryan,” he gave me a smile that flashed white teeth behind his beard. “I hope you are not expecting miracles. We have made some progress. What you would call the basics. Some of the narrative can be followed. Simple things. Like, ‘In the beginning.’ Or, ‘Consider the following.’ And then it becomes gibberish. Words don’t make sense. It hit me, in preparation for this meeting, that Fluvium is using code in places.”

  “No surprise there,” I said. “He wouldn’t have wanted just anyone figuring out how to build a cerebrum.” I glanced at our Mayanist. “Skylar? What have you got?”

  Skylar Haines was an expert at Mayan hieroglyphics, totally brilliant. He read Mayan writing better than he read English. We needed him because the scrolls and writing recovered from Fluvium’s tomb were partially written in Mayan as well as Egyptian and Latin. The only downside to having Skylar working on them was, well, Skylar. In his case, brilliance came at a cost. Given his aversion to most forms of personal hygiene, his stained and rumpled week-old clothing, oily dreadlocks, and yellow-fuzzed teeth, no one wanted to be in the same room. As it was, people had left the chairs on either side of him empty.

  He glanced sidelong at me through smudged bottle-thick glasses. “Um, dude, this is some heavy lifting, like challenging, you know? Okay, so, it’s like the roots are there. Then it gets crazy complex. The glyphs are nothing like I’ve never seen. Complex with distinct differences in prefix, positionals, and suffixes. I’ve never seen a lot of these prevocalics. And it has chunks of Latin tossed in. Like, short phrases right in the middle of a series of glyphs.”

  I stared at him. He could have been talking Greek. Even if it was Mayan. “Skylar, what does that mean in simple terms I can understand?”

  “Best way to put it? Confusing as hell, dude. Like, what would Shakespeare do if you handed him a modern book on string theory? Didn’t matter that he’s the brightest and most creative mind when it comes to the English language in the 1500s. He’s gonna see words in that physics text that he knows. Articles. Nouns. Verbs. Common words in English, right? And then he’s gonna see a lot of words that make no sense at all. What would Shakespeare make of the words, quantum wave theory? He’d know quantum as the Latin word for how much. A wave is water in motion. He might know theory as from the Greek, meaning to contemplate or view. See where I’m coming from? And the grammar’s different. Endings and usage have changed. Idiom is different. Think: ‘Dost thou bite thy thumb at me?’ In modern English, it’d be, ‘You flipping me off?’ ”

  “Yeah, I follow.”

  “Good, ’cause, dude, I could use a little time outa here.” Skylar glanced around. “Like, you know, maybe get to Santa Fe? Score some real food. It’s tough being Shakespeare for you guys without a little time to smell the roses.”

  “Oh, God,” Dan Murphy muttered as he rolled his eyes. “Not again.”

  Murphy was the Mayan mathematics expert. Like Yusif, Dan despised Skylar. But then, he’d lived in a tent with the guy once on an excavation in Belize. Might have soured him on Skylar’s, um, shall we say unique personality and hygiene?

  “Dan?” I asked. “Anything on the math?”

  “Breakthrough.” He pushed his notebook out on the table, and I could see the intricate bars, dots, and ovals that made up the Mayan base twenty mathematics. “In our math, we use symbols for add, subtract, multiply, and divide. For a long time, what I was seeing in Fluvium and Alpha’s math didn’t make sense. I mean, obviously an equation, right? But then it hit me. It’s all in the positioning. If the bars are horizontal and the dots on top, it’s add. Bars horizontal and dots below means subtract. Vertical with dots left means multiply. Vertical dots right, divide.”

  “Brilliant,” Yusif said as he fingered his beard.

  “But what do we know?” Eli asked from his chair. “How does this help us?”

  Maxine Kaplan shot a knowing glance at Wixom, a slight shrug of her shoulders indicating her boredom.

  Murphy answered, “Not much, General. I mean, the equations are elegant, but like Skylar, I’m hitting a wall. I can see the pattern, but I’m losing the details. Maybe it’s because I’m not a physicist.”

  Wixom added, “Murphy has shown me some of the equations. Hoped I’d recognize something. Be able to fill in some of blanks where the math doesn’t make sense. I’ve drawn a blank.”

  Yusif added, “Remember, it took twenty-three years to unlock the secrets of the Rosetta Stone. We’ve only had three months.”

  “Don’t brin
g up time,” Eli told him pointedly. “The difference between now and 1799 when the Rosetta Stone was found, is that we could be extinct in a couple of hours. Our entire timeline essentially ceasing to exist.”

  Glancing at him, I could see that Eli knew something. Whatever it was, it had him worried. Really worried.

  3

  Grazier

  Eli Grazier had an uneasy tickle in his gut. It happened when he was out of his element—and he hated the feeling. He had traveled in person to New Mexico and now perched on the bottom step of Skientia’s Los Alamos Lab One. The room was large, thirty-by-thirty–feet square, and had a high ceiling festooned with lights, conduit, and pipes. Thick bundles of electrical wiring snaked in every direction; elevated workstations were strategically placed along the walls, now-dark monitors and keyboards at each. Up the stairs—on a raised platform in the back—a row of comfortable seats for observers stretched to either side of the heavy security door.

  Eli hadn’t earned his rank by being an idiot; he’d read the professional literature and fully understood what it meant to be a clinically diagnosed psychopath. He’d had numerous conversations about his “disorder” with Colonel Timothy Ryan. Grazier knew where he would score on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, or PCL-R: Well above the twenty-seven points on the test that indicated a positive clinical diagnosis.

  Fortunately, he was high functioning. In an instant, he could be convincingly attentive, charming, and persuasive, but behind the mask, he remained totally focused and unemotional. That he suffered from neither guilt nor empathy, Eli considered to be pluses—as was his aversion to taking responsibility for failures. Unlike his criminal brethren, he concentrated on long-term goals and maintained perfect self-discipline. And, yes, psychopath though he might be, Grazier was smart enough to question each and every one of his actions, and he did so with total dispassion. The test left no doubt about his narcissistic and borderline tendencies. He would do anything, sacrifice anyone, to come out on top.

  Thankfully, fate had placed him in charge of this present situation.

  Grazier rocked on his heels and stared at the hemispherical void left in the middle of the concrete floor. A perfect sixth of a sphere, it looked as if it had been milled to the micron by a precision cutting tool. Hard to believe the missing concrete—along with the woman known as Alpha and Skientia’s Chief Operating Officer, Tanner Jackson—was somewhere in the future.

  The future? Grazier’s stomach twitched uncomfortably.

  Around the missing sphere, the scientists had placed a variety of detectors. Mounted on tripods, they were something cobbled together by Maxine Kaplan’s team to record variation in the quantum fields. No one had ever had the opportunity to study the spot where a time machine had vanished. The severed power cables and the surviving base of a steel workstation, however, remained as they had been the moment after Alpha—or more correctly, Domina Nakeesh—had poured the power to her improbable contraption.

  So where was she? A couple of seconds ahead of now? Next week? Sometime in the coming months? Years? Decades?

  Who knew?

  And there lay the root of his conundrum. This wasn’t a typical military or political problem. Not something where he could outmaneuver, destroy, or defeat an enemy. The rules had changed.

  Grazier took a deep breath, swelling his immaculate uniform with its perfectly pressed trousers; the colorful campaign ribbons on his chest shone in the lab’s bright lights. He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, flecked as it was with gray at the temples. A grim expression left the flat angles of his face strained, his broad mouth reflecting the bitter thoughts that lay behind his dark eyes.

  Having his thumb on the very pulse of research, he’d been immediately aware when the strange woman “appeared” in Skientia’s Los Alamos lab. She had “popped in” during a test designed to detect and attract entangled particles from the past, spoke no recognizable language, had no knowledge of history, customs, or modern science. Instead, she spoke something related to, but decidedly different than Italian, wrote in little pictures, and doodled in dots, bars, and weird symbols.

  An idiot savant?

  Some form of extreme autism?

  Or an incredibly cunning and competent spy?

  In the end she’d been labeled as “Prisoner Alpha,” a maximum-security risk, and placed in the military psychiatric hospital at Grantham Barracks for evaluation and diagnosis.

  “Lot of good that did,” Grazier growled to himself as he stuck his thumbs in his belt. Alpha had escaped. Not only from Grantham, but—given the circular divot in the concrete—from the very “here and now.”

  Eli reached into his pocket and let his fingers caress the curious pager that he’d been given. That was baffling as all hell. But to have it happen in his own bedroom was truly disconcerting.

  In or out?

  At the sound of the door opening behind him, and shoes on the stairs, he turned.

  Dr. Timothy Ryan walked slowly down the steps. Ryan was in his fifties, but taller and leaner than Eli. Silver was cropping into the man’s short hair. A pensive look creased Ryan’s thin face as he gave Grazier a nod before turning his attention to the hollow in the floor.

  “They still talking up there?” Grazier asked.

  “For all the good it’s doing. We’re off the map, Eli. Maxine Kaplan, Wixom, a dozen of their engineers and physicists, Rogers and a couple of his associates—they’ve been able to put a lot of the pieces together, but they still don’t have a clue as to how long we’re going to have to wait until we catch up in time with Alpha.”

  Grazier lowered his voice so that the guards flanking the door at the top of the stairs couldn’t hear. “Does either Kaplan or Wixom have any idea about Fluvium’s cerebrum? Any clue about Harvey Rogers and his lab up at Grantham? Why we relocated him?”

  “No. We’ve left Fluvium’s sarcophagus and scrolls here because we took them from Skientia. And the hope is that some of the translations will help us to catch up with Alpha, or have some kind of intelligence about the timeline they came from. Something that will click with Kaplan. Give us an edge.”

  “What’s the word on Falcon? I’d give my left nut to have his perspective on all of this.”

  He referred to Captain James Hancock Falcon, perhaps the most brilliant mind Grazier had ever known. And the most delicate. Falcon suffered from a combination of Dissociative Identity Disorder and schizophrenia. The twenty-nine-year-old had an uncanny ability to discern patterns in data. At that moment, Falcon was catatonic after a psychotic break; he was lying in a special bed in the psychiatric ward in Grantham Barracks. Word was he might never recover.

  “No progress on that front. Eli, for all we know, when those goons arrested him, the trauma may have driven him so deeply into his psychosis . . . Well, we all have hope.”

  “One of these days, I’ll make Bill Stevens pay for that.” Grazier’s dry chuckle held no humor. “And I’m supposed to be the self-serving psychopath? Stevens is the one who swallowed Alpha’s story—hook, line, and sinker. Bet she seduced him with just a single look from those weird blue eyes of hers.”

  “She possesses a remarkable magnetism. Something the likes of which I’ve never seen. Exotic, sensual. A presence that sucks the air out of a room.” Ryan’s smile turned bitter. “Nor have I forgotten that you came to the conclusion that I was under her spell.”

  “What is it about her? What makes her so stunning and magnetic? That she’s from another timeline? Another universe? Whatever it is, she plays men like a master.”

  “Alpha is an enigma. Unlike any woman I’ve ever known. A couple of times in the very beginning, she tried a sexual ploy. Something feral, maybe hormonal. If I wasn’t such a stickler for never messing with a patient . . . Well, who knows?” Ryan let his gaze roam the lab, then settled on the spherical depression in the concrete.

  “This room is monitored every
nanosecond of every day.” Grazier pointed up at the two guards standing to either side of the security door, then to the cameras and motion sensors. “She suddenly materializes with that time machine of hers, and my people will swarm this room. I’ve got one of the best security teams in the country to keep an eye on things. They follow the chain of command, take orders directly from me.”

  “Hope so. It’s the not knowing.” Ryan fingered his chin. “The uncertainty that comes with the realization that we’re not alone. That’s a creepy feeling. Downright unsettling. Knowing that people can just pop in from other timelines. From parallel worlds so different from ours. That, like in the case of Alpha, they think we’re completely expendable.”

  Eli shot him a sidelong glance. “Creepier than you can guess.”

  Ryan—psychiatric clinician that he was—caught the nuance. “Eli? What do you know?”

  “That Alpha isn’t the only one.”

  Ryan’s penetrating gaze tried to pierce his defenses.

  Eli preempted him. “Not here. Not in front of the surveillance. Suffice it to say, if my source is correct, we’re nowhere near out of the woods yet.”

  Absently, Eli fingered the square shape of what he called “the pager” where it rested in his pocket. To Ryan, he said, “I’ll brief you when we get back to the barn. Assuming, that is, that Major Swink can spool that Blackhawk up and get us the hell out of here.”

  Ryan lifted his sleeve, speaking into the mic. “Winny? You on deck?” He listened to something in his earbud. “Five minutes?” He looked at Grazier. “Where to, Eli?”

  “Your place.” That meant Grantham Barracks—the military psychiatric hospital outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Tim Ryan had once been in charge. Now it was the home for a most improbable special operations team. The kind not even Hollywood could have dreamed up.

  Grazier took one last look at the now-silent lab. Lot of drama in this room. They’d cleaned the blood up where the time-containment field had cut Dr. Reid Farmer’s body in two. The same with the spot where Peter McCoy had died of a gunshot to the heart.