Implacable Alpha Read online

  “If you control information and time, you pretty much control everything.”

  Eli kept giving me one of his calculating looks. “Now, put yourself in the president’s hot seat. He knows that in the blink of an eye, everything we thought we knew, every rule in the book, is gone. A woman from another timeline—hell, maybe another universe for all I know—has popped into a research lab in New Mexico. And, God knows, it was a matter of luck that she popped into one of our labs and not one in China. How do you deal with that? Who do you trust? How do you keep it secret?”

  “And Stevens thinks he can take it all for himself?”

  “He’s been in at the ground-floor level since the beginning. Briefed by Jackson and McCoy. Hell, the son of a bitch knew they were trying to kill me. Thought he had me by the balls that day I briefed the president. Was going to have me committed as a nutcase. Only thing that saved my ass? Stevens hadn’t briefed the president, which really pissed off the old man.”

  “So why didn’t the president ax Stevens?”

  Eli’s gaze was fixed a thousand miles beyond eternity as he stared at the Rockies. “Stevens has his own power base. And the guy knows too much . . . like where all the bodies are buried. If it were left up to me, he’d have an unfortunate accident. Assuming he doesn’t have a file on me hidden somewhere that would land on some reporter’s desk at CNN or Fox the day after his funeral.”

  The queasiness in my stomach got worse. “So, what do you see as the solution?”

  “We play it out, Ryan. When it comes to Bill Stevens, the president knows he’s in bed with a scorpion. Stevens took Alpha to the White House, probably to prove that the Many-Worlds hypothesis was real. The president is perched on the horns of a dilemma. He’s got a security nightmare on his hands.” Eli fixed on me. “God, I wish Falcon would snap out of his damned catatonia. I need to know what the game is, who the players are, and what they want. We’re the only thing standing between survival and disaster.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Tell you when we get to Grantham.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “If only Falcon was conscious.”

  But he wasn’t. The fact that Eli—the man without a remorseful bone in his body—could look that grim sent a tremor through me.

  6

  Karla

  Chief Petty Officer Karla Raven pulled the last of her kit from the Chevy Tahoe’s rear deck and slammed the hatch shut. She slapped the roof, her signal to the driver that he could go.

  Through cool gray eyes, she watched the Tahoe accelerate across the smooth concrete in Grantham Barracks’ underground parking lot. The tires hissed as the vehicle passed the Skipper’s blue-and-white–striped Ducati Diavel. Karla hoisted her heavy pack and stared thoughtfully at the motorcycle. Looked like it hadn’t been moved since she’d left for her insertion, exfiltration, and evasion training four days ago.

  Karla’s path to the military psychiatric hospital at Grantham Barracks traced its way back to her enlistment in the Navy and her iron determination to be the first female SEAL. Took her three rollbacks before she earned her trident. Despite the hazing, she’d made Green Team, aced SEAL sniper training, and been assigned to a team. Earned an E7 and command of her own platoon. Until an IED in Afghanistan blew most of it away.

  She’d been cashiered by a pimple-faced lieutenant over her PTSD. Well, and for the impulse control disorder, i.e., kleptomania. All of which had landed her here, at Grantham Barracks. A most improbable place from which to save the world.

  Skipper hadn’t moved his Ducati? “Must be something cooking,” she muttered, turning to the glass doors and the level-four security guard who stood there.

  “Hey, Chief,” the man told her. “How was the vacation?”

  “What vacation? I was attending a mental health care conference in Santa Fe.” At least, that was the cover story. Grantham these days was about as hush-hush, eyes only, if-we-tell-you-we-gotta-kill-you as security could get. As if a special operations command could ever be hidden in a more unlikely location than a military loony bin.

  At the door, she pointed to the Ducati. “The colonel hasn’t touched his bike since I left.”

  “Heard he’s been away.”

  Away? Karla kept her expression blank as she stepped through the glass doors, barely noticed the divots where small arms fire had been patched. The story was that two assassins had tried to kill Prisoner Alpha the day she’d been delivered to Grantham.

  Too bad they didn’t succeed. Would have saved us a shitload of trouble.

  Even then, the male assassin hadn’t made it. One of the security team had taken him out with a heart shot. Then the female shooter had shucked a device from the dying man’s belt and vanished. To this day, they both remained unidentified—a remarkable feat given the facial recognition software and surveillance available to the government.

  Karla passed another guard at level three, rode the elevator up, and was hustled through the level-one security into Ward Six. As she stepped onto the Ward floor, Staff Sergeant Myca Simond met her, saying, “Good to have you back, Chief. Sorry to rush you, but Colonel Ryan wants you in the conference room five minutes ago.”

  She gave the freckle-faced redhead a nod. “Roger that.”

  As they walked down the waxed-and-polished hallways, he asked, “How was the recertification and training?”

  She could tell Simond. He had the same clearance she did. “Boring. They dropped me out of a C-130 in the middle of the night. I parachuted into a deployment of Abrams on a training exercise out at Piñon Canyon and spent the next three days running, crawling through mud and cactus, eating grasshoppers, and hiding while half the training grounds hunted my ass.”

  “They catch you?”

  “Hey, Myca. What I just told you? That was all bullshit. I was only on the ground for about six hours.” She gave him a grin. “Here’s how it really went down. They figured I was going to do fancy SEAL shit. You know, disguise myself as a cholla, slither down drainages, wiggle snakelike in the brush, and sneak through the rocks. Instead, I walked into a mobile command post, stole a captain’s ACUs, changed clothes, and drove out in a Humvee.”

  “No shit?”

  “Most of my time in debriefing was spent explaining the downside to their total lack of security.”

  As they walked down the hallway, she missed the old Ward Six with its familiar cadre of patients. These days, most of the mental patients had been moved to Grantham’s other five wards that were now under Dr. Mary Pettigrew’s administration. Karla had only met the woman once. Dr. Pettigrew might have looked like everyone’s grandmother: gray-haired; round face with a dimple in the chin; slightly overweight; and wearing glasses. She wasn’t. The brief time Karla had spent in her presence, she found the woman to be a no-nonsense clinician dedicated to helping her patients.

  As they reached the conference room door, Simond told her, “I’ll take your pack, Chief. Put it in your room for you.”

  She watched Simond do his best not to stagger or grunt as he took the eighty-pound pack. She hid her grin as she entered the conference room.

  If you didn’t know the room’s history, the fluffy and cuddly-looking animals drawn on the walls, the flowers and soft pastel colors, thick carpeting, and collection of beanbag chairs in the corner would have thrown you off. While the décor had been designed to soothe, to make patients relax and feel safe, it had become the war room where life-or-death decisions regarding the future of the world were made.

  At the head of the table, to Karla’s surprise, sat General Elijiah Grazier. She hadn’t seen the two-star since the man had appeared in Santa Fe and more or less rescued them from the clutches of the federal government. Turned out that shooting up mansions, stealing aircraft, aerial combat over the Chesapeake, and gunfights in Los Alamos focused the attention of lots of different kinds of law enforcement—not to mention
the infamous Bill Stevens.

  Grazier had given Team Psi an out: They could work for him as a specialized black-on-black unit dedicated to Alpha and the threat she posed to, well, just about everything. Or they could expect a long incarceration in the federal penal system.

  Now, with the exception of Captain James Falcon—whose chair remained ominously empty—the whole team was present. On the way to her seat, Karla slapped Winny Swink’s raised hand in a high five.

  “Have fun?” the redhead asked.

  “All but the airplane ride. Without you at the stick, we didn’t do a single barrel roll.”

  Karla seated herself across from Catalina Talavera. Not quite thirty, Cat had two PhDs from Stanford, one in biochemistry and another in genetics. She might remind Karla of a porcelain doll with her large almond eyes, petite nose, and delicate chin, but since the days when Cat had tried to commit suicide on the Capitol steps to protest the misuse of her research, the woman had shown remarkable courage. Cat had been committed to Grantham for psychiatric “observation” and her own “protection.” Not to mention that the Department of Defense wanted her locked away where she couldn’t email classified bioresearch to the New York Times. That she was also an illegal alien and could have been deported back to Acapulco added to her mystique.

  To Cat’s right sat beanpole-thin Private First Class Edwin Tyler Jones. Cat Talavera and ET—as Jones was called—enjoyed a budding romance. Talk about yin and yang, ET was one of eight kids born of a single mother in a run-down black neighborhood in Detroit. Early on, he’d been recruited by one of the Detroit street gangs—the brothers having a use for his incredible computer skills. ET’s passion was cracking codes, security systems, breaching firewalls, and penetrating cybersecurity. Having no better way to avoid arrest as the law closed in, ET built a new identity for himself, enlisted in the army, and ultimately had himself committed to Grantham as a preferable alternative to a cell in Leavenworth.

  “Hey, Chief,” ET told her. “See you made it back. Steal anything fun on the outside?”

  Karla dealt with more than just her PTSD; the trauma of losing most of her SEAL platoon to an IED had developed into what they called “an impulse control disorder.” In the old days it had been known as kleptomania. She just couldn’t help stealing things.

  “Would have swiped you a Rolls-Royce, but whoever owned it had taken the keys with them.”

  “Since when you worry about keys?” ET asked. “You hot-wire boats, cars, all kinds of shit.”

  “Okay, so they took the distributor cap, too.”

  He reached across the table, slapping and backslapping her fingers. “Effin’ A!”

  She didn’t tell him that she had a gold lighter, shaped like a duck, that she’d palmed from the debriefing colonel’s desk.

  At the other end of the table, watching this interaction, Major Samuel Savage had a dyspeptic look on his bronzed face. Savage looked exactly like what he was: the descendent of Creek and Choctaw warriors. The complexion, lines, and planes of his face would have been perfect for an Edward Curtis photo. Raised on the Creek reservation in Oklahoma by his traditional Uncle Buck, Savage liked to recall that he was probably the only kid alive who ever had to do calculus in his head at the same time he was gutting a deer. No one was laughing when he graduated first in his class at West Point, took a field commission, and never looked back. While assigned to Army Intelligence in DC, he’d finished his PhD in indigenous religious studies, gone on to serve in the CIA’s Intelligence Support Activity, and stumbled headfirst into the “Alpha” situation on a mission in Egypt.

  As the only “normal” member of the team, Savage served as second in command under Dr. Ryan. The major still had trouble dealing with the fact that the rest of his team consisted of “mental patients.” Even after they’d managed to pull his ass out of the shit more than once.

  “Good to have you back, Chief,” Colonel Ryan called from where he sat at Grazier’s right. “How was the recertification exercise?”

  “By the book, sir.” Karla didn’t figure she needed to tell the Skipper about the stolen uniforms, or the Humvee, or the fact that she’d exceeded mission parameters. The Skipper was known to worry himself needlessly over trivia.

  Then Karla turned her attention to General Eli Grazier sitting at the head of the table, stopped, and saluted.

  “Good to see you, Chief,” Grazier said as he lazily returned her salute.

  “You, too, sir.” What in hell was Grazier doing at Grantham? Coupled with the fact that Colonel Ryan’s Ducati hadn’t moved in days, the signs were that some kind of heavy shit was about to come down.

  Karla had saved Grazier’s life when an assassin’s bullet would have blown out the general’s back. Ryan had made it clear to her that Grazier, being a psychopath, would throw her to the wolves in a hot second. And he’d never lose a minute of sleep over it. But then, as the saying went: “If you don’t have a sense of humor when it comes to this shit, you’re obviously in the wrong profession.”

  “Let’s get this over with,” Grazier said as he looked up and down the table. “For the time being, this is the most secure location available to us. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, with the exception of Major Savage, you are all mental patients confined to Grantham Barracks. And as to Savage? He died last month in Afghanistan.”

  Karla glanced at Savage, saw the stiffening of his features. The guy had almost died, being shot through the left lung during the infiltration of the Skientia lab. But for that chance round taking Savage out, they might have gotten to Alpha before she threw the switch that sent her into the future.

  “In short,” Grazier said, “outside of this room, only the president of the United States knows you exist as an official entity. Chief of Staff Bill Stevens, a handful of investigators and their staff, think you were nothing more than a group of escaped mental patients that I used as a cover to decoy them away from the real operatives who took down Skientia. I’ve done everything in my power to convince them I used that classification as a means of saving face for the Department of Defense.”

  ET was grinning. Figured.

  Grazier nodded as if to congratulate himself. “We want to keep it that way. Not only is the world ill prepared to hear that people from other timelines can pop into ours, but it’s research we don’t want the Russians, the Chinese, Iranians, or others to be tinkering with.”

  Ryan leaned back. “You didn’t fly out to Los Alamos just to attend the latest session with the research team there. This is the post-COVID world; you could have done that through a video conference.”

  Grazier spread his hands meaningfully. “I wanted to see the security feeds myself. See the spot where Alpha disappeared. And I wanted to have this meeting.”

  He extracted his smart phone, pulled up an icon, and tapped.

  Karla watched the screen on the far wall come to life. She recognized the security video, having just been in the Grantham parking garage. On the screen, Dr. Ryan and a couple of orderlies stood a couple of paces out from the glass doors. The Skipper had a clipboard in his hands.

  “What you’re seeing here,” Grazier told them, “is Prisoner Alpha’s arrival at Grantham.”

  Karla watched the three-car security detail drive up, a black Suburban in the blocking position, followed by a Lincoln, with a Tahoe chase vehicle close behind.

  The detail pulled to a stop, the security team bailing out, weapons drawn, to form a perimeter. An officer—a captain in dress uniform—emerged from the Lincoln’s passenger door, reached back, and opened the rear coach door. Alpha, wearing an orange jumpsuit, emerged. Even then she looked stately, her blue eyes casting about, her confining chains somehow made irrelevant by the sheer magnitude of her personality.

  Ryan was talking to the captain, then to Alpha, and the image fuzzed out.

  “This is the familiar static discharge that some of you have e
xperienced just before someone teleports, or whatever you call it.”

  When the image reformed, it was in the middle of a gunfight; most of the security detail lay sprawled on the smooth concrete. A man and woman, standing, were firing on full auto. Ryan had pulled Alpha down onto the concrete as the captain capped off rounds from his duty pistol. He was laid over the Lincoln’s roof.

  Karla saw the male assassin, a blond man, drop as if center-punched. At the same time, the captain’s head exploded in a haze of brains and blood, and he went down.

  The woman assassin screamed, “Dear God, no!” as she knelt beside the blond man. Lifted a box that Karla knew was called a navigator from his belt. The woman fiddled with it. Pulled another, the device called a cerebrum, from behind her, and ran her fingers through a projected blue field. The image went fuzzy again and turned to static.

  Grazier reversed the feed. Using fingers on his phone, he narrowed the image to the woman. Zoomed in to focus on her face. Auburn-haired, green-eyed, she looked tanned, young. Maybe in her late twenties. Desperation reflected in the set of her full lips, the angles of her cheeks and nose.

  “My missing assassin,” Ryan said. “For God’s sake, tell me you’ve found her.”

  “Actually,” Grazier said woodenly, “she found me.”

  7

  Ryan

  I sat in shocked silence. Pensive worry reflected in Eli’s dark and somber eyes. Around the conference room, the tension among my people could be felt, heavy in the air. It made a mockery of the bunnies, fawns, and pastoral scenes painted on the walls.

  Everyone in Grantham knew that an assassination attempt had been made on Alpha the day she arrived. That wasn’t the sort of thing that we could have kept quiet even if we’d wanted to. Two people had died: the male shooter and Captain Stanwick.