Implacable Alpha Read online

  The bullet holes had been patched, the shattered glass doors replaced, and the bullet-riddled Lincoln had been towed out of the garage.

  I’d spent hours studying the auburn-haired woman’s image. Wondered who she was. How she had escaped. This, however, was the first time my people had seen the footage.

  “She found you?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  Eli raised his eyebrows. “I was going to bed. In my own bedroom in Georgetown.” He glanced around the table to make sure my people understood. “My house? Given what I’m privy to? It’s like Fort Knox, only more secure and better monitored. Two separate agencies have security systems in my place.”

  “And this woman appeared?” Sam Savage gestured at the image frozen on the far wall.

  “Stepped out of my closet.” Eli ran fingers down the line of his chin. “Told me not to reach for my pistol, that she’d unloaded it. And that she’d disabled my alarm button.”

  “How’d she get in?” Karla asked, a skeptical frown on her forehead as she studied the image.

  Grazier gestured at the projection. “You know what happens when they use the navigator and cerebrum. Like on the surveillance video, it knocks out the lights, plays hell with cameras and electrical systems. From reports like yours, Chief Raven, it feels like a wave rolling through you. Cuts your strings, as you say. Couldn’t have stated it better.”

  “So, she still has the same cerebrum and navigator that she used here,” I noted, staring at the boxes the woman cradled. Each was about the size of a thick hardback book, and I could see the faint haze of the holographics they projected.

  Cat wondered. “Anything like a roof access, some—”

  “No.” Eli left no doubt. “When I checked with my security, they had nothing. Just two periods of static separated by about an hour and a half.”

  “Why’d she want to see you?” ET flexed his long spiderlike fingers on the table.

  “To give me this.” Grazier reached into his pants pocket. He produced a small square device. Might have been a garage door opener. Maybe two-by-three inches and a half inch thick. On the surface, I could see a silver button.

  “She tossed me this. Said that she was here to destroy Alpha and Fluvium. That if I wanted in, I should push this button.” He paused. “ ‘In or out.’ Her words exactly.”

  “But Fluvium’s dead,” Cat said. “We’ve seen the body. The guy’s a mummy. Been that way for over three thousand years.”

  Grazier met Cat’s eyes, smiled a sort of rictus at her. “That was my reaction, Dr. Talavera. My intruder wasn’t impressed. Reminded me that I wasn’t thinking the whole ‘time thing’ through. The implication was that by now, we should be grasping on to the fact that time isn’t a constant.”

  “Which means?” Savage asked.

  “Which means if Alpha pops back into our world, appears again in that hollow in Lab One back at Los Alamos, and manages to escape, she might damned well get back and rescue Fluvium. Essentially pull him out of our timeline before he dies of old age in ancient Egypt. If that happens, you, me, and the rest of us will cease to exist.”

  Karla asked, “Do you know how hinky and weird this all sounds, sir?”

  “Yeah.” Eli licked his lips. “And, Chief, we’d better learn the rules in this new game pretty damn ricky tick quick, or we’re going to lose it all.”

  This was the second time I’d seen Eli look scared. It sent a chill through my belly. “So, what does it mean? In or out?”

  Grazier shrugged. “Tim, like I said, we don’t know the rules. Put this in perspective: These people pop in and out of our universe. We know that Alpha and Fluvium popped in sometime during the Eighteenth Dynasty three thousand three hundred years ago in ancient Egypt. They laced the Nile with a bioengineered algae.”

  Eli singled out Cat. “Good work on your part figuring that out, Dr. Talavera.”

  Cat responded with a self-conscious smile.

  “Turns out that the bio agent they used may have been recorded as one of the famous ‘Plagues of Egypt’ where the Nile ran with blood. The algae known as Oscillatoria turns water red. But Fluvium didn’t use all of his samples. The other was found in his sarcophagus, an even more deadly strain.”

  “Good thing that stuff didn’t end up in someone’s water supply,” Cat added. “No one should die that way.”

  “You were the people who figured out that Fluvium and Alpha were using our world, and perhaps others, as testing grounds for what we would call bioweapons.” Eli arched an eyebrow. “Clever, actually. Pick a timeline after it diverged from their own, and they could experiment with an entire planet’s population. Infect it, jump ahead in time, and evaluate the long-term results. See what their meddling wrought.”

  How cold could a couple of people be? I could ask that? Given my profession? Let alone our own history of Nazi, Bolshevik, and Khmer Rouge atrocity?

  The thing was, I’d been treating Alpha, cudgeling my brain to find a way to reach her when we all thought she was suffering from an undiagnosed and catastrophic mental disorder. The notion that I’d sat across from a mass murderer who would callously experiment on entire worlds, that I had looked into her eyes and cared for her welfare, sent a queasy tremor through my soul.

  Was I that bad a judge of character?

  Karla’s gray eyes slitted as she studied the projected image of the auburn-haired woman. “Looking back, it’s too bad your assassin didn’t shoot straighter.”

  “Maybe,” Eli agreed. “But what’s to say our assassin’s any better than Alpha? This could be like choosing between two warring drug gangs, or deciding if you’re going to back Hitler or Stalin on the Russian Front. Until we know the rules, let alone the objectives of either combatant, we shouldn’t be picking sides.”

  “Wish Falcon was here,” ET muttered uneasily.

  We all did.

  Me most of all.

  Falcon was my patient. And I couldn’t do a thing to help him.

  8

  Falcon

  Falcon’s skull might have been a bell the way Aunt Celia’s voice seemed to reverberate around the inside. “James, I know I can never be a mother and a father to you . . .”

  The words were coherent, but indistinct, tonally fuzzy around the edges as they vibrated with increasing amplitude inside his head.

  Images formed behind Falcon’s eyelids: sine waves of the vibrations rushing from left to right, varying in amplification, and breaking apart around the edges.

  Sound made visible, comprehensible, when Aunt Celia’s words were not.

  Of course, Aunt Celia couldn’t be mother and father. Her real name was Cecelia Jean Falcon, and she’d been what James’ father called, “the spinster aunt.” Aunt Celia had owned a sprawling mansion on ten acres up in Westchester County where she entertained, rubbed elbows with the elite, and had accrued a rather scandalous reputation concerning married men.

  Mother and father were dead.

  “I was eight when they died,” Falcon told himself.

  “They’re gone,” Aunt Celia confirmed, that familiar acidic anger in her voice.

  “I know that,” he cried.

  “I’m all that you and your sister have left.”

  His sister. He wondered whatever had happened to Julia. Why he hadn’t kept up with his little sister’s life. Julia would be twenty-seven. She’d been a doctoral candidate at Columbia. Probability suggested that they would have hooded her by now. Julia had always been smart.

  “Smarter than you, you weak piece of shit,” Rudy Noyes told him in a smarmy voice.

  The sine waves fractured on the back of Falcon’s eyelids.

  Rudy? When had he come? Falcon opened his eyes, glancing across the small room to where Rudy leaned against the wall. Posture insolent, Rudy wore a scuffed brown bomber jacket, had his arms crossed. In his long fingers,
a switchblade knife clicked and flashed every time Rudy flipped it open and closed. A glittering of amusement lay behind his derisive stare.

  Rudy’s not here. He’s a hallucination. Not real. Just part of my dissociative psychosis.

  “Go away.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, you little pussy.” Rudy artfully twirled his knife around his fingers as he lifted his other hand to push long black hair over his ears. “Somebody’s gotta tell you what a spineless shit you are.”

  “I’m not!”

  “Wussy pussy, wussy pussy,” Rudy repeated in a singsongy voice. “Falcon is a wussy pussy.”

  “Am not.”

  Rudy gave him a devilish grin. “Then why are you still locked in this room? No wonder you can’t get laid. You couldn’t pay a whore enough to pop your cherry, you spineless little turd.”

  With that, Rudy flipped him the bird, turned, and swaggered off toward the bathroom.

  Falcon clamped his eyes shut, aware of the fragments of Aunt Celia’s voice as they echoed hollowly in the darkness around him.

  Cecelia Falcon had tried. She’d ensured he received the best private education, finishing his high school years at the all-male Salisbury School in Connecticut. She’d bought him a Jaguar XK on his sixteenth birthday, figuring the sleek car would ensure he was popular. Not only did he remain a misfit, but it also backfired. The other boys considered him even more pathetic and spoiled. She would have paid for his university if MIT hadn’t offered Falcon a full scholarship to study math, theoretical physics, game theory, and complicated systems theory.

  Falcon had been at MIT when the major first walked into his life.

  “And a damned good thing I did.”

  Falcon’s eyes snapped open at the authoritative voice. Major Bradley Kevin Marks sat in Falcon’s worn easy chair where it rested in the corner. Marks, as always, wore his dress uniform; the creases looked sharp enough to cut a finger. The colorful campaign ribbons on the jacket’s right breast dazzled in the light. Falcon could see the room reflected from the mirrorlike polish on those black shoes.

  “Noyes? What a two-footed maggot,” Major Marks muttered, squinting with his steely gray eyes. “I’d flush him down a toilet, and then I’d apologize to the sewer for the offense.”

  Major Marks looked to be in his fifties, tall, his silver hair short-cropped. A career officer, Marks reminded Falcon of a bulldog—and it wasn’t just the man’s strong jaw. But then, the major had seen it all.

  “He called me a wussy pussy.” Falcon placed a hand over his eyes as he leaned his head back into his pillow. He didn’t want to see the acoustical panels overhead, let alone think of the little tennis-ball–sized camera up in the ceiling that monitored his every move. Like a gleaming black orb—maybe an oversized spider’s eye—the thing had an eerie presence. A constant reminder that no matter how inviolate his room, he was still linked to the outside world.

  It waited . . . just beyond the door.

  “And all you have to do—” Major Marks’ voice inserted itself into Falcon’s thoughts, “—is get up, walk over, and turn the knob.”

  “I . . . can’t.”

  “I expect better of you, soldier.”

  “You didn’t see those eyes. Black pupils like pinpricks, ringed in pale blue like some washed-out ocean, and the whites so wide and scary.”

  “He was just a cop, Falcon. He’s gone.”

  “Can’t hurt me. Not while I’m here. Safe. In my room.”

  “In your prison.” Marks’ voice had no give as he looked around the small room. “That’s the crying shame. You realize, of course, that you are doing this to yourself. The washed-out looking white guy with the pale hair and those watery-blue eyes? That was Special Agent Hanson Childs, Army CID. Him and all those MPs, sure, they wanted you locked away.” Marks raised his hands to emphasize the room. “And you did it for them.”

  “I’m not going out that door,” Falcon insisted, experiencing the first tingles of fear. “Those eyes are out there. Black dots of pupils in washed-out blue. Pain is out there. People dying. Suffering . . . and I don’t want to hurt. Not anymore.”

  “People out there are depending on you, and you damned well know it.”

  Falcon rubbed his throat, fought the tightening. Like it was getting hard to breathe. Panic. It started to build. He could feel the thoughts as if they were physical things as they started to loop in his head.

  Aunt Celia was shouting in that piercing voice: “Jimmy, you are such a disappointment. I require the bare minimum of you. I cannot be the mother and father you lost. I ask so little, yet even that seems to be beyond your most facile ability to perform!”

  Falcon swallowed. “I’m sorry. My fault.”

  “Yes. It is . . .” Aunt Celia leaned over the polished table. Behind her, the tall grandfather clock from Germany tick-tocked in its carved cabinet. The flowered wallpaper seemed to ebb and flow at the periphery of Falcon’s vision. He could feel little Julia’s wide-eyed gaze where she cowered in the dining room doorway behind him.

  “Jimmy, you are such a disappointment,” Aunt Celia’s voice started over. “I require the bare minimum of you. I cannot be the mother and father . . .”

  The loop started its endless repeat.

  As Falcon fell into the well of self-disgust, a faint voice could be heard from beyond the locked door.

  “Falcon? Can you hear me? We’re trying something different. A new drug.”

  The sound of the voice reassured him. That was Cat Talavera. Just hearing her was a relief. Then Aunt Celia’s voice drowned it, declaring, “Jimmy, you are such a disappointment. I require . . .”

  Like falling into a black pit, Falcon wanted to weep.

  9

  Cat

  The most thoroughly monitored patient in Grantham’s Ward Six was Captain James Hancock Falcon. Cat Talavera considered that as she tapped the syringe, then squeezed out the little air bubble to get precisely 1.5 ccs of her latest antipsychotic cocktail.

  Cat had grown up as a DACA kid, brought to the USA at the age of six by her parents when they’d fled Acapulco. She’d excelled at school, earned a full-ride scholarship to Stanford, completed her bachelor’s in two-and-a-half years, and earned a PhD in biochemistry, followed by a second PhD in genetics by the grand old age of twenty-nine.

  When she’d discovered that her research had been used as a clandestine biological weapon to wipe out an entire village in Afghanistan, she’d tried to expose the operation; she’d emailed her research to the New York Times. And, distraught, she’d attempted suicide on the Capitol steps. She hadn’t anticipated that NSA would intercept the email, or that the Capitol steps were so closely monitored with an EMT only minutes away. All of which had landed her in the military psychiatric hospital at Grantham Barracks.

  Cat stood beside Falcon’s bed, aware of the monitors that recorded his heartrate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, and the helmetlike sensors on his head that measured brain activity. Lit by fluorescent lights, the room couldn’t have been mistaken for anything but a hospital. The presence of Nurse Virginia Seymore in her scrubs only added to the effect. Now the woman crossed her arms, asking, “Think that will do it?”

  “Let’s hope,” Cat answered. “The last formula elevated Falcon’s dopamine levels while slowing activity in the limbic system. If I can just dampen Falcon’s peculiar ring of fire.”

  “What’s that?” ET asked where he leaned in the doorway.

  “The ring of fire,” Seymore told him. “It’s a term used by psychiatric professionals to describe the ring of mental activity when most of the brain is active. Usually associated with attention deficit disorders. Like the whole brain is turned on without any ability to organize itself, all the areas are screaming at once. But Falcon’s is different, unique to his disorder. Not so much a ring, it’s more like a fountain emitting from the amy
gdala.”

  “Falcon has a pattern of brain areas that keep repeating,” Cat explained as she slipped the needle into Falcon’s IV and injected it. “Falcon is special and rare. His brain is organized differently. That’s why tailoring a pharmacology for him is so hard. This latest one? I’m trying to inhibit the D2 receptors in specific parts of his brain. Target it at the base of the fountain, if you will. If I can shut off the looping at the source, maybe he’ll be able to break the compulsive repeats.”

  “He’s a schizophrenic,” ET interjected.

  “More than that,” Cat told him as she dropped the needle into the sharps container. “He’s dissociative and schizophrenic. He hallucinates people, like Rudy Noyes, that Major Marks of his, and Theresa Applegate. But they’re his alter egos, creations by the dissociative part of his personality. They appear to him as real as you and I do.”

  “Yeah. I know.” ET rubbed his long skinny arms. “But what make him so damn smart?”

  “It’s how the neurons and pathways are organized, how they make connections. At the cellular level, Falcon’s brain is patterned in a way that the brains in normal people are not. He puts information together in a unique way. We see it as intuitive, but it’s just a different cognitive process.”

  “Comes at a price,” Seymore said as she reinserted Falcon’s IV. “Falcon might be brilliant, but until those agents put him into a catatonic state, the poor man lived in constant insecurity and paranoia. Only place he ever felt safe was in his room.”

  Cat stared thoughtfully down at Falcon. Medium-brown hair, five-foot-six, bland features, common physique. On the street nothing would have set James Falcon apart from the crowd. From the looks of him, he was the middle of the bell-shape curve white male.

  But he was the brain who came within a whisker of stopping Alpha.

  Wasn’t Falcon’s fault that the woman had managed to start her time device and skip away to the future.

  ET considered the monitor where it displayed Falcon’s brain. “I don’t get it. Why’s he still locked away? Thought catatonia was easy to treat.”