Spiral

Jake was careful to note the sequence of taps she used.

Jake took the spade and went to work.

After ten minutes, at a depth of maybe three feet, his spade struck concrete. He brushed away the dirt.

“Dig it out,” Orchid said.

Five minutes later, he had it free of the earth. It was a cylindrical plug of concrete, maybe a foot in diameter and two feet long. It weighed about fifty pounds. A piece of rebar stuck out of the top, like a handle.

Orchid said, “I was sure it was in one of the bunkers. I checked nearly every damned one.”

Jake understood. The bunkers drew your attention, but they were decoys. Liam had hidden the Uzumaki in a nondescript patch of weeds. Orchid couldn’t have found this spot in a hundred years. This is what Liam had been hiding, and what he had died trying to protect.

“Give it to me,” she said.

THE ENTRANCE TO THE BUNKER WAS SEALED BY A MASSIVE iron door, ten feet tall and thick as a safe’s door. A larger metal bar sealed it closed, locked by a simple combination padlock. Orchid read him the combination from the sheet of yellow paper. Jake opened the lock and lifted the handle. To his surprise, the door swung open easily, the hinges barely squeaking. The interior of the bunker was dark, but Jake detected a kind of odd glow inside, brightening and fading with the rhythm of a heartbeat.

“Inside,” Orchid ordered.

As Jake entered, the source of the glow became clear. Bioluminescent patches of red, green, and yellow all along the walls, pulsing slowly on and off. The glowing fungi that Liam had left in the letterbox-there were rows and rows of it here.

“Go to the back,” Orchid said.

Orchid flipped a switch, and an overhead light turned on.

The bunker was a half-cylinder, twenty feet high in the center and maybe a hundred feet long, like a submarine cut in half. The floor was swept bare concrete. But it wasn’t empty, like the one that Jake had visited when he came here with Liam. Rows of lab benches lined the walls, some covered with beakers, pipettes, and a few larger pieces of equipment, others with trays of glowing fungi, pulsing red, yellow, and green. It was a smaller, stripped- down version of Liam’s lab back at Cornell. He must have brought it in bit by bit over months. Maybe years. Assembling it on his trips to supposedly observe the white deer.

Orchid directed Jake to set the concrete plug down. Orchid held Dylan close, the gun to his head.

Dylan was wide-eyed, staring at a strange chair in the center of the space. It was made of black reinforced carbon struts, almost like a high-tech electric chair. There were straps on the arms and legs, and there was a terrifying head assembly of bolts and clamps.

Next to the setup was a small metal table. On it, Jake saw a MicroCrawler.

It took him a moment to realize.

This is where she had tortured Liam.

Dylan was transfixed by the chair. He looked scared to death. He seemed to grasp what it was for. He was shaking, in full-blown panic.

He broke for the door.

Orchid caught him with one arm and tossed him back, smashing him into one of the cases holding the glowing fungi. The boy fell to the ground, pulling trays of fungi down on top of him.

Jake took a step toward her. “If you hurt him, I’ll-”

Orchid tapped on her leg and a lightning bolt ran up Jake’s spine. He fell to the ground, quivering, seeing white.

Finally it stopped. After a few seconds he managed to sit up.

Dylan had backed against a wall, patches of glowing fungus clinging to him. His face was empty, hollow, as if the boy Jake knew and loved had disappeared.

“Stay still,” she said to Dylan, “or I’ll shoot you.”

Orchid pointed to the chunk of concrete. “Break it open,” she said to Jake.

Jake slowly stood. He lifted the plug of concrete and threw it down hard on the concrete floor. A corner broke off, but nothing more. The second time was no better. The third time it hit at an angle and split open cleanly, revealing a hollow, spherical cavity inside. Inside the cavity was a large child’s red balloon.

An old builder’s trick. You want to leave a cavity inside concrete, help keep the weight down, you embed an inflated balloon when you pour it.

Jake picked up the balloon. Something was inside it.

Jake ripped the balloon away, the rubber old and brittle. Inside, he discovered a rectangular metal box the size of a paperback book. Jake guessed it was made of titanium. The box was featureless except for a thin, almost invisible seam at its midsection and an index card-sized display panel on top. The panel sprang to life, turning a soft white in response to Jake’s touch.

Words appeared on the screen.

ENTER #1

Orchid stared at the box for a long moment, then said, “Touch your right index finger to the pad.”

Jake did as ordered. The words on the screen faded, then said:

IDENTITY #1 ACCEPTED

ENTER #2

Orchid said, “Take it to Dylan.”

Jake understood. Liam had programmed it so that only Jake and Dylan could open it. Jake guessed that Maggie’s prints would open it, too. Any two of them.

He carried the box to Dylan, the boy’s hands still cuffed together.

Dylan looked terrified.

“Hang in there,” Jake said. “You never know when the blueberries will come.”

Dylan seemed to understand. It was one of his elephant jokes. It wasn’t blueberries that would be coming. It would be elephants.

Jake held the box out. Dylan touched his finger to the pad.

The screen changed again, said:

IDENTITY #2 ACCEPTED

Jake stepped back. He heard a click. He opened the lid.

Inside was a layer of gray clay. Pushed into it was a thin brass cylinder, perhaps an inch long and thin as the ink cartridge in a ballpoint pen. Jake guessed what it was. Liam had told Jake how on their missions the Japanese Tokko had carried the Uzumaki in small brass cylinders.

“Put it down,” Orchid said. “On that table.”

Jake ignored her. He carefully removed the cylinder from the box. The thickness changed slightly midway along, where there was a seam. The two halves were threaded, then screwed together. Unscrew the two halves, release the contents, and millions of people would die.

“Professor Sterling.”

He glanced up at Orchid. He saw the excitement written on her face. This was it. This was when she was most vulnerable.

“Put it down on that table. Then reconnect your cuff,” Orchid said.

Jake turned to face her. He held the cylinder tight in his right hand.

“Put it down,” she said, raising the gun to point it directly at his skull.

Jake said, “No.”

EVERY GOOD SOLDIER KEPT A THREAD, A LIFELINE TO THEIR larger self. The lifeline was a rock-solid anchor, a fixed point that would allow them to act for the greater good no matter what the cost, to put aside any fear or hesitation. For some it was a connection to a particular person: a wife, a parent, or a child. For others it was an idea, a belief in the rightness of their task. For Jake, it had been his belief that a soldier’s suffering, given or received, prevented a still larger suffering. That had been his anchor during the Gulf War. It let him come back from what they had done.

Soldiers without an anchor were time bombs. Once they left the military, once freed from the structure of regimen and hierarchy, these souls became lost. The darkness in Orchid’s eyes said she was capable of anything.