He thought he’d better check the monitor, since he’d been gone for over an hour. He went into the bedroom, opened a drawer in the dresser. In the drawer sat the laptop computer, and next to it a metal box dense with electronic parts, along with an electric soldering iron, cutters, pliers, tape, and a roll of solder wire.
A light on the box was blinking. It meant that an emergency call had been made over Nanigen’s intracompany network. Shit, he’d missed it.
The message was encrypted. He tapped the keys of the laptop, and ran the de-encryption program, the one he’d downloaded from Nanigen’s VPN. It took a minute to unscramble the call, and then he began to listen as voices came out of the laptop. “You say you’re at Tantalus Base?” “Not exactly. We’re in Ben Rourke’s fortress.” “What?” “He’s got all kinds of equip-” “You’re telling me Ben Rourke is alive?” “Absolutely. And he doesn’t like you, Mr. Drake.”
Eric leaned over the dresser, listening more intently. This had been an emergency call made through the videoconference link with Tantalus. He couldn’t get the image, but he could get the sound. The voices went on. “What about the others?” “They’re all dead, Mr. Drake.” “Peter Jansen is dead, too?” “Yes.” “Are you sure he’s dead?” “He got shot. His chest exploded. I saw it.”
Eric gasped as if he’d been punched. “No,” he said. He closed his eyes. “No,” he said again. He made a fist and slammed it on the dresser. “No!” He turned around and pounded the bed with both fists, and picked up a chair and threw it against the wall, and sat down on the bed and buried his face in his hands. “Peter…oh, Peter…God damn you Drake…God damn you.”
Eric Jansen didn’t cry for long. He didn’t have time right now. He got up and restarted the playback, and listened to the end of the message. “As you get closer to Diamond Head, you will see a blinking light by the sea… Fly toward the lighthouse.”
He had been monitoring all the major intracompany data feeds, waiting, and hoping, for news of his brother and the other graduate students. He had felt pretty sure that Drake had dumped them somewhere, maybe at the arboretum, though he couldn’t be certain. He had gone there in the truck and walked into the valley through the tunnel, and had listened with the equipment but heard nothing. Nevertheless, he had hoped that Peter would turn up sooner or later. He had had faith in Peter’s resourcefulness. He had waited, hoping he could rescue Peter and the others.
He had made a terrible mistake. He should have gone to the police immediately, even if it had guaranteed his own death.
The call had come in almost an hour ago. Damn! He had taken his sweet time getting that food! Eric swore and dragged open the drawer, scooped up the laptop and a radio headset, and ran down the stairs. In the driveway, the two guys were sitting beside the parked truck. Eric didn’t have a car. He had worked out a deal with one of the guys to rent the truck, paying fifty bucks every time he used it. Now, he handed the guy fifty dollars and got in, placing the equipment on the seat next to him.
“When you be back?”
“Don’t know.” He started it.
“You okay, man?”
“There’s been a death in my family.”
“Oh, sorry, man.”
He swung onto Kalakaua Avenue and immediately realized he’d made a mistake. Kalakaua was the main drag of Waikiki, and the crowds had flooded the avenue, people going on foot and in cars. He should have gone the other way to Diamond Head. But that probably would have been just as bad. As he inched his way through the stoplights, past the major hotels, he began to cry again, and this time he let it happen. It’s my fault, he told himself. My brother is dead and it’s my fault.
Drake had planned the killing with extra layers of security, different ways to make Eric die. Eric wasn’t sure exactly how Drake had done it, but Drake had made the boat stall in heavy surf, and he’d rigged something that had launched two Hellstorms at Eric. The killer bots flew out of the cuddy cabin after the boat stalled. At first Eric had thought they were flies or moths, but then he saw the propellers, and the munitions, too. After he jumped out of the boat with the killer bots flying after him, he had to keep himself under water, to avoid them. He had texted Peter just before he jumped, warning Peter to stay away, but there had been no time to explain things.
Eric was a strong swimmer and knew how to handle himself in surf. He had gone into the surf without a life jacket, diving deep whenever a breaker passed over him, in order to keep himself safe from the bots. He had considered the surf the safest place to be. Safer than anywhere else just then. He swam into a small cove, where there was a pocket beach known locally as the Secret Beach. The beach was tucked among the headlands. You couldn’t see it from most places. It could only be reached by a hiking trail.
He had come out of the water at the Secret Beach only after he was reasonably sure no one had seen him swim there. He had bagged a ride into Honolulu from some local guys, who asked no questions and could not have cared less where he came from. Going to the police had not been a good option. The police would never believe his story, that tiny flying robots armed with super-toxin weapons had been sent by the CEO of the company to kill him: they would think he was schizophrenic. And if he went to the police, Drake would learn he was alive, and would send more Hellstorms, and he’d be killed for sure and very fast. In Honolulu, he had not returned to his apartment: Drake might have set a trap for him there. Instead, he’d visited a pawnshop, and taken his Hublot chronograph watch off his wrist and pawned it for several thousand dollars. He needed to go into hiding, and figure out how to bring Drake to justice. He had put down cash for a seedy, low-profile rental.
As Nanigen’s vice president for technology, Eric Jansen knew a lot about the company’s communication network. A degree in physics helped. After a trip to Radio Shack, he had tweaked up a listening device. He had begun scanning the Nanigen intracorporate channels, and learned that his brother had shown up in Hawaii immediately, then had disappeared along with the other students. He suspected Drake had done something with the students. He had not believed Drake would murder them; that would be too obvious, and Drake was a clever man. So Eric had assumed that Drake had made them disappear in the micro-world temporarily, and that they would eventually reappear.
Eric had been waiting for the moment when his brother would come to the surface, for he had faith in Peter. He had thought that Peter would get through this, and come to light, somehow, and that he, Eric, would eventually rescue him. If the two of them could go to the police, there would be two corroborating witnesses to Drake’s crimes.
This was not to be.
He had screwed up massively. He should have gone to the police right away. Even if the police didn’t believe him, even if it meant that Drake would kill him, because it just might have saved Peter’s life. The whole source of the problem was Omicron. Eric had been very careful not to tell Peter what he had discovered about Project Omicron. Eric had been trying to protect his younger brother. None of this had done any good.
He swung through Kapiolani Park, picking up speed and weaving around the cars, hoping he would get to the lighthouse in time.
Chapter 43
Ko‘olau Mountains 31 October, 11:10 p.m.
At an altitude of 2,200 feet, Danny Minot pointed the nose of his micro-plane upward, gaining height in order to be sure he would clear the sides of Tantalus Crater. The crater was lined with entrapping trees, black and menacing. He looked back, wondering if any micro-planes were following him. But he couldn’t see anything. He headed upward, gaining altitude.
This was easier than a video game; the micro-planes had been designed to be almost crash-proof. Did the plane have running lights? He found a switch, and the running lights came on, red and green on the wingtips, white pointing forward. He turned them off so that the others couldn’t follow him, but after a little while he switched the lights on again. It made him feel better, somehow, to see the familiar winking lights on the wings.
And he saw the city of Honolulu spread out below him. The hotels of Waikiki towered and seemed impossibly huge. Red-and-white lines of cars moved along the boulevards, and he saw a cruise ship docked in the
