Jagger scooped him up and deposited him on the other side of the fence. “Last one there does the dishes tonight.”
As the boy bounded away, Jagger turned to look back toward the monastery, but Beth had disappeared in the crowd.
[13]
From her position in the center of the dark intersection at the end of the tunnel, Nevaeh watched Phin storm out of Toby’s room. He turned back and said, “There’s something wrong with the controls. I should have cleared the building that time!”
Sebastian stepped into the corridor and put his hand on Phin’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Get some rest and we’ll try again later.”
Phin jerked himself free. “Fix the controls and we will.” He stormed away and entered his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.
Sebastian shook his head, walked to his room, and disappeared into it. Light splashed into the corridor. Nevaeh waited for him to shut the door, but he didn’t.
A minute later Toby came out of his room, strolled to the kids’ room, and opened the door. The light clicked on, illuminating the skulls opposite the door. “Come on, guys,” Toby said. “Let’s do something.”
Nevaeh could hear Jordan’s groggy voice, but not his words. She guessed they weren’t very pleasant.
She rose and walked through the first flickering sphere of candlelight. The kitchen door was open, and a light over the stove showed an empty room. She continued past Ben’s door and stopped at her own. Three doors away, Jordan bolted out of his and Hannah’s bedroom. He grabbed two skulls to keep from crashing into the wall, then looked back into the room as Hannah pattered out, giggling. Jordan’s hair stood up on one side, and he wore pajamas covered with cartoon skateboarders; Hannah had on a pink nightgown and slippers like pink clouds. It didn’t matter that Toby had just rousted them, nor that it was just after noon: in this windowless dungeon, night reigned around the clock, and the kids had taken to never wearing street clothes unless they were heading out.
Jordan looked in Nevaeh’s direction, stiffened, and squinted into the darkness.
She stepped into the light of a candle so he could see her. He smiled and pressed a finger to his lips. He grabbed Hannah’s hand, and they ran the other direction.
Toby’s voice came out of the bedroom: “… six… seven… eight…”
The children flashed through three pools of light, then disappeared into the black throat of the corridor.
A few seconds later Toby stepped into view. The teenager had on his typical uniform of layered shirts and fashionable jeans: heaven forbid he should ever be caught in pj’s. He looked both directions and addressed Nevaeh in a loud whisper: “Where’d they go?”
She shrugged, and Toby took off. Nevaeh knew he’d never find them: ever exploring, Jordan had found a place where the skulls had crumbled, revealing another room beyond. And she was sure that was only one of many hiding places the boy had discovered.
She thanked God for Jordan. He had been like a son to her since she’d woken up with her legs draped over him on that awful day so long ago. She was thankful, too, that the children’s personalities and mental states had remained childlike. Ben had a biological explanation for that too, but she knew it was God. Without their constant youthful energy, quick laughter, and optimistic outlook, she would have gone crazy a long time ago. Maybe Phin should spend more time with them.
She walked the corridor to Sebastian’s room and looked in. He was sitting at a table against the far wall, his back to her. Three laptop computers crowded in front of him, like children listening to a story. Another device, which resembled a black soda can capped by a glass dome, sat off to one side. Wires ran from it and disappeared behind the computers.
She walked silently toward him, past a big workbench on which he’d arranged his shark fishing gear: rod, reel, fighting harness, sonar. Stacked in a basket on the desk were hand-annotated underwater topographic maps from places like Vigo Port, Spain; Terceira, Azores; and Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica. The chair in front of the workbench was the floor-mounted fighting chair from which he’d caught a record-setting marlin-1,362 pounds and 15 feet long. Displayed on the wall was a selection of old whaling harpoons: two-flue and one-flue, toggling, and a bomb lance. They had nothing to do with shark fishing, but Sebastian was nostalgic about them, having used them on a Dutch whaling expedition in 1880. When Nevaeh protested his hobby-reminding him that even Peter Benchley had become a shark conservationist-he’d said the only reason she didn’t shark fish herself stemmed from a general distaste for cannibalism.
Sebastian’s fingers clicked over the center keyboard. He paused to watch numbers and graphs construct themselves on the monitor. Before they stopped moving, his hands flashed over the keys again, restarting the process.
She stopped behind him and watched him work. She considered grabbing hold of his close-cropped Afro, then thought her nails on the back of his neck would give him a better scare. She raised her hand.
“What do you want, Nevaeh?” he said, clicking away.
She slapped the back of his head. “You’re no fun.”
“I’m busy. Go away.”
She turned and rested her backside against the edge of the desk. “Have you cracked the code on the microchips yet?”
“You just got back with them.”
“And we should be heading for the zone of operations by now, but we can’t move until you have the chips ready for the control panels.”
“Can’t stand still, can you? I had a dog like that once.” He glanced at her. “Had to put him down, made me too nervous.”
She picked up the soda can thing, drawing its wires tight against her side as she examined it. Under the glass dome rested an octagonal computer chip about the diameter and thickness of a dime. At each of its corners, a thin gold peg disappeared into a hole in the top of the can. It looked to Nevaeh like a spider caught in a trap.
“Hey, hey,” Sebastian said, standing and taking the can from her. He replaced it on the desk. “Do you want me to decode this thing or not? Get out of here, Nev. I mean it.”
She crossed her arms. “Give me an ETA.”
He sighed and dropped back into the chair. He waved a hand at the monitors, as though tossing sand at them. “These chips are designed not to be decoded. Each UAV requires two chips onboard and two matching chips at the control console. All four have to communicate with each other as well as the rest of the fleet for the drone to work. Thanks to your success at MicroTech, we now have duplicates of the control console chips. But they’re encoded and unusable until unlocked by the commanding officer-or me. Trouble is, each one has its own AES-256 encryption block.” He smiled at the confusion on her face. “That’s the most secure encryption in the world-NSA standard.”
“Can’t you just give me an ETA?”
“How long until the field test?” he said. It was their one window of opportunity, the only time the particular combat drones they planned on hijacking would be fully armed outside a theater of combat. The U.S. military had ordered beefed-up versions of their premier hunter-killer drones, each with enough firepower to bring down a skyscraper. They also wanted fleets of these flying killing machines to work in unison, with the ultimate goal of creating the most powerful conventional warfare unit of destruction ever. The field test was slated to be a demonstration of an operational ten-unit fleet. It was the Tribe’s intention to make it a demonstration of much more.
“Two weeks.”
Sebastian made a dismissive sound with his mouth.
“But Ben’s inside man says they always change the date for security purposes. Could be anytime.”
Ben-forever cultivating connections within multiple countries’ seats of power-had been particularly secretive about this one. The source must have had umbra-level clearance: he’d told Ben about the drones’ field test, the
