Shadowmark (The Shadowmark Trilogy Book 1) (3 page)

“No.”

“Too bad. I was hoping to catch all of you, but you can relay the message quickly, I trust. We’re implementing ARCHIE.”

Lincoln groped around for the nearest chair and rolled it toward him, but he didn’t sit yet. “You’re . . . as in . . .? But just as a precaution, right?”

“No, I’m afraid not. The towers aren’t man-made.”

Lincoln sat down. “So aliens, then.” The words sounded strange as they left his mouth. Lincoln experienced a rush of excitement—
wait until Nelson finds out
—followed swiftly by a surge of panic.
There are towers in all major cities around the world.

Cummings continued, “How quickly can your team write a program to interact with the aliens and determine if they’re hostile?”

“You’re joking. How much time do we have?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do the lifeforms communicate?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“What
do
you know?”

“We’ll share everything we have. Are you in?”

Lincoln laughed. “Like I’d pass up an opportunity to communicate with the first intelligent beings from outer space?”

“Good. One other thing,” Cummings said. “There’s a facility we’re sending you to.”

“A facility? What kind of facility? Where? We have everything we need here at the lab.”

“Can’t tell you anything else over the phone. Has to do with ARCHIE. I’m sending a chopper to your building. Get your team ready.”

“Surely there are other people more qualified than us.”

“There are, and we’re sending some of them to you. But they can’t handle the coding like you.”

Lincoln did some quick thinking. “Paul,” he said.

“Yes?”

“My sister is in London, trying to get a flight back stateside, but it’s chaos at the airports. I haven’t been able to reach her all day. She may get through to the lab office, and I can’t miss her call.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m afraid . . .”

“I don’t think you understand. Either she gets on a plane headed to the States, or I’m not leaving the lab.”

Cummings was quiet for so long Lincoln worried they’d been disconnected. Finally he said, “I’ll see what I can do. Chopper’ll be there in an hour. See you soon.”

DAY 3

“M
INA
S
URREY
. P
AGING
M
INA
S
URREY
. Please report to the customer relations desk.”

Mina almost ran to the desk, luggage in tow. She passed several television screens, now reporting lines of cars in the London streets, honking and swerving, headed out of the city in a mass exodus. The towers had not moved.

“Ms. Surrey?” asked a tense-looking man behind the counter.

“Yes?” she said, slightly out of breath.

“We have a cancellation, and you have been bumped to the top of the list.”
 

His thick Scottish accent threw Mina for a moment, and she paused to process what he had just said. “I have?”

“Yes. By someone named Paul Cummings from Washington, DC.”

“Who is that?”

The man shrugged. A line was forming behind Mina. He handed her a ticket and a note. “He left this message for you. Your flight leaves this evening.”
 

His eyes were already fixed on the next customer, so Mina moved out of the way to examine the hand-scribbled note.
 

Lincoln Surrey flying to meet you in Atlanta.

Lincoln must have pulled some strings, she thought. But how? He didn’t know anybody that important. Mina looked at the ticket. Her flight left at 8:00 p.m. She silently thanked Paul Cummings, whoever he was. Eight hours. Eight hours and she would be headed home. She smiled as she entered the airport security line.

“Lincoln.”

Lincoln stirred in the small office chair where he had been dozing and blinked watery eyes at one of his associates, computer engineer Lindsay Alvarez.

“Fresh coffee in the break room,” she said, sipping from her own styrofoam cup, the plastic stirrer pressing into her tan cheek. She nodded toward an open doorway at the back of the conference room, causing a piece of straight dark hair to fall into her oval face. She brushed it behind her ear. She’d taken out her contacts and put on dark-rimmed glasses.

She sat in a chair across from Lincoln at the large meeting table, next to Robert Carter, their roboticist, a greying man with a receding hairline and a gut that hung over his khaki cargo pants. He pushed his round glasses up on his nose and twiddled a cigarette between his fingers, already anticipating his next smoke break.

Chris Nelson, computer-engineer-hacker-genius, sat at the end of the table to Lincoln’s left, facing the door, completely awake and oblivious to the people around him as his fingers hummed over the keys of his laptop. The youngest of the group at twenty-eight, Nelson had a soft waistline and a bowl haircut. He wore a black
Space Invaders
t-shirt with a blue pixelated 8-bit alien on the front.

“Did you put on that shirt after I called you, Nelson?” Lincoln asked, smirking.

Nelson shot Lincoln an amused glance. “Heck yeah,” he said, his voice breaking slightly.

The four of them sat in the small conference room where they had been deposited after their helicopter ride to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Nothing had been hung on the plain white walls. The rolling seats were stiff and unforgiving, the grey carpet barely worn. They had dropped their overnight bags haphazardly about the room, obstructing the small paths between the chairs and walls.
 

Lincoln had seen little else of the vast complex, but the sense of urgency they had experienced in the helicopter pervaded the air here as well. When they arrived, he’d barely registered the offices teeming with people rushing up and down, phones ringing, and televisions blaring. A large screen in the ground floor lobby of the building cycled through three-dimensional renderings of all of the towers with lists of data displayed beside them. Lincoln would have liked to stop and look at them, but the group strode quickly past to the bank of elevators that took them to this third floor room. The muffled sounds of people scrambling to make sense of chaos occasionally echoed down the hall.
 

Someone in uniform stood outside the door, checking on the group from time to time. Helicopters whined in the distance. Lincoln wondered what the military was planning to do about the towers. Despite the fact that his team was supposed to help, they had yet to be given any information on the situation or their role in it. Lincoln assumed they were waiting on Cummings, who had always been their point of contact for ARCHIE in the past.
 

No one slept. The team had begun working right away, taking advantage of the lull to pull up existing programs and refresh their memories on scenarios they had not seen in over a year.
 

 
Lincoln checked the time—7:00 a.m. He’d only dozed for twenty minutes. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at his screen.
Nelson was already digging into code, updating algorithms. Alvarez and Carter were discussing possible methods of contact.
 

“I don’t see how our programs are going to determine anything just by looking at the towers,” she said. “The aliens will need to
do
something.”

“Let’s hope they don’t do too much,” said Carter, “except open up and spit out E.T.”

“Then we’ll at least be useful,” said Alvarez.

“What will also be useful,” said Lincoln, standing up, “is if they hold up a big sign saying,
We come in peace. Here’s the cure for cancer
.”

“When was Cummings supposed to arrive?” Carter asked.

“He didn’t say,” said Lincoln.

“What I want to know,” said Nelson, never taking his eyes away from his screen, “is how this facility is in any way better than our lab.”

“I was wondering the same thing,” said Alvarez. “Why bring us here in a hurry only to dump us in an empty conference room?”

Lincoln shrugged. “Security?”

“But you’d think they’d have a better place to put us,” said Nelson. “I’ve heard about this place. They have whole buildings for R&D, counterterrorism, you name it.” His fingers whizzed over the keys.
 

“Maybe this is just a stopping place.”

“I hope so.”

Lincoln went to get a cup of coffee and returned to his seat. They worked in ignorance for several more hours, gradually dropping questions, taking turns dozing at the table, making fresh coffee, checking cell phones for messages from family or news about the towers. Carter took several smoke breaks, returning each time cloaked in the strong odor of tobacco.

The screen in front of Lincoln blurred. After three days without solid sleep, even the copious amounts of caffeine he was forcing into his body were doing nothing to remove the fog from his brain. He checked his phone occasionally, not expecting much with the spotty cell phone signal inside the room.
 

His irritation grew with his weariness. He scrolled through the numbers in his phone, looking for Paul Cummings. The number was still there. Lincoln toyed with calling the number and telling Cummings they were waiting for him. But then, Cummings would know that.

Footsteps echoed outside, voices at the door. It opened. Their escort stepped aside for two other men in Army fatigues. The first man was at least six inches shorter than Lincoln, but strongly built, with dark hair buzzed short and a presence that took up the entire doorframe.

“Lieutenant John Halston,” he said, extending a hand to Carter, who was closest to the door. “This is Corporal Schmidt.” Halston gestured to the much younger man behind him. Schmidt nodded. He was about twenty, with a fresh boyish face and peach fuzz on his chin. The others all stood and shook hands, except Nelson, who glanced up from his computer to nod in Halston’s direction.

“The colonel’s on his way,” said Halston.
 

“Colonel who? Is Cummings here?” asked Lincoln, closing his laptop.

Halston glanced at Lincoln. “You’ll have to speak to Colonel Nash about it, but there’s no one named Cummings here.”

“What?” said Alvarez. Lincoln imagined his own expression must have mirrored hers—a mixture of surprise and irritation.

“Look, Lieutenant,” began Lincoln.

“I’m sure Colonel Nash will explain everything,” Halston interrupted. He left the door open, moving with Schmidt to one side of the table.

One by one the team sat again, adjusting their seats until they were closer together. Nelson closed his laptop but drummed his fingers on the table as if his mind were still working through the lines of code. “So what’s going on out there?” he asked.

Halston sat down in a chair along the wall near the door. “Nothing’s changed with the towers.”

“I was hoping you’d be able to give us more answers.”

Halston shrugged. “Me, too.”

A moment later a trim man in his late forties walked through the door unaccompanied. His dark hair was turning grey at the temples, and he held a tablet and manila folder in his hand. Halston stood, nodded to him, and closed the door.

“I’m Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Nash,” the man said quickly, extending his hand exactly as Halston had a few moments before. The team rose again and everyone shook his hand, including Nelson. Then Nash pulled a chair to the head of the table, opposite Nelson, and settled into it. Everyone sat back down. “I’ll get right to it,” he said, blue eyes looking straight at Lincoln. “My orders are to take you to the ARCHIE facility in West Virginia.”

Lincoln shifted in his chair, leaning forward over the table. “What kind of facility is it?”

“You haven’t been there?” Nash looked around at the others now.

Lincoln shook his head. “Cummings just told me about it last night. Where is he?”

“He’s decided to meet us there. Sent an email this morning. We’re going to take a small unit with us in convoy. It’s a few hours’ drive.”

“We can’t fly?” asked Alvarez.

Nash leaned back in his chair. “The helicopters are occupied, for obvious reasons.”

Lincoln bristled at Nash’s tone. He ran a hand over his face to wipe away some of the sleep. “And what are we going to do there?”

Nash slid his manila folder over to Lincoln. “You’re still writing your program. Cummings said the facility would help you somehow. And he’s sending more people to us as soon as he can round them up. If they’re not here by tonight, we’re leaving without them.”

Lincoln undid the metal clasp and opened the folder, letting the documents slide out onto the table. He picked up the top sheet. It opened to a large topographical map with faded contour lines. The next sheet of paper contained a hand-drawn map. The bottom read
Mine Entrance
with arrows pointing down tunnels that said
to ARCHIE
.

“It’s in a mine?” Lincoln looked around at his team, eyebrows raised. He passed the documents and waited on Nash to answer.

“Looks like it,” Nash said. “That map was already here at APG. Halston found it hidden in storage in a box that hadn’t been opened in years.”

Lincoln looked at Halston, who sat perfectly still in his seat against the wall, eyes staring at Nash without really looking. Then Halston glanced at Lincoln, nodded, and said, “Took me hours to find it.”

Carter rubbed his eyes, fatigue making the lines on his face more pronounced than usual. “So, let’s be clear—we’re still writing our code, but we’ll be doing it somewhere in West Virginia. It’s inside a mine, and no one in this room knows exactly what’s in the facility. We’re waiting on Cummings and his people.”

Nash leaned forward with his tablet, unlocking it and pulling up a document. “That’s about it. If you’ll sign these, we can get going.” He passed the tablet to Lincoln first, who signed with the stylus and passed it to Nelson.

As the tablet went around the table, Lincoln struggled to make sense of what Nash was saying. His interest had been piqued, and the lack of explanation only deepened his curiosity. “Can you tell us what the facility is like?” he asked. It was but one of the many questions swirling around in his brain.