Deadly Memory (Living Memory Book 2), page 21
Nothing to do now but wait. Everson sat on the hood of his black SUV until it got too hot, then retreated into the air conditioning inside. An hour passed. Two.
He slapped the dashboard. “Where is she? Any word?”
Michelle shook her head. “Nothing yet. They’re in an old truck. Probably doesn’t move very fast, and they might have stopped for gas or food.”
They waited some more. He was starting to worry that they’d missed something when Michelle sat up straight and pulled her headphones off of one ear. “Highway patrol thinks they’ve spotted them. Five miles out, coming our way. They’re following behind to cut off their retreat.”
“Good,” Everson said, his adrenaline spiking. “Tell them no lights, no sirens, and stay back. If they turn around, block the road but don’t engage.”
“They know,” Michelle said.
“Tell them again!” The last thing they needed was a bunch of armed policemen dominated into shooting each other.
Michelle spoke into her microphone. Everson climbed out of the car and back into the heat. He jogged toward the row of police cruisers who were stopping and checking each vehicle that came through. A long line of cars reached out beyond the checkpoint.
“Let them all through,” Everson shouted. He reached the first cop and lowered his voice. “The terrorists have been spotted. We need to get this line clear.”
The cops sprang into action, waving the cars through. The line slowly shortened as the traffic passed through without stopping. Eventually, it cleared, and Everson was looking at an empty stretch of road. He found the highway patrol officer in charge, a bulky man with a ridiculous waxed mustache.
“Where are they?” Everson demanded.
“Any moment now.”
A white spot appeared in the distance, then resolved out of the dust into a boxy white truck. Finally. The truck slowed, but made no move to turn around. Everson expected them to pull a U-turn once they saw the barricade, or even accelerate to ramming speed, but the truck slowed gently and approached with caution. Maybe they planned to dominate the cops. He didn’t actually know if that was possible without a lab to refine the scent chemical, but he wouldn’t put it past Samira and Alex to figure it out.
The sergeant raised a megaphone and bellowed for the vehicle to stop. Cops fanned out and raised their weapons. The spinning LED lights from the police cruisers reflected off of the truck’s windshield, preventing a view inside the cab. Everson felt a sick feeling in his gut. His intuition told him something was wrong.
“Step out of the truck with your hands up,” the sergeant shouted.
A bearded, heavyset man with blue overalls and thinning hair stepped out of the truck, his hands up and his eyes wide as saucers. Everson had only seen Samira’s father in a photograph, but this didn’t look like the same man.
“Get him clear and check the truck,” Everson snarled at the sergeant.
He turned back to the SUV. He already knew it wasn’t them. Where had they gone?
He hurled the door open, climbed in, and slammed it closed again. “Any other sightings? Anything from the other roadblocks?”
Michelle looked at him in surprise. “It’s not them?”
He shook his head, then punched the dashboard in disgust. How was this possible? A bunch of amateurs with no training, driving a dinosaur through California, and yet he couldn’t track them down? They must have had help. He’d assumed the Chinese contact was merely for pick up in Tijuana, but they must have someone in-country, a professional spy who was helping them evade capture.
He knew they weren’t coming now. They waited at the blockade for several more hours anyway, but no dinosaur-carrying truck appeared. Samira Shannon had somehow slipped the net.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Samira’s muscles slowly relaxed as they drove north, each mile bringing them farther away from the careful breadcrumbs they’d left for Everson and the CIA to follow. There was no way to know if it had worked. Maybe he wasn’t even tapping their phones. But she thought he probably was.
The ‘Pinky and the Brain’ incident had not occurred in Tijuana, as Gabby and Kit had intentionally staged their conversation to let on. It had happened on a ranch near the Oregon badlands where Samira, Beth, Arun, and Gabby had worked uncovering an ichthyosaurus one summer back in her graduate student days. The dig site had been on ranch land owned by a paleontology enthusiast by the name of Brook Waters, who had welcomed their team eagerly and since become a patron of their work. That was where the team was headed; not to Thailand or China or Mexico.
They had intentionally staged the elk hunt, too, making sure Charlie was seen, to leave evidence confirming that they were headed south. With any luck, the CIA had believed their misdirection and would be looking for them a thousand miles away from their actual destination.
When they crossed into Oregon, the only indication was a small wooden sign on the side of the road. The barren wilderness went on for miles in every direction under a stark and cloudless sky. Not exactly the lush greenery of Charlie’s home, but they would take what they could get.
Three hours later, the view had barely changed. They pulled into Waters Ranch, named for the five generations of Waters sons who had raised cattle there rather than any natural rivers or lakes. In the distance, Samira could see the green of pasture and the latticework of metal irrigation pipes that kept it that way. Everything else for miles around was flat and brown. A few hundred cattle milled listlessly inside a wooden pen.
Now was the moment of truth. Samira hadn’t been able to think of a way to contact Brook ahead of time, not if she wanted to keep their destination a secret. She was about to show up on his doorstep with a dinosaur wanted by the CIA and hope he would welcome them.
She stopped the truck and climbed out. As the dust drifted away, she saw Brook in the distance, wearing jeans and a broad-brimmed hat and heading their direction. She couldn’t really make out his expression, but he walked with what looked like wary concern. She doubted he had many unexpected visitors in unfamiliar vehicles, and that when he did, it was rarely a good thing.
“Open the back,” she told Alex. “Get everyone out.”
“Even Charlie?”
“Especially Charlie.”
When Brook came close enough that she could make out his craggy, weathered face, she called out to him. She put her hand up, half in greeting and half to shade her eyes from the setting sun.
“Samira?” he said. “Heavens, girl, what are you doing here?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I would have called if I could.”
He reached her and wrapped his arms around her. “Been a long time,” he said. “You never write.”
“Sorry,” she said again. “You know how it is.”
“What’s going on? Who are your friends?”
With a little help from Alex, Samira’s father stepped down from the tailgate. He looked remarkably good for someone riding in the back of a truck for hours, never mind for someone with a deadly illness. She realized again how much she was asking of Brook—not just to harbor them from the government, but to invite the Julian virus right to his doorstep.
“That’s my dad, and my friend Alex,” she said. “But the last one in the truck will take a little more explanation…”
At that moment, Charlie sprang from the truck. He landed gracefully, talons splayed and toothy mouth agape. His protofeathers stuck out all over his body, making him look larger than he actually was.
“Whoa!” Brook stumbled backward several steps. In moments, though, he recovered himself and stared. “Samira? Is that what I think it is?”
“That depends. Do you think it’s a theropod dinosaur alive and well in Oregon?”
“I can’t believe it.” He took one step forward, circling slightly as if approaching a frightened animal. “I’ve been following the news, but I didn’t even know you guys were trying to bring back a dinosaur. I didn’t think it was possible with animals that old.”
“It’s not, generally speaking. This is kind of a special case. Brook, meet Charlie.”
“Hello,” said Charlie in his squawking voice. “Glad meet friend.”
Samira laughed as Brook’s eyes seemed to bulge out of his head.
“We’ve got a lot of explaining to do,” she said.
The rest of the team joined them at the ranch, all except Kit. Gabby and Arun arrived first, and Samira had to tell the stories all over again, and then yet again once Beth arrived with Mom.
When the car pulled up, Beth jumped out with a shout and ran to her for a hug, her head only barely reaching Samira’s collarbone. Mom was even faster, catching Dad up into an embrace and then holding him at arm’s length to study him, her face drawn with stress and her eyes red with tears. “Samira said you were sick.”
“I was. I am. I still have the virus, but Charlie slowed the symptoms. You shouldn’t get too close.”
“You idiot,” she said, burst into tears, and hugged him all the harder. Finally, she looked up at him. “Who’s Charlie?”
Beth brought a surprise with her, too. She returned to the car, ducked into the back window and came out with a red-and-green macaw, a little bit windblown but otherwise none the worse for wear.
“Wallace!” Samira exclaimed. She reached out, offering Wallace her arm.
Wallace squawked indignantly and shuffle-stepped up Beth’s shoulder, working his way around to the other side, away from Samira.
“Oh, I know,” Samira said. “But I’m here now. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”
Beth slipped Samira a package of peanut butter crackers, and once Samira offered him one, he grudgingly deigned to come to her.
Samira rubbed a finger against his feathers. “Mercenary bird. You’re just in it for what you can get.”
Later, they sat on porch chairs outside of Brook’s house and watched Charlie run through the fields.
“Incredible to watch,” Beth said. “I’ve been modeling his musculature for months, and this is the first time I’ve seen him really use it.”
A steer stood grazing, unaware of the feathered engine of death approaching it from behind. Charlie didn’t even have to dominate it; the steer never stood a chance. Charlie leaped. He landed with both feet and jaws striking it simultaneously and drove it to the ground. After one throaty bellow, the steer fell silent. Charlie sliced jaws through its flank, then yanked at an angle, tearing off a slice. He threw his head back like a heron swallowing a fish, and gulped the piece down whole.
“I’m sorry,” Samira said to Brook. “This must be costing you a fortune.”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “This is a sight not witnessed in sixty-six million years. Do you know how much people would pay to see this? I’m getting a bargain.”
“I can’t pay you,” Samira persisted. “I’m basically asking you to harbor us as fugitives, at least until I can figure out something better. The CIA will be looking for us. If they find us—”
“Enough,” Brook said. “Ever since you got here, you haven’t stopped trying to convince me to kick you out. This is the most amazing thing that’s happened to me since uncovering that ichthyosaurus on my back acres. Did you know I’ve been taking a paleobiology course online from the University of Alberta?”
“No. Seriously?”
“I have. Makes me want to sell the ranch and get my degree.”
“Oh, you wouldn’t do that, would you?”
Brook sighed. “No, not really. Not exactly practical, and I’m too old. But don’t try to convince me that having a real, live, intelligent, talking dinosaur eating my cattle isn’t the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Samira laughed. “Okay. But I don’t promise not to feel guilty about it.”
“I have almost a thousand acres for Charlie to hide in, a supply of food, room in my house for all of you to stay, and more money than I need. This is the perfect place for you to be.”
“At least for a little while,” Samira agreed.
Dan Everson crushed his empty coffee cup and hurled it out the window. They’d been tricked. Samira Shannon, a naive amateur, had laid a false trail, and he’d blindly followed it. He’d let his disdain for her and poor security practices cloud his judgment. She could be anywhere in the Western United States by now, or in Canada, or halfway across the Pacific on a Chinese ship docked at some other harbor. There were dozens of small harbors up and down the coast with a lot less security than the big ports. She could even have doubled back to some farm in the Midwest.
Agents swarmed Playa del Rosarito and the other Tijuana beaches, but he already knew they would find nothing. Samira hadn’t been seen crossing the border, despite guards looking out for her face and vehicle. Her father’s truck hadn’t been spotted by any highway patrol south of Salt Lake City. And now the other members of her dig team had gone missing, their phones off the grid and their vehicles unaccounted for. He kicked himself for not having agents assigned to them for surveillance, but before Samira’s sudden flight with the dinosaur, he would have had no real reason to spend the manpower.
This had turned from a chase into a search. That meant bringing in local law enforcement across the Western US in a massive bioterrorist manhunt. He’d check satellite imagery to see if he could track where they went, but he doubted he would find anything with sufficient resolution that happened to be looking at the right place at the right time.
In short, this disaster was about to turn into a huge expense for the agency and a huge black mark for him. Until this week, he’d been a star, central to one of the most important missions in the intelligence community. Now, if he failed to recover this dinosaur, it might cost him his career.
Which meant he absolutely would not fail. He still controlled the stores of chemical he had extracted from Charlie and processed at the black site in Colorado. He might not explicitly have authority to use them for this, but he hadn’t explicitly been forbidden to, either. Somebody had to know something. If she wasn’t leaving a money trail, it was because she was relying on friends. He would dominate every person she’d ever known, if necessary, to find out the truth.
And if she really did have help from Chinese infiltrators? If she’d already defected to China and left the country with the dinosaur? Then he would do everything in his power to get them back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The stars stretched across the Oregon sky like a blanket of diamonds, with only a hint of light pollution glowing on the western horizon. Brook sat on the grass, leaning back against his hands and gazing up at the brilliance. Charlie lay on the ground like a bird, his taloned legs tucked under his body and invisible beneath his feathers. He rested his head in Brook’s lap and gazed up at the bright heavens with him.
Samira smiled at the sight. Brook and Charlie had bonded in a matter of days, apparently undaunted by the genetic gulf between them. Brook had always treated his horses as if they were intelligent, speaking creatures, so it had seemed like nothing to him to accept Charlie as an equal and friend.
“That’s Aquila the Eagle,” Brook said, pointing at a constellation. “An eagle is a descendent of your kind, a powerful hunter. You might see one flying over the ranch sometime. To the left is Cygnus the Swan. That’s another big bird, one that lives in the water and can migrate as much as four thousand miles.”
Samira walked on, leaving them to it, and sat down with her mom by the embers of their dying campfire.
“How are you doing?” Samira asked.
“Oh, you know, hanging in there.”
“I’m sorry for all this. Pulling you away from your home and friends, making you a fugitive. I know it’s not what you signed up for.”
Her mom lifted her chin. “I signed up to be your mother. That means loving and supporting you no matter what. I’d say this is exactly what I signed up for.”
Samira leaned over and gave her a brief hug. “Thank you.”
Her mom looked up at the stars. “I know God is working all of this toward some great purpose.”
Samira sighed. “It would be nice to think so.”
She looked up at the sky. As glorious as it appeared, she knew she was seeing only a paltry fraction of the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, which was itself just one galaxy among hundreds of billions. So much unseen, so much that would never be known.
She glanced back over at Charlie, lying in Brook’s lap while Brook stroked his feathers. Her mind boiled with questions to which she had no answers. What did their future hold? How long would they be able to hide here? What would happen to Charlie if the world discovered he existed? Was there any free life possible for a creature like him in a modern human world?
She couldn’t see how there could be, but she hoped so. Whatever came later, they had this moment, free and safe in a patch of Earth’s natural beauty. They would all just have to wait together to see what came next.
EPILOGUE
Distant Rain Sweeping Towards Home as Night Falls woke yet again in her bare, odorless cell, wishing she could die. Death wouldn’t be that hard to accomplish. She knew how to use her own chemicals to alter her body. The changes she could make were limited—she couldn’t, for example, turn into a snake and slide through a small hole to freedom. Changing her glands to produce a chemical that would kill her, though, that she could do. She would simply fall asleep and never wake up.
The alien creatures would be here again soon with their wire nooses and the sticks that delivered jolts of lightning from their tips. They would drive her back with shocks whether she fought or not, and snare her neck and legs with their nooses. They would force her down to the floor and harvest the chemicals from her scent glands. Chemicals that, when threatened, she instinctively tailored toward dominance and control.
