Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

His eyes darted ever so slightly away as he said it. He wasn’t being completely forthcoming, and yet what he had said was, at its core, truthful.

“Is that all?” The message was the key component to all of this, but why did he believe that seeing her own genetic code would have any kind of effect? Maybe there’s more to it? “What about the rest of the message?”

His look of surprise confirmed that she had made the right guess. “You are every bit as remarkable as I had hoped, my dear. Yes, there is a portion of the message that we have not been able to make sense of, even after all these years of research. It’s a long binary sequence. Coming at the end of the message as it does, it may simply be normal background radiation, but it might also be a sort of signature, the sender signing off, as a HAM radio operator might do.”

All these years of research. The words triggered a cascade of questions and Jenna had to fight to maintain her pleasant demeanor. “That’s right. You’ve been working at this for a long time. I know you told me, but why didn’t you have Mercy or one of the others do this?”

Something changed in the old man’s expression, like a curtain falling over a stage in the middle of a play. “With each successive generation, we were able to fine-tune the DNA sequence. The early generations…lacked something…but you, my dear, were the most perfect expression of the message, thus my hope that you will be able to unlock its final secrets.”

This time he was lying, but not about his intentions. What had he said earlier about Kelli Foster and Jarrod Chu? Generation Six, cultivated in 1984…an almost perfect match to the genome code. He was holding something back, something that concerned him enough that he was dodging her subtle manipulations.

She decided not to press him too hard just yet. “Oh. I figured it must be something like that. I’m surprised you didn’t come round me up sooner. I mean, since you knew where I was.”

“I was sorely tempted. Thirty-seven years is a very long time to wait for an answer. But it was important to allow your abilities to fully develop. If not for this threat to your safety, I would have been content to wait a few more years.”

Once more, she sensed an omission, but before she could figure out where to probe next, the car pulled to a stop and Cray shut off the engine. Over the steady drum of rain on the roof, Jenna could hear a loud rumble like an industrial generator.

Soter peered through the rivulets of water streaming down the windows, then threw the door open. “I’ve forgotten my umbrella. I fear we shall all get wet.”

“Won’t be the first time today,” Jenna replied. Mercy gave a good-natured groan.

Outside the car, the noise was even louder, making conversation impossible. “That’s the transmitter,” Soter shouted, waving for them to follow.

A second car pulled up beside theirs. Four men wearing rain slickers got out and joined their procession. Jenna guessed they were part of Soter’s security force. They certainly didn’t fit her stereotype of what astronomers were supposed to look like.

Cray hurried ahead to the front door of the building and held it open for the others. As Soter had warned, the brief trek from the car to the structure left them all soaked, but the downpour didn’t dampen Soter’s enthusiasm. After shaking off as much water as he could, he took the lead, guiding them inside with child-like eagerness. His cane was all but forgotten, tucked under one arm, as he moved. Cray and Markley brought up the rear, while the other four men remained outside.

The mechanical noise was dulled, but Jenna could feel vibrations rising through the floor and emanating from the walls. The transmitter was inside the building. Soter ushered them into a dimly lit room that reminded Jenna of the signal room in Cort’s safe house, but on a much larger scale. Computer servers lined the walls, along with a variety of other electronic devices and their blinking red and green LEDs. A few of these were no bigger, and looked no more sophisticated, than a citizen’s band radio, while others looked like the sound controls at a rock concert. Soter moved past these, his wet shoes squeaking on the black and white checkerboard tile floor. He led them to an area that had been partitioned into smaller workspaces. Each desktop held no less than four computer monitors, and each screen displayed incomprehensible graphical and textual data. A broad window, looking out at the metal-frame structure Jenna had glimpsed from the road, stretched across the wall beyond the workstations.