39
“Heather. Hey, Heather. You all right?” Mark’s voice sounded as if it came from a great distance.
Heather shook her head to clear away the sequence of clear visions within which she had been wandering, each of them playing out different outcomes to their current situation. As her eyes refocused on Mark and then Jennifer, there was no doubt in her mind what they had to do. The time for crying was past. They had to take action and soon. She flipped off the television.
“Where’s the cell phone number of that contest judge? Never mind, I remember it.”
“Dr. Caldwell?” Jennifer asked. “Why?”
“Because we’re going to call him right now and cut a deal.”
Mark stepped closer. “Are you out of your mind? He wants us to give away our cold fusion device.”
“It can’t be helped. We have to get this damped down or we’ll have mobs camped on our doorstep.”
Mark shook his head. “No way. Without the cold fusion device, we can’t run our subspace transmitter. We won’t be able to hack into secure networks anymore.”
“Mark’s right,” Jennifer chimed in. “We’ll be completely blind. And right now, I get a very bad feeling about that.”
“Look,” said Heather, “I know it’s bad, but I don’t see any other way out. Even if we didn’t worry about getting into college, I think the press will start following us. Think about it. We’ll be watched twenty-four seven.”
For several seconds silence filled the room.
Finally, Mark looked up from his study of his hands. “I’ll go along with this on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You let me try to contact Jack Johnson using the quantum twin device I implanted in Janet’s laptop.”
“Jesus, Mark! How’s that going to make things better?” Jennifer asked.
“You know Jack and Janet are on the run or dead,” Heather added. “Even if they’re alive, they probably scrapped the laptop.”
“Then it won’t hurt to try. Anyway, that’s my offer. If we don’t all sign the release papers, then Dr. Caldwell isn’t going to agree to the deal.”
“But how can it work out?” Jennifer continued. “The last thing we need is Jack finding out about us. At this point he’s a hunted terrorist.”
“I don’t believe Jack’s a terrorist and neither do you. We won’t let him know who we are, just that we are the ones who originally contacted the NSA. Right now, he’s cut off. He needs to know he has a powerful source of information he can contact.”
Heather shook her head. “Even if we can come up with a way to convince him of all that, after we give away the cold fusion device, we won’t be able to snoop classified networks anymore.”
“I’m sure you two little geniuses will come up with a solution to that.” Mark turned and grabbed the wireless telephone, holding it out to Heather. “Do you want to make that call to Caldwell or not?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Heather took the telephone from his hand and began to dial.