Chapter 88
Heather sat on her back porch, looking out across the canyons as the sunset painted the sky orange. Sensing her mood, her parents had wisely left her to her own reflections.
Looking back on the last week’s events, it was no wonder she felt like a wrung-out sponge. The press replayed the story until it was impossible to get away from it. The police had arrived at the Rodriguez house to find Dr. Rodriguez dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, a suicide note lying near his body.
Unfortunately, the military had taken control of the site shortly after the police had secured the area, confiscating all materials in the name of national security. Only the suicide note had been released to the public, a rambling apology for the unauthorized nanite testing that Dr. Rodriguez had conducted in his private laboratory. Luckily, the note contained no mention of Heather.
If Heather and Jennifer hadn’t successfully uplinked the data from Dr. Rodriguez’s lab to the NSA site, the military cover-up would have been complete.
Mark was freed of tabloid attention, which now focused squarely upon the secret basement laboratory beneath the Rodriguez house. One lucky thing had happened. In all the commotion, Jack and Janet had failed to discover the QT microchip Mark had placed in Janet’s laptop.
And the quantum twin of that device had yielded a wealth of encrypted information since then. While the encryption of the data was first-rate, Heather’s unique ability with numbers was better. The decryption of secure message traffic between that computer, the NSA, and some other remote systems had finally given Mark, Jennifer, and Heather an understanding of at least a part of what the NSA knew about the situation.
It had been in one of these communications that Heather had discovered the link between Raul, the water bottle, and Mark’s grogginess at the State Championship game. More importantly, they had learned that the killer who had attacked Janet and then Mark was a man named Priest Williams, and that Jack had killed him.
As Mark had already told them, the man had displayed incredible healing abilities. The lab tests on Priest's blood had revealed that it was permeated by millions of nanites, microscopic machines that read information from their host’s DNA and used that information to repair bodily damage. The data confirmed the information from Dr. Rodriguez’s computer that she and Jennifer had uplinked to the NSA.
Heather had read many articles on current nanotechnology research, some of which had speculated that in the future, humans would be able to inject swarms of tiny machines into their bloodstream to do things like clean arteries and attack infections. But what these nanites did was far beyond any nanotechnology currently envisioned.
There could be no doubt. The technology had come from the Rho Project. Apparently the report on the subject was being kept very classified, with only Jack’s team, one individual at the laboratory doing the testing, and two key people at NSA headquarters knowing anything about the report’s contents.
Just as it looked like the press furor would abate, today had brought more tragedy to the Rodriguez household. Raul had disappeared, apparently having run away from home. Police had arrived to find Mrs. Rodriguez lost to a hysteria that required hospitalization.
A cool breeze ruffled Heather’s hair. Brushing a strand from her face, she watched as the sky changed from red to purple.
Raul. The knowledge that he had tried to drug Mark had destroyed whatever feelings she had held for him. But he didn’t deserve this. Shaking her head, Heather rose from the lawn chair, turned her back on the gathering darkness, and stepped back into the light and warmth of her own home.