“YOU REALLY SHOULDN’T BE accompanying us, sir,” Rathman said to Langston Marsh, as his thirty commandos packed into the Zodiac rafts. “This is going to get messy.”
“Nothing you can’t handle, I trust.”
“We’re about to sink a civilian vessel. That’s a new experience even for me.”
“But necessary in this case. I’m sure you understand that now.”
“I do.”
“Then you should also understand why I have to be here. Something about this young man is different from the others we’ve hunted. He must be disabled and taken into our custody, not exterminated like all the others. And I have to be on site to interrogate him immediately—myself.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the insurance policy I asked you to take out?”
Rathman checked his watch. “En route now. Ten minutes or so out, depending on traffic.”
“We’ll take them with us, then. As leverage.”
Marsh gazed out into the bay, toward the lights of the Blue and Gold Fleet tour boat that had now crossed under the Golden Gate Bridge. “I often wonder what my father was feeling as he took off on that fateful flight. Did he know what he’d be facing? What was he thinking when he climbed into that cockpit? Did he somehow sense he was about to confront his own mortality? Did he realize he was among the first men at the front in a war I’ve been fighting ever since? That’s the kind of moment I believe this is, Colonel. That’s why I have to be there, just like my father was.”
Marsh spotted a dark van slide to a halt up the hill from which the private dock was located.
“I believe,” he said to Rathman, “that our insurance has arrived.”
98
LEAKAGE
“LEAKING?” ALEX WONDERED. “WHAT’S that mean, exactly?”
“It explains the contents of your sketchbook, for one thing,” Donati told him. “Each of those images you drew represents something your conscious mind couldn’t possibly have knowledge of. But if the image leaked out from the chip hidden in your head and was somehow processed by your subconscious, you’d have an explanation for how you could draw things you’d never seen with no memory of imagining them. It explains everything.”
“Including my headaches?”
“You mean the ones you’ve been getting since Friday night?” asked Sam.
“And before.” Alex nodded. “Only, they’ve gotten a lot worse since Friday night. But it’s not just the pain. It’s also, I don’t know, kind of a pressure, like somebody squeezing my skull. Seems to originate just behind my eyes, but I’m not sure.”
“I thought you were lying about them, to get out of tutoring sessions, so I’d give up and leave. Like you always being late.”
“I never told Dr. Payne about the headaches,” Alex said, addressing them all, “not a single word.”
“You didn’t have to,” Donati said, still scrolling through the images. “Your CT scan spoke for itself, only your doctor didn’t understand the language well enough. That’s why he called in a neurological expert, someone who could tell him what it was he’d found. A foreign body that looks implanted in the skull? A foreign body that by all indications has ruptured and is leaking something dangerously close to the brain? I can only imagine what he made of that.”
“But how can you tell it’s leaking?” Sam asked him.
“I can’t, based on these still shots. I’m proceeding from the anecdotal evidence you’ve provided that further suggests that the concussion Alex suffered altered the chip’s positioning which accounts for the worsening of his symptoms. As for the leakage, well,” Donati continued, moving a finger from one of the tendril-like things to another, “I believe we have these to blame. Each time a new one sprouts, it weakens the chip’s molecular integrity and creates space for neurons to escape and interface with his brain.”
“So whatever it is I’m carrying in my head,” Alex picked up, “all these secrets about how to win the war that’s coming…”
“Are stored molecularly inside this chip, essentially within strands of your own DNA,” Donati completed. “Its organic nature indicates it could only be implanted in utero to avoid almost certain rejection, explaining why you were smuggled here as an infant.”
The tour boat was steering toward Alcatraz now, the island a blotch on the dark, fog-drenched horizon through the big viewing window. They had entered “the Gap,” passing between hills on either side that forced the air lifting off the ocean into a kind of wind tunnel. Normally, such thick fog was more of a summer phenomenon, but the unseasonable warmth had left it lingering well into the autumn months.
“There’s something else,” Alex told them all, “something that happened in the second CT scan.”
“Obviously called for since Payne didn’t believe the results he got from the first,” Donati replied. “Probably suspected a machine malfunction or something like that.”