Amid the Shadows (32 page)

62

“NO!” screamed
Christine.
 
She grabbed his jacket and
shook him hard, but Zahn’s body simply slid the rest of the way down the wall
to the floor.
 
She looked up at the wall
of monitors, some still showing the rioting in China.
 
She moaned and desperately turned back to
Rand who lay still behind her.
 
“Rand!”
she screamed and grabbed his shoulders.
 
She pulled his head up to hers and brushed his hair out of the way when
her left hand felt something: a pulse.

Christine gasped and
looked up at Sarah.
 
“He’s still
alive!”
 

Sarah nodded,
smiling.
 
“He’s yellow again.”

Two soldiers stumbled
into the room with one hopping and leaning on the other.
 
They both looked down at all four of
them.
 

Bazes spotted Rand on
the floor and then looked at Christine and Sarah, whom he noted was much
smaller than he expected.
 
He then looked
at Zahn’s body sprawled out with his mouth open.
 
“What happened?”

“Who are you?” asked
Christine through swollen eyes.
 

“My name is Bazes,” he
nodded at the other man, “and this is Clausen.
 
We came with Rand.”

“What the hell took you
so long?”
 

“Those bastards were
wearing some kind of cold suits!” growled Clausen.
 
He immediately realized what he had said and
looked at Sarah with a guilty frown.
 
“Sorry ‘bout that.”

Bazes turned and looked
around the rest of the room, stopping at the monitors on the wall with the
video feeds.
 
“What is this?” he asked.

“Listen to me!”
 
Christine pleaded.
 
“We have to do something.
 
It’s a nuclear attack!
 
The missiles in China are going to go off!”

Bazes’ eyes opened
wide.
 
“What?!”

“It’s a massive
virus!
 
The attack on China is some sort
of decoy!”

“Dear God.”
 
He pushed away from Clausen and hopped on one
leg, quickly searching his pants.
 
Bazes
found what he was looking for in the right leg pocket and ripped it open,
extracting a small satellite phone.
 
He
flipped up the oversized antennae and pressed a button.

“It’s Bazes.
 
He’s dead.”
 
He looked back at all the monitors.
 
“And we have an emergency!”

63

Guo Cheng was the
Minister of Public Security of the People’s Republic of China, which was
charged with the security and safety of the entire country.
 
He slowly returned his phone to its receiver
and pushed a red button on the base.
 
Less than ten seconds later, his assistant came running into the
room.
 
Cheng looked at him urgently.
 
“Get the Prime Minister and the President on
the phone
right now
.”
 
His
assistant bowed and disappeared.

With a deep sigh, Cheng
leaned back in his chair and stared at his phone.
 
The call had been from Benecke, head of
Homeland Security in the United States.
 

Before the call, he
thought he had enough problems.
 
The
riots had escalated, and their only option for stopping the global cyber-attack
was to kill all internet connectivity in and out of the country.
 
But it would come at a price.
 
That attack was on the Chinese government
only, but to stop it meant stopping all electronic communication and commerce
for over a
billion
people.
 
The
economic impact, especially in the current economy, was going to be horrific.

That was before
Benecke’s call.
 
Now what they had to do
was much worse, and it was going to be absolutely disastrous.

Ron Tran exited his
gate in the Bueno Aires airport along with several hundred other passengers,
all arriving on the first wave of morning flights.
 
His inability to sleep on planes left him
exhausted, but the excitement of the last three days had kept him awake purely
from the adrenaline.
 
He spotted a group
of people standing around a giant television and walked quickly to join them.

Something was
wrong.
 
He pushed in closer from the back
of the crowd and tried to understand what was happening.
 
He couldn’t translate the words of the
newscasters, but he could see words in Chinese inside a window in the upper
left hand corner.
 
China was dark.

A wave of anxiety began
to form inside him as he peered harder at the screen trying to understand what
that meant, but the Chinese message just kept repeating the same words.
 
China is dark.

Suddenly he realized,
China was not just offline; China was literally “dark”.
 
China had turned off the power for its entire
country, all at once.
 
Every single one
of its nuclear and coal power plants, over 70 in total, were
all taken
offline, plunging the entire country into total darkness.

Tran shook his head; he
couldn’t believe it.
 
He instantly
thought of Stux2 and China’s Command and Control system.
 
The systems, as well as the missile silos,
all had back up power, but those were from other plants.
 
With all of the plants offline, there
was
no redundant power
.
 
Even the plants
that had backup generators wouldn’t have enough juice to power the systems and
connections all the way back to the country’s central command system.
 
They had stopped it.

Tran backed up and
tried to think.
 
How did it all
happen?
 
What did it mean?
 
Where was Zahn?
 
After several minutes, Tran stood up and
calmly walked down the giant hallway, blending in with the huge crowd of
arriving passengers.
 
As he walked, he
calmly unzipped his backpack and slid his laptop computer out.
 
He held it casually in his hand until they
passed the next garbage can, where he quietly let it fall in.
 
He then walked downstairs and circled back to
the ticket counter.

“I’d like to purchase a
one way ticket, please,” he said, handing his ID to the agent.

She peered at the card
and placed it back onto the counter.
 
“Of
course, Mr. Chang.
 
Where are we headed
today?”

“La Chinita,
Venezuela.”

64

Christine sat on the
cold floor, leaning her head against the wall.
 
She had one hand on Sarah who lay asleep in her lap and her other on
Rand, who was still out.
 
Bazes sat in a
chair nearby watching the video feeds on the wall.

“Did they stop it?” she
asked Bazes quietly.

He turned and looked at
her, considering the question.
 
“Yes.”

She nodded and looked
down at Sarah.
 
After a few minutes, she
spoke again.
 
“Are you with the
government?”

This time, Bazes
smiled.
 
“Actually, you can probably say
the government is with me.”

She wrinkled her brow,
unsure of what that meant.
 
“So does that
mean you have some authority?”

“Yes.”
  

“I’m wondering if you
can help me with something.”

Bazes raised an
eyebrow.
 
“Such as?”

“There is someone I
need the FBI to investigate.”

“And who would that
be?” he asked.

“I don’t know his name,
but he’s a ranger at Natirar Park in New York.”

65

Three years later…

Kingston Estates was
the largest youth house in Kansas City, situated on a sprawling ten acres along
the Missouri River and less than fifteen miles from downtown.
 
Lawrence Grayson, Kingston’s Director, walked
down the large hallway leading out to the main yard.
 
He was proud of the house, and it showed.

“As you can see,”
Grayson boasted, “this is one of the nicest facilities in the state and we
pride ourselves on it.
 
We also place
more children than all of the others combined.
 
As “houses” go, the children are fortunate to be at ours.”

They turned left and
walked down two sets of steps out into the sun.
 
The lawn and surrounding bushes were well-kept and looked as clean on
the outside as the two-story building did on the inside.
 
After walking up a small hill, Grayson
stopped at the top and gestured to the large field in front of them, where
dozens of children were playing.
 
They
were all different ages with the smaller children running around together,
while the older children clumped and played in smaller groups.

“Mr. Grayson!” one of
the smallest boys called, running up to him.
 
He smiled and bent down as the boy approached.
 
“Yes, what is it?”

“I have to go potty.”

Grayson turned and
smiled with a mild look of embarrassment.
 
“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be right back.”
 
He grabbed the young boy’s hand and hurried
off.

Sarah, now nine,
quietly stood on the grass scanning the yard.
 
After a moment, she looked up at Christine and pointed to the far
corner.
 
“That’s him.”

Christine’s gaze
followed her hand and spotted a young boy just four or five years older than
Sarah.
 
With sandy brown hair, he was
alone on the opposite side of the field, doing pull-ups on an old rusty bar.
 
He didn’t notice them, and as she watched,
Christine realized he was not interacting with any of the other kids.

“Are you sure?”

Sarah nodded.

Christine smiled.
 
They had been searching for a long time.
 
She turned to her left.
 
“Well?”

Next to her, Rand
watched the boy carefully.
 
After several
seconds, he nodded with a satisfied look.
 
“He looks trainable.”

Christine smiled again
and slipped her hand back into Rand’s.

EPILOGUE

New
York City – 1871

Dozens of people leapt
from their wagons and carriages, running through the puddles to help.
 
A crowd was beginning to form, and several
people darted away to find a doctor, but it was too late.

Dean Kelly sat on the
muddy ground cradling the body of his young son in his arms.
 
“My Ryan!
 
My perfect little Ryan!” he cried out over and over, tears streaming
down his face.
 
Kelly just stared at his
son’s pale face, so peaceful and calm, and rocked his still body back and
forth.

The pain was
overwhelming and unimaginable.
 
His boy
was gone.
 
His perfect boy.
 
His little Ryan was so smart and so gifted.
 
Even his father, a man of high intelligence,
was stunned at his own son’s abilities.
 
Ryan never had to be told something twice. He remembered virtually
everything from almost the day he could speak.
 
At the age of ten, he was better at mathematics than any tutor Kelly
could find.
 
But what Ryan loved more
than anything else was biology.
 
Now,
that was all gone
, Kelly thought to himself.
 
All of Ryan’s dreams were gone.

What Kelly did not know
was the greatness his son had been destined for, a destiny that would now never
come: to become a prodigy like few the 19
^th
century had ever
seen.
 
To be the youngest to finish Yale
University at thirteen years old; and, to gain a doctorate in medicine by the
time he was sixteen.

In the late 1890s, he
would have gone on to make numerous biological breakthroughs which would have
radically advanced the understanding of the human body.
 
In 1912, after joining the famed Institute
for Cancer Research in London, he would have made the greatest contribution of his
life: discovering unique cellular characteristics that could later identify and
predict mutation behavior.
 

However, the discovery
would go misunderstood for decades until Ryan Kelly’s daughter, following in
her father’s footsteps, would uncover important clues and take it even
further.
  
In 1952, she would develop the
biological knowledge and foundation for the first prototype: a prototype for a
cure of human cancer cells.
 
And less
than forty years later, by the end of the twentieth century, cancer would rank
just below chicken pox on the list of most dangerous global diseases.

But young Ryan Kelly
was gone and his future suddenly erased.
 
Neither his father, nor the rest of the world, would ever know about his
discoveries and his gifts to mankind.
 

God would try again.