The Amazon Code (5 page)

She left the room to stir the chili once more, then returned. “I’ve been ordering swimsuits online, and the first one came to the office today — want me to model it for you?”
 

Julie flicked him the single raised-eyebrow look she used when she was trying to look sexy, which only made her look goofy.
 

Which makes her look sexy.

“Fine. I guess I’ll put the book down,” Ben said, grinning.
 

Julie ran off into the bedroom of the cabin, situated next to the kitchen and behind the larger living room area, and Ben closed the guidebook and placed it on the end table next to the chair.
 

He heard her cell phone ring, a piercing screech that she wouldn’t change or turn down. She carried the thing with her everywhere, afraid that at any moment she’d be called in to handle an emergency email password change or an office computer freezing.
 

After another minute, Julie walked back in the room — still wearing the clothes she’d had on before.
 

“Everything okay?” he asked.
 

She shook her head. He focused on her eyes. Where there had been playfulness and joy in them a moment ago, she was now all business.
 

“Jules, what’s up?” he stood up from the large chair and pushed the recliner in, then walked toward her.
 

“We need to go to Brazil.”
 

Ben wasn’t sure how to respond. “Excuse me? Brazil? The country?”
 

“That was a friend of mine from college. He told me Drache Global had surfaced down there, and that he thinks they’re planning something again.”
 

Ben felt his blood run cold.
Drache Global.
After he’d spent two months trying to research what the company actually did — and more importantly, who was behind it — he’d all but lost hope. The government, if they knew anything at all, wasn’t offering any help, and Julie’s position at the CDC hadn’t been quite high enough for her to negotiate anything useful.
 

All he knew was that they were one of the subsidiaries of the
real
organization behind the attacks at Yellowstone National Park months earlier, and they’d mostly gotten away with the act of terror. No one but Ben and Julie knew how close the nation had come to total destruction, and he made a vow to himself that he’d never stop looking for them. They had a few different names of other subsidiaries that might be involved, including Dragonstone and Drage Medisinsk, but searches for those companies only turned up public information on their dealings in whichever countries they operated. Nothing illegal, nothing that might link them to the attacks, and nothing for Ben to follow. He’d already spent too many waking hours trying to find and follow a thread, and he’d nearly thrown in the towel.
   

Now, someone was handing them a lead, beckoning.
 

He’d be damned if he let the opportunity slip through his fingers.
 

7

JULIETTE RICHARDSON STARED OUT THE small oval window of the 737 as it flew south over the Caribbean Sea. She longed to be down there, cruising around in the bright blue waters between Mexico and Jamaica. The cruise she’d chosen would have taken them to three ports in Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Port Royal, and they’d have spent a luxurious seven days aboard a gigantic floating 5-star hotel.
 

Instead, they were flying over the open waters and onward toward Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where they would have a plane change and then fly north again to a smaller municipality in Central Brazil called Marabá, where they would land in the stifling heat and overwhelming humidity to spend God-knows-how-long tracking down an organization they weren’t sure really existed. They would meet up with Dr. Meron, Paulinho’s acquaintance, at her research firm, NARATech, and try to piece together tidbits of information that might — or might not — point back to Drache Global.
 

She turned to Ben, who was sitting in the seat next to her. “You think we’ll find them?” she asked.
 

He opened his eyes. “Hm?”
 

“Sorry, I thought you couldn’t sleep on planes,” she said.
 

He rubbed his eyes and sat up straighter in the seat. “I wasn’t asleep. Just couldn’t hear you…”
 

She watched him pop a piece of gum into his mouth and waited for him to respond. It took another ten seconds.
 

“Yeah, I think we’ll find something,” he said.
 

She raised her eyebrows, hoping to get the message across.
We could have been on a cruise right now, but you’re dragging me halfway around the hemisphere because you
think
we’ll find
something
?
 

He got the hint.
 

“Fine,” he said. “Yeah, I think we’ll find them. It’s a company, or an organization, or whatever. But it deals in currency, just like the rest of us. They’ve got to have their fingerprints there somewhere.”
 

She nodded.
 

“And you said that this ‘Paul’ — Paulinho — guy had some information that tied Drache Global to his friend’s company?”

She nodded. “Yes. He told me she thought they were connected somehow; that maybe they were funding her, but trying to keep themselves out of the spotlight.”
 

Ben was silent for a moment. “What does her company do, exactly?”
 

“From what I gather online, they’re a neurological research company. Neurological Advanced Research Applications, I believe. NARATech. Paulinho said they’re currently working on an application to map dreamstates.”
 

“Dreamstates?”
 

“Dreams. They’re using fMRI technology, applied directly to the skull, to image and record human dreams.”
 

“That’s a trip. Does it work?”
 

“I guess,” she said. “There’s nothing about it on their website, but I pried Paulinho for whatever he knew about it. It’s not much, but he told me they’ve had ‘mostly positive results.’”

“Wonder what ‘negative results’ looks like,” Ben said.
 

“Whatever it is, if Drache Global is actually behind it, it’s probably important to something they’re planning.”
 

“Did he say anything about what this ‘research’ actually looks like?”
 

“No, except that they’ve had some sort of anomaly crop up. He didn’t know what it was, but he said it made Amanda seem ‘fidgety’ when they spoke.”
 

“‘Fidgety?’”

“That’s what he said.”
 

Ben didn’t respond, but instead went back to ‘sleep’ with his head resting gently against the rock-hard cushion of the airplane seat. His legs, far too long to be comfortable, were smashed against the seat in front of him, not helped by the passenger’s decision to recline the seat as far back as it would go.
 

Watching Ben sit there like a crash-test dummy who had been smashed against the front of its vehicle after a failed test, Julie felt even more uncomfortable.
 

“Now I know why you don’t like flying,” she said.
 

Ben opened his eyes and grinned, shifting in his seat to try to find a more comfortable position. “You think
this
is why I hate flying?” he asked.
 

She smiled back. “Surely it’s not the kind, caring staff of in-flight personnel.”
 

He glared at her. “I know you’re joking, but it still hurts to remember.”
 

She laughed. They’d flown together only once before, when they were both invited to the White House to meet the President after the events at Yellowstone National Park. The United States government, ostensibly intending to honor them at the nation’s capitol, didn’t seem to think it necessary to honor them
until
they arrived — they wouldn’t spring for anything more expensive than coach tickets. They spent the hours-long flight smashed together in the back row, neither seat able to recline to offer even a little respite from the miserable journey.
 

To top it off, the plane had run out of alcoholic beverages, leaving Ben and Julie to subsist on peanuts and half-cans of Diet Coke delivered by a flight attendant that was clearly and vocally unsatisfied with his career. The attendant made a snide comment every time they’d asked for something, and he eventually told Ben to “get up and get it yourself” when Ben asked for another beverage.
 

And yet, If there was anything they both took away from the experience, it was the memory of laughing at the ridiculousness of it all; an inside joke between them. Julie knew Ben hated flying for a number of reasons, but even Ben admitted he was in much higher spirits when they traveled together.

She wondered if he’d ever get over his fear of flying. It was a control issue — namely, that he knew he
had
no control — but she liked to remind him that fears could be overcome.
 

He always argued back, as was his custom, but Julie secretly loved to see him squirm in his seat as the plane took off and then again as it landed. She thought it made him look cute.
 

“You’re still thinking three days, right?” she asked.
 

“Three days for what?”
 

She shot him a look. “Three days to find whatever we can about Drache Global, then the rest of the time we’re on vacation.
Not
looking.”
 

“I thought we said a week — “

“
You
said a week. We’re spending
two weeks
there, and I’m not wasting half of it tracking out a mysterious organization.” Julie didn’t push any further; she knew Ben was much more adamant about chasing the nebulous organization that had almost cost them their lives. She wanted to know who they were as much as he did, but she was more than happy to leave the detective work to actual detectives.
 

Ben didn’t respond at first, but when she didn’t stop staring at him, he finally nodded. “Yeah, right, I know. Three days. But if we find —“

“No, Ben. Three days. That’s it.” She wanted to sound decisive, firm, but the words sounded tired. She
was
tired — Yellowstone and the debriefing sessions with the government and media in the following months had taken their toll, and she was ready to be done with it. Like her mother always said, “sometimes you don’t get closure, you just move on.”
 

Ben, however, was not the type of person who could simply “move on.” He was far too stubborn and driven to move on. It was probably the most frustrating thing about the man. Julie loved that she could count on him to finish a project, no matter how large, but she had to balance that with the reality that he tended to focus on nothing else until the project was finished.
 

She was always afraid that he would eventually find some lead, a small thread of information that might pique his interest in the case once again. She’d even considered not telling him about Paulinho’s call, but she knew he was too smart for that. He’d ask who had called, and he’d know it was something serious, and she would eventually tell him.
 

So it was with great reluctance that she told Ben about the possible lead in Brazil, put their vacation on hold, and agreed to fly to Brazil with him to dig around for a few days. If everything went as planned, they’d spend a few days with Paulinho and his friend Amanda Meron, checking through her company’s investment documents and funding details, and possibly examining some of the research, then they’d spend another ten days lazing on the beautiful white sand beaches and drinking with the locals.
 

If
everything went as planned.
 

8

BEN MASSAGED HIS HANDS, WORKING out the stiffness from white-knuckling the airplane seat’s armrests during their landing a couple of hours ago. He listened as the group shared welcomes and pleasantries, all of them waiting for their drink orders to be delivered. They sat around a circular table at a picturesque Brazilian cafe, an umbrella that stood over them blocking out the most egregious of the sunlight that bathed the city streets. Streams of shoppers and businesspeople moved around them on the walkway, navigating between the cafe’s street-side table.
 

The man who’d introduced everyone, Paulinho, still stood in front of his chair, a full-width smile on his face. He’d shaken Ben’s hand with a grip that seemed to want to impress, but not quite strong enough to feel useful. Ben couldn’t tell if he liked him or not, but as was his usual custom, he decided that he did not, but would allow the man to change Ben’s mind. The man’s skin was dark, deeply tanned from the Brazilian sun, and as he drew his hand away Ben noticed a small, circular tattoo on the inside of his wrist. He didn’t recognize the design, and couldn’t get a long enough look at it to decipher it further.

To his left sat Julie, who blushed when Paulinho kissed her on each cheek. Ben couldn’t remember if that was supposed to be a European greeting or something the entire world did, but he still thought it was strange to see it in Brazil. Across from Julie, to Ben’s right, sat Dr. Amanda Meron, a young woman who seemed, in Ben’s opinion, better fit for a beach volleyball team than a science laboratory. Her skin was light, but bronzed with a natural glow that only summertime in a place like Brazil could provide. Her hair was short and blond, but long enough to be pulled back in a loose ponytail that rested gently on the back of her neck. She was apparently American or European by birth, and she stood out from the Brazilian natives around them.
 

Ben tried not to dwell on the fact that she was absolutely gorgeous. When Julie told him about her company, he’d assumed she would be a shriveled old lady, her back hunched from years of sitting over a microscope. Glasses, probably held onto her white lab coat by a long dangling chain she would clip onto her front pocket. He pictured his late grandmother, a wide, tiny woman who had the fierceness of a bull and the shoulders to match. He thought about every other “science-y”-type person he could think of — Bill Nye, Bill Gates, some white lab coat-wearing men and women in stock photographs — all of them nerds, according to Ben.