The Ark: A Novel (15 page)

"You're a car nut, I see," Dilara said. She looked more closely at some of the photos. Locke noticed that they were the ones that featured him with one arm around the same woman, a beautiful blonde, in all of them.

"That was my wife, Karen," he said.

"She's gorgeous." Dilara faced Locke, her eyes showing the condolence he'd seen many times. "When did she pass away?"

He always dreaded the inevitable questions, but at least he was now able to talk about it without choking up. "Two years ago. Car accident. Her brakes failed, and she got broadsided at an intersection."

"I'm very sorry."

"Me too," he said. He let the pause go on slightly too long. He cleared his throat. "If you don't mind waiting here, I'm going to talk with my boss. I may ask you to come in, but I'd like to talk to him first. If the phone rings, it'll be me, so go ahead and answer it."

"Sure. I'll just take in the view."

Locke left her and walked to the end of the hall, where he knocked on the door of Miles Benson, Gordian's president and CEO. He heard a gravelly voice yell.

"Locke, get your butt in here!"

The receptionist must have told Miles that Locke was there. He wasn't even in the room yet, and it sounded like he was off to a great start.

Locke opened the door to Miles' expansive office. The room was comfortable, but it was all business. In the middle of the room was an eight-person conference table. To the side were a couch and chair, with an empty space where a second chair would have been appropriate. At the far end sat a massive desk. Behind it was a weathered man in a flat-topped crew cut he retained from his days in the Army. Miles Benson waved Locke over but continued typing at his keyboard. When he was done, he looked up at Locke, raised an eyebrow at him, and grabbed a folder from his desk. Then he began to rise, something visitors rarely expected since they almost always knew that Miles Benson was a paraplegic, paralyzed from the waist down in an industrial accident.

Locke had seen him do so many times, but the process still amazed him. He rose, still sitting, courtesy of his IBOT chair, a motorized wheelchair developed by the maker of the Segway. The chair normally moved around on four large wheels, but whenever he felt like being twelve inches higher, Miles would activate the gyroscopic control that pivoted the seat so that it balanced on just two of the wheels. Computers continually adjusted the wheels so that it wouldn't tip over. The effect was disconcerting at first, but Locke had quickly gotten used to it. He sat on the edge of the conference table so that his eyes were level with Miles'.

Miles fingered the controller, and the IBOT deftly swung around the desk. He shook Locke's hand with a grip that could crush steel. Locke knew he lifted weights daily and exercised with a racing wheelchair. Miles wasn't the type to let a little thing like paralysis slow him down.

"How was the marathon?" Locke asked.

"Won my age division," Miles, who was 62, replied proudly. "I would have come in first for everyone 40 and up if I hadn't gotten a blister on my left hand in the 23rd mile. Some son of a bitch from the Special Olympics passed me with a mile and a half to go."

"I think you mean Para-Olympics."

Miles grunted. "Whatever. All I know is he was twenty years younger than me, and that he was an ass. Looked over his sunglasses while he went by me and winked. I almost ran him off the road."

"What stopped you?" Locke said with a smile.

"The same thing that's stopping me from tearing you a new one for abandoning the Norway job--my good-natured heart. That's a half-million dollar contract you let go."

Miles was more than Locke's boss. Miles had been a mentor in his college years, driving him to excel in engineering school when he was Locke's professor and academic advisor at MIT. When Locke had left the military, it had been Miles who had advised him to start his own engineering consulting firm, which Locke called Gordian Engineering. When the grind of administrative and sales work had gotten to Locke, Miles had convinced him to merge Gordian with Miles' own company that he had founded when he left MIT. The combined firm took on the Gordian name, and Miles assumed leadership of the combined company. Even though Miles was a stellar engineer, his true expertise was in sales and hiring, and with Locke able to concentrate his engineering skills on fieldwork, the company had doubled in size annually.

So even though Miles' words would have seemed sharp to anyone else, Locke knew that he didn't really mean it.

"I know you had a good reason," Miles continued.

"The job's not abandoned. Just delayed. We were able to finish up the work on Scotia One."

"From what Aiden told me, you saved their bacon a couple of times."

"Unfortunately, the only reason they were in trouble in the first place was because of me. And Dilara Kenner."

Miles tossed the folder he'd been holding onto the conference table. "That's for you. I already looked through it. I had Aiden gather up everything he could on Dr. Kenner. She has a pretty impressive background."

"She's pretty impressive in person, too."

As Locke perused the contents of the folder, he explained to Miles the events of the last 36 hours. When he was through, he looked for some response from Miles, who was as inscrutable as ever.

"How do you think this is all related?" Miles finally asked.

"Good question. Coleman and Hayden are linked somehow, and somebody has gone to a lot of trouble to get Dilara Kenner and me out of the way so that we won't find out how. The next job is to discover what their connection is to Genesis, Dawn, and Oasis. I'm hoping that if we know what they have in common, we'll know how finding Noah's Ark can prevent the death of a billion people. In the meantime, I think it's time we involve the FBI on this."

"I agree," Miles said. "It sounds like you're on to something here. I know the local Special Agent in Charge. I'll give him a call. What about your father? You said you thought the guy who tried to bomb the rig was ex-military. Maybe General Locke could help us with this."

Locke stiffened. The thought of running to his dad for help was horrifying. When times had been lean at Gordian, Miles had pushed Locke to get his father to steer some military contracts their way, but Locke had steadfastly refused.

Not if my life depended on it,
he thought, but he said, "That's not a good idea."

Miles frowned. "You sure? He's well-connected and could grease the skids for us getting information."

"We can handle this on our own."

Sherman Locke was a two-star general in the Air Force, an enlisted man who had worked his way up through Officer Candidate School. When Locke's mother had left them when he was four, his maternal grandmother had raised Locke and his newborn sister. Their father had been a stern disciplinarian, and nothing Locke did ever seemed to be good enough. He was once grounded for three months for getting a B in high school, the only time it happened.

Locke never considered the Air Force Academy an option because his poor eyesight at the time--since corrected by laser surgery--meant he was ineligible for pilot training. Instead, he wanted to go to West Point. The General, as Locke called his father, wouldn't support his application. The General never would tell Locke why, but he guessed it was because his father didn't think he was tough enough for it. In defiance, when Locke matriculated at MIT, he immediately enrolled in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps over his father's objections.

From that point on, Locke made sure to make his own way, both in the military and in private life. Getting help from his father was anathema. Their relationship had been cool ever since, even when Karen tried to mediate and bring them back together. Then she died, and the wall between them went up again.

Miles obviously didn't think Locke was making the right call. Locke could see it on his face, but he couldn't think of anything that would change his mind.

"All right," Miles said after a pause. "It's your decision. You're keeping Dr. Kenner with you at all times? She seems to be critical to this whole thing."

"She's in my office now. I don't plan to let her out of my sight."

"Ask her in here," Miles said. After Locke made the call, Miles said, "What's your next step?"

"After we stop off at the computer shack to talk to Aiden, I'm going to take Dilara over to the Coleman offices and see if we can't find out the connection there."

A knock at the door. This time, Miles changed his voice to a pleasant invitation. "Please come in."

Dilara came in without hesitation. Even though Locke had never told her about Miles' condition, she didn't show the slightest amazement at the sight of him sitting in his wheelchair three-feet above the floor. She walked right over to him with her hand outstretched.

"Nice to meet you, Dr. Benson," she said.

"Your photos don't do you justice, Dr. Kenner. And please call me Miles."

"Thank you, Miles. And I'm Dilara. I assume you've heard my story."

"Yes. Tyler says you've been through a lot in the last few days."

"Let's see. I had an old family friend die in my arms, I was run off the road, I survived a helicopter crash in the open ocean, and I was nearly blown up. So that would be yes. But at least I got some new clothes out of it. Oh, and I'm still alive." Miles smiled at Locke as if to say he was right. She
was
impressive.

"Tyler thinks there's much more to uncover here," Miles said. "He has Gordian's full resources to pursue this."

"Thank you for your help."

"Well, this isn't just out of the goodness of my heart. Scotia One has already talked to me about replacing the lifeboat he blew up, so I want to know who to bill. The contract for investigating the Hayden crash will cover part of the expense. But most of all, I'm an old soldier, and I tend to take it personally when someone tries to kill one of my own."

"I do, too," Locke said. He stood. "Shall we go see what Aiden can tell us?"

"Keep your eyes open out there," Miles said.

"Don't worry," Locke said. "Dilara can handle herself."

"I know. She's not the one I was talking to."

* * *

Howard Olsen stood 50 feet from the Gordian building's entrance, hovering at a bus stop to avoid suspicion. Since he hadn't known how Tyler Locke was arriving in Seattle, the best place to intercept his targets was at the company headquarters, and his plan had been correct. He'd seen Locke and Dilara Kenner arrive in a red sports car 30 minutes ago, but the garage gate had prevented him from following them in and finishing the job right then and there.

He'd scouted the building thoroughly, but there was no way for him to get in undetected without more advance work. His next opportunity would be to tail them when they drove out of the building. His partner, Cates, was waiting in a car around the corner. There was no place to park within view of the garage exit, so Olsen would call Cates when he spotted Locke's car emerging. Then it would be a simple matter of following them and waiting until they stopped at a light. Olsen and Cates would pull up next to them and spray them with the two MP-5 submachine guns that were in the car. They'd be dead before they knew what was happening.

The computer shack, like the rest of Gordian, was not what Dilara had been expecting. She thought it would be some drab box filled with cluttered computer equipment and wires all over the place. Instead, she found a sleek high-tech center that could have served as the bridge of a futuristic starship. Colorful flat panels sat on ergonomically-correct desks spaced at discreet distances around the room. Through a huge window at the opposite end, she could see an entire wall covered with a screen the size of the Jumbotron at a football stadium.

Everything she saw continued to confound what she thought she knew about engineers. Tyler Locke was this swashbuckling adventurer, his company was on the cutting edge of technology, and every person she met defied the nerd stereotype. She had been taken aback seeing Miles Benson's wheelchair solidly perched on two wheels, but she thought she hid it well.

"That's our pre-visualization facility," Locke said, pointing at the Jumbotron. Two men slumped on a couch, wildly swinging controllers and blasting away at life-sized aliens in some videogame. "Before we go to work on a difficult project, we like to storyboard scenarios or display engineering schematics. When the pre-viz isn't in use, we let our guys blow off steam with it."

Other than the two game players, only one person was in the computer shack, typing at a computer.

"It's Monday," Dilara said. "Where is everyone?"

"Could be a meeting going on, but most of our engineers don't have regular hours, so work weeks are relative. We're driven more by deadlines and when the clients need to see us. Sometimes this room will be packed on a Saturday night if we're finishing up a project."

The room's lone occupant, a shaggy-haired man in his twenties, peered intently at a monitor while his hands flew over the keyboard like a virtuoso playing a Beethoven sonata. His back was to them, and he was so focused on the computer that he didn't seem to notice them.

"He hates to be surprised," Locke said with a grin. The man at the computer didn't flinch and kept typing. Locke went over to the man and stood directly behind him. He raised his hands as if he were going to grab the man's shoulders.

"It won't work, Tyler," the man said in an Irish brogue without stopping what he was doing. "I noticed you and that fine lady when you entered. You can't sneak up on me when there are twenty monitors in the room reflecting your every move."

He spun around in his chair and popped to his feet. He shook hands with Locke and then began to use sign language. That's why he hadn't turned around when they were speaking. The man was deaf.

Locke smirked and replied both in sign language and verbally. "Yes, I will introduce you, and no, she is not interested in that." The man, who had a handsome face and thick eyebrows that overpowered his wire-framed glasses, smiled at her roguishly. Whatever he had said, she didn't get the sense that Locke would tell her.