THE ENEMY WITHIN

THE ENEMY WITHIN Chapter 6

Kitamura reached to turn off the music.

"Want to keep that hand, Lieutenant, I suggest you put it back on the wheel," Jasper said without opening his eyes ... quite possibly without even waking up.

*

A fog descended over Hanover. Vincent, Noah and Jamie eyed the gate from an old SUV Noah stole earlier that night. Stealing cars, or anything else for that matter appeared frighteningly simple for Noah, both on a mechanical and moral level.

"What do you think he's like? After all the zapping and drugs, you think he's all –" Noah made a face somewhere between crazy and a perplexed rubber chicken.

Jamie turned around and punched him in the leg. He gave her a look of mock indignation. "Could have happened to any of us."

"But it didn't happen to us," Noah said.

Vincent detected a hint of superiority in Noah's tone. He opted to let it go.

"You saying you don't want to get him?" Jamie asked.

Noah peered through the haze at the institution. "I'm saying our journey's hard enough without tying an anchor around our throats. Maybe he's one of us. If he is, great, I'm down with whatever. But if he loses his shit or gets in the way, then what? Are we just going to drag him along?"

"What if you were the one in there?" Jamie said.

Noah looked away. "We all went through the same thing. But he's in there and we're out here. Make of that what you want."

Jamie turned back to Vincent, perhaps waiting to see if he would jump in. He had more important activities transpiring in that moment. After another minute, he concluded his connection to the Eye. It had, at last, revealed itself. NASA and every other space agency knew about it. "We do only what we need to do to get him out. Last thing we need is for people to be talking about this."

"We're breaking someone out of a mental institution. You don't think someone's going to talk about it?" Noah said, chowing down on some corn nuts.

*

Kitamura and Jasper stood in the back of the Socorro telescope operations room. The chamber was abuzz with activity as a satellite telescope approached the unidentified object. Jasper hadn't spoken a word since their arrival. That was never a good a sign.

"Two minutes to visual," a tech called out from the front of the room.

Simon Keyes crosschecked flight data with each team as seconds ticked away.

The front monitors showed nothing but dark space on one side and the blue marble of earth on the other. Seeing it from that angle, it was hard to imagine that mankind had any place on something so beautiful. Conversely, it was mankind's enlightenment that allowed them to have this image as a result of their scientific advancements. They'd come a long way from cave paintings. The dichotomy of it would have occupied Kitamura's mind for some time were it not for the momentous event unfolding before him.

Simon and a younger woman approached. "Colonel Jasper, Lieutenant, this is Shiri –"

"What'd you find?" Jasper said, his eyes boring into Shiri.

She wilted like a sunflower suddenly finding itself in the arctic. Jasper had that effect on people.

"You know how the object's been intermittently sending infrared flares? They'd be easy to miss with all the solar radiation which has a similar wavelength," Shiri said. An oscillating infrared wave appeared on the screen after a few keystrokes. "The waves were woven together in a way that made it nearly impossible to decipher anything."