No Regrets - Page 36/42

Since Mary.

Somehow, thinking about Mary didn't evoke the same instantaneous pain it always used to. He still felt guilty over her death and had a burning desire to see every last one of the Swarm dead, but Noelle had done something to him that helped ease the searing pain he'd become so familiar with. She was helping him heal.

If he hadn't felt it happening, he wouldn't have thought it possible.

Noelle went completely still. "I did it," she said in a near whisper. "I figured it out."

David crossed die space in three long strides. He stared at the screen, not understanding a word or symbol he saw.

"Are you sure?"

She looked up at him, excitement shining in her green eyes. David wanted to kiss her so bad he could almost taste her mouth. "Yes. I'm one hundred percent positive. Only..."

"Only what?"

She bit her lip as if trying to figure out what to say. "This isn't all of the text."

"Then how do you know you cracked it?"

"I could spend the next twelve hours trying to explain, my solution to you, or you could just take my word."

David had a hard time sitting through an hour-long lecture. "I'll take your word for it."

"Did Monroe give you anything else? Any numbers or instructions?"

"No, nothing."

Noelle sat back and let out a frustrated sigh. "Then what I've got here isn't going to help much."

Disappointment and relief warred within him. It wasn't over yet, which meant she wasn't leaving him yet. "What do you mean?"

"It's kinda hard to explain without those twelve hours, but I'll try. Do you have a map?"

"Of where?"

Noelle shrugged. "It doesn't really matter. I just need it to show you what I mean."

David rummaged through his knapsack and pulled out a map of Colorado. Noelle went into the kitchen, dumped out a box of dried pasta into a bowl and tore the front off the cardboard box. There was a little clear plastic window that displayed the noodles inside the box. On that window, she drew an arrow and labeled it north. Then she drew another arrow pointing down and to the right.

Noelle spread the map out on the counter and placed on top of it the cardboard box front with the plastic window and the arrows she'd drawn. "Okay. The up arrow is north—just a reference—and the second arrow gives us our solution, which are map coordinates. The tip of the arrow is the destination this text was encrypted to hide. It's our target location for the weapons."

David frowned. "But you don't know the destination unless you know where to put the arrow on the map."

"Exactly. I know magnitude—distance in this case— and direction, but not the origin."

Frustration welled up in David's chest. "All this effort and nothing tangible to show for it. Damn, I'm sorry, Noelle."

"It's not a lost cause. There's got to be another piece of text somewhere, like this one, which gives us the origin. If we know that, we'll know where this text was telling us to go. Can't you ask Monroe?"

"I can try, but I'm pretty sure that he would have sent along anything he thought we could use. Is it possible you missed something? I mean, couldn't there be another bit of info in all that gobbledygook?"

Noelle chuckled. "It's not gobbledygook. It's a string of equations that share like variables. The solution to that series of simultaneous equations clearly leads to a fairly simple vector analysis. I made some assumptions along the way, and if I feed my algorithm different values for certain variables, then I will get a solution with a new magnitude and direction—a different vector, but it's all fairly simple now."

David stared at her. He could feel his IQ slipping as her words slaughtered brain cells left and right. "I'm sure it is."

She seemed agitated that she couldn't share this with him, but there wasn't much David could do about that. He just wasn't in her league when it came to this stuff.

"So, what do we do now?" she asked.

"First, you make a backup copy of all that stuff and show me how to use it. I want to get you away from this mess as quickly as possible. My gut tells me that as soon as we figure out the last piece of the puzzle, I'll be going wheels up immediately."

She looked away quickly as if wanting to hide her eyes from him. "So we'll be separating soon then?"

David didn't like the thought of leaving her behind any more than she did, but he knew it was her best chance for survival. At least until all this was over. He couldn't very well drag her into the remaining Swarm stronghold when he went to hunt them down. He needed to know she was safe. "Yeah. We will."

"Will I see you again?" Her voice was so small and vulnerable it made him want to pull her in his arms and promise never to leave her side again. Which was about the stupidest thing he could possibly do.

"You will. We have... unfinished business." David didn't promise. He didn't know if he'd survive this mission or not, but he knew that if he did, he'd hunt her down no matter how deeply they tried to bury her in any of the protection programs. She was his woman and he wasn't letting her go until one of them decided to call it quits. Besides, he might have a child on the way, and he wasn't about to walk away from that while he still drew breath.

She nodded, but he could see in her expression that she didn't believe him. David didn't blame her one bit. He had a hard time believing that he would come out on the other side of this mission alive too. Even though the odds weren't great, they were better than they had ever been before because Noelle had given him a reason to live, which was more than he'd had in a long, long time.

Caleb and Grant were nearly finished patrolling the perimeter David had set up to protect the cabin when Caleb heard a faint noise. He stopped, motioning Grant to do the same.

"You hear that?" asked Caleb, sniffing the air for the scent of animals—including the human variety.

The sound came again, louder this time—a faint moan coming from the woods. It sounded like a man.

Grant nodded and pointed to a thick growth of brush growing in the ditch that ran along the south side of the road leading to the cabin.

"Cover me," said Caleb as he readied his weapon and headed for the brash.

Caleb felt Grant standing guard at his back, knew his buddy would keep watch in case this was some sort of trap.

The breeze shifted, and the smell of blood filled the morning air, thick and heavy. Lots of blood.

Caleb leaned down and eased some branches aside. Under the dense overhang of twisted stems and dried leaves he saw an arm clothed in hunter's camouflage and a pale hand caked with dried blood. Cautiously, Caleb pushed away more branches until he could force his body through a tight opening.

The man moaned again, a low, pitiful sound. He was lying on his side with a deep gash a few inches above his right knee. Caleb could see bone. The heavy fabric of his pants was sliced open and soaked with blood around the wound.

Just above the horrible cut, the man had buckled his belt tight around his thigh, making a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. A bloody axe lay on the ground a few feet away next to a partially chopped chunk of firewood.

The poor bastard had damn near chopped his leg off while gathering wood, and from the amount of blood staining the ground, it was a wonder he was still alive.

"Got a man down, here," Caleb told Grant.

"How bad?"

"Pretty damn bad," replied Caleb.

"Anyone we know?"

Caleb turned the man over so he could see his face. Shit. This was not good. "He's just a kid. Maybe seventeen. We need to get him some help."

"The truck is just down the road. Closer than the cabin."

"There's nothing in the cabin that can save this kid, anyway. He needs blood and lots of it. We've got to get him to a hospital." As carefully as he could, Caleb lifted the boy into his arms. The boy let out a rough groan that made Caleb's stomach churn. He didn't look good.

"Can you carry him?" asked Grant from the far side of the thick foliage.

"I'm on it," said Caleb. The boy didn't weigh much, but he was all arms and legs, and it seemed to take forever to work his way back out of the heavy brush without jarring his injured leg.

This whole thing made Caleb's stomach turn. He wasn't a squeamish man, but the sight of a kid cut up like this tore him apart. At least it hadn't been a girl. Caleb wasn't sure he could have handled that. Not after what had happened in Armenia.

Grant was still keeping careful watch, scanning the area with his rifle ready to go when Caleb cleared all the branches.

"Let's get moving," said Grant. "I've got a bad feeling about this."

Owen watched the two Delta Force operators until they disappeared around a bend in the gravel road. Brian wasn' t going to survive long enough to get to a hospital—Owen had made sure he'd lost too much blood for that—but he'd served his purpose. He'd been excellent bait.

Owen made a mental note to thank Mr. Lark for sending the boy the next time they spoke. With those two commandos blown into tiny bits by the explosives he'd set in the truck, David and Noelle were going to be much easier targets.

Noelle knew her time with David was growing short, but she tried not to let it interfere with what she had to do. She showed David how he could input new values for the missing variables and how to interpret the results. She'd even made him practice.

While David used a satellite phone to contact Monroe, Noelle burned a backup copy of her work onto a spare disk she had in her laptop tote bag. Just in case it fell into the wrong hands, she put a password protection script on all the files. It might not have been the best security software out there, but it was decent, and it sure would slow down anyone who didn't know what they were doing.

Across the room, she heard him speak in a low voice over the phone. "No, sir. She's sure. There's got to be another script we didn't recover."

Noelle could hear Monroe's deep voice cursing on the other end of the line, even from across the cabin.

"Yes, sir. That's what I thought, too."

David's hand tightened on the phone as he listened.

"No, it wasn't a waste of time," he said. "Find the team that recovered the text and maybe they'll have a clue."

David's eyes closed for a moment, but not before she saw a flash of grief shining behind his lashes. "All of them? I thought Jasom lived."

He leaned against the counter, looking more defeated with every word. "Just what do you expect me to do out here?

She's gone as far as she can with the intel we've given her. You want us to start making things up?"

David clenched the phone so hard she thought the plastic housing would crack. "No, sir," growled David. "That won't be necessary. Just give me the coordinates of where the team found the script and I'll go there myself."

The last piece of the puzzle fell into place in Noelle's head with a nearly audible click. "That's it, David. The origin.

It has to be from the perspective of whoever wrote this ciphertext. Where was it found?"

"Hold on, sir," said David into he phone. To Noelle, he rattled off the coordinates that Monroe had just given him.

Noelle hurriedly typed them into her program and hit the run button. She held her breath, waiting. A few seconds later, the results shone bright on her laptop screen. David was looking over her shoulder.