“Definitely,” Nicole agreed. “Everything is just way too suspicious. Daniel’s disappearance. All of this. His dad is gonna call us later. Until then, we should see what else we can learn.”
A perky, twenty-something woman who was wearing one of the center’s embroidered baseball caps approached them cheerfully. She sported a T-shirt with what looked like glow-in-the-dark fireflies and the words, “Light up the Night—Together!” emblazoned on the front. Her nametag read: “Tiff.”
She tilted her head and smiled. “Do you have your tickets? I can get you on the next trolley.”
“Tickets?” Kyle said. “No, we don’t have any tickets.”
Tiff looked genuinely disheartened. “I’m afraid if you don’t have tickets already, you’re out of luck. They’re usually plucked up within a few minutes of going on sale.”
“What exactly is all this? The trolleys? The fireflies?”
“You’re not here for the firefly viewing?”
“We don’t know anything about the fireflies. I thought your website said you closed at six thirty?”
“Oh. Well, this week we have special hours. It might not have gotten updated on the site.” She spread out her arms in a welcoming manner. “We’re open late all week for the Synchronous Firefly Event!”
“Which is, what, exactly?”
“The Great Smoky Mountains are home to nineteen different species of fireflies, but the most special of all are the Photinus carolinus. For one week of the year, here in nearby Cades Cove, they blink on and off—” As she said that, she opened and closed her hands in a blinky manner. “—all together, all at once. It’s one of the only places in the world that it happens, and only during this one week.”
“But how?” Mia asked. “How do they know when to blink?”
Tiff tilted her hands palms-up and smiled again. “No one really understands why it happens. They say it has to do with mating rituals.”
“No, I mean, how do the individual fireflies know when to blink, if they all do it at the same time?”
“One of nature’s great mysteries. And that’s what everyone is here for . . . although tonight might not be the best showing. It’s looking like rain, so our little friends might not be as active as they usually are.”
“Actually,” Kyle said, “that’s all really interesting, but we’re here because we . . . Well, we’re looking for our friend Daniel Byers.”
Tiff shook her head, still smiling. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“This may sound strange, but does a Dr. Waxford work here by any chance?”
Another head shake.
“Malcolm Zacharias?” Nicole asked.
“Well, yes, now that you mention it. I mean, he doesn’t work here, but Mr. Zacharias comes by sometimes to pick up packages. We have one in the back for him right now, I believe.”
“From Marly Weathers?”
Tiff stared at her, slightly puzzled. “How did you know that?”
“Because . . . Marly is my dad. He told me to come by and get it.”
“He did?”
“Yes. I just—we just—flew in from Philly. Mr. Zacharias can’t make it and Dad didn’t want it sitting here tonight.”
Tiff didn’t quite look convinced.
“My dad has an unlisted number and he doesn’t like me giving it out to anyone, but I can tell you his email address if you need to verify everything.” She fished her phone out of her purse. “I have it right here, if you want to check.”
“Um . . . well . . . that won’t be necessary. Let me go get that package for you.”
After Tiff stepped away, Mia asked under her breath, “How’d you know Marly Weathers’s phone number wouldn’t be listed?”
“I figured that a reclusive billionaire wouldn’t want his number out there.”
“Huh.” Abandoning the straw, Mia tipped the cup to her mouth, gulped down the remaining pineapple globs and deposited the empty cup in a trash can nearby. “But he would let you give out his email address?”
“I wasn’t sure about that part, but we got what we were looking for. Right?”
“Not yet, but—”
Tiff returned, carrying a sealed package about the size of two shoeboxes. “Here you go. Now, they need me to help corral people onto the trolleys, so . . .”
“Sure.” Nicole accepted the box. “Thanks.”
“I hope you do get a chance to see the fireflies while you’re here in town. Somehow.”
“Yeah. That’d be nice.”
“It’s a remarkable experience.”
“Right.”
Tiff swept off toward the trolley line, and Nicole led her two friends outside to open the box and find out what Marly Weathers had sent to Mr. Zacharias.
Dr. Adrian Waxford got a text from General Gibbons that she was on her way up the mountain.
He’d requested that she contact him when she turned onto Forest Service Road 141, since that was the last place where there was cell reception.
He directed Garrett Marion, the guard who was currently on duty at the Estoria, to drive down and unlock the gate so the general would be able to get through.
Nicole set the package on a picnic table nestled in a small copse of trees off to the side of the building.
Kyle offered to open it in case there was anything weird in it. She took “weird” to mean “dangerous” and didn’t argue, but just slid it toward him.
He started working at the tape.
“It says to open the other side first,” Mia pointed out.
“I’m living dangerously. Can I borrow your knife?”
She drew out her butterfly knife, skillfully flicked out the blade, and passed the knife to him, handle first.
“Man, every time you whip that thing around I think you’re gonna cut off one of your fingers.”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“It also makes for nicknames.”
“Nicknames?”
“Yeah. Like ‘Lefty.’”
“Ha.”
He carefully slit the tape, then tipped open the cardboard flaps, and removed the box’s contents: a book about haunted places in Tennessee, a pile of overstuffed file folders, some maps of the mountains, and a stack of printed web pages with federal government letterhead.
“Divide and conquer,” Nicole said.
They split up everything and got to work.
A storm is tracking toward us through the mountains.
Though the sun won’t set for another couple hours, with the clouds mounting in the west, the evening sky is already beginning to darken.
“So Daniel, does it look like Rush out there?” Alysha asks me through her headset radio.
“More like Pink Floyd.”
“Pink who?”
“Pink—never mind. Let’s just say this is not a Mozart sky.”
We fly over the peaks toward the fire-ravaged mountaintop that the Great Carrigini told us about, but as we get closer, it’s evident that the area is too overgrown for a helicopter to land.
The pilot veers south and heads to the base of that second peak, the one that would be a shorter hike distance-wise, but that would require us to cross Little Bear Creek.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
7:00 P.M.
2 HOURS UNTIL THE DEADLINE
Dr. Adrian Waxford watched as General Vanessa Gibbons’s rental car rolled up the dirt road to the Estoria Inn.
She parked and stepped out, dressed in civilian clothes.
Adrian sent Garrett back down to ascertain that the gate was locked and secure once again.
Seeing the general out of her element like this, and not at the Pentagon, reminded Adrian of a time when he was a boy and glimpsed his elementary school teacher down the aisle at the grocery store.
It’d been such a shock to see Mrs. Reynolds in a place other than school, dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. It seemed like the entire universe had shifted on some great, unseen axis.
His mom had been pregnant with his
brother at the time.
His little brother, Jacob.
The one whose murder was the reason for everything here at the Inn.
General Gibbons removed her aviator sunglasses. “Adrian.”
“General. How was your trip?”
“Endurable.”
“Do you need anything?
“I do not. Let’s begin. I’d like to accomplish as much as possible as promptly as we can. It looks like a storm is rolling in and I’m not excited about the prospect of driving down this mountain to my hotel while the roads are getting washed out by rain.”
“Fair enough. Follow me.”
Adrian placed his hand on the vascular biometrics vein recognition reader, the door opened, and he led the general into the Estoria Inn.
“Check this out.” Nicole showed her friends the pages she’d been reading. “Marly’s been monitoring everywhere Dr. Waxford travels around the country. There’s a map to a place up here in the Smokies—the Estoria Inn. Kyle, you said there were rumors that Waxford was looking for a new research place in Tennessee, right?”
“Yeah. And this haunted sites book has that same hotel highlighted. Supposedly, it’s haunted by a little boy who was murdered there. There’s a blueprint of the place—it’s got all the sightings marked, where they occurred, in which hallways and rooms—if you buy into that stuff.”
It’d always amazed Nicole that for a guy who loved to tell stories about ghosts as much as Kyle did, he still didn’t believe in them.
Mia pointed to the official-looking printouts in front of her. “This stuff is all about a Senate hearing tomorrow—an investigation into funds that the Pentagon seems to have misplaced.”
“You think all this has anything to do with what’s happened to Daniel?” Nicole asked. “Don’t forget, it was Malcolm Zacharias who was supposed to pick up this box.”
Kyle studied the papers and books strewn across the table. “Right now most of the arrows point to this Estoria Inn place.”
“Does that book tell how to find it?” Nicole asked.
He consulted the appendix and then pulled up a map on his phone. “It looks like it’s not too far from here. Maybe another ten miles or so around the other side of Spider Peak. Some of the roads are just for the forest service so it might be a little confusing, but we should be able to figure it out.”
“We came all this way. It would be pointless to turn around and drive back to Atlanta without checking it out, right?”
None of them could come up with a good reason to leave Tennessee before at least seeing if they could get some answers, not if the hotel was that close.
“Do you need to call your aunt?” Nicole asked Mia. “Tell her we’re gonna be a little later than we thought?”
“Probably a good idea.”
Kyle gathered everything, jammed it into the box again, and they returned to the car. “If we get up there and anyone asks us what we’re doing, we’ll just tell ’em we’re looking for ghosts—alright? We’ll say we heard these stories about the hotel and maybe someone dared us to go up there, spend the night, something like that. We’re teenagers. It’s believable.”
Mia cleared things with Sue Ellen, they piled into the sedan, and took off for the Inn.
As Adrian and the general neared the kitchen, he offered to find her something to eat.
“No. Thank you.” She proceeded into the hallway leading toward the subjects’ rooms. “I only saw three cars parked outside. How many staff do you have working tonight?”
“One of the cars is mine. Then, Henrik Poehlman is here—I think you’ve met him. We also have a security guard, Garrett Marion. Two other staff are on their way up. Our research assistants have all gone home.”
“So, a skeleton crew.”
“We value the funding that you and your committee provide. We try to stretch it as much as possible. It also helps to minimize the visibility of the center.”
“How so?”
“The more guards, the more vehicles would be driving back and forth, and the more attention it would attract. But there are plenty of other security measures in place, I assure you.”
He expected her to ask him to elaborate, but she said nothing.
They came to the first room.
A clipboard with the intake data about the subject hung next to the one-way mirror. The form listed the inmate’s ID number, his crimes, his sentence, and the date of his arrival.
No names.
Just numbers.
It was easier that way, rather than being reminded that these men used to have a name, a life, an identity on the outside.
General Gibbons only glanced briefly at the form, then peered into the room and gasped—something Adrian had never before known her to do.
“What happened to his eyes?”
“We tattooed them.”
“You tattooed his eyeballs?”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t in your report.”
“We do it to all of the subjects as a safety precaution.”
“Explain to me how that’s a safety precaution.”
“The ink contains nanobot geo-trackers. In Wisconsin we had that incident in the winter with one of the subjects slipping away.”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Well, we didn’t want to chance having that happen again here. This way, if anyone were to escape, we would be able to find him before he could even reach the base of the mountain.”
“And if he did?
“If he did?”
“Reach the base of the mountain. I’m not familiar with this technology. What’s the range for those trackers?”
“They’re tied in to the defense satellite grid.”
“So, global.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm . . . And what about the wounds on his face?”
“Those are from the Tabanidae.”
“The flies.”
“Yes.”
“How long was he exposed to them?”
“I never leave anyone in there for more than fifteen minutes. The results after that would be . . . well . . . quite undesirable. And not productive for what we’re trying to accomplish.”
She was quiet.
“It’s all in the name of justice. All for the greater good.”
“Yes. So, regarding the geo-trackers: The subjects could be located wherever they go—unless they removed their eyeballs, I presume?”
“They haven’t been told what the ink contains, so there’s no reason to think they would take that step.”
“Show me how to use it. How to track the men.”
Adrian was a little surprised that she was so interested in this peripheral aspect of the program, but he decided that it would be best to do whatever was necessary to satisfy her curiosity as expeditiously as possible so she could get on her way before the nine o’clock deadline.
“The unit is in the security center just down the hall,” he told her. “Follow me.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The pilot guides the chopper into the narrow clearing near the base of Spider Peak.
Because of the wind, his landing is a little rocky, but he obviously knows what he’s doing and manages to rest the landing skids on the ground without jarring us too much.
He turns off the engine and indicates a trail entering the woods nearby.
“According to what Dr. Carrigan said, that’s the one we want. We’ll need to follow it past the creek, then up to that next rise.”
“Wait,” I say. “‘We’?”
“I’m coming with you.”
“What about your heart problems? You said earlier you couldn’t do any strenuous exercise.”
“I can’t let you three go alone.”
I shake my head. “No, really. We’ll be okay. We can’t take the chance that you’d have a heart attack or something.”
“He’s right,” Tane agrees. “How serious are your heart problems?”
“Pretty much . . . I mean . . . I’ll be
okay.”
“No,” Alysha says emphatically. “You need to be safe.”
Eventually, he sighs. “Alright. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t come.” He checks the time. “If the hypnotist was right, you’ll easily make it to the Estoria by eight thirty.”
“You should head back to town.”
He shakes his head. “I want to be close by so I can get you out of here after you find Petra.” He pulls out a handheld two-way radio and gives it to Tane. “This’ll be good for at least six miles. Even in these mountains, it’ll cover you, no problem. Radio me. If I don’t hear back from you by the time it gets dark, I’ll go for help.”
“What if the storm hits before then?”
“Well, if the wind picks up much more than this, I will need to take off.” He rubs his jaw. “I can always call the authorities from town.”
I shake my head. “Don’t contact anyone until we radio you. Petra’s life might depend on it.”
“I’ll just slow you guys down,” Alysha says to Tane and me. “Maybe I should stay here.”
Tane is studying the trail. “Honestly, it looks pretty smooth. I think you’ll be okay.”
“I don’t know.”
“We need you with us,” he insists. “You hear what we can’t—like when you noticed that cell phone ringing in the parking garage or the sirens on the ransom video. If we’re in the hotel and people come after us, you’ll hear them long before we do.”
He does have a point.
“I don’t have my cane,” she notes. “What if the trail gets too narrow for you to guide me?”
“Well, if we need to, we can always leave the radio with you, keep going, and come back for you after we have Petra.”
At last he convinces her.
The pilot finds a flashlight. “For your hike back here.” He hands it to me. Then, as the storm clouds mount, Tane, Alysha, and I start toward the trail.
They’re ahead of me, and just before I enter the forest, I glance one last time across the meadow at the helicopter pilot.
And I see someone standing behind him.
What?
I’m about to call Tane and Alysha back, but then I remember Kyle suggesting that I film things to try to discern whether or not I’m having a blur. And, since we’re in the middle of the mountains and someone has suddenly appeared out of nowhere, this seems like a good time to test his theory.