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PEEKABOO, WE SEE YOU

Gutierrez walked into the smaller Situation Room like a suit-wearing cage fighter rus.h.i.+ng to the ring, aggressive and excited to get it on. Tom Maskill and Vanessa Colburn trailed in his wake, the boxer’s entourage s.h.i.+ning with their own intense auras.

Ah, Murray thought, the energy of youth.

Gutierrez, Maskill and Colburn slid into their seats. Donald Martin and all the Joint Chiefs were already present. A full house once again.

Murray was thrilled that Vanessa had made it—he wanted her to see this.

“Okay, Murray,” Gutierrez said. “I just cut short a meeting with the Russian amba.s.sador about this Finland crisis to hear your urgent news, so let’s go.”

“Mister President,” Murray said, “Montoya’s weather theory panned out. We think we’ve located the source of the infection.”

Murray called up a map of the Midwest on the Situation Room’s big screen.

“This is the location of the first construct,” he said. A red dot appeared at Wahjamega, Michigan. “These blue dots represent approximate locations of the hosts seven days before we attacked that construct, and the green lines represent wind direction.”

Gutierrez studied the map briefly, then nodded. “And here is the same information for the hosts a.s.sociated with Mather, South Bloomingville, Glidden and g.a.y.l.o.r.d, Michigan.” As Murray spoke each city’s name, he added a yellow dot to the map. “This information provided enough data to triangulate a specific search zone.”

Murray tapped some more keys. The map zoomed in on a grid that included southwest Michigan, northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana. “But that’s still a huge area,” Gutierrez said.

“Yes sir,” Murray said. “But it helped us focus the hunt. It took our image-processing computers three days to identify visual anomalies, but by doing so, we found this . . .”

Murray clicked the keys again. The map vanished, replaced by a grainy photo of what looked like a translucent, teardrop-shaped rock pointed at both ends.

All of them, including Vanessa, sat back in their chairs. Murray felt like a conductor reaching the emotional apex of a symphony. The room filled with excitement and relief. They finally had a target; they could finally hit back.

“Son of a b.i.t.c.h,” Gutierrez said.

“NASA is convinced it’s artificial,” Murray said. “It’s very small, about the size of a beer keg.”

“How could we not have seen this?”

“There’s a lot here we don’t understand, sir,” Murray said. “The thing is stationary, hovering forty miles above South Bend, Indiana. The object seems to bend light around it—which makes it basically invisible, but the image a.n.a.lysts identified a visual fluctuation. They had to write a program that combined images from five different sources, then create this computer-generated model.”

“So this isn’t a real picture?”

“No sir,” Murray said. “They explained it to me with an a.n.a.logy. Imagine a contact lens dropped in a swimming pool. It’s not actually invisible, but if you don’t know the contact lens is there, you’re never going to see it. If I tell you to look in one corner at the shallow end, forget the rest of the pool, look for something that might stand out just a little, and you had a dozen people helping you, eventually you’d see the lens and figure out what it is. NASA doesn’t know how the thing can just hover there. It doesn’t drift. It should take a ton of energy to keep something stationary like that, yet it doesn’t give off an energy signature. That’s supposed to be impossible.”

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