The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,224

know anything about this? Her eyes said she did.

“Now, if that’s all … ” Sanjay said.

Peter stepped toward the door. But as he reached the threshold, a sudden doubt occurred to him. He turned to face the group once more.

“What about the power station?”

Sanjay heaved a weary sigh. “What about it, Peter?”

“If Arlo’s dead, shouldn’t we be sending someone down there?”

Peter’s first impression, considering the startled looks on everyone’s faces, was that he’d somehow implicated himself at the last second. But then he understood: they had failed to consider this.

“You didn’t send somebody down there at first light?”

Sanjay swiveled toward Jimmy, who shrugged nervously, evidently caught short. “It’s too late now,” he said quietly. “They’d never make it before dark. We’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

“Flyers, Jimmy.”

“Look, I just missed it, all right? There was a lot going on. And Finn and Rey could still be all right.”

Sanjay seemed to take a moment just to breathe, composing himself. But Peter could tell he was furious.

“Thank you, Peter. We’ll take this under advisement.”

There was nothing more to say; Peter stepped from the room, into the hall. Ian was just where he’d left him, leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest.

“I guess you heard about Lish, huh?”

“I heard.”

Ian shrugged; the stiffness had gone out of him. “Look, I know she’s your friend. But you can’t say she didn’t have it coming. Going over like she did.”

“What about the girl?”

Ian startled, a blaze of anger in his eyes. “Flyers, what about her? I’ve got a kid, Peter. What do I care about some Walker?”

Peter said nothing. As far as he could see, Ian had every reason to be angry.

“You’re right,” he said finally. “It was stupid.”

But Ian’s expression softened then. “Look,” he said, “people are just upset is all. I’m sorry I got mad. Nobody thinks it’s your fault.”

But it was, Peter thought. It was.

The answer had come to Michael just after dawn: 1,432 megahertz—of course.

The bandwidth was officially unassigned, because it really had been assigned—to the military. A short-range digital signal, cycling every ninety minutes, looking for its mainframe.

And all night long, the signal had been growing stronger. It was practically on their doorstep.

The encryption would be the easy part. The trick would be finding the handshake, broadcasting the one reply that would cause the signal’s transmitter, wherever and whatever it was, to link up with the mainframe. Once he did this, the rest would be just a question of uploading the data.

So what was the signal looking for? What was the digital answer to the question it was posing, every ninety minutes?

Something Elton had said, just before he’d gone to bed: Someone’s calling us.

That was when he’d figured it out.

He knew just what he needed. The Lighthouse was full of all kinds of crap, stored in bins on the shelves; there was at least one Army handheld that he knew of. They had some old lithium cells that could still hold a charge—not more than a few minutes’ worth, but that was all he’d need. He worked quickly, keeping an eye on the clock, waiting for the next ninety-minute interval to pass so he could grab the signal. Dimly he sensed some kind of commotion going on outside, but who knew what that was. He could jack the handheld into the computer, snatch the signal as it came in, capture its embedded ID, and program the handheld from the panel.

Elton was asleep, snoring on his cratered cot in the back of the Lighthouse. Flyers, if the old man didn’t take a bath soon, Michael didn’t know what he’d do. The whole place stank like socks.

By the time he was through it was almost half-day. How long had he been working, barely rising from his chair? After that whole thing with Mausami, he’d been too restless to sleep and returned to the hut; that might have been ten hours ago. His ass felt like he’d been sitting that long at least. He really had to pee.

He stepped from the hut, too quickly, unprepared for the blast of daylight that filled his eyes.

“Michael!”

Jacob Curtis, Gabe’s boy. Michael saw him jogging up the path with a lumbering gate, waving his arms. Michael took a breath to prepare himself. It was hardly the boy’s fault, but talking to Jacob could be a trial. Before Gabe had gotten sick, he would sometimes bring Jacob around the Lighthouse, asking Michael if he could find something for the boy to do to make himself