Game Over - By James Patterson Page 0,46

capacitors that powered the light.

“Bright enough for ya?” asked Dana, rubbing her eyes as the lights went back out.

“They’re to warn low-flying aircraft,” I explained. “They have to be bright. Which also means they have to use a lot of electricity.”

As the capacitors recharged, I examined the electrical conduits running into the lights and did some quick calculations.

“Okay,” I announced. “On the count of three, we jump up again.”

Dana pointed at the sky above us. “Don’t know if you noticed, but… there are no more platforms to jump to.”

“Just do it, ’kay? Straight up and as high as you can go.”

She shrugged as I tried to tune out the ringing metallic sounds of our pursuers, concentrating instead on the increasingly higher pitch of the charging capacitors.

“One, two, three,” I counted. “Jump!”

As soon as I’d delivered a swift kick to the conduit, Dana and I leaped up into the air. The high-tension wires spilled free and exposed the copper leads to the tower’s structural steel.

I was only a couple feet in the air when the coordinated pulse emerged from the capacitors. It tore a new path swiftly through the tower’s girders, then up the legs and through the bodies of the giant alien insects.

“Nice!” yelled Dana as we landed back on the platform and eyed the sizzling corpses of the guard bugs. Then I quickly repaired the wiring so we wouldn’t get shocked ourselves and so that low-flying aircraft wouldn’t have any trouble seeing the tower.

We scrambled back down to Number 7 and Number 8’s transmitter. “All set?” asked Dana, as I unplugged my handset from the device.

“All set. I just entered some new coordinates.”

“New coordinates?”

“The transmitter—and the hunters—will now think I reside on a rocky island just south of the Comoros Islands off the coast of Africa.”

“But won’t that be dangerous for the people who live there?”

“It’s uninhabited,” I reassured her. “With any luck, the aliens will get frustrated and start hunting each other. Now, let’s get moving.”

Chapter 59

DID YOU EVER have a friend who you worried was doing something stupid, but you didn’t want to be a busybody, so you stayed quiet and kept your opinion to yourself?

Looking through the glass at Kildare’s ant colony in the science lab, I was realizing I’d just had a situation like that. I couldn’t keep the what-ifs from running through my head. What if I’d argued with Kildare? What if I’d persuaded him not to pursue his plan? What if we’d regrouped and come up with a bold strategy that hadn’t involved meekly going along with Number 7 to the GC flagship store? What if I’d just gone solo against his parents so that he didn’t have to be involved? Why had I even gotten their poor son sucked into this mess?

I sighed and looked down at Kildare’s ants. Maybe they were hungry. After all, they probably hadn’t been fed since the other day. I materialized some food—a nice fresh turnip—and was removing the lid from the tank when I noticed they’d been digging a hole in the sand. At the bottom something white was poking through. A piece of paper!

I put the turnip in the corner of the tank and removed the paper. It was the page I’d seen Kildare scribbling on the last time we’d been in the lab.

I pored over the organic chemistry formulas he’d written down, all involving some high-energy, self-propelling reaction, resulting in a bunch of compounds I didn’t recognize. In fact, the only things that made any sense to me were two heavily circled abbreviations in the center of the page: NaCl and H2O, shorthand for sodium chloride—common table salt—and dihydrogen oxide, more commonly known as water.

Water and salt? I had some serious chemistry studies ahead of me, but now, thanks to Kildare, at least I knew where to go.

Chapter 60

NO BETTER PLACE to find salt and water than in the ocean, right? I headed out to the beach at Shirahama, a not-too-touristy surfer beach south of Tokyo on the mighty Pacific. It was a cool day, and only a handful of surfers were out trying their luck in the rolling surf, including the legendary Japanese wave rider Katsu. I looked on jealously, but I had homework to do.

Instead of a wetsuit and board, I materialized a beach umbrella, chair, and a three-foot-high stack of chemistry textbooks. I needed to identify and understand the nature of all the chemicals and the reactions that Kildare had written down for me.

The first thing I figured out was why