The Babel Tower Page 12

  Dylan had mixed thoughts. Maybe he should have told Liz weeks ago about what Katarina had said. But…if it was just company politics leading the data to be released, would that be so bad? It’s not like it would hurt Liz. He turned to Katarina. “It sounds like you don’t need my help.”

  “Unless the board doesn’t agree. Then I’d need to figure out Jax’s code. Any ideas?”

  Dylan remembered what Liz had mentioned at his lab, about her DNA. He started to tell Katarina, but something in him resisted. “Not really,” he said.

  “I figured.” Katarina leaned back and sighed. “It’s too bad, because as long as Liz is the only access point, she could be a target.”

  “A target?”

  “Yeah, because like I said, if she’s gone, then the board can override the system. Owen and I told her she should get a security detail. It’s not unusual for a person in her position. But she wouldn’t agree.”

  It was true. Dylan couldn’t stand the idea of Liz being at risk. Maybe…he should tell Katarina. It would probably be safer for Liz if access to the code required her being alive. “You know, now that I think about it, Liz mentioned that Jax uses her DNA to store data. The code might have something to do with that. If we let that idea spread a little, it could keep Liz safer, right?”

  “Fascinating.” Katarina tapped her lips, thinking. “You’re right. But how would the DNA be used?”

  “They could do it a lot of ways. Maybe Jax embeds a unique encryption code in the DNA?”

  “If that’s true, then you’re right. It would keep Liz safer. Could you look into it more?”

  “Okay… But you’re the one who works with them. There’s not much I can do.”

  “Anything would help.” Katarina was quiet, staring ahead. “One other thing. You know about the farmer in Nebraska?”

  “The one that won’t sell his land?”

  “Yes. Something about him doesn’t make sense. He wants us to think he’s a simple farm boy who doesn’t want to leave home. But no one’s that simple. Maybe he’s working with the Feds or someone else.”

  “I don’t buy it. Liz said he’s just stubborn.”

  “Liz finds him interesting,” Katarina replied, a touch of annoyance in her voice. “Apparently she visited him one day and helped him with digging or something. People at the tower said she returned covered in dirt. Can you believe that? She’s made me look for every scrap of information I can find on Mr. Conrad.”

  “And?”

  “That’s the thing. I’ve basically found nothing. There’s zero trace of him online. He’s never had a credit card. Never had a passport. Not even a birth certificate. It’s possible that he’s legitimate. Home birth, homeschooled, and that’s it. But I doubt it.”

  Something about Katarina’s idea didn’t add up as Dylan thought back to what Liz and Owen had said about the farmer. But he also couldn’t make sense of why Liz would have helped the guy with digging. “What about the family? Weren’t they there before?”

  “Bingo. That’s what got me worried. I did some research on the grandfather. He fought in Vietnam, won a purple heart. It’s not certain, but some of his background suggests CIA. What if the government is using its old connection with him to monitor something from their farm?”

  “I don’t know…” The whole thing seemed like a stretch. “What are you planning to do about it?”

  Katarina tapped a small package on the bench between them. “I want to monitor the farm—to protect Liz. I got these cameras to place around there. They look like flecks of dirt, undetectable, and they’ll show us whoever comes and goes. Think you could visit and stick them in good places?”

  “Me?” Dylan was shaking his head. “No, I’m not going to Nebraska.”

  “Suggest it to Liz. Tell her you’ll try again to buy the land. She’ll agree. She’s spending a lot more time out there, and she’s fascinated with the guy. I’ve never seen her so driven to learn about somebody, and she’s met with world leaders. Just don’t mention the cameras.”

  Dylan had to laugh at the thought. “So I just say, Hey Liz, do you want me to visit that farmer about selling his land? That’s your idea?”

  “That’s it. Trust me.”

  Dylan didn’t like it. He took a deep breath. “What’s in it for me?”

  “This buys us more time. I need to figure out who’s trying to access the data. Oh, and I think Liz has a crush on this guy. So you may want to check out your competition.”

  “Liz is like a little sister,” Dylan said, his reddening face thankfully hidden by the night.

  “Right…and you wouldn’t mind in the slightest if she found out about us?” Katarina’s voice sounded like she was smiling.

  Dylan swallowed. “She wouldn’t care.”

  “Well let’s keep it between us for now, okay?”

  “Agreed.”

  She nudged the package closer to him. “The cameras are tiny, won’t be noticed. Just stick them on the front porch and anywhere else that makes sense. We’ll see whoever comes and goes.”

  “You really think this will be good for Liz?”

  “Absolutely. It’s possible the farmer is just a boring guy that Liz happens to find interesting. But it’s also possible he’s trying to cover up something.”

  Dylan looked again at the pile of trash and the fire hydrant beside their bench. The city had so many messes. Now the tower was creating messes, too. He’d never imagined himself hiding cameras around somebody’s home, but he’d also never thought Liz would be at risk. It was just cameras…

  He turned to Katarina again. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you.” She leaned closer. The lines of her face were soft and seductive in the shadows. “Thinking about inviting me over again tonight?”

  26

  Jake gazed up at the dead apple tree. The third he’d lost this year. He rubbed his hands over the crisp, dry bark. No bugs, no worms, just rot. The exact same thing had taken the others.

  It wasn’t lack of water, he knew that. Good apples required good water, and his irrigation and filtration system meant only the best for the orchard. It wasn’t the soil, either. He knelt down and rubbed it between his fingers. The brownish dirt crumbled in his hand. The color and texture hadn’t changed in his lifetime.

  It had to be the heat. He’d never seen a summer this hot, or last this long. September should have brought more cool mornings. It hadn’t.

  And now another tree had to be pulled out. He grimaced at the work before him. First he’d chop it down. Then he’d split the wood. Then came the hard part: removing the stump.

  A smile spread across his face. He still felt like it was a dream when Liz had come and helped with the last tree. She hadn’t contacted him since, but he hadn’t stopped thinking about her. Now even a dead apple tree was making him smile. Part of him hoped beyond reason that she’d suddenly show up again to help, as if felling apple trees was his invitation to her. But he knew better.

  He’d be on his own with this one. Most of the time, he didn’t mind working alone. He preferred it. It’s just that some jobs were better with four arms than two, especially if two of those arms belonged to Liz Trammell. But he could handle the tree himself—tomorrow, after a good breakfast.

  He turned back toward the house. The sun had just dropped below the horizon. The sky before him lit up in red and purple streaks. It was beautiful, except for the cranes stabbing into the sky, dipping and turning and rising. He let his eyes get so lost in the wonder of it that he didn’t notice the motorcycle parked in front of the house until he was almost on top of it. He read the name on it: Ducati. The gleaming black machine seemed utterly foreign.

  His gaze lifted to see a man talking to his mother on the porch. They were both smiling, laughing.

  “Jake, come here!” his mom said. “You’ve got to meet Dylan.”

  No, Jake thought, I don’t have to meet Dylan. But the two of them blocked the way through the front door.

  Dyl
an held out his hand. “Great to meet you, Mr. Conrad. Your mother is marvelous.” She giggled at that. “I’m Dylan Galant.”

  Jake nodded.

  Dylan paused, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, Dylan continued. “Your mother invited me to stay a while longer, but I just wanted to see your place. It’s become quite the legend in my circles.”

  “We make legends of what we don’t understand,” Jake said.

  “I guess we do.” Dylan smiled. “Well, I’d heard your grandfather was sick. I’m a doctor connected with the tower, so now we’re like neighbors and I thought I’d pay a visit.”

  Jake held a straight face. Pops had a simple cold. He didn’t need a doctor. And how did this guy know about it?

  “I brought some medicine with me. Your mother has the details. It should help him recover quickly.” He reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and produced a little white card. “This has my contact information. Call me if he has any setbacks, okay?”

  Jake took the card, eyeing it suspiciously. He knew he wasn’t supposed to judge a man based on his looks, and really not at all, but he didn’t like this guy. He felt like he could never like this guy, but he’d pray for God to help him. Eventually.

  “Oh, thank you again, Dr. Galant,” his mother said. “We will call. And please, next time you’re here, you must stay for dinner.”

  “I’d love that,” Dylan said. He gave her a friendly embrace. “Bye, Ms. Conrad.” He glanced at Jake, and nodded. “Mr. Conrad.”

  “Goodnight.”

  The man stepped off the deck, zipping up his leather coat. He fired up the motorcycle, sounding like a little jet plane, and rode away with a cloud of dust.

  “You don’t have to be so rude,” Jake’s mom said.

  “That man seems like the type to sell snake oil. I hope you didn’t buy it.”

  She smiled, putting her arm through his and walking him inside. “He brought medicine, not snake oil. This could be just what Pop needs.”

  “I doubt he’ll take it.”

  “Oh, we’ll see about that.” They paused at the foot of the stairs. “Evening reading soon?”

  “I’ll wash up and be down in a few minutes.”

  “What’ll it be tonight?”

  “Something from Proverbs. We need a dose of wisdom in this place.”

  She laughed and gave him a friendly shove up the stairs. “Try to smile when you look at yourself in the mirror. It’ll do you good.”

  He climbed the stairs two at a time. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he muttered.

  27

  Liz stood on a platform facing the huge crater in the ground. It had been two months since the televised interview. Jax’s team had come up with a brilliant idea to build the tower even higher and safer in the atmospheric winds. Katarina had the company making more profit than ever, and the projections for the stock price were rising.

  In the meantime, the tower had consumed Liz’s time. She’d selected the builders and the suppliers. She’d signed the media contracts for the reality show—Building Babel. And, most importantly, she’d picked the chief engineer.

  There had been five finalists for the lead role. “The best in the world,” Jax had said, after his team combed through hundreds of applications.

  And Jax’s favorite had won: Hunter Black. He’d showed up for the interview alone with a backpack, chinos, and a button-down shirt. Liz liked that. The other finalists came in large teams and pinstripe suits—from New York, Tokyo, and Berlin. But Jax recommended Mr. Black, from Kansas City. The engineer had the right resume, having built towers around the world. Katarina didn’t like him, but for the tower, Liz would follow Jax’s recommendation. She approved him for the job.

  Now Hunter joined Liz and Jax at the edge of the pit. The three of them walked down the viewing platform that extended over the giant hole in the earth. The flat metal surface was like a diving board under Liz’s feet, except it had no spring. She felt like an ant on the edge of a swimming pool.

  “Will it get any bigger?” she asked.

  “Not much.” Hunter held out his large hands and formed the shape of a square. “The foundation will be five hundred feet deep, and about three thousand feet on each side. “It’s like nine football fields put together. And it goes deep enough to hit water.” The engineer pointed to the bottom of the pit. “That’s the aquifer bubbling up down there.”

  Liz studied the muddy surface below. Shafts of metal rose out of the brown water, reaching for her like fingers. They went all the way around the pit, each one angled toward the center. Six thick shafts rose up in the center, coiling around each other like DNA. Liz pointed down to them. “That was my father’s idea, right?”

  “It was,” Jax said. “He scribbled a little note beside it in the drawing. He called it the wind helix.”

  “Brilliant idea,” the engineer added. “Wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago, but this synthetic steel bends and molds. Those six shafts go down another five hundred feet, and a block of concrete the size of the White House anchors them down.”

  “How’d you get the concrete down there?”

  “Our team from Norway is leading that. They have the drilling technology to reach deep under the North Sea. We imported one of the drills and used it to pump the concrete in. We let it set around the steel shafts, then pumped more concrete in all the way to the bottom of the pit you see.”

  “So the tower will stand no matter how hard the wind blows?”

  “Exactly,” Hunter said. “These roots aren’t going to budge, and the counterweights above keep it balanced. The team from Korea built a computer model to test it. Even with a direct hit from a tornado, the tower will stand. All twenty million square feet of concrete and two hundred thousand tons of steel—it’ll stand. There could be damage, of course, but nothing is going to knock this tower down.”

  “Good.” Liz’s head was spinning a little from the height. She turned back. “Let’s take the picture. I want to meet more of the building teams.”

  The three of them posed for a line of press cameras. Flashes. A few questions from reporters with CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and more. Liz answered them with a smile: Yes, all is on schedule. We’re 3D printing the supplies on site. Record speed and the best quality. Watch the show! You’ll see!

  They journeyed back to the makeshift town. Lines of pre-fabricated buildings like motels housed the thousands of workers. A renovated barn served as the town hall, where groups streamed through to meet with the head of the operation. Liz greeted them with smiles, feeling like a politician.

  The Babel board had insisted she do this often. Her friends were behind the idea, too. “Good for morale,” Dylan had said, flashing his bright smile.

  Liz knew it was true. Jax’s suggestion of free drinks once a week also helped. As the workers finished their day, they crowded around the barn for cold beverages and a chance to see the woman behind all this.

  A group of Egyptians greeted Liz. One of them cracked a joke about the pyramids, and how they had some work to do to catch up with the tower. Next came the drilling team from Norway, the modeling team from Korea, the Brazilian ecosystem team, and the Russian welders.

  After a while Liz took her leave and walked outside. She gazed up at the stars, imagining the tower reaching up to them. She tried to envision the day when she’d reach the top. She’d be the first to stand at such heights, and she had a sense that she would find something there, something that had been worth striving for all along. It’s what her father would have wanted.

  Then Liz looked east, over the cornfields, and she thought of Jake. He kept showing up in her dreams, usually holding a shovel or a bright red apple. He was surely on his farm now, within earshot of the construction but oblivious to it all the same. He didn’t even own a TV. Probably not a radio, either. How could the man live like that, in such blissful ignorance of the world around him? Her tower was changing things. She was bringing the world to his backyard. She wanted to see
him again, more than she cared to admit. Maybe she would pay another visit and ask how he liked the new neighbors.

  28

  Rachel Conrad scrubbed the dried breast milk off the bottom of the bottle. She rinsed it, put it in the sanitizer, and picked up the next bottle to clean. Her hot pink kitchen gloves protected her hands from the scalding water. The television on the wall distracted her from the boring work.

  It was episode two of Building Babel.

  An army of workers covered the bottom of the tower’s foundation pit. They wore white construction hats and fluorescent orange jackets with yellow reflector strips. Cranes lowered steel beams down into the subterranean world, and the workers guided the beams into place. The narrator’s voice said: “The crew has the largest cranes in the world—from Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and Japan. Last night they finished pouring the massive concrete slab, the tower’s foundation. It is over fifty feet thick and the size of nine football fields. It will support a mile of glass and steel. Today we see the dangers of working with such huge materials, all for the sake of building the next great wonder of the world.”

  The televised feed zoomed onto two of the workers. One was crouched down, positioning a beam into a perfectly fitted hole within the concrete. A flag was stitched onto his sleeve—white and green with a crescent moon and star. Another man stood beside him, looking up and holding the top of the steel beam, keeping it steady. The flag at his shoulder had three bands—orange, white, and green—with a symbol in the center.

  “These two workers hail from India and Pakistan,” the narrator said. “The two nations have fought multiple wars, with millions of deaths. Kabir, the one who is standing, his parents were killed seven years ago by Muslim jihadists from Pakistan. He speaks Hindi. Abbas served in the Pakistani military. He claims to have killed dozens of Indians. He speaks Punjabi. They have agreed to work together today.”