Shadowmark (The Shadowmark Trilogy Book 1) Read Online Free

Mina moved out of the way to examine the hand-scribbled note.  
    Lincoln Surrey flying to meet you in Atlanta.
    Lincoln must have pulled some strings, she thought. But how? He didn’t know anybody that important. Mina looked at the ticket. Her flight left at 8:00 p.m. She silently thanked Paul Cummings, whoever he was. Eight hours. Eight hours and she would be headed home. She smiled as she entered the airport security line.

    “Lincoln.”
    Lincoln stirred in the small office chair where he had been dozing and blinked watery eyes at one of his associates, computer engineer Lindsay Alvarez.
    “Fresh coffee in the break room,” she said, sipping from her own styrofoam cup, the plastic stirrer pressing into her tan cheek. She nodded toward an open doorway at the back of the conference room, causing a piece of straight dark hair to fall into her oval face. She brushed it behind her ear. She’d taken out her contacts and put on dark-rimmed glasses.
    She sat in a chair across from Lincoln at the large meeting table, next to Robert Carter, their roboticist, a greying man with a receding hairline and a gut that hung over his khaki cargo pants. He pushed his round glasses up on his nose and twiddled a cigarette between his fingers, already anticipating his next smoke break.
    Chris Nelson, computer-engineer-hacker-genius, sat at the end of the table to Lincoln’s left, facing the door, completely awake and oblivious to the people around him as his fingers hummed over the keys of his laptop. The youngest of the group at twenty-eight, Nelson had a soft waistline and a bowl haircut. He wore a black Space Invaders t-shirt with a blue pixelated 8-bit alien on the front.
    “Did you put on that shirt after I called you, Nelson?” Lincoln asked, smirking.
    Nelson shot Lincoln an amused glance. “Heck yeah,” he said, his voice breaking slightly.
    The four of them sat in the small conference room where they had been deposited after their helicopter ride to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Nothing had been hung on the plain white walls. The rolling seats were stiff and unforgiving, the grey carpet barely worn. They had dropped their overnight bags haphazardly about the room, obstructing the small paths between the chairs and walls.  
    Lincoln had seen little else of the vast complex, but the sense of urgency they had experienced in the helicopter pervaded the air here as well. When they arrived, he’d barely registered the offices teeming with people rushing up and down, phones ringing, and televisions blaring. A large screen in the ground floor lobby of the building cycled through three-dimensional renderings of all of the towers with lists of data displayed beside them. Lincoln would have liked to stop and look at them, but the group strode quickly past to the bank of elevators that took them to this third floor room. The muffled sounds of people scrambling to make sense of chaos occasionally echoed down the hall.  
    Someone in uniform stood outside the door, checking on the group from time to time. Helicopters whined in the distance. Lincoln wondered what the military was planning to do about the towers. Despite the fact that his team was supposed to help, they had yet to be given any information on the situation or their role in it. Lincoln assumed they were waiting on Cummings, who had always been their point of contact for ARCHIE in the past.  
    No one slept. The team had begun working right away, taking advantage of the lull to pull up existing programs and refresh their memories on scenarios they had not seen in over a year.  
      Lincoln checked the time—7:00 a.m. He’d only dozed for twenty minutes. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at his screen. Nelson was already digging into code, updating algorithms. Alvarez and Carter were discussing possible methods of contact.  
    “I don’t see how our programs are going to determine anything just by looking at the towers,” she said. “The aliens will need