135
Music thundered in Raul’s head, not that * stuff he’d been forced to endure in his former life either. This was pure Nickelback, Chad Kroeger screaming out his rage at the world. Why he hadn’t thought of piping music into this prison, home, royal chamber that was his section of the Rho ship, Raul couldn’t fathom. After all, he’d had Internet access for ages. He could scan all the satellite frequencies of television and radio, even decrypting the most classified communications.
Maybe that was it. He’d been so down in the weeds scanning data, he’d overlooked the simplest of things to make his life better. Understandable considering how hard he’d been driving himself.
He felt the door open before he saw it, just another of the mechanisms tied into his neural net, and he certainly didn’t need to see Dr. Stephenson to know who had entered his inner sanctum.
“Good morning, Raul.”
Letting the music fade from his mind, Raul waited, floating in the air just above the machine that had been the focus of his energies these last few weeks. Why Stephenson bothered to walk through the room was one of the mysteries that cloaked the scientist. After all, he’d shown he could override Raul’s manipulation of the stasis field whenever he desired. But instead of floating effortlessly, the man wove his way through the alien conduits and machinery until he reached the open central area where Raul waited.
“Going to a party?” Raul asked. He’d never seen Stephenson wear a business suit in the lab, although he’d seen him in one on television. This was a navy blue three-piece, tangerine shirt, gold cufflinks, a paisley tie, and chocolate Italian shoes.
Stephenson came to a stop before the machine. “The president’s arriving for a briefing in an hour.”
“Impressive.”
“That’s not what I came to talk about.”
“Fine. Spit it out.”
Dr. Stephenson’s eyes flashed briefly, giving Raul the pleasure of knowing he had managed to annoy the man.
Stephenson returned his attention to the device, running his hand lovingly along the surface of the thick coils that snaked in and out of the thing, coils within which whirls of glowing energy flashed, growing in intensity and then fading out with no apparent rhythm to the pulses. In the dim grayness that filled the room, the strange luminance failed to seep beyond the coils that contained it, providing no spot of light on Dr. Stephenson’s hands, even when they touched a glow spot.
“You’ve done well.”
The unexpected compliment caught Raul by surprise, sending a warm glow of pride through his entire body. Why the hell did he even care what Stephenson thought? After all, he hated the man.
“It’s not finished, yet.”
“I know, but we’re very, very close now. What about the power?”
Raul rubbed his hands together. As challenging as the repairs to the device had been, providing the huge increase in power that would be required to bring it online had proved the most daunting of his tasks.
“Eighty-three percent.”
“We need at least ninety-five.”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.”
“You need to pick up the pace.”
“Why don’t you get your ass in here and help me then?”
“I’m sure you can handle it. Besides, I have other pressing matters to attend to.”
“Like the Bandelier Ship?”
Stephenson raised an eyebrow. “Among other things.”
Raul had been monitoring the news about the Enemy ship, the one they had all believed stone dead until it had unexpectedly come to life a few days ago.
“So that’s why the president is visiting.”
“Even I have to play tour guide sometimes.” The annoyance in the deputy director’s voice left little doubt what he thought about this interruption.
“You said I was doing well,” Raul returned to the original subject. “You know I’m working around the clock. Why are you pushing me to up the pace?”
“There’ve been some complications with the nanite distribution.”
“You mean the remotely programmable version you’ve been peddling around the world?”
Stephenson paused, as if considering what he would say. “You’ve been watching the news networks and spy satellite feeds. You know about our program at Henderson House.”
Although the confirmation that Stephenson had been monitoring his activities annoyed him, he got the sense that something big was about to be revealed.
“Not going according to plan, is it?”
“Just a technical problem. But with the world so new to the challenges of complete health, it would be a bad time for anything about Henderson House to leak out.”
Raul laughed. “I guess so. Lots of people are already upset about the total breakdown of birth control in the third world. Pill’s not working. Normal abortion methods failing. Little sperms have gotten hardy. All the world for a condom, eh?”
Stephenson shrugged. “Which brings us back to Henderson House. We already had one leak, which we were lucky to plug.”
“I don’t get it. What’s my work got to do with that?”
“All programs have leaks. Especially the most sensitive.”
A light dawned in Raul’s mind. “And you want to be able to instantly reach out and touch someone should that happen. By creating a gateway.”
“I need you to stop surfing the Internet and focus every ounce of your attention on the task I assigned you.”
“You know what I want.”
“I’ve known for a long time now. You want the McFarland girl.”
“Then you know why I’ve been searching the world’s data feeds.”
“You just focus on getting the machine working. You do that and I’ll tell you where to go get her.”
Raul was stunned. Was it possible that Stephenson could know where Heather was? He couldn’t really put it beyond the man. He’d surprised Raul before.
“You’d let me bring her here?”
“She’s a runaway known to be suffering from psychotic delusions. Nobody would even know what became of her.”
Raul stared into the deputy director’s face. There was something else there, something Stephenson was hiding behind those cold eyes. Whatever it was, the scientist wouldn’t be making him this promise if he couldn’t deliver.
Raul shifted his concentration and ten thousand tiny strands of force plunged into control panels around the room, the massive neural network directing the simultaneous repair work ramping up to full capacity.
Dr. Donald Stephenson grinned, then turned and strode from the room. His departure went entirely unnoticed.
136
Garfield Kromly strolled nonchalantly through the crowds on the vast open lawns of the Washington Mall, enjoying the first really nice Sunday morning in weeks. Pam would have loved it. He could almost feel her delicate little hand in his, her shoulder pressed against him as they stared out at the great spire of the Washington Monument.
“Ah, my sweet little darling,” he muttered under his breath. “I miss you.”
Someone jostled him, but when he looked to his left, he couldn’t tell who it might have been. All he knew was that the small brown paper-wrapped package he’d been holding in his left hand was gone.
Despite his best efforts and those of the few people he trusted at CIA, Kromly had been unable to fully break the encryption on the data disk. But the one thing he had learned was enough to give him chills.
The network of global positioning system satellites, more commonly known as GPS, had been compromised by a super-secret US government program, somehow connected to the Rho Project.
That they were using GPS was oddly fitting. When global positioning data had first been made broadly available, the US government had partially corrupted the down-linked time data using a process known as dithering, part of what was called Selective Availability. The idea had been to provide the correct information only to classified subscribers, so they would have much more accurate location data.
As was often the case with such schemes, civilian users immediately came up with ways to correct the data, allowing almost the same accuracy for their users as that available to the US military and intelligence communities. Thus, the huge sum of money aimed at Selective Availability was essentially a complete waste. Another hundred-million dollar military toilet seat.
But now the GPS signal was being manipulated in a very subtle way, acting as a carrier signal for information transmitted worldwide. The data on the DVD disk containing this information had been extracted by the late Dr. Nancy Anatole from the personal laptop of Dr. Donald Stephenson. It was a disk she had hidden away with instructions that it be forwarded to a friend on the Senate Intelligence Committee should anything happen to her. And although the disk had eventually found its way into Kromly’s hands, he had not been able to unscramble enough of the information to discover the true purpose underlying the GPS embedding.
As the soft breeze gently tousled his gray hair, Garfield returned his gaze to the Washington Monument and the small flock of birds settling into the grass near its base.
Well, the pass had been made. He could only hope that the Ripper’s resources exceeded his own. The disk was Jack’s problem now.