Balls Wilson strode into the Ice House foyer flanked by a Delta security detail. The Delta Force team had been on-site less than an hour and had declared the area secure less than ten minutes earlier. Whatever shape the building had been in during the initial firefight, Delta’s arrival hadn’t improved its structural integrity.
A lean, square-jawed man, clad all in black, walked up to him. “General Wilson. I’m Bob Chavez. I lead this team.”
General Wilson’s eyes took in the whole man. Typical Delta. Fit. Cocky. More civvy merc than military. The type of man most special operators wanted to become.
“You got time to give me a tour?”
“All the time in the world, General. No more bad guys.”
“Any alive?”
“A couple got away before we got here. The rest are dead. Couldn’t keep seventy-two virgins waiting.”
It was the answer Balls had expected. No real tragedy. They’d long since extracted all the information they were going to get out of the Arabs. It saved the government the expense and aggravation of a bunch of public trials. That would more than compensate for the cost of rebuilding this facility. The real loss was the three Gregory accomplices.
“Find any Anglo bodies?”
“Hard to tell. You’ll need a good forensics team for that.”
They started at the bottom, taking the main stairwell down to sublevel four, and worked their way up, stopping to let Balls examine every cell, room, and laboratory, Chavez providing a full briefing as they walked. All the violent action had happened on sublevels three and four, and on the ground floor. Those were a blood-spattered, bullet-and explosive-shattered mess. Damage on sublevels one and two seemed limited to water damage from the sprinklers. The labs all appeared in good shape, the reason they used halon fire suppression systems. Ironic. People be damned. At least the electronics were safe.
Balls paused in the first-sublevel electronics lab, walking to Eileen Wu’s workstation. As far as he could tell, nothing had been disturbed. The Gregory laptops still occupied the top of the workbench, their guts attached to an electronic forensic array. As he stared down at it, the thought occurred to Balls Wilson that in an android world, Eileen would be the perfect medical examiner.
Well, she and the rest of the team would get their chance to see what equipment still worked after the real MEs finished with the slaughterhouse.
Turning back to Bob Chavez, Balls nodded. “Thanks, Bob. I can show myself out.”
“Couldn’t have that, General. You might trip on the stairs. How would that look on my report?”
The image of the grinning Chavez stayed with Balls Wilson all the way back to NSA headquarters.
Dr. Donald Stephenson wasn’t happy. The accident had killed three people. More importantly it had set back construction two weeks. Now he had a bunch of unionized French construction workers complaining about how the aggressive work schedule was jeopardizing worker safety. He’d just finished explaining to that collection of morons that if they didn’t get back on schedule, a black hole was going to jeopardize worker safety a hell of a lot more. Besides, if they did their jobs as they were supposed to, there wouldn’t be any more accidents.
Luckily none of the new equipment had been damaged when the crane cable had broken, dropping a section of dismantled muon detectors back into the ATLAS cavern, crushing three members of the construction crew. But the collapse had damaged needed construction equipment, thus the delay. Well, they’d just have to make it up.
But not all the news was bad. Stephenson turned to the latest progress reports from the matter disrupter construction team. Apparently that foreman knew his ass from a hole in the ground. Having already completed the electrical conduit work, his team was actually ahead of schedule. At this pace they’d be ready for the first small-scale matter-to-energy conversion test in a month.
He logged into his computer, using a biometric fingerprint scan followed by a sixty-four-character password that changed on an hourly basis. It was a formula Dr. Stephenson had designed and that only he knew. Since the Nancy Anatole incident, he’d made a number of security enhancements so that he no longer had to worry about a hacker accessing his private system. Still, it was an inconvenience, one that didn’t elevate his current mood.
All his work, these last forty-odd years, had boiled down to this offshoot of the Rho Project. He actually felt like shaking Freddy Hagerman’s hand for pushing up his schedule. Thanksgiving night, when everything had gone so wrong, it had forced him to use Raul to generate the anomaly, even at the cost of completely depleting the Rho Ship’s power cells, effectively killing it. But in six months, the world would wake up to a new dawn, a golden age of knowledge and enlightenment. Nobody knew this gateway’s real purpose and no one would dare try to stop him now. The November Anomaly had made sure of that.
Failure wasn’t an option. Either this project succeeded on schedule, or the Earth, and eventually the entire solar system, would disappear into a new black hole, as its event horizon gobbled up anything that happened to pass within its reach. And with each gulp of additional matter, that horizon would expand.
Shrugging aside all thoughts of the unthinkable, Dr. Stephenson set to work modifying the construction plan in the ATLAS cavern to remedy today’s setback. The workers weren’t going to like it, but they hadn’t liked anything about the project so far. Of one thing he was certain. They’d do what he demanded. Like it or not.
The homes off of New Cut Road were widely spaced, the lots deeply cut into the thick woods, giving each a sense of being its own manor. Heather crouched in the woods beside Mark and Jennifer near one of these houses, and settled in as the dawn colored the eastern sky with a peachy glow. They’d traveled a little over fourteen miles on their circuitous route through the Maryland woods, placing them about five miles from Fort Meade, as the crow flies. Heather would have liked to cover more distance, but had settled for being careful, doubling back on their route and spending part of the night in streams on the off chance that dogs picked up the trail.
But she knew they weren’t going to use dogs anytime soon. They’d have to figure out who had lived and died inside the facility last night before they knew whom they were looking for. Once they found the hijacked Ford and fingerprinted it, they’d know that Mark, Jen, and Heather were among the escapees, if anyone else had made it out. All of that took time under the best of circumstances. The mass confusion added by Jack’s explosions around the base only made the confusing situation worse.
Jennifer had finally come out of her drug haze at a little past four a.m., and had now recovered sufficiently to operate without assistance. That was good. They were going to need each other at peak performance over the next twenty-four hours.
The sound of the garage door opening snapped Heather’s attention back to the scene before her. As she’d anticipated, both cars backed out into the driveway, one after the other, and drove off down the lane as the garage door rumbled shut behind them. Two working adults. No children. That and its isolation were the reasons Heather had selected this particular dwelling.
Leading the way, she moved quickly to the side of the house, rapidly examining the electrical meters, cable box, and telephone wiring. It took her exactly fifty-three seconds to bypass the security system. With a nod to Mark, Heather moved up beside him as he broke the lock on the garage’s side access door and stepped inside.
They swept the house, clearing the first floor, then the second, leaving the basement for last.
“All clear.” Mark’s voice from the basement allowed Heather to reduce her guard for the first time in weeks. Even though she knew it wouldn’t last, for right now it felt damn good.
“You want the shower first?”
Mark shook his head as he looked her up and down. “You and Jen each take a bathroom while I keep watch. You both look like hell.”
Neither Heather or Jennifer bothered to argue. In twenty minutes they were back downstairs, dressed in jeans and blouses that were a couple of sizes too big, but far better than the lab coat and orange prison garb.
“Your turn. I’ll take watch while Jen hacks their laptop.” Mark handed her the Mark 17 SCAR-H and two spare magazines.
“Check the fridge while you’re at it,” he called out as he headed upstairs toward the master bedroom. “I could eat an elephant.”
Heather followed Jennifer into the office, a room just off the foyer that had a clear view to the spot where the curving driveway disappeared into the trees that surrounded the house. Jennifer slid into the seat in front of the laptop, held down the power button for several seconds, and waited for the laptop to power off. That done, she inserted the subspace USB dongle into a USB port on the Dell laptop’s right side.
Jennifer brought up the BIOS screen and set the computer to boot from the USB device, bypassing the user log-in and password. As the Windows desktop appeared, she smiled and cracked her knuckles.
“Damn, I’ve missed this.”
As Heather watched, Jennifer began her web search, memorizing the locations of key facilities she wanted to access. Satisfied, she began a completely different kind of search, this time using the dongle’s subspace receiver-transmitter.
“Check for Jack’s messages first,” Heather said. “Then you can start your hacks.”
Jennifer nodded, shifting her attention back to the web browser.
Jack had a standard operation procedure of posting encrypted messages on a handful of Facebook accounts, using encryption software Jen and Heather had designed. And while they no longer had a copy of the program, it only took a couple of minutes to download the latest version of the Java Development Kit and install it on the laptop. From there until she had the program up and running would be a matter of minutes, not hours.
As Jennifer set to work, Heather walked over to the window and peered out. Except for a few birds pecking at the grass near the driveway, nothing moved. Heather walked out of the office, unlocked the front door, and stepped outside. Moving into the trees, she paralleled the narrow lane that led from the driveway into the woods. Fifty feet later, the lane turned hard left and headed toward the road that linked lanes just like this one to the highway. The distant squeal of children at play in a backyard dominated all other sounds.
Turning away from the lane, Heather made a 360-degree loop through the woods surrounding the house, her movements generating no more noise than a field mouse’s, despite the too-big Nikes that encased her feet. Finding nothing of concern, Heather reentered the house through the front door, locking it behind her. She turned to see Mark coming down the stairs, clad in better-fitting jeans, a black T-shirt, and a pair of gray New Balance running shoes. More importantly, for the first time in weeks, he’d shaved. The weight he’d lost had taken his already low body fat to near zero, making the muscles in his arms stand out like cables beneath his skin.
“How’s your head?” Mark pointed to the Band-Aid at the edge of her hairline.
Heather reached up to touch it. “I’ll live. You ready to eat?”
“What’ve they got?”
“Haven’t checked yet.”
Mark turned toward the kitchen, with Heather in tow. “House like this, a couple of miles away from a store, they’re bound to have a full fridge.”
It wasn’t full, but close enough to bring a smile to Mark’s face. The leftovers included chicken wings, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and half a pan of green bean casserole. Heather made plates for herself and Jennifer, leaving Mark to finish off the rest.
When she set the plate, hot from the microwave, down beside the laptop, Jennifer didn’t even notice.
“Brunch is served.”
“Yeah, OK. Give me a sec.”
Having watched Jen in some of her programming Zen states before, Heather left it and walked back to the kitchen. If it got cold, Jen could heat it back up if she wanted to.
Retrieving her own plate from the microwave, Heather sat down beside Mark, who had amazingly almost finished clearing his first plateful. The smell of the food made her mouth water so she was afraid drool would leak over her lips as she took the first bite. It didn’t, and the meatloaf tasted as good as it smelled. But somehow, Heather couldn’t swallow.
Standing up quickly, she strode to the sink, leaned over, and vomited into the garbage disposal. Immediately Mark was beside her, his arm around her waist.
“What’s wrong?”
Heather spit, tried to answer, and then succumbed to another retching bout. It was stupid. Jack and Janet had warned them about this, the aftereffects of killing a man. Somehow she’d thought, since she’d already seen Mark kill men, that she’d be immune to the reaction. But now that she’d dropped the mental guard she’d maintained throughout her captivity, the thought of the Navy SEALs she’d killed and the guards at the NSA facility flooded her mind. America’s finest. Heroes serving their country. They had families too. But she’d killed them all. And even though she thought she’d done what she’d had to, that didn’t make it better.
Turning on the cold water, she rinsed out her mouth and washed her face, then flipped on the disposal. When she turned back to face Mark, he didn’t bother to say anything, just pulled her close and wrapped his strong arms around her body. As he held her, tears leaked from Heather’s eyes, gaining volume until they formed streams down her cheeks.
“Oh, Mark. I’ve seen our futures. And most of them, the most probable ones, are so...so dark. And not just for us. For everyone.”
“Look at me.” Mark leaned back until his gaze held her, pulling her out of her visions and into his eyes. “I don’t give a shit about those futures. None of them. I’m the now. And I’ve got a message for anyone trying to bring on that darkness. They try to take this away from me and they’ll be sorry.
“I know this doesn’t make mathematical sense, but I want you to forget about any future that doesn’t go our way. Even if it’s 99 percent likely, throw it away. We can’t waste energy fighting to prevent bad outcomes. The only way we’re going to get through this is by focusing on what we want to happen. Visualize that. Find us a way through.”
Heather steadied herself, wiped her eyes, and nodded. When he tried to pull her close again, she stopped him.
“I’m OK now. I think I’ll try to eat again.”
As she seated herself in front of her plate, Heather did what Mark had asked. As she began to chew, she pushed all the dark visions out of her mind. As her grandfather had always said, “If you’re going to bet the long shots, then let those ponies run.”