The blood drained from Denise Jennings’s face as she listened to what Eileen Wu had to say. Since she’d been listening for more than forty minutes, Denise thought that by now she must look like a starving vampire. She certainly felt like one.
The NSA’s newest prodigy had traced every one of Denise’s Big John queries and had figured out the same things Denise had. Worse, she’d kept digging and, despite Denise’s objections, was determined to bring her up to speed.
Why had she opened her door and let the young computer scientist inside her house? Denise had recognized how odd it was for Eileen to be in Columbia at nine p.m. Her house was in the opposite direction, in Annapolis. Plus the girl was a notorious loner. Still, Denise had invited her inside.
Now they both knew too much.
Dear God. Admiral Riles. Jack Gregory and his entire team. Now the Smythe and McFarland kids. All of them set up by their own government. That didn’t take into account all the top government officials who had been killed. All of it to protect the Rho Project. And although Dr. Donald Stephenson had a perfect alibi—he’d been halfway around the world when it happened—Eileen Wu believed he’d somehow generated the November Anomaly. Denise believed it too.
Denise didn’t want to join the others who’d fought against Stephenson’s Rho agenda, but unless she managed to divert Eileen, this headstrong young woman was going to get them both killed. And for what? The damage had already been done. Besides, Denise had already done her part. She’d tipped off that investigative reporter Freddy Hagerman. It was time for him to step up.
Suddenly Denise felt Eileen’s dark eyes on her. Maybe there was still a way out of this.
“Eileen, I’m stunned. The stuff you’ve uncovered goes far beyond what I found out.”
“Because you quit looking.”
Denise shook her head. “Not entirely. I’m not an investigator or a field operative. And for reasons I’m sure you understand, I couldn’t take this to anyone in the agency. So, rather than give up, I took it to someone who has managed to dig into the Rho Project and stay alive. I met with Freddy Hagerman.”
“The reporter.”
“Pulitzer Prize winner. He matches his reputation.”
“So you handed your responsibility over to him.”
“That’s not how I see it, but if you do, that’s OK with me.”
“And you want me to do the same.”
“I’m just saying you should think about it. It’s not your specialty, but it’s what he does. From all accounts, he’s quite good at it.”
“I’m not good at quitting.”
“Think of him as a teammate.”
Eileen stared at her for several more moments, then rose and turned toward the door.
“Think about it.”
Opening the door, Eileen paused.
“We’ll see.”
Then the night carried her away.
Charley Richardson, Paladin’s security team commander at the LHC site, didn’t like changes to his team this late in the game. But Bruce Conrad had gotten his ass kicked outside a bar in Meyrin. Charley would have liked to meet the man who could dismantle Bruce the way this one had. Paladin should find and hire him.
So now Charley was one man down. Worse, the company was sending him a woman as Bruce’s replacement. He stared down at the file on his desk. On paper she was dynamite. Charley had seen plenty of men who were dynamite on paper but didn’t stack up when the shit hit the fan. His men came from all over, all ex–special ops from a half dozen different countries. They’d earned their spots on this team. It didn’t matter that this job was crap, turning his warriors into a bunch of facility guards alternating shifts, mostly checking people’s paperwork, controlling access to the MINGSTER and the ATLAS cavern. He still needed people he knew.
But this assignment had come from Jacob Kroner himself. No way could Charley tell Paladin’s hard-nosed president he didn’t want the woman. That was all right. Just because she made it on to the team didn’t mean she’d last long enough to be a thorn in his side.
Charley rose to his feet, slid into his coat, and stepped out into the cold parking lot where he’d assembled his team for this announcement. As he looked at them, seventeen cocky bastards, each one a major ass-kicker, he grinned.
“We’ve been assigned Bruce’s replacement. Her name is Inga Hedstrom. She arrives this afternoon.”
He held up his hand to quiet the low mutters.
“You know I like to choose my own people. This one’s out of my hands. But she still has to measure up.”
Charley clasped his hands behind his back, the posture thrusting his massive chest forward. “I’m sure you gentlemen will show her a proper welcome.”
Artan Yuzman, the larger of the team’s two Turks, chuckled. “You can count on it, boss.”
Mark wouldn’t have imagined ever wanting to thank Dr. Stephenson for anything. But he’d been responsible for Mark’s reassignment to the ATLAS electrical construction team. That would have happened without outside help, but after Stephenson had looked at the Gantt charts, he’d immediately seen the correlation between Mark’s assignments and a tremendous increase in productivity. So now Mark was the ATLAS team foreman.
He began his new job by instructing his crew to continue as planned while he spent a couple of days familiarizing himself with the Cage, a monstrous construct of steel supports and metal grating that extended from the cavern floor to the ceiling, ninety meters above. The Cage housed all the power cables routed into the ATLAS cavern from the MINGSTER and provided support for the cooling equipment required to maintain superconductivity in the primary power lines. It was a towering steel structure so tightly packed with cable and equipment that workers had to worm their way through crawlways that some of them refused to enter.
Mark traced every inch of cable that had been run and every electrical component already installed, comparing each item against the memorized plans. Although he found a number of minor variances or shortcuts, he found no significant deviations until halfway through Wednesday’s second shift. Deep within the most densely packed vertical section, he identified a cable that wasn’t on the plans.
Fascinated, he stayed on into the third shift, following the mysterious line down toward the cavern floor. The way it meandered down through other cable groupings, it had clearly been installed with the intent of making what Mark was doing almost impossible.
At floor level the cable split into four lines, made to look like standard 220-volt, fifty-hertz power lines, that disappeared into groupings of similar lines. The third shift ended at midnight, but Mark continued. At four thirty a.m. he finally stopped, convinced that he knew where each of the four cables terminated. The odd part was that they disappeared into four separate prefabricated load-bearing steel-and-concrete buttresses. There was nothing electrical in these buttresses. At least, there wasn’t supposed to be.
Returning to the spot high up in the Cage where he’d first discovered the mysterious cable, Mark began tracing it back the other way, toward the spot where the Cage exited the cavern roof. Reaching the level of the skywalk, the scaffolding walkway that connected the Cage to the steel scaffolding lining the cavern walls, Mark squeezed between two trusses and stopped. High up, along the backside of one of the trusses, the cable passed through an encyclopedia-sized, unmarked metal box.
Working his way back out of the tight space, Mark moved to one of the electrical tool cabinets mounted at regular intervals throughout the Cage, grabbed the tools he needed, and returned to the mysterious box.
Unfastening the cover, Mark took extreme care to avoid tilting or vibrating the case, easing it open while holding the penlight in his teeth, just enough to give him a glimpse inside. Not good. Attached to the inside of the removable front cover, a small glass ampule held a silvery liquid bubble at one end. A mercury switch. If he’d just pulled the thing open, that shiny little bubble would have rolled to the other end. Mark didn’t care to find out what would happen if the silver globule made that trip.
Mark removed the cover, keeping its angle unchanged, and examined the wiring inside the case. It formed a simple circuit connected to a currently unset digital timer. Whether the mercury switch was rigged to bypass the timer or send an alert wasn’t immediately clear and Mark didn’t feel like putting in the effort to figure it out right now. He’d already figured out what this whole set of cabling represented.
Some government, probably the United States, had rigged a fail-safe device. Within each of those four prefabbed buttresses was a nuclear bomb. It was the only thing that made sense, even though it didn’t make any. They had to know that a nuclear detonation would just feed the anomaly, turning it into an instant black hole. So they’d put these here as a last resort.
So long as Stephenson’s wormhole device worked, they’d never be used. Replacing the cover, Mark wormed his way out to the railing surrounding the Cage’s top level and onto the skywalk. It was time to take a moment to meditate and contact Heather. He’d let his personal savant figure out what she wanted him to do about the nukes.
“A training accident?” Charley Richardson slammed his fist down on the desk as he looked at his executive officer.
Bob Jones shrugged. “Shit happens.”
“Like hell it does. Not on my team. Not to three of my top people.”
Charley got to his feet, stretching his six-and-a-half-foot frame.
“You’re saying Artan and Yuzman both took a tumble while racing on the confidence course?”
“Yep. Right near the top of the high log climb. Artan slipped, tumbled into Hedo, and they both fell.”
“Right on top of Diego.”
“Actually Diego tried to break their fall.”
Charley stood nose to nose with Bob, his gray eyes locking with the other man’s brown ones. “Now tell me the real story. No attribution.”
“Does that apply to the whole team?”
“It does.”
Bob nodded, plopping down on the couch across from Charley’s desk. “You’re going to want to sit down for this one, boss.
“You know how you told the boys to show our new recruit a proper welcome, make sure she has what it takes?”
“I remember.”
“Well, they’ve been giving her the business. Nothing major. Just screwing with her stuff. Sexual comments alternating with the silent treatment. Letting her know the president may have put her here, but she isn’t one of us. Basically making her life hell.
“This morning she’d had enough of it. We were formed up for PT out where we’ve rigged our hand-to-hand-combat training pit, when she stepped out of formation and walked right up beside me, in front of them all.
“I thought she was going to break down, call it quits, start pleading, or something. You could hear the fellas laughing, so I stepped aside and let her have the floor. You know what she said?”
“No, I don’t know what she said, and I don’t want to guess. Get to the damned point.”
“She just stood there, with the team gathered around her in an arc. I’ll never forget her voice if I live a thousand years. It was throaty, smooth as silk, the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard. She looked them all up and down, then said, ‘Let’s make a deal. You pick your best man. If he beats me hand to hand here in the pit, every one of you can have a turn at me, and I’ll be the best piece of ass you’ve ever had.’
“Shit, you could’ve heard a pin drop. There was so much testosterone in the air it was flammable.
“Then she said, ‘But if I win, you’re going to show me the same respect you show each other. Do we have a deal?’”
“And?”
“And she had a deal. The boys argued about who would do the fighting, but finally Diego Vasquez won out.”
Charley nodded. Vasquez was the only guy on the team stronger than he was, and quick as a mongoose.
“So what happened?”
“Diego came at her full bore, just exploded out of the pack. It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. It was like Inga knew his moves before he made them. She cracked his ribs on that first charge, just used his momentum to add power to her kick. It dropped him to his knees, left him gasping for air.
“But she was already on his back, her arms locked around his neck in a submission choke hold, cutting off the blood supply to his brain. Diego’s eyes just stared in disbelief, then rolled up in his head. Once he was out, she dropped him at her feet.
“I was so surprised, the two Turks charged before I could stop them. Artan reached her first, tried a flying takedown and got a mouthful of his own teeth when her elbow flattened him. Hedo pulled up in a fighter’s stance. He might as well have been blindfolded with his arms tied behind his back. Her first kick broke his kneecap, her next one caved in the side of his face. Once he was on the ground she stomped his rib cage. Thought she was going to kill him.”
“About that time, Artan distracted her by climbing back to his feet. He didn’t stay there long though. Anyway, when she was done, she turned around to face the rest of us. I swear to God, she wasn’t even breathing hard. All she said was ‘Anyone else?’ but she didn’t get any volunteers. Then she turned her back on us and walked away.
“So that’s why those three are in the hospital. Diego’s in the best shape. He’ll probably be released tomorrow. Artan and Hedo are going to be there for a while.”
“I guess she didn’t take kindly to the Turks breaking her deal.”
“I tell you what, boss, I wouldn’t screw with her.”
Charley nodded. “So it was a training accident.”
“Just like I said.”
“Looks like we’ve got a new teammate. Spread the word.”
Bob rose to his feet, opened the door, and paused.
“I don’t have to.”
The door to the command hooch banged closed behind him.