The knock on his door roused Freddy from the light doze that had almost allowed the glass of Crown Royal to slip from his fingers.
Shit. What time was it? The LED lights on the cable box read 11:45. Who the hell would come knocking at midnight?
Freddy thought about grabbing his snub-nosed thirty-eight. But what if it was the Ripper? The thirty-eight would just get him killed.
Setting the glass on the end table, Freddy slid out of the easy chair and stumbled to the door. Wiping a hand over his face, he took a deep breath to clear his head and opened the door.
It took a full five seconds for Freddy’s mind to process the girl standing before him. She was a petite Asian in jeans and a purple camisole that left her navel exposed. At least he didn’t see any piercings.
“Wrong house. The party must be down the street.”
“Freddy Hagerman?”
“What of it?”
“I understand you met with Denise Jennings of the NSA at the Thomas Jefferson Building.”
Now she had his attention. Freddy motioned her toward the couch, but she remained where she was.
“I won’t be here long enough to come in or sit down. I came here to give you this.”
She handed him a leather valise he had mistaken for her purse, and stepped back, her eyes as black as her hair.
“I think you’ll find that I finished the work Denise started. I understand you know what to do with it.”
“Mind if I ask a couple of questions?” Actually, he had more than a couple of questions.
“No need. If the answer isn’t in what I just gave you, I don’t know it.”
“Your name?”
“Good-bye, Mr. Hagerman.”
She turned and walked down the dark driveway and climbed inside a small car. No interior light came on when she opened the door. Neither did she turn on her headlights when she drove away. So much for getting the license plate number.
Freddy stared after her as she turned the corner at the end of his block. Then he closed the door, walked into the kitchen, and spread the valise’s contents across the kitchen table. Three coffeepots later, with the first gray of dawn lightening his windows, he knew that she had spoken the truth.
He also knew that if the Ripper hadn’t told him not to publish the story until after November Anomaly Gateway Day, he would already be on his way to New York.
Donald Stephenson paced the ATLAS cavern like a lion in a cage. It was strangely quiet. He’d given the entire staff eight hours off, instructing the G-Day crew to report promptly at four a.m. to begin the six-hour countdown.
They’d been shocked. The cavern always had a night crew. But tonight, Donald wanted to savor the culmination of his life’s work alone.
As he walked among the massive equipment, his footsteps echoing, and looked up at the steel scaffolding draping the cavern walls, a sudden chill raised gooseflesh on his arms. It reminded him of another November night, so many years ago, when he’d stood in another man-made cavern, alone with the Rho Ship.
The truth was, that moment had been the purest of his life. The sense of discovery, the revelations. The renewed sense of purpose when, even though many thought him successful, in his mind he had just been spinning his wheels.
Mankind imagined itself a highly evolved species...or, even more bizarrely, as the one, all-powerful God’s greatest creation. But on that first night when Donald had made his way, alone, into the Rho Ship, he had discovered proof of what he had always thought to be true. Man was no more than an adolescent species on a backwater planet in an aging galaxy.
If the Rho Ship hadn’t been so horribly damaged in its combat with the Altreian starship, it wouldn’t have taken Donald so long to prepare the way for mankind’s next evolutionary leap. But through all these years of baby steps and setbacks, Donald had persisted, until those steps had finally deposited him on destiny’s doorstep.
Odd how his fate seemed entwined with Thanksgiving, like some cosmic circadian rhythm. For the first time in a very long time, a genuine smile creased his ageless face.
Tomorrow, on Thanksgiving Day in America, he would change the world.
The Anomaly Transport and Control Center (ATACC) looked nothing like anything Ted Cantrell had imagined. When he and his CNN news crew had arrived to begin setup for the most important broadcast in history, he’d expected to find something like the NASA Flight Control Room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, a room filled with banks of high-tech workstations arranged in a neat grid in front of a wall filled with large display screens. This felt more like the Batcave.
The ATLAS cavern was huge, the walls draped with steel lattice construction, grated metal walkways leading to metal stairs, each of these girded with steel rails that were all that prevented someone from stumbling into a deadly fall. High up along one of the topmost levels, international camera crews and media had been allotted space to set up cameras and on-site reporting stations. Every available space along the long, narrow walkway was packed with equipment and cables, with open space reserved only for the network anchors.
Eschewing an anchor desk, Ted had decided to stand back against the blue railing, allowing the camera to frame him against the huge cavern that opened up behind him. Despite the tight operating space, the view was breathtaking. Its great form rising thirty meters from the central cavern floor, the Rho Gateway Device resembled an inverted horseshoe magnet, its metal walls five meters thick, its outer surface sprouting appendages that looked like the buds on a potato left too long in its sack. Huge cables snaked out from a massive steel structure that rose three hundred feet from the cavern floor, terminating on those buds or disappearing beneath the ATACC. They were the lines designed to carry more power than any power plant on Earth had ever generated.
As Ted stared at them, he felt a sudden tightening of his throat. Despite the thick layers of insulation that surrounded each of those cables, he wondered if that power might not burst free, sending uncontrolled electrical arcs crawling across all this steel latticework.
But if he felt dangerously exposed up here, what must it have felt like to be one of the hundreds of scientists and technicians who occupied and surrounded the ATACC? Rather than being constructed at a safe distance from the gateway, the control center was snuggled up against it, wrapping the monstrous piece of equipment as if they were two lovers spooning up in bed. Safety and beauty had been sacrificed at the altar of speed, reducing the length of thousands of cables and putting scientists in position to directly observe and react as required.
Ten meters from the gateway mouth stood the large metal shell that housed the vacuum chamber and electromagnetic containment fields designed to slow the November Anomaly’s death spiral. If all went well, they wouldn’t need it much longer. If things didn’t go well it wouldn’t matter.
According to top scientists on the program, the anomaly’s descent into instability continued to accelerate as Dr. Stephenson’s equations had predicted. If the Gateway Device failed today, there wouldn’t be a second chance.
The noise along the high ramp picked up as foreign news organizations began their broadcasts. Jan Fernandez, his assigned makeup artist, stepped forward to pat his face down with a powder puff, erasing the beads of sweat that had popped out on his brow despite the cool temperature here in the cavern.
“Thirty seconds to air.”
Ted nodded at his producer, took several deep breaths, and, just as he’d done in crisis after crisis around the world, put on his game face.
From his left to his right, the three eye-level monitors mounted on the walkway’s metal wall showed CNN’s Atlanta feed, his own image, and a tight shot of Dr. Stephenson sitting on a high perch above the other ATACC scientists, surrounded by keyboards and monitors.
Bob Marley, the Atlanta anchor, spoke in his ear.
“We go now to the best crisis reporter anywhere, CNN’s own Ted Cantrell.”
It was showtime.