by Edwin Dasso
“What is it?” Kotler asked.
Kayne shook her head. “It’s more than just records,” she said. “People have gone missing, too. People connected to this facility. To the Pit.”
“Missing,” Kotler replied.
“Some turned up dead,” she said. “Lots of accidents. A few suspected murders. Some people were tortured. I don’t think the police knew there was any connection, any kind of pattern to it. The Pit was an off-book project, top secret. There’s no real way to know that a murder in Dallas might be connected to half a dozen other murders all over the country. So unless you happened to know that these people were all working together on a secret project—one that isn’t even around anymore—you wouldn’t necessarily see any connection.”
“Disparate cases, with nothing to alert anyone that there’s a link,” Kotler nodded. “Ok, I can see the problem. But you found the link.”
“QuIEK did. But yes, it’s there. Someone has been covering this up. Someone doesn’t want there to be any record of the Pit. And there isn’t, as far as it goes. Public records are all scrubbed. Only the classified stuff is still out there. No one has access to it, really, unless they know it’s there, and have the clearance to get to it.”
“No one but you,” Kotler smiled. “And QuIEK.”
She nodded. “Right. For all the good it’s done.”
They bumped along the gravel road, letting the conversation fade as they contemplated what they knew and what it might mean.
Suddenly Denzel ended his call and turned in his seat.
“That was Agent Mayher,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the drive. “She says that she and Agent Symon are running down a lead. Guy’s name is Andrew Jesup. He has an interesting face tattoo.”
“Face tattoo?” Kotler asked. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Symon and Mayher don’t think so,” Denzel said. “Guy was a wannabe communist. He had a sickle and hammer tattooed on his face, maybe as some kind of statement. He worked in the local government records office, and they think he may have scrubbed the place of any information about the Pit, before he disappeared.”
Kotler arched his eyebrows, then nodded. “Well, that tracks.”
“It does?” Denzel asked.
Kotler could have kicked himself. He felt Kayne tense beside him.
“That someone local would have to have known about the Pit,” Kotler said, recovering. “Dr. Rivers had to have found out about it somewhere.”
Denzel considered this, then nodded, turning back in his seat and facing forward.
“Smooth,” Kayne said, with a hint of smile in her voice.
“Maybe I need an AI to run my mouth,” Kotler replied, settling back.
They rode in quiet for several more miles, along a bumpy gravel road. The condition of the road was poor, with loose gravel and a fine, gritty sand heaped in mounds along previous tire tracks. It was clear that it hadn’t seen much use in quite some time.
It was dangerous to drive more than ten or twenty miles per hour here, even in a four-wheel-drive. So the entire ride was a slow, tedious, jarring journey that left everyone feeling jangled and frazzled by the end of it.
As the 4x4 pulled to a stop, the agent in the driver seat—Agent Barr, Kayne had finally learned—turned to them and said, “At least we get to do that all over again on the way back.”
There were courtesy laughs from Kotler and Denzel, but Kayne found herself wondering if anyone would notice if she hired a helicopter for a pickup.
“Ok, everyone out,” Denzel said. “GPS says the entrance we targeted is here, somewhere. Keep your eyes peeled. And no one goes in alone, got it?” He directed this last comment mostly toward Dr. Kotler, who smirked, shrugged, and nodded.
Kayne climbed out of the 4x4 and stood, stretching her aching back as she surveyed the hill before her.
This was, as officially as it could be, the middle of absolutely nowhere.
The facility she’d uncovered in her research had to be remote by its very nature. Isolation was key when you were doing strange and mysterious things that may or may not be strictly sanctioned by federal laws or international treaties. There hadn’t been a lot of specific details about what went on here, but what few details Kayne had uncovered sounded like a season of Black Mirror.
She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting once they arrived. She knew there wouldn’t exactly be signs and spotlights directing them in. Secret bases tended to be hidden. But here, standing in the hills outside Los Lunas, miles from anyone and anywhere, they appeared to just be nowhere at all.
She checked her phone and was relieved to see she had a signal. Weak and anemic, a single bar, but it was LTE. That was good. She could work with that.
She didn’t necessarily need an internet connection to run QuIEK. Despite the power of the AI software, it was actually quite compact. She could run it entirely from her smartphone, and often did.
Connectivity was more of a security blanket. She had other resources—a virtual network of microcomputers she called Smoke Screen, hidden close to internet hotspots in cafes and hotels and bars across the country. If she had connectivity, she could reach out to these in a pinch. Extra processing power, not to mention the odd Google search, could always come in handy.
So it was a relief to see she was still online. At least out here, in the open.
She smiled, then laughed quietly.
Poor fugitive would miss her internet.
To be fair, over the past two years, as she’d been on the run, internet connectivity had become her lifeline to anything resembling a normal life. Where she had to remain fairly isolated, out here in the three-dimensional world, she could be anyone she wanted to be online. Anonymity was just part of the scene.
So the majority of her interaction with others was done online. Her community was there. It wasn’t quite the same as being able to drop onto a padded chair in a Starbucks and reminisce with an old friend—in fact, she had to maintain a strict no-contact rule when it came to anyone in her old life. But she did have “friends” online. She’d managed to keep up relationships with a few souls here and there. Never family or friends from her past. Never even her former clients, except in extreme cases.
But she did have some human connection, even if they never knew who she really was.
She shook her head and moved forward, scouting the ridge line, looking for any sign of an entrance to a defunct, classified government facility.
When she reached the top of one mound of stone, she looked out over the expanse of hills and rocky terrain, stretching in every direction.
It really would be easy to disappear in a place like this, she thought. Isolated. Secure. No one would ever find you.
It had some limited appeal.
Kayne was not, by her nature, a recluse. She liked people. She liked them a lot. And that had been one of the roughest parts of being on the run. As a fugitive, keeping people in your life was a luxury you just couldn’t afford.
So, for the past couple of years, she’d been a loner. She made contact with her clients—the people suffering injustice, ignored by law enforcement, needing her help. But that contact was short. Empty. No real connection.
Of course, there was Agent Symon.
One of the few people she communicated with regularly who actually knew who she was—just not where she was. Most of the time.
Symon had actually gotten closer to catching her than any other agent. He’d nearly had her, a couple of times. He’d literally put his hands on her, once, in Orlando. But in the end, even Agent Symon, the FBI’s best fugitive hunter, was no match for Alex Kayne’s hyper paranoia and obsessive planning. She’d managed to get away and stay away, and she’d been a few steps ahead of him ever since.
Since then, though, she’d formed a sort of relationship with him. Phone calls, video calls, text messages. Even the occasional face-to-face chat.
It was like dancing at arm’s length, but it was the m
ost real human contact she’d had in years.
Until today, anyway.
Kayne glanced back over her shoulder at the FBI agents and Dr. Kotler.
Dr. Dan Kotler—now he was something.
She wasn’t entirely sure what, but something.
She’d never met anyone like him. Clearly very intelligent. Dry sense of humor. Always ready with a quip or a grin. And apparently always in a little trouble. She could relate.
But there was something else. Something only someone like Alex Kayne, fugitive and reluctant recluse, could pick up on.
Kotler was running.
Maybe not the same way Kayne was. No one seemed to be after him, trying to bring him down or lock him up. Not at the moment, anyway. But she couldn’t shake the idea that Kotler was hiding behind his quirks and mannerisms, projecting something to the world that was more play than reality.
Dan Kotler was in disguise.
What he might be hiding, or hiding from, Kayne couldn’t say. But a runner knows another runner, when she sees him. And Dr. Dan Kotler was a runner. Just like her.
It made him…
What, exactly?
Relatable. And, strangely, something of a comfort.
Kayne couldn’t afford to blindly trust anyone, but she was having a hard time keeping her shields up when it came to Dan Kotler. He’d already gotten closer to her than anyone else—including Agent Symon. A single word from him, right this moment, would put her in handcuffs. She really should know better. She did know better.
And yet…
She was looking in the direction of Kotler and the two agents as they fanned out, searching, when she saw the glint of something not far from where the 4x4 was parked.
“Hey!” she shouted, pointing. “There’s something there!”
The men turned, following where she pointed. She scrambled down the hillside and joined them as they pushed through some brush and up over a mound of loose stone.
Parked at the foot of a ridge, covered in branches and debris, was a sedan.
It was filthy, with dust caked on the windshield and in the wheel wells, covered in tumbleweeds and brush.
It was a miracle that it had made it here, over the rough terrain, with no four-wheel drive.
“Rental,” Agent Barr said, pointing to a sticker on the back glass.
“Dr. Rivers’ car,” Denzel agreed, peering in the driver-side window. He stood, turning in a slow circle, looking at the landscape around them. “The entrance has to be close.”
“So far I’m not seeing anything,” Kotler said.
Agent Barr concurred.
Kayne, however, was thinking.
The text message that Rivers sent had several cryptic references. One of those—quantum encrypt—was the biggest reason Kayne was here.
It was a clue. And it tickled something in Kayne’s brain.
So far they hadn’t found anything to indicate what that reference meant, but Rivers had mentioned that the Decalogue translations plus quantum encryption had gotten her in—presumably “in” meant “into the Pit.” So, it seemed likely that Rivers’ had somehow opened the door using quantum encryption, and that the Decalogue stone was somehow part of that.
The stone was miles from where they stood. There was just no way it had any role in opening the door to this place. Not physically.
But the information from the stone was right in Kayne’s pocket.
She turned her back to the agents and Dr. Kotler, and took out her phone. Using QuIEK, altering how the phone’s radio antennas functioned, she started pinging any local signal she could find. She immediately picked up the bluetooth and wireless signals from the smartphones each man was carrying, plus the signal from Dr. Kotler’s iPad, still in the 4x4.
But another signal was there as well. A strange one.
Strange, because it had the characteristics of a wireless data stream, but it was different from anything Kayne was used to. Not a bluetooth signal. Not even cellular. Close, though. Something related to a cellular signal, like an early ancestor.
Kayne considered this.
This facility was abandoned in the 90s. Cellular technology was alive and well in that era. Wasn’t it possible that there could be some sort of early LTE tech here?
Government and military technology tended to be about 20 to 30 years ahead of civilian tech, by most estimates. So it could be possible that there was technology here that had eventually been surpassed in the private sector. Old tech, but still part of the framework of modern cellular systems. A distant cousin. Or, more likely, an ancestor, generations older than modern-day LTE.
The protocol known as LTE—which stood for “Long Term Evolution”—had been proposed as a cellular phone standard in 2004, but its origins could be traced back to the late 80s. Early versions of the tech could have been in use by select entities, and entities rarely got more select than secret government facilities.
She had QuIEK connect to the signal, and start following it, tracing it back to its origin.
She came up against a firewall immediately, blocking all access.
And that was interesting.
Because QuIEK—the Quantum Integrated Encryption Key—simply did not notice firewalls. It was a digital skeleton key that could get her into any system, any time.
And it would get her into this one, too. It was already working its way around the roadblock, finding its weaknesses, negotiating with it to open the lock. QuIEK would get in.
It was just going to take longer than usual.
Because, she was stunned to discover, the “firewall” she’d bumped into was, itself, built on quantum encryption.
The implications of this were stunning. Quantum encryption, in the 90s? Who was working on anything like this, during that era? The idea had been around for a long time, since the early 80s at least, but technology built on the theories hadn’t come along until the past twenty years or so. Kayne had been a part of the birth and evolution of that tech.
QuIEK was hardly the first quantum encryption software to exist—it just happened to be the best. There were others. But Kayne had rarely encountered anything as advanced as what she was seeing here.
The people who built this place, the things they were experimenting with—this was big. Change-the-world big. So what had caused them to shut it down?
And if this was the lock on the front door, what would they find inside?
She started working at the lock, using QuIEK to push at its edges. It was good, and under any other circumstances it would be unbreakable. But QuIEK was already making headway.
At this rate, she’d have it open in a couple of days.
Not quite good enough.
Was there a way to do this faster?
She was thinking this through when Kotler walked up to her.
“Hardly the time to check in on Twitter,” he said, smiling.
She looked up, blinked, and gave a smile in return. “You’re not going to believe this,” she whispered. She walked him through what she’d found, and he stepped in beside her, peering at her phone’s screen as QuIEK did its thing.
“It would help if I could figure out the encryption key for this,” she said, shaking her head. “QuIEK will crack it, but it’s going to take a few days. With the key, I could be through in seconds.”
“So if you only had the password?” Kotler smiled.
She shook her head. “No, not the password. I mean, yes, if we had that, we’d be in. But this is different. The key is more like an address. Like GPS coordinates. A map of quantum states, basically. It would tell us exactly where to start, and more or less show us a roadmap of the security for this thing. A basic quantum decryption would be able to crack this in a few hours, with that key. Maybe a day. QuIEK would do it in seconds.”
Kotler was staring at her.
“What is it?” Kayne asked.
“I’m thinking about the text message,” he said. “Decalogue translations plus quantum encrypt.”
Kayne consi
dered this.
“The Decalogue Stone,” Kotler said.
Kayne blinked. “You think that’s the encryption key?”
He shrugged. “You’ll have to tell me.”
She considered this, then pulled up the files she had on the stone. She had digital translations and scans. She fed these to QuIEK and had the AI start working on how they could be applied.
It took only a moment. QuIEK ran every permutation, finally settling on the symbols from the stone itself, translating them into a set of quantum coordinates based on their general shapes.
It was the sort of intuitive system that would have been out of reach for any other quantum encryption software, but QuIEK’s advanced AI made short work of it.
Kayne and Kotler watched the phone’s display as a string of Hebraic characters lined up, then disappeared, leaving behind a cascade of code that eventually resolved into something they could read.
Access Granted.
Kayne looked up at Kotler, who seemed as surprised and thrilled as she did.
“What did that just do?” Kotler asked.
Kayne was shaking her head, about to answer, when Agent Denzel yelled up at them.
“We got something!” he shouted. “A door just opened in the side of the rock! Get down here!”
Kayne and Kotler looked at each other, then scrambled down the hill to meet the other agents. In moments they were standing at the front door of the Pit, which stood wide open, a gaping hole in the mountainside.
“No welcome mat,” Kotler said.
“If anything, it screams ‘do not enter,’” said Agent Barr.
“Let’s get it together,” Denzel said. “Gear up. We’re going in.”
They pulled on gear, got themselves prepared.
And then they descended into the dark.
7