by Brandt Legg
“Nothing yet. His body was just identified. But he was an Astronaut, and the protocol is fairly established. It won’t be just us digging into this. The big six, maybe a few others, will be all over it.”
Skyenor knew the big six in intelligence circles meant the US, China, Russia, Germany, Israel, and the UK. The thought of all that attention into the final works of any Astronaut was disconcerting, but adding the top intel minds in the world focusing on what Hayward was doing made Skyenor suddenly nauseous. “The timing couldn’t be worse.”
“What was he doing for you?” she asked, looking at another screen, trying to figure out who would kill Hayward Hughes. Astronauts were always targets, but it had been quite a while since the last assassination.
“Same thing we talked about yesterday.” He hesitated. “But it’s the deeper part.”
“Right, the blanks you told me you would fill in later.”
“Yeah. I was hoping to have more information from him first. Obviously, I’m not going to get that now.”
“Can you give me a hint?”
“I’d rather go over the whole thing with you in a few hours. Let me collect the rest—”
“Give me something to get started on,” she pressed.
“The space-based weapons. You need to look into specifics—NPL, that’s nuclear pumped lasers, DEWs for direct energy weapons, chemical lasers, nuclear induced plasmas of gas mixtures. Airbase lasers, space-based lasers, and COIL, chemical oxygen iodine laser. Get up to speed on all that. Then our dialogue will be easier for you to grasp.”
“Is this all as horrifying as it sounds?” she asked.
“Worse . . . much, much, worse.”
“So nothing to worry about then,” she said sarcastically.
“Why did they kill him?” Skyenor mused, ignoring her quip. “He must have found something he shouldn’t have.”
“What if I told you we’ve got increased Russian activity all over the place?”
“Then I’d even be more nervous.”
“The Russian president is facing considerable domestic pressures. You know what that means?”
“Right, classic distraction. International crisis takes the pressure off the domestic front.”
“Exactly. He may be about to launch something.”
“I have a bad feeling,” Skyenor said. “There’s real evidence that it’s much more complex than that. But I have to go right now. Don’t forget, look at the lasers.”
“Call me the minute you’re done with Chase?”
“Absolutely.”
“And then you have to lay this whole thing out for me.”
“Promise.”
Thirty-Two
Undisclosed location
The technician looked at Tolstoy. She was pretty, if not for the fury in her eyes, lethal enough to kill him, but he knew it wouldn’t be her stare that ended his life. It would be an arranged “accident”. There was still hope, just not too much. “We’ve analyzed the number where The Astronaut’s message went. Unfortunately, the recipient ID is . . . encrypted.”
“Of course it is.”
“We have programs working on it, but it will likely take . . . weeks to crack.”
“Weeks?” Tolstoy shouted.
“If ever,” the man admitted, then looked down at the floor, away from those beautiful-horrible killer eyes.
“We don’t have days, let alone weeks. I need this in hours! Who has that information?”
“We will try.”
Tolstoy wanted to execute the man on the spot. “What was in the message?”
The man smiled weakly.
“You think something is pleasant about this situation?” she asked, as if her words were daggers.
“I think there may be a solution. The message will have been preserved. We can use the phone to unencrypt that.”
“Then why haven’t you done it?”
“We have to power the phone back on.”
“Turning it on is what got us into this mess.”
“Yes, but it did not explode or make poison gas,” he said, alluding to their earlier conversation as if trying to bring levity into the tense situation.
“It sent the message! An explosion or gas would have been far less damaging.” She strangled him with her eyes. “Can you assure me it won’t send anything else?”
“No, but if it does, we will be able to follow.”
“Follow?”
“We will be ready to trace it immediately.”
She wanted to ask why this precaution hadn’t been taken earlier, but it would’ve been a wasted question. The damage had already been done, and she never wasted time—especially not today. Anyway, as soon as she was finished with the tech “expert,” he would be removed from her world permanently. “Could there be another message waiting to send?”
“The chances are extremely low—almost zero percent—that it would actually send another message. I say this because if there was something, it should have sent simultaneously when the other went out. But we must turn the phone on to finally decipher the earlier one.”
“Do it.”
He opened a large briefcase, revealing several installed banks of wires and blinking LED lights. The technician carefully inserted Hayward’s phone.
The instant the sequence completed, the phone emitted a “sent” chime.
“Does that mean it just sent another message?” she asked, instinctively reaching for her gun before deciding this wouldn’t be the best time to kill the man.
“Yes, but it’s okay. We will know where it goes.”
“We better know everything.”
He ran through the encryption. “Here it comes. Take a look.” He swiveled the readout screen so she could see.
As Tolstoy read the message scrolling across the screen, she knew she could not let the technician leave the room alive. He had seen too much. But that was a small problem compared to the astronomical damage The Astronaut had done.
The mission had been compromised. Protocol dictated that she should notify Yuri. After years of work, Blackout was now a known operation to the enemy.
But there still might be a way to save it, she thought.
“Is this . . . true?” the technician asked, his expression flashing between fear and regret. As soon as he uttered the words, he seemingly realized he should never have asked, that the consequences of what he had seen were world-ending not just to the residents of the target city, but to himself. This was too big of a secret to know.
“I want that number,” she said, ignoring his question.
“I already told you, it will take weeks.”
“Not that one. This one.” She pointed to the screen. The message remained there, blinking, as if taunting her.
It took them a couple of horrible minutes, but in the end, he succeeded. “It belongs to Dr. J. W. Skyenor, the director of DARPA.”
“DARPA?”
“Yes, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”
“I know what it stands for,” she said, bristling. “Now, if you want to keep your job, get me that other number. It’s more important . . . very important to you . . . understand?”
He did. It was clear that by ‘keep his job,’ she actually meant to keep his life. He believed the task impossible, especially since he had never encountered encryption such as this. However, buying time was what they did in his business, so that’s what he started to do. The technician began tapping keys, hardly knowing what to do first, just hoping something good might happen. Maybe Tolstoy would drop dead by some other means.
It’s okay, she thought, I already have Skyenor covered. This part is actually good news. But the other one could be anybody . . . the director of the CIA, the NSA . . . who knows who this Astronaut knew. Given the work history of Astronauts, it could even be someone in a foreign intelligence service . . . What a nightmare.
She sent an alert to the field team she had on Skyenor, raising the priority. Because of the DARPA director’s push into t
he laser weapons area, he had gotten too close to Blackout. She had given an elimination order yesterday, but now it was critical, particularly since he had just received the message.
Tolstoy’s coded message stated: “Kill target immediately without regard to collateral damage.”
Thirty-Three
Washington, DC
Skyenor’s mind was working overtime. This was nothing new for the director of DARPA, who constantly juggled dozens of critically important technology-based weapons and related espionage projects. The events surrounding the constant search for supremacy among the major military powers of the world and, in recent years, the increasing threat from rogue nations and terror groups, kept him immersed in adrenaline and stress during his waking hours. Those terrorists and rogue nations who were finding it easier in the days of drones, autonomous weapons, and cyber warfare, to compete with the big boys, were a growing headache. However, on this day, he was even more distracted.
Firefly, DARPA’s top secret space weapons program, had been surpassed. The revelations he’d received from various immediate intelligence reports had caused him to invoke CHAD. The urgent meeting of CISS, HITE, and DARPA had been a day early just to get Gatewood and Tess in the game. Later today, he would have enough information to absolutely terrify them.
The heated competition for laser space weapons worried him more than anything else in his career. Now, with The Astronaut’s death, everything seemed to be closing in. The meeting with Chase and Wen, while an annoyance, could help. The pair of fugitives were looking for answers, but he hoped they could actually provide him with some. If they had any new information that would affect Firefly, he needed to know it.
Normally someone else got Skyenor his daily ritual of sugar and caffeine, but since he was meeting Chase and Wen there, he did it the old fashion way and ordered it himself. While waiting, he texted an assistant and demanded a complete review on the classified work Hayward had been doing for DARPA. Skyenor knew the basics, The Astronaut answered directly to him after all, but now he needed to understand the intricacies of his work, the parts that had gotten the gifted savant murdered in the middle of the capital of the free world, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the start of the space wars.
Sipping a Caramel Cocoa Cluster Frappuccino® Blended Coffee, as he walked out of the Starbucks, his phone sounded a chime that told him an encrypted message had arrived. He paused on the sidewalk, moved out of the flow of pedestrians, and placed his fingerprint on the biosensor so the message would present unencrypted. “Hughes,” he muttered, shocked to be getting a text from a dead man.
Since Hayward had also been working on Firefly, he was anxious to read it. Yet as he did, the final words of the deceased Astronaut made the color drain from his face. Suddenly, Firefly took a different priority. All his worst nightmares had been surpassed.
“Hell is coming,” he breathed.
He glanced up absently, trying to make sense of it, and saw Chase and Wen coming toward him, recognizing them from photos Tess had sent. He stared back at the screen, reading the message again. I’ve got to call a CHAD meeting immediately, he thought. He looked up again, this time making eye contact with Chase, who was now less than twenty feet away.
Chase was the last thing Skyenor saw as the bullet blew apart his nose and entered the temporal lobe of his brain before exiting between the occipital and parietal lobes, taking a chunk of his skull with it. His body crashed onto the sidewalk, splattering coffee and blood. Pedestrians scattered, screaming, as two more bullets hit his torso, making sure the job was done.
Wen, witnessing the event as a trained marksman, quickly assessed the angle from which the sniper was shooting. She returned fire and watched as the man fled across a nearby low roof. Without hesitating, she ran toward the building, until more shots pinned her down. A second shooter. She knew there would be more. After spotting the sniper’s nest, Wen found a way out.
Chase dove toward Skyenor and made a show of checking the dead body while reaching underneath to grab Skyenor’s phone. He looked up just in time to see a man with a gun rushing toward him. Chase recalled Wen telling him months earlier that assassinations of high value targets would often utilize as many as four gunmen.
The billionaire pulled a gun out of his jacket, grateful he had been practicing the move, and pointed it at the man. “Federal agent, stop!” Chase hoped he sounded convincing.
The man fired anyway, but not at Chase. He pumped two more bullets into Skyenor’s body, then turned and ran as Chase fired at him.
Thirty-Four
Undisclosed Location
The technician knew that if he could get the phone that had received the second encrypted message, he might be able to reverse engineer his way into figuring out who had gotten the first one.
“Any chance an operative could retrieve Skyenor’s phone?” he asked Tolstoy.
She looked at him as if he were a dunce, impatient at having to do his job, clean up his messes. Tolstoy didn’t answer. Instead, she tapped commands into her own phone, then worked the touch screen on a tablet as if she were casting a spell.
“The first and second messages were similar, but not the same,” he said when she did not respond. “The first recipient received a shorter version. Like it might have encountered a glitch. Perhaps when we turned it off, or more likely, there was a type of cyanide app installed and deployed which distorted part of the message.”
This seemed to please her, as her tone was softer when she replied. “What was missing?”
“Give me a minute.” He compared the exposed aspects, syllables, character length, line spacing, duration, and numerous other factors. The technician smiled, relieved he finally had some good news to share. “The second message omitted the city, parts of the sender’s theory of source, the perpetrators . . . and the pyramid schematic.”
“Better,” Tolstoy replied. “I still need to know who received the first message,” she said, but there was hope now, as long as Skyenor was dead.
“I can’t break the encryption yet, just the echoes and patterns. These are also three extra sentences in the first message that did not go to the second recipient, but that doesn’t appear to mean anything.”
“Obviously they mean something,” she said, her tone turning sour again. Idiot.
“Of course. I meant they don’t fit the other encryption. It’s another code.”
“I need to know what those sentences say.”
“I know you do,” he said, and he was desperate to decipher them as well, because he understood that they might be the only way he could identify who the recipient was—meaning the only way to save his life.
Washington, DC
Chase pursued the man who’d fired the last shots into Skyenor’s already dead body. The shooter suddenly disappeared into an office building. Unbeknownst to Chase, he had just been ordered to make sure he obtained the target’s phone, and hoped Chase would follow. The killer had seen Chase at Skyenor’s body and thought he might have taken the phone, which had been in the target’s hand when the first bullets hit. Anyway, going back to the crime scene wasn’t going to happen, not in Washington DC, where one in six people walking the streets were some sort of federal agent.
Chase ran into the lobby of the building, hoping there would be a security guard. All he found was a maze of hallways and a bank of elevators. It turned out to be one of the older structures in the area. He cautiously went toward the main hall, having no idea where the shooter had gone.
A handful of early commuters were arriving. More workers are probably caught up in the excitement down the street, he thought. Moving carefully, he went around the corner, assessing the area as Wen had taught him, looking for the best paths of escape that would’ve appealed to a criminal trying to disappear.
What he should have been looking for were points of ambush. It had not occurred to Chase that the killer would be waiting for him.
He won’t be in there, he thought glancing at the restroom
doors. He wouldn’t be dumb enough to get himself trapped knowing authorities will be all over the area in minutes. He scanned the area. The most likely scenario is this guy found the back door.
Chase was wrong.
The man burst out of the men’s room behind him and shoved a pistol into his ribs. “Give me the DARPA phone, and I will not kill you,” he said in accented voice that sounded to Chase to be Russian, or at least Eastern European.
Chase immediately doubted the proposition. The man could have just shot him, then searched his body for the phone. Maybe the shooter was being careful because the building was starting to come to life. Several more workers had arrived, a few were hovering around the elevators, waiting. A woman was walking down the hall nearby, and another man was heading toward the restrooms and them.
The killer’s gun was concealed, but Chase knew the professional wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him and everyone else in the lobby. In an instant, he relived all the lessons he’d learned the last couple of years on the run—trying to stay alive, trying to evade and then catch the shadow people . . .
Either way, I’m risking death, so here goes nothing!
“What DARPA phone?”
“Sorry, no phone, you die.”
Spinning, Chase threw his elbow up hard and fast. He got lucky and caught the man’s chin. The firm blow was only enough to throw him off balance for an instant. Chase could have taken the opportunity to run away, but the fate of a million innocent people was at stake and he needed every bit of information. This man was the only link.