Theoretically, the Rho Ship’s wormhole drive could connect to a gateway, forming a survivable transport portal. The real problem was the portal size. In such a configuration, the portal would have to be inside the ship, and the wormhole drive would have to be configured to operate with a reduced footprint. Where it normally ramped up and thrust the starship through a newly formed wormhole, it didn’t have to maintain that wormhole for very long. But a gateway needed to remain open for extended periods and had to be large enough to allow the transport of troops and heavy equipment. That kind of extended operation required a large matter disrupter facility and a massive portal, the kind Stephenson was building in Switzerland.
Raul’s neural network roamed the World Wide Web via worm fiber connections, just as it monitored satellite and radio frequency broadcasts. It had allowed him to learn the details of Dr. Stephenson’s plans. More importantly, it had led him to an inescapable conclusion about Heather and the Smythe twins. Stephenson didn’t know about their altered abilities. The Rho Project hadn’t had anything to do with that.
That left only one other possibility. They had found the Altreian ship long before the government had discovered its cave. Somehow, that ship had altered them. Everything the Altreians did had a purpose, and the only purpose Raul could see in enhancing these humans had been to turn them into soldiers, soldiers whose only mission was to stop the Rho Ship from accomplishing its agenda. That now meant stopping Dr. Stephenson.
Raul knew enough about the Kasari Collective to know he didn’t want them on Earth. Not because he thought their assimilation of the human race would be harmful to the Earth’s population. The Kasari merely wanted to add to their numbers and resources. In doing so the human population would be augmented, illness eliminated, life spans extended for millennia, wars a thing of the past...at least internal wars. None of that bothered him. But if the Kasari came through, Raul would lose the special power he’d worked so hard to achieve.
If Stephenson hadn’t created the November Anomaly, Raul would have put a stop to his plans. But turning the Earth into a black hole wasn’t an option. So now he had the same problem Heather and her friends had.
Since Dr. Stephenson had to be allowed to succeed in creating his gateway in order to get rid of the anomaly, Heather and the Smythes would be irresistibly drawn to the November Anomaly Project. They would have to be on-site to have any chance of shutting down the gateway after the anomaly was transported, but before Stephenson could synchronize it with its sister Kasari gateway. On what Stephenson was calling G-Day, Heather would be inside the ATLAS cavern, close enough to Stephenson’s portal for Raul’s purpose.
And then he would never be alone again.
The cold rain that had blown in two days ago showed no sign of going away. Freddy pulled his black London Fog raincoat’s collar up, slammed the car door, and walked toward the quaint old house in western Annapolis. Mary Beth Kincaid had met Jonathon Riles while he was a midshipman at the Naval Academy and they’d fallen madly in love, getting married immediately after his graduation. Her father had been a navy captain and she’d married another one. It was no surprise to Freddy that she’d moved back to her old family home after Admiral Riles’s reported suicide. The house looked like something an old sea dog would be comfortable in.
From all reports, Mary Beth was a strong woman, volunteering all her free time for community charities. Strong, but heartbroken. Her old friends said she’d lost her zest for life, isolating herself in the old house when not at work. Neighbors checked in on her, but it was clear she wanted to be by herself, to be left alone with her grand piano and her grief.
Walking up the three steps, he stepped onto the open front porch and raised the brass knocker. The haunting notes of “Greensleeves” drifted out, making him reluctant to interrupt her playing, but his damned reporter’s nose had led him here, and maybe, just maybe, he could help this wounded lady find some peace.
As the song ended, he finally brought the knocker down in three sharp raps. The woman who opened the door little resembled the one in the picture he’d seen of Admiral and Mrs. Riles. It was a photo taken when Admiral Riles had just been appointed director of the National Security Agency. In that picture, the laugh lines around her sparkling blue eyes were the only lines on her face, a face framed by blonde hair elegantly highlighted with the first streaks of gray.
No hint of blonde remained in her hair and her cheeks looked tugged down by the weight of the world. Perhaps it was the reflection of the dark clouds behind him, but her eyes seemed to have dulled to gray.
“Mrs. Riles?”
“Yes. How may I help you?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’m hoping you can tell me.”
She studied him for several seconds. Then, with a questioning look, she opened the door.
“Please come in. I was about to pour myself some tea. Would you like some?”
“That would be nice,” Freddy said, removing his raincoat and hanging it on the coat rack.
“One lump or two?”
“Black...er, plain is fine.”
Freddy moved to the mantle, studying the photos in their frames, neatly arranged from left to right in chronological order. Mary and Jon, arm in arm at a Naval Academy formal, cutting their wedding cake, a kiss at a promotion party, the two of them standing on the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan, and finally the same photo Freddy had found online.
The tinkle of fine china behind him caused him to turn to see Mary Beth setting two cups and saucers on the coffee table.
“We were a lovely couple, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would.”
Freddy felt out of his element. It wasn’t the old sea captain’s house that was messing with his head. It was this old woman. Mary Beth carried an aura of pain and grace that sapped his wit, leaving him little better than a muttering simpleton.
“Please, come and have a seat beside me.” She patted a spot on the sofa.
Freddy maneuvered around the low table, his bad leg making the turn awkward. Mary Beth noticed.
“How’d you lose it?”
“A bad encounter with an industrial saw.”
“Sorry to hear it. Losing a part of yourself is hard.”
Picking up the teapot, Mary Beth poured, first his, then hers, her hand surprisingly steady. Freddy reached out, pinching the tiny handle between forefinger and thumb, feeling as if he would snap it off before the cup reached his lips.
“Well, Mister...”
“Hagerman. Freddy Hagerman.”
“Well, Mr. Hagerman, if you’d be so kind, I’d like to hear why you came to see me.”
Freddy took a sip, burned his lip, and set the cup back on its saucer. For once he wished he were better at this tact shit.
“Mrs. Riles, I came to talk about your husband.”
Her face showed no change.
“Go on.”
“I’m an investigative reporter for the New York Post. There’s really no way to say this other than to come right out with it, so here goes. I have good reason to believe your husband didn’t commit suicide.”
Again, he detected no change in Mary Beth’s expression.
“I believe Jonathan was murdered by a group of people bent on stopping his investigation into the Rho Project.”
Her eyes were definitely blue now. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.”
For a moment Freddy was speechless. “You knew? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
The laugh bubbled off Mary Beth’s lips but didn’t make it to her eyes.
“Oh, I told them all. Told the investigators. Told his superiors. Told everyone. But I’m a grieving widow, an old woman, blinded by love for my dead husband, unwilling to see anything bad in him, clueless to the goings-on in the real world of men and politics. I finally quit banging my head on that wall. But you know something, Mr. Hagerman? No matter what they say, it didn’t feel better when I stopped.”
“So will you help me?”
“I don’t know how.”
“Do you know a man named Jack Gregory?”
For the first time since he’d met her, a genuine smile graced Mary Beth’s lips.
“Let me tell you something, Freddy. Jonny always said I was the best natural judge of character he’d ever seen.”
There it was again, that nice smile.
“It was the reason I invited you in.”
She reached for her cup, took a small sip, dabbed her lips with the back of her hand.
“Jack Gregory is a young god. Jonny would have given his life for him. So would I.”
“I think he did.”
Setting her cup back in its saucer, Mary Beth locked her eyes with Freddy’s.
“Then I’m happy.”
“Jack’s not.”
Her left eyebrow rose a quarter of an inch.
“Tell me about it.”
For the next half hour Freddy related the abridged version of what Jack Gregory had told him that night in the Maryland hotel. When he finished, Mary Beth Riles dabbed the corners of her eyes with a kerchief.
“So my Jonny was trying to save the world.”
“And Jack still is.”
“One thing about Jonny. He always had a backup plan. You up for helping me look through his old things?”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
Rising to her feet, Mary Beth held her hand out to Freddy.
“Then let’s go save our saviors.”
Eileen stared at the computer screen in disbelief, a chill crawling up her spine from just between her shoulder blades to the base of her skull. What had started with her obsessive search for clues to the technology underlying the two missing Gregory devices had taken a nasty turn into a very dark place. If she continued on her current track, the knowledge lurking in that darkness was likely to chew her up and spit her mangled corpse into some Potomac backwater.
Eileen’s problem was that she couldn’t quit. It wasn’t in her nature. It was the reason she’d gotten her doctorate from Caltech when others her age were having sweet sixteen parties.
She’d finished her detailed analysis of the data recorded coming and going from the Gregory USB dongles. The things had provided a listing of every programmable system within a one-kilometer radius. But the information went well beyond anything a hacker could obtain, even with a physical connection to those systems. Somehow the dongles had managed to provide the exact location of every system, down to the nearest millimeter. It was an impossible level of detail, and while Eileen couldn’t yet confirm that degree of accuracy, she’d checked coordinates of several samples. They certainly had sub-meter precision.
Even if she assumed the USB dongles had some unknown and undetectable Wi-Fi signal that could connect to other systems, the location thing stumped her. How? It was as if some sort of futuristic neutrino scan had detected all those systems and recorded their locations before tapping them for information. If technology like that existed, it had to be Rho Project–related.
That led Eileen to perform her own review of the events that had led Admiral Riles to launch Jack Gregory at Los Alamos. If Gregory had stumbled upon it during his investigation, he would have realized certain governments would pay for that kind of technology. Perhaps something on that path held a clue to how those things worked.
It was a path that led her to make use of Big John’s correlative search capabilities. Eileen wasn’t worried about attaining authorization for her initial search. It fell within the span of her forensic examination of the hack that Gregory’s team had pulled off. But with every query, Big John led her farther astray, quickly invalidating her working hypothesis. Worse, she found herself seduced by the quest, her “How?” changed to “Why?”
From what she’d learned, it was clear that Eileen wasn’t the first to snoop this trail. Denise Jennings’s digital fingerprints were everywhere she looked. But Denise’s chain of Big John queries had suddenly ceased. Apparently that train of discovery had finally frightened Denise too badly to continue.
As Eileen looked at the evidence before her, she couldn’t help envy Denise’s good judgment. But now that she’d seen the rabbit disappear down this hole, Eileen had no choice but to follow.
Siena’s Piazza del Campo was almost empty. A few tourists stood atop the fish-bone patterned red bricks, peering over the wrought-iron fence in front of the Gaia Fountain, snapping pictures, applying suntan lotion to pasty white legs, or texting friends who had wandered off to see the Siena Cathedral or one of the medieval Tuscan city’s other tourist destinations.
Heather, as Inga Hedstrom, had been with the Swiss private security firm Paladin for three weeks. Her current assignment involved babysitting Bayad al’Fahd, the yuppie son of a Saudi prince, on his upper Tuscany tour. Not that Bayad didn’t have his own bodyguards. He had a half dozen of them. But young al’Fahd was an important new client of Credit Suisse and the second largest Swiss bank had extended the extra protection as a courtesy. Thus Heather found herself the upper-class equivalent of a new account microwave oven.
Getting hired by Paladin had been the easy part. Inga Hedstrom, a dual US and Swiss citizen, was twenty-nine and 120 pounds, and stood five feet eight inches tall. With her boyishly short blonde hair and blue eyes, only her icy demeanor kept her from being attractive. Jack had created an elaborate black ops profile, including a lot of dead former colleagues who raved about her work in postmortem write-ups. With the ability to infiltrate all the appropriate record systems, she’d had no difficulty ensuring her security clearance and records appeared in all the right places. And since she had left CIA employ six months ago and all her CIA missions were classified and close-hold, they avoided broad scrutiny.
Heather liked being Inga, but she didn’t particularly like this assignment. Once it became clear that she had no interest in doing anything other than her job, Bayad had told her to stay away from his inner circle. Assuming she didn’t know more than cursory Arabic, he had begun laughing it up with two of his biggest bodyguards. Wasn’t it funny that the Swiss bank actually thought this woman could enhance his protection, when all she was fit to enhance was his harem?
On the upside, not being allowed within his inner circle meant she didn’t have to listen to the moron’s views on women, or anything else for that matter. On the downside, she was too far away from Bayad to prevent the attack when it came.
She trailed ten meters behind Bayad’s pack as they approached the string of outdoor eateries lining the piazza’s northwest side. Along the dining area’s right side, two men busily unloaded chairs from the rear of a white van, much to the irate restaurant manager’s dismay. A vision flashed through her brain a second before the vehicle began to move, its wheels laying a thin layer of smoking rubber toward Bayad.
As Heather sprinted forward, pulling the Glock from her shoulder holster, the two chair stackers wheeled, pointing previously concealed MP5 submachine guns toward the group of surprised Saudis. Heather’s first bullet caught the nearest man in the chest, the nine-millimeter Parabellum sending him tumbling onto an adjacent table. But a woman carrying a child blocked her line of fire to the second assassin, enabling him to unleash a fusillade of automatic weapon fire into Bayad’s clustered bodyguards. Heather’s second round struck just above the bridge of his nose, its mist trail giving him a momentary red halo as he fell.
One of the two remaining bodyguards shoved Bayad out of the van’s path, covering his employer with his body as the van slammed into his partner’s rising gun hand, wedging it and the man’s face deep inside the front grill. The passenger door opened away from Heather as she found her view blocked by terrified patrons. As she rounded the rear of the van, she heard a double tap and saw the bleeding bodyguard roll off the wide-eyed Bayad. Seeing the assassin’s trigger finger tighten, she fired again, striking the man’s gun hand as the weapon discharged into the paving stones beside Bayad’s head.
And then she was on him, her kick buckling the assassin’s right knee as she pistol-
whipped him across the side of his head. As the big man hit the pavement, the squall of the van’s tires sent Heather diving to her right, shoulder-rolling into a shooter’s crouch in time to see the white van skid into a racing turn, its back doors slamming open as it accelerated away across the piazza. Taking a forty-five-degree angle away from her, it prevented her from getting a clear shot at the driver. Heather put four rounds into the right tires and another four into the white side panel, but if she hit the driver, she couldn’t tell. Skidding around the corner, the van disappeared down Via Casato di Sotto.
Heather ejected the magazine, slapped in a fresh one, and leaned down to check the unconscious assassin. His pulse and the blood matting the hair on the right side of his head told her he wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon. Kicking his pistol away, she did a rapid pat-down, pulled the man’s ankle knife from its sheath, and turned her back on him.
Bayad had scrambled back against one of the tables, pushing the chairs aside until he was half under it, his breath coming in short, hyperventilating gasps. As Heather knelt beside him, the wail of sirens echoed through the streets. Holstering her weapon, she knelt beside the Saudi.
“Mr. al’Fahd. Are you injured?”
“What?”
“Look at me. Are you injured?”
As his eyes focused on her face, a wave of relief washed his features. “No. I don’t think so. Just bruises, Allah be praised.”
Four police cars raced into the piazza, spilling heavily armed blue-and-gray-clad polizia onto the asphalt thirty meters to either side of her. Seeing Heather kneeling beside the seated Bayad, in the midst of so many dead bodies, they advanced with submachine guns leveled.
A loudspeaker blared in Italian. “On your stomach, arms and legs spread. Now!”
Heather flopped facedown, spread-eagled.
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