The Sixth Idea

by P. J. Tracy

  Friedman settled his gaze on Grace and Harley. “I really have no idea how this can be stopped, or if it can be stopped—but since computers are an integral part of this, you seemed like the best hope, perhaps the only hope.”

  Harley stood up from his seat and cracked his knuckles nervously. “We traced cyberattacks related to one of the homicides to a house in upstate New York. The FBI is on the way and Grace and I already planted a bad bug in their servers. But I think we can make it worse.”

  In the elevator on the way up to the office, Grace folded her arms across her chest and stared up at the polished wood ceiling. “What’s your idea, Harley?”

  “Full-on assault. We’re already into the bad guys’ computers, so if we amp things up and kill the software, the chips are useless.”

  “And if the software exists somewhere else?”

  “This will buy us and the Feds some time. I’ve got this covered for now. Go get Lydia so she can meet Friedman.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  In the New York mansion, Zero looked at his four colleagues sitting around the table, thinking about how times had changed since the group’s inception almost sixty years ago. The five of them still orchestrated the grand plan as their predecessors had, but over the years it had been necessary to call upon the talents of younger generations who had been born into a digital world. There were a dozen of them in the adjacent ballroom, where grand computers hummed and keyboards clicked.

  Zero’s mouth pinched in distaste at the muffled sound of exuberant voices coming from the other side of the common door. Some of them were barely into their twenties and acted like frat boys. So unprofessional. So undignified. And yet all of them were the best of the best, at the top of their field. Today they were celebrating the launch of their creation that would change the world, for the benefit of good men and women everywhere.

  The intercom at Zero’s right hand buzzed and a young voice he recognized but couldn’t put a face to filled the room. “Minus sixty, sirs. We’re copacetic. In sixty minutes, Iran’s nuclear program is going to be so fried it’ll be like it never existed.”

  “Thank you. We’ll be in shortly.” Zero switched off the intercom and addressed the group. “We’re almost a year ahead of schedule and about to witness a whole new era of possibilities. Congratulations, gentlemen.”

  There was excitement in the room, broad smiles and handshakes, but Three, always the spoiler, spoke up in his fussy, whiny voice while he stroked his wispy mustache, perhaps trying to coax it from the emaciated caterpillar it was into something more robust. “But we still have some loose ends.”

  “Alvin Keller is dead,” Zero snapped. “Arthur Friedman is most likely dead as well, and even if he’s not, his mind is—our people have confirmed that during their visits.”

  “But Lydia Ascher . . .”

  “Lydia Ascher is irrelevant at the moment. What is relevant is that in less than an hour, we are going to witness the birth of a miracle—a safer world. We’ll deal with the last remaining detail afterwards if we deem it necessary.”

  Some heated debate ensued at the table, most of which favored Zero’s perception of things—with the Sixth Idea finally coming to life, a granddaughter of a dead scientist wasn’t so important, at least for the time being.

  Fifteen minutes later, as they were still debating, the intercom came to life again. Another young voice, this one panicked.

  “Sirs, we can’t execute.”

  Zero felt a chill ride up his spine. “Why?”

  “We’ve been compromised.”

  He heard loud voices in the background. “Excuse me?”

  “We’ve been hacked, sir. We were goddamned hacked.”

  “Who was it? China? Russia?”

  “We don’t know. Whoever it was somehow got past our defenses and planted a virus that disabled our software and traced our location.”

  Traced our location? Zero’s mouth opened, and then closed. He heard his heart beating in his ears, felt it banging inside his chest. He didn’t look at his colleagues around the table, afraid he would see his own terror on their faces.

  They all knew what had to happen next. The rules were clear, immutable. Zero pulled out his keyboard tray and entered a numerical code. There wasn’t much time to consider the consequences of those eleven keystrokes. Truth be told, he’d never imagined that this day would ever come. It had always seemed so perfect. They had the most magnificent weapon ever devised and they had guarded it jealously. Only five men in the entire world knew of its potential, and for the first time in history, a secret had been kept. Everything that had anything to do with the Sixth Idea was contained within the impenetrable walls of this house. And soon, sixty years of painstaking work and progress would be gone. So many lives and a weapon of sublime capabilities would be lost forever. But it had to be that way—whoever had breached this fortress could never be allowed to take possession of the Sixth Idea, and the only way to ensure that was to kill it; to wipe it entirely from existence as if it had never happened, as if it had never been conceived.

  Immediately to his left, his second in command collected a sterling silver tray from a credenza behind him. It held five Waterford lowballs that shot colored arrows of light across the room. A decanter in the middle of the tray shimmered gold against its facets as he brought the tray to the table. His hands trembled as he made five generous pours into the lowball glasses.

  Zero raised his glass, looked at each man, then said, “Thank you, gentlemen. It has been an honor to serve with you.”

  Then he looked down at his keyboard, pressed enter, and bizarrely, crossed himself. They all flinched involuntarily as they heard loud thunks throughout the mansion as heavy locks engaged on every door. And then the quieter but more sinister sound of hissing gas.

  The five men at the table all heard the abrupt, urgent pounding on the door to the adjacent room, and the panicked voices.

  “Sirs? Sirs! All our doors are locked from the outside and there’s some kind of gas coming out of the vents that doesn’t smell right! SIRS! WE CAN’T GET OUT!”

  Zero’s right eye began to twitch. He looked down so no one would notice. The voice on the other side of the door belonged to a young genius who had been so nervous, so excited about the possibility of working here that he had inadvertently blurted out his name when Zero had interviewed him. “Please call me Tommy, sir.”

  On the other side of the door, Tommy leaned his forehead against the wood. They had all heard the sounds of the locks clicking into place on the two doors that closed off their workroom.

  At first, Tommy hadn’t been alarmed, just startled. But then Frank collapsed at his desk, his face smashing down on his keyboard so hard it broke his nose and sent a gusher of blood over the letters.

  Tommy moved first. Frank’s desk was next to his, and they had become good friends over the years. He lifted Frank’s face off the keyboard, saw his dead, open eyes, and felt quickly for a carotid pulse.

  “Jesus.” He looked up at the others and didn’t have to speak to convey the obvious. Frank was dead.

  And then in the absolute horrified silence, they all heard the telltale hissing from the ceiling ventilator directly over Frank’s desk, and the room deteriorated into chaos.

  Men pounded on windows, threw chairs and their precious computers at glass that would never break. They threw themselves at doors that barely trembled in their casings, and the screaming and pleading was terrible to hear.

  From the other side of the door, Zero heard another sound—the fingernails of men clawing at the wood of the door that separated them, and the pounding of fists that gradually weakened, and the screams that diminished and then died. And because he was suddenly very sleepy, he put his head on his hands and heard once again the voice of his Great-Uncle Elijah, who had lived through Auschwitz all those years ago.

  I was one of those who survived, God
forgive me. By cleaning the gas chambers after the horror. The first time I went into the stench and the darkness I saw a mountain of corpses piled on top of one another against the door, bloody gouges carved into the wood with broken fingernails stuck there like memories and accusations. It felt like my soul died that day, but I kept going back, day after black day, carrying out those bodies so I could live. Surely God will never forgive me for that.

  Zero heard these words in his head as he fell into a pleasant, final slumber, hearing the dreadful scratches on the other side of that door. He was weeping as his breath finally stopped. What have I done?

  FIFTY-NINE

  Early morning sun was laying a faint bar of gold on the table in Harley’s breakfast room, and even that feeble light hurt Magozzi’s eyes. Dahl and Gino were sitting across from him and they both looked like they’d just come off a five-day bender in Vegas. Magozzi knew he looked as bad, and he felt even worse.

  “You know why I’m here, Detectives.”

  “Yeah,” Gino muttered. “The Feds are taking over the case, which is exactly where it belongs, and I’m clicking my heels together to throw this pile of donkey dung into somebody else’s lap. But what gives, Dahl? We’ve still got Lydia Ascher stashed upstairs and we’d like to be able to tell her she’s going to see the light of day again.”

  Dahl looked off to the side. “You can tell her it’s over.”

  Magozzi scowled. “Are you kidding? People have been chasing down this woman, trying to kill her for days, and you think she’s going to take your word for it? That all of a sudden it’s safe to show herself? You’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than that.”

  Dahl leaned forward and said, “Some of what I’m going to tell you will eventually become public once the investigation is closed. Some of it won’t. For right now, none of it leaves this house. Agreed?”

  Gino and Magozzi nodded.

  “By the time our agents got to the house in New York, it was leveled to the ground. Gone. There was nothing left, and I mean nothing, except some partially incinerated bones and electronic components—a substantial amount of both—and those probably only survived because they were far enough away from the blast site.”

  “Where was the blast site?”

  “In the basement. There’s a twenty-five-foot crater in the ground where the foundation was. It was rigged to self-destruct. Something scared the hell out of whoever was in that house—I’m guessing it was your friends hacking into their computers and finding their location. But whatever was in there is gone now, and it was obviously worth dying for.”

  “But is it gone for good? Just because one house blew doesn’t mean there aren’t other houses just like it, other players continuing whatever twisted mission they had.”

  “We’ve followed every associated lead so far. Silver Dune is gone. Any trace they ever existed is obliterated, including tax records. And American Iron Foundry in Cheeton filed bankruptcy yesterday. The plant was already gutted when our agents got there. The Cyber Crime Division came up empty because there was nothing left to mine.

  “By all appearances, this was an autonomous entity that had a perfect doomsday switch for their operation. When you go to outrageous lengths to destroy something, you’re not going to leave bread crumbs for somebody to follow in another place.”

  “That’s pretty damned sophisticated,” Gino grumbled. “Way too sophisticated for the government to pull off.”

  Dahl blinked at him, not sure if Gino had been joking. “Or so sophisticated that only a government could pull it off. Our investigation will answer your questions eventually.”

  “You just told us a lot without telling us anything.”

  “Remember that, Detective Rolseth—I didn’t tell you anything.” He looked at them both curiously. “The Sixth Idea, Detectives. Did you ever find out what it is?”

  Magozzi shifted uncomfortably in his chair. This was where things got dicey. Arthur Friedman had made a pretty compelling argument that the Sixth Idea should stay buried, and Dahl had no clue Friedman had ever come here. They trusted Dahl, but in the end, he was government, which had apparently started this whole thing in the first place. “Annie and Roadrunner found some old papers in Donald Buchanan’s crypt. Early theoretical stuff on EMP, speculations about how it could become a weapon in the future. Nothing more than that.”

  And that was absolutely true, Magozzi realized. The cemetery hadn’t yielded anything more than what he’d just told Dahl—Monkeewrench had projected and envisioned how it might be a viable weapon in the modern era, but there was no proof it existed. Especially now.

  “I see.” He stood up and gathered his coat and briefcase. “I need to get back to the office, but I also need to take Ms. Ascher with me for a debriefing.”

  Magozzi bristled. “No way. You want to debrief her, you do it here. And only if you give us your word that the FBI is going to throw every single resource at her to keep her as safe as she needs to be, because I’m not so convinced this is over.”

  “Really? You want to play this game?”

  “It’s not a game, it’s a life, and I don’t really give a shit who has jurisdiction.”

  Dahl let out a weary sigh. “Neither do I. Of course we’re going to offer her anything she wants—a new identity, witness protection, a temporary safe house—it’s her call, anything short of a beach house in Malibu.”

  “Thank you.”

  SIXTY

  Upstairs in a sitting room, Grace was watching Lydia and Arthur Friedman. With Magozzi’s and Gino’s blessing, she and Harley had told them everything they knew—if there were two people in the world who deserved to know exactly what was going on, it was that pair.

  Ever since she’d introduced them, the two had been clustered together on a sofa, talking nonstop. Well, actually, the doctor had been doing most of the talking, filling in some family blanks for Lydia. She had shed some tears, and from Grace’s vista across the room, she thought she’d caught a glimpse of a few tears rolling down Friedman’s cheeks, too; especially when Lydia had shown him the book, In Case of Emergency, and had told him the story behind it.

  It was actually quite an extraordinary thing to watch—the two had seemed to bond before her eyes, tethered together by a tiny thread of the past, and yet that tiny thread had sewn an instant family where none had existed before. Grace understood this, and suddenly realized she was watching a version of her own past play out. She had been totally alone, without family, just like Lydia and Friedman, until she met Harley, Annie, and Roadrunner. And later, Magozzi and Gino had come into the fold. Now all of them were woven together by threads of the past and they would always be a part of one another’s future.

  An hour after Dahl had arrived, Magozzi and Gino finally rejoined them. They looked exhausted, but something in their faces had lifted.

  Harley crossed his arms across his chest. “You two look like a couple marathoners staring down the twenty-sixth mile. Did the house in New York answer some questions?”

  “Yes and no. It went up in a fireball, and that fireball took everything with it, including the computers and the people inside. Agent Dahl thinks it was rigged to self-destruct.”

  “Were they the same people who scrubbed the footage of Chuck’s killers at the hotel and took down his website?” Lydia asked quietly. “The same people who killed Wally and Otis and a lot of others and tried to kill me twice?”

  “Yes, we believe so. But it’s too early in the investigation to know anything for sure. As a precautionary measure, Agent Dahl said the FBI will offer you a protected safe house until things are resolved.”

  Friedman’s eyes lifted and connected with everyone’s in the room before finally settling on Lydia’s. “They did have the Sixth Idea. They nurtured it from your grandfather’s concept, protected it, and ultimately destroyed it when it was in danger of being discovered. They were the guardians. Albei
t amoral guardians, but guardians nonetheless.” He took her hands in his. “If your grandfather was alive today, this is the outcome he would have wanted. Without the senseless killing of all the innocent descendants, of course.”

  “So it’s over?” Lydia asked guardedly, hopefully.

  Friedman shrugged. “At least for now. But the concept of using EMP as a strategic weapon is as old as the first atom bomb. Somebody else will eventually re-create the Sixth Idea, it’s just a matter of who will do it, how they will do it, and when.”

  “What about the Russians who were watching you?” Grace asked. “They were obviously onto something, and you are the last man left on earth who they think might be of use to them.”

  “A very good point, Ms. MacBride. But since an Alzheimer’s patient has been missing for so long in inclement weather, I will be assumed dead. That opens up a whole array of options for my future, as long or as short as that may be.”

  “What will you do now, Arthur?” Lydia asked.

  His mouth curved into a smile, sending rays of wrinkles across his face. “Play golf every day until I die.”

  Harley chuckled. “Well, you’re not golfing in Minnesota in December, which means you’re planning on becoming a traveling man. Grace and I will work up a new identity for you. Like Detective Magozzi said, things aren’t exactly ironed out yet, and until they are, you should fly under the radar.”