Tom and Trish also had plenty of staples stored in the basement walkout of the cabin. They weren’t really full-blown preppers, but they did believe in a certain level of emergency preparations. So, a corner of the basement was dedicated to about two years’ worth of flour, sugar, both white and brown, syrup, pancake mix, salt and pasta of several varieties. Below the basement they had a partial subbasement, dug down below the frost level, which held the harvest of potatoes, carrots, parsnips and onions from a quarter acre root garden Trish tended in a sheltered hollow behind the cabin. The subbasement also held several cases of canned goods such as tomato sauce, vegetables and fruit, and canned meat.
Tom enjoyed hunting and fishing, and there were ample deer in the area and fish in the lake. He was confident that they would not lack for meat if they ever had to wait out a disaster of some sort that interrupted the normal availability of food from the Save-on-Foods grocery store back down in Golden.
Once the water had been hauled up to the cabin, and the grouse was plucked, cleaned and hung in the cool basement, Tom and Art joined the girls and Trish in the snug living room looking out over the lake. As darkness fell, they lit the three propane lamps and settled in for a game of Monopoly. The three kids sipped on marshmallow-topped hot chocolates, and Tom and Trish each enjoyed a good splash of Lamb’s Navy Dark Rum mixed with Coke Zero with a squeeze of lime. Their eyes met as the kids chattered about their property-buying strategies and whether any alliances should be considered to increase the chances of beating their dad. The Svenson parents knew they were both thinking the same thing — how fortunate they were to have such a wonderful family and life, with hardly a care in the world.
Chapter 12
November 6, 2027
El Peñón summit (9,000 feet) near Vicuña, Chile
At eight o’clock at night Darya’s alarm clock brought her quickly awake. She opened the blackout curtains of the single window of her small dormitory room to catch the late day sun low in the western sky as she dressed for her night’s work. She completed her post-nap cleanup and tied a heavy jacket around her waist as she headed down the hall toward the cafeteria. She would be working inside, but the main observatory, open to the night sky, would be cool at this altitude and time of the day even though it was late spring, approaching summer.
The slight, dark-haired young woman took her time eating a light meal that could best be described as brunch. Much of the work at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope observatory occurred during the night, so the cafeteria was accustomed to feeding the scientists and technicians a selection of breakfast, lunch and dinner options throughout the day. Darya’s one-hour slot on the Big Eye wouldn’t start until eleven o’clock, so she had plenty of time to browse through her laptop for personal communications and world news. For that matter, she didn’t really need to be present in the observatory during her time allotment. She had already fed the scanning parameters into the scheduling system after checking and double-checking all the details. The duty technicians needed no help from her to upload her parameters and initiate her scan sequence. She could monitor the scan just as effectively on her desktop computer in her small room, or for that matter she could sleep through the night and review all the results in the morning. It was very unlikely that anything that might require any intervention from her would occur. Yet she preferred to be on the spot watching her pictures of the sky as they unfolded, not that anything very meaningful would be apparent from visual inspection of the two hundred digital photographs the Eye would take in her allotted hour.
Darya Ahmadi was a twenty-six-year old PhD candidate in astrophysics at the University of Oxford, one of the foremost centers for astronomy research in the world. Her thesis was titled “Frequency of Earth-Sized Planets in the Core of the Milky Way Galaxy.” She had been fortunate to have a supervisor with enough influence to secure her a six-month fellowship at the LSST observatory in the Chilean Andes, which was operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation. She had a few weeks left to go before she would have all the data she needed to complete her thesis, but she was already excited by what she had found.
Darya was a British citizen, born to parents whose own families had both fled from Iran at the time that the last Shah was overthrown. From an early age Darya had demonstrated intense interest in and curiosity about the contents of the nighttime sky. Not just the planets of the solar system, but even more so the multitude of other stars in the Milky Way galaxy and the many other galaxies that modern astronomical observations had identified. As she grew older, Darya excelled in mathematics and physics. By the time she came to choosing a specialty, she had a great academic foundation that helped her excel in her field of interest, exoplanets.
The fellowship to the LSST observatory was a tremendous opportunity for Darya. The southern hemisphere was preferable to the northern hemisphere for viewing large numbers of stars within the Milky Way galaxy because the orientation of the solar system, including the Earth, kept the South Pole pointed toward the central core of the galaxy. The location, fairly high in the Andes, had been carefully selected for favorable ambient light levels and low humidity to provide clear viewing conditions without being so high up as to risk altitude illness for the resident scientists and support staff. The LSST itself was an extremely powerful instrument with a twenty-five–foot wide primary mirror and the largest digital camera ever constructed, along with a massive processing and data storage system to record and analyze the pictures of the night sky.
Darya had been using the incredible power of the Big Eye to scan a large number of stars deep within the core of the Milky Way galaxy in the general direction of the constellation Sagittarius, the archer. She was examining a volume of space nearly forty thousand light-years away from Earth, searching for planets in orbit around the many stars packed densely into that region of the galaxy, so-called exoplanets.
As powerful as the LSST instrument was, the young astronomer was unlikely to see many, if any, exoplanets directly in the digital photographs the instrument output. The system would only be able to resolve extremely large planets at that distance and even then, they would need to be at a point in their orbit to one side or the other of their star so as not to be obscured by the glare of the star. In any case, Darya was not interested in large planets. She was interested in planets roughly similar in mass and diameter to Earth. Detecting planets of this size required sophisticated analysis of multiple images taken at different points in time to measure variations in the star’s brightness resulting from planets passing in front of it, and small wobbles in its path through the galaxy caused by the gravitational effects of one or more planets. One of Darya’s thesis contributions was to be a refined algorithm for imputing the existence of orbiting planets from a star’s pathway oscillations.
Darya arrived at the observatory a half hour before her eleven-o’clock time slot. She greeted the senior operator and confirmed that her scan parameters were queued up and ready to execute. She then slipped into an observation room reserved for viewing scans in real time. For a few minutes she watched the large-scale screen mounted on the wall, which was displaying the telescope’s current scanning assignment. Then she booted up her laptop and began reviewing the results of her own previous scan.
At eleven o’clock sharp, the large monitor screen went blank and the observatory vibrated briefly as its heavy-duty electric motors repositioned the scope toward the distant section of the galaxy that Darya was interested in. Her first picture began to display a few moments later, followed by another roughly every fifteen seconds thereafter. After fifteen minutes, the scope would adjust slightly to focus on a different area. One of the advantages of the LSST was that its image width was so large that it permitted several different stars to be investigated at the same time.
Darya continued to view the pictures as they formed, somewhat mesmerized by her window into the center of the Milky Way. The pictures were beautiful and awe-inspiring. However, they would not yield their most interesting secrets
until further processing by her sophisticated algorithms, which would reveal subtle differences between the pictures undetectable by the human eye. Matters proceeded as expected until about halfway through her time allotment.
Suddenly a soft tone began to sound throughout the observatory — similar to a fire alarm, though not as strident. At the same time a red light began to flash in the upper-left corner of the monitor. After a brief pause the display cycled back to the previous sequence of pictures and a banner popped up along the lower edge of the screen, stating “Transient Object Detected,” and a green square outline appeared near the lower-right corner of the screen. The electric motors operated briefly, signaling a repositioning of the telescope, and fifteen seconds later a new picture came up on the monitor, with the same banner but with the green cursor now positioned in the middle of the screen.
Minutes later the senior operator knocked briefly and then stuck his head into the room.
“Sorry Darya,” he said, “the rest of your scan has been bumped by a transient object detection override. Maybe you will get an asteroid named after you as a consolation prize.”
One of the primary missions of the LSST was to identify any object moving around within the solar system and gather enough data on its successive positions that the orbital mechanics at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory could map out its orbit and assess any risk of collision with Earth. Even though Darya’s project had nothing to do with spotting dangerous rocks and was focused far beyond the solar system, the transient object detection program was always running automatically in the background of the observatory’s massive processing system. It operated somewhat similarly to Darya’s own algorithms, by comparing successive pictures of the same area of the sky and noting any changes — in particular, the vanishing and reemergence of a distant star as a much nearer object moved in between the star and the Earth.
Apparently, Darya’s first picture sequence of the night had triggered the alert when compared to an earlier picture of the same area, a picture that could have been one of Darya’s or could have been from any other project that had ever looked at the same area. The processing system would have pulled every such picture from its massive data storage banks for comparison, unobtrusively working away in the background.
A detection override was fairly routine for projects that were scanning the solar system itself, since nearly all of the system lies in the same plane, including the asteroid belt. It was much less common for projects such as Darya’s, which were scanning down below the plane of the ecliptic, where few objects belonging to the solar system exist. Although near-Earth-object detection was not Darya’s specialty, she was aware of all this background as she replied to the operator.
“Yeah, thanks Diego,” she replied, “I guess I’ll knock off for the night and submit a request for a replacement slot. Based on where it seems to be coming from, I don’t think it can be an asteroid though. It must be a comet on a long, tilted orbit out of the Oort cloud, still far enough out that it hasn’t started to vaporize and grow a tail yet. Good night.”
Although her hypothesis was plausible, Darya was wrong.
Chapter 13
November 10, 2027
Near Clear Lake, Lake County, Northern California
Peter Poplinski was doing what he enjoyed more than most other things apart from beating the crap out of someone foolish enough to get in his way or screwing a young girl unlucky enough to catch his attention. He was cruising his Harley east along the gentle curves of California State Route 20 parallel to the East Fork Russian River in Lake County, California, far from his home base near Twin Falls, Idaho. He was riding by himself, having come from a job he preferred to keep to himself, though he was en route to meet up with a small squad from his club that he had tasked with an important piece of his grand strategy.
As he meandered along the road he continued to reflect on the job he had recently completed and the hundred thousand dollars in cash bulging in his saddlebags. Like any professional, he was playing back the job in his mind, searching for areas of sloppiness or lessons he could use to improve his performance on similar assignments in the future.
***
Peter had been contracted by a capo of the recently established Portland organization to conduct a hit on a resident of the city. It wasn’t the first time Peter had been called on for this sort of work, though he knew nothing of the identity of his employer and vice versa. Their entire relationship was conducted through public telephone landline calls arranged through cryptic cell phone contacts.
Peter was not given, nor did he expect, any explanation as to why his employer had chosen to outsource the assignment to a freelancer rather than use his own resources. Likewise, he wasn’t informed as to why the target was to be hit, though he expected that it was something beyond just a serious case of delinquency on a gambling or drug debt. Peter had no formal education beyond high school, but he was smart and streetwise. He suspected that the target was either a witness in a case against a member of the organization or a police informant, or he was in some other way a direct threat to the organization or its leadership. He was therefore primed to be on the lookout for private security or police protection or surveillance.
All the details were left entirely to Peter. He was given only a name, picture, and address. He was told what post office box number the payment would be in and where the key would be hidden. The only stipulations were that the corpse had to be found in a public place and be identifiable, and for the death to have clearly not been an accident.
The hired killer had known that the job would involve some risk, though he had planned it carefully and, if anything, the risk and the associated challenges appealed to him. He had left his bike at a local cash-only performance shop to have some engine work done on it and had taken a bus from there. He had bought a nondescript, used Ford sedan from a newspaper ad. He’d paid with cash and picked it up at night in a part of town where minding your own business was the first rule of survival.
He used the car to carefully study the man’s house and neighborhood and his comings and goings. At first he kept his distance until he was reasonably sure that no one else was keeping an eye on his target or guarding him. He was careful to park in a number of different observation spots and varied the picture the car presented, sometimes raising either the hood or the trunk. He slept in the car even though the nights were cold. He didn’t want to leave any more of a trail than was absolutely necessary.
On the morning of the third day his target left his high-end home in his BMW X2. Peter followed at a discrete distance. He had tailed the man on several previous trips and was still gathering information on his habits and patterns, though Peter knew he was quickly reaching the point where additional information would not be of sufficient worth to justify his continued presence and the risk that his target, or someone else, would notice him. The target, unaware of the following predator, drove to Forest Park and parked on the side of NW 53rd Drive adjacent to one of the many trailheads for the network of walking and biking paths within the park.
Peter was following along NW 53rd at a distance of about a hundred yards, having dropped back once beyond the busier urban roads. When he saw his target pull over he continued cruising along, noting the man exiting his car and heading for the trailhead. He drove on for a half mile and then cut a U-turn and came back, stopping about two hundred yards away, just in time to see another figure emerge from a late model sedan, which had been parked just in front of the X2. The new player had also headed for the trailhead.
Peter had waited a couple of minutes and then left his Ford and walked quickly to the X2. A few seconds later, he had the vehicle open, and he slipped into the back seat. It was a spontaneous and opportunistic strategy that he had known would be both a risky and difficult ploy as he squeezed his large frame down as low into the back seat footwell as possible.
Peter’s objective was to blend into the darkness of the car’s interior without restricting his ability to mo
ve quickly. He was quite sure that his target was meeting someone secretly in the park; he was not just out for a walk. It was possible that the two of them would return together to this car. It was also possible that his target would return alone but for some reason would open a rear door and spot Peter, preempting an attack. Peter considered these risks but found them acceptable. He was confident that if worst came to worst he could either bluff or fight his way clear, though that would harm his chances for a subsequent attack. He settled into the mental discipline required to remain alert despite being able to see very little.
Three quarters of an hour later Peter heard the scuffing of footsteps on pebble-covered gravel. The front door opened, and a person slipped behind the wheel. Peter slipped his garrote, twenty inches of light cord anchored at both ends to wooden handles, around the target’s neck. Seconds later, his heels were drumming on the floor in a final convulsion as Peter’s crossed arms tightened the cord so forcefully that the windpipe was crushed. As the stench of evacuated bowels filled the car, Peter’s attention was already on the outside, checking for anyone nearby who might have seen anything. No one was in sight. The whole process had taken less than two minutes.
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