The Rift

by Bob Mayer

  She hit accept. “Yes?”

  “Someone is using the Loop,” Hannah said without preamble. “Mrs. Sanchez was contacted by one of her former personnel. The message is heading to a third cutout.”

  “Someone’s being very careful.”

  “The message originated in the Knoxville, Tennessee, area,” Hannah said.

  “Who do we know there?” Neeley asked as she looked at the map display and spotted Knoxville, to the direct east of Nashville along I-40.

  “We’re checking the files,” Hannah said. “But it seems to be coming from the outside to the inside.”

  From a civilian? Neeley wondered. She’d been a civilian once herself. A civilian who’d walked into an airport with a bomb packed inside a gaily wrapped package, before the time of 9/11. That was when she met Gant and left the civilian world far behind.

  Neeley stepped back into the TOC and looked at the screen. The flashing dot indicating the Prius had just passed downtown Nashville. It then moved onto I-40 east.

  “My Sanction is heading in that direction.”

  “Yes. That is why I called.”

  Something was off. Neeley had known Hannah too many years. “This is a Sanction, correct?”

  “Correct. The Sanction has three confirmed murders.”

  “Should I allow the Sanction to get to wherever and whatever his objective is?”

  A long two seconds. Silence followed. “I’ll get back to you on that as quickly as I can.”

  The phone went dead and Neeley stared at it for a very long time, ten seconds, while her mind went into dark corners.

  Which wasn’t unusual.

  Ivar’s locker was squared away, his deployment gear was packed according to Protocol, and now they were driving alongside that third-longest airstrip in the world at Groom Lake, aka the heart of Area 51. Doc was at the wheel of a jeep, only slightly more modern than Colonel Orlando’s had been, which meant it was ancient. Ivar had to wonder why the Nightstalkers used such antiquated vehicles here.

  Doc had been talking, almost nonstop, all morning and into the afternoon, bombarding Ivar not only with the history of Rifts and Fireflies, but also dipping deep into his own well of knowledge to discuss various theories. His theories on Rifts. It wouldn’t have taken Frasier, the Nightstalkers’ shrink, to point out that Doc was overcompensating, threatened by another scientist’s presence on the team.

  Ivar, being a physicist, of course, didn’t make such a psychological analysis of the situation. He just thought Doc was acting pretty much like every professor he’d ever worked for on his path to get his own PhD. Self-centered, convinced they had all the answers when they didn’t even know what most of the questions were, and, most of all, being about one-upmanship.

  Aka a dick.

  Two massive hangar doors cut into the side of Groom Mountain were partially open, and Doc drove right up to them, guards waving them through after scanning their eyes. Ivar caught glimpses of aircraft he didn’t recognize scattered throughout the hangar, but Doc drove straight to the far wall. Two guards scanned their eyes once more and then allowed them access to an elevator.

  “They rely a lot on eyes being the true window into our souls here,” Ivar said.

  “Save it for Eagle,” Doc said shortly. “He likes that kind of philosophical stuff.”

  They got into the elevator.

  “It takes a while,” Doc said as the doors slid shut after they entered.

  “How far down?” Ivar asked as the elevator began to accelerate into the Earth.

  “Two miles.”

  That took ten minutes and it seemed Doc had run out of things to talk about, so the only noise was the whirring of the elevator’s engine. Actually, Doc never ran out of things to talk about or ways to spread the wealth of his knowledge. His mind had slipped into a dark rut—more a valley, actually—which it always did whenever he went down to the Can. The left side of his brain, the numbers side, was calculating the tons of pressure accumulating around them as they descended and how small a mass of protoplasm his body would be crushed into if it all collapsed.

  Sometimes being smart had its disadvantages.

  “The Can is a Super-Kamiokande,” Doc said as he gave up, knowing he’d be crushed into a tiny, tiny object if everything imploded.

  “Like the one in Japan?”

  “Yes. Early on when they started digging into Groom Mountain to develop the base, they did soundings and found a large, natural void deep underground. No one thought it was of much use until we realized we needed to build the Can.”

  “And the Can detects Rifts.” Orlando would have been proud, because Ivar made it a statement, not a question.

  The elevator came to a halt and Doc opened the metal gate. A corridor carved out of solid rock beckoned. They began the two-hundred-yard walk down it, fluorescent lights flickering overhead.

  It ended, opening to a cavern eighty yards in diameter.

  “The Japanese have one, we have one, and the Russians have one,” Doc said as they walked out onto metal grating suspended over still dark water.

  “So you can triangulate.” Another statement.

  Two people were on duty, staring at computer monitors with the glazed look of someone who spent 99.9 percent of their time doing nothing with nothing happening. Ivar understood that. He’d spent a lot of bench time doing the exact same thing.

  Doc and Ivar walked over. “The Can picks up muonic activity, which Rifts give off when they begin to form. Gives us thirty-eight minutes of warning at least. That’s the fastest from first indication to activation recorded. We usually get more time.”

  Ivar looked over the shoulder of an operator. Four large displays were further broken down into data boxes with various electronic readings, graphs, and charts. He began to ask questions of the two operators, much to the irritation of Doc, who finally walked away to a stack of printouts and began going through them.

  Even the operators eventually had enough of the questioning and turned back to their screens. Ivar walked out onto the metal grating that extended over the dark pool of water covering the stainless steel tank, which was sixty meters wide and deep. Along the walls of the tank, over 20,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) were patiently waiting for incoming muons. PMTs are extremely sensitive light sensors that can detect a single photon as it travels through and reacts with water. They were all linked together with the output displayed on the computers at the workstations.

  The tank was filled with very pure water. The surface was dark black and Ivar found it quite mesmerizing. Pretty much everyone who came down here did. Ivar knelt and glanced quickly over; Doc was flipping through some charts and the two operators weren’t visible, hidden behind their large monitors. He pulled a small black orb out of his pocket, pressed the top, was rewarded with a slight buzz, and dropped it into the water. Then he stood, hands on the railing.

  After five minutes, Doc had enough, dropping the readouts. “Let’s go. All that matters is that we get our Rift alerts.”

  “Really?” Ivar was surprised. “But if we don’t understand the Rifts, how are we going to stop them completely? Moms said—”

  “We know enough to shut one when it happens,” Doc said.

  “Seems a bit shortsighted,” Ivar said.

  Doc stopped abruptly and faced Ivar. He jabbed a finger in his chest. “When you have more time on the team, then maybe you can question me. For now, I suggest you shut up and learn.”

  Ivar didn’t step back. “Excuse me, Doc, but you didn’t know how to shut the Rift in my lab. You didn’t even know what the hell that was in my lab. I barely remember what I was doing. This thing seems to be evolving, changing, as Ms. Jones said. Think about what happened in North Carolina in my lab. This guy, Burns, coming through in St. Louis. The scientist who opened the Gateway Rift received a fatal dose of radiation, yet Burns apparently is s
till moving about. And what he did to the Snake. That’s all something new, right?”

  “You did not even get your PhD,” Doc said. “Do not dare lecture me.”

  “Oh, fuck off,” Ivar said.

  Both operators had turned their chairs around to observe the fireworks, which was more interesting than the screens they’d been watching. Which was unfortunate, because in one of the data boxes on one of the screens, there was a slight disturbance—not muonic, and not enough to trigger an alarm, but something, a slight surge.

  Something that should have been noticed.

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” Ivar said. “You can wipe your ass with it.”

  Instead of continuing the fight, Doc headed for the elevator. “You coming?” he added over his shoulder.

  The operators turned back to their screens and all was normal.

  At least it appeared that way.

  Scout was getting antsy. She’d ridden back home, hiding in her room, waiting for her iPhone to come alive with a message from Nada. Her mother was still off doing whatever it was that her mother filled her days with. Probably shopping for a pot or something. And then for something to put in the pot. Then something to put the pot on. Then she’d come home and spend hours trying to figure out the exact right place to put the pot. Decide there was no exact right place. And spend tomorrow returning the pot, along with the thing she’d wanted to put in the pot. And the thing she’d wanted to put the pot on.

  The usual crap.

  Scout was curled up, arms around her knees, on the window seat in her bedroom staring out at the river.

  It was no longer as enchanting as it had been.

  A crackling noise caught her attention and she cranked open the window and leaned out. The metal skeleton holding up the power lines had a slight golden glow on the one leg the black line had been heading toward.

  Not being an expert on unnatural forces except for her brief stint with the Nightstalkers, Scout figured she ought to be cut some slack for her guesstimate being off as she watched the glow go up the leg, as if steel were turning to gold.

  It reached the first arm holding a power line and moved vertical.

  Without even realizing she was doing it, Scout’s hand went into her pocket and she pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. She’d quit, really, last week, but circumstances were getting a bit weird.

  She scratched a wooden match on the roofing tile outside the window just as the glow touched the wire. Her shoulders were hunched, expecting an explosion, a ball of flame, an earthquake, flying monkeys, something.

  But nothing. Except the gold didn’t spread any more on the tower.

  The cigarette dangled from Scout’s mouth, unlit as she waited, until she cursed as the match burned down to her fingers. She dropped the match and took the cigarette out of her mouth.

  She realized the thump of the pile driver had stopped and spared a glance across the river. The workers were staring at the tower also, gesturing and talking among themselves. Scout felt a sense of fellowship and also relief that she wasn’t just imaging all of this.

  Everything stayed exactly like it was for almost a minute; then, as if the metal tower digested a big ball of gold, the orb flowed out of the wire, back down the tower, and into the earth.

  Scout leaned farther out of the window, in danger of toppling to the ground. She could see what the men on the river couldn’t. The golden pulse came out of the leg, into the ground, and along the black line she’d spotted earlier in the day.

  Then it was in the water, a very slight golden mist, slowly spreading outward in all directions. It reminded Scout of a nature channel show where a python had imbibed a deer whole and it went down the gullet and the python slithered back into the water in order to digest the large meal.

  The men on the barge had already dismissed it and were back at work, pounding away.

  “It just ate a lot of power,” Scout whispered to herself, not knowing how she knew it, but she knew it.

  And there was no doubt that wasn’t a good thing.

  She pulled herself back in the window and grabbed her iPhone. She texted the same number.

  And was rewarded with “NUMBER OUT OF SERVICE.”

  “Come on, Nada,” Scout said.

  Captain Griffin was on the roof of the White House, watching the sky with his binoculars. When he scanned south, the Washington Monument crossed his field of vision. As he did every time he saw it, he thought how odd it was that the monument was two tones. The obsessive part of him wanted to run over and paint it all one color, although the two tones came from different shadings of marble used in the construction, not different paint. And the two different types of marble came about because while initial construction of the monument began in 1848, it ground to a halt in 1854 because of the Know Nothing Party.

  Really. The Know Nothing Party. Griffin liked that. He could think of a lot of politicians who could be charter members.

  Then, of course, there was the Civil War, which put a damper on building as Washington became the most heavily fortified city in the world at the time. Lincoln did insist work continue on the Capitol Dome and managed to see the Statue of Freedom placed on top, although he did not live to see it totally completed in 1866.

  And even after the Civil War, for the Washington Monument, there were more politics. So for twenty-three years, like a broken shaft, the one-quarter-completed monument graced Washington’s skyline, testament to a broken country.

  It depressed Griffin to think that Abraham Lincoln never saw the completed monument. He often wondered how the various presidents felt when they gazed out from the White House. It was a hobby of Griffin’s to study the history of Washington, D.C., and the buildings and countryside around the White House. He was a big believer that one’s environment affected a person greatly.

  They really should have matched the stone, Griffin thought as he completed his sector, then started over, jumping three-quarters right quadrant so that anyone observing him wouldn’t see a pattern, because there was no pattern.

  Patterns were bad for effective security.

  And thinking about security reminded him of the kerfuffle over the holidays when the White House had gone into lockdown and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff had lost his mind and committed suicide in the command bunker under the East Wing.

  So they said.

  Griffin had been on leave and was sorry he’d missed the excitement, but the Keep had handled things well and gotten him up to speed on what had really happened. The world was a much more dangerous place than the average person realized.

  Or needed to know.

  The Monument flashed by in his binoculars again as he circled back. When he redid his kitchen in Virginia, the contractor tried to pawn off two different granites on him. Said it looked cool. Not. The guy was just trying to unload stuff he’d bought for someone else after the other person reneged. Two tones in the same object just didn’t work.

  He was so lost in thought he almost didn’t hear the phone.

  Warren Zevon.

  He kept the binoculars to his eyes with one hand as he pulled the phone out of his pocket and hit the accept key by feel. Then he glanced down, verified the message, and forwarded it, all automatically.

  Then he lowered the binoculars and forwarded the message to the Keep. As it zoomed out of his phone to a tower, then back here to the White House, just one floor below him, where the Keep kept her office, he shook his head. There were those who believed the Loop was secure, a way those in the know could pass messages outside the system.

  There was no outside the system. Not in a world where there were people like Hannah in the Cellar and the Keep in the White House and Ms. Jones at Area 51 and Mrs. Sanchez in the Pentagon comptroller and the other powerful denizens who ruled the dark world of covert ops. There was only what they allowed.

 
The world was a dangerous place and there were people who dealt with those dangers.

  And for that, Captain Griffin was very grateful, unlike the many who decried every dollar spent by the government.

  He knew the message was encrypted with a one-time program. He shook his head. They should have stuck to nonelectronic encryption. Use the same agreed upon page from Tale of Two Cities and a trigraph. Sometimes the old ways were the best.

  Captain Griffin put the phone back in his pocket and scanned the grounds. There was a small patch of browning grass amid the sea of green. Some sprinkler head had to be off.

  He made a mental note to tell maintenance about it at the end of his shift.

  “He’s pulling off I-40,” the specialist who was sitting at the large display announced.

  “Refueling?” someone asked.

  Neeley walked over and stood behind the specialist, watching the image. The Nighthawk tracking the Prius was at a high enough altitude and far enough away that it couldn’t be heard and was just a distant black speck in the sky from the target vehicle.

  The Prius drove past the cluster of gas stations at the exit. It continued along a secondary road, winding its way into the Tennessee countryside.

  Neeley’s phone buzzed and she stepped outside to take the call. “Yes?”

  “It’s a Sanction,” Hannah announced.

  “He’s turned off the interstate,” Neeley said. “I’m not certain where the target is headed.”

  “Most likely Knoxville,” Hannah said. “A message is being passed on the Loop via five cutouts. It originated in the Knoxville area.”

  “The terminus?”

  “We’re past cutout three now,” Hannah said. “Two to go to the terminus.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait—”

  “I want this shut down now. The Nightstalkers can deal with Rifts and Fireflies and all their other anomalies, but Burns, no matter where he’s been or what’s been done to him, is rogue. He was rogue before he got sucked through that Rift and he’s rogue now. I want this done before it escalates into who knows what. Not even Ms. Jones understands what’s going on.”