dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  Or did he?

  “Three people to man this whole place?” he asked, pointing to the monitors. “Seems like a skeleton crew.”

  “Budget cuts mean we can only afford to have three permanent staff members.”

  “Dumb bean counters. Do you get any visiting astronomers?”

  “Occasionally.” Klein pointed to a screen that showed the gates of the Pabody/Reich complex. “Here they come.”

  A man got out of a BMW in front of the gates. The car matched what Ani had told them about the people who’d been chasing her. Joe noted the registration number, clocked that there was another man inside the car, and then received a welcome interruption.

  “There are supposed to be between eight and twelve people working out of Pabody/Reich,” Abernathy said. “And Klein’s funding is on the rise, not falling. Plus, looking at the figures I have in front of me, the professor is burning a lot of energy. Electricity usage has gone up tenfold, and he has no problems paying for the extra. I wonder why he’s lying to you, Joe.”

  “I wonder …” Joe said aloud and Klein gave him a strange look.

  “I was wondering if it would be possible to zoom in on his face,” Joe said, covering.

  “No need. There’ll be plenty of opportunities to get a better look at both of their faces.”

  They watched the gates open and the man get back in the BMW, then Joe shifted screens to watch them arrive at the front of the main building. They got out of the car and approached the door: two stocky men in their late twenties or early thirties, dressed in matching gray suits.

  Joe moved on to the screen showing the feed from the dome camera he’d spotted over the front door, where the vantage point was ideal. He watched the two men approach until they were close enough for him to get a really good look at them.

  Ani had said that she thought they were freelancer operatives, and the way the men held themselves screamed army or ex-army—a near-identical straightness and stiffness in the way they carried their obviously well-developed upper bodies that he’d noticed in a lot of the soldiers he’d encountered, on both sides of the Atlantic. The suits looked pretty expensive, cleverly tailored to downplay each man’s considerable physique, and looked way too high-end for a government budget.

  He squinted at the screen at a bulge that showed under the left arm of one of the men as he lifted his right to rest it against one of the steel porch supports in front of the door. It stretched the material of his suit enough for Joe to make a couple of observations. First, the guy was wearing an underarm holster, and second, by the shape of the bulge it made, Joe thought it housed either a Glock 29 or a SIG Sauer P239. He looked a little closer and the guy moved again and Joe decided it was more likely the SIG, because the material had stretched tighter and outlined the pistol a little better. It had a longer grip than would appear on a Glock without some sort of customization.

  If it had been the Glock, then maybe—and it was very much a long shot kind of maybe—it could have been a law enforcement agency issue weapon. Certain specialist firearms units in the metropolitan police carried Glocks. Joe knew that only too well because a plainclothes cop had pulled one on him during an undercover investigation: a gross misunderstanding that had almost gotten Joe killed and eventually led to the officer involved being disciplined.

  The SIG, on the other hand, wasn’t carried by any UK force or department that Joe was aware of, suggesting that it was the guy’s weapon of choice, rather than one he’d been assigned.

  Freelancers?

  Joe found himself nodding in agreement with Ani’s conclusion.

  Clever girl, he thought. I hope you’re taking advantage of your time alone in Klein’s office.

  There were a ton of hacking tools on the tablet that Abernathy had given her, but Ani didn’t like the look of them and downloaded a set of her own from her Dropbox. While the tools were downloading, she checked to see how much space she’d have to copy Klein’s files, and was shocked to find a terabyte’s worth of solid-state hard drive. A lot of space for a tiny computer, but she was still going to have to be picky about what she saved to it.

  With the tools downloaded and installed, it took about thirty seconds to crack the wireless protection key and three minutes to bypass the pretty meager security on the Pabody/Reich network.

  But then the tablet was blazingly fast and her tools brutally efficient.

  The network administrator, or more likely Klein, had committed the cardinal but very common mistake of making his password memorable by changing the complicated but reasonably secure alphanumeric one into something short, and by making it a single word. Ani’s software—which she called Cid after a character in one of her favorite video game series—basically threw a dictionary at the network router, and kept at it until it found the right password or phrase. It always astonished her that people were still so sloppy protecting their computer networks. When you considered all the sensitive data that sat on people’s computers, one would think that people would make an effort to protect it. Ani had found networks and systems that were still protected by the password “password,” or ”PASS01.”

  Klein’s entire network security rested upon his belief that no one would try the word “perihelion.”

  Unfortunately for him, Ani had a feeling about Klein, and had specified that Cid throw words relating to astronomy at the network first.

  Half a minute later, she was discovering that the computers on Klein’s network were—theoretically—almost as easy to crack. Klein had granted himself access to all computers on-site, and he’d used the same password on all of them. But then Cid had floundered trying to find it and Ani, aware that time was very much of the essence, had called Gretchen.

  “I’m trying to crack a network,” Ani told her. “I need a password.”

  “Who and where?” Gretchen asked.

  Ani told her.

  “Hunting down Imogen Bell, huh? Why don’t you try jansky.”

  “Jansky?”

  “Karl Jansky, the father of radio astronomy.”

  Ani tried it. “Nope.”

  “Of course not. We’re talking a place that searches for alien messages. Try tesla.”

  Ani typed the word in.

  Access granted.

  “You got it in two,” Ani said admiringly. “Tesla?”

  “Nikola Tesla,” Gretchen explained. “A pioneer in electrical engineering, genius with OCD, and the first person to detect signals from space as a response to his own electrical stimuli. In 1899, actually.”

  “You are so amazing,” Ani said. “Catch you soon! I’ve got secrets to rifle through.”

  “Seek and ye shall find,” Gretchen said cheerily, and hung up.

  Ani was just wondering where to start looking when suddenly a window opened up on the screen of the tablet computer: a stylized photo of Abernathy that made him look like he’d been painted by Van Gogh, along with a rudimentary chat box.

  >You’re in, Abernathy typed.

  >Yep, Ani replied, once more impressed by the tech that Abernathy had at his disposal.

  >Wondering what to steal?

  >Any pointers?

  >Let’s grab it all. Icon on your home screen—the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek. Open it.

  Ani did as she was instructed, even though having the Enterprise for a hacking tool was so nerdy that even she inwardly groaned. The groan became audible when tapping on the icon made the noise of a Star Trek communicator. A window opened up showing what looked like a rotating wormhole in space. It was followed by a dialogue box that featured Leonard Nimoy as Spock in 8-bit graphic form. A couple of seconds of waiting brought up the query:

  Wireless network detected: PabReich17c5

  Computer detected: Klein01

  Mount drive? YES NO

  Ani smiled and tapped YES. Klein’s computer appeared as an icon next to the wormhole.

  “That’s pretty cool,” she said to herself.

  >Drag drive into the warp, the program instruct
ed, so she did as she was told, picking up the drive icon with her finger and sending it into the center of the wormhole. There was a whoosh and then the drive icon shattered into thousands of pieces that were sucked into the wormhole.

  She went back to the chat box.

  >Is that doing what I think it’s doing? she typed.

  >It’s sending us everything on the entire network at pretty much the speed of light. Was that what you were thinking?

  Ani shook her head in admiration.

  >Looks like hackers like me are redundant.

  There was a pause, and then Abernathy typed back.

  >There are few hackers like you. With our help you will be legendary.

  Ani waited as every piece of information on Klein’s entire network was copied to the servers at YETI HQ.

  If I get out of this alive and with my mind intact, she thought, then I am definitely taking Abernathy up on the job offer.

  The two men in suits, once inside the observatory’s main building, systematically ran rings around Klein. For Joe it was almost embarrassing to watch. Klein, viewing the footage for the first time, must have felt like a prizewinning fool. Swapping his attention from screen to screen, Joe watched as the men took turns distracting Klein while the other got up to various flavors of no good.

  He saw the first guy—the one with the SIG—point to a security camera as the other picked Klein’s pocket for his keycard. Then the first guy kept Klein talking while the second cloned the card with a pocket-sized skimmer before slipping the original back in the pocket it had come from. In the office, the second guy buddied up to Klein while guy number one put some kind of device underneath the desk. Then guy number two got directions to the bathroom and, instead of heading for them, used the keycard on a succession of doors and took photographs of documents, copied files onto a credit-card-sized hard drive, and generally snooped around while Klein and guy number one traded jokes.

  Watching it all played back in front of him, Klein went through the ascending order of behaviors that led, pretty inevitably, to anger. First he wrinkled his nose in incomprehension, and then, as it became apparent what the men were up to, his brow creased and his cheeks started burning red. Observing guy number one planting something under the desk reversed the last phase, and Klein’s face drained of color. Seeing guy number two with free run of the facility, using a cloned version of his own keycard, made Klein’s hands tighten into rigid claws at his side. As Klein watched the guy stealing information, Joe thought he could actually hear the professor grinding his teeth together.

  “What do you think they were looking for?” Joe asked, careful not to mention how easily Klein had been duped. Joe needed the professor to feel like Joe was on his side.

  Klein shook his head. Suddenly, he didn’t look like the confident, almost arrogant man that had let them into the observatory. Now he seemed like a spoiled kid having a temper tantrum over not being allowed an ice cream.

  “We’re an observatory,” he said sharply. “We’re hardly MI5.”

  “They certainly seemed like they were interested in something,” Joe prompted, adding some encourage into the mix. “And they had the technology and skills to hunt it down.”

  Klein looked genuinely baffled. “We search through space looking for things that will help humankind understand its place in the universe,” he said. It sounded like a prepared speech. “And we use what we find to help generate theories to explain how everything in the universe got where it is. We don’t actually have any secrets. We’re scientists. Everything we discover is available on the internet.”

  “Do you think it could be connected with Imogen Bell?”

  “How could it be? Why would it be?”

  “It’s why we’re here.”

  Klein looked at Joe with suspicion. “Yes, why is that again?”

  Joe watched the men leave on-screen, shaking hands with Klein before getting back into their car and driving off.

  “Imogen Bell believed that she had intercepted a message from outer space. I think that perhaps other people believe that, too.”

  Anger and suspicion turned to scorn, and Klein even let out a single note of derisive laughter. “Well, they’re as crazy as she is. Is that why you’re here? Chasing little green men? My goodness, I hope my taxes are being spent better than financing science fiction nonsense.”

  Joe gave him a puzzled look. “Isn’t a large part of what you do here tied to SETI?” he asked.

  “Not a large part, no,” Klein said. “We do get some serious science done here as well, you know.”

  “But nothing worth dispatching two mercenaries to rifle through your files and hard drives?”

  “Mercenaries?”

  “That’s what those guys looked like to me.”

  “Okay, maybe they weren’t government agents, but isn’t it more likely they were tabloid journalists trying to plaster some more embarrassing stories across the hysterical front pages of their gossip rags?”

  “Unless journalists have started packing heat, I think that’s pretty unlikely.”

  “Weapons?” Klein roared. “What are you talking about?”

  “Automatic pistols in shoulder holsters. Why don’t you copy over the footage of those two men onto my colleague’s computer and start telling me everything you can about Imogen Bell?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THREADS

  By the time Joe and Klein returned, Ani was already done uploading terabytes of information to Abernathy’s data-hungry computers.

  The speed with which it had happened was staggering.

  Frightening, even.

  Sending data from one computer to another over a hundred and fifty miles away at a rate that was simply breathtaking. There was no commercial tech available that could transfer data that fast. Nothing she’d even heard of like that in development. Whoever was making the tech for Abernathy and YETI was someone that Ani really wanted to meet.

  She’d even had time to mess around on the tablet—more wonders to discover!—and then sign in and check her email.

  Her heart started pounding when she saw one from JMcV—Jack “Black Hat” McVitie, the missing hacker who had started her on this crazy trail—with the subject line HELP!

  She was about to tap on it to read the message when the door opened and Klein followed Joe into the room. Joe was calm and poised, but Klein was in a terrible mood. His face was all blotchy and his eyes were practically bugging out of his head.

  “This is insane,” Klein insisted forcefully, as if simply saying a thing loudly and firmly enough made it true. “Absolute insanity. Imogen Bell was mistaken. The harm she did to this institution is incalculable! She made Pabody/Reich a laughingstock by jumping the gun …”

  Joe gave Ani a despairing look, then surveyed Klein with an icy glare.

  “So what was this message from space, exactly?” Joe asked, then seemed to remember something, and moved toward Klein’s desk. He felt around underneath it, bringing out a black device and putting his finger to his lips. He showed it to Ani, then Klein, then crossed the room, exited, and returned a few seconds later, empty-handed.

  “Can’t be too careful,” he said, closing the door. “Someone might have been listening in.”

  “Do you know how insane that sounds?” Klein protested. “This is a radio telescope setup!”

  “So you keep telling me,” Joe said. “The message?”

  Klein made a hmmmph sound before going over to his computer, tapping the keyboard, and clicking his mouse. There was a crackle from his computer speakers.

  Ani went cold. Fear hammered at her. He was about to play the .wav file, the terrible sound that had almost invaded her mind twice already!

  Her hands were halfway up to her ears to try to block the sound when suddenly she stopped.

  Puzzled, she sat there, staring at Klein and trying to figure out what was going on.

  The noise coming from Klein’s computer was the sound of static, with occasional bleeps and bloops and then a stra
nge high-pitched eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. The whole thing lasted about twenty seconds, and she knew that she had never heard the sounds before.

  It certainly wasn’t the .wav file.

  “That’s the message that Imogen Bell thought proved intelligent life was trying to contact us?” Ani asked, trying to keep the disbelief—and, something that surprised her, disappointment—out of her voice.

  “You were expecting a greeting in the Queen’s English?” he said sarcastically.

  Klein was lying. She didn’t know exactly how she knew it, or what it was about the man’s demeanor that made her so certain, but he knew more than he was saying.

  That wasn’t the message that Imogen Bell recorded, but that was the message that got sent out to all the other observatories across the world. That was the message that made her a laughingstock.

  “Were you here the night that Dr. Bell thought she’d found proof of extraterrestrial life?” Ani asked.

  Klein looked at her oddly. “Of course. I practically live here. This is my life—”

  “Did you hear what she thought was a message before she sent it to everyone and started the process that ruined her reputation?” Ani asked, cutting him off.

  “Of course … that is, no … I mean …” Klein was too flustered to put together a coherent sentence. Ani was shocked that he honestly, bafflingly, hadn’t figured on anyone asking that simple question. Which meant, of course, that he was completely unprepared for it, and his burbling contradictions said a lot more than his words ever could.

  Gotcha.

  Within a couple of seconds he had recovered his composure, but by then, Ani didn’t believe anything that came out of his mouth.

  “She sent it worldwide without me hearing it,” Klein said with all the certainty Ani expected from a reasonably good liar. “Left me out of the loop. She must have wanted the glory, but was unprepared for the resulting humiliation.”

  Ani realized that Joe was studying her intently. She thought that the expression she detected on his face was approval. It gave her the courage to try something extreme.