Kwang! Broken glass and liquor cascaded down around them. Abbey could hear Moto screaming obscenities in the background, the word punk rising above all others, and then a series of shots from another gun, much louder. Boom-boom-boom-boom! followed by the word, "Punk!"
She frantically crawled behind Ford toward the back.
Kwang! Kwang! More glass and bottles came crashing down, with splinters of wood and pieces of insulation and wallboard whirling through the air. Moto roared something in Japanese.
Kwang! Kwang! The bar above their heads exploded into splintered wood, pieces of metal, and chunks of drywall and insulation.
"Get back here!" the man screamed.
Suddenly Moto was staggering along beside them, wheezing and coughing, blood spraying from his mouth. He clutched an enormous revolver in his hands and turned to fire two more shots, which went wild.
Kwang! Kwang! came the response and Moto, struck in the chest, was thrown backward into the shattered wall, one hand clawing away at the shower of broken glass, before crashing to the floor.
Kwang! Kwang! A small bar refrigerator tumbled to the floor in front of her, several bullet holes in it, spraying Freon in a cloud of condensates--and there, duct-taped to the back of it, was a slender, brushed-aluminum case with a stenciled logo of which Abbey saw only the initials NPF.
Almost without thinking she ripped it off, stuffed it into her belt.
"Run!" Ford said, turning around and seizing her by the arm; they bolted through the door, into a little stockroom filled with boxes. Another door stood in the back of the stockroom and Ford slammed through it and they tore down a narrow flight of stairs into a basement corridor, turned a corner, sprinted up another set of stairs, busted through a pair of metal crash doors into a back alley. Still gripping her arm, he hauled her along the street and around the corner to a busy intersection. They paused, gasping for air.
"You all right?" Ford asked.
"I don't know." She gasped, sucking in air, her heart galloping in her chest. "You're bleeding."
He pulled out a handkerchief, wiped his face. "It's nothing. We've got to get out of here." He raised his hand, whistled for a cab.
She shook glass out of her hair, trying to get herself under control. Her hands were trembling. It was horrible to see a man killed in front of her; it reminded her all over again of Worth lying on the deck, blood welling up from his caved-in head. She leaned over and vomited on the sidewalk.
"Taxi!" Ford yelled, handing her a handkerchief.
She gasped, tried to straighten up, wiped her mouth with the handkerchief.
"Taxi!"
"Aren't we waiting for the police?"
"Absolutely not." He flagged down a cab, opened the door, and shoved her in. "La Guardia," he said to the driver. "Take Grand to Flushing. Stay off the expressway."
"Your call, man. Gonna add ten minutes."
The cab lurched forward into the rush of traffic. "Why are we running?" Abbey almost shouted.
Ford leaned back, his face covered with sweat. A cut on the bridge of his nose was welling blood. "Because we don't know who just tried to kill us."
"Kill us? Why?"
Ford shook his head. "I don't know. He was a professional. If our late, brave friend didn't have that cannon behind the bar, we'd all be dead. I've got to get you to safety. I should never have involved you in this."
Abbey shook her head. She could feel it pounding. "This is insane. What the hell's going on?"
"Somebody's looking for that hard drive. From what he said, it seems he might think we have it."
Abbey reached into her jacket and pulled out the aluminum case, duct tape dangling. "We do. This was taped to the back of the fridge."
Ford stared at her. "Did the shooter see you grab that?"
"I think so."
"Shit," said Ford quietly. "Shit."
54
Abbey sat cross-legged on the rucked-up bed, laptop in front of her, FireWired to the mysterious hard drive. Stenciled on the side was the information:
#785A56H6T 160Tb
CLASSIFIED: DO NOT DUPLICATE
Property of NPF
California Institute of Technology
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
The five-dollar motel clock, screwed to the Formica night table to prevent it from being stolen, glowed midnight. They had gotten into Washington-Dulles at eight and driven for an hour into the middle of nowhere in suburban Virginia to a hotel that Ford seemed to have once used as some kind of safe house. The Watergate it wasn't and Abbey didn't like it at all. There was no room service, the room smelled of old cigar smoke, and the sheets looked suspiciously dirty. Ford had registered without showing an ID and had paid in cash. The sleazy clerk had leered at them, and Abbey had a pretty good idea of the kind of vile thoughts that were going through his mind.
Ford had ordered her pizza and disappeared, refusing to say where he was going, promising to be back before dawn. He had left her with a laptop and the hard drive and told her to break into it.
Easier said than done. She'd been at it for hours with no success. The hard drive was no brand she recognized or could find on the Web; it looked proprietary, very high density. No normal drive this size could possibly hold 160Tb. An NPF special. And password protected. She'd been running through all the obvious candidates, "password," "letmein," "qwerty," "12345678" and a zillion other common combinations, taken from Web sites that listed common passwords. Then she had started in on combinations of Corso's names, birthdate, his mother's names and birthdate, various street and place names near his house, local bars, names of his high school and college teams, mascots, the top bands and hit songs of his teen years--in short, anything she could guess about him from his age and digging up information on him on the Web. But then she considered that she was going about it all wrong. The password would have been created by the mysterious professor who'd stolen it from NPF. She knew nothing about this man, not even his name. How could she possibly guess his password? Or even worse, it might still have an NPF password, which would be well-nigh uncrackable.
She downloaded several programs from the Web and tried a brute-force attack using hashes and rainbow tables, to no avail. It was starting to look hopeless. For all she knew, the drive was locked up with military-level cryptography.
Still, the drive did ask for a password and that was a good sign. There had to be another way to solve the problem. She cracked her sixth Diet Coke and guzzled it. Feeling the need for further sustenance, she rummaged in the pizza box and pried up the last cold, hard piece from the cardboard, scarfed it down, and chased it with more Coke.
She thought about her own passwords and how she chose them. Most of them were dreamed up on the spot, often curse words mingled with the first digits of p or e, two numbers she had memorized to many digits for no good reason back in junior high. Her favorites were E3a1t4s1h5i9t and F2u7c1k8y2o8u. Simple to remember, impossible to crack. For the hell of it she tried both of those, again with no result.
She sipped the Coke, imagining this professor's last day at work, what it would be like to get fired and told to clear out his desk by five. He was pissed enough to steal a hard drive with classified data. As soon as he got home, he would have changed the password on the drive to prevent anyone from NPF being able to access it.
She sighed and tossed the Coke can toward the wastebasket. It bounced off the rim and rolled across the floor, dribbling liquid on the already stained rug. "Fuck," she said out loud. If only she had a joint to relax her, help her mind drift a little, figure things out.
She picked up her earlier train of thought. He would have changed the password when he got home, first thing. She closed her eyes, trying to visualize the scene: this imaginary professor arriving back at some shabby bungalow in Southern California, stained carpeting, wife upstairs complaining about having no money. The guy pulls the hard drive out of his underwear or wherever he'd put it, plugs it into his laptop. He's furious, he's upset, he ca
n't believe what's happened to him. He's not thinking clearly. But he has to change the password--that's essential. So he pulls a new one out of his head and types it in.
What was going through his head at that very moment?
Abbey typed in fuckNPF. No go.
She recalled the standard rules: a good password should consist of at least eight characters of mixed numbers and letters, lower and uppercase.
She typed in fuckNPF1.
Bingo.
55
Ford eased his rented Mercedes down the curving lanes of the posh Washington neighborhood around Quebec Street NW, until he found an evening house party. He parked his car behind the other cars along the curb and stepped out into the warm night, buttoning his suit jacket. Elegant Georgian houses lined the leafy lanes, windows glowing yellow in the summer dark. The party house was more brightly lit than most, and as he walked past it he heard muted jazz trickling into the air. Ambling down the street in his suit, hands in his pockets like a neighbor out for a stroll, he made his way toward Spring Valley Park, a small ribbon of trees alongside a creek. Slipping into the park on a path, he waited until he was sure he was alone and then swiftly cut into the woods, crossed the creek, and approached the backyard of number 16 Hillbrook Lane. It was nearing midnight but he was in luck: there was only one car in the driveway. Lockwood was still at work. No doubt he was very busy these days--and nights.
Circling the property, he could see no evidence it was under active surveillance or being patrolled. The house was mostly dark, with a soft glow in an upper window--the wife, probably, reading in bed. The front stoop light had been left on. Fortunately, the president's science advisor didn't rate Secret Service protection. Still, there might be alarms or motion sensors that turned on lights, the usual suburban stuff, but by moving extremely slowly he was able to minimize the risk of setting one off. He managed to creep close to the driveway undetected.
He chose a hiding place in a grouping of yews alongside the driveway and crouched in the deepest shadow, waiting. It was possible Lockwood might remain at work all night, but he knew the man's habits well enough to know he wouldn't sleep in the office. Eventually he would come home.
Ford waited.
An hour passed. He shifted his position, trying to stretch his cramped legs. The light went out in the top of the house. Another hour passed. Then, a few minutes past two, he saw car lights down the street and a sudden rumble from the automatic garage door as it was activated and began to rise.
A moment later headlights swept into the driveway and a Toyota Highlander eased in and glided past him; Ford ducked from his hiding place and darted behind the car into the garage. He crouched behind the rear bumper, then waited. A moment passed, the left-hand door opened, a tall man got out.
Ford rose and stepped out from behind the car.
Lockwood jumped back, staring at him. "What the hell--?"
Ford smiled, held out his hand. Lockwood stared at it. "You scared the daylights out of me. What are you doing here?"
Keeping the friendly smile, Ford dropped his hand and took a step forward. "Call your man off."
"What are you talking about? What man?"
There was a note in Lockwood's voice that Ford believed. "The man who murdered Mark Corso and tried to kill me and my assistant this afternoon in Brooklyn, shot up a bar, and killed the bartender. You can read about it in the Times online. He was from the Agency, I'd guess. Looking for a hard drive."
"Jesus Christ, Wyman, you know I'd never be involved in anything like that. If someone's trying to kill you, it isn't us. You better tell me what the hell you've been doing to provoke this."
Ford stared at Lockwood. The man looked flustered and confused. The operative word was looked. After eight years in Washington, people got awfully good at deception.
"I'm still on the case."
Lockwood's lips tightened and he seemed to be collecting his wits. "If someone's after you, it isn't CIA. They're not that crude and you were one of their own. Of course, it might be one of those acronyms at DIA. A black agency. Those sons-of-bitches answer to nobody." Lockwood's face turned red. "I'll look into it immediately and if it's them, I'll take appropriate action. But Wyman, what in God's name are you doing? You're assignment is long over. I warned you before to leave this alone. Now I'm telling you: give it up now or I'll bust you. Is that clear?"
"Not clear. Another thing: my assistant is a twenty-year-old student who is completely innocent in this affair."
Lockwood dropped his head and shook it. "If it's one of ours, trust me, I'll find out and make a stink. If I were you, though, I'd consider who else it might be--outside the government." He added, "But I've got to ask you again: why the hell are you doing this? You don't have a dog in this race."
"You wouldn't understand. I'm here to get more information. I want you to tell me what's going on, what you know."
"Are you serious? I'm not telling you anything."
"Not even in exchange for the information I've got?"
"Which is?"
"The object didn't fall in the Maine ocean. It struck an island."
Lockwood took a step forward, lowered his voice. "How do you know that?"
"I've been there. I've seen the hole."
"Where?"
"That's the information you'll get--in return."
Lockwood looked at him steadily. "All right. Our physicists think the thing that went through the Earth was a chunk of strange matter. Also known as a strangelet."
"Not a miniature black hole?"
"No."
"What the hell is strange matter?"
"It's a superdense form of matter. Made entirely of quarks. And extremely dangerous. I don't really understand it--look it up if you want more. That's all we really have that's new. So--where's this island?"
"Name is Shark. In Muscongus Bay, about eight miles offshore. It's a small, barren island--you'll find the crater at the high point."
Lockwood turned, pulled his briefcase out of the car, shut the door. As Ford turned to leave, Lockwood stuck out his hand and grasped his, surprising him. "You keep your head down, be careful. If I find out our people after you, I swear I'll put a stop to it. But keep in mind it may not be our people . . ."
Ford turned, ducked out the garage door, and crossed the backyard into the darkness of the park. He moved toward the creek where the growth was thickest, crossed the stream, and came out on the path. He emerged on Quebec Street, straightened up, adjusted his suit, and ran his fingers through his hair. He again assumed the air of a neighbor taking the air, walking briskly, ducking into the shadows once to avoid a cruising cop car. Rounding several corners, he came to the end of the street where he'd parked his car, keeping to the shadows of a copse of trees.
Bad news. Peering through a screen of trees he could see two cop cars, light bars going, parked on either side of his rental car, obviously making the plates. Had Lockwood called the cops? Or maybe he'd left it parked too long: the house party was long over and some paranoid suburbanite had called the cops. Unfortunately, he'd rented the Mercedes in his real name--there'd been no choice.
Cursing under his breath, Ford melted back into the darkness and threaded his way through backyards and parkland toward American University and the bus stop on Massachusetts Avenue.
56
Abbey scanned the files on the 160 terabyte hard drive, sampling a few at random. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of images of Mars, spectacular, amazing, extraordinary images of craters, volcanoes, canyons, deserts, dune fields, mountains, and plains. The radar images were equally spectacular, slices through the Martian crust. But the gamma ray data were simply tables of numbers and various arcane graphs, impossible to decipher. No images there--just numbers.
One folder caught her eye, titled GAMMA ANOMALY. Inside was a single file with a pps extension--a PowerPoint presentation, and it had been created on the disk only a few weeks before.
Abbey clicked on the pps file. A screen p
opped up and the presentation began.
The MMO Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator:
An Analysis of Anomalous High-Energy
Gamma Ray Emission Data
Mark Corso, Senior Data Analysis Technician
This was looking good--this must be the presentation that irritated his supervisor, Derkweiler, and got him fired. His obsession. She clicked to the next page, which showed a schematic of the planet Mars with the orbital trajectories of the MMO satellite drawn around it, the multiple orbits overlaid. Then came a graph labeled Theoretical Signature of Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars, showing a nice, neat square wave pattern. The next one was labeled Actual Gamma Ray Signature, which was hard to make out, and then both were combined for what looked to her like a pretty tenuous match, with large error bars and a lot of background noise. There were peaks and valleys, but just barely, and the theoretical and actual signatures looked out of phase.
She clicked again but that was the end.
What did it mean? It was obviously an oral presentation, no written text to go along with it.
She clicked through it again, trying to figure it out. Theoretical Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars. She thought back to her freshman physics class at Prince ton and what she was supposed to know about gamma rays. They were the most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum, higher energy than X-rays. Gamma rays, gamma rays . . . Like she told Ford, there shouldn't be any coming from Mars--or should there? She cursed herself for not studying harder.
She Googled gamma rays and read up on them. They were produced only by extremely violent events--supernovae, black holes, neutron stars, matter-antimatter annihilations. In the solar system, she read, gamma rays were naturally created in one way and one way only: when powerful cosmic rays from deep space struck the atmosphere or surface of a planet. Each cosmic ray strike tore apart atoms of matter, producing a flash of gamma radiation. As a result, all the solar system's planets, bathed in a diffuse cosmic ray bombardment from deep space, glowed faintly in gamma rays. The glow was diffuse, planetwide.
Impact wf-3 Page 20