Run (Book 2): The Crossing

by Rich Restucci

  The team climbed the steps quickly. When they reached the sixth floor window, Dallas began pounding on it, and a tall Asian man arrived in seconds, pointing a fire extinguisher at him through the glass. “Hold on,” Seyfert yelled, and he double clicked the device in his hand. A small explosion made the fire escape shudder. Several windows exploded, but not the one near the sixth floor fire escape.

  Dallas bellowed at the scientist through the closed window. “Let us in, dumbass!”

  The man nodded, wide-eyed, and undid the catch on the top and bottom of the windows. “Just let me get the scree—”

  Dallas put his boot through the screen and stepped into the room. “Don’t move a muscle, young fella,” he said to the tall man pointing his shotgun at him. The main raised his hands and started breathing fast. Dallas looked around at all the laboratory gizmos and benches and whirring computers. Then he looked up and noticed the florescent lights illuminating the room.

  “Now how in hell do you have power?”

  “We have a direct line to the Pilgrim power plant. It’s a nuclear facility, and it’s still operational. We…” he trailed off as the noticed the newcomers.

  Rick, Bourne, and Seyfert had followed the big man into the building. “They won’t be climbing up after us,” Seyfert said, “but we aren’t going back that way either.”

  Bourne was all business. “Where is Doctor Poole?”

  “She went down to five when she heard your tank pull in. She took Ravi and Phil with her.”

  “Okay, son, sit in that chair and keep your hands where we can see them.”

  “And relax nerd,” Seyfert added, “we’re here to kick the shit out of the forces of evil.”

  “Aptly put, Seyfert. What’s your name, son?”

  “Henry Cho. I’m a post doc working on—”

  Dallas cut him off. “Colonel, they have power.” The Texan pointed to the overhead lights.

  “How is this possible, Henry?” demanded Bourne.

  “As I was saying to your friend, we have a direct line to the Pilgrim nuclear power plant. It’s still operational, and before we lost contact two days ago, it was still throwing juice.”

  “Losin’ contact ain’t the best news there, pard.”

  “The loss was on our end. We have a computer linked via satellite and we could speak to them. We even had video. We’ve theorized that the satellite’s orbit must have degraded because of the lack of personnel, and…”

  “Okay Henry, we understand.” Bourne looked to the SEAL. “Seyfert, go get Doctor Poole. Dallas, provide cover.”

  Dallas tensed as Henry raised his hand. “I uh… I could just call her.”

  Bourne nodded, raising his eyebrows. “Please do.”

  Henry stood slowly and reached for a gray phone. He pushed the SPKR button and a key on the right side of the instrument. “Brenda, are you there? The cavalry has arrived.”

  “The damn tank drove away, Henry, they couldn’t get to us. Something blew up outside too, the whole building shook.”

  “Brenda, I’m looking down the barrel of a very large gun. They’re up here with me now.”

  “With you?” a man’s voice said, “How did…?”

  “If you could all come back upstairs please,” Colonel Bourne was polite, “we can get down to business.”

  “We’ll be right there.”

  The glass entry door whooshed open a few moments later, two men and a woman walking in. The woman and an Indian man were wearing lab coats, and the third newcomer was in jeans, work boots, and a green T-shirt. The MIT folks were all smiles until they saw the weapons. The woman saw Rick and her eyes went wide in surprise. The look vanished almost immediately and she put her hands on her hips, “Rick! What are you doing here? Where’s Sam?”

  “Sam’s safe, she’s with my father.”

  “Your father!” she almost screamed. “How could you leave her in California? I can’t believe you left my daughter three thousand miles away! Actually I do believe it! Are y—?”

  Seyfert and Dallas looked at each other sideways, Seyfert making a face.

  “Doctor Poole, calm down!” Bourne’s voice was one that didn’t need raising for folks to know who was in charge, so he generally kept it moderated. Still, Brenda shut right up. “Rick showed intelligence in leaving your daughter behind. In fact, the only reason he was allowed on this mission is because he knew this facility and how to get here. From what I hear, Alcatraz is guarded by a nuclear submarine and a team of SEALs. We’ve lost several men, one just now, and quite frankly your daughter would have been a liability en route. We’ve come a long way, and we’re here to take you where you wanted to go. We’ve also brought you some food. While you eat, we need details on this facility you need to go to, where it is, and what it is, so we can best plan on how to get you there.”

  “I understand. I’m sorry.” She had directed this at the colonel, and didn’t look at Rick. “This is Ravindra Thandayuthapani, and this is Phil.”

  “Please call me Ravi. Thank you,” the Indian looking man said, and extended his hand.

  The other man extended his hand as well. “Guess I’m just Phil.”

  Introductions were made, and then the colonel asked where they were going.

  “Colonel,” Rick cut in, and all eyes focused on him, “I have a question for them. When we spoke on the phone a month ago, you said you had prior knowledge of this virus. What knowledge?”

  All eyes focused back on Brenda.

  35

  “The facility we are in is aptly named CSAIL,” Brenda said between spoonfuls of noodles, “the Computer Sciences and Artificial Intelligence Laboratories. You must understand that the people employed here are the apex minds in these fields. So last year, when the NSA came to our director and asked us to come up with a solution for an extremely nasty and aggressive viral worm based on the Stuxnet architecture, he didn’t hesitate to accept the challenge. Especially with the price tag associated with the project. Funds were nearly limitless.”

  The two military men, the Texan, and Rick looked as if they had no idea what she was talking about.

  She stopped slurping her soup long enough to realize they were confused. “Stuxnet? Iranian nuclear facilities? Operation Olympic Games? Don’t you people watch the news?” Bourne folded his arms, and Brenda got the message. “Okay, Okay, sorry. Stuxnet was a computer worm…a program hidden inside other programs to wreak havoc on computer systems. This particular worm was like nothing anyone had seen before. It didn’t just shut down hard drives, or gather information, it actually targeted specific functionalities in several nuclear reactors and either shut them down or took them over, completely locking out the facility technicians and not allowing the workers there to do anything. Equipment was destroyed, research lost, and people died.”

  “Fascinating,” admonished Seyfert, “and the zombies?”

  She took a sip of Gatorade, giving Seyfert a dirty look. "I’m getting to that. Stuxnet went through several iterations; Flame, Abyss, and finally Abaddon. The source code for each virus was far more advanced than the last. The Abaddon virus was the pinnacle of human code writing. Scary stuff. At first none of us here could even get inside the code, then Kerry devised an algorithm to…” Brenda had been speaking quickly, and she suddenly looked up from her bowl and noticed she had lost her audience again.

  “This new virus could shut down anything. A hospital, an aircraft carrier, even your car. Things with the most basic of programming to the most advanced cyber security in the world began becoming infected. Independent systems with no link to the outside. Totally secure. Two systems at the NSA, three at the FBI, a critical system at the CIA. You remember that Russian sub that was lost with all hands in October of last year? Abaddon. That was when the NSA came knocking on our door. Russian subs are okay to lose I guess, but not American subs. The NSA was being proactive.”

  “Jesus Brenda!” Ravi almost shouted. “This is…this is treason.”

  “Relax, Ravi, the NSA i
s as dead as everyone else. I don’t think confidentiality agreements and gag orders are going to be enforced.”

  Bourne was shaking his head. “I never heard of anything like this.”

  “You wouldn’t unless you had SCI clearance. Nobody knows about this. We weren’t even kept in all the loops. So, back to Abaddon. Nobody could figure out how it could infect independent systems. Either a super spy network was infiltrating every three letter intelligence installation in the country, or there was some type of signal that could penetrate hard lines. The NSA was sure it was a bunch of spies, and so we were tasked with coming up with a counter virus to clean out Abaddon.”

  She looked at Ravi. “We did. We worked day and night at their secure facility. We came up with a deadly, and I do mean deadly anti-virus. Rama. It not only undid the havoc that Abaddon had wreaked, but it re-wrote source code on the fly. It could prevent Abaddon from taking hold, and also save critical systems that had already been damaged by putting them in a slave mode allowing the systems to be operated by anyone who had the proper key code. Damaged systems were repaired.”

  She paused and looked at the colonel. “Dead systems came back to life.”

  “Holy shit,” said Seyfert, understanding. “You did it. You created the plague.”

  “No,” she said, “no we didn’t. All of our research and development was halted as soon as we came up with the first Rama prototype. The NSA took our product and shut us down. They escorted us from their facility and revoked our clearance.”

  Ravi harrumphed. “They wouldn’t even let me get my iPad from my locker, they bought me a new one.”

  “That was months before the plague first hit Boston. Of course, you understand as soon as they shut us down, we started up again without telling them.”

  “Now that sounds like treason,” Bourne said accusingly.

  “You can shoot us later. Anyway, Ravi and I worked on this constantly, even after the plague broke out. There was one critical point that we never did figure; how Abaddon infected closed systems. When there were eighteen of us, and we were stuck in here, we tried to figure out how that could happen, so after we fortified the building, we brainstormed. We came up with nothing until Dr. Linda Martin, a neurologist and a pioneer in artificial intelligence and organic computing, came up with a radical idea. She postulated that the only thing that was common to every scenario was that there was human interaction.

  “These NSA spooks, they undress all the way before they go in and out of the computer labs, and they made us do the same. No clothing, jewelry, or electronics of any kind. They had prescriptions for our eyeglasses before we even got there. When we were totally naked, we were escorted through a metal detector and each of us had a full body MRI. This was each time we entered or left a lab, and guards were rotated every four hours. Their computer labs were totally independent, no outside lines or wireless anything, and we were underground. Nobody could possibly have hacked a system to upload the virus, but it still infected three of the systems in lab two, and all of them in lab three.

  “Dr. Martin came up with the idea that we must be carrying the virus and transmitting it with some type of hidden signal. She studied each of us and herself and there was nothing anywhere. Then she put Kerry in a magnetoencephalography machine. An MEG works by recording the magnetic fields that are produced by the human brain’s naturally occurring electrical currents. Kerry’s alpha wave patterns were like nothing Dr. Martin had ever seen. She put us all in the machine, and we all had irregular patterns. In addition, alpha waves are supposed to diminish when your eyes are open, but ours were super high in amplitude all the time, and the patterns didn’t look right.”

  She lifted the bowl of soup and finished the broth. “Rama was being transmitted via alpha waves.”

  “Still a theory,” Ravi added. “Thank you.”

  “Yes, but it makes sense,” Brenda countered. “It makes sense that if the alpha waves are just a signal, then they could carry a hidden signal, but we were still back to square one. How did the signal penetrate a wireless network? That was when Phil reminded us that alpha waves were magnetic signals, and even wired computers are just signal machines.”

  Everyone looked at Phil, who shrugged. “I’m not without skills.”

  “What’s your field of expertise? Bourne asked.

  “Cleaning. I’m the janitor.”

  “Oh… I’m sorry, I just thought…”

  “Well, I was gonna get my PhD, but then everybody woulda’ called me Dr. Phil. You understand.”

  Rick, Dallas, and Seyfert smiled. Bourne did not.

  “Anyway, we argued back and forth on how the signal could carry a virus, and how we thought it was just too coincidental that this plague popped up at about the same time we created an anti-virus for Rama. So we acquired some test subjects and began testing on the seventh floor. That’s where the MEG was kept and…”

  “Wait,” Seyfert raised his index finger, “wait a second. Test subjects?”

  “Yes, we needed to determine how or even if it was either Abaddon or Rama that was causing this plague. We captured seven subjects, and began testing immediately. Once we—”

  Seyfert interjected, “Where are the test subjects?”

  “Two are down the hall, the others are…they’re up one floor.”

  “Ya’ mean ta tell me ya’ got the livin’ dead on this floor with us?”

  “Of course. How else could we run our tests? It’s completely safe, I assure you. After what happened upstairs, we beefed up our security and contamination procedures. The precautions we’ve taken ensure that—”

  “Where exactly is your holding facility?” demanded Bourne in his I-will-not-be-fucked-with voice.

  “It’s right down the hall in the AI lab, I’ll show you.”

  Rick, Seyfert, and Dallas all checked their weapons and clicked safeties off.

  They walked down the long hall to another lab with a few larger instruments. It didn’t look like a computer lab. A large glass window looked in on the room.

  “There, as you can see, they are quite restrained.” Two creatures, both naked, were strapped to gurneys. The first, a male, at least six feet in height, appeared clamped to the table with leather restraints and metal straps across its neck, chest, waist, and knees. The other was only most of a torso, nothing below her ribcage was left, and her arms were gone as well. Both were, as the doctor had said, very well restrained. Some slight movement came from each, but they were mostly content.

  The colonel rubbed his shoulder wound and made a grimace. “Would you please open this door?”

  The lab was hermetic, and the primary door whooshed as it was opened. “We have to step inside, the inner door won’t open until the outer door is closed. There are Tyvek suits on the wall that we will need to wear as well, but there are only four. If you would…”

  “Seyfert, with me. Doctor Poole, please remain outside.”

  “What? Why? What do you intend—?”

  Ravi gently grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. “Get out of the airlock, Brenda. Thank you.”

  The door closed and Seyfert began looking around. He found a green cordless drill with a charger next to it and pulled the battery from the charger. Brenda began banging on the glass, but Seyfert and Bourne couldn’t hear what she was yelling. Seyfert garbed up with one of the Tyvek suits and put a shield over his face. The banging intensified, and Bourne folded his arms and turned around to look at her briefly. Rick was trying to talk to her, but she was shaking him off and pointing at the glass, obviously yelling.

  Both creatures were agitated now, but they couldn’t move because of the restraints. Both undead wore blindfolds, and the male was growling.

  Seyfert tested the drill, and the creatures grew significantly more rowdy, straining at their bonds and mewling or snarling. He moved to the full specimen, whose head was restrained with two crude, wooden two-by-four blocks on either side of its cranium. He used the drill to sanitize the thing, drilling into i
ts forehead. It stopped its pathetic thrashing immediately, and Seyfert moved on to the next one. He repeated the process and put down the drill, and began to strip off the white suit.

  Bourne nodded to him and they moved through the airlock.

  Doctor Poole looked ashen. “What have you done? Do you have any idea what we had to go through to obtain those specimens?”

  Seyfert was incredulous. “And you were going to do what now that we’re here? Take them with us? Got a big fuckin’ suitcase, ma’am? Earth to science lady: not happening!”

  “Stand down, sailor.” The colonel looked at Brenda. “He’s right though, we couldn’t very well take them with us, and if we’re going to be here for a few hours, then I for one don’t want them around.”

  “Me neither,” agreed Phil. “Never did like them in here with us. They killed eleven of our people up on the seventh floor.”

  Brenda whipped around. “I could have told them that,” she spat with venom.

  Phil just shrugged.

  “Enough. Tell us what you need to bring with you, and we’ll help you pack. You are each allowed to bring thirty pounds of equipment and data, and we will assist by carrying thirty pounds each as well. Any more and you may slow us down, so figure out what you need. Seyfert, begin working on an exfil strategy. Dallas and Rick, check the perimeter, stay close and check all of the barricades. This mission is not over. Let’s get to work. Doctor Poole, you will also need to tell me where we are going, and how best to get there.”

  36

  “Seriously? That’s the best ya got?”

  “Easy, Texas, there’s no other way. The fire escape we came in on is destroyed, and the one on the other side of the building is crawling with Limas, I checked.”