by Greg Ahlgren
PROLOGUE
By Greg Ahlgren
© 2006
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people have been generous in providing comment, suggestions, encouragement and assistance for this book that it would be impossible to list them all. However, a special debt of gratitude is owed to David Sims whose literary and creative talents helped jumpstart this project, to Debbie Elliott for her assistance in preparing and assembling the manuscript, and especially to Bennett Freeman, whose scientific, creative and literary input has been invaluable.
Prologue
The air conditioning was broken again. It wasn’t so much the heat that was bothersome as the stultifying oppressiveness once the circulating pump quit. The lack of airflow made the atmosphere in the Brandigan Applied Sciences Building on the MIT campus thick and clammy. As Campus Security Officer Yolanda Jackson walked down the hall on the 21st floor an unseen hand tightened around her lungs. Her breathing became raspy and shallow. She knew she should have grabbed her inhaler from her patrol car parked around the corner, but who knew that the air conditioning would be out? It was too late now. Her asthma would have to wait.
Without looking, she touched the two-way radio on her duty belt and contemplated reporting the failed air conditioning. But at three in the morning she’d only be able to raise an indifferent dispatcher at Campus Maintenance who would ask all sorts of questions before telling her he’d have an H-VAC guy give her a call in an hour or so. Better to wait until the end of her shift and fill out a maintenance report form that she could leave with her supervisor. Let it be someone else’s problem.
Besides, tomorrow was Sunday and she planned to take Jamal and Lionel to Salisbury Beach. They’d spend more time on the rides than playing in the surf. The rides were so damn expensive, but she had promised. She wished Luther’s check had arrived on time. She had delayed leaving for work in case it was in the afternoon mail. It wasn’t. She was annoyed, because the judge had repeatedly warned Luther that his checks had to arrive by Thursday.
Officer Jackson didn’t mind night shifts. It was quieter, and in the seven years she had held the job, the worst she had encountered was a drunken undergrad intent on taking out his academic frustration on the nearest uniform.
Night shifts were more checking doorways and buildings, and fewer interactions with students. It was not that she disliked students, but the nights passed quickly and she could work while Jamal and Lionel slept. They were now old enough to be left alone.
At night, if she got no calls, she only had to check each building in her patrol area twice, randomly walking two or three floors. This was the second time through Brandigan this shift. She had walked the 8th and 12th floors hours earlier and hadn’t noticed the air conditioning out.
As she passed the Astrophysics Department Office and rounded the corner, she noticed that the door to the faculty lounge was ajar. Even as she instinctively reached down and turned off her two-way radio she smiled. There would be no intruder in the faculty lounge of the Astrophysics Department at 3:00 on a Sunday morning. Someone had obviously left the door open when leaving on Friday.
She pushed open the door, stepped into the lounge and flipped the light switch. She frowned when the room remained dark. The air conditioning and interior room lights must be on the same defective circuit. Maybe she should radio Maintenance after all. Any electrical problem presented a risk of fire. Surprising that the hallway lights were unaffected.
She pulled out her long black flashlight with her right hand and slid the button forward. The beam played across the lounge and caught an orange stepladder open in the middle of the room. The ceiling tile above it had been pushed aside exposing the crawl space with its tangle of wires and piping. A stale stench from the opening assaulted her nostrils. Maintenance must have already started to investigate the problem. Probably they had left it for Monday. She aimed her flashlight around the rest of the room and was about to back out and close the door when she saw what looked like a shoe protruding from behind a leather couch against the side wall.
Without thinking she commanded, “All right, stand up and step out here. Let’s see some identification.”
As soon as the instinctive words were out of her mouth she regretted her decision. Even though it was probably a student playing God-knows-what-prank, she realized that she should have stepped out of the room, closed the door, and radioed for help. If she were a District Police Officer she would have done that. But of course if she were a District Officer she would have had a gun. Her whole body tensed.
The crouching figure slowly rose up and stepped out. Yolanda Jackson relaxed when the figure turned toward her, caught in the flashlight beam.
“I still need some identification,” she rasped, trying to keep her voice stern. “What are you doing here?”
The figure stepped toward Yolanda and smiled. She never felt a thing. As if in slow motion she saw the figure’s right hand reach toward her through her jittering flashlight beam, and she looked down at her left side just above her belt. A dark stain was already spreading over her uniform shirt. She tried to turn the flashlight back on herself but her hand went numb. She heard the flashlight clatter to the floor. The last thing she saw before her vision faded was the light beam stumbling across the far wall as the flashlight rolled away from her. She felt herself losing consciousness and thought she was falling. She tried to reach out with her left hand and was grateful that someone caught her under her arms. She thought of Jamal’s baseball game just four days earlier. She arrived in the second inning after he had already batted and gotten a hit. She thought it pointless to die to cover up some silly prank. She vaguely heard, rather than felt, her black shoes being dragged across the floor and she felt as though she were being lifted up. Then everything faded to oblivion.
Chapter 1
Monday, June 22, 2026
The tower clock in the Brandigan Applied Sciences Building was striking six as Paul deVere stared in the retinal scan on his dashboard, starting the car. He gripped the steering wheel–steering wheels gave him a feel of control, a solidity the joystick didn’t have.
He’d learned to drive on a steering wheel car, as had many men of his generation, and still liked its feel. That was really why he’d bought the new 2026 Ford Phaser, it was one of the few cars that still offered the steering wheel option. He could even remember driving a manual transmission, but you couldn’t find those any more than you could find tail fins.
“An old guy’s car,” his wife laughed on the day he bought it.
“Screw you,” he’d muttered, but not loudly enough so she might think he was offering. That the steering wheel prevented her from using his car was all to the good. Besides, at 53, with thinning hair and a slight paunch, wasn’t he entitled to an old guy’s car?
He nosed out of the MIT Department of Astrophysics parking lot and onto Charles Street. He had to catch himself from turning left across the bridge, as he usually did after work, and turned right instead, heading home toward Concord. Just past the statue dedicated to the Glorious American Communist Revolution, he turned right onto Massachusetts Avenue and continued west. The statue was one of the few concessions the autonomous Northeast District (formerly New England, New York and Pennsylvania) allowed the American Soviet government.
He flipped the switch under the dash to activate the tracking sensor. His friend and fellow Astrophysics professor, Lewis Ginter, had invented it. “Never hurts to be too careful,” Ginter had said. “No reason the bastards should know more than they have to.”
He listened for a few seconds but didn’t hear a steady beeping. No tracking of his GPS. Good.
There wasn’t any particular reason it would be tracked, except that Paul deVere was one of the top astrophysicists in the Northeast District,
and hence of general interest to the Party leaders in Vodkaville. Vodkaville was slang for Yeltsengrad, the Soviets’ new name for Minneapolis. It had been designated the new capital of the American S.S.R. Nobody in the Northeast District called it anything but Vodkaville, of course. Nobody who’d been alive in America before the Second Revolution called it anything but Vodkaville either.
Sometimes he was tracked, and on those days he was careful to follow his routine until the tracking stopped. There was no rhyme or reason to it. He was rarely tracked heading west toward his home. Once though, when he had left early to pick Grace up from crew practice, the sensor had beeped all the way.
His position at MIT afforded him time to pursue his own research. The work he and Lewis had been doing fell under the general area of his expertise, so nobody raised an eyebrow when they talked about mechanized phase shift adjusters and chronologically precise altimeters.
He left Route 2 at exit 56 and steered the Phaser toward the Hanscom Housing Project–formerly Hanscom Air Force Base when the United States had had an air force, heck when there had been a United States–and headed up Route 4. Route 2 was more direct, but he often took this detour and assumed it would cause no untoward suspicion. Besides, he was early and wanted to kill enough time to let the summer sun dip further.
All in all, deVere felt he’d been almost divinely placed for Project Intervention. If he believed in God he would have, that is. His grandfather had believed in God, but that was before the Second Revolution. Gramps had tried to explain why he believed in God to young Paul, who listened out of respect. But even as a middle school student he couldn’t bring himself to believe in anything so unscientific.
“What proof do you have?” the thirteen year old had defiantly challenged his grandfather. “What proof is there of God?”
It had been a cold, drizzly November afternoon. Paul and his grandfather stood in the family’s wood frame dairy barn while sleet pelted the sheet-metal roof. Paul’s grandfather had just finished locking their small herd of Jerseys into the milking stations. The animals stood patiently munching feed.
“Proof?” Alphonse deVere asked, pausing in his work of attaching the milking machine. He studied his grandson with a kind gaze before indicating the waiting bovines. “What proof is there of a cow?” he asked.
Paul smirked, suddenly confident that he had won the day. Obviously, his grandfather had no logical response, and so spat out the first thing that had come to mind. From that day forward Paul had remained triumphantly atheistic, secure in his scientific beliefs. Besides, he often told himself, under the new regime it didn’t pay to be religious.
Paul consulted the tracker again a mile before the critical turnoff to Lexington. No tracking. He eased up to allow a truck to pass. He hugged the truck around the bend, obscuring his license plate from any roadside cameras.
At The Patriot’s Coffee Shop he pulled off the road and into the gravel parking lot. The diner was located at the site of the former Museum of Our National Heritage, within sight of the Munroe Tavern. The parking lot was empty save for one rusting Volvo, which he assumed belonged to the proprietor. The shop was ostensibly named after the region’s professional football team, but deVere knew better.
As he swung in through the glass doors the shop appeared devoid of customers. The attendant was wiping the Formica counter and barely looked up. DeVere grabbed a Boston Globe from the stand next to the door before draping one leg over a stool and settling down.
“Coffee, regular.”
The man nodded and retreated to the coffee machine at the end of the counter.
“Where’s Ralph tonight?” deVere asked.
“Sox game.”
DeVere flipped past the front page headline exposing more fraud on Vodkaville’s contribution to the Big Dig and unfolded the sports section. He didn’t know this counter guy, and there was no benefit in reading the article in front of him. He would read it later.
The man returned with the coffee. “Good article on the Big Dig,” the clerk said, nonchalantly indicating the front page lying open on the counter. “Vodkaville is really screwing this one up.”
DeVere glanced at the sports section headline, “Sox Home for Eight Game Stand,” and ignored the bait.
“So many people think this is their year,” deVere said neutrally.
The man scoffed and moved back, grabbed a burger from the freezer, and threw it down on the grill. It began sizzling immediately.
“If that paper didn’t have the best damn sports department in the District it would have been shut down years ago,” he said loudly.
“Everyone talks about how good it is but they’re always way too optimistic on the Sox,” deVere answered.
“It’s only a matter of time before Vodkaville shuts down the Globe. The way they discourage it only makes it more popular.”
The man flipped the burger before strolling out from behind the counter to the booths along the outside wall.
“You decided, ma’am?” he asked.
DeVere swiveled quickly. A lone elderly woman sat hunched low in one of the booths, sideways to the counter.
DeVere swore softly. He had been certain when he had walked in that no one was in the shop. Of course, she was sitting so damn low.
The woman kept her head down and hesitated before answering flatly, “Cheese steak sandwich. No onions.”
DeVere turned back. She seemed so…familiar. And the voice. He shrugged and flipped to the inside page on the Sox story. Late June and only two games behind the Yankees whose aging ball club was beset with a rash of injuries. Maybe this WAS the year.
The attendant threw shaved meat on the grill and began pushing it around with a spatula. As if reading deVere’s mind he said, “People are saying this might be their year but I don’t know. It still hurts thinking about what happened back in ’10.”
DeVere cringed at the mention of that World Series game seven in Boston. He had been there, right behind third base. In the bottom of the ninth Polito had been what, thirty feet from home plate? From his seat he had seen the Sox players erupting from their dugout and pouring onto the field to welcome home the winning run as the ball rolled to the left field wall.
DeVere shuddered and changed the subject. “Aren’t there usually more customers this time of day?”
The man shrugged. “Search me. I usually work in Boston but Ralph called me this morning when he got tix. Asked me to fill in.” He gestured out to the parking lot.
“Didn’t even know if the old bird would make it,” he said. “I’ve only filled in here once before.”
“Didn’t realize he was a Sox fan.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
DeVere grunted. “You have trouble getting parts for that?” he asked, indicating the Volvo.
“Naw,” the man said. “There’s a junkyard in upstate New York that has everything for old Volvos. It’s the newer ones where you can’t get parts. Not like the old days.”
DeVere turned back to the Arts section and began reading movie reviews. He checked his watch, and ordered more coffee. If he ate, Valerie would wonder why he wasn’t hungry when he got home. Telling her he had stopped at a coffee shop would be like telling her he had gone to a bar with Ginter. He didn’t want another fight, not tonight.
DeVere stayed at the coffee shop until dusk. Lewis had told him that near sunset, at the end of a long summer workday, the roadside eyes were at their weakest and their human monitors less attentive. At night the monitors would change shifts and be at their highest vigilance. Vodkaville boasted 24-hour vigilant surveillance, but Lewis had assured him that was to scare people.
“The technology they’ve got in those is Soviet junk,” Ginter had scoffed. “And the people are worse. It’s all just one big freaking sight deterrent.”
DeVere paid for his coffee with cash, walked outside without looking at the booths, got back in his Ford, and checked the tracking sensor again. A slight beep, then nothing. He’d asked Lewis if the trackers could s
omehow detect the sensor.
“Haven’t yet,” Lewis had told him.
“But could they?” deVere had pressed.
“If they can, I don’t know about it, and I know 99% of what they’re capable of,” Ginter had assured him.
DeVere often wondered about that other one percent.
He left it on for thirty seconds until he was confident he wasn’t being tracked. He pulled out of the parking lot and drove the final few miles through the main square of Lexington. As he passed by, he glanced–as he did every time-at the town green. The monument had long since been removed but no marker was necessary. It was here, 251 years earlier, that the town’s colonists had mustered on a cold April morning. He stared at the stately homes that lined the common and wondered how many of the current residents would ever do so.