Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  A front had come through after midnight, sweeping the sky clean and leaving the day bright and clear. The trees bent low over the road, their leaves still heavy with the overnight rain. Jon had put the Corvette’s semi-rigid top down, so they drove drinking in the lush scents and melodious bird-calls of a hill-country summer morning.

  Marianna stretched sensually. On a day like this, all things seemed possible. Mycroft would furnish whatever key Jon needed to solve the mystery of Antipode. CROM would crush Grishin’s nefarious schemes. She and Jon would . . .

  God, she felt good! Jetlag, Jon, and a not exactly restful night had left Marianna in a fey and frisky mood. She stroked the back of Jon’s neck, ran a finger along the line of his jaw. All the while Route 421’s two-lane blacktop was winding through somnolent Piedmont forest on its way into the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

  She leaned over to run the tip of her tongue around the rim of his ear.

  “Now,” she breathed, “tell me what you’ve got this Mycroft guy working on.”

  Yuri Vissarionovich Geladze was not a happy camper this fine midsummer morning. Not happy with having spent the night in transit. Nor with the mission objective: return them. Both of them.

  Together with the rest of his striketeam, Yuri had been left to cool his heels in the lobby of the main GEI Systems Research building. He looked out on the green, sun-streaked lawns of Grishin International’s Raleigh-Durham campus, and subjected them to a withering glower.

  His yawn spoiled the effect.

  Yuri stood and stretched, still stiff from over eleven hours in transit. Departure at three-thirty in the morning, Azores time. Nearly three hours on the helicopter just to get to Horta. Then another eight-hour flight on the GEI corporate jet. Shouldn’t have taken more than six, six and a half hours to cross the Atlantic, but the pilot’d had to deviate far to the south, into the Gulf of Mexico, there to enter the old “Calle Corridor”—the air-route long favored by Colombian cocaine runners for its spotty radar coverage and corruptible Floridian officialdom. Finally touching down on the private airstrip at ten A.M. local. He’d managed to snatch no more than two, three hours sleep in all that time.

  And his cast was itching again, devil take it!

  Yuri glared at the timestamp over the reception desk. Half past ten already. What the devil was keeping Bondarenko? He had disappeared shortly after they’d arrived—off seeing about something he called a “Denial of Service” attack. Something to do with technology.

  How was it possible even to speak of technology in the same breath as attack? Technology was for men who kept their consciences as clean as their fingernails. When technology reached the point where men ceased to die from a bullet through the brain, then it might be time to take notice.

  Attack, on the other hand—now that was something Yuri knew something about.

  Yuri did not much care for abstractions. He thought not about attacks in general, but about one attack in particular. The attack they would be launching within the hour.

  And, even thinking about that attack, he did not picture the overall evolution of action and counteraction. Instead, he focused on one moment in the ebb and flow of the battle to come.

  The cast was driving him mad! If he only had something, some sort of implement that he could slip beneath its polyurethaned fiberglass to scratch this ferocious itch. Even a pencil might do. He scanned the empty, antiseptic lobby again. Nothing!

  Yuri grimaced and returned to his contemplation of that single, anticipated instant—the moment he and Marianna “Peterson” met once again.

  There was an itch he could scratch.

  He frowned. That was the problem with the mission parameters. What would happen once he had that bitch in his crosshairs was not covered by his instructions. Not at all.

  Quite the contrary, Grishin had expressly ordered him to return the woman to Rusalka alive and unharmed. There had followed a long-winded explanation from Bondarenko as to why they needed her and her companion back aboard before the final phase could begin. Yuri had only half listened. Much too complicated. He preferred things simple.

  This was going to be simple. In the confusion of the action, an opportunity would no doubt present itself. If not, Yuri would create one. Either way, the bitch would die, and by his hand.

  This would make trouble, Yuri foresaw. But perhaps not so much trouble. Bondarenko would still have the other one, the man, for whatever scheme the devious little weasel was concocting. And, once Peterson was dead, Grishin would put it behind him. Too much else going on to waste time crying over one dead woman, and a spy at that.

  For the first time that sunny August morning, Yuri smiled. No, this would not make much trouble at all.

  The scrub woods of the Piedmont lay behind them now. The air had turned cooler as the ’vette climbed through transition forest toward the higher elevations. Still plenty of oak and hickory and tulip trees, but increasingly interspersed with groves of northern hardwoods and the occasional stand of spruce or fir.

  Knox was beginning to regret having shared his hunch with Marianna.

  “That’s it?” she was saying. “I flew us all the way out here for this, this Tunguska thingee?”

  He downshifted as the Corvette hairpinned into yet another of the Blue Ridge Highway’s countless switchbacks. “I warned you it was a crazy idea.”

  “There’s crazy and there’s crazy, Jon. This is just plain bonkers! Why would Grishin give a damn about a hundred-year-old meteor strike? Why would anyone?”

  Knox sighed. “You’re not listening. It wasn’t a meteor. It was . . . something else.”

  “I am listening. I’m not hearing anything worth listening to. If it wasn’t a meteor, what was it?”

  “Well, there’s no dearth of theories: a comet, a hunk of antimatter, reactor meltdown in a nuclear-powered starship, the list goes on and on.”

  “Starship? As in, like, extraterrestrials?”

  Knox nodded. “Would’ve had to have been. Humanity barely had heavier-than-air flight back in 1908, much less space travel.”

  “CROM doesn’t do aliens; you want the FBI. And I wasn’t asking what everybody else thought it was. You tell me what you think it was.”

  “Let’s save that till we’re there. Not much further now.” The dashboard GPS showed they were approaching the turnoff.

  He slowed and eased them in through the break in the guardrail, past the Keep Out sign, down a brief stretch of blacktop so overgrown that branches screeched against the car’s sides. Then they were bumping along on dirt track, paralleling a deep gorge being cut ever deeper by a tumultuous mountain stream. Their way led through sunlight and shadow cast by tattered wisps of cloud grazing the mountaintop, at times almost whiting out the blue of the sky. Flowing in around the windshield, the misty air was redolent of bee balm and the summer’s last Catawba rhododendrons.

  Marianna broke the silence. “So he’s really got a photographic memory?”

  “Mycroft? You bet. Why else do you think he moved way the hell out here?” He pointed across the gorge and up. Through intermittent gaps in the leaf cover, the dark shape of Mycroft’s demesne could be glimpsed, wreathed in pale tendrils of fog.

  “It’s very beautiful, Jon.”

  “I suppose. But it’s not the scenery that does it for Mycroft. It’s, well . . . things change slowly up here on the Blue Ridge. Some of these little off-road towns aren’t much different from the way they were back before the turn of the last century.”

  “So, less change, less stimulation, means less new stuff to remember?”

  “Basically. He’s afraid too much trivia and he’ll overload his indexing capacity. When he worked out of the head office, people were always giving him stuff to read just so they could call it up later. He was getting to be sort of this informational dumping ground. Nowadays he only gets assigned to special projects.”

  “Like this wild goose chase?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, not really listening. He was looking up a
gain.

  Weathertop was built on what the locals called a “bald,” one of those grassy summits peculiar to the Southern Blue Ridge. Balds are so named because, to the bafflement of botanists, no trees will grow on them. In result, Weathertop enjoyed an unobstructed three hundred sixty degree panorama. Maybe Mycroft was a closet scenery buff after all.

  Almost there, just around one last bend.

  Knox had only visited here once before in the five years of Mycroft’s self-imposed exile, but it was all coming back. Now, roll to a halt in front of the crossing gate.

  Marianna laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I thought that business about not lowering the drawbridge till ten in the morning was just a figure of speech.”

  “Ten-thirty,” Knox corrected, peering through the haze to where the steel-framed drawbridge stood, still raised, on the other side of the gorge. “And, no, metaphors are risky business where Mycroft is concerned—too many of them turn out to be true. Hop out of the car now, and stand still for the scan.”

  The mists that gave the Blue Ridge mountains their pastel hues, and their name, seemed to cling especially close around Weathertop’s carriage entrance. Knox watched a shadow separate itself from swirling billows of particulate fog and move toward the car.

  “Jonathan, welcome.” Mycroft’s voice echoed off walls faced with dripping cedar shakes. “And this must be the special client who summons us to duty at the crack of dawn.” Little more than a shape in the mist, but it sounded like Mycroft.

  Knox looked closer. Uh-huh, he could just make out the pattern of the ornately carved front doors showing through the silhouette’s chest.

  He raised his voice. “Cut the crap, Mycroft. Turn off the doorman and let us in.”

  The figure abruptly vanished.

  “Real-time, full-motion hologram,” he explained to a startled Marianna. “He’s got a fog-generator built into the entryway, see? That’s for times like now, when the real thing isn’t thick enough to sustain a solidlooking projection.”

  “Too weird!” She was still staring at the spot where the image had been. “What’s it for?”

  “Oh, stray backwoodsmen, lost hunters, other folks he’d rather not deal with in person. Shouldn’t include us. Not today.” He pounded on the heavy door. “Hey, Mycroft, open up!”

  With a muted hum, the door swung open to reveal Weathertop’s post-and-beam greatroom.

  Oaken timbers, reclaimed from the ruins of some antebellum mill, played counterpoint to a late-model plasma-screen monitor occupying half of one wall. The whole front of the room was window doors giving out on a broad expanse of cedar deck. Beyond its parapets, range after range of hazy blue-green mountains gradually blended into the azure of the sky. The vista was dominated by the six-thousand-foot crags of Grandfather Mountain twelve miles away to the southwest.

  Their host—the flesh-and-blood person this time, not a holographic image—was still seated at his console, resetting the wards he’d lifted long enough to allow them entry. That done, he rose and walked towards them.

  Knox noted with relief that Mycroft had dressed for the occasion. Which is to say he had dressed, period. In place of the usual ratty old bathrobe, his gaunt frame was decked out in jeans and a threadbare LL Bean workshirt. The gleam of a smile flickered in Mycroft’s dark face, but couldn’t dispel the impression of fatigue. And of something else.

  Mycroft got to within maybe ten feet of his guests and ground to a halt. His eyes darted around the room, looking everywhere except at Marianna, finally coming to rest on Knox’s face. That tentative smile again, followed by a release of breath shaped into a greeting: “Jonathan. Hello.”

  Knox closed the distance remaining between them and clasped his friend’s hand. He was surprised to feel it trembling. “Mycroft? You okay?”

  Mycroft swallowed. “I must apologize, Jonathan. I don’t entertain many visitors these days. I had no idea it would induce such a reaction. Please bear with me, I’ll be all right in a moment.”

  “Sure, sure you will. Just take it easy, okay?”

  Knox felt a tug on his arm. Oh, right—the formalities. “Marianna, I’d like you to meet—”

  “No, no, not now,” she whispered. “We’ve got to move outside his critical radius first.”

  Knox stared at her a moment; then he placed it. “Critical radius” was a measure of how close one wild animal could approach another without triggering a fight-or-flight reaction. It varied from species to species. By the way she was eyeing the couch on the other side of the greatroom, Marianna had pegged the safe distance for Homo sapiens Mycrofti at six or seven yards out.

  “Whoa!” he said. Trust Marianna to conceptualize every situation in terms of attack and defense. But she didn’t know Mycroft. “Hold on a minute.”

  For Mycroft had adopted a familiar stance: head inclined, eyes closed, a thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of his nose.

  After a few moments Knox asked, “Better?”

  Mycroft opened his eyes, expelled a breath, and nodded. More or less back to normal . . . or what passed for normal, given an IQ in the one-eighties.

  “Marianna,” Knox picked up where he’d left off, “I’d like to have you meet Finley Laurence, Archon’s Senior Vice President for Intractables,” adding, “Don’t ask” under his breath.

  He turned to Mycroft. “Finley, this is Marianna Bonaventure, Deputy Director of CROM Reacquisition.” He didn’t bother expanding acronyms or organizational affiliations: that had all been in last night’s encrypted email.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Laurence,” Marianna said, her voice low and soft, her eyes directed downward at the wide-plank flooring. Very nonthreatening.

  She needn’t have bothered. Mycroft shook himself, walked up to her and held out his hand. “Call me Mycroft, please, my dear. Everyone does.”

  “Marianna,” she said, taking the hand gingerly, as though mistrustful of this sudden transformation.

  “I never forget a face, Marianna,” Mycroft said, releasing her with what looked like reluctance, “but I will take special pleasure in remembering yours.”

  Knox choked on a laugh. He’d never seen Mycroft’s courtly side before.

  “Thank you, uh, Mycroft,” Marianna said. “Are you sure you’re all right now?”

  “Much better, thank you. A little concentration works wonders to lower the pulse rate. If the mind is calm, the body must follow. Enough so, at least, that I can properly welcome you to Weathertop.” A sweep of Mycroft’s arm took in the house and the panorama beyond. “A name perhaps more than usually appropriate, under the circumstances.”

  “Lord of the Rings.” Marianna picked up without missing a beat. “The mountain where battle was first joined against the forces of darkness. Though this feels more like the refuge at Rivendell.”

  Two Tolkien references were about Knox’s limit. “Speaking of the forces of darkness, Mycroft, were you able to confirm . . .”

  “Yes, yes, Jonathan.” Mycroft sounded peeved at the interruption. “You’ll be pleased to know that your ‘guess’ was dead on. As usual.”

  “So, there is a connection? Between Galina’s Tunguska toast and Sasha’s old obsession?”

  “It took some digging, but yes—a connection called the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis. Fallen into disrepute these past thirty-odd years. No one ever followed up on it. Almost no one, I should say.”

  “What’s the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis?” Marianna wanted to know.

  “It’s this, Marianna, right here.” Mycroft crossed to his console and spoke a command. “Unless I very much miss my guess, there’s your—how do you pronounce it, Jonathan?”

  “Vurdalak.”

  The wall-filling plasma screen now held a close-up of a single page from the British journal Nature, dated September 14, 1973. A headline had been circled in red: Was the Tungus Event due to a Black Hole?

  “Oh, now, wait a minute.” Marianna shot Knox a hard look. “A black hole?”

  “I wish for all o
ur sakes that it were not,” Mycroft said. “As it happens, there is proof. Of a sort.”

  “Proof?”

  “All in good time. There’s someone you need to meet first.” Mycroft turned to his console again, spoke into its mike. “Lestrade, link Tomsk-1.”

  A videoconference window popped open on the screen. In it there appeared a man’s face. A homely, smiling face. The man smiled and tipped what looked like a cowboy hat.

  “Mr. Knox, Ms. Bonaventure, pleasure to meet you. My name’s Jack Adler.”

  32 | Doomsday Scenario

  JACK SPENT THE next fifteen minutes giving his audience of three the short course in primordial black hole physics, with emphasis on the Tunguska event. Just like around the Siberian campfire a week ago. Except here, thanks to the one called Mycroft, he could call on the 3-D simulations from his home lab as a visual aid. Those vivid sims of the first moments of creation were great for snapping undergrad classes out of the afternoon doldrums. Today, though, Jack suspected he could’ve got by with bright lights and bird shadows; his audience was hanging on his every word, focusing with an almost eerie intensity.

  Question was, were they buying it?

  The two guys, Knox and Mycroft, were at least nodding in the right places. The woman, Bonaventure, was going to be to be a harder sell. He’d seen that skeptical look before, though seldom in eyes so beautiful. Beautiful eyes that had just now begun to widen. She was staring, not at Jack, but at the simulation.

  “That! I’ve seen that before. What is that?”

  Jack paused in mid-sentence to check where the sim had got to.

  “That’s the PBH—Vurdalak, you call it?—orbiting inside the Earth. Uh, where’d you say you’d seen it?”

  “I’m sorry, but that information’s only available on a need-to-know basis.”

  Mycroft hadn’t told Jack much about this “client,” this Marianna Bonaventure. Not as much as she’d just told him with that one rapid-fire disclaimer: government, for sure. And not the National Park Service, either. Maybe some agency with enough in the way of discretionary funding to bankroll a Tunguska-II expedition?