by Mark Wandrey
“I’m completely confident in what I believe,” said Victor.
“So am I,” said Duke with complete conviction.
“I have more news, not really good news though. Your friend, Billy Harper, the cop, sent an e-mail. He says he is under investigation and is being followed. He cannot come here again and is concerned that he may have been followed here.”
“We need to get out of here, then!” Duke said. Victor looked sad but he shook his head.
“We are done with this place. Pick two-dozen of the faithful; tell them we are going to move to that mission on 84th street for now. They can network with others.” Kadru nodded her head and turned to leave. Duke stayed.
“Our time is running short, I think we need to act,” his big friend said.
“Soon, but not for some time. We need to work within the system, continue to build our strength, and bide our time.”
“Ok,” Duke said and left as well. Something in the manner of the big man made Victor suspicious. He dressed and went to help with the move. Before long the sheer difficulty of the task overwhelmed his concerns and he’d completely forgotten the way Duke had acted. It was late in the afternoon before he noticed both Duke and Gabriel were gone, as were many of the faithful.
“Do you know where everyone is?” he asked Paul and Mary who were busy packing supplies into a donated moving truck.
“No idea,” they both told him. He shrugged and went back to work. All afternoon he was haunted by a nagging suspicion that something was going on.
Mindy opened the e-mail with a sense of dread but was quickly rewarded with the answer she'd been hoping for. “Come to us and we will talk about these matters,” Kadru had written earlier that morning. “Victor wishes to meet you, Sky Watcher, to see how we can cooperate to make the Portal to Heaven available to all the people. I would also like to talk about what it is you see in the Portal, and what you believe.”
Mindy wrote a quick reply saying she would tell Kadru once she made arrangements to travel to New York. She snatched up the laptop that Skinner had given her and headed downtown.
In the reception office of the FBI, she asked for Special Agent Smith. The man there looked at her strangely before answering. “There is no Special Agent Smith in this field office,” he said simply.
“Please check the duty log for me,” she asked patiently. The agent looked annoyed but typed in the name anyway. By the look on his face she knew that Skinner had made the arrangements once again.
“I see now, Ms. Patoy. Would you follow me, please?” They took a different route through the labyrinth of offices this time and arrived at an unmarked door. The agent held it open for her. “Please wait inside.”
Mindy stepped into the room and the door instantly closed behind her. She spun around and grabbed the handle just a second too late as the lock clicked before she could turn the handle. This wasn’t the plush meeting room she’d found herself in before, just plain white walls, mirrored on one side, a metal table, and two chairs. This was an interrogation room. “What the hell is going on here?!” she yelled through the closed door. Turning around she spotted a camera aimed at her, its red “active” light glowing. “Why am I being detained?” No one answered her call. “God damn it, who is in charge here!” she yelled and kicked over the chair nearest to her. It rebounded off the wall and came to rest at her feet with a loud clatter but no other effect was forthcoming.
Disgusted, she righted the chair and dropped into it. She placed the computer on the table and opened it up. Using the wireless network card, she tried to get an outside connection. Not surprisingly, there was no response. With a sly grin she activated the networking wizard and had it search for connections. Three wireless networks were operating in range of her computer, all encrypted.
With a snort Mindy set to work. Breaking a sixteen-bit encryption key was nothing compared to sorting millions of stars for a match. It only took two minutes to get access to one of the three local FBI wireless networks. Five seconds after that the door opened.
“Okay Ms. Patoy, you can stop that now. We are officially impressed.” She didn’t look up; instead she started looking around the FBI network for the external gateways. While her encryption code-breaker worked, she'd penned a quick mayday e-mail to Leo Skinner. All that remained was a way to send it. “I insist you cease and desist this illegal penetration of a government computer system. It is a felony under USC 19, 125.41 and cause for you to be arrested.”
“I have been detained with no probable cause and not read my rights, allowed to contact a lawyer, or informed why I am being detained.” Someone on the other side of the one-way glass rapped for attention. The man who had been speaking reached over Mindy’s shoulder and deftly powered off the computer and slid it away from her. Mindy made no attempt to stop him.
“You are not under arrest at this time, Ms. Patoy, but we do have a few questions. Not the least of which is what are you doing here today, and who is it you are coming here to communicate with?”
“I’d have to say that is none of your business on both accounts and insist you both release me and give me back my computer.”
“This is government property.”
“It was given to me as a gift on a previous visit.”
“Really? Who was it that gave you this expensive piece of hardware? That person should be brought up on charges for stealing government property. Or should you be the one charged?”
“I didn’t get her name. It was a female special agent, black, and she escorted me to the conference room last time I was here.”
“Did she give you a signed receipt? That would be procedure. While not keeping this black female agent from being brought up on charges, it would at least keep you from being prosecuted as an accomplice.”
“What do you want of me, Agent Noname, and are you intending to talk to my back the entire time?”
The man came around to face her and took the chair on the other side of the table. “Bureau Chief Edward Masciler, Ms. Patoy, it is good to meet you. Now, if you would be so good as to inform me who you are here to converse with?”
“Good to meet you as well, but you can just forget it. Don’t you know this information yourself, or can anyone call up and demand to use secure connections?”
“Hardly. The request came through ‘unusual’ channels. Unusual but powerful.”
“Well, I suggest you contact those channels and make your inquiries because I am not telling you anything.”
“You are forcing me to book you on charges of theft of government property.”
“That’s fine, give me my call.”
“I can hold you for up to seventy-two hours without charging you, Ms. Patoy. Considering that you are being less than cooperative, I think it might be the best option.” She narrowed her eyes, trying to decide if he was bluffing. Then she decided she didn’t care. Seventy-two hours from her life would not mean much either way. After that they would have to give her that phone call and she would unleash legal hell on Mr. Masciler.
The tiny cellular phone hanging on agent Masciler’s belt rang for attention. He stood and moved away from her before answering it. As soon as he’d said hello he became quite animated, his bravado giving way to rage, then to something else. After a moment he hung up and came over to her.
“Miss Patoy, will you please come with me?”
“I don't see as I have a choice,” she said and got up to follow him. She was certain to take her “gift” computer with her.
Agent Masciler took her by the arm, an indignity that she bore without comment, and led her out into the office. A short distance away he opened another doorway and gently urged her inside, closing the door behind her. This was a conference room identical to the one she had used on her first visit. There was no one waiting for her, no camera and no one-way glass. The scrambled telephone on the ornate wooden conference table was patiently blinking one of its lights.
Mindy shrugged and sat down in front of the phone. She put th
e computer down and picked up the receiver. “Mindy Patoy,” she said.
“You remember how to scramble?” asked the familiar voice of her longtime friend Leo Skinner. She laughed with relief and said she did. He gave her the codes at each step and in no time they were talking with that curious echo effect.
“I got your message about ten minutes ago, I'm so sorry. Did they give you the run around?”
"Run around? Well, they tried to arrest me, if that counts."
“What?!”
”Yep, let me tell you what happened.”
“It’s getting out of hand,” Skinner said after she'd told her tale. It was hard to tell over the tinny sounding line but Mindy thought she heard worry in his voice. “Were you able to get an answer to that puzzle?”
“Not yet.”
“Damn, I was hoping that was the reason you wanted this meeting. What is it you wanted to talk about then?”
“The price of my discovery of that answer,” she told him coolly.
“I though you said you didn’t have an answer yet.”
“I don’t yet. But I do have my first clue.”
“Most professional astronomers are above base desires.”
“What gave you the impression that I was interested in something as simple as money?” Quiet answered from the other side for some time.
“What is it that you want?”
“To see the Portal, to watch it in operation, to study the stars directly through it? I do my best work on the spot, and to get a chance to be one of the ones to go through.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that easy. This is a highly classified operation, as I’m sure you have figured out. There are only a few people ‘in the bag’ as we call it, and a few more crawl in every day. There is an NSA sector chief riding the whole thing real hard. He had a cow when I let myself in without being invited, and I’m afraid he’d have a whole herd if you came in out of the blue.”
“Well, then you have a problem. You see, I’m working on the new SETI web page today. ‘Alien Intelligence Found in Central Park, Government Intelligence Still Missing and Unaccounted For’ is the headline.”
“Cute.”
“You like it too? Some of my best work.”
“You wouldn’t do that to me, with as big a risk as I’ve taken.”
There was a tone of betrayal in his voice that made Mindy feel shame deep down inside. But she continued onward anyway. “Don’t you bet on it. This kind of bullshit attitude is what got my career ruined. I’ve already told the director of SETI, and he’s mighty excited. Let me put the pieces together for you. We receive a signal from outer space seven years ago. We’ve only just discovered the basic structure to that signal. A couple months ago a formerly friendly stellar neighbor of ours called LM-245 suddenly goes off course, very dangerously off course. Then these Portals appear. They are a way for us to escape off the planet, only we don’t know where they go. I would humbly suggest you get me ‘in the bag’, if you want my help.”
“Sounds an awful lot like blackmail to me.”
“Dragging me into this and getting me arrested by the FBI sounds an awful lot like entrapment to me!”
“How dare you, young lady? I’ve been in this business since long before you were born!”
“I respect that, but you must also respect the situation we are all in and realize that if I do not look out for mine and SETI’s own interests, no one else will. So what will it be?”
“Come to New York. I’ll give you a number to call when you get here, and we’ll work out the details then.”
An agent she had never seen before met Mindy outside the door and escorted her out. There was no sign of agent Masciler, and for that she was grateful. As she drove quickly back to Renton, she thought about what she was going to tell Harold. He was filling a cup of coffee when she walked in and Mindy came up short.
“You’re going there, aren’t you?” he accused her.
“I have to. I need to see it for myself. That signal is linked with the Portal, and it changed my life, for better or worse.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Get everything I have collected ready to publish. It’s our leverage to make them let me, and ultimately us, into the inner circle. They may have found the Portal, but we got the phone call before the delivery man ever showed up.”
“I guess we don’t have anything else to do. Money is starting to dry up again. I think people might be figuring out what’s going on, either that or it’s fear of the asteroid.”
“Keep working on the signal.”
“Why bother? It’s like trying to decipher a telegram informing you that aunt Matilda is coming to visit, after she had already arrived, and left.”
“You might be right, but if you can break the code it could still prove useful.”
“Just as our backers say, you are very convincing. We’ll keep working on the signal. There's enough funding for that. We even have a few new hints of the signal origins!”
“Awesome,” she said, but already her thoughts were turning to New York and what she would find when she got there.
As soon as Mindy could gracefully get away she used her new laptop computer to book the flight that evening. Next she sent an e-mail to her mysterious contact at the Followers of the Avatar and passed along her itinerary. The computer communicated via its wireless card and the transaction was completed in minutes.
Like
most people who used wireless portable devices, Mindy didn't bother watching what sort of connections the machine used as long as it did what she wanted it to. She didn’t notice a quick communication session that took place after her transactions were done. It happened in the seconds before she shut the machine down and headed to her apartment to pack. In three hours she was snoring at thirty thousand feet.
April 24
Early morning in Portal City found Mark Volant in his trailer having already been up for hours. He picked up a file that had been left in his inbox the previous night. It was clear that they were losing containment on the Portal. The story of a crashed satellite had lost credibility weeks ago, and the local press was hot on the story of something big. The group called the Followers of the Avatar was new to him, and the file told a disturbing story. He was stunned by the detail of the drawings from the website. They had the Portal down to a T. More important were the drawings of the alien 'Avatar' they claimed to have delivered it. He’d heard a couple descriptions and seen a police composite drawing but this was much better. The website picture was so detailed it seemed almost alive. If these creatures were on the other side of the Portal, why hadn’t they shown themselves to the team yet?
Local containment breaches could be dealt with, national or international ones could not. In the file were several pages detailing a breach in progress. Useful information could be gleaned, even though the cost seemed far too high. However, if the strings could be cut, the information could be harvested at only the cost of one additional person in the bag. Breaking those strings would mean getting messy, not that he hadn’t gotten his hands dirty on plenty of occasions. But never domestically, and not quite to this scale.
He signed the order with surprising ease and scanned it off in time for lunch. That onerous task finished, Volant hopped down from his trailer and headed toward the lunch wagon. His thoughts were on a ham sandwich and the delicious apple pie. That was probably why the first two popping gunshots didn’t register in his conscious mind. There was a screech of tires followed by a long string of shots that brought him around in a snap. The alarm siren went off an instant later.
Volant set off at a dead run for the source of the disturbance. A few yards from his trailer he ran into a group of scientists standing around with confused looks on their faces. “It's an alarm!” he yelled at them as he approached. They looked even more confused. “Someone is attacking the compound. Get into a secure area!”
He slowed just enough to shove one of them in the direction of a security trailer before l
eaving them behind. “I hope Osgood has enough common sense to keep his egghead down,” he growled as he ran.
Volant came around one of the huge hydrogen fuel cell generator trailers and into view of the West 97th Street checkpoint just as two soldiers dropped to their knees and opened fire. Their M-4 carbines spoke in short, controlled bursts as they stitched a rapidly approaching NY City bus. The windshield was punched through over and over as rounds found there mark, still more bullets whining off the grill and bumper.
“Get the tires!” Volant screamed at the men when they paused to slap home fresh magazines. He was still a good fifty yards away but he'd made himself heard. The soldier in charge, a sergeant, nodded and yelled the order to the man next to him.
The next burst of automatic fire tore up the road around the front tires. Volant had his sidearm out as he ran but he knew he was still too far away to be effective.
Both front tires were hit repeatedly, deflating with popping sounds and making the bus much harder to steer. The driver was not visible and Volant wondered if there was one. Then the bus tried to swerve back on course only to slam into one of the phalanx of concrete barriers that flanked the entrance with a thunderous crash. A shower of glass and plastic flew into the air, toppling the first barricade and bringing the bus to a shuddering stop on top of the second.
“What started this?” Volant demanded as he came to a stop behind the two men who were again reloading their weapons. The sergeant pointed to an upturned and burning cab a dozen yards away.
“That hack tried to run the barricade. When we stepped out to challenge the driver, the guy capped a couple rounds at us. Per the ROE, we lit it up.” Volant nodded his head; he'd written the Rules of Engagement for this OP.
"Let’s find out what or who was driving this thing..."
Volant reached for the double doors and was immediately sent sprawling as the doors were slammed open. A man leaped from the doorway and raced back toward the street. “Freeze!” yelled one of the soldiers; “Don’t move!” cried another one. The man was running away from them in an erratic pattern and their training said that you never fire at a fleeing man’s back. Volant rolled to a sitting position, and he had no such compunction. His .40 caliber Sig Sauer P250 came up into a sitting Weaver stance. He took careful aim and double-tapped the man in the small of the back.