AMPED w-2

by Douglas E. Richards

  But this situation changed quickly in college. As a physics major she was around other bright people who shared her passion: other bright people who were predominantly men. And the further she went forward in her major the greater the men outnumbered the women. The incoming class for the physics graduate program at the University of Arizona consisted of eighteen men, her, and one other woman who was now her closest friend. While many red-blooded males in physics departments around the world welcomed relationships with women who could understand their work, most had to seek relationships outside of the field. It was either that or get used to being very, very lonely. But as for Madison and her friend, they tended to get their pick of the litter.

  But she still hadn’t been happy during her first three years in graduate school. There was more to life than dating, and she had struggled to find a thesis project. Everything in cosmology these days was string theory. It was the cool kids’ table from high school translated into academia. If string theory wasn’t your thing—and it was definitely not hers—then you were a second class citizen. She found herself foundering, and there were times when she contemplated dropping out of the program with a master’s degree and going into industry.

  But then, just this year, new developments in the emerging field of gravitational wave astronomy had come along—just when she needed a new direction the most. Gravitational wave detectors had previously cost hundreds of millions of dollars, had required oscillation of the mass being detected, and their sensitivity—if one could call it that—had been laughable. But a new breed of detector had emerged. A breed that took advantage of novel theoretical principles, could be built for just a few million dollars, and had off-the-charts sensitivity.

  In fact, if anything the new technology was too sensitive, generating the equivalent of a library of congress full of data each day. If not for supercomputers capable of many trillions of operations each second nothing meaningful could have ever be extracted from the morass, unless one was looking for the Sun, which Madison was pretty sure had already been found.

  She had leaped onto this new bandwagon immediately. This powerful tool was sure to launch careers like so many bottle rockets on the 4th of July, and catapult gravitational wave astronomy to an unforeseen level of prominence in the cosmological quiver. And she was perfectly positioned to be in on the ground floor. Given the ocean of data a single detector could generate, if she used the most powerful tool of all, the one between her ears, she was confident she could find a way to make a major breakthrough.

  The U.S. physics community, having been denied the Supercoliding Superconductor—ensuring Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider would become the particle physics capital of the world—was hungry to take a leadership position in this emerging field. Centers around the country had embraced the new technology, even before all the bugs had been worked out, and once perfected, additional waves of adoption had occurred overnight. Now almost seventy percent of all detectors in operation were located in America. While this advantage wouldn’t last long, U.S. physicists couldn’t have asked for a better head start. And The University of Arizona had been in the very first wave. Madison had truly been in the right place at the right time.

  As she basked in the knowledge that her life had come together more perfectly than she could have dared to hope, her computer monitor on a desk ten feet away began blinking. The light from the full screen was vivid in the darkened room. Greg Davis groaned beside her. “You’re not going to check that, are you?”

  She smiled. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

  “I think we need a new rule. We turn off our cell phones during sex. I think we should turn of computer monitors also.”

  “But this isn’t during sex,” she pointed out. “It’s after sex.”

  “Well, given how often that false-alarm generator of yours goes off, a case of false-alarm-us interuptus is only a matter of time.”

  “And you’d like to make sure that doesn’t ever happen?”

  “Right. I mean, you wouldn’t interrupt Da Vinci while he was painting a masterpiece would you?”

  “So you’re suggesting you’re the Da Vinci of sex? Wow, really?” She rolled her eyes. “So what are you worried about Leonardo—that your brush might go limp?”

  Davis laughed. “Not at all. You just don’t want to interrupt a master at work.”

  Madison kissed him briefly and then grinned. “We could always stop having sex,” she said. “Then you’d have nothing to worry about.”

  “As great as that sounds,” he responded wryly, “I’m going to have to pass.” He shook his head and gestured toward the computer. “Go ahead. I know it’s killing you not to check it out.”

  He glanced at the clock on the end table nearest him. “We can probably catch the late movie if you’re still interested, but we’d better drag ourselves out of bed and get ready. How about if I take the first shower while you take a quick look at your data.”

  Madison had her robe on and was seated at her computer almost before he got the sentence out. Davis just shook his head and wandered into the bathroom.

  Madison’s desktop was tied into the university’s supercomputer, which sifted through the billions and billions of pages of data generated by the physics department’s detector at incomprehensible speed. For months now she had been perfecting a program that would alert her if it spotted anything truly out of the ordinary. And Davis had been right. She received several alerts each day, and each time they were false alarms. But even so, these false alarms pointed out flaws in her programming. With each one her program got a little bit tighter, her filters a little better.

  She looked at the data from a few angles, wanting to determine as quickly as possible the ordinary occurrence she had failed to take into account this time. But after several minutes of thought and study, her jaw dropped as low as it could go.

  Nothing about this occurrence looked ordinary. In fact, the data were impossible.

  “Nah,” she mumbled out loud. “Must be a glitch in the detector.”

  She ran a quick diagnostic. The detector was working perfectly. But how could that be?

  Madison Russo was checking her calculations for the third time when Greg Davis emerged from the bathroom, clean, fully clothed, and ready for a late night on the town.

  She frantically began to run other crosschecks on her data, her eyes so wide they looked unnatural.

  Davis watched her in fascination, knowing better than to interrupt—if this were even possible. He suspected he could have played a trumpet in her ear and she wouldn’t have noticed.

  After several minutes she finally turned away from the screen for just a moment and he said, “You found something big, didn’t you?”

  Madison nodded, her stunned face communicating awe—but also more than a hint of fear.

  “What is it?” he asked breathlessly.

  “Something that will change everything,” she whispered. Then, exhaling loudly, she added, “Forever.”

  13

  The JDAM penetrated the two story structure and erupted into an orange-yellow fireball nearly twice the size of the building before collapsing into a raging firestorm. Every inch of the mirrored glass perimeter shattered and the inside of the building was vaporized in an instant.

  Over a mile away the explosion shook the car Jake was in and the resultant fireball was impossible to miss against the night sky, even at this distance, and even if his eyes had been closed at the time.

  The moment it hit, Jake felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. There was no end to possible threats from WMD, but none were like this one. Given Miller’s ability to dole out superhuman intelligence and Desh’s training and skills, he had eliminated what he was convinced were the two most formidable people on the planet.

  This was a rare moment to savor. The execution of the entire operation had been flawless.

  Jake arrived, congratulated Ruiz and his team, and waited patiently while a dozen firefighters arrived in three
large trucks to battle the resultant blaze. He had contacted the Denver Fire Chief using an alias—one with considerable authority that could quickly be verified—and insisted that the firefighters on the scene leave immediately once they had conquered the blaze, after which Jake, Ruiz, and a select group of his men would move in, scrub the scene as best they could, and look for remains that would prove that Kira Miller’s short time on earth had come to an end. Given that ground zero was basically at a point halfway down her throat, this would likely prove quite challenging.

  A call came in on Jake’s cell phone from his second in command, thousands of miles away. “How’d it go?” he asked Kolke, his tone upbeat.

  “Not well, I’m afraid, Colonel. The assault teams went in, but came up empty in both cases. Neither scientist was in his home or office.”

  “Any chance this was just coincidental?”

  “No, sir. They’d been warned. Their computers were either gone or wiped. They knew we were coming.”

  Jake’s expression hardened. He didn’t care about missing the two scientists. Now that he had cut off the head of the snake, they had become nothing more than harmless bit players he needed to interrogate for the sake of thoroughness. But the fact that they were warned introduced just the slightest uncertainty into the results of the operation he had just conducted. Shit. “How long after I gave you the signal did your men arrive?”

  “The soonest twenty minutes. The latest forty-five.”

  “Any evidence of disarray or hasty packing?”

  “None.”

  Jake frowned. This was getting more troubling by the second. Still, if the destruction of Miller’s headquarters had set off a warning signal the two scientist’s had received immediately, they would still have had time to disappear. They could have kept a suitcase packed and money on hand as a precaution. Given Miller and Desh’s paranoia, each cell member was almost certainly prepared to disappear at a moment’s notice.

  Even so, the possibility that they’d been warned before the JDAM hit couldn’t be ruled out either. And if this were the case, it could only mean that Miller and Desh had known he was coming.

  Jake walked the short distance to where Captain Ruiz was watching the firefighters at work through a pair of high-powered binoculars. “Captain, I want to go through this entire op from start to finish. I need to be sure there’s no chance they slipped the noose somehow.”

  “Slipped the noose, sir?” said the captain dubiously. “We recorded their heat signatures the entire time, right up until the instant the building was turned into slag. They couldn’t have escaped. And they couldn’t have survived.”

  “I appreciate your assessment, Captain, but let’s do this anyway. You saw both of them enter the building. And the physical match was unmistakable, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  Jake stared off into space for several seconds in thought. “Okay, I assume this was before you were fully in position. Any chance they saw you as well?”

  “None at all, sir. I was five miles away at the time. We had just identified this facility as the likely target and wanted eyes on the scene as soon as possible. While in route, we discovered there was a street camera close enough to get clear images of the facility’s entrance. So we commandeered it.”

  Jake reeled as though from a physical blow. His eyes widened in horror, and for a moment he looked to be in danger of exploding into a bigger fireball than had the building behind them.

  It was impossible for the captain not to notice his superior’s reaction and he swallowed hard. “Colonel, it was real-time video,” he said defensively. “And it was Miller and Desh. Their images couldn’t have been any clearer.”

  Jake nodded and walked quickly away, knowing that this was the only way to prevent his mounting fury from escaping and lashing out unfairly at the young captain.

  Their quarry had escaped. He was sure of it.

  But it wasn’t the captain’s fault. He hadn’t been briefed on the Rosenblatt intel. It was Jake’s fault, and his blood almost boiled from a mixture of frustration, anger, and self-recrimination.

  He had been duped. Miller had been on to him even before the captain and his team were in place around the facility. But how?

  Even as he posed this question, one possible answer presented itself. This group—Icarus according to Rosenblatt—could have hacked into defense computers and placed watchdog programs that would warn them if anyone was using satellites and pulling records looking for specific real estate northeast of the airport. He should have been more cautious. He should have located their facility without using satellites or computers.

  And he should have considered this possibility earlier. He hadn’t because things had been going so well. Too well. He should have known an op against a team as formidable as this couldn’t have been as easy as this one had seemed to be.

  Rosenblatt had told him the Icarus team had invented technology that could prevent street cameras and satellites from getting a clean image of them. The core council carried this technology in a tiny device on their key rings and kept it with them at all times. While the scientific expert listening in on the interrogation had said this was flat out impossible, and that Rosenblatt was lying to him, Jake knew otherwise. Rosenblatt’s psyche was truly shattered. He was well beyond the ability for elaborate deception. And Jake thought this scientific expert was a narrow-minded idiot. Electricity had once been flat out impossible. The microwave oven as well. And the cell phone. The word impossible had little meaning where Kira Miller was involved.

  The fact that the captain had seen a clean image from a street camera—especially one they had allowed to point at their headquarters—was a dead giveaway. This could only have happened if Miller and Desh wanted it to happen. The images had been faked. And the heat signatures must have been faked as well. No known technology could do either of these things as effectively as they had been done, but this was hardly noteworthy. Being able to interfere with cameras was just the beginning of Icarus’s capabilities. Rosenblatt had told him Miller’s group had perfected any number of breakthroughs in the fields of optics, electronics, and holographics over the past several years.

  Yes, he had destroyed their headquarters, set them back, but that was all. They had managed to disappear again without sustaining so much as a scratch, and had done so in a way that seemed effortless. And the remaining members of Rosenblatt’s cell had gone to ground as well—at least for now.

  He had held all the cards. He had wrung their location out of Rosenblatt in record time and then hadn’t hesitated in the slightest before mounting an attack.

  Yet still he had failed.

  He had been so sure that he would find and eliminate Kira Miller—eventually. But his confidence was now badly shaken.

  And for the first time, he was beginning to wonder if he and his unit might have finally met their match.

  14

  The entire group drove van Hutten to the airport. Kira, Desh, and Connelly kept him company in the back of the van while Griffin drove. Seven hours earlier van Hutten was a total stranger and now, because of the shared experience of enhancement and a shared vision to better humankind—he was now family. He shook the men’s hands warmly and hugged Kira as he exited the back of the van, both exhausted and exhilarated.

  As soon as the door was closed, Griffin hit a switch that threw his image on the screen in the back of the van, and video of his three colleagues appeared on a small monitor next to him. “Where to, gentlemen?” he said somberly to his two special forces colleagues. “Or will you be leaving us here to take a flight?”

  “Drive to the trailer park,” said Connelly. “We’ll fill you in on the way.”

  “Will do,” acknowledged Griffin, moving back into traffic.

  “They bombed the shit out of the decoy facility,” reported Desh grimly. “Just like we thought.”

  “Under the circumstances,” said Kira, “you and Jim did an impressive job of keeping your focus on our meeting.”
>
  When Kira had kidnapped David Desh almost three and a half years earlier, she had stripped him totally naked. At the time he had said something on the order of, “What are you worried about? Do you think I’ve imbedded some kind of subtle tracking device in my underwear?” At the time she had laughed and admitted this was pretty unlikely, but always liked to err on the side of caution. But Desh had given her an idea.

  Once Icarus was up and running, she turned her attention to creating undergarments more technologically advanced than cell phones. She had already invented a powerful but tiny bug and transmitter combination; one easily hidden, which worked on principles so unlike those in use that it was undetectable even by the most advanced equipment. Desh had been at the wrong end of this technology once, having been sure that he was clean, while all the while Kira had listened to his every word.

  Kira had simply combined this advance with technology capable of non-invasive monitoring of certain vital signs, which was already available. She had married the two technologies, seamlessly, in elastic waistbands, and while this was never discussed during a first recruiting meeting, each member of Icarus was issued a set of custom made undergarments to wear at all times with this technology imbedded. She made sure the components were nearly microscopic and able to withstand the immersion and thrashing they received in a washing machine.

  If an Icarus member was in trouble, they could press the section of waistband below their navels and the bug/transmitter would activate. It their vital signs indicated they were having a heart attack, stroke, or had been rendered unconscious in any way other than sleep, the bug/transmitter would activate automatically. In this way the core council would be alerted to any attack, whether the member remained conscious or not, and would also be alerted to medical emergencies—very useful functions for a pair of underwear to have.