“What do you need?”
“I’m glad you asked.” Carter grimaced, feeling even worse about what she was about to say next. “How would you like to meet your hero?”
EIGHTEEN
Under normal circumstances, leaving the relative shelter of the secret Cerberus Headquarters facility beneath Castel Sant’Angelo would have been almost unthinkable for Dourado. For as long as she could remember, she hated being outdoors, exposed to a world so big that she felt like she might get sucked away into space if she stood too long under the open sky. And then there were all the people, each one a potential predator, just waiting for a chance to pounce on her—figuratively, but maybe literally, too.
People couldn’t be trusted. The world was too big, and she was so small, so insignificant. That was why she preferred the digital world. In the virtual landscape of cyberspace, she was a goddess. That she was able to even think about venturing outside was a testimony to how far she had come since her panic-stricken youth in Belem, Brazil. Indeed, under normal circumstances, her value to the Cerberus Group would only have been diminished by venturing out into the open world, away from the hardware that imbued her with such god-like omniscience.
These were not normal circumstances, though, and that made the experience a little more tolerable.
Getting through the airport was miserable, but probably no more so for her than for everyone else. The terminal was crowded with people who had seen their scheduled flights delayed due to the disruption in air traffic caused by the global earthquake. But at least she was indoors. Her flamingo-pink hair and facial piercings attracted the attention of her queue-mates, some giving her judgmental frowns, but more offering nods and smiles of approval.
The short flight to Geneva wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be. The plane’s cramped interior made her feel safe, like a comforting hug, which helped keep her mind off the fact that she was hurtling through thin air five miles above the surface of the Earth. Yet, for all her coping skills, what made the trip endurable was the knowledge that she was on her way to meet Marcus Fallon.
She had not been exaggerating when she called him a hero of hers. If anything, she had downplayed her feelings about him. Fallon was the personification of the future she had dreamed of all her life. Like no one else in the field of robotics, he had bridged the gulf between the limitations of the physical world and the limitless possibilities of cyberspace.
What Fallon did was similar to what Fiona could do with the Mother Tongue. She could create golems out of clay and loose earth and then bring them to life with an ancient language to do her bidding. He created robots out of metal and plastic and brought them to life with binary machine language to do his. The big difference was that, while the Mother Tongue was nearly extinct, computer code was a language that anyone could learn and which Dourado already spoke fluently. And now she was on her way to use that knowledge to help the man she idolized regain control of his wayward creations. She felt like a street kid tapped to play in the World Cup final match.
As she made her way through the Swiss airport, though, she felt a little of the old familiar panic setting in. As excited as she was at the prospect of helping Fallon, she would still have to brave the world outside.
A large figure stepped in front of her and even though the rendezvous had been pre-arranged before she left Rome, Dourado nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Erik,” she gasped.
That was all she could say for a few seconds, but Lazarus didn’t seem to notice. “The pink hair was a good idea. Hi-vis. Easy to spot.”
She wasn’t sure if that was his attempt at humor. Probably not. He didn’t strike her as the sort of person to crack jokes, though in truth, she did not know him very well. Their orbits rarely crossed. Joke or not, he made no further comment as he led her outside to the stop for the shuttle that would take them to the rental car pick-up lot, and that was fine with her.
Thirty minutes later, the ordeal ended with their arrival at the safe house where Carter, Fallon, and Tanaka had gone following the escape from Tomorrowland. The initial meeting with Fallon was a blur, and she was pretty sure she had embarrassed herself by fawning over him, but a few minutes later she was back in her environment, using her laptop to remotely probe the security of the Space Tomorrow mainframe and intranet.
Carter greeted the news of her intent warily. “Won’t the hacker be able to track us here?”
“He can try, but I’m spoofing our location.”
With Fallon’s help, she was able to establish off-site administrator privileges, after which it was a simple matter to begin searching for the Trojan horse that had allowed the unknown hacker to hijack Fallon’s robots and turn them against him. But after employing every anti-virus measure and security subroutine in her arsenal, along with a few that Fallon suggested, she could find no evidence of the incursion.
“What does that mean?” Carter asked.
“It means that the hacker covered his tracks very well,” Fallon said
Dourado thought that was oversimplifying it. “It’s got to be someone already on the inside. Someone with full access to the network.”
Fallon shook his head. “No. That’s a very short list, and everyone on it is above suspicion.” He glanced at Tanaka and received a nod of confirmation. “We’re looking for someone who’s just that good. When we find him, I may have to offer him a job.”
“A job,” Carter murmured, as if thinking aloud. She fixed her gaze on Dourado. “Someone with the skill to do this could pretty much have anything he wanted, right? Why do this?”
Fallon waved a dismissive hand. “He’s just trying to make a statement.”
“You mean like, ‘I can destroy the world if I want to?’ That’s quite a statement.”
“Hackers are ego-driven creatures, prone to delusions of godhood.”
Dourado could not disagree with the sentiment. “If that’s all this is, then the incursion is probably over. He’s made his point. Maybe he’ll try to blackmail you at some point in the future. But if it’s something more, he might be waiting for us to make the next move.”
“Challenge accepted.” Fallon rubbed his hands together in a show of eagerness. He turned to Dourado. “What do you say? Ready to beat him at his own game? When he pops his head up again, we’ll be waiting with a sledgehammer.”
As excited as she was at the thought of testing her skills against the unknown enemy, Dourado also felt a twinge of apprehension. If the hacker was that good, the sledgehammer might come down on her head. Up to this point, all she had done was look in the windows, so to speak. Once she started giving remote commands to the network, the hacker would be alerted to her presence, and he wouldn’t be fooled by her spoofed location. “Maybe we should be ready to move,” she said. “Just in case.”
Carter laid a hand on her shoulder in what seemed to be a gesture of encouragement.
Dourado accessed the robotics interface, which allowed her to interact with all the autonomous machines at Tomorrowland, and began the two-step process of learning how the system was structured, and testing the robots to see if they would respond to her commands. As before, there seemed to be almost no evidence of the cyber-attack. The robots were functioning normally, doing their job without any active oversight. Maintenance robots had already begun repairs on the two construction-bots that had been damaged.
“The storm has passed,” Fallon declared. “I’ll still have to figure out how he cracked my security, but it’s safe to go back in.”
“Safe?” Lazarus, who had, after an understated reunion with Carter, remained in the background, now broke his silence. “It’s an ambush. He wants you to go back. You’ve got something he wants.”
Carter took a swatch of metallic fabric from her pocket. “You mean this?”
Lazarus nodded. “This wasn’t just a data breach. He has plans for that antenna array and the Black Knight. He needs you to get it working again. That’s what he’s waiting for. He’ll wait until you
do that to make his move.”
“I’m not sure we have a choice in the matter,” Tanaka countered. “Like it or not, that antenna array is the only way to eliminate the threat of another solar event.”
“Not the only way,” Dourado countered. “There’s the sun chariot.”
Fallon raised an eyebrow. “Dr. Carter told me about your friends’ excursion to the Sinai. I’ll admit, it’s intriguing. It would go a long way toward explaining where the Black Knight came from. But we’re facing a time crunch here. And I believe in cleaning up my own messes. Technology caused this problem, and technology can fix it.”
Lazarus did not back down. “You aren’t in control of the technology. What’s to stop the hacker from turning it against you again? Self-driving cars, drones. There’s a lot of stuff out there with your hardware that could be turned into weapons. If we go in there, we might make the situation a lot worse.” He shook his head. “We have to let Pierce handle this.”
Tanaka gestured to the computer. “May I use that for a moment?”
Dourado regarded him warily. She didn’t like people using her hardware, messing with her settings, downloading God-only-knew what kind of crap off the Internet. “Why?”
“If I can access our surveillance satellite, I should be able to determine how much time we have before another event.”
“I guess that’s a good reason.” She got up from her chair to make room for him, but stayed close, looking over his shoulder as he entered a web address into the browser. A moment later, a three-dimensional map of the Earth appeared, encircled by an orbital tracking line that ran more or less from pole to pole.
Dourado had known about the Black Knight satellite long before she overheard Fallon telling Carter about it. She knew that the authorities had dismissed it as a modern legend, cobbled together from assorted radio anomalies, questionable eyewitness reports, and erroneous scientific interpretations, but she also knew that was exactly what they would say to keep the truth from getting out. Just like with HAARP.
Tanaka stared at the screen for only a few seconds before making a dire announcement. “It’s worse than I feared. The Black Knight will be fully deployed by 1800 UTC.”
Carter shot a glance at her watch. “Eight o’clock local. Forty minutes, give or take. But at least it’s after sunset.”
The physicist shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. The satellite is currently moving above the Western hemisphere. It’s daytime there.”
Dourado knew what that would mean. A solar pause above the Americas would trigger another series of tidal earthquakes along the geologically fragile Ring of Fire. California would be devastated. Tsunamis and abnormally high tides would inundate coastal areas, where most of the population was already concentrated. And if it continued longer than a few minutes… If it went on for hours or days…
“That’s it, then,” Fallon said with grim finality. “We can’t wait for your friends to pull a rabbit out of the hat. We need to go back to Tomorrowland. Right now, if not sooner.”
“Forty minutes,” Carter murmured. “Cintia, can you reach George?”
“I can try.” She tapped Tanaka on the shoulder, and when he had vacated the chair, she sat down in front of the computer again and initiated a call to Pierce’s satellite phone. It took several seconds for her to establish a connection, but instead of Pierce’s voice, the only sound to issue from the speakers was a burst of static, and then silence as the call dropped. Dourado turned to Carter. “I think it’s up to you.”
Carter turned to Lazarus. Dourado couldn’t read the big man’s impassive expression, but Carter seemed to draw strength from him. She faced Fallon. “You think you can shut it down?”
“If I can’t, no one can.” He grimaced, perhaps realizing it was the wrong thing to say. “Yes. We can do it.”
“Cintia, you can deal with the hacker? Keep him off our backs long enough to do this?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I guess that’s all any of us can do,” Carter said with sigh. “All right, let’s load up. We’re going to Tomorrowland.”
NINETEEN
Mount Sinai, Egypt
Pierce stared at his phone in frustration. “Call ended?” he grumbled. “Call didn’t even start.”
“Was that Cintia?” Gallo asked. She had to shout to be heard over the throaty roar of the helicopter’s engine. “What did she say?”
“Don’t know. The call dropped.”
“I hope everything’s okay.”
Me too, Pierce thought. Dourado had called earlier to let him know about her decision to leave Cerberus Headquarters to join Carter and Lazarus in Geneva. Her expertise would give them an edge in dealing with the situation there and perhaps unmask the enemy that now seemed intent on turning the ancient Black Knight satellite into a weapon of mass destruction. Her decision surprised Pierce—she wasn’t exaggerating her agoraphobia—but he had given her the go-ahead. Dourado was a lot tougher than she believed. Now he wondered if she was regretting the decision.
“If it’s important, she’ll try again,” he shouted. “Probably just checking up on us.”
They had come a long way in just a few short hours, from Kazakhstan to Istanbul, and then on to Sharm El-Sheikh on the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, where Pierce had used his UNESCO credentials to wrangle a military helicopter flight to Saint Catherine’s Monastery—a World Heritage Site—on the slopes of Mount Sinai.
This was not Pierce’s first visit to Egypt, but the world had changed since his last visit. The rising influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and of ISIS on the world stage had not only brought the specter of terrorism to the reliably tourist-friendly Arab nation, but also a threat to the ancient monuments for which the nation was most famous. Islamic militants had called for the destruction of the pyramids and the Sphinx, which they condemned as temples to false gods. Pierce did not consider it to be an idle threat. A similar declaration made by the Taliban government in Afghanistan had resulted in the destruction of the fifteen-hundred-year-old Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001, and more recently, ISIS fighters had destroyed ancient Roman temples in Palmyra, Syria. Pierce was a little apprehensive about traveling to Egypt, especially without Lazarus present to advise him on matters of security, but recent attacks in Paris and Brussels had demonstrated that nowhere was truly safe. And right now, the looming solar crisis trumped all other considerations.
Saint Catherine’s—its official name was ‘Sacred Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount Sinai’—built in the sixth century, was one of the oldest Christian monasteries in existence. It housed the world’s oldest continually operating library, which contained, among its many other treasures, the Syriac Sinaiticus, a fourth century copy of the Gospels—the oldest copy in existence. Of course, the significance of Mount Sinai to all three of the world’s major monotheistic faiths went back much further.
According to the Bible, Mount Sinai was the place where God had first called Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, and then later presented him with the Ten Commandments. Whether this particular mountain was the same mountain recorded in the Biblical account was a matter of some debate, though. There were at least thirteen other sites believed by Biblical scholars to be the actual site of the divine encounter.
Pierce had been drawn to archaeology after watching the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark as a young boy. From the moment he walked out of the theater, he had dreamed of searching for the lost Ark of the Covenant—an artifact straight out of the Bible—just like his hero Indiana Jones. Now that he was the caretaker of the Herculean Society, he found himself crossing paths with those larger than life stories in ways that would make Indiana Jones jealous of him.
The helicopter landed just beyond a large garden, a few hundred yards from the monastery’s fortress-like walls, which sat at the base of the mountain, as if guarding the approach. Pierce couldn’t make out many details. They had seen a few scattered lights in the nearby tourist village as they made their approach, but
the monastery appeared to be in a total blackout. Pierce was afraid that it might be deserted, but as the helicopter’s rotor blades began to wind down, a tiny light appeared in front of the monastery gates. It began moving down the path toward them.
“Here comes the welcoming committee,” Pierce said.
He threw open the side door and stepped out into the brisk night air as the light drew closer. He could now see that it was a handheld electric lantern, and the hand that held it protruded from the voluminous black sleeve of an exorasson—the robe worn by Orthodox monks. Pierce couldn’t quite distinguish the monk’s face, but the ambient glow from the lantern did reveal a prodigious beard spilling half-way down the man’s chest.
Pierce stuck out his hand. “Are you Father Justin? I’m Dr. George Pierce, from the World Heritage Committee. We spoke on the phone.”
“Yes.” The man held the lantern higher and gave a slight bow.
Pierce sensed the monk wasn’t going to accept the offered hand, so he drew it back before things got awkward. “Sorry about the late hour, but as you can imagine, we’ve got our work cut out for us.” When the man didn’t reply, Pierce added, “You know, because of the earthquakes. Lots of damage to survey.”
“Please don’t think us ungrateful.” Father Justin’s English was perfect, without any trace of an accent. But there was more than a trace of irritation. “Surely there are others whose need is greater than ours. Would not your time and resources be better spent helping those who have lost everything?”
Pierce spread his hands in a show of helplessness. “That may be true, but I’m a cultural preservation expert, not a rescue worker. This is what I do, and I take it very seriously.”
“As do we. For seventeen centuries we have tended to this holy place. This is not the first time an earthquake has shaken our walls. We will repair the damage as we always have. That is what we do.”
Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Page 14