by Jack Bowie
“You really think so, Gary? Sometimes I wonder if anyone else cares.” He had been worried about this a lot lately. Some of his friends had come into the store that morning and acted, well, different. They talked to him as usual but there was a look in their eyes. Something that cut right through him. Did they know he had killed Brown? Did they understand why?
“Sure they do, Macon. I talk with a lot of people. So does the Commander. We know what the people really want. They want liberty, and freedom. They want the Feds to get out of their farms and out of their homes. Let them live the way they want to. No, don’t you worry, we’ll have everyone on our side very soon. You’ll see. And then we’ll start changing things.” Gary punctuated the final statement by thrusting a full clip into the butt of the newly assembled weapon.
“I hope so. I really do.”
“I know you do, Macon. And you’ve done really well here so far. Got the boys clickin’. They feelin’ okay?”
“Yeah. Everybody was a little, well you know, spooked last night. But they calmed down real quick.”
Gary turned back to the SIG giving it a final polish. Without looking up he said, “Who shot the filthy propagandist, Macon?”
Shot! How did he find that out! There had been nothing on the news about that. Holly had wanted to keep it a secret; just inside the cell. “Ah, it was Cal. Brown surprised us runnin’ out of the office and all.”
“That’s understandable, Macon.” Gary finished his cleaning and slipped the automatic under his jacket. Then he looked up and stared hard into Holly’s eyes. “Napes can handle it can’t he? Not go blurting it out everywhere?”
Holly was driven back into his chair from the gaze. What could he say? “He’ll be fine, Gary, just fine. He’s a good soldier.”
“That’s great, Macon. I know you can handle whatever comes up. Now tell me about the Gathering. Preparations going okay?”
“Sure, Gary. Absolutely. We’ve got everything under control. Following your plans to the . . .”
Holly heard a scream from outside. Gary jumped from his seat, stormed down the stairs and through the back door. Holly tried his best to keep up with the man.
“What the hell is going on?” Gary yelled.
“Boss!” cried Frisco running up to the farmhouse. He was out of breath and barely able to get the words out. “It’s the shed!
* * *
Thomas walked to the shed door and knocked his shovel against the jamb. No one approached him and his noisy ploy garnered no response. He lifted the latch and walked in.
The door opened into a dark, musty storeroom. He stepped in, closed the door behind him, and looked around. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary: sacks of fertilizer tossed on the ground, rusty farm tools hanging on the walls, and a well-worn 1967 John Deere pin-up calendar dangling from a rafter. He was checking the sacks when he saw a thin strip of light between two wall panels. It could just be from the bright sun outside, but he went over to investigate anyway.
He ran his hands along the rough boards. They seemed to be solid, but he wedged his fingernails into the slot and gave a yank. The wall suddenly came loose and swung back, nearly knocking him over.
On the other side of the wall was a stark white concrete staircase descending into the earth. As he peered down all he could see was a flickering light at the foot of the steps. He pulled a Glock 9mm from the crook of his back and cross-stepped down the stairs, hugging the cold, damp sidewall. There shouldn’t be anyone around, but he wasn’t going to take anything for granted with this crowd.
At the foot of the staircase was another door, this one metal with heavy hinges and extensive rubber weather-stripping. The door was open, light from the area beyond providing his original clue. A cool breeze from the room brushed his face and flowed up to ventilation ducts in the ceiling of the landing. The air had an odd smell, like a doctor’s office. He paused, waiting for a telltale sound or movement, but all he heard was the dull drone from the exhaust fan above his head. Satisfied there was no one else around, he stepped over the raised threshold and into another world.
All around him were shiny metal tables replete with test tubes, beakers, centrifuges and electronic equipment he didn’t recognize. The walls were covered with shelves holding a huge assortment of jars and beakers.
Thomas finally recognized the odor. The pungent smell of acetone permeated the windowless space. He hadn’t seen a laboratory this extensive since the last time he was in Quantico. Whoever built it wanted nothing but the best.
It was too complex for an explosives operation. You could make a bomb with a bucket and a stirring rod. It had to be drugs. That’s how they were supporting the operation. No one would have guessed from the bucolic rural scene above.
Thomas walked over to an odd apparatus sitting on one of the tables. It was a tray with dozens of tiny receptacles, like miniature Petri dishes. He was reaching for the tray when he heard a noise and spun around.
He never saw what caused the sound.
Chapter 9
Vision One, Palo Alto, California
Tuesday, 10:00 a.m.
“How was the dentist, Megan?”
Wonderful,” Connelly replied as she rushed past her assistant’s desk. “I’ve got to get a fifth molar pulled.” She had just endured forty minutes of poking, scraping, and filing on her teeth only to find there was still more work to be done. Now it was ten o’clock and she had three hours of work to make up.
Not a promising way to start the day.
“Five wisdom teeth! Cool! My mother says that’s a sign of good luck.”
“Your mother thinks everything is a sign of good luck, Cathie.” Cathie Petrie was a young, ambitious farm girl from the Napa Valley, who had come to the city to find her fame and fortune. Reality struck early, however, and she had accepted a job as an underpaid assistant in a struggling Bay area start-up. Brighter than her background would have suggested, Petrie had developed as rapidly as her boss, and the two now shared a close friendship as well as a business relationship. Petrie’s greatest asset had been her ability to keep her hyper-active boss relatively organized through the chaos at Vision One.
“What have we got this morning?”
Petrie followed Connelly into the office and recited the plan for the day. “Robin called and cancelled the con-call on the advertising plan. She said the agency guy, I think it was Mendelsohn, wants to make some last minutes changes to the proposal. Your staff meeting is at 11:00, and the new product review is still on for 4:00. Paul called and said he would check back later. Your tickets for D.C. are on your desk. Out Thursday morning, back Saturday afternoon.”
Damn. She’d forgotten about that trip. Three days gone for one lousy day of meetings with government clients and prospects. That meant even more work she had to get done this week.
“Are you going to see Adam?” Petrie added.
Connelly froze. Adam Braxton, her ex, now lived in Northern Virginia. He was a computer security consultant and had recently gained national attention, or maybe notoriety, on the rumored discovery of an Internet mole. Their relationship had remained cordial, at least as long as they lived on different coasts, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to see him in person.
“Maybe,” Connelly replied without much enthusiasm. “But I’ll have to recheck the schedule.”
Petrie paused then offered, “Okay. Just wanted to ask. You keep mentioning seeing him sometime.”
Connelly shook off the anxiety and started unpacking her briefcase, carefully laying the file folders across her desk while planning the day’s agenda in her head.
“Did Paul say what he wanted?” She asked. Paul Venton was Vision One’s CEO. It wouldn’t do to put him off.
“He said he just wanted to discuss the advertising budget. Nothing urgent.”
“Okay, it sounds like I’ve got some work to do. Hold any messages ‘til I get caught up.”
Connelly sat down behind the pile of papers, took a deep breath, and started reading.
<
br /> * * *
Connelly couldn’t sit and push papers any longer. She had to get away from these four walls. Ever since her promotion to Chief Marketing Officer, her life had turned into one flood of paperwork after another. She felt farther and farther away from the business.
There was only one sure-fire remedy for these blues.
She left her office and took the elevator to the basement. There she walked down a dim corridor toward a pair of huge unmarked swinging doors. Pushing them open, she stepped into a surreal world of flashing monitors, rainbow-colored cables, and more computing hardware than NASA needed for a shuttle launch. It was Vision One’s subterranean research laboratory. Buried in the basement of the corporate offices, the laboratory was the home of the company’s sharpest minds, and their competitive advantage.
“What’s up, guys?” Connelly called into the maze.
Looking around she was disappointed to see only two researchers. A glance at her watch explained it. It was 2:15. Lunch time for the techies who lived on a slightly shifted schedule from the business world upstairs.
A short, curly-haired woman spun away from her workstation. “Hi, Megan. What brings a bigwig like you down to the trenches?”
Bonnie Jefferson was a graphics software expert Vision One had stolen from Google. She had led the team that produced the first commercial release of their product. Now she was back doing what she really liked, advanced research on new graphical interfaces.
“It got lonely upstairs,” Connelly replied. “Besides, I have to make sure you’re working your fingers to the bone. That’s my job isn’t it?”
“You know, the last time a manager came down here we made him disappear,” said a deep voice from the corner.
“Give me break, Tony. There are enough people disappearing as it is.” Connelly turned toward Dr. Anthony Caravino, a world-class geophysicist and one of Vision One’s top researchers. He was a critical interface to the company’s oil and gas customers.
Vision One had once been a small, close-knit family. A tight group of entrepreneurs struggling to keep their start-up alive. Now they were growing up, and the children were leaving the nest. She couldn’t help but feel a certain loss. It was good to still have a few of her old friends around.
“Yeah,” Caravino replied, finally turning in her direction. “I know what you mean. We miss Ben a lot. I hope he gets back soon.”
“Me too.” How did Tony know who I meant?
Connelly began wandering around the lab, more to break the direction of the conversation than to examine all the new equipment, then came over behind Caravino.
“So, what’s new down here?” she asked.
“Show Megan the proto, Tony,” Jefferson replied.
“We’re just finishing up on the force-feedback joystick,” Caravino explained. “Want to try it out?”
Vision One had been working on the new interface for nearly a year. If they pulled it off, it would be another coup for the company. “Sure,” Connelly replied. “If I can use it, anybody can.”
Caravino jumped up from his seat. “Then let’s give it a try.”
He led the pair to the back of the room. There, standing out from the corner, was Vision One’s breakthrough product: the HoloCube, or ‘The Cube’ for short. It looked like a struggling artist’s attempt at minimalist sculpture. Sitting on the floor was a shining cube of stainless steel, one meter on each side. Hanging from the ceiling was an identical cube, exactly one meter above its partner. Four small square tubes ran from the corners of the upper cube to their corresponding points on the lower.
The Cube always reminded Connelly of the box kite her father had tried to teach her to fly on vacations at the Cape. Only a lot more expensive.
“Here we go,” Caravino said as he began typing at another workstation.
Connelly watched as the top surface of the lower cube began to shimmer with an unearthly glow. Then there was a soft whoosh and the space between the cubes filled with a translucent three-dimensional holographic image. It looked like a multi-layer cake: layers of browns and grays below a wide layer of blue.
“I always get shivers when it starts up,” Connelly commented with a grin. “What am I looking at?”
“This is a geologic cross-section of the newly-discovered oil reservoir under the Great Salt Lake. Who would have thought we have as much oil in Utah as the Saudi’s do in their peninsula?”
Caravino pointed to the top of the image. “That’s the sky at the top. We’ve color coded the various soil and rock textures; darker shades correspond to denser strata. Light brown is the surface sand, gray is shale and black is bedrock. The oil reservoir is the red blob on the lower right of the image.
“The black line running down from the top is the current location of the main drill shaft. The blinking point at the end of the line is Exxon’s new remotely-controlled drill-head. You need to get the pipe into the reservoir.”
Jefferson rolled a steel pedestal next to Connelly. Sitting on the top of the pedestal was a mass of wires and two joysticks that looked like a control for a toy drone. “Here you go,” she said with a grin. “The stick on the left controls vertical motion and the one on the right horizontal. Can you get the drill-head to the oil?”
Connelly raised her eyebrows and stood in front of the device. How difficult could it be?
She grasped the left handle and tried to push it forward, but it wouldn’t move.
“Something’s wrong, Tony. It won’t work.”
The researcher flashed a friendly smile. “That’s ‘cause you’re trying to push down through mantle rock. The program computes the effort needed to drill on the proposed path and pushes back on the joystick proportionally. The head can’t bore into the mantle so you can’t move the stick. Try going left.”
Connelly tipped the right handle to the left and the dot slid along the boundary. A bright green line followed her path. A row of numbers along the bottom of the hologram spun crazily.
“Okay, what am I doing?”
“The green line is a flexible extrusion recovery line tied to the electronic drill head. You want to get the line to the pool of oil.” He pointed to the red blob in the image. “We could compute a trajectory, but the best way is to ‘feel’ your way with the joystick.”
“What are the numbers?”
Jefferson had moved over and now stood behind the executive. “Those are the spatial coordinates of the head, the length of the drill shaft, and some torsion metrics. Try it again. Think of it as a very expensive video game.”
“I’ll try not to think of that,” Connelly replied. She tightened her hand around the joysticks and took a deep breath. Staring into the hologram, she slowly guided the glowing dot down the field. The green line snaked toward the blob.
“I’m stuck. I can’t get it any farther.”
“Just retrace your path,” Caravino said. “That’s the beauty of a simulation. It doesn’t cost anything to do it on the computer. Better now than in Utah.”
She moved the “drill” back up the screen, the green line changing to white. About halfway up, she tilted the joystick down and the dot responded. It moved closer to the red blob.
“I think I’ve got it!”
This time, she managed to keep the drill on course. When the dot reached the pool, red “oil” flowed up the drill shaft and erupted into a fountain of color at the top of the screen.
“Bonnie! What’s this?”
“Oh, sorry, Megan,” Jefferson said sheepishly. ”You weren’t supposed to see that. We added a little something to the simulation. It’s only for debugging, really.”
Connelly shook her head but couldn’t help but smile. The scientists had found their own way to deal with the constant pressure. She was still looking for hers. “Not a problem. Just so Exxon doesn’t think all we do here is play games.”
“Not a chance,” Caravino replied. “The VPs that were here last week seemed pretty impressed.”
“They couldn’t stop talking abo
ut all the money they’d save,” Jefferson added. “You know, Megan, I could make it even faster with one of the new IBM parallel servers.”
“Okay, you two,” Connelly raised her hands in surrender. “That’s enough. I can tell when I’m outnumbered. Thanks for the demo, though. It’s really good stuff.” She turned and started for the door.
“Our pleasure, Megan,” Caravino answered with a grin. Then his face turned starkly serious. “But really, thanks for stopping by. It’s nice to know somebody upstairs cares.”
Connelly said goodbye and started toward the doors, but stopped and turned back into the lab. “Tony, have you heard anything from Ben?”
“Got an email last week. Sounded like things were going fine. The systems had passed acceptance and he was getting the software transferred and loaded.”
“No problems then?”
“None he told me about.”
“Great. That’s what I thought.”
She walked back down the hall to the elevator tower. So things were okay in Utrecht. But then what did his letter mean?
Chapter 10
National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland
Tuesday, 5:30 p.m.
“Here’s the latest message, Garrett. It looks like things are heating up.” Kam Yang walked around to the side of his boss’s desk and dropped the striped folder on an empty corner.
Garrett Robinson scanned the file then set it back down. Yang had been able to continue the decryptions. “So it seems. This should be very interesting reading for the policy folks.”
“What do you think they’re going to do? I haven’t heard a thing. The Director has seen the reports hasn’t he?”
Robinson gave the scientist a sour look. “Of course he has. I’ve briefed Director Stroller on every one of your dispatches. There’s a lot going on, Kam. The world doesn’t just revolve around you.”