Quantum

by Patricia Cornwell

  Never on my most distracted day would I approve point-to-point links carrying high-speed data signals inside a confined underground space shared with rodents, reptiles and a miscellany of service people in and out.

  00:00:00:00:0

  PLAGUED by distractions, and knowing how to block them out. All would have been fine but for the timing.

  Confronted with the worst news of my life moments earlier. Preoccupied, secretly in turmoil and easy to forget how I’ve been reconditioned. Unaccustomed now to the sun, moon, the sky outside my deep stone catacomb. Spending endless hours with no fresh air. Never seeing windows, atriums, cupolas. No room with a view of the good Earth I crave. Only instrument displays, and arrays of computer screens in near-dark conditions.

  Doing as instructed while preparing for the ultimate mission. To stop the unthinkable before thought takes form. Day in and out on the hunt for heat trails and their signatures. Sniffing for signals everywhere. All leading up to why I had trouble with the knife, wooden handled with a long single-edged blade.

  Like a mole, eyes watering, not seeing well in the glare. In a hurry and confused. Scared and bereft. Caught off guard, didn’t feel it when it happened. Blood everywhere, I scurried about, crazed like a dying mammal, a tiny subterranean one. Except I’m not dying.

  Mortified, frenzied, but not wounded mortally. Not physically. Trying to clean up before anybody sees the stupid thing I’ve done.

  2

  “CAN WE HURRY this along, for freak’s sake?” Fran complains, sweating through her white uniform shirt, huffing and puffing as we stop outside the first door of the second airlock. “And you can spare me the tour. Jeez, you can talk.”

  “Nope, I’m not sparing you.” I reach inside my jacket, untucking the lanyard around my neck.

  Clipped to it is my badge holder, and I slide out my smartcard, instantly seeing my personal identification verification in my head. As if branded there:

  00010-080121101

  At times my memory can be exhausting, driving me crazy. Almost as crazy as Fran is making me right now.

  “I want to make sure you’re up to speed on what we’re dealing with around here,” I say to her firmly. “Somebody needs to know all this besides me. What happens when I’m not around?”

  “Stop talking like you’re dying.”

  “Speaking of. Deep, slow breaths. You need to chill before you overtorque and have a stroke. We’ve got to work harder to get on top of this problem . . .”

  “Chill?” she interrupts with a snort. “Have you noticed how hot it is down here!”

  “Nothing like it’s about to be.” I hold my smartcard over the electronic reader mounted on a yellow steel post in the uneven glow of a sodium vapor lamp.

  The closer we get to the Yellow Submarine, the warmer and more humid it is. In the 80s at least, the air saturated. I’ve sweated through my underclothes and socks. My hard hat makes my head ache, my scalp itch, and there’s little I hate more than wearing safety glasses. At least these are amber tinted and custom fitted for the firing range. Even so, when I look up and down, they slip on my sweaty nose.

  “All right, same drill,” I announce with a sharp clack of the lock releasing. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Motioning Fran to hurry through as I open a shark-gray metal door that like everything else is marked with yellow-painted stripes and plastered with warnings.

  Yellow, yellow everywhere, including a blizzard of sunny stickers about the pinch-point potential for crushing fingers and hands if you don’t shut one door all the way before opening the next.

  In addition to other bright reminders of what can terrorize, maim or kill you down here:

  CONFINED SPACE

  ASBESTOS HAZARD

  DO NOT DISTURB WITHOUT PROPER TRAINING AND EQUIPMENT

  ABSOLUTE “BUDDY SYSTEM” REQUIRED

  Not that your average buddy or bear would wish to spelunk alone or at all inside an underground concrete tube filled with asbestos-wrapped high-pressure pipes heated up to 218 Celsius, or 424 degrees Fahrenheit. And standing water and active leaks. Plus the skittering slithering critters that love hot humid places. Not much fun if you have a plethora of phobias as Fran now does.

  She can’t even put on a scuba mask or have an MRI anymore without feeling buried alive, is terrified of spiders and snakes, just the thought enough to break her out in hives. No big surprise she’s been a horror show since I received the alert not even a half hour ago at 1538 hours eastern time. As I was winding up my briefing, a motion detector registered a fault in one of the airlocks leading to the Yellow Submarine tunnel, suggesting the sensor picked up movement that shouldn’t be there.

  I instructed Fran to dash back to Building 1195C, our protective services headquarters. To grab hard hats, safety glasses, flashlights, steel-toe footwear, and meet me ASAP in the parking lot of 1111. Told her I’d be waiting for her with bells on. Or more specifically, with my portable spectrum analyzer turned on.

  Figuring that by the time she rolled up, I would have scanned the building’s perimeter with a receiver not much bigger than a handheld radio that can detect 99 percent of all electronic signals up to the 12.4 gigahertz (GHz) range. This pretty much covers everything from wireless heart monitors to navigation and avalanche beacons to submarine and aviation communications to television broadcasts.

  Virtually any low to superhigh frequency signal that I might consider problematic or rogue is going to be sniffed out by my handy-dandy analyzer that I keep with me or in my truck almost everywhere I go. It’s my divining rod, my stick I poke at things, and in real time it’s telling me all motion sensors are transmitting. They’re operating nominally, and that’s reassuring and not. I don’t want a malfunction.

  What I want even less is a bad actor up to no good, and I can’t stop thinking about the stolen-badge report from yesterday. The alleged victim works inside Building 1110, and it’s connected to 1111 by the sealed-off tunnel I’m constantly worried about. I found the story suspicious then, and now my concerns are like a rock in my shoe. The alleged missing badge with its high-level security clearance could have gotten someone through these airlocks. Worse, before it was deactivated, there was ample time for it to be used all over campus and also to gain access to the air force base.

  But I remind myself there’s likely a mundane explanation. There almost always is, and I make the mistake of wondering out loud if there might be bats down here. Perhaps the detector was tripped by something other than a trespasser of the human variety.

  “Oh Jeez-us!” Fran’s eyes dart around wildly.

  “Relax. I’ve never seen a bat, well not in this tunnel. I’m just trying to figure what could have caused one detector to pick up motion and not the others. Unless it wasn’t on 2 legs. Maybe on 8 or more. Or something flying that got in and out somehow. Or slithering, I guess.”

  “Please shut up!”

  “Better that than a bad guy with a stolen badge.”

  “We canceled it within minutes!”

  Well, not exactly, because we can’t cancel something until we know there’s a problem, I remind her. And we didn’t know that within minutes. It took way too many hours. But I understand her overall point. The smartcard was deactivated 23 hours ago at around 5:00 p.m. yesterday, suggesting it shouldn’t have worked had someone tried it to access airlock doors down here recently. Hopefully she’s right, but the so-called stolen badge won’t stop nagging at me.

  “On the count of 3. One, 2, 3, and stay clear!” My shout echoes off concrete.

  Hands and limbs out of the way, and I close the airlock door behind us, making it possible to open what’s dead ahead, centered in the opposite water-stained wall. The repurposed submarine hatch and likely inspiration for the Yellow Submarine code name is circa World War II
and painted French’s mustard yellow. The ton of steel is oval shaped and bomb shelter thick with a bank vault spin-dial lock straight out of Bonnie and Clyde.

  Only certain people like me are authorized to have the combination. Although most likely it will be Fran’s problem soon enough, adding to the vulnerability of 1111-A. Because there’s no way she’ll check on anything unless she gets a grip. And gosh knows I’ve tried to help her while there’s still time.

  00:00:00:00:0

  “A FALSE ALARM, what a surprise, and I won’t say I told you so.” She can’t wrap this up fast enough. “Has to be an error if the motion detector in the first airlock didn’t go off. Yet this one did.” Indicating the second airlock door we just came through.

  I don’t offer the bat theory again. Or suggest a bird, ghost or extraterrestrial is to blame. Certainly not a spider or snake, and I remind Fran in general there’s no “has to be” in most of life’s formulas. She should know that loud and clear since she’s the one who taught me from the get-go never to stop questioning. And not to kill time. Or be in too big of a hurry.

  She’s always encouraged me to occupy the moment, to be mindful and pay attention. But she’s unable to practice what she preaches right now, is something less than her relentless self.

  “It’s obvious nobody’s been down here.” Her sharp-featured face is bright red, her blue eyes deer-in-the-headlights wide and watery.

  Hovering near the door, she watches me sweep the airless dead space with my signal sniffer. Monitoring the small display, I point the antenna like a magic wand, snooping for any transmissions. Including cell phones, radios and, most of all, the sensors programmed to alert on rapid motion, triggering the alarm that went off.

  Turning in slow circles, I hold up the antenna, scanning in 360-degree sweeps. Finding nothing atypical about the detector covering the yellow hatch roughly 4.5 meters, or 15 feet, from us.

  “Weird, weird, weird,” to myself.

  “What?” Fran’s unhappy eyes as she breathes hard, wiping her face on her sleeve. “And you look like a crazy person right about now.” What she always snipes when I spin.

  “It’s weird that the only fault was with the one I was alerted about during the briefing,” I stop turning, looking at the metal airlock door behind us, pondering the oddity.

  “Like I said, a malfunction of some sort.” Fran unzips her police uniform jacket, pushing it out of the way of her Glock .40 cal, in case she needs to quick draw.

  Meanwhile I’m neither armed nor dressed appropriately beyond the steel-toe sneakers she brought for me to put on. At least she’s in uniform instead of a suit and vintage leather flight jacket not meant for such conditions. But I was in the midst of giving the briefing when the alarm went off. There wasn’t time to change my clothes, no time to spare when it’s 1111-A. Especially when facing a government shutdown. While expecting a major winter storm to slam our peninsula. Creating the perfect formula for espionage and sabotage.

  By midnight, most federal workers will be furloughed if politicians can’t agree on whatever it is this time. NASA centers nationwide will be locked down, the average employee not allowed access to the facilities, offices or computers. Except that won’t include me, depending on which way I spin at any given moment. Maybe I’m the stealthy cop. And maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m the nerdy scientist instead. It all depends on what’s going on around me.

  I can make exceptions and choices your typical NASA employee can’t with my two jobs and offices at Langley. As a special agent, I have enforcement powers and a badge, and when so inclined carry a gun. But I also have a master’s degree in aerospace engineering and a PhD in quantum mechanics, with extensive training and experience in other disciplines. Most significantly, cyber investigations. Not to sound boastful, I’m not average.

  “Exactly my point,” Fran is saying impatiently. “You have to open the first door to get to the second one unless you’re Houdini. Also, if this detector here at the hatch didn’t go off, then obviously nobody got close to your super secret bunghole or whatever.”

  “Tunnel. And most likely nobody did. But we don’t know that for a fact yet.” Sliding my tactical flashlight out of a pocket. “And I continue to be unhappy about the timing of the badge reported stolen late yesterday afternoon. Since the alleged victim works in the building next door.”

  “And I’m unhappy that I’m starting to itch and it’s hard to breathe!” she warns semi-hysterically. “There’s not enough oxygen in here! I don’t need a damn asthma attack!”

  “There’s plenty of oxygen, and you don’t have asthma,” as I shine the light over unpainted concrete walls, ceiling and flooring.

  Checking what’s around us in the off chance the alarm was legitimate and someone has been in here unauthorized. Searching for what I think of as low-tech evidence, like a cigarette butt. Footwear and other patterns transferred to surfaces. A shed hair. A lost button. Something falling out of a pocket. A mindless mistake.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Fran’s frustration is about to boil over. “This is nuts, you see that, right? Dropping all these morbid bombs about not being here and crap like that.”

  “My returning home to Langley was never meant to be forever.” I say it kindly, knowing the truth really can hurt. “I’m here and I’m not, my ambitions, heart and soul elsewhere. And you’ve always known that.”

  “Dragging me down here for no good reason,” she isn’t going to listen, “like we’re about to be hacked by North Korea.”

  “If that should go down, whether it’s a nation or individual, you don’t want it happening on your watch. Which is why I’ve tried to show you all this before, most recently yesterday, to no avail.” Moving away from her as she hovers near the airlock door. “Well, going forward, maybe when there’s a big storm coming or an alarm goes off—or both—you’ll understand why it should matter to you. And if you’re not going to come down here yourself, then you’ll have to find someone who can.”

  Doing my best to make it penetrate that soon enough whatever happens in Langley’s cyberspace is on her.

  “Hack into what?” At the top of her lungs. “A steam pipe?”

  Her sarcastic question doesn’t merit a response, and I focus my attention on the hatch, careful where I step. Getting closer to what Fran considers the monster in the closet or under the bed, and I believe she’d do almost anything to avoid checking this or any tunnel. There isn’t much she wouldn’t do to avoid stepping foot in one and hasn’t since Christmas Eve three years ago.

  She hasn’t done a lot of things since then, and probably no one knows more about her history than I do. No one is less callous to her current misery and how real it feels. But if I gave in to her every phobia, she couldn’t do her job. She would have lost it by now, and that’s the irony. When she decompensates, her defense is to make it all about me, as if I’m the one acting squirrelly even as I help her.

  “. . . Ever since you got back from Houston, you’ve been freaking over everything,” lecturing me, jabbing her index finger into the warm stale air. “Like the world’s going to end if you don’t walk on the freakin’ moon someday.”

  Yes, I’d very much like to step foot there, I don’t bother to reply. But I’ve also got my sights on other destinations, including Mars, and crouching in front of the yellow-painted hatch, I zip my analyzer inside my gear bag.

  “Well, you know my attitude about what you can’t control,” I answer. “You know what they say: que será, será.”

  “Yeah, ‘whatever will be, will be,’ bullshit. You’ve been a nervous wreck ever since those interviews.” Fran isn’t going to spare my feelings or even be polite about it.

  And that’s the downside when you’ve known someone most of your life.

  3

  IN HER late 40s, she looks younger and more fit t
han she deserves, and it isn’t fair. Especially when one is as calorie and workout obsessed as I have to be.

  Fran can eat and drink pretty much anyone under the table without penalty or remorse, and forget exercise. No need when you clean your own house, do your own repairs and work in the yard, if you ask her. The last time I dragged her to the gym here on campus, she broke out in hives, claiming an allergy to exercise.

  Yet she doesn’t have an ounce of padding in any of the wrong places, is built like a stevedore and about as strong. I remind her when I can that she’s old enough to be my mom. But she doesn’t act mature or maternal, more like a bossy badass aunt. A dyed-in-the-wool cop from a long line of them, she’ll tell you she doesn’t know how to be anything other than what she is.

  Take it or leave it, some things are hardwired in, and I don’t disagree. A perfect example of the apple not falling far from the tree, her father a Hampton chief and commander of SWAT. And his father a legendary investigator for the Virginia State Police. Even without her law enforcement pedigree, Fran was considered quite the force when Hampton PD and NASA Protective Services formed a reciprocal partnership about the time Carme and I left for college.

  Since then, Fran has been deputized by us and has jurisdiction on our grounds. And NASA Langley’s federal special agents like me have jurisdiction in Hampton. This is helpful since nobody actually lives on the NASA campus and has to drive through Hampton to get anywhere. What happens if I witness a crime on my way to or from work? In the old days, that was a problem. One could be in uniform with a badge and gun, and have no more power than any other citizen when witnessing a bank being robbed.