by Brandt Legg
“The same. He was also a large donor to a certain congressman.”
“Which one?” Tess asked, already dreading the answer.
“Jie Shi’s boyfriend.”
“Incredible,” Tess said. “So the Russians must be very worried about Chase and Wen. Jie Shi is deep in the MSS, who have an execution-order on Chase and Wen, and now the shadow people who’ve been attempting to assassinate them forever.”
Another IT-Squad was tracking Jie Shi. Tess hardly had time to check in on what yesterday had been her number one priority, but Blackout had suddenly made Jie Shi a distant number two. Yet anything having to do with China always easily stole her attention since she considered them the greatest threat.
“Where is Jie Shi?” Tess asked. “And Chase and Wen?”
“Jie Shi was in New York with the congressman this morning,” the analyst said.
“Is she in DC now?”
“Checking.”
“Maybe Spinx is also having an affair with Jie Shi,” another analyst joked.
Tess shuddered.
Tess took a call from Gatewood in Secure. “Power isn’t necessarily the problem for these weapons,” the HITE director told her. “We’ve been working on other energy sources for lasers.”
“Enough to let them destroy a city from space?” she asked, always frustrated by Gatewood’s refusal to ever share all the details.
“It would be an amplification of where we are, but it is possible.”
“How would someone have obtained that technology from HITE?” she asked, knowing of what Gatewood referred to as the agencies “death-sentence-secrecy.”
“They did not obtain it from HITE. If someone has the ability to transform these substances to mass-power, they did so before we got there.”
“What are we talking about here?”
“Minerals. Extremely rare minerals that can add to the power source.”
“If I can do anything about this, I need you to elaborate.”
He scoffed. “Tess, you can’t do anything to stop the source. I just needed you to be aware that if you’re counting on cutting this thing off by narrowing the possible power plants or denying the destructive capabilities of what Blackout could unleash . . . don’t.”
“Are you telling me Russia has access to these minerals in sufficient enough quantities to power a laser weapon capable of taking out a city?”
“I don’t know. Intelligence is your business, mine is technology. It’s there. They could have it, or someone else could.” Gatewood thought of the only person in the world that he feared, a man who used to have his job, the only living former head of HITE, Kalor Locke, and worried that he might somehow be involved. But he did not express his suspicions to Tess.
“Thanks for nothing helpful, Holt. If you decide to give me some information I can use, you have my number.”
“I’m just saying, don’t count on the power supply to lead you to the perpetrators. And it may not be Russia.” He thought again of Kalor Locke. “It could be anyone.”
Fifty-Six
Washington, DC
Reviewing the latest information from Osborne and the new data The Astronaut had recovered from the assets Chase and Wen had collected, the three spoke for more than twenty minutes trying to find a breakthrough. Finally, without much progress, Nash gave them some good news.
“Certain interesting information from the flash drive you found at Hayward’s place,” The Astronaut said. “There is a man named Rod Irwin, who was convicted of espionage. Turns out he never gave up one of his co-conspirators.”
“And?”
“They were trading all kinds of high-tech secrets. Advanced weapons systems, aerospace, all kinds of classified and restricted technologies. Hayward had traced some of the transactions to a foreign operative known as Tolstoy, and noted many of Irwin’s schemes were connected to Blackout.”
“Can he tell us anything?”
“Prosecutors believed that the co-conspirator was a US agent—CIA or FBI. I think if we can find that agent, we can unravel Blackout.”
“Where is Irwin now?”
“As luck would have it, he’s serving his sentence at the federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia.”
“We just caught our first break then.”
“Only problem is, he’s in the high security section of the facility.”
“I’ll call Tess,” Wen said. “She can get him moved to the minimum security section where Mars is.”
“And I’ll get a hold of Mars,” Chase said.
Petersburg, Virginia
Mars, a forty-five-year-old convict at Petersburg, was Chase’s oldest friend. Years earlier, Mars had worked for Chase’s mother’s auto repair business, and been like an older brother to the up and coming billionaire, who was fifteen years younger.
He still had seven years remaining behind bars, two from his original sentence, and an additional five from a new charge after he’d escaped to save Chase’s life. The billionaire had vowed to either get the conviction overturned, or break Mars out.
This might finally be the chance to get him out. If Mars helped stop Blackout, a presidential pardon would be a reasonable reward.
Mars scratched his chin. His weeks’ worth of stubble was only slightly shorter than his close-cropped hair. The 6’4” convict looked out at the trees that separated the minimum security portion of the prison from a river, and freedom. Only a low, chain link fence prevented him from running. Mars had spoken to Chase minutes earlier, and now had a mission.
Save the world.
“Again?” Mars responded.
Mars thrived in prison by running multiple underground businesses while incarcerated. He’d also developed a method to help keep Chase’s whereabouts unknown by utilizing “decoying.” The plan flooded intel agencies, law enforcement, and other surveillance organizations with false reports and sightings of Chase and Wen, occurring at random intervals around the globe. The many people looking for them would get a constant stream of bad information. Through credit card use, surveillance cameras linked to facial recognition data bases, and a number of other related methods, the sightings would pour in at critical times and overwhelm those seeking Chase.
Being behind bars normally meant all communications were monitored and there was zero access to cell phones. However, Mars had several guards on his “payroll.” He couldn’t always get a phone, but he’d arranged many advantages that could be bought in any corrupt prison system; including the world’s largest—the American system, which held more than 2.3 million people, giving it the highest incarceration rate of any country. The message had come in from his case worker, a career Bureau of Prisons employee who was building his retirement on what Mars, and a few other incarcerated high rollers, “tipped” him.
Mars spotted Irwin and started casually walking in his direction. Passing on the way to the weight pile, Mars nodded, a kind of not-too-friendly greeting one inmate gives to another when there was some familiarity between them.
Irwin nodded back. “You used to be inside,” he said, his short white beard perfectly matching his white hair. Although Irwin was at least five inches shorter than Mars, he appeared big enough to handle himself in any routine barroom brawl. Prison fights, though, were a different thing. Size wasn’t always the deciding factor. Experience and anger were generally more important, as well as alliances. Maybe that was why Irwin had initiated a conversation with Mars after recognizing him from the inside.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Mars said. “Got transferred over here about six months ago.”
Irwin nodded, but said nothing.
Asking details was generally frowned upon between inmates, but in this case, Mars volunteered the information. “I was originally finishing up a dime at Lompoc, but I escaped.”
Irwin’s eyes widened, and he looked out toward the fenceless perimeter of the minimum-security prison as if wondering why Mars hadn’t bolted again. “Really? You escaped?”
“Yeah.” Mars allowed
his gaze to wander to the perimeter as well.
“How much time did you have left on that dime?”
“Two years.”
“Man, you were there and you ran? Why would you blow that for a new charge?”
“Friend was in trouble. Thought I could help.”
“Must be some friend.”
“Like a brother.”
“I got a couple brothers I don’t give a damn about.”
“Not that kind of brother,” Mars said. “The good kind.”
Irwin nodded. “I guess so.” He looked out to the old soybean fields for a moment. “Still . . . that’s a crazy thing to do. You end up helping him?”
“Yeah.”
“Five years’ worth of help?”
“I think so.”
“Wish I had a friend like you.”
Fifty-Seven
Georgetown, Washington, DC - April 3rd - 1:34 pm
Chase knocked on the polished wood door of the stately row house. Wen scanned the area. The end unit allowed her to see around to the side street. Any number of suspicious vehicles concerned her, but when the tall, bespectacled scientist answered the door, very much alive, she relaxed a bit.
“Doctor Forbes?”
“That’s right,” the man replied somewhat cautiously, a mess of thick black hair betraying his calm demeanor.
“We’re friends of Hayward Hughes. We really need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“I think you know,” Chase said. “Laser weapons.”
Forbes went still. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Chase spotted two suitcases in the hall behind him. “That’s not true. You were working with Hayward, helping with the DARPA project.”
“Why isn’t Hayward here?”
“I think you know the answer to that, too.”
“He’s dead?”
Chase nodded. “Afraid so.”
“Did you kill him?” Forbes asked shakily. “Are you here to kill me?”
“Quite the contrary, Doctor Forbes. We’re here to help you.”
He started to close the door. “I don't need any help.”
“You’re scared.”
“Damn right, I am. Four of my colleagues are dead, the DARPA director, and now Hayward. Scientists are becoming an endangered species.”
“We can get you to a safe place,” Wen said.
“I don’t even know who you are.”
“Listen, please, if we were here to cause you harm, we could have killed you already. We need to know what you know about laser weapons.”
“It’s classified.”
“We’re way beyond that,” Chase said. “Somebody is using technology you helped to develop. They’re planning to destroy an American city. They’re going to do it tonight.”
Forbes leaned heavily against the door. “Oh my god . . . I warned them this could happen.”
“Who?”
“Skyenor, and the others on the team.” He looked back inside, as if deciding how to escape.
“We need your help to stop it,” Wen told him.
“Don’t you want to know if such a thing is even possible?”
“We know it’s possible,” Chase said. “We want to know what city, and who’s doing it. In order to find that out, we need to learn how it works.”
Doctor Forbes stared at them. “I’ll give you five minutes.” He stood aside and let them in. “I’ve been telling them for years that this could be misused. My research has always been in the area of lasers and energy development, but just like nuclear energy can be turned into a weapons program, so can lasers. That’s what DARPA wanted . . . an insurmountable weapon.”
“How is it insurmountable?” Wen asked, knowing they would have to find a way to stop it.
“There are two things you need to know about lasers,” he said. “They are incredibly accurate and highly controllable as far as damage setting. Those are sought-after attributes for military applications. Although, that wasn’t my initial area of research.”
“You made that clear,” Chase said. “But now a million people are going to die. Weren’t there safeguards?”
“A laser is, of course, a beam of light, meaning it travels at the speed of light. That’s 186,000 miles per second. Nothing goes faster. As a weapon, that is a devastating advantage.” He paused and met Chase’s eyes. “The only warning you get from an incoming laser is when it hits you.”
“What’s the second thing?” Wen asked, hoping there was a way to deactivate the weapon if they could find it.
“Lasers require a vast amount of power.”
“And where would they get this power?”
“There are brokers in these things. The Russians are—”
“You think it’s the Russians?”
Forbes nodded. “DARPA and the top brass at the Pentagon are concerned about the Kremlin’s Peresvet, an ultra-secret and extremely complex laser weapon, but it’s only part of Russia’s high energy laser directed energy weapon system.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Chase said. “Could it be the Russians who are about to pull the trigger on this thing?”
“The Russians are all in, and have been pursuing lasers as long as we have. They could have the capability, but would they dare? I don’t know the answer to that. I’m a simple scientist, not a geopolitical analyst.”
“How can we find out their target? How can we stop it?”
He looked at his suitcases, and then at the closed door as if trapped, and sighed. “There could be dozens of potential strike points, depending on how they have configured the weapon, but—”
“A pyramid configuration,” Chase said.
The doctor’s face went ashen. “Then my guess is it will be one of two places.” He took a deep breath and rubbed the back of his neck. “Power is the key. It’s—”
Doctor Forbes collapsed to the floor at the same time the window shattered.
Fifty-Eight
Petersburg, Virginia - April 3rd - 1:40 pm - 15 hours 4 minutes until 4:44AM on 4/4
Mars and Irwin went silent as a couple of guards passed by.
“Why did you get put out here?” Mars asked, looking at the double high fences capped with razor wire. The gun towers could see and control the minimum security side where they were now, but they were only there for the “inside” convicts. Being moved from the locked-down higher security section to the “camp” was a world of difference.
“I’m not entirely sure.” Irwin appeared suddenly nervous, as though a sniper might be waiting to take a shot at him. “My attorney thinks it’s because some Fed wants to question me, and they’d rather do it out here than inside.”
“Then it may just be temporary.”
Irwin looked around. “I hope not.”
“It can make you go crazy doing time out here,” Mars said. “This close to freedom, as if you could just walk over and touch it.”
“Or just leave.” Irwin smiled for the first time.
“Yeah, well, that didn’t work out too good for me.”
“You touched it and got burned.”
“Yeah,” Mars said, sighing. He watched a couple of hulking convicts bench pressing a scary amount of weight.
“How long were you out?” Irwin asked, clearly wanting to continue the conversation. “Before they got you, I mean.”
“Few days.”
“Five years for a few days . . . crazy.” Irwin shook his head. “Did you at least get a decent meal with your woman?”
Mars looked out to the gun towers. “I did have the best pizza in New York.”
“Must have been Lucali’s.”
“It was!” Mars said, laughing.
“That’s not just the best pizza in New York, it’s the best pizza in America. How they roll out the dough with empty wine bottles, that wood-fired oven . . . ”
“And that tomato sauce. So perfect, I could eat it with a spoon.” Mars licked his lips. “To have a Lucali’s pizza right
now, mmm, that alone was worth a few months onto my sentence.”
Irwin smiled. “For one of their large basil and cheese, maybe just a few pepperonis, I might do an extra month, especially if it was out here.” He lit up a cigarette, held out the pack towards Mars.
Mars shook his head. “No thanks. Never got the habit.”
“Good thing. It’s a nasty one. I was going to quit, but then there was the investigation, the depositions, the trial, all that stress. But I decided to quit again . . . then prison . . . and I finally thought, if there’s ever a time in a man’s life to smoke cigarettes, it’s when he’s doing twenty-five years in federal prison.”
Mars whistled. “Twenty-five years, who’d you kill?”
Irwin laughed, an angry, bitter laugh. “Hell, if I’d killed someone, I probably would’ve gotten half the sentence. It was actually a big misunderstanding between me and the government.”
Mars smiled. “Isn’t it always?”
“Yeah, well, in this case I worked for the government, and they didn’t appreciate the kind of friends I kept.”
“It seems friends is a theme with you,” Mars said, as if trying to make sense of what Irwin had just told him.
“Huh?”
“No, I mean, I’m guessing you either stole government property, did some sort of bid-rigging, or maybe a tax thing, but none of those would give you twenty-five years. Unless you had a real jerk for an attorney?”
“Aren’t all attorneys jerks?” Irwin said.
“I was a lawyer once.” Mars made a comical expression. “And I have to agree with you.”
Now it was Irwin’s turn to laugh. “I’ve observed there is a disproportionate number of attorneys in prison compared to other professions.”
“So it was a bad lawyer? You can appeal.”
“Nah. I was selling classified information.”
Mars raised his eyebrows. “The feds frown on that kind of thing.”
“I’ll say.”
They were silent again. A group of three inmates went by and eyed the new guy suspiciously. Finally, when they were out of earshot, Mars turned to face Irwin.
