Wormhole - 03

by Richard Phillips

  Heather knelt down, stripping the dead guards’ shirts and belts as Mark lifted his sister. Following her to the elevator shaft, Mark saw that the door stood open onto the empty shaft. Shifting Jennifer onto his back and wrapping her arms around his neck, he let Heather strap Jen’s hands together with a bloody shirt. Then, hooking both belts together, Heather fastened them around Mark’s and Jennifer’s bodies.

  She paused for a moment to inspect her work, then turned and leaped into the shaft, caught the thick cable, and began rapidly climbing. Mark followed, the added weight jolting his frame hard enough that he wondered if the cloth ties would handle the strain. They held and he began steadily pulling himself hand over hand up the shaft.

  “You good?” Heather asked from above.

  “Right behind you. All the way to the top.”

  “We’re making a short stopover on sublevel one.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I found our laptops.”

  Heather passed the open elevator door on sublevel two, continuing her steady climb until she hung suspended three feet above the opening into sublevel one. Swinging her body, she launched herself into space, landing in a forward roll that brought her back to her feet in the wet corridor as cold water rained down on her from above. As she’d seen on the security cameras, sublevel one had been completely evacuated once the fire alarms and waterworks had started.

  Nevertheless, she pulled the Berretta from the holster and chambered a round. Moving forward in a shooter’s crouch, she began clearing rooms left and right as she moved past them. To her rear, she heard Mark land and slide. Then he was beside her, moving with his own gun drawn, Jennifer dangling awkwardly from his back.

  Unlike on the lower sublevels, laboratories and offices filled this floor, a facility designed to provide close-in, real-time technical support to some of the best interrogation teams in the business. This was where equipment captured with the prisoners held below came to be analyzed and dissected, providing a rapid turnaround totally focused on providing corroboration or leverage on the former owners. A single cell phone often yielded information that skilled interrogators wielded on their subjects like Chinese water torture.

  Heather paused outside of the lab she had targeted, took a deep breath, and held it. Opening the door, she stepped inside, grabbed the nearest chair, and used it to wedge the door wide open, letting the halon gas pour out into the hallway. The gas itself wasn’t harmful, but it displaced the breathable nitrogen-oxygen mix that fires and people lived on. Without waiting for the gas to drain out into the hallway, Heather stepped into the room and turned on the lights, leaving Mark standing guard with Jennifer outside.

  The lab was a large room, sixty feet by forty-eight, with raised flooring to accommodate the wiring that ran beneath it. Rows of workbenches divided the room into four sections. On the third of these, Heather found what she was searching for. Both laptops had been stripped, the motherboards and computing components plugged into other systems capable of recording all electrical activity in the circuits. Heather ignored them, selecting instead the two specially modified USB dongles. Removing these from their mounts, Heather dropped them in a small plastic Ziploc bag she retrieved from the supplies strewn across the workbench, and made her way back toward the door.

  Pausing momentarily to grab a white lab coat from a hanger by the lab entrance, she slipped out of the wet hospital gown, fastened the coat around her with the gun belt, and stepped back into the corridor. She’d been in the lab for just over three minutes, and she felt certain that she could have held her breath another seven. Still, it felt good to replace the old lungful with a fresh breath.

  Partially revived by the cold downpour, Jennifer was moving on Mark’s back, in weak protest against the trusses that bound her to her brother. The sound of distant gunfire echoed from above.

  “Got ’em?” Mark asked.

  “What we need.”

  “So now it’s up and out.”

  “The shaft comes out in an elevator alcove about fifty feet from the main entrance. Right now there’s a serious fight going on up there; we should be able to get to the parking garage exit with minimal resistance.”

  “Minimal?”

  “Three to five guards. Eighty-seven percent probability based on my last look at the video.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Heather led the way back to the shaft at a jog. Her last step propelled her out onto the cable. The gunfire was louder now, interspersed with yells and screams of pain. She slowed her ascent as she approached the open door to the main elevator alcove. A black-clad guard crouched facing away, firing down the hall toward the entrance. Heather shot him in the back of the head.

  Leaping into the alcove, she grabbed him by his heels and pulled him farther back into the alcove as Mark landed behind her.

  Heather yelled to make herself heard over the sound of the raging gun battle in the main foyer. “Take his uniform. I’ll cover you.”

  Mark unstrapped Jennifer as Heather grabbed the dead guard’s short-barreled Mark 17 SCAR-H and magazines and took up a defensive crouch by the exit into the main corridor. When she glanced back again, Mark, dressed in black, was finishing lacing up his boots.

  Heather tossed him the SCAR-H. “I’ll carry Jen. You get us the hell out of here.”

  As she lifted Jennifer’s body onto her shoulder, Heather saw Mark lean around the corner and squeeze off two quick shots. Seeing him motion her forward, Heather hit the hall in a dead run, heard Mark firing behind her as she ducked around the corner. A crouching guard saw her coming, paused to take in the girl in the white lab coat with an orange-clad woman slung over her shoulder, and hesitated. Heather’s bullet took him between the eyes, the nine-millimeter Parabellum slamming his lifeless body to the floor with an audible thump.

  As she reached the door out to the parking garage, Heather heard Mark’s boots pounding down the hall behind her. Turning the handle in her hand, she stepped aside as Mark’s shoulder hit the door, launching it into one of the two guards crouching outside. The other tried to level his weapon, but Mark was too fast, his booted foot catching the man in the chest with the force of a battering ram. Two trigger pulls ensured neither man would pose a continuing threat.

  Glancing back down the hallway, Heather saw an Arab prisoner peek around the corner. She squeezed off a round that caught him in the throat, sending him sprawling.

  “Got their keys,” Mark said. “Let’s go.”

  Ducking as low as she could and still run with Jennifer slung over her shoulder, Heather followed Mark through the rows of cars while he clicked the alarm buttons on both key fobs. They were rewarded with the sound of a honking horn and the flash of headlights on a white Ford Edge halfway down the second row.

  Heather piled Jennifer into the backseat and climbed into the passenger seat as Mark threw the car into drive and squealed around the exit ramp. As Mark cornered out of the building, the mini-SUV slid sideways, tires spewing black smoke as the rear window exploded in a hail of bullets. Heather emptied the Beretta along the calculated back trajectory and then they were around the corner, headlights off, sliding right onto Canine Road, then left onto Rockenbach with all the speed Mark could extract from the new Ford.

  “You’re bleeding.” The concern in Mark’s voice made Heather aware of a dull throbbing in her left temple.

  A quick touch and her hand came away bloody. “Just a glass scalp cut. Bleeds a lot, but I’m fine.”

  At Cooper Avenue, Mark hung another left, letting the speed fall off naturally as they entered the wooded housing area. A left on Ninety-First Division Boulevard led to Colyer Loop and then Anderson Loop. Mark parked the Ford on the curb in the widest expanse between houses, turned off the interior lighting, opened the driver’s door, and stepped out into darkness, a move that Heather duplicated on the passenger’s side.

  As Heather opened the rear passenger door, Mark stepped up beside her. “I’ll get Jen. You take this.”

  He
handed her the Mark 17 and lifted Jennifer from the backseat.

  Heather paused to listen to the cadence of distant gunfire and sirens, letting her mind play out the most likely scenarios. Someone would find the bullet-riddled vehicle first thing in the morning. That was just fine.

  She stepped away from the SUV, walking swiftly across the grassy expanse between houses and into the woods beyond, Mark striding silently by her side.

  Balls Wilson strode into the Ice House foyer flanked by a Delta security detail. The Delta Force team had been on-site less than an hour and had declared the area secure less than ten minutes earlier. Whatever shape the building had been in during the initial firefight, Delta’s arrival hadn’t improved its structural integrity.

  A lean, square-jawed man, clad all in black, walked up to him. “General Wilson. I’m Bob Chavez. I lead this team.”

  General Wilson’s eyes took in the whole man. Typical Delta. Fit. Cocky. More civvy merc than military. The type of man most special operators wanted to become.

  “You got time to give me a tour?”

  “All the time in the world, General. No more bad guys.”

  “Any alive?”

  “A couple got away before we got here. The rest are dead. Couldn’t keep seventy-two virgins waiting.”

  It was the answer Balls had expected. No real tragedy. They’d long since extracted all the information they were going to get out of the Arabs. It saved the government the expense and aggravation of a bunch of public trials. That would more than compensate for the cost of rebuilding this facility. The real loss was the three Gregory accomplices.

  “Find any Anglo bodies?”

  “Hard to tell. You’ll need a good forensics team for that.”

  They started at the bottom, taking the main stairwell down to sublevel four, and worked their way up, stopping to let Balls examine every cell, room, and laboratory, Chavez providing a full briefing as they walked. All the violent action had happened on sublevels three and four, and on the ground floor. Those were a blood-spattered, bullet- and explosive-shattered mess. Damage on sublevels one and two seemed limited to water damage from the sprinklers. The labs all appeared in good shape, the reason they used halon fire suppression systems. Ironic. People be damned. At least the electronics were safe.

  Balls paused in the first-sublevel electronics lab, walking to Eileen Wu’s workstation. As far as he could tell, nothing had been disturbed. The Gregory laptops still occupied the top of the workbench, their guts attached to an electronic forensic array. As he stared down at it, the thought occurred to Balls Wilson that in an android world, Eileen would be the perfect medical examiner.

  Well, she and the rest of the team would get their chance to see what equipment still worked after the real MEs finished with the slaughterhouse.

  Turning back to Bob Chavez, Balls nodded. “Thanks, Bob. I can show myself out.”

  “Couldn’t have that, General. You might trip on the stairs. How would that look on my report?”

  The image of the grinning Chavez stayed with Balls Wilson all the way back to NSA headquarters.

  Dr. Donald Stephenson wasn’t happy. The accident had killed three people. More importantly it had set back construction two weeks. Now he had a bunch of unionized French construction workers complaining about how the aggressive work schedule was jeopardizing worker safety. He’d just finished explaining to that collection of morons that if they didn’t get back on schedule, a black hole was going to jeopardize worker safety a hell of a lot more. Besides, if they did their jobs as they were supposed to, there wouldn’t be any more accidents.

  Luckily none of the new equipment had been damaged when the crane cable had broken, dropping a section of dismantled muon detectors back into the ATLAS cavern, crushing three members of the construction crew. But the collapse had damaged needed construction equipment, thus the delay. Well, they’d just have to make it up.

  But not all the news was bad. Stephenson turned to the latest progress reports from the matter disrupter construction team. Apparently that foreman knew his ass from a hole in the ground. Having already completed the electrical conduit work, his team was actually ahead of schedule. At this pace they’d be ready for the first small-scale matter-to-energy conversion test in a month.

  He logged into his computer, using a biometric fingerprint scan followed by a sixty-four-character password that changed on an hourly basis. It was a formula Dr. Stephenson had designed and that only he knew. Since the Nancy Anatole incident, he’d made a number of security enhancements so that he no longer had to worry about a hacker accessing his private system. Still, it was an inconvenience, one that didn’t elevate his current mood.

  All his work, these last forty-odd years, had boiled down to this offshoot of the Rho Project. He actually felt like shaking Freddy Hagerman’s hand for pushing up his schedule. Thanksgiving night, when everything had gone so wrong, it had forced him to use Raul to generate the anomaly, even at the cost of completely depleting the Rho Ship’s power cells, effectively killing it. But in six months, the world would wake up to a new dawn, a golden age of knowledge and enlightenment. Nobody knew this gateway’s real purpose and no one would dare try to stop him now. The November Anomaly had made sure of that.

  Failure wasn’t an option. Either this project succeeded on schedule, or the Earth, and eventually the entire solar system, would disappear into a new black hole, as its event horizon gobbled up anything that happened to pass within its reach. And with each gulp of additional matter, that horizon would expand.

  Shrugging aside all thoughts of the unthinkable, Dr. Stephenson set to work modifying the construction plan in the ATLAS cavern to remedy today’s setback. The workers weren’t going to like it, but they hadn’t liked anything about the project so far. Of one thing he was certain. They’d do what he demanded. Like it or not.

  The homes off of New Cut Road were widely spaced, the lots deeply cut into the thick woods, giving each a sense of being its own manor. Heather crouched in the woods beside Mark and Jennifer near one of these houses, and settled in as the dawn colored the eastern sky with a peachy glow. They’d traveled a little over fourteen miles on their circuitous route through the Maryland woods, placing them about five miles from Fort Meade, as the crow flies. Heather would have liked to cover more distance, but had settled for being careful, doubling back on their route and spending part of the night in streams on the off chance that dogs picked up the trail.

  But she knew they weren’t going to use dogs anytime soon. They’d have to figure out who had lived and died inside the facility last night before they knew whom they were looking for. Once they found the hijacked Ford and fingerprinted it, they’d know that Mark, Jen, and Heather were among the escapees, if anyone else had made it out. All of that took time under the best of circumstances. The mass confusion added by Jack’s explosions around the base only made the confusing situation worse.

  Jennifer had finally come out of her drug haze at a little past four a.m., and had now recovered sufficiently to operate without assistance. That was good. They were going to need each other at peak performance over the next twenty-four hours.

  The sound of the garage door opening snapped Heather’s attention back to the scene before her. As she’d anticipated, both cars backed out into the driveway, one after the other, and drove off down the lane as the garage door rumbled shut behind them. Two working adults. No children. That and its isolation were the reasons Heather had selected this particular dwelling.

  Leading the way, she moved quickly to the side of the house, rapidly examining the electrical meters, cable box, and telephone wiring. It took her exactly fifty-three seconds to bypass the security system. With a nod to Mark, Heather moved up beside him as he broke the lock on the garage’s side access door and stepped inside.

  They swept the house, clearing the first floor, then the second, leaving the basement for last.

  “All clear.” Mark’s voice from the basement allowed Heather to reduce he
r guard for the first time in weeks. Even though she knew it wouldn’t last, for right now it felt damn good.

  “You want the shower first?”

  Mark shook his head as he looked her up and down. “You and Jen each take a bathroom while I keep watch. You both look like hell.”

  Neither Heather or Jennifer bothered to argue. In twenty minutes they were back downstairs, dressed in jeans and blouses that were a couple of sizes too big, but far better than the lab coat and orange prison garb.

  “Your turn. I’ll take watch while Jen hacks their laptop.” Mark handed her the Mark 17 SCAR-H and two spare magazines.

  “Check the fridge while you’re at it,” he called out as he headed upstairs toward the master bedroom. “I could eat an elephant.”

  Heather followed Jennifer into the office, a room just off the foyer that had a clear view to the spot where the curving driveway disappeared into the trees that surrounded the house. Jennifer slid into the seat in front of the laptop, held down the power button for several seconds, and waited for the laptop to power off. That done, she inserted the subspace USB dongle into a USB port on the Dell laptop’s right side.

  Jennifer brought up the BIOS screen and set the computer to boot from the USB device, bypassing the user log-in and password. As the Windows desktop appeared, she smiled and cracked her knuckles.

  “Damn, I’ve missed this.”

  As Heather watched, Jennifer began her web search, memorizing the locations of key facilities she wanted to access. Satisfied, she began a completely different kind of search, this time using the dongle’s subspace receiver-transmitter.

  “Check for Jack’s messages first,” Heather said. “Then you can start your hacks.”

  Jennifer nodded, shifting her attention back to the web browser.

  Jack had a standard operation procedure of posting encrypted messages on a handful of Facebook accounts, using encryption software Jen and Heather had designed. And while they no longer had a copy of the program, it only took a couple of minutes to download the latest version of the Java Development Kit and install it on the laptop. From there until she had the program up and running would be a matter of minutes, not hours.