Blinding Fear

by Roland, Bruce

  As he planned the operation, Gnash tried, in a purely analytical way, to calculate what would happen to the surrounding neighborhood in the event the explosion was larger than he expected. As the drone returned he could see some of what was happening, as well as hear, and knew he had miscalculated. The size of the blast, which he now guess-timated was at least 30% more powerful than his original computations, would, under normal circumstances, scar this region of the city and state for years to come. The seen and unseen consequences, both human and environmental, would be staggering in complexity and scale; the costs to rebuild lives and infrastructure in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.

  But these weren’t normal times and he could not have cared less.

  This and his other, related operations were of infinitely greater importance. The Cray supercomputer that really did exist in the basement of the inferno that had once been the proud Center for Astrophysics, was quickly melting into a slag heap of twisted plastic, glass and various metals; the data stored in it that had been accumulated over a hundred and fifty years, now thankfully gone forever.

  Then, over the barking of countless dogs, he began to hear many sirens in the distance and knew it was time to leave.

  Chapter 14

  There it was, exactly where he had “left” it and Frank was elated!

  Whalen’s Comet had moved a little since he had last seen it but thankfully it had followed the trajectory he had calculated, so it hadn’t been too difficult to relocate. It was still just a fuzzy dot against a gigantic star field but it was again his comet!

  As he had anticipated when he began his search anew, the process had proven to be much less laborious than the first time. Thankfully, he’d remembered the approximate celestial coordinates and after a week of night sky observation and photo-taking he was able to find it.

  He sat back in one of his dining room table chairs and crossed his arms, jubilantly looking at the photos on the screen of his MacBook. He reached forward and hit the cursor key repeatedly to cause the image to morph back and forth between two separate photos he’d taken three days apart. He could clearly see the dot’s position shift every so slightly; a small difference but enough to tell him all he needed to know for the moment: the comet was indeed moving and probably toward the inner planets. He didn’t have the software or hardware to calculate the exact path it would take but he really didn’t care. He had reclaimed his prize!

  If he could, he would have given the middle finger salute to whoever the bastard was who thought he would give up so easily. To think, that by sending him such an obviously fake, cease-and-desist letter, he would give up what had become the overriding passion of his life was laughable.

  He couldn’t help but remember the organization that the letter had supposedly come from: “United States Department of Policy and Planning for Near-Earth and Other Space Objects.” Ridiculous!

  In spite of his belief the letter was a fraud, however, he couldn’t help having some nagging concerns of how whoever it was had penetrated the security protocols of his laptop. The thought had caused him to nearly completely shut down on-line communication with other amateur astronomers for fear he might slip up and reveal details about his search. The one exception was Richard Halpren, a semi-reclusive, retired and also divorced-scarred, Air Force Master Sergeant who lived in the appropriately named west Texas town of Ransom Canyon. He was double-dipping in retirement by putting his military training as a jet engine mechanic to use at a private airport. He’d said he wasn’t allowed to talk about the specifics of his job or company other than it was a high-tech startup.

  Frank and Halpren had “run” into each other in an astronomy chat room and begun sharing their respective passions for looking for unknown comets as well as the other unfortunate aspects of their lives. Outside of sending the details to the International Astronomical Union, Halpren was the one person with whom Frank had shared his discovery of Whalen’s Comet. Over time and many “conversations,” it seemed to him that Halpren could be trusted to keep his discovery a secret. When Frank had voiced his concerns about secrecy, Halpren had reassured him he had nothing to fear. After that Frank also revealed the seemingly crazy letter to his on-line friend and the two had shared a good laugh over the lunacy and stupidity of some people in their avocation.

  Pushing back from the table, he examined the leftover debris of the many and varied, nutrition-less snacks and drinks he’d consumed over multiple nights. They were creeping ever closer to the computer. He realized he would be forced to clean up the table. He didn’t want a half-consumed burger or chocolate shake or fizz-less cola falling or spilling on the keyboard. He could deal with a larcenous amateur astronomer. What he couldn’t accept was his own stupidity in destroying his computer and the precious photos it contained.

  He stood up and began collecting old wrappers, cups, bags, pizza boxes and partially eaten fries, hot dogs and other sundry foods and taking them into the kitchen for disposal in the overflowing trash can.

  He had to admit that in terms of cleanliness the horseshoe-shaped kitchen was pretty much a copy of the dining room table. He stood in the middle examining the disaster. Unwashed dishes and utensils, pots and pans with baked-on or dried-on remains of former meals and a hodgepodge of rotting fruit, vegetables and leftovers had turned the space into a perfect breeding ground for every type of bacteria. With a sigh, he looked around trying to figure out where and how to attack the mess. Realizing he needed a new roll of paper towels from the garage he turned to leave......

  .......and came face to face with a very tall man, standing at the open end of the kitchen, calmly staring at him. He was dressed in a dark blue jogging suit and was wearing a black ski cap.

  Frank staggered back, speechless with fear, running into the stove, sending several unwashed pans clattering to the floor, bits of days-old food spraying in various directions.

  “A bit of a mess, don’t you think Mr. Whalen?” The man spread his well-muscled arms wide, encompassing the totality of the hygienic disaster. He slowly shook his head. “If you believe in the idiom ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’ you are most certainly going straight to Hell.”

  Somehow Frank managed to compose himself enough to yell at the intruder. “Whoever you are, you need to get out of my house before I call the cops!”

  “Oh, that’s not going to happen, Mr. Whalen,” the man said, in a carefully modulated baritone voice.

  Frank fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his smartphone, quickly dialed 9-1-1 and put it to his ear. At the same moment he noticed the man smiling and holding something that looked like a cell phone only slightly thicker.

  “You will note at this moment you have no cell tower connectivity. This little device has seen to that.” The man waved it at him then put it back into one of his pockets. “I’ve also seen to it that your landline won’t work either. If you were to go outside you would find your network interface opened and disconnected. Not to worry though, when I leave I’ll be sure to close it up.” He chuckled lightly.

  After seeing “No Signal” on his cellphone it suddenly dawned on him that he might actually be in danger from this lunatic. “What do you want!” he cried out, desperately looking for some sort of escape from the kitchen. “I’ve got some cash in the bedroom. You can have my laptop. It’s a MacBook Pro......”

  “Do you really think I would want or need a used computer, Mr. Whalen?” the man tranquilly replied. He reached into his other pants pocket and pulled out some gloves and began to carefully pull them on.

  “Do you follow football, Mr. Whalen?”

  “What?! What are you talking about?!”

  “A really simple question, actually. Do you follow football? High school, college, pros?”

  Frank spasmodically nodded his head, not believing what was happening.

  “Have your ever noticed how easily wide receivers can reach out and catch a football thrown at them at 60 miles per hour?” The man completed putting on his gloves a
nd stopped, apparently waiting for an answer.

  “Are you insane or something!?” Frank yelled.

  The man held up his hands with the gloves, thoughtfully inspecting them. “It’s the gloves, you see. They’re coated with a compound made of neoprene and silicone that makes them very “tacky.” It allows them to catch and hold a ball they would never be able to do with their bare hands.”

  “Please, just tell me what you want!” Frank pleaded, his voice cracking.

  The man continued as if Frank had never responded. “What I’ve been able to do is develop a technology using the latest 3-D printing that allows me to emboss another man’s fingerprints on the tacky part of the gloves.” He held them up for Frank to see. “Pretty clever, don’t you think?”

  It was then that Frank realized that for all of his insane comments, the man intended to kill him. He began desperately looking around for some sort of weapon.

  The man pointed toward a six-inch paring knife on the counter to Frank’s right. “That one will do quite nicely, I’m sure.”

  Frank snatched up the knife and held it out menacingly. “If you think I’m going down without a fight, you’re seriously mistaken.”

  “How cliched. But that is precisely what I want you to do.”

  “What?! Why are you doing this?! I’ve never done anything to you!”

  “That may be, but recently you have been a very bad boy in other ways.”

  It suddenly hit him like a lightning bolt—the e-mail! He’d thought it was sent by another amateur astronomer trying to steal his comet but now he knew: it was exactly what it said it was! This man wasn’t some nut-job! He was here to carry out whatever legal sentence the e-mail had referred to! That meant he must be from the government. Maybe he could talk his way out!

  “If it’s the crazy e-mail from that governmental space agency you’re talking about, you can’t touch me! This country has laws that protect innocent people from monsters like you!”

  The man laughed. “Very good, Mr. Whalen. I’m glad to see you’ve connected the dots. And by the way, I can ‘touch you.’ The new laws referred to in the e-mail—that you so foolishly ignored—are very real and override all other national, state or local laws. They allow the government and its agents—me—to take all necessary action to eliminate the clear and present danger that now exists—you.” The man pointed his gloved right hand and fingers at Frank making a gun shape. He closed one eye, aimed and quietly said, “Bang. You’re dead.”

  “You’ll never get away with it!”

  The man laughed again, this time louder. “Another wonderful cliche! Of course I will! I meticulously planned every aspect of this operation. Take the fingerprints on my gloves. They belong to one of your local meth-heads. At this moment he’s probably flying as high as he’s ever been, thanks to some high-quality product I generously gave him. When I’m finished here, some of your property, perhaps your precious MacBook, among other things, will find its way into his possession. When the police go through your house looking for evidence they’ll find his fingerprints along with some of your precious stuff missing. At his wreck of an apartment they’ll discover your property. They will quickly determine that for at least the third time in the last five years he broke into a house—yours—looking for anything to feed his habit. Tragically you caught him in the act, a fight ensued and you came out the loser. How sad.”

  As the man talked Frank tried to plan an escape. Deciding only one course of action might work, he suddenly lunged forward with the knife, hoping to catch his adversary off guard.

  The man easily side-stepped the thrust, clamped a powerful hand on Frank’s wrist just below the knife, spun him around, leveraged his arm up behind his back and wrenched the knife away. With another easy motion he planted the blade deep in Frank’s thigh. The pain was far beyond excruciating. As he screamed he hoped one of his neighbors might hear it and call the police.

  “A nice try Mr. Whalen, but not nearly good enough.” He then forced the arm much higher. Frank heard and felt something pop in his arm, eliciting another agonizing shriek. A split-second later he felt himself being thrown out of the kitchen, tumbling across the dining room table, ending up in a heap, face down on the floor. He tried to push up, but agonizing pain exploded through his right elbow and shoulder causing him to slump back down. He rolled to his back and looked up at the man, standing over him, again smiling.

  “You don’t have to do this!” Frank wheezed through the torturous pain. “I won’t tell anyone else about the comet! I’ll delete the photos! I’ll do anything you want!”

  “It’s far too late for that Mr. Whalen. You’ve proven yourself to be very untrustworthy. It’s time for you to accept full responsibility for your foolish actions.” He viciously kicked Frank in the ribs. “You even shared your most recent activities with one of your associates. Now I may have to pay him a visit. Most regrettable. You’ve given me extra work!” He lashed out again with his foot. Somehow, in spite of the searing pain in his ribs, thigh, and arm Frank managed to deflect the blow, grab the foot and twist as hard as he could. The man spun around, easily breaking away but leaving his athletic shoe in Frank’s hands. The man reached down and snatched it out of his hands. “These shoes are another of my brilliant ideas,” he said with a twisted smile. “It turns out our friend, the meth-head, wears exactly the same size shoe as I do. How fortunate, don’t you think? I’ll make sure his footprints, made from your blood, are found throughout your wonderful home.”

  Frank rolled over onto his stomach, groaning from the searing pain radiating from numerous parts of his body. Unexpectedly he felt a drop of liquid spill on to his cheek. He slowly touched a finger to the spot, then looked at the finger. It was something red.

  “It’s the meth-head’s blood, actually,” the man said proudly. “While he was unconscious during one of his benders I extracted a small amount, which I will now splatter here....and here....and here.” Frank could see him flicking a teaspoon, spraying the blood around from a small vial. It was grotesquely, horrifically reminiscent of a priest blessing the room against evil.

  The man completed his gruesome task and turned back to Frank. “I think the time has come for you to meet your maker, Mr. Whalen. No more playing around.”

  Frank dazedly watched as the man walked quickly toward him, pull his leg back and direct what Frank knew would be a fatal blow toward his head.

  Chapter 15

  Lieutenant Austen Beckett of the Massachusetts State Police Fire and Explosion Investigation Section surveyed the three day-old scene of the massive explosion and fire on the campus of Harvard University. He knew something was wrong. In spite of what the FBI was saying, the emerging causal factors just didn’t add up and he didn’t like it.

  Ignoring a light drizzle, he stood at the edge of the parking lot of what used to be the Center for Astrophysics complex. He visually surveyed the shattered and charred remains of what had once been the bucolic home for astronomy on campus. Hundreds of small, differently colored cones dotted the devastation, signifying where various pieces of crucial evidence had fallen. Large plumes of steam drifted out of the still-smoldering, gigantic trash heap that had once been a proud building. The hundred year-old copper observation domes were now virtually unrecognizable piles of partially melted slag.

  Something caught his attention at his feet. It was a red cone. He bent down, picked it up and saw underneath what appeared to be part of a human molar. He straightened up, took a deep breath and whispered to himself, “Good Lord, what happened here?”

  He took a few moments trying to better understand the apparent chain of events that led to the landscape of utter destruction in front of him. They’d been very fortunate in one respect. A high-definition surveillance camera at a local convenience store had caught the delivery van as it slowly drove toward the campus—the name, address and phone number of the business clearly visible on its side. Without the video they’d have sifted through the dime-sized pieces of human anatomy and
vehicle for months trying as best they could to literally and figuratively put the pieces together. The truth was it could have taken them more than a year to solve the mystery.

  Somehow, an apparently drunk Guatemalan emigrant accidentally drives what amounts to a 2,000 pound bomb on wheels into a seemingly random building reducing it to smoking rubble in seconds. He is out that night as the result of an apparently phony order for explosive gases at an industrial lab on campus. From what is an apparent—there was that damn word again!—standing start, the 21 year-old van is going at least a nearly impossible 60 to 65 MPH when it hits the building. The owner of the delivery business says he recently had all of the engine hoses and belts replaced, yet there is a leak in a gas line that leads to the first small explosion moments after the impact. At least two to three of the very robustly engineered and constructed gas canisters fail in the crash, multiplying a relatively simple engine fire by a thousand times, creating a full-on, fuel-air explosion that would make the U.S. Air Force proud.

  But what is the most puzzling piece of the entire jigsaw puzzle is the destruction of the $500,000 Cray XC-30AC computer in the basement of the building directly below the site of the impact. Belonging to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams computer (what kind of name was that!) was the sole repository for all new comet discoveries worldwide for the last hundred years or so. Now they were all gone. The IAU calls the loss “mind numbing.”

  Was it possible the entire event was not an accident at all? Was all this a masterfully orchestrated “hit” on the computer? But why? What kind of astronomical data or information could it possibly contain that would make all this necessary? He had no answers nor did the nearly inconsolable IAU director he interviewed the day before.