by Tom Clancy
The last door on the right was unlocked, and he opened it and stepped inside.
“Ah, Major, right on time. I appreciate that. Come in, come in, let me show you around.”
There didn’t appear to be much to see. In one corner was a computer desk, a holoprojector and workstation upon it and a leather rolling chair in front of it. A small fridge and stove sat to one side, and there was a foldout couch next to that. A sign on a door past the couch identified it as a loo.
Peel raised one eyebrow, as if to say, Show me what, sir?
Bascomb-Coombs smiled. “Doesn’t look like much, does it? But the real works are elsewhere, of course, at Lord Goswell’s computer facility in Chelmsford. We are hooked into it telephonically, and to answer your question, yes, quite undetectably. I can do from here what I can do at Chelmsford, and nobody will be the wiser.”
“If you’ll excuse my ignorance, Mr. Bascomb-Coombs, just what is it exactly that you do? I mean, I know about the device, what Goswell has told me of it, and I have seen the results, which are certainly quite impressive, but I’m not up to speed on how it works exactly.”
The scientist laughed. “And I doubt seriously I could explain it to you. Turner’s Dictum is that “A thing can be told simply if the teller understands it properly,” but I’m not sure I entirely understand it myself. And please do not take offense, but I doubt that you have the mathematics and physics to comprehend it if I did have it all. At this stage, my computer is rather like a kitchen match. I can use it to light a fire handily, but I’m not totally conversant with the chemical processes that make it work.”
He smiled, and Peel smiled back. Had the man just called him stupid?
“I’ll give you a basic lesson, if you want. You are somewhat familiar with ordinary computers?”
“Somewhat.”
“Then you know that most computers are Turing engines that use Boolean logic based on binary operations. You have zeros and ones—quantum bits of information called Qubits—and these are the only choices. It is either one or zero, period. In a quantum computer, however, one can get superposition of both at the same time. It doesn’t seem reasonable on the face of it, but in quantum parallelism one can use all the possible values of all input registers simultaneously.”
Peel nodded, as if he had a fucking clue what the man was talking about.
Bascomb-Coombs went on: “Using Shor’s quantum factorization algorithm, one can see that factoring a large number can be done by a QC—quantum computer—in a very small fraction of the time the same number would take using ordinary hardware. A problem that a SuperCray might labor over for a few million years can be done in seconds by my QC. So for a practical matter like code breaking, the QC is vastly superior.”
Peel nodded. “If so, why isn’t everybody using these QCs?”
Bascomb-Coombs laughed again. “Oh, they would much like to! But it isn’t something one whips up in an old mayonnaise jar out in the woodshed. The problem is that the coherent state of a QC is usually destroyed as soon as it is affected by the surrounding environment. What this means is, as soon as you turn it on and try to access it, you destroy it. A bit of a trick to get around that. They’ve tried all kinds of things over the years: lasers, photon excitation, ion traps, optical traps, NMR, polarization, and even Bulk Spin-Resonance-quantum tea leaves, this last.
“Wineland and Monroe worked out the single quantum gate by trapping beryllium ions. Kimble and Turch polarized photons and did the same thing. NTC had some early success with nuclear magnetic resonance, and Chuang and Gershenfeld applied Grover’s algorithm for a 2Q model, using the carbon and hydrogen atoms in a chloroform molecule. But the problem has always been multiplicity and stability. Until my unit.”
“How did you manage that, if it is so hard?”
“Because I am smarter than they are,” he said. It didn’t sound like bragging and, given the results, apparently it wasn’t.
“I lost you back when I said ‘Qubits,’ didn’t I?”
“Before that, I’m afraid,” Peel admitted.
Bascomb-Coombs smiled. “Don’t feel bad, Major. There aren’t a handful of physicists in the world who would understand how I’ve done what I’ve done, even with the working model in front of them. Your talents lie elsewhere. I shouldn’t want to try and knock you about in a dark alley nor go against you on a battlefield.”
Peel acknowledged the compliment with a nod. “Quite.”
“Anyway, what it all means is that I’ve got a computer that can do wondrous things, and picking locks is at the top of its list. Short of pulling the plug and removing it from any incoming communications, there isn’t a computer on earth I can’t break into. Money means nothing when you can enter any vault at will. Military secrets are at our beck. Nobody can hide anything from us.”
“Really? Then why aren’t you king of the world?”
The man laughed yet again. “I like you, Peel, you are so refreshing after years of mealy-mouthed scientific types. The simple answer is, the computer isn’t perfect yet. It has a few glitches, and now and again, it goes down. Somewhere about half the time I use it, actually. So I am loath to waste my up time on frivolous things like money and power—at least until I get it more stable. That’s where I’m spending my energies, on the system. Because Goswell owns the physical unit and has it quite well guarded, I can’t turn down his requests just yet. But the time is coming. And I’ll need men with your skills with me.”
Peel thought about the million euros in the Indonesian bank. He was already richer than he’d ever expected. His father, title notwithstanding, had been a land-poor duffer who’d lost even that before he died. A million euros was nothing to sniff at, but if he stuck with this strange character, the chance of more was distinctly possible.
“I am at your service, Mr. Bascomb-Coombs.”
“Oh, do call me Peter, Terrance. I’m sure we’re going to get along just fine.”
14
Wednesday, April 6th
Seattle, Washington
Ruzhyó rode the underground train through the SeaTac airport toward his gate. He was booked on a British Airways 747 to London. He had taken a bus from Mississippi to New Orleans, a Stretch-727 from there to Portland, and a Dash 8 from there to here. Had anybody been able to follow him to Mississippi, they would have seen a similar travel pattern from Las Vegas to Jackson: He had rented a car and driven to Oklahoma City, then caught the first of three short commercial flights southeastward from there. A pursuer might have expected him to continue east or south, to Miami, say, and instead, he had reversed his direction. Once in London, he would fly to Spain or Italy, from there to India or Russia, and from there, home.
If you were being chased, it was not wise to run in a straight line, especially if the hounds were faster than you.
The train was full, and when it stopped again to load more passengers, Ruzhyó got up from his seat and offered it to a young and very pregnant woman carrying two bags. He and Anna had wanted children, but that was not to be.
The woman thanked him and sat. He held onto a railing and watched the wall pass in front of the windows.
The train stopped, the passengers alighted, and Ruzhyó headed for his gate. He was hours early, but he had nowhere else he wanted to go. He would find a sandwich shop; a bathroom to attend to his needs; a place to sit and perhaps to sleep. In the military, one learned to sleep whenever the opportunity arose, and sleeping in a comfortable chair was easy.
The flight to Heathrow was a direct one, only nine or ten hours, and he was booked in the center cabin, as would be a man traveling on business. He wore a medium-price suit, a pale blue shirt and tie, and carried a briefcase full of magazines and blank paper to augment the image. He was just another corporate wheel in the machine, nobody to look twice at.
British Airways wasn’t as bad as some, certainly much better than any of the Russian or Chinese internal airlines. His last flight on the English carrier had been dull enough, save for the touchdown. Th
e big jet hit the runway hard enough to deploy the oxygen masks and to shower passengers with luggage from the overhead bins. No one had been hurt, but it had been something of a surprise. Perhaps they had been letting the stewardess practice her landings. Or maybe the pilot had fallen asleep.
He mentally shrugged. He had hit harder. Once, during a monsoon, the JAL flight he was on had landed in Tokyo hard enough to collapse the nose gear, sending a shower of sparks past the passengers’ windows despite the wet pavement. Once, on a flight to Moscow, the vintage turboprop Russian plane upon which he had been traveling had landed safely but hit a refueling truck as it taxied to the gate, killing the driver and throwing to the floor half a dozen passengers in too much of a hurry who had unbuckled and left their seats. Bones had been broken on that one. And once, after he had alighted from a small Cessna at a remote field in Chetsnya, the little craft had taxied away toward the runway to depart, rolled over a land mine sixty meters away, and had been blown to pieces.
He had ceased to worry about such things long ago. If your number was up, then it was up. Until then, the old saw was true: Any landing you could walk away from was a good landing.
A little pub in the terminal had Rueben sandwiches on the menu, and he ordered one and a beer. The television set was on, a sports channel. Hideously ugly women, puffed up like human toads and stained dark brown, paraded back and forth on a stage, flexing their muscles. They looked like men in bikinis. Backstage, one of the women was interviewed, and when she spoke, her voice was deeper than an operatic bass singer’s.
Amazing what people would do to themselves. Ruzhyó had once trained briefly with Russian Olympic track athletes, and he knew something of the chemicals they used to enhance their performances. The male steroids these women bodybuilders took left them with permanent changes in their bodies: deep voices, acne, hairy faces and bodies, and enlarged sexual organs. It was fine to pump up when one was twenty-five to stand on a stage, but what would these poor women look like at fifty or sixty? He shook his head. No eye for the future.
“Jesus, would you turn that shit off?” one of the other bar patrons said to the man behind the counter. Several of the other men raised their glasses in support. The counterman shrugged and changed the channel.
Ruzhyó ate his sandwich and drank his beer.
Wednesday, April 6th
London, England
MI-6 had given Alex and Toni a fair-sized office with full access to their computer systems. Well, at least insofar as this particular problem went. Toni had come across plenty of off-limits files.
Alex was down the hall, conferring with Hamilton. Toni was alone in the office, cross-referencing airline computer data, when Angela Cooper tapped at the open door.
“Come in,” Toni said.
“Sorry to bother you, Ms. Fiorella, but Alex wonders if you might join him and the director-general for a word?”
Alex? She was calling him Alex?
“Sure,” Toni said. She logged out of the workstation. Cooper stood there waiting, smiling, but looking somehow impatient.
“This way, please.”
Toni felt short and dumpy next to the blonde, who wore a dark green suit with the skirt hemmed a couple of inches too high above her knees, and sensible pumps with two-inch heels. She had good legs though, and maybe if Toni were tall and leggy, she’d showcase them, too, instead of wearing a plain blue silk blouse, jeans, and walking shoes. Well, she hadn’t packed for work, had she? After the conference, at which she’d worn both suits she’d brought and then sent them to the cleaners, pretty much all she had in the way of clothes were casual things. It was supposed to be a vacation, wasn’t it? But she’d call the cleaners and get her work clothes back. She wasn’t going to let Ms. Cooper here make her look any worse than she had to look.
“Sorry about interrupting your vacation this way.” Toni pulled her thoughts away from clothes and back to the moment. “What? Oh, well, it’s not your fault. We got to see a little of your country anyhow.”
“Different than the States, isn’t it?”
“You’ve been to the U.S.?”
“Oh, yes, of course. A few work trips. And I spent a summer at UCLA back when I was a student. Lovely climate, I got my first real tan there.”
I bet you did. Toni imagined Cooper in a bikini. She would be striking. The line of men hitting on her would form quickly in the SoCal sunshine. She’d have to carry a stick to keep them off—unless she wanted the attention, and probably she did. She was the type.
“Alex says you are from the Bronx?”
Oh, did he? What was Alex doing telling her that? “Yes. I’m afraid New York isn’t anything like California.”
“I spent a week in Manhattan once, late in August. The heat and humidity were fairly awful.”
“It’s worse in July.”
Ten paces went by without any more conversation. The silence was just getting awkward when Cooper said, “I understand that Alex is divorced and has a daughter. Have you met her—the daughter?”
Jesus, what was Alex doing, telling her stuff like this? And when had he had a chance to tell it? Next thing you knew, he’d be giving this woman pictures of him and Toni in bed together! She said, “No, I haven’t met her. Talked to her on the com a few times. Seen pictures of her. She lives with her mother in Idaho.”
“That’s out West, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Out West.”
“Ah, well, here we are, then.” She indicated the door with one hand.
“You aren’t coming in?”
“Afraid not, other duties. I’ll see you later.” Cooper turned and left, a hint of a sway in her hips as she walked.
The bitch.
Inside, Alex stood next to a table with Hamilton, both of them examining hardcopy photographs under a bright light. Alex looked up at her. He didn’t smile. “Toni. Come check this out.”
She moved to stand next to him. The pictures were spysat overflies of some kind of military installation, computer-augmented for color and dimension. There was what appeared to be a pair of ICBMs on railcar launchers at one end of the complex. “What am I looking at?”
Hamilton said, “This is the experimental rocket station in Xinghua, near the coast of the East China Sea. The Chinese have been developing a new long-range nuclear missile here.” He tapped the ICBM in the photograph. “Last evening, a computer put two of the working prototypes on alert and began a ninety-minute countdown to launch. The missiles were aimed at Tokyo.”
“Lord!” Toni said.
“Precisely. The computer was locked out, they were unable to shut it down. Fortunately, both warheads were dummies, and also fortunately, technicians were able to abort the launches manually. The Chinese, while not normally forthcoming about such things, are terrified. Someone bypassed their computer safeguards and codes and lit the fuses from outside. U.S. spysats that keep the station under observation saw the prelaunch movements, and the U.S. military scrambled stealth fighter-bombers from their base on the South Korean island of Cheju-do. If the Chinese missiles had lifted, the stealth jets would have tried to shoot them down, and they would very likely have bombed the station to prevent any further launches.”
Toni stared at Alex. He looked grim.
“Even without the nuclear payload, a pair of rocks that big dropping into the middle of downtown Tokyo would have caused considerable damage,” Alex said.
“And it’s our airline hacker?” Toni said.
“Or somebody just like him. I can’t believe there are two of them.”
Toni shook her head.
“We’ve got to run this guy down, fast. And our best tracker, Jay, is out of commission.”
“Never rains but it pours, eh?” Hamilton said.
Toni looked at the man, then back at Alex. Bad, this was definitely bad.
Wednesday, April 6th
Washington, D.C.
Tyrone had figured out that if he got to the soccer field immediately after his school shift ended, the field woul
d be empty for forty minutes before the next shift arrived. Forty minutes was plenty of time to get ten or fifteen good throws in.
He stood near the middle of the field, testing the wind with a wet fingertip. There was a pretty good breeze coming in from the north, and he decided to tape a couple of pennies to his MTA boomerang to keep it from getting wind-whipped. That took only a minute, then he was ready.
He angled himself against the wind, took a couple of deep breaths, and shook out his shoulder to loosen the muscle. He’d been considering lifting weights. The top throwers were all in good shape, and he could use a little more power in his arms. The balance was tricky. If you threw too soft, you didn’t get any time aloft, and if you threw too hard, you could get a fast nosedive. But there were times when you needed a little more strength, like now, when the wind was gusting, and at his size, Tyrone didn’t have any extra muscle. He didn’t need to be Hercules or anything, but a little more mass wouldn’t hurt.
He made his first throw, to check the angle of the blades and see how the taped coins balanced. The Indian Ocean glowed in a red blur as it spun but wobbled offcenter and augured in too fast. He retrieved the ’rang and adjusted the angle on the blades by carefully bending them up. He moved the coin on the long arm in toward the angle a few millimeters, retaped it, then tried another throw.
Better, but still off a hair. Well, he could spend all day adjusting the thing, especially in gusty conditions, and it was close enough for practice.
He was on his seventh toss, having finally gotten above a minute for flights, which was about as good as he expected in the wind, when he heard Nadine yell at him.
“Yo, Ty!”
She came across the field, shrugged out of her backpack, and removed from it her own MTA, a long, L-shaped blue and white striped model. It was a Quark Synlin. He’d never seen one up close, but he’d seen holos, and he saw a couple at the tourney, from a distance, so he recognized it right off.
