"Until," Sari said savagely. She bolted from the cabin. Mitchell trotted after her.
Chapter 11
Pete’s sleek Mercedes skidded slightly as it churned up Brook Cove’s long dirt-and-gravel driveway, a plume of dust fanning out behind the car. He had the door open and was clambering out before he’d even shut the ignition off. Sari and Mitchell ran to meet him. Panicked half sentences spilled out of both of them at the same time, overlapping to form a barely comprehensible mosaic of what had happened. On the rapid walk back to the cottages and then down to the lab, Pete managed to extract the major details.
“Well?” Mitchell demanded, standing over the seated Forsythe with his chubby arms crossing and uncrossing impatiently.
Pete shrugged. “Well what?”
“Do you think More kidnapped her?”
“For lack of any other plausible theory, yes, I do. But as for where he took her and why, I—1 don’t have any idea.” Mitchell spun away and began to pace, his hands pushed down into the pockets of his baggy jeans. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Yeah?” said Sari. “What?”
“I think Neville is working for the Visitors, and I’d bet Hannah’s on a lizard Mother Ship right now.”
Sari’s hands went to her hips and her voice grew annoyed and defensive. “Oh, Mitchell, gimme a break. Why would Neville be working for the Visitors?”
“I was hoping you might know. I mean, nobody here knows him better than you do, Sari. Certainly not in the biblical sense,” he said bitterly.
She whirled on him, her freckled nose wrinkled in pained anger. Before Mitchell could move or Pete could step in between, she lashed out with a solid punch to Mitchell’s chest. The blow made him stagger back a couple of steps. Sari’s right arm cocked for a roundhouse follow-up and halted only when Pete clamped a firm grip on her wrist, squeezing just tightly enough to make her wince.
“Ow! Let go of me!” She tried to wrench loose, but Pete wouldn’t release her.
“Knock it off, both of you.” Gently, Pete lowered Sari’s arm to her side and let it go. “Okay, I know why Sari feels guilty. I feel guilty myself. Maybe if I’d’ve stayed last night, this wouldn’t have happened. Why do you feel guilty, Mitchell?” “Me? I don’t feel guilty. ...”
“The hell you don’t. You wouldn’t have said what you said to Sari if you didn’t feel partly responsible yourself.” “Okay, okay! I feel guilty, but I have a good reason for being pissed at Sari.”
“Oh, geez,” she said sourly. “This I gotta hear.”
“I told you—I told all of you—that I didn’t trust Neville. Pete was the only one who agreed with me at all. The rest of you—you women—made me feel like the only reason I didn’t like him was because I was jealous of him. Neville More, the handsome, charming computer genius, versus Mitchell Loomis, the szhlubb."
Pete made a cautionary face. “Mitchell, calm down. What the hell are you talking about?”
“1 didn’t care what everybody else said. That wasn’t why I didn’t trust him. So I started checking into his story. I wanted to know if he’s really been going around helping computer installations fight the Visitors.”
Sari stamped her foot. “Would you please get to the point?” “Don’t rush me,” he snapped.
“Hannah’s life is at stake!” Sari screamed.
Pete pushed them apart again. “Mitchell, just talk. We can all clobber each other with baseball bats after we get Hannah back safe and sound. Did you find out anything about More?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did. I called three of the places I remember he said he’d stopped at. Two confirmed that he did help them clear up their computers and get their operations geared toward fighting the Visitors.”
“Gee, that sure is incriminating,” said Sari mockingly. “Not so fast. The third place said things got totally screwed up within a week after your friend Neville left.”
Pete jumped in, hoping to head off another salvo from Sari. “Are they sure More was the cause of their problems?” “They said that thought hadn’t even occurred to them until I mentioned it. But now they can’t come up with any other reason for their computer system to go totally haywire.” Now it was Pete’s turn to pace. “Dammit, Mitchell. Why didn’t you tell this to somebody as soon as you knew?” “That was yesterday, and I did try. I tried to tell you before you left. But you were in such a big hurry.”
Sari’s eyes flashed angrily. “Hey, that’s not fair! Did you tell Pete why you wanted to talk to him, what was so goddamned important?”
“Well, no, but—”
“But nothing,” she countered. “What’re we supposed to do, read your fatheaded mind?”
“Oh, so now she’s making fat jokes,” Mitchell growled to the ceiling. “Very useful, considering—”
“About as useful as you keeping everything to yourself instead of—”
“HOLD IT!" Pete shouted, so loudly he surprised even himself, the sound bouncing harshly off the walls of the small office. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Are your computers okay?”
“Well, they worked fine last night when we quit for dinner,” said Mitchell.
“Never mind last night. What about this morning?”
Sari shrugged. “We both got up late. Neither of us has used ’em today.”
“Then let’s see if More left us any calling cards,” said Pete. Mitchell led the way to the main computer room, where two younger scientists were huddled around the central terminal.
They parted when they heard Mitchell order, “Let us through.”
“It’s all yours, Mitchell,” said Donna, a short black woman with a compact Afro hairstyle. “But you may have a few problems.”
Mitchell froze, fingers touching the keyboard. “What do you mean, a few problems?”
“Kenny noticed it first,” Donna said, nodding at her coworker, a youthful Japanese fellow with a mop of straight black hair falling across his eyes.
“What was it doing?” Sari asked.
“More like what it wasn’t doing,” said Kenny, lips tight in frustration. “It wasn’t doing much of anything.”
“Oh, God, noooo!” Mitchell wailed, frantically pecking at the keys. “Oh, please, no ... no ... no. .. .”
“No what?” Pete wanted to know, but Mitchell’s attention was riveted to the computer screen.
Pete hadn’t had too much experience with computers, but he knew enough to recognize that something was seriously wrong with this one. Letters and numbers galloped across the CRT like single-file herds of horses that refused to be corralled into making sense.
The faces of the Brook Cove scientists confirmed for him that the situation was as bad as he suspected. For five minutes Mitchell’s fingers flew over the keys without letup. The only noises he made were an occasional grunt of effort and pitiful mewings that sounded entirely inappropriate coming from someone of Mitchell’s bulk.
Finally, without warning, he sank into the chair at the work station and covered his face with both hands. Preceding animosity forgotten now, Sari touched his shoulder lightly. “Mitch? What is it? You lost me.”
A strangled sound escaped from Mitchell’s throat.
“Mitchell, tell us,” Peter urged.
With a sluggishness bom of shock, Mitchell turned to the others. “That bastard planted a virus.”
Pete looked from face to face, seeking a clue. “A virus? I don’t get it.”
Through gritted teeth, Mitchell continued. “It’s . . . it’s a tiny program inserted into a computer system. The programmer who puts it in can set it to be triggered whenever he wants it to go off. Then it replicates itself and spreads all through the computer’s body, so to speak. Just like a virus in a living body. Only in a computer it waltzes along, merrily erasing and garbling memories. It spreads a kind of rapidly creeping paralysis. And since computer systems are sometimes linked automatically to other systems, the virus can spread that way, too.”
Pete considered the ramifications. “More must’v
e been doing this same thing everyplace he supposedly stopped to help. That means some of those viruses have been out there for weeks. Is there any way to stop them from spreading?”
Kenny spoke up. “I did a paper on systems security for my master’s. Sometimes you can stop it—if you catch it early enough. Since the sabotage is a little like a timed-release cold capsule, if you can find it before it springs out of its hiding place, you can head off the damage. If you’re too late for that, maybe you can get lucky and cut off from interlocking systems before it spreads. But if we’re too late altogether, More’s viruses could wind up knocking out every major science and defense computer system in the country—maybe even the world,”
“Okay,” Pete said, his mind racing as it simultaneously tried to sort this new knowledge and think up a course of action. “Kenny, you seem to know a lot about this virus thing. Mitchell, give him the list of all the places we know Neville More worked at. Kenny, call ’em all up and tell them to do whatever they have to do, whatever they can do to fight the virus and stop any more infections. Tell ’em to spread the word to every computer system they know of to search for a hidden virus immediately.”
Mitchell reached into his shirt pocket and numbly handed a sheet of paper to Kenny, who grabbed it and ran out to make those critical calls.
“I don’t get it,” Sari whispered. “Why would Neville do this?” Then she pounded a fist on the desk top. “Shit—I can’t believe I misjudged him like that. I feel like such a dumb jackass.”
Pete draped a reassuring hand around her neck. “Hey, Sari, we all do right about now. We all had chances to ask questions. We all saw two and two add up to five and ignored it.” “Well, we’re in great shape,” Sari said with a short, bitter laugh. “Hannah’s been kidnapped, Neville’s killed our computer, the Visitors are about to poison the world’s oil supplies, and we can’t stop them. And all because we ate that goddamned chicken dinner last night. Every drop of wine and wine sauce must have been spiked, except what our illustrious chef had for himself. All I want to know is, why did he do it?"
Pete sighed. “I have a clue, I think. 1 did check into his background right after I met him. Denise Daltrey did some digging through the CBS News files. We found out something that wasn’t widely known. Remember the company he started a few years ago, after his first company failed? Well, the second one evidently went belly-up not two days before the Visitors reinvaded.”
Sari shook her head. “So what? What would that have to do with his collaborating with the lizards?”
Mitchell cleared his throat. “I may know.”
Peter and Sari looked at him. He took a breath, then continued, “People I talked to at the other places he worked before he came here, some of them knew him pretty well. Seems he was working on a real big deal just before the second company went bankrupt. Word spread, and More decided to cash in on the interest by selling stock. First time he did that. And he made a mint. But then the deal fell apart, the stock price plummeted, loans came due—everything went sour at the same time.”
“Did anyone know what the secret deal was?” asked Pete. “Yeah—some super new software and chips for the Pentagon. More supposedly solved some of the big problems with the Star Wars antimissile system.”
“But that’s all been experimental,” said Pete.
“Yeah, well, More sold the Pentagon on some bag of tricks that he said would make the system a reality.”
“What happened?” Sari asked.
“It was supposed to be a long-term-development contract— would’ve made Neville a billionaire in time. But he lied. Not only did he steal other people’s ideas and claim them as his own; at the last second some of those people spoke up and told the Pentagon that the stolen ideas didn’t really work anyway. More screamed he was innocent. And he swore he was set up by industry people who hated him and were jealous of the fact that he was a genius and they were just stupid peons.”
Sari bit a fingernail nervously. “Wow. All this was to get back at the guys he thinks ruined him.”
“Yeah,” Pete said, “and he may do in the whole planet in the bargain.”
“What do you think he’s getting from the Visitors?” asked Mitchell.
“Who knows,” said Pete. “Doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that Neville found out that Hannah can give the Visitors the info they need to make this oil poison of theirs work. Somehow we’ve got to get her back before they ...” There was no need to complete the sentence. Three minds conjured up similar horrific images of Hannah Donnenfeld being tortured aboard Diana’s starship. The bleakness of the situation required no verbalization.
“How do we get her back?” Mitchell asked simply.
Pete took a very deep breath, held it, then blew it out in a slow puff. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”
Chapter 12
The first thing Peter did was call President William Brent Morrow to apprise him of the latest developments. The ad hoc network of government agents spread across the country would aid in warning science and defense establishments that their computer systems were in grave danger. In addition, bulletins were circulated to both police and public, asking for help in apprehending Neville More and finding Hannah Donnenfeld.
But Morrow couldn’t disagree with Forsythe’s conclusion that Hannah was more than likely in Diana’s clutches by now. A check of defense surveillance records revealed that a Visitor skyfighter did penetrate New York airspace at about the time More must have been spiriting Hannah off the Brook Cove premises. But the intruder had slipped in and out so rapidly that there’d been no chance to try to intercept it. To all concerned, that pretty much cemented Donnenfeld’s immediate fate. Morrow promised to contact Mike Donovan and Julie Parrish with the Los Angeles resistance and enlist their help, too.
Pete had worked with the West Coast group more than once. In fact, both Julie and Donovan had visited New York. Since Diana’s starship was generally stationed over Los Angeles, Donovan and Parrish had more experience in dealing with Diana than all the other resistance cadres combined. They sent word back via the President that they’d turn over every rock and pursue every tenuous fifth-column link for news of Hannah and for a way to secure her release.
leading Morrow and his advisers to conclude that the drilling platform off the Saudi Arabian coast was some sort of test to determine if the strategy was indeed feasible.
That being the case, and with Donnenfeld in Visitor custody, Morrow had to make a grave decision. First, he had to assume that the Visitors would get the data they wanted from Donnenfeld. Once they did, they would be able to bring their oil-destroying bacteria up to full and deadly strength in short order. And the moment it was, it would be injected into the Persian Gulf’s giant undersea oil field. If that worked, Diana would surely do the same thing around the globe.
Morrow could hope that the California resistance platoon would somehow free Donnenfeld before Diana could shatter that starchy New England resolve. But even in the best of times, hopes were rarely sufficient as foundations for critical policies. Today’s world was no Dickensian dichotomy—these were simply the worst of times', and they demanded quick, concrete action: air strikes on the Visitors’ Persian Gulf platform before Diana had a chance to make use of it.
Using scrambled phones, President Morrow called the Prime Minister of Israel. Avram Herzog was very different from “Wild Bill” Morrow, slight in stature, urbane, with a short graying beard, but he was a no-nonsense leader and Morrow liked that, feeling they could always speak frankly without resorting to the time-wasting amenities diplomats loved so much.
From his uncluttered Jerusalem office, Herzog told Morrow there had been no additional activity in the Gulf. “They put that one platform in, seemed to finish it, and that’s that, Bill.” “How closely are your people watching it?”
“We’ve got three agents—one of ours, a Saudi, and an Egyptian. Their instructions are not to take their eyes off it.” Morrow chuckled. “Who’d’ve thought y
our people and the Arabs ever woulda been looking through the same binocs at a common enemy, Avram?”
“Global disasters make strange bedfellows,” said Herzog dryly.
“Amen to that. Anyhow, you’re the expert on what you can and can’t do in that region. In view of these latest circumstances, what do you think of short-circuiting that drilling rig before the lizards try to use it?”
Herzog waggled his dark brows. “I was wondering when you’d get around to that. I don’t think we’ve got any choice. We have to try something.”
“It’s risky. They’ve got to be expecting some kinda move. In fact, they’re probably surprised we haven’t done anything up till now. What shape is your air force in?”
“Pretty good,” said the Israeli. “We were rather ferocious at the outset. With a fair amount of sacrifice of good men, we managed to save most of the air force.”
“You could lose more than a few men on this mission.” “You don’t have to tell an Israeli about the dangers of war, my friend.”
Within the hour a squad of ten K’fir and F-16 jet fighters screamed into the air, bearing the blue-and-white Star of David into battle one more time. But this time it wasn’t only their tiny homeland for which they entered combat. The fortunes of the entire resistance, and the fate of the world might turn on this sortie.
The suspicion shared by Morrow and Herzog, that the Visitors had long been expecting an attack, proved to be an understatement. Even before the Israeli planes were within visual range of the drilling rig, a phalanx of skyfighters met them with lasers blazing.
From their observation post near the coastal dunes, the wiry Jewish agent Lavi Mayer, Abdul ibn Aziz, the bearded Saudi, and their dark-skinned Egyptian comrade, Gamel Nefti, watched the mismatch. A pair of Israeli jets took direct hits and instantly exploded into churning fireballs. A third fighter lost a wing and spun toward the shallow Gulf waters, trailing the black oily smoke of death. It blew up on impact.
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