Dead Wrong

by Richard Phillips

  Janet laughed. “Tupac Inti isn’t the kind of man who takes orders. He’s a West Point grad who quit the Bolivian army because he didn’t like the kinds of orders he was getting. Didn’t you ever wonder why Bolivia’s President Suarez, a member of Tupac’s own Quechua tribe, never lifted a finger to help him get a fair trial? It’s because Suarez fears Tupac. And with damn good reason.”

  As Jack thought back on it, he realized that Tupac’s reaction had bothered him. But at the time, Jack had been too busy to worry about it.

  “So I’m supposed to let a bunch of neo-Nazi pricks kick my ass, then just walk away?”

  “I wouldn’t call what happened in that jungle ‘kicking your ass’. ”

  “They took someone I was hired to protect away from me. As I remember it, you helped.”

  Janet rose to her feet, crossed to the kitchen chair where she’d draped her leather jacket, slipped it on, and walked to the door. When she turned back to look at him, her face held a trace of disappointment.

  “This is more important than one man. I’m not proposing that you abandon your job. All I ask is that you give me two weeks before you make your move. Jack, I need you to trust me on this one. Can you do that for me?”

  As Jack watched Janet stare back at him, he found himself wishing that he wasn’t so damn stubborn. Maybe then she’d be staying with him instead of preparing to step out into the night, with only a leather jacket to shield her from the tropical squall. But Jack couldn’t change who he was, so he gave her the best he had to offer.

  “I’ll think it over.”

  CHAPTER 39

  As the bitter winter wind howls through the night, attempting to prevent me from entering the cavern housing the Altar of the Gods, its chill pulls my breath forth in smoky puffs that I barely notice. I crawl through the opening, light a torch that I take from its wall sconce, and allow my feet to carry me through the passage that leads to the Altar. There my footsteps halt.

  The beautiful golden orb that graces the end of the Incan Sun Staff captures my gaze. Its intricately carved rings and the gears and shafts that form its inner workings hold me in a spell. With my gaze locked to the symbols that cry out to be rearranged, a slow boiling fear floods my soul. Even as I stand alone, frozen in terror, in thrall to this wonder of wonders that rests atop the altar, I feel my hands move toward the orb of their own volition.

  If the touch of the staff sends a mystic current through my body, the feel of the golden metal beneath my fingertips shifts my perspective and causes the cavern to shrink around me until I can see myself. It is as if I have become the cavern and everything within it. The thing in my head screams in a way that I have only heard in my dreams, and my body shakes like the boughs of the trees out in that howling wind. Yet my hands continue to stroke the orb.

  Now they twist it, first the bottom ring, aligning the symbols with new counterparts on the silver staff, before skipping up several rings to repeat the process. And as my hands turn ring after ring in a seemingly random order, the intricate engravings grab the torchlight so that its flames crawl across the golden surface and into the orb’s interior.

  Shaking uncontrollably, my hands nevertheless turn the next-to-last ring until all the symbols feel wrongfully right, so much of the torchlight now absorbed by the orb that the cavern grows dark around me.

  My right hand now wraps the last of the circular rings in a death grip as my left hand clutches the silver staff; the muscles in my hands and arms bulge and slither beneath my skin as they war with each other for control. Cold, more deadly than ice, slides through my veins and into my chest, cramping my lungs on its way to my heart. Then with a final convulsion, my fingers twitch, imparting to the topmost ring one final shift. As the golden orb comes free from the staff, my undying scream echoes from the cavern walls.

  The wind-whipped rain drenched Jack’s naked body as lightning crawled through the night sky overhead. With a sound like ripping cardboard, the leading edge of thunder crackled and then shook the ground with its fury, its reverberations shaking him awake. Jack felt the H&K hanging at his side, in his right hand, his thumb telling him that he’d flicked off the safety, his index finger having invaded the sanctuary of the trigger guard.

  Jack stood in the midst of the raging storm, struggling to comprehend how he had gotten here. Having never sleepwalked in his life, he had apparently grabbed his pistol from the nightstand, gotten out of bed, and walked outside to stand in the rain. Judging by the amount of water sluicing off his body, he’d been standing here for several minutes.

  As he stood alone, trying desperately to wrap his mind around what had just happened, a single thought filled Jack’s head.

  Not good!

  CHAPTER 40

  Despite the late hour, Dr. Priscilla McCoy, or Bones, as everyone but her mother called her, sat at her terminal. Her nickname had been based on her snarky personality rather than on any physical resemblance to the Star Trek doctor. She stood five foot two in boots and had a serious face, framed by shoulder-length blond hair. Men thought her pretty, but she had no time for relationships. Though she’d gotten her last name from her Scottish father, she’d gotten her physical appearance from Anna, her Austrian mother. But Bones had long known that she’d inherited her brilliant mind from her mother’s secret lover. It was a secret that she and her mom had shared together.

  Having graduated at the tender age of thirty with a triple doctorate from Caltech, some would call Bones a late bloomer. They would be wrong. Bones was about to change the world.

  Staring at the digital package that Dr. David Kurtz had pushed to her workstation, Bones felt a thrill straighten the fine hairs on the back of her neck. Mathematics was her god, quantum theory her goddess, computer hardware her Olympus. Bones could do in her head differential equations that stumped some of the world’s best mathematicians.

  Grand mistress of the world’s most advanced computing environment, Bones needed no monitor, mouse, or keyboard. The 3D motion capture field before her precisely recorded the movements of her hands and fingers, letting her issue instructions and evaluate data far more efficiently than she would have been capable of using the archaic tools. Her right hand touched the holographic projection of the golden orb. With a flick of her fingers, she spun the image, first about the Z axis and then through the Y and X axes before bringing it to a stop.

  Bones began manipulating the stacked rings, rotating each independently so that she could study the interplay of the engraved symbols as they moved in relation to each other. Something became immediately apparent within the simulation. The symbols were not only moving, but they were transforming due to the movements of the orb’s internal mechanism. Fascinating. Although the 3D model Dr. Kurtz had delivered was very good, its internal model was incomplete, having been based on the limited views the available pictures provided of the device’s inner clockwork mechanism. No matter. Bones had at her disposal the colossal computing power necessary to infer the missing parts.

  Spreading both hands, she made a tossing motion, and fifteen more copies of the orb appeared, arranged in a plane before her. As if she were playing cat’s cradle, Bones drew her hands apart, creating a sixteen-by-sixteen cube of the golden orbs. Her motions as smooth and precise as those of a Tai Chi master, she shrank the cube of orbs until it was no larger than a six-sided die. Then she duplicated that into a line of cubes, and then a plane, and then a new cube of cubes. Judging the assigned computational priority to be sufficient, Bones initiated the processes that would compute all of the golden orb’s possible internal solutions.

  Having recently moved from experimental laboratories into use here at the NSA, quantum computing was a relatively new capability. Bones had engineered the breakthrough that enabled large-scale quantum stability at room temperature, thereby bringing herself to the NSA’s attention. It was the only place she’d ever wanted to work. The NSA was the goal that had made her continue her Caltech research while all her classmates were being snapped up by Google
and its competitors. But even though the commercial sector offered far more money, the NSA was the only organization that operated without limits. And for what Bones had in mind, she didn’t need no stinkin’ limits.

  Quantum computing was as close to magic as anything modern technology provided. Traditional computers solved problems one instruction at a time, limited by the speed of the processor. Those limitations on computing speed had been attacked by spreading the computation across multiple processors, with the most advanced machines throwing thousands or even millions of processors at the most complex problems. There were also limitations on this approach, the most important being the physical hardware requirement for each of the microprocessors and its associated connections.

  But by taking advantage of the quantum mechanical properties of superposition and entanglement, it was possible for a single quantum computer to perform calculations many orders of magnitude faster than all of the world’s supercomputers combined. Most so-called authorities on the subject thought quantum computing was still in its infancy, but the NSA’s QB4096 was no baby. If anything, it was a baby killer.

  Not a particularly pleasant analogy, but Bones thought it appropriate. The NSA’s enemies whined about invasions of personal privacy, but personal privacy had been extinct long before the turn of the millennium. It was only a matter of time until new machines picked up and interpreted people’s thoughts as they walked around the shopping mall.

  As Aldous Huxley forecast, the human race stood at the door to a brave new world. And Dr. Priscilla “Bones” McCoy was about to take her size-six leather boot and kick that door off its hinges.

  CHAPTER 41

  The darkness that draped Tupac Inti was complete. If he squeezed his eyes tightly closed, he could see the ethereal flashes that the mind and optic nerve created, but those wandering ghost lights provided him no comfort. The darkness did that.

  In his years working the notoriously dangerous Bolivian mines, there had been many times that he and his fellow miners had been temporarily stranded due to minor cave-ins or the loss of power routed down from above. In the last of those incidents, Tupac had waited twelve days in the darkness for the drills to break through. Although he and the seven others trapped with him had taken turns using their headlamps to provide some cheer for those who had needed it, the final battery had failed on day six in the depths.

  But darkness had never terrified Tupac. The overabundance of carbon dioxide and the lack of oxygen had done that. When the drill had finally punched an airhole into their small chamber, Tupac’s yells of joy had echoed through that space along with the others. When he’d finally been pulled up through the narrow rescue shaft to emerge into the night air, Tupac had spread his arms wide as if to embrace the star-filled sky. He’d had no urge whatsoever to kiss the ground.

  Tupac heard the grinding squeak of rusty hinges announce the arrival of his host in the dungeon. Then the light from the naked bulb outside his cell knifed through the bars and into his eyes, forcing him to turn away as his pupils reacted to the unaccustomed illumination. The sound of footsteps on damp stone drew close and then stopped outside his cell. Keys rattled and then clanked against the lock.

  Squinting up at the backlit figures that stepped inside, Tupac saw the neatly brushed, shoulder-length, gray-blond hair and beard of Conrad Altmann more clearly than he saw the man’s face. Altmann walked up close to the corner where Tupac sat chained to the floor, staying just far enough away to avoid entering the filth that had accumulated around Tupac’s naked form.

  When Altmann spoke, his voice was filled with false sympathy.

  “Hello, Tupac. Have no fear. Today I bring only questions, not pain. If you answer my questions satisfactorily, you can shed these chains. Think of it. I offer you a hot shower, clean clothes, and a room with a real bed and toilet. You’ll get good food and water instead of the disgusting gruel you’ve endured these last few days.”

  Although Tupac had prepared himself for this ordeal, he couldn’t stop the visualization Altmann’s words created in his mind, couldn’t keep the want out of his eyes. But he managed to keep it out of his voice.

  “I can only tell you what I know.”

  Altmann’s grin held no mirth. “That will do nicely. What do you know of an artifact known as the Incan Sun Staff?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  The neo-Nazi’s cold eyes narrowed. “You see why I have such trouble treating you in a civilized fashion? You promise me truth and deliver only lies.”

  “Maybe you could describe it to me.”

  “I hardly think that is necessary. You have it tattooed on your chest.”

  Tupac glanced down at the bold image that emblazoned the left side of his chest. “Ahh. You mean the Staff of Manco Capac.”

  “Whatever you prefer to call it.”

  Tupac paused. The longer he could drag this out, the less torture he would have to endure. He had promised Admiral Riles that he could endure anything the neo-Nazis could put him through for two weeks. That two weeks had been part of his deal. Then he could tell Altmann what he wanted to know, but not before. That meant he had to make it through eleven more days of this.

  Looking up at Altmann’s face, at his perfectly groomed beard and hair, Tupac had an almost overwhelming desire to puke all over the bastard’s leather shoes. But he restrained himself.

  “Where have you hidden the silver staff?”

  “What makes you think I have it?”

  Altmann chuckled, a sound that reminded Tupac of the clicking of crab pincers.

  “Legend says that when Pizarro separated the golden orb crown piece from its silver shaft, he sent the orb to the King of Spain, but he presented the staff to his puppet emperor, Manco Inca II. The true keepers of Incan lore thought Manco Inca II unworthy, and subsequently stole the silver staff. Its hiding place is said to have been passed down from generation to generation of lore keepers. There the silver staff awaits the day when a worthy successor will reunite the silver staff with its golden crown piece and use the restored Sun Staff to resurrect the Incan Empire.”

  Altmann bent down, extended a finger, and poked Tupac on the left side of his chest. “In each generation, the next lore keeper in the line of succession is marked with this tattoo.”

  Now it was Tupac’s turn to laugh, although it hurt his dry, cracked lips to do so.

  “Actually, after I graduated from West Point, a couple of my buddies took me to New York City to celebrate. Apparently I had a very good time, because I woke up with this. Until right now, I had no idea what it meant.”

  Altmann straightened, his grin transforming into a grimace that allowed the hate to leak from his blue eyes.

  Turning to the three men who waited outside the cell, Altmann issued his instructions in a clipped tone. “Get him cleaned up, and strap him down to the cart while I change into some work clothes. Strap the rubber plug in his mouth. I don’t want him biting off that forked tongue before I straighten it out.”

  CHAPTER 42

  Janet Price signed her name as Janet Schuster, checking into the Los Tajibos Hotel and Convention Center at noon. A fifty-dollar tip to the uniformed front desk attendant ensured that Janet didn’t have to wait for her second-floor, pool-view room, despite her early check-in. Having outfitted herself in a three-button black blazer over a sleeveless white shirt, straight-legged black trousers, and sensible but sexy black platform shoes, she fit seamlessly into her role as a successful woman visiting Santa Cruz on business.

  Janet let the bellhop ferry her suitcase to the room, but kept her laptop case with her as she made her way upstairs. The four-star hotel was one of the nicer business travel locations in Santa Cruz, and Janet found her spacious room more than adequate.

  Another twenty-dollar bill accompanied her request to the bellhop that he notify the front desk that she didn’t want to be disturbed until tomorrow morning. Janet reinforced this by hanging the “Do Not Disturb” sign outside her door and engaging the security lock.r />
  Moving to the desk, Janet opened her case and removed the laptop she’d purchased two hours ago, turned it on, and ran through the process of establishing her log-in, password, and preferences. She knew this laptop wasn’t secure and would be accessing the Internet through an unsecure WiFi connection, but that didn’t matter.

  When she logged onto the Internet, Janet navigated to one of the many sites that appeared benign but were actually NSA portals; such a site allowed someone who knew how to navigate it to download the specialized tools that could turn any computer, tablet, or cell phone into a digital fortress. Although the software equivalent of a Swiss Army knife could be downloaded and installed in a matter of minutes, the applications Janet wanted took just over two hours to retrieve, install, and configure.

  Thirty minutes into the process, Janet removed her jacket and hung it in the closet. She left her shoulder holster in place, so used to the weight and feel of the Glock beneath her left arm that it was distracting to remove it. Stepping to the window, Janet looked out over the beautifully landscaped pool area with its majestic palms and the appealing gentle curves of the deck. The hotel had managed to avoid the overcrowding of deck chairs that turned many such pool areas into a close approximation of the worst Las Vegas had to offer.

  Just after three o’clock in the afternoon, Janet sent the message that requested an encrypted video chat session with Admiral Riles. She didn’t have to wait long; the active session available notification popped up on her screen eight minutes later. When she clicked the “Connect” button on the video chat application, Janet was surprised to see Levi Elias’s serious face looking out of the screen at her.

  “Hello, Janet.”

  “Hi, Levi. I was expecting Admiral Riles.”

  “He’s delegated this to me.”

  Janet paused. She’d been told that the NSA director had limited this operation to a very tight group that didn’t include the NSA’s curly-haired chief analyst. Although that had raised a lot of questions in Janet’s mind at the time, she’d known her role and hadn’t asked a follow-up question. Having always valued Levi’s take on situations, she was glad to accept this change. Based on the way she’d routed this chat request, it had gone first to Riles and then been assigned to Levi, so she had no reason to go over Levi’s head with her questions.