Halon-Seven

by Xander Weaver

  To Anatoli’s credit, he was determined. He tracked Bayer day and night. As a result, Dargo had great confidence in the reports. Bayer had taken a number of meetings with industrial fabrication facilities in Germany and Switzerland. He had also talked with two prominent bankers in Switzerland. And even though Anatoli had complete audio recordings from each of these meetings, Dargo was no closer to understanding what Bayer was really up to. It seemed the man was seeking financing for a large scale manufacturing project. At the same time, he was looking at a number of facilities to produce his product. But no matter who he spoke with, he was never willing to go into detail concerning the product that was to be manufactured. Apparently the device was highly technical in nature, and Bayer considered it a proprietary secret of the highest order.

  There was little doubt that Bayer’s sub rosa project was directly connected to the mission Dargo had undertaken. It had something to do with the project the Americans called ‘Meridian.’ None of these things sounded a warning bell on their own. That had more to do with his overall impression of Bayer as a man. The real warning signs were the glimpses Dargo had at the sort of financing Bayer was working to secure. Bayer was already outrageously wealthy. Yet the man was making deals to borrow money and leveraging every asset he owned. Whatever Bayer’s endgame was, the man was dealing in sums of money that boggled the imagination. No wonder Bayer considered Dargo’s operating funds to be pocket change.

  The real problem was the sort of money Bayer was working to leverage. Dargo had seen such unadulterated sums before. Not personally, but he was a student of history. The sort of money Bayer was putting together could be used to fund a revolution. It was the sort of financing needed to fund a private army. And worst of all, Bayer seemed like just the sort of megalomaniacal asshole to do something like that.

  As far as Dargo could tell, everything hinged on the acquisition of Meridian. Though Bayer was keeping him in the dark on the exact details of the technology, Dargo was no fool. He was putting things together. Even if what he was seeing made no sense. And since he had no trust for Bayer, he knew he needed to sort things out before they had their hands on Meridian. If he didn’t figure out Bayer’s end game soon, he might find himself one of the loose ends that Bayer hired people like him to clean up.

  No matter what he had done, Dargo was unable to connect the dots and find any clue to Bayer’s larger plan. That was, until yesterday.

  Over the last several days, Anatoli had repeatedly tried and failed to gain access to Bayer’s laptop. On a number of occasions, he managed to gain physical access to the device, but each time he had failed to defeat the operating system’s security. He’d had access to the computer, but he couldn’t access the data. As far as Dargo was concerned, this was a major professional black eye. He had never come up against a computer system that he couldn’t compromise, at least not in the field. Whatever Bayer had on his laptop, it used top-notch authentication and encryption. It was more secure than anything Dargo had ever encountered.

  That led Dargo to take a closer look at Bayer’s financial records. Bayer was a wealthy man who had done an amazing amount of traveling over the last year. As a result, Bayer’s financial records were time consuming to data mine. But in the end, they provided a great deal of information about the man. Dargo had already searched that information for a clue to the man’s motivation for attacking the Meridian team. He’d also looked for clues that might hint at what Bayer was looking to manufacture in Europe. Nothing had proven illuminating. But taking a fresh look at the financial documents from a fresh perspective, something struck him as tremendously useful.

  One of Bayer’s credit card statements held the key to accessing his laptop. A regimented and anal man, Bayer harbored great concern for the contents of his laptop. That much was clear in the level of security used to protect it. But the man was also concerned with the loss or theft of the machine. According to the credit card statement, Bayer subscribed to an online, cloud-based, backup service. Every time he connected his laptop to a network with Internet access, the backup service on his laptop would select the modified files and mirror them to the off-site facility for safe keeping.

  Under normal circumstances, this would’ve been a good idea. It was ironic that Bayer spared no expense to secure access to the laptop itself while failing to select an equally secure off-site backup service. He was using a British backup service called DataSecure. Their technology had a major shortcoming. If the DataSecure servers could be considered a hotel, and each user account on the service the equivalent of a room in that hotel, it meant their security was like having every room unlocked by the same master key. More secure backup systems used an individual key for each user account, essentially a different key for each hotel room. Extremely secure systems allow the user to specify their own encryption key, ensuring that no unauthorized user anywhere would have access to the data—not even the people managing the servers. In the hotel analogy, it would be like letting each guest set a private combination for the door lock of their room. That way, not even hotel management could get in.

  All of the data stored on the DataSecure servers was encrypted using the same cypher. While this meant the data on the service’s system was encrypted and safe from prying eyes, it also meant that anyone with access to the service’s master decryption key would be able to read any data on the backup servers, regardless of the uploading account.

  Fortunately for Dargo, Bayer used DataSecure for his cloud backup solution. Dargo had simply contacted a hacker associate, and a few short hours later he had access to the decryption key, and with it, every bit of data on the DataSecure servers. Six hours later, he no longer had a need to access Bayer’s laptop directly. He had retrieved an exact duplicate of the contents of the laptop’s hard drive and restored it to a virtual machine on his own laptop. Now he had access to every file Bayer did. And best of all, Bayer would have absolutely no way of knowing his data had been compromised.

  The last several hours had flown by for Dargo. He’d been examining the contents of Bayer’s computer.

  Even while a young man in school, Bayer had been gifted with an enormous ego. On his first day at the university he had started a journal. And to Dargo’s astonishment, Bayer had maintained that journal ever since. In an effort to protect what he referred to as his legacy, Bayer had even gone so far as to digitize the entire archive. For years, the log chronicled nothing of intrinsic value. Just another college student trying to find his place in academia, intending to one day make his mark on the world. The tone of the journal changed shortly after Bayer graduated from the university, when he was recruited into the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

  After joining the academy, being the low man on the totem pole, Bayer was passed from one project to the next, always acting in a support capacity. He participated in the development of a new type of rocket propellant, helped develop new deep-earth drilling technologies, and had had a part in many other projects of absolutely no importance at all. But eventually he’d become involved in energy research. According to the journal, that was where Bayer really had found his calling. He quickly rose through the ranks and was soon leading his own team in the study of different energy-generating technologies.

  Bayer’s team had worked with wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, and even nuclear power sources. The goal was to develop a power source that would make Russia one hundred percent energy independent. They were to eliminate the need to import oil, coal, and natural gas. Russian leaders saw the requirement of resources from outside the country as a weakness. As such, it was critical to eliminate that weaknesses. Only then would Russia become the one true leader on the world stage.

  About five years after taking the lead of his team, Bayer was reading through old state archives from the turn of the century. He believed he could draw inspiration for a new means of energy production if he looked to the past and considered how his country had grown through the use of more primitive energy resources. He also hoped to find supp
ort for his own programs by drawing on examples from Russian history to make his point. It seemed he was forever bickering with the administration and always needed new justification for the money spent on research. He had hoped that the study of the historic reports might help on at least one of those fronts.

  What Bayer found was a report of a meteorite that had been discovered only a dozen miles outside of Moscow, in February of 1907. Apparently hundreds of city residents heard the strike. Many saw the light in the sky as the rock crashed to Earth. Fifty armed soldiers were immediately dispatched to the impact site, originally thinking it was a military attack of some sort. But in the end, the soldiers returned with only a strange stone twice the size of a loaf of bread. The soldier who had carried the rock back to Moscow had developed burns on his hands; blistering where he had touched the fallen chunk of stone. That might’ve been the end of Bayer’s interest, had there not been one additional note at the end of the report, stating that the soldier with the burned hands also experienced burns up his arms as far as his shoulders. That was strange, because the man said he had never felt any heat from the rock, and the object had never touched him anywhere above the wrist.

  The mention of the burns had piqued Bayer’s interest. The burns were likely due to radiation, not largely understood in the early 1900s. Bayer had felt compelled to investigate further. According to the journal, it had taken him over a month to locate further information on the meteorite. It turned out that a pair of scientists had taken possession of the rock shortly after its retrieval from the woods outside of Moscow. No further mention was made of the soldier with the burns, but apparently the scientists worked with the meteorite for several months without incurring similar injury.

  By Bayer’s own admission, he was becoming more and more fascinated by the reports filed by the pair of scientists in 1907. Though the scientists of that day knew little about chemical analysis, they had discovered that the meteorite reacted in extreme ways when exposed to electrical current.

  This was the part of the report that Dargo found impossible to believe. If the report was accurate, the scientists discovered that when a certain level of electricity was passed into the stone, the weight of the ore would change dramatically. Pushing only enough electricity to power a series of light bulbs actually made the stone completely weightless. For the weight to change, Bayer theorized in his notes, the mass of the ore must have changed when subjected to electricity. Either that, or some other fundamental change must have occurred in the object’s density.

  Though Dargo suspected that someone in the scientific archives was having fun at Bayer’s expense, the journal entries made it clear that Bayer was buying into the idea completely.

  Bayer had continued to dig into the state archives for further information regarding the experiments on the meteorite, soon to the detriment of his position at the Academy. Apparently, he was put on report after several unexplained absences from the lab. According to the journal, Bayer was spending that time in the archives.

  For better or worse, that time must’ve paid off. After an arduous search—the journal didn’t indicate exactly how many weeks—Bayer finally located a report suggesting the meteorite had been moved to a test facility located deep in the wilds of Russia. At first, Bayer wasn’t sure he had picked up the paper trail of the same meteorite because the stone was now referred to by a new code name, Alexander’s Fountain. Research was being conducted at a top secret, remote military lab that was entirely devoted to the study of the meteorite.

  After confirming that Alexander’s Fountain was indeed the same meteorite he was tracking, Bayer continued his research. Apparently Alexander’s Fountain took its name from Alexander III, father of Nicolas II, then the Tsar of Russia.

  At this point in the journals, Bayer became less specific when referring to the meteorite, or Alexander’s Fountain, as he took to calling it. He seemed to be somewhat paranoid, concerned that someone might be reading his logs while he was away. All the same, it was clear that Bayer had found additional reports from the military installation, indicating that Alexander’s Fountain was regarded as a powerful new energy source, electrical specifically, though implications were also made that the ore could also produce power in the form of vast amounts of heat. Depending on the current applied to the stone, the properties it exhibited were immensely different and could be harnessed in different ways.

  Surprisingly, all at once, Bayer’s access to the military and scientific reports dried up. At first he suspected he couldn’t find the location where later reports were warehoused—likely the result of them being misfiled. But he soon found ancillary reports indicating some sort of catastrophe had taken place at the military facility in the wilds of Siberia. The reports had ceased because something had caused Alexander’s Fountain to go critical, and somehow the accident had literally wiped the installation from the face of the map.

  After that, the military machine had gone to considerable lengths to hide the fact that the military laboratory ever existed. But by this point, Bayer was not willing to let things go. These long forgotten reports held the key to fulfilling the goals of his project in the present.

  In the months that followed, according to the logs, Bayer got himself in great trouble with his superiors. He became consumed with discovering what had happened to Alexander’s Fountain. He lost his position as team lead and was later removed from the project entirely. After that, he was moved to less prestigious posts, conducting what amounted to busy work. The logs showed that this initially bothered Bayer, though he soon grew to see the reprimand as a chance to spend more time digging into Alexander’s Fountain. His largest problem quickly became that there simply was no more information to be had. After the destruction of the facility, all reports entirely ceased. Though he thought the project might’ve been renamed or reclassified, Bayer found no evidence to support the theory. He found it strange, but it seemed the loss of the facility was a black eye the government wanted to expunge from history.

  Sitting back in his chair, Dargo pulled off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He’d read hundreds of pages from Bayer’s personal journal, and after all that he’d seen, one observation stood out from all others. Bayer had started writing as a normal, if uptight, self-absorbed individual. But once he sunk his teeth into the meteorite research and the mystery of Alexander’s Fountain, the man had grown steadily more obsessed and less stable. Dargo now believed his concern over his employer’s motivations was well founded. This man was not to be trusted.

  Still, he wasn’t sure what to do about it. A wise man would simply walk away. But that was unprofessional, no matter how intelligent it might be. Plus he and his men had been paid, thus far, in good faith. Walking away would reflect badly on Dargo’s standing in the professional community. Not to mention that walking away now could be unsafe. Dargo already suspected Bayer had murdered his predecessor.

  But truth be told, Dargo had to admit he had concerns for the Meridian team should he pull the ripcord now. Bayer seemed to be teetering on the brink of doing something disastrous. What exactly, Dargo wasn’t sure. But each time they spoke, Dargo had the feeling Bayer was on the verge of giving one foolish, bloodthirsty order or another. Bayer wanted Meridian so badly that he wasn’t thinking straight. If Dargo were to leave, he feared the entire research team might pay the price. Not that he owed them anything. Certainly not Cyrus Cooper.

  The fact that Cyrus was involved at all deeply troubled Dargo. Anger welled from the pit of his stomach every time he thought of the man. If it weren’t for Cyrus, Natasha would be alive today.

  Dargo clamped his eyes shut and tried to push away thoughts of his little girl. His little girl? Did he truly still think of her like that? Well, why not? She would always be his little girl, even though she had been twenty when she died. A grown woman by any standard. But still his little girl.

  It pained him, even now, to think of the mistakes. So many mistakes. They seemed a lifetime ago. But he could still see her smile,
still see the light in her eyes. She’d been precocious, a force of nature. There had been a stubborn streak in that girl that knew no boundaries. Still, he’d never seen her as happy as when she was with Cyrus.

  The fact that she had been with Cyrus at all was a mistake. A cruel twist of fate had left Dargo’s employer indebted to Cyrus. But complicated didn’t begin to describe the circumstances leading to what had transpired. There was more than enough blame to go around. The Coalition was at the top of the list when Dargo attributed blame. The principals of that group had orchestrated all that had happened. And Cyrus had been Coalition—might still be, Dargo now reasoned. If that was the case, there would be a reckoning.

  Still, he reminded himself, Cyrus hadn’t been Coalition when Natasha first met him. That much he now knew for certain. And Dargo had to admit that she might have been better prepared for the threats she faced if he’d been more honest with her in the time before her death. There was more than enough blame to go around, he reminded himself once more.

  It could have gone so differently, Dargo reflected. It had been a disaster that was decades in the making. With time, Dargo had gained painful perspective. He hadn’t been the only man to lose a loved one to that foolish spy game. When all was said and done, there was no question that Cyrus had loved Natasha. For more than a year following that day, Dargo had watched from afar as losing her had nearly killed the young man.

  Dargo snatched the glass from the counter beside his laptop and took a long slow drink. The stereotype was not lost on him, the angry Russian, sitting in the dark and drinking Vodka. He didn’t care. Sometimes a stereotype was accurate. It didn’t matter that he rarely touched the stuff these days. For some reason, over these last few years he found that, rather than relaxing, drinking only made him angry. Today it was fine. He was already angry. He missed his little girl.