The Noise

by James Patterson

  The skin of Tennant’s fingers and palm felt rough, callused. She had the hands of a manual laborer beyond her years.

  With expert precision, the pilot set the chopper down about fifty feet from the largest of the hangars, and Martha heard the blades above slow to a deep thump.

  Fraser was first out of his harness and to his feet. He told the two soldiers, “Take both girls to 185. They’re expecting you. Doctors, you’re both with me.”

  “What’s 185? I need to stay with Sophie and monitor—”

  “It’s okay, Doctor. I’ll take good care of her.”

  Martha turned toward the voice.

  Dr. Fitch was standing at the helicopter door with two orderlies. He looked tired. Wind from the blades above twisted and tossed his hair. He was holding it out of his face with one hand. There were heavy bags under his eyes. “I’ve been kept apprised of her current situation. I’ll get her situated, and you can join us when you’re through.” Before she could respond, he nodded at the orderlies—they jumped up into the helicopter and went to work on the straps holding Sophie’s gurney to the floor.

  Tennant’s hand tightened in Martha’s. “I’m staying with Sophie.”

  Martha gave Fitch a quick look, and he nodded.

  She pressed a hand to the side of Tennant’s face. “I’ll be there soon, okay?”

  They all climbed down out of the chopper, and Martha watched as they wheeled the gurney away, Tennant at her sister’s side, the soldiers close behind.

  “They’re waiting on us,” Fraser said impatiently. “This way.”

  He led them toward a side door on the hangar. The large overhead was closed. A marine officer was stationed there, which Martha thought was odd. “Isn’t this an Army facility?”

  “Not today,” Fraser replied.

  The marine officer produced a retina scanner, raised the device to Fraser’s face, and pressed a button. He studied a small display on the other side, then motioned him through. He then scanned Harbin and Martha. Martha was curious where they’d gotten their retina data. Nobody else had scanned her. She hadn’t agreed to anything like that.

  When finished, the marine pointed at a door near the end of the hallway behind him. “Through there, sir.”

  Martha and Harbin followed Fraser down the hall, through the heavy steel fire door, into the main bay of the hangar.

  Martha gasped.

  The light-blue and white hull of the giant aircraft glistened under the halogen floodlights mounted in the girders of the ceiling. On the tail of the Boeing 747 was the number 28000 printed in large block letters directly below the American flag. The door was open. Wide, retractable steps protruded to the concrete floor. Additional marines and about half a dozen people in dark suits stood surrounding the aircraft.

  “I’ll be damned,” Harbin said softly.

  “I’ll be damned,” Martha repeated as her heart thumped in her chest.

  She’d only seen Air Force One on television and in pictures.

  The plane was much larger in real life.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Martha

  The plane was also filthy.

  As Martha and Harbin followed Fraser up the steps toward the door, she noticed the hull of the plane was covered in dust and dirt, caked on in some places. She imagined this was nothing unusual for a jet. She supposed most images of the iconic plane were Photoshopped and edited much like those of the world’s most famous models, slightly larger than life, unattainable. Air Force One was a symbol of this great nation. Not only did it represent the office of the president, but also the thoughts and beliefs that built this country. Martha imagined a team of people traveled with the plane to ensure it always looked camera-ready.

  So why was it dirty?

  They were met at the top of the stairs by another marine with a secondary iris scanner. From there, they stepped onto the plane into a very narrow corridor paneled in dark wood with the presidential seal embedded in the wall. Martha noted the spotlight in the ceiling above it was either off or dead.

  “Follow the corridor to the end and make a right, sir,” the marine instructed Fraser with a salute.

  The corridor opened upon a large room that spanned the width of the 747. Martha recognized the space from numerous photographs over the years, presidential photo ops with dignitaries and members of the press corps. The walls were paneled in a rich mahogany. The tan carpet was so plush Martha wanted to sink into it barefoot. Oh, Christ, she was wearing hiking boots. Muddy hiking boots, at that. Jeans and a tan button-down shirt no doubt covered in sweat stains. When was the last time she’d showered? She could only imagine what she smelled like. She caught a glimpse of her wild hair in a mirror and had to turn away. Was this really how she was going to spend her first (and probably only) moment aboard the most famous plane in history?

  “Had I known where we were going, I might have shaved and dabbed on a little cologne,” Harbin said in a low voice, reading her mind. Somehow, Fraser managed to appear impeccable in standard-issue fatigues. She noticed his name tag had been affixed to the Velcro at his shirt pocket. She wasn’t sure when he’d done that.

  As they stepped into the room, at least a dozen faces looked at them. The president’s press secretary was there, along with General Norman Westin, whom she recognized from a recent appearance on Meet the Press, and Samantha Troy, acting director of the NSA, seated on a couch. General Westin gave Fraser a slight nod, then went back to his conversation with Deputy Press Secretary Jeanna Brazzell.

  She also knew, from press conferences, the faces of the director of Homeland Security, the president’s chief of staff, and two others. Six others were seated in plush leather chairs surrounding a maple table. Martha recognized the secretary of defense and members of the Homeland Security Council, as well as people from the National Security Council. They all looked tired. The lines of their faces and dark circles under their eyes told Martha a good many people hadn’t slept recently.

  When a man in khaki pants and a navy-blue shirt stepped out of a door at the back of the room, the first thought that went through Martha’s head was He’s much shorter than I expected. The second thought was Why was that man with him? The president’s gray hair was slightly ruffled, and he hadn’t shaved in at least two days. She noticed a stain on his shirt. It looked like coffee, small, but there, under the breast pocket. Reaching for a cloth napkin on the credenza just inside the door, he dipped it in a glass of water and scrubbed at the stain before giving up and tossing the napkin aside. He leaned into the shoulder of the man who had entered with him, said something at his ear, then shook his hand.

  The president turned from him and faced the three of them for the first time. He, too, looked tired, run-down. “Lieutenant Colonel, thank you for joining us on such short notice.”

  “Sir.” Fraser saluted.

  The president eyed Martha and Harbin. “These were Holt’s people?”

  The use of were was not lost on Martha.

  Fraser nodded. “There are four others, but I only had time to personally vet these two. This is Dr. Martha Chan and Dr. Sanford Harbin. I apologize for our appearance. We came directly from the field.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  “Sir,” Harbin said. He reached across the table to shake the president’s hand.

  The president turned back to Fraser. “The survivors from Mount Hood?”

  “They’re with Dr. Fitch right now, in 185.”

  The president considered this, then nodded. “Good, good. Find someplace to sit. We need to get started.”

  As they took seats and moved closer to the table, Martha tried to get another look at the man who had entered with the president. Dressed in a deep-scarlet cassock and white rochet was Cardinal Manual Kitzmiller, the highest-ranking member of the Catholic Church in the United States.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Fravel

  Dr. Russel Fravel yawned, sat back in his chair, and admired his handiwork. After nearly twenty-
four hours of bad password attempts, he’d given up on that approach. He knew the fingerprint scanner was a waste of time, too. On a whim, he tried placing a piece of cellophane tape over the scanner and pressed down with his own finger, but that didn’t work. So much for the crap he’d seen in the movies. Knowing Holt most likely used his fingerprint to unlock the laptop brought on another problem. The fingerprint scanner eliminated the need for a memorable password. The laptop was as secure as the front door to Fort Knox.

  When that thought had popped into Fravel’s head, he’d had a revelation.

  What if he didn’t use the front door?

  Like most buildings, computer systems were designed to keep people out but did little to restrict the movements of those already inside.

  This thought paired with another.

  Unlike the movies, government employees were subject to budgeting constraints and the slow movement of bureaucracy. Computers and operating systems were sometimes five to ten years old. Laughable when compared to the average teenager’s gaming PC. Even agencies like the NSA, who wrote much of their own operating code, were forced to run it on outdated equipment.

  When Fravel realized this, he’d rebooted Holt’s laptop and paid close attention to the opening sequence. When the password box came up almost immediately—before the operating system itself loaded up—he had his answer. This meant both the fingerprint reader and password were handled by the laptop’s BIOS, or the hardware itself, not the operating system.

  From a design standpoint, this would seem extremely secure. And it was, unless you had a screwdriver and a few spare parts.

  In one of the Army’s black plastic supply cases, he found a set of screwdrivers. From the lab where Tomes and Hauff were working, he commandeered another laptop and an external hard drive with a USB connection.

  Back at his own tent, he went to work.

  He removed the screws from the back of Holt’s laptop and laid each of them out on the table in the order removed in case he’d have to put things back together. He lifted off the cover, set it aside, and located the small solid-state hard drive. Only four screws held the drive down. He took those out, too. He then dismantled the external hard drive he’d taken from the lab, removed the SSD from the enclosure, and replaced it with the drive from Holt’s laptop before putting the enclosure back together again.

  Fravel then booted up the spare laptop, logged in to Windows, and plugged the external hard drive containing Holt’s drive into the USB port. An Explorer window appeared, neatly listing the contents in folders organized in alphabetical order.

  All of this took him less than thirty minutes.

  Fravel leaned forward in his chair and studied the various folders.

  There was a large one called LinuxRD27 with the operating system, then hundreds of small folders. Some had names that made sense, others appeared to be random sequences of letters and numbers, most likely encrypted. He clicked through several of the folders and found nothing but gibberish. He’d been afraid of that—even though his little hack had granted him access to the data on the drive, Holt’s operating system had encrypted the information, leaving it unreadable. He searched about a dozen other folders and found more of the same.

  Fravel caught himself cursing as he clicked through folder after folder, file after file, and got nothing but error messages. Then he opened up a new window and typed *.mp4 into the search box. The asterisk was considered a wildcard character, and mp4 was the standard file extension for video files. He clicked on advanced search and checked off a box to search the entire drive.

  Nearly two hundred videos came up in the search.

  He sorted the results by date and double-clicked on the first one.

  The video of Frederick Hoover with DARPA, the one Holt had played for them when they first arrived, began.

  Fravel minimized the window and took a closer look at the search results. The video wasn’t stored in one of the encrypted folders but instead appeared in a temp folder. Suddenly, it made sense—when Holt played a video, the encryption software wrote a local copy into the temp folder without encryption so the operating system’s video player could play the file. Data in temp folders was as the name suggests—temporary—routinely overwritten as space was needed. This file, and a few hundred more, had not been overwritten yet.

  Fravel copied all of the files to his laptop, then began to play them, one at a time.

  What he was seeing…

  His heart began to thud against his ribs. He felt the blood rush to his face. His skin prickled with it, and he had to remind himself to breathe.

  This couldn’t be true.

  This was physically impossible.

  Yet, Frederick Hoover laid it out in this matter-of-fact tone as if he were communicating a recipe or driving directions. The man’s face was utterly emotionless.

  He watched three more videos before he had to stop.

  He couldn’t keep this information to himself. He needed to tell the others. Tomes and Hauff were in the biology tent. Reiber was with that girl they’d brought back from Barton. He wasn’t sure where Doctors Chan and Harbin were, but he’d find them—this couldn’t wait. Not another second.

  Fravel scooped up the laptop and external drive and ran out of the tent.

  That was when he heard a strange sound.

  A low hum, quickly increasing in volume.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Martha

  “We don’t have a name for it,” General Westin began. “Frankly, I’m not sure I want to name it. I want to locate and eradicate the cause before we get to the point of requiring a name.”

  The interior lights of Air Force One dimmed, and a large video screen came to life on the wall at the fore of the cabin with the presidential seal emblazoned at the center.

  “For the record, what you are about to see has been classified Echelon, meaning discussion must be contained to people within this room. Your understanding and acceptance of that was detailed in the paperwork each of you signed for the Joint Chiefs’ office.”

  The general raised a remote and pointed it at the screen.

  The presidential seal was replaced by grainy footage of a parking lot with a ramp leading up into a garage in the far corner.

  “This is a shopping mall in Herdon, Oregon, about thirty miles outside of Barton. You’ve all read the lieutenant colonel’s report.”

  Several murmurs rolled through the group.

  The time stamp in the corner of the screen read six minutes after eleven in the morning. About half the lot was full, and several cars moved through the frame. A woman approached a parked minivan with several shopping bags and two children following closely behind. She keyed the button on her remote, and the back door opened. The kids climbed inside, she placed the bags on the floor in front of them, then closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side and got in. Two slots down, a pickup truck pulled into an empty space and a man got out and started walking off to the right—presumably toward the mall—the same direction the woman and children had come from.

  Someone ran by him, practically a blur, they were moving so fast. Not heading to or from the mall but perpendicular to it, heading in the direction of the parking garage.

  Two more people quickly rushed through the frame, following the first.

  Six more.

  Then at least a dozen.

  An elbow caught the man from the pickup truck in the shoulder and sent him spinning. Another runner clipped him in the leg. Martha watched in horror as he tripped and dropped to the blacktop a moment before more runners appeared—so many now—they ran right over the top of him. He twitched and jerked as feet cracked down on his legs, his back, his head, like heavy pistons. Martha let out a gasp as the man stopped moving, then vanished under a sea of people.

  More runners came into the frame.

  They filled every inch of blacktop. Others raced up bumpers and ran across the cars themselves—trunks, roofs, hoods—metal and plastic giving way under thei
r feet as tires exploded and vehicles fell under the weight.

  The woman in the minivan had started to back out and slammed on her brakes as the first runner crossed behind her. As the crowd grew, she had no place to go. Within moments they were surrounded, then buried under the masses as people raced all around and over them. Martha thought of the children in the back, thought of her own children. There were so many runners she only caught glimpses of the van, and each time the roof was a little lower. She didn’t see the windows explode out—one second they were there, then they weren’t, then she lost sight of the van altogether as more runners converged on the scene.

  There were so many.

  Hundreds? Thousands? As the seconds ticked by, Martha lost track. The group just got bigger. An endless stream of runners, these people.

  The video had no sound, and Martha took no comfort in that. Her mind filled in the missing screams. She heard the children in that minivan, she heard the crunch of bone. She heard each destructive footfall as the horde of people continued to grow in size. Their faces were expressionless, and while their legs moved with unimaginable speed and power, their arms hung loosely at their sides like dead appendages.

  In the upper-left portion of the screen, a light pole toppled over. Another fell about twenty seconds later. Immediately after that, the pole holding their camera collapsed, and the screen went dark.

  The general paused for a moment, then said, “We have one more shot, and I find this one particularly disturbing.”

  Martha couldn’t imagine anything more disturbing than what she’d just seen, but then the camera switched to another angle, this one focused on the side of the parking garage. The entrance ramp of the garage was completely engulfed—the runners moved in and around the building in much the same way they had overtaken the cars—like a swarm of ants—the blacktop, the concrete, all lost around them. She watched them disappear inside. Some smashed into the exterior walls, and without a moment’s hesitation, they rerouted and continued forward. Faces and limbs were covered in blood, scrapes, and scratches—even broken limbs didn’t slow them down. They pressed against the wall in their path in a desperate fevered fury. Some slammed into it repeatedly until they found a way around or through, but they didn’t slow or stop.