And yet the platinum plate, the most compelling piece of evidence Michael had yet seen, had pointed here. Michael knew he had no choice but to press on. Reaching the top of the ladder, he stepped onto a rock ledge a couple of feet in width. This time, instead of proceeding along the ledge to what looked like the fourteenth and final ladder, he waited for Kate to show her head. “You ever play that game chutes and ladders?” Michael said.
“You mean the one where you roll the dice and you climb a ladder on the board, but if you hit a snake you go sliding back down?”
“That’s the one.”
“We call it snakes and ladders, but yeah, I played it when I was a kid. Why?”
“I don’t know. Fourteen ladders in a row,” Michael said, staring down at Ted below. “I can’t help but think we’re going to hit a snake.”
36
THOUGH THE DOOR of the alcove rattled in time with his aggressor’s fist, Mobi did his best to remain unperturbed. After twenty minutes of effort he had finally managed to get Quiann to pick up the phone and he wasn’t about to let the big bully outside ruin his moment.
“Hi, my name is Mobi Stearn. I’m a telecommunications engineer here at JPL in California.”
“Who is this that continues to call?” the heavily accented voice demanded.
“Dr. Mobi Stearn,” Mobi said, somewhat self-consciously. “Am I speaking with Dr. Jie Quiann?”
“Yes.”
“I have an urgent matter I’d like to discuss with you, sir.”
“Yes.” Quiann paused. “I see you are calling from Deputy Director Alvarez’s IP address.”
“Yeah. I can explain that.”
“I must speak directly to Deputy Director Alvarez.”
Mobi saw that making friends might be harder than he had anticipated. “Well that’s the thing, sir. She’s held up and I’m kind of your go-to guy here.”
Quiann lowered his voice. “I will speak only to Deputy Director Alvarez.”
Mobi could see the call was going nowhere. If he wanted to save the day he’d have to pull a rabbit out of a hat and he’d have to do it now. “Look, sir, we’ve got a reverse engineered cold fusion reactor with a secondary coil that’s about to spray plutonium over half of California and figuring you to be a nice guy, I’m guessing that isn’t the kind of thing you want to do. Now, I have no idea what kind of encryption algorithms you’ve tried to open COM with that thing and frankly I don’t care. I don’t think that’s the solution. What we need are the original Horten files. Our copies are missing anything to do with the radio gear and if we’re going to crack this thing, I need to start there and I need to start now. So what do you say? You want your next vacation to Disneyland to be in a Hazmat suit or do you want to dance?”
Mobi regretted the Disneyland part. He was pretty sure Quiann would never be granted admission stateside again thus rendering the comment moot, but still, he hoped he’d made his point. He needed Quiann’s help and he needed it now.
“Are you the Mobi Stearn who won the millennial Caltech Athenaeum robo-war?”
“You Googled me?”
“It is very important that you are who you say you are, Mr. Stearn.”
“Millennial champ. My bot carried a small-scale EMP I put together with spare parts from the Rutherford lab. Scrambled anybody who got close.”
“Interesting. I would think that an electromagnetic pulse weapon would disable your robot as well.”
“Nano-ceramic shielding.”
“Clever,” Quiann said.
The line was quiet for a long moment. “Dr. Quiann?”
Mobi was sure he could hear typing.
“I do not have much time,” Quiann said. “I am compressing the files now.”
Mobi let out a sigh and said, “Thank you.”
“Please, be discreet, Mr. Stearn.”
The line went dead and Mobi heard nothing more.
37
MICHAEL REMEMBERED CLEARLY when his father first taught him to trust his own opinion. He was supposed to write a book report. In the report he was supposed to talk about what other people said about the book. He was supposed to provide footnotes and a bibliography to support his work. But Michael didn’t like writing reports. Especially when he thought what the other people had to say about the book was dumb. So his father made a deal with him. He told him to write what he thought about the book. He didn’t need a bibliography or footnotes because he wouldn’t be quoting anybody else. All he had to do was think about the book and write down what he thought. With this spin on it, Michael found the project interesting. He had a lot of things to say about the book. He chose his words wisely. He was proud of the finished project. He handed it in. And he got an F. The teacher wrote that what Michael had written was not scholarship. When he showed the graded report to his father, his dad said that the teacher was right. It probably wasn’t scholarship. Then he asked Michael, what he had learned?
“Not to do my own thing if I want a good grade.”
“Yes, but what else did you learn?”
“Not everybody out there wants me to succeed.”
“True, but what else?”
Michael thought about it. “I learned to think,” he finally said.
WITH A FINAL heave, Michael summitted the karst. Up here, free from the shadows, he found himself bathed in the light of the newly risen moon, the surrounding peaks poking their heads from the clouds like islands in a deep dark sea. The vantage point was so intoxicating, so foreign, that it took a glance at the dark river below to remind him of what he was doing there. Michael took a fresh breath and refocused his gaze. There was a small shrine to the north of him consisting of a stone Buddha sitting amidst a stick forest of recently burnt incense. To the west lay the saddle between the two peaks of the karst, dense foliage covering the ridge. To the east and south was simply raw limestone, no defining features really, nothing to hide. Kate reached the top, Ted breathing hard behind her.
“It’s a shrine,” Ted said. “An old one by the looks of it.”
“Long way up to pray.”
“Local Buddhists believe that proximity to the spirit world could be found at the tops of mountains. Chances are that network of ladders has been there forever.”
Ted dug into his pack pulling out what looked like the sensor to a fancy metal detector. He then opened up Kate’s pack removing a portable LCD screen and a telescopic handle.
“When I heard you were in Yangshuo, I pulled in a favor.” Screwing the device together he said, “Ground Penetrating Radar. The rock in this region is extremely porous. Water tends to flow through it creating pockets and caverns over time. Anything like that, this girl here will pick it up.” Ted tossed Kate a device about the size of a packet of cards. “Laser grid. It should help us map this out.”
Kate clicked a switch on the device’s all weather case. A red grid of laser beams emanated from all four sides of the device turning the peak into a life-sized chess board, lines of laser light delineating search quadrants.
“Sweet,” Kate said. “Michael, are you seeing this?’
Michael turned his head and nodded. If the truth were known, he was more interested in the full moon than the red lines of laser light. There was something about the way the moon hung just above eye level in the eastern sky, something atavistic about its presence that made Michael want to dig deeper. This was a moon that held secrets. Secrets that for better or worse, could no longer afford to be kept.
Michael reached into his pocket and withdrew the engraved plate he had extracted from the old man’s skull. Holding it up under the moon’s pale glow, it looked somehow different than it had earlier in the day; its platinum surface seemed less harsh, almost organic. Michael studied the disc carefully. The actual engraving appeared exactly as it had before: a double peaked karst before a rising moon — nothing more, nothing less. But Michael found it difficult to believe that this same metal plate that a Japanese surgeon had gone to such trouble to implant in the man’s skull didn’t
in some way hold more significance than what he had seen so far.
Michael turned the disk over in his hand. The reverse side was smooth blank platinum. It remained as blank as he had remembered it, except for a little patch of dried brown blood that Michael had missed while washing the plate in the river. Later, when he had time, he thought, he’d have to clean that bit of blood off. Or would he? Michael felt his pulse race. He peered at the stain again. Had he been hasty in washing away the old man’s blood? Had he dismissed the smooth back of the plate too quickly? One way to find out. Michael reached into his pocket and withdrew his Swiss Army knife.
“Kid?” Ted said.
Michael snapped open the surgically sharp blade. Messages had been hidden in relief before. It wouldn’t be that different from the seam uniting the two halves of the capsule. It was there, you simply had to know where to look.
“Michael,” Ted interrupted. “If we’re going to do this thing, we need all hands on deck.”
Michael ignored Ted and pressed the tip of the hardened stainless steel blade to his thumb. He felt a well of excitement churn in his stomach as the skin broke, a pearl sized drop of blood pooling out. Quickly dropping the Swiss knife back into his pocket he traded it for the platinum disc, squeezing out more blood which he let fall to the smooth surface of the disc, spreading it around like finger paint. The result was predictable at first — just a mess of blood exactly as it had appeared when he had removed the plate from the old man’s head — but as the thin layer of dark blood dried slowly before his eyes, he held the disc at an oblique angle and something else took shape. Though the blood stained the smooth surface of the disc, it was unable to penetrate what must have been a hairline engraving. As a result an image was forming, an image which Michael immediately recognized as a topographical representation of the peak they were standing upon. The drying blood revealed a series of contour lines reaching out like ripples on a pond, the furthest line aptly intersected by a blood red swastika. Michael didn’t hesitate. He didn’t call Ted or Kate. He simply swung his pack over his shoulder and headed due west, down the craggy limestone path toward the saddle separating the two peaks. If the swastika meant what he thought it did, he didn’t want to waste a second more.
38
MOBI SCANNED THE file Quiann had sent him, unsure what bothered him more: the pounding at the door or the high pitched whine of a drill coming from the back wall. Rand wanted him out of the alcove, that much was clear, but whichever way Mobi looked at it, the time for surrender had long past. Now all that mattered was making his last stand pay. Quiann’s file consisted of background on the Horten and a link to a feed consisting of two streaming codes: one in red and one in blue. The code in red was live data being transmitted up to the satellite from China’s Jiuquan South Launch Center. The blue data was the satellite’s response. So far Mobi hadn’t been able to discern a pattern in the streaming codes, but he had established three things.
Number one: the original Horten had been equipped with powerful radio transceivers to communicate with other aircraft of its type. Number two: apparently the Chinese were fine with this design because their satellite contained a modern, but extremely powerful transceiver as well. And number three: transmissions to and from the Chinese satellite were encrypted at the point of origin and then re-encrypted before being returned to the base. As far as Mobi was concerned the crux of the problem lay in this final point, namely dual encryption.
Dual encryption was a risky business, especially when you were dealing with something as far away as a satellite. If something were to go wrong, if a single line of code was buggy on the space side re-encryption protocol, control would lose contact. That this had apparently happened begged two questions: A — why had Quiann been so obtuse in launching a dual encryption protocol, and B — what the hell was Mobi going to do about it when he was stuck down on Earth with a drill buzzing in his ear?
Mobi had to assume that the answer to the first question was an insane desire for secrecy, but in terms of what he was going to do about it, that was more complicated. So far no pattern had emerged between the data streaming up to the satellite and that which it was returning. Without a pattern, Mobi had no way in, only the unwavering conviction that the alcove door would soon be breached. He decided to risk an instant message to Alvarez. “Called our friend,” Mobi typed. “You there?”
He hit send and waited. There was nothing. Only the whirring of the drill, punctuated by the syncopated thumping of what Mobi now suspected was a jack hammer. Then, the thumping stopped leaving only the drill. Mobi’s screen chimed in response.
“Closer than you think.”
“Where?” Mobi typed.
“Clear-code buried in data stream. Analyze.”
Clear-code buried in data stream? Mobi read it again. Alvarez obviously had new information. He started to type again, but was interrupted not by a message, but a muffled voice.
“Mobi?”
Mobi threw his head back at the sound of his name.
“Mobi, it’s me, Allison.”
The voice was coming from the outside the alcove.
“Deputy Director Alvarez?”
“It’s me you’ve got to worry about, Stearn,” Rand’s baritone commanded. “Now how about you get your ass out here, and we can get on with the show.”
“I am getting on with the show,” Mobi said. “I’m figuring out how to get that thing out of the sky without blowing plutonium from here to Korea.”
A pause.
“It’s too late for that. Our platform is locked on. We’re taking the Chinese bird out whether you crack the mystery of the flying foo dog or not.”
Except there was something about Rand’s response that told Mobi that it wasn’t too late. Perhaps it was Rand’s moment of hesitation or his surfeit of confidence, Mobi wasn’t sure, but something was up. It was Alvarez who spoke next.
“You might as well just come out, Mobi. It wouldn’t matter if that terminal in there was cat wired into every mainframe in the building. It’s still just a laptop, and they’d still haul you out. Even a secure 4-EVR structure gets breached eventually.”
Mobi listened, but what was she saying to him? A secure 4-EVR structure? What the hell was that? Some kind of brand name for a bank safe? And the cat wiring. If anything, Alvarez’s terminal was optically linked to the rest of the facility. Alvarez would know that. CAT wire was a residential standard. But secure forever? Mobi thought it through. Was it that simple? Was she telling Mobi that this little room he was in was secure FOREVER, or at least long enough? Then why bring up the cat wiring? CAT WIRED. Mobi broke it down to its alphanumeric. 22894733. Is that what she was telling him? It was worth a shot. Mobi logged out of the Operating System and keyed in 22894733 at the shell prompt.
Bingo.
Each of JPL’s servers showed below the prompt, each open to his inquiries, each ready for his instruction. Mobi got it now. He understood what Alvarez was telling him. He wasn’t locked in. They were locked out. Mobi controlled JPL’s systems. And the best thing was, Rand didn’t even know it.
Mobi’s screen chimed again. The message read, “Check outgoing data packets.”
“I’ll give you one more chance, Stearn,” Rand said through the door. “Open up, or we’re coming in guns blazing.”
But Mobi wasn’t listening. Not really. He had access to the servers now. Isolating the outgoing data was a simple process. There was the usual space-bound traffic in the log, and the stuff to other research institutions, and the traffic to China. But the China traffic was more than just his conversation with Quiann at the Launch Center; it was a series of encrypted packets sent directly to a separate location that looked to be in Beijing, Xiyuan to be precise. Xiyuan, Google quickly told him, was near Beijing’s Summer Palace. It was also the location of the headquarters of the Chinese Ministry of State Security — the country’s spy service. Mobi wasn’t sure what this meant, but he knew it was big. He was getting in deeper by the moment.
“Stearn,” Rand yelled through the door. “You can’t pull a paycheck in prison!”
“Like I’m in it for the money,” Mobi said. Then he fished a pair of earbuds off Alvarez’s desk and drowned out the racket with good old rock 'n' roll. Rand could huff and puff, but Mobi was the lone wolf in town. If anybody was going to have the last word about what went on above planet Earth tonight, it was him.
39
A SPARK LIT off the blade of his shovel as Michael thrust it into the rocky soil. He had been digging for less than five minutes and already he had hit a hard flat surface, maybe twenty inches below the grade. Now, instead of digging down, he began shoveling dirt to the side revealing that the surface he had hit was in fact an iron plate. Ted’s GPR unit had confirmed that the spot where he now stood had a hollow beneath it, but in reality the technology hadn’t been necessary. The contour map on the back of the blood stained disk had been engraved to scale, the swastika perfectly marking the spot.
Kate and Ted hunched down alongside Michael to remove the earth from the metal plate’s surface. Within minutes they had uncovered a four-foot-wide iron trap door, hinged into aging concrete. A simple deadbolt key lock kept the plate fastened down, but one look revealed the mechanism was heavily corroded.
“Pass me the pick.”
Ted handed over a lightweight climbing pick and Michael jammed the blade under the metal door at the hinge. The concrete was white and flaking where it had deteriorated with exposure to moisture over time. Holding the edge of the door up with the pick, Michael levered the blade of the shovel into the gap and popped it up with one swift motion at the hinge. The rusted metal let go almost immediately and Michael pulled the blade of the shovel out, moving on to the second hinge. This one was harder to jimmy, but ultimately let go with a groan. Ted moved in beside Michael and together they were able to lift the heavy metal plate up on end, letting it fall backwards into the fresh pile of dirt. They were left with a gaping hole into the darkness.
Lethal Circuit (Michael Chase 1) Page 17
