Impact

by Douglas Preston

  She found him sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the Portland Press Herald. She was shocked at how tired he looked. His light brown hair lay in straggly locks plastered to his forehead, he hadn’t shaved, and his shoulders were stooped. He was not tall but he had always been straight, stocky, and muscular. Now he looked half-collapsed. Since she had sunk his boat and wrecked his livelihood, he had quit bugging her about college and her future, stopped complaining about all the money he’d spent. It was almost like he’d given up on her—and his own life. He couldn’t have made her feel worse if he’d tried.

  As she set her suitcase by the door he looked up in surprise. “What’s this? You going somewhere?”

  She struggled to smile brightly. “I got a new job.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Sit down, have a cup of coffee, and tell me about it.”

  The sun streamed in the window, and she could see the blue of the distant harbor beyond, dotted with fishing boats, and, through the opposite window, the big meadow behind the house, the grass long and green. Half an hour until the car arrived. Taking a mug out of the cupboard, she poured herself a cup, added her usual four teaspoons of sugar and a good pour of heavy cream, stirred it up, and sat down.

  “No more waitressing?”

  “No more. I got a real job.”

  “At Reilly’s Market? I saw they’d posted a notice looking for summer help.”

  “I’m going to Washington.”

  “Washington? As in D.C.?”

  “For a week or two, and then maybe I’ll be back. The position involves a certain amount of travel.”

  Her father leaned forward, an uncertain look on his face. “Travel? What in the world will you be doing?”

  She swallowed. “I’m working for a planetary geologist. I’m his assistant.”

  Her father stared at her with narrowed eyes. “What do you know about geology?”

  “It’s not geology. It’s planetary geology. Planets, Dad. It’s more like astronomy. This scientist runs a consulting firm for the government.” She paused, remembering what they’d discussed. “He was in the restaurant a couple of days ago, and we got to talking, and he offered to hire me as his assistant.” She took a slug of coffee and smiled nervously.

  “Why, Abbey, that’s great. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the pay?”

  “It’s excellent. In fact, there was a signing bonus . . .”

  “A what?”

  “A signing bonus. You know, when you take a new job, you sometimes get a bonus for accepting.”

  The eyes got narrower. “That’s for highly skilled people. What skills do you have?”

  Abbey just hated lying. “I took astronomy and physics courses at Princeton.”

  He looked at her steadily. “Are you sure this is legit?”

  “Of course! Look, there’s a car coming for me in fifteen minutes, so I gotta say good-bye. But there’s something I want to tell you first—”

  “A car? For you?”

  “Right. Car service. To the airport. I’m flying to Washington.”

  “I want to meet your employer. I want to talk to him.”

  “Dad, I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.” She swallowed, glanced out the window.

  Her father, frowning, set his coffee cup down. “I want to meet him.”

  “You will, I promise.” She pointed out the window. “Look at the harbor.”

  “What?” Her father’s face was all red with worry.

  Now or never, Abbey thought. “Hey, look at your mooring!”

  He turned and squinted out the kitchen window, then scraped back his chair in irritation. “Agh, for chrissakes, some jackass is hanging on my mooring.”

  “Those damn summer people,” said Abbey. It was a familiar refrain, the summer cruising folk snagging the empty moorings of fishermen.

  “They come up from Massachusetts, think they own the harbor.”

  “Better get the name of the boat and tell the harbormaster.”

  “I certainly will.” He rummaged in the magazine basket and pulled out a set of binoculars. He squinted, staring through them. “What the hell?”

  “What’s the name of the boat?”

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Abbey couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Dad, it’s the Marea II. A thirty-six-foot Willis Beal, two hundred fifteen horse power Volvo engine with less than two thousand hours, pot hauler, raw water, tanks, the works. Built in 2002 by RP Boatworks. Ready to fish. It isn’t new but all I had was a hundred grand.”

  The binoculars began to shake. “What . . . the hell?”

  A honk came from the driveway.

  “Oops, there’s my ride.”

  “I can’t possibly afford the payments . . .”

  “It’s free and clear. I bought it for you with my signing bonus. All the papers are on board. Gotta go.”

  “Abbey . . . wait, you bought me a new boat? Wait, for God’s sakes . . .”

  “Got my cell, I’ll call you from the road.”

  She rushed out of the house, tossed her suitcase in the back of the black SUV, and jumped in after it. Her father came to the door, still confused. She waved as the car scurried off down the graveled driveway and onto the main road.

  46

  As Ford entered the glass-and-chrome lobby of the Watergate Hotel, the assistant manager, who must have been lying in wait, came whisking around from behind his desk, hands clasped in front. He was a small man dressed in hotel black with a pinched, obsequious expression on his face. “Mr. Ford?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please excuse my concern, but it’s about the girl in the room you booked.”

  Ford detected a note of disapproval in the man’s anxious voice. Perhaps it had been a mistake to book her at the Watergate. There were plenty of quieter and cheaper hotels in Washington. He raised his eyebrows. “What’s the problem?”

  “She hasn’t left the room in two days, she won’t let the staff in to clean or stock the minibar, she’s been getting food deliveries at all hours of the night, and she won’t answer the room phone.” A literal wringing of the hands. “And, well, an hour ago there were complaints of noise.”

  “Noise?”

  “Yelling. Whooping. It sounded like some sort of . . . party.”

  Ford tried to maintain the serious expression on his face. “I’ll look into it.”

  “We’re concerned. We just renovated the hotel. Guests are responsible for any damage to rooms . . .” The disapproving voice trailed off into a significant silence.

  Ford dipped into his pocket and pressed a twenty into the man’s hand. “Trust me, everything’s going to be fine.”

  The man gave the bill a disdainful look as he pocketed it, retreating back to his station. Ford moved toward the elevators, considering that this was turning out to be a more expensive proposition than he had imagined.

  He knocked and Abbey opened the door. The room was a mess, dirty dishes, pizza boxes, and empty Chinese food cartons piled up in the entryway, emitting a smell of stale food. The trash can was overflowing with Diet Coke cans, papers were scattered about the floor, and the bed was wrecked.

  She saw him looking around.

  “What?”

  “They have a quaint custom in large hotels like this called maid service. Ever heard of it?”

  “I can’t concentrate when someone’s cleaning around me.”

  “You said this would take an hour.”

  “So I was wrong.”

  “You? Wrong?”

  “Hey, maybe you better sit down and take a look at what I found.”

  He looked at her closely; she was haggard, her hair knotty and in disarray, eyes bloodshot, clothes with a slept-in look. But the expression on her face was one of pure triumph. “Don’t tell me you solved the problem?”

  “Does a toilet seat get ass?”

  He winced. “You should publish a dictionary of your expressions.”

  Reaching into the minifri
dge, she pulled out a Diet Coke. “Want one?”

  He shuddered. “No thanks.”

  She settled into the chair in front of the computer and he took the one beside it. “The problem was a little more difficult than I thought.” She took a long pull on the Coke, stretching out the moment. “Any object in the solar system traces out a curve—either an ellipse or a hyperbola. A hyperbolic orbit means it came from outside the solar system and is going back out again—moving at faster than escape velocity. But our Object X was moving in an elliptical orbit.”

  “Object X?”

  “Gotta call it something.”

  Ford leaned forward. “So you’re saying it originated inside the solar system?”

  “Exactly. I had the angle of entry into the Earth and a picture of Object X coming in. But what I didn’t have was its velocity. Turns out the University of Maine at Orono has a meteoroid tracking station. They didn’t get a picture of X but they got the acoustical signature on tape—the sonic booms—and got a precise velocity of twenty-point-nine kilometers per second. A lot slower than the hundred thousand miles an hour first reported in the papers.”

  Ford nodded. “Following you so far.”

  “So it was in an elliptical orbit. The apogee, the farthest point from the sun, is where it probably started its journey.”

  “I see.”

  She hit a few keys, and a schematic of the solar system came into view. She typed in a command and an ellipsis appeared. “Here’s the orbit of Object X. Please note: the apogee is right at the orbit of Mars. And here’s the kicker: if you extrapolate backward, you find that Mars itself was right at that point in its orbit when X began its journey toward Earth.”

  She sat back. “Object X,” she said, “came from Mars.”

  A long silence enveloped the hotel room. Ford stared at the screen. It seemed incredible. “You’re sure about this?”

  “Triple-checked it.”

  Ford rubbed his chin and sat back. “Looks like we need to go where they know about Mars.”

  “And where’s that?”

  Ford thought for a moment. “Right now they’re mapping Mars. Over at NPF, the National Propulsion Facility in Pasadena, California. We should head over there, poke around, see if they’ve found anything unusual.”

  Abbey cocked her head and looked at him. “You know, Wyman, there’s one thing I don’t get. Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you? Nobody’s paying you, right?”

  “I’m deeply concerned. I’m not sure why, but my internal alarms are going off like crazy and I can’t rest until I figure this out.”

  “Concerned about what, exactly?”

  “If that was a mini–black hole, the planet was just kissed by the Grim Reaper. We came this close to extinction. What if there are more where that came from?”

  47

  Harry Burr waited in the car park of the upscale Connecticut mall, leaning on the fender of his yellow VW New Beetle, smoking an American Spirit cigarette. The message had come in the night before, urgent. Burr had never had an assignment that wasn’t urgent. When somebody wanted somebody else dead, it was never “take your time, no rush.”

  He rolled the cigarette thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger, feeling the sponginess of the filter, watching the smoke curl up from the glowing ash. A foul habit, bad for his health, unattractive, working-class. Tweedy professors didn’t smoke, or if they did, it was a briar pipe. He tossed the butt on the cement floor of the parking garage and ground it up with a dozen twists of the sole of his penny loafer until it was a shredded tuft. He would quit, but not right now.

  A few cars passed and then one slowed as it approached him. It was an ugly American car, a late-model Crown Victoria, black, naturally. His employers, whoever they were, watched too many movies. He loved his New Beetle and it was perfect for his work. No one expected a contract killer to arrive in a Beetle. Or wear a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches from L.L. Bean with chinos and argyle socks.

  As he watched the black car ooze up, Burr didn’t know and didn’t want to know who was hiring him, but he was pretty sure it was quasi-official. He’d had a fair amount of that kind of work lately.

  The Crown Vic stopped and the smoked window—smoked window!—rolled down. It was the same Asian man he had dealt with before, in a blue suit and sunglasses. Still, he went through the little password charade. “You leaving this space?” he asked.

  “Not for another six minutes.”

  They loved that kind of stuff. In response, a hand extended with a fat manila envelope. Burr took it, opened it, riffled the brick of money, tossed it onto the passenger seat.

  “Above all, we want that hard drive,” said the man. “We’re raising the bonus to two hundred thousand dollars for the drive, intact. You got that?”

  “I got it.” Burr smiled blandly and waved the car away. The Crown Vic departed with an ostentatious squeal of rubber. Nice, he thought, draw a little attention to yourself, why dontcha?

  He slid back into his car and opened the envelope, pouring out its contents: fact sheet, photographs, and money. A lot of it. With far more to come. This was a good job, even an excellent one.

  Shoving the money into the glove compartment, he scanned the photographs and perused the assignment letter. He whistled. This was going to be easy. Get a hard drive and kill a geek. There must be something pretty sweet on that hard drive.

  He plucked a glossy product photograph of a hard drive out of the batch and gazed at it, shoved it back, sorted through the others, and then scanned the fact sheet. He’d review it more thoroughly tonight, do the research, make the hit tomorrow. He could hardly imagine now what it was like in the days before Google Earth, MapQuest, Facebook, YouTube, reverse white pages, people search, and all the other privacy-busting tools on the Internet. In half an hour he could do what was once a week’s worth of research.

  Harry Burr laid the papers aside and indulged in a little self-reflection. He was good, and not just because he was prep-school educated and could recite the Latin first declension. He was good because he didn’t like killing. It gave him no pleasure. He didn’t need to do it, he didn’t have to do it, it wasn’t like eating or sex. He was good because he felt for his victims. Knowing they were real people, he could put himself in their shoes, look out at the world through their eyes. That made it so much easier to kill them.

  And finally, Harry Burr was efficient. Back when he was another person, a snot-nosed, prepped-out prick in Greenwich named Gordie Hill, his father had taught him all about efficiency. He had a store house of quotations he would roll out: if you’re going to do it, do it; if you make a lot of money, no one will care how you did it; if you intend to win, one way is as good as another. “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,” was what the old man said when he walked out of the kitchen after shooting his mother. Never to be seen again. A few years later Harry learned his father had been quoting Hitler. Now that was funny.

  Harry Burr smiled. He was “damaged,” or so he was led to believe by the parade of school psychologists, social workers, counselors, and all the other professional advice-giving-for-one-hundred-dollars-an-hour folks after his mother’s murder. So why not make a career of being damaged? He plucked the crumpled cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket. Fishing the last one out, he lit it and put the empty pack back in his pocket. What was it St. Augustine said? “God give me chastity, but not right now.” One of these days he’d quit, but not right now.

  48

  Abbey waited behind Ford as he knocked on the open door of the office of Dr. Charles Chaudry, director of the Mars mission. She felt itchy and hot in the new suit Ford had made her wear, especially in California in June.

  The director rose and came around his desk, hand extended.

  “My assistant, Abbey Straw.”

  Abbey shook the cool hand. Chaudry was a handsome man with a lean, chiseled face, dark brown eyes, springy on his feet, athletic, personable. He sported one of those tight little ponyta
ils that seemed endemic to Californians of a certain age.

  “Come in, please,” said the man, his tenor voice almost musical.

  Ford eased his frame into a chair and Abbey followed suit. She tried to hide her nervousness. Part of her was thrilled at the cloak-and-dagger business, the pretense with which they’d gained access. This Ford fellow, who looked so buttoned down and mainstream, was actually a subversive at heart. She liked that.

  The office was pleasantly large and spare, with windows looking out over gray-brown mountains that rose abruptly behind the giant parking lot. Two walls of books added to the comfortable, scholarly atmosphere. Everything was as neat as a pin.

  “Well now,” said Chaudry, folding his hands. “So you’re writing a book on our Mars mission.”

  “That’s right,” said Ford. “A big, beautiful photography book. They tell me you’re the man in charge of mapping and photographing the surface.”

  Chaudry nodded.

  Ford went on to describe the book in enthusiastic detail, the layout, what it would cover, and of course all the beautiful photographs it would contain. Abbey was amazed at the transformation from his usual dry and cool manner to a bubbling enthusiasm. Chaudry listened politely, hands tented in front.

  Ford finished up. “I understand that because this is a NASA project, the photographs are in the public domain. I’d like access to all your images, at the highest resolution.”

  Chaudry unclasped his hands and leaned forward. “You’re right that the images are in the public domain—but not at the highest resolution.”

  “We’re going to be running double trucks and gatefolds and we’ll need the best resolution we can get.”

  The director leaned back. “The high-res images are strictly classified, I’m afraid. Don’t be concerned—we can get you all the images you need at a resolution more than adequate for a book.”

  “Why classified?”

  “Standard operating procedure. The imaging technology is highly classified and we don’t want our enemies knowing just how good that technology is.”