Impact

by Douglas Preston

  What was going through his head at that very moment?

  Abbey typed in fuckNPF. No go.

  She recalled the standard rules: a good password should consist of at least eight characters of mixed numbers and letters, lower and uppercase.

  She typed in fuckNPF1.

  Bingo.

  55

  Ford eased his rented Mercedes down the curving lanes of the posh Washington neighborhood around Quebec Street NW, until he found an evening house party. He parked his car behind the other cars along the curb and stepped out into the warm night, buttoning his suit jacket. Elegant Georgian houses lined the leafy lanes, windows glowing yellow in the summer dark. The party house was more brightly lit than most, and as he walked past it he heard muted jazz trickling into the air. Ambling down the street in his suit, hands in his pockets like a neighbor out for a stroll, he made his way toward Spring Valley Park, a small ribbon of trees alongside a creek. Slipping into the park on a path, he waited until he was sure he was alone and then swiftly cut into the woods, crossed the creek, and approached the backyard of number 16 Hillbrook Lane. It was nearing midnight but he was in luck: there was only one car in the driveway. Lockwood was still at work. No doubt he was very busy these days—and nights.

  Circling the property, he could see no evidence it was under active surveillance or being patrolled. The house was mostly dark, with a soft glow in an upper window—the wife, probably, reading in bed. The front stoop light had been left on. Fortunately, the president’s science advisor didn’t rate Secret Service protection. Still, there might be alarms or motion sensors that turned on lights, the usual suburban stuff, but by moving extremely slowly he was able to minimize the risk of setting one off. He managed to creep close to the driveway undetected.

  He chose a hiding place in a grouping of yews alongside the driveway and crouched in the deepest shadow, waiting. It was possible Lockwood might remain at work all night, but he knew the man’s habits well enough to know he wouldn’t sleep in the office. Eventually he would come home.

  Ford waited.

  An hour passed. He shifted his position, trying to stretch his cramped legs. The light went out in the top of the house. Another hour passed. Then, a few minutes past two, he saw car lights down the street and a sudden rumble from the automatic garage door as it was activated and began to rise.

  A moment later headlights swept into the driveway and a Toyota Highlander eased in and glided past him; Ford ducked from his hiding place and darted behind the car into the garage. He crouched behind the rear bumper, then waited. A moment passed, the left-hand door opened, a tall man got out.

  Ford rose and stepped out from behind the car.

  Lockwood jumped back, staring at him. “What the hell—?”

  Ford smiled, held out his hand. Lockwood stared at it. “You scared the daylights out of me. What are you doing here?”

  Keeping the friendly smile, Ford dropped his hand and took a step forward. “Call your man off.”

  “What are you talking about? What man?”

  There was a note in Lockwood’s voice that Ford believed. “The man who murdered Mark Corso and tried to kill me and my assistant this afternoon in Brooklyn, shot up a bar, and killed the bartender. You can read about it in the Times online. He was from the Agency, I’d guess. Looking for a hard drive.”

  “Jesus Christ, Wyman, you know I’d never be involved in anything like that. If someone’s trying to kill you, it isn’t us. You better tell me what the hell you’ve been doing to provoke this.”

  Ford stared at Lockwood. The man looked flustered and confused. The operative word was looked. After eight years in Washington, people got awfully good at deception.

  “I’m still on the case.”

  Lockwood’s lips tightened and he seemed to be collecting his wits. “If someone’s after you, it isn’t CIA. They’re not that crude and you were one of their own. Of course, it might be one of those acronyms at DIA. A black agency. Those sons-of-bitches answer to nobody.” Lockwood’s face turned red. “I’ll look into it immediately and if it’s them, I’ll take appropriate action. But Wyman, what in God’s name are you doing? You’re assignment is long over. I warned you before to leave this alone. Now I’m telling you: give it up now or I’ll bust you. Is that clear?”

  “Not clear. Another thing: my assistant is a twenty-year-old student who is completely innocent in this affair.”

  Lockwood dropped his head and shook it. “If it’s one of ours, trust me, I’ll find out and make a stink. If I were you, though, I’d consider who else it might be—outside the government.” He added, “But I’ve got to ask you again: why the hell are you doing this? You don’t have a dog in this race.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. I’m here to get more information. I want you to tell me what’s going on, what you know.”

  “Are you serious? I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Not even in exchange for the information I’ve got?”

  “Which is?”

  “The object didn’t fall in the Maine ocean. It struck an island.”

  Lockwood took a step forward, lowered his voice. “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been there. I’ve seen the hole.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s the information you’ll get—in return.”

  Lockwood looked at him steadily. “All right. Our physicists think the thing that went through the Earth was a chunk of strange matter. Also known as a strangelet.”

  “Not a miniature black hole?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell is strange matter?”

  “It’s a superdense form of matter. Made entirely of quarks. And extremely dangerous. I don’t really understand it—look it up if you want more. That’s all we really have that’s new. So—where’s this island?”

  “Name is Shark. In Muscongus Bay, about eight miles offshore. It’s a small, barren island—you’ll find the crater at the high point.”

  Lockwood turned, pulled his briefcase out of the car, shut the door. As Ford turned to leave, Lockwood stuck out his hand and grasped his, surprising him. “You keep your head down, be careful. If I find out our people after you, I swear I’ll put a stop to it. But keep in mind it may not be our people . . .”

  Ford turned, ducked out the garage door, and crossed the backyard into the darkness of the park. He moved toward the creek where the growth was thickest, crossed the stream, and came out on the path. He emerged on Quebec Street, straightened up, adjusted his suit, and ran his fingers through his hair. He again assumed the air of a neighbor taking the air, walking briskly, ducking into the shadows once to avoid a cruising cop car. Rounding several corners, he came to the end of the street where he’d parked his car, keeping to the shadows of a copse of trees.

  Bad news. Peering through a screen of trees he could see two cop cars, light bars going, parked on either side of his rental car, obviously making the plates. Had Lockwood called the cops? Or maybe he’d left it parked too long: the house party was long over and some paranoid suburbanite had called the cops. Unfortunately, he’d rented the Mercedes in his real name—there’d been no choice.

  Cursing under his breath, Ford melted back into the darkness and threaded his way through backyards and parkland toward American University and the bus stop on Massachusetts Avenue.

  56

  Abbey scanned the files on the 160 terabyte hard drive, sampling a few at random. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of images of Mars, spectacular, amazing, extraordinary images of craters, volcanoes, canyons, deserts, dune fields, mountains, and plains. The radar images were equally spectacular, slices through the Martian crust. But the gamma ray data were simply tables of numbers and various arcane graphs, impossible to decipher. No images there—just numbers.

  One folder caught her eye, titled GAMMA ANOMALY. Inside was a single file with a pps extension—a PowerPoint presentation, and it had been created on the disk only a few weeks before.
r />   Abbey clicked on the pps file. A screen popped up and the presentation began.

  The MMO Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator:

  An Analysis of Anomalous High-Energy

  Gamma Ray Emission Data

  Mark Corso, Senior Data Analysis Technician

  This was looking good—this must be the presentation that irritated his supervisor, Derkweiler, and got him fired. His obsession. She clicked to the next page, which showed a schematic of the planet Mars with the orbital trajectories of the MMO satellite drawn around it, the multiple orbits overlaid. Then came a graph labeled Theoretical Signature of Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars, showing a nice, neat square wave pattern. The next one was labeled Actual Gamma Ray Signature, which was hard to make out, and then both were combined for what looked to her like a pretty tenuous match, with large error bars and a lot of background noise. There were peaks and valleys, but just barely, and the theoretical and actual signatures looked out of phase.

  She clicked again but that was the end.

  What did it mean? It was obviously an oral presentation, no written text to go along with it.

  She clicked through it again, trying to figure it out. Theoretical Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars. She thought back to her freshman physics class at Prince ton and what she was supposed to know about gamma rays. They were the most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum, higher energy than X-rays. Gamma rays, gamma rays . . . Like she told Ford, there shouldn’t be any coming from Mars—or should there? She cursed herself for not studying harder.

  She Googled gamma rays and read up on them. They were produced only by extremely violent events—supernovae, black holes, neutron stars, matter-antimatter annihilations. In the solar system, she read, gamma rays were naturally created in one way and one way only: when powerful cosmic rays from deep space struck the atmosphere or surface of a planet. Each cosmic ray strike tore apart atoms of matter, producing a flash of gamma radiation. As a result, all the solar system’s planets, bathed in a diffuse cosmic ray bombardment from deep space, glowed faintly in gamma rays. The glow was diffuse, planetwide.

  She read through several articles but it all came down to the same thing: no known natural process could create a point source of gamma rays in the solar system. No wonder Corso was interested. He’d found a point source for gamma rays on Mars—and no one at NPF believed him. Or was it all in his head? It was hard to tell.

  She stared at the computer screen, rubbed her eyes, glanced at the clock. Three A.M. Where was Ford?

  She sighed and got up, rummaged in the small fridge. Empty. She had drunk up all her Diet Cokes, eaten the bags of Cheetos and wolfed down the Mars Bars. Maybe she should sleep. But the thought of sleep did not appeal to her. She was too worried about Ford. She began idly looking through the data, and then Googled the Mars Mapping Orbiter. Launched a few years ago, gone into orbit around Mars a year later. An orbiter stuffed with cameras, spectrometers, subsurface radar, and a gamma ray scintillator. Purpose: to map Mars. It carried the most powerful telescope ever launched into deep space, called HiRISE, which was classified but thought to be able to see an object twelve inches across from 130 miles up. In the few months of its operation the MMO had sent more data back to Earth than all previous space missions combined.

  And it looked like a lot of that data, maybe all of it, was on the hard disk.

  She reordered the folders by date. At the very top was a recent one—very recent—labeled DEIMOS MACHINE.

  That sounded intriguing. She opened it and saw there were more than thirty files in it, with names like DEIMOS-BIG and VOLTAIRE-ORIG to VOLTAIRE-DETAIL with a suite of files labeled VOLTAIRE1 through VOLTAIRE33.

  She clicked through them all, one after another, staring at the blurry, false-color images, each one clearer than the last. They were all of a strange-looking construction, a hollow cylinder surrounded by spherical projections sitting on a five-sided base. Sunken in dust. It looked like something from a movie set or an art project of some kind.

  She began clicking through all the Voltaire images, and finally the bigger files at the top, DEIMOS-BIG and VOLTAIRE-ORIG, staring at the images with growing comprehension. Her heart began to accelerate as it dawned on her just where this strange construction had been photographed. She could hardly breathe. This was incredible, unbelievable—

  She heard a footfall outside the door, a thump, the click from the lock, and the door swung open.

  She sat up. “You won’t believe—!”

  Ford cut her off with a harsh gesture. “Shut that down and pack up. We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

  57

  Harry Burr looked around the lobby of the cheap hotel, smelled something, checked his shoes for dog shit. Nothing—somebody else must’ve tracked it in. He had had plenty of time to cool off on the trip down to Washington. He’d been so close: Christ, he’d even seen the girl rip the drive from the back of the fridge on their way out, but they’d jumped in a damn cab before he could catch up to them and finish the job.

  They hadn’t completely escaped him. He’d been able, with the hack number on the cab’s roof and a little help from a friend on the D.C. force, to trace them here. He went up to reception and rang the little bell, and a few moments later a doughy man-boy with a belt three sizes too tight, squeezing a tight ring in his fat, shuffled out from the back. “Help you?”

  Burr put on an appropriately agitated air and spoke in a rush. “I certainly hope you can. I’m looking for my daughter. She ran away with a man, a real scumbag, met her in church if you can believe it, the pervert.” He paused to take a breath. “I think they spent the night here, got some pictures of them”—he fumbled in his suitcase and pulled out glossies of Ford and the girl—“here they are.” He paused, gulping in breath.

  Smacking his lips, the man slowly bent over the two photographs and looked. A long silence ensued. Burr resisted the impulse to poke him a twenty, which was clearly what the man was waiting for. Burr didn’t like paying for information—you sometimes got bad information that way. People who gave you information from the kindness of their dumb little hearts always gave you good.

  Another smacking of the lips. Mr. Phlegmatic raised his eyes and met his. “Daughter?” he asked, with a skeptical note in his voice.

  “Adopted,” he said. “From Nigeria. My wife couldn’t conceive and we wanted to give a little girl in Africa the opportunity. Look, have you seen her? Please help me, she’s my little girl. That scumbag met her at our church, he’s twice her age and married, too.”

  The eyes dropped back to the picture and a long sigh came out, like a bag being squeezed. “I seen ’em.”

  “Really? Where? Are they staying here?”

  “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “There won’t be, I assure you. I just want to save my daughter.”

  The clerk nodded, masticating a piece of gum. His face reminded Burr of a cow with its cud. “If there’s trouble, I’ll have to call the cops.”

  “Do I look like a man who’d cause trouble? I’m a professor of English literature at Yale for heaven’s sake. I just want to talk to her. What room?”

  No answer. Now was the time to apply a little cash. He flipped up a fifty, which the clerk pawed out of his hand. With a grunt he went into the back office and came out with the register. He opened it on the desk and turned it around, pointing with a fat finger. Mr. and Mrs. Morton.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Morton? They took only one room? Number one-fifty-five?”

  The man nodded.

  Harry Burr made the face of a father thinking about something he’d rather not think about. “What about ID, didn’t they have to show ID?”

  “Sometimes we forget to ask,” he said lamely.

  Burr checked the map of the motel and noted that room 155 was in the motel’s back wing, first floor. It was a cheap motel, all the rooms with separate front entrances and no back doors. So much the better.

  He straightened up. “Thank
you, thank you very much.”

  “No noise or I call the cops.”

  “Don’t worry.” Burr went out to his idling car, pulled out of the drive-through, reached in the glove compartment, and felt the reassuring grip of the Israeli Desert Eagle .44 magnum semiautomatic, his working firearm. He grasped the suppressor and affixed it to the muzzle and laid it on the seat next to him as he eased the car around to the back of the motel.

  There wouldn’t be any noise if Burr could help it.

  58

  “Out the window? Are you nuts?” Abbey stood in the door to the bathroom, hands on her hips.

  Ford ignored her. He pulled open the cheap sliding aluminum window in the bathroom. He shoved Abbey’s suitcase out, pushed out his own. “Now you.”

  “This is crazy.” But Abbey obeyed, ducking her head out and wiggling through the window. Ford handed her the laptop and drive and then he squeezed out. They were behind the motel. There was a weedy service drive, a chain-link fence, a drainage ditch, and then a large parking lot surrounding a frowzy mall. The sky was gray and a light drizzle fell.

  Abbey picked up her suitcase. “What now? Call a cab?”

  “To the mall.”

  “It isn’t open yet.”

  “We’re not shopping. Just follow me.”

  “Why are we running?” Abbey asked. “What’ve you done?”

  “Later.”

  Abbey followed Ford across the driveway. He tossed their suitcases and his briefcase over the fence. “Go.”

  “This is ridiculous.” Abbey grabbed the chain links and climbed over, dropping down the other side. Ford scrambled up and over.