The petite scientist, dressed in faded jeans and a Stanford sweatshirt, nodded, finishing the soda and dropping it in a wastebasket by her feet. “I’ll have to check my results with the computers in Osaka in the morning, but my current analysis pinpoints the origin of the transmission to a point in space between HR4390A and HR4390B, two stars of the southern constellation Centaur, 139 light-years away, just barely inside our search envelope.” She selected a couple of options from a pull-down menu and the powerful Hewlett-Packard workstation translated the billions of bits of data into an image of the faraway galaxy. She typed in the coordinates and a small red X appeared on the screen. “Right here.”
Ishiguro stared at the thousands of stars making up one small fraction of the vast constellation. “Zoom in.”
Jackie clicked her way through a few more menus, not only directing the radio telescope much closer to the two star systems, but she also used a custom software package to enhance the magnified image, sharply improving its quality.
Ishiguro stared at the screen long and hard, his mind considering the possibilities. But before he could contact Sagata and claim to have received an artificially generated signal from deep space, he first had to make certain that the signal was real by detecting it consistently from the same star system. “Have you checked our logs from—”
“Yes, and the answer is no. These two star systems are each roughly five times the size of ours, that translates to about six days of searching at fifty thousand ten-second hits per star system. We had finished our search in HR4390A and were two-thirds through the search on HR4390B when this signal came along. I’ve checked the logs for the search done to date and there is no indication of this signal ever being present.”
Ishiguro nodded, staring at the monitor. “Well, let’s extend the search of this system, focusing on this frequency and start hitting around the point of origin.”
“You know that’s going to require a decision record to deviate from our standard operating procedure, and only Bozo the Jap over there can approve it.” She extended a thumb over her shoulder toward Kuoshi, speaking on a cellular phone at the other side of the room.
Ishiguro smiled. “He’s probably calling Osaka to complain about your politeness, again.”
She shrugged. “It’s not my problem that the chauvinistic pig doesn’t know how to treat a woman.”
“He’s not chauvinistic. He’s just Japanese.”
She exhaled heavily, extending her lower lip as she did, ruffling the bangs dangling over her forehead. “Thank God Mother married an American. Had it not been for Dad, I would have been raised just like her, submissive, subservient, and spending the rest of my life washing your underwear, pressing your suits, and being your sexual slave.”
He shrugged. “I like the last part.”
She made a face. “Lucky me.” She reached for a drawer beneath the workstation and pulled out a blank decision record form. “Too bad right now I have to write a DR.”
“I’ll get it signed off. Kuoshi’s just a rubber stamp around here.”
“For how long do you want the DR?”
“Twenty-four hours. See if it surfaces again.”
Ishiguro kissed his wife on the cheek and she patted him on the rear as he headed off to have his chat with Kuoshi Honichi, still blasting Japanese on the phone. Based on the look on the corporate liaison’s face, the scientist knew that it was not going to be a pleasant conversation.
Chapter Three
000011
1
December 12, 1999
There are certain events that have a profound effect on some people’s lives, when things may never be the same again. Marriages, births, divorces, deaths, even new jobs and layoffs become pivot events for many. Susan Garnett considered the untimely deaths of her husband and daughter such a transforming event, when life changed for the worse in a fraction of a second, altering her outlook forever. She began to measure everything according to this new perspective, finding that her world had indeed changed much since awakening from that long coma. The sun shone a little less brightly. The skies didn’t seem quite as blue. Colors appeared bleached, food tasted blander, sounds seemed muffled, friends were distant, even her own parents didn’t seem real anymore. In this surreal world, where nothing remained the same, where she could no longer cope with everyday events, when the fear of breaking down governed most aspects of her life, Susan Garnett had actually survived thanks to an even stronger force burning deep inside her.
Retribution.
The word had echoed in her mind over and over, again and again, bouncing off the outer walls of her consciousness, keeping her focused, keeping her alive, helping her ignore this alienlike world in which she now lived, where nothing, not even the most fundamental of feelings, had survived unscathed. She no longer loved, no longer felt, no longer cared. She had simply kept on to honor her family, to put the one person responsible for their deaths behind bars, to give him a taste of the personal loss that had stripped her of everything she considered vital in life. And now that she had achieved this personal vendetta, anger—the last human emotion still burning in her heart—had flamed out, leaving her core empty, dark, alone, with nothing left to live for.
And so Susan Garnett found herself in her apartment, sitting up in bed, the phone off the hook to keep Reid and the rest of the FBI from bothering her. She contemplated her life, her options, the shiny Walther PPK on the nightstand, the magazine in her right hand, a single bullet in her left.
She had left the FBI building at three in the afternoon, when she could no longer keep her eyes open. She had not felt guilty for leaving Troy Reid in their current situation, with the phones ringing every minute and everyone from the President down demanding answers. After all, she had done everything she could to catch the hacker. It was now time to wait—something Susan had found quite difficult to do these days, for it meant letting her mind go idle, encouraging dangerous thoughts. A Bureau car had dropped her off in front of her apartment building, and she had immediately gone off to bed, waking up thirty minutes ago, wondering what to do next.
Yesterday she had seriously contemplated pulling the trigger. Tonight she was no longer certain if that was the right thing to do.
Setting down the magazine and the bullet next to the gun, Susan grabbed the remote control and began to channel surf without really looking at anything, her mind revisiting her options. Her eyes landed on the clock display of the VCR over the TV. It flashed 7:59 P.M., almost twenty-four hours after last night’s global event.
2
Troy Reid sipped at his coffee while going through the motions of reviewing several field reports before drafting his daily update to his superior, the associate deputy director of investigations of the FBI, who would further condense Reid’s report, along with those generated by the criminal investigative division, the intelligence division, the laboratory division, the training division, and the office of liaison and internal affairs, before submitting his update to the deputy director. At that level the deputy director would also take inputs from the associate deputy directors of administration, and send a “big picture” report to the director, who would in turn brief the President.
He glanced at the computer screen on the corner of his desk, quickly reviewing the two paragraphs he had managed to write so far. Unfortunately there wasn’t much to report at this time. Almost twenty-four hours after the bizarre event the FBI still didn’t have one clue. And the Bureau wasn’t alone. Susan’s E-mail to the entire hacker community owned by the FBI had returned nothing beyond what she already knew. Either the hackers were holding back, or like the FBI, no one had any idea who had triggered the event last night. The two-hour-old CIA report on his lap indicated that the Agency also had nothing, and strongly suspected that the intelligence services of several friendly nations were in a similar state of ignorance.
Reid leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He had been here almost thirty-six hours and couldn’t wait to wrap up the report for his
boss and head on home to his wife of thirty years. She had called him an hour ago to see how he was weathering the storm.
He stretched and yawned, feeling fortunate to have such a loyal and understanding wife, who had stuck by his side through the years, putting up with his second love, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where she was used to him working long hours. As a young and tough field agent in the seventies and eighties he had been on assignments for weeks at a time, on many occasions sleeping in the backs of cars or in the street. And his wife had always been home waiting for him, as well as sitting by his bedside when he had been hospitalized twice with pneumonia from exposure, and several more times after he had been kicked, stabbed, punched, and even shot once in the shoulder from behind by a twelve-year-old punk. The round had broken his clavicle before exiting just above his left pectoral, nicking the bottom of his chin, chipping the bone, and shaving a square inch of flesh. But Reid didn’t care. He wore the scars of his profession with pride. The strain on his wife, however, had been pretty severe, which was part of the reason he had applied for retirement at fifty-five instead of sixty, to try to make up for some of the lost personal time. His wife was already counting down the days until his retirement next summer. Oddly enough, he found himself looking forward to a change of pace, figuring that three decades at the Bureau was long enough.
Reid rubbed the discolored tissue on his chin while glancing at his report. He leaned forward and began to tap the keys to conclude his daily update but the system did not respond. He pressed several keys with no effect. The system had hung up. He frowned and was about to press the CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys to reboot it when he noticed the frozen time on the system clock: 8:01 P.M.—the exact same time of yesterday’s event.
Damn! It’s happening again!
He grabbed the phone, but the line was dead. By the time he stood, walked around his desk, and reached for the door, his phone rang.
Puzzled, Reid turned around, staring at the black unit next to the PC. The event must have ended already. He picked it up while checking his system. The PC was alive again.
“Sir, we’ve just had another—”
“I know. Get Sue on the phone right away. Let’s see if her software traps caught anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
Reid returned to his desk, sitting down. “Bastard,” he said, staring at his screen. “Who are you? What do you want?” He tapped the side of the monitor with a finger while he considered the significance of this second event. The hacker had been cocky enough to try it two days in a row and at the exact same time. And, like yesterday’s event, Reid could see no apparent damage done to his system. He browsed through his main directories, looking for signs of data loss, but found nothing abnormal. Next, he launched his virus scan software, which checked every file in every directory in the PC, also coming up empty-handed.
The phone rang.
“Sue?”
“It’s busy, sir.”
“Must I have to do everything myself?”
“But, sir, she is not—”
“Forget it. I’ll call her. Get back to work. I want answers on this damned hacker!”
“Ye—yes, sir.”
Reid slammed down the phone and dialed her number, cursing when he got a busy signal. He dialed the operator, but she could not pry into the line. Susan had the phone off the hook. He slammed the phone down again and buzzed one of his assistants.
“Yes, sir?”
“Send a car over to Sue Garnett’s, NOW.”
“Yes, sir.”
3
Heavy knocking on the door pulled her away from her thoughts, the TV tuned to some sitcom rerun.
“Miss Garnett? Miss Susan Garnett? Open up, this is the FBI.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she mumbled, switching off the TV and shoving the gun, the magazine, and the single bullet in the drawer of the nightstand. “Why can’t you all just leave me alone?”
More knocking, followed by, “Miss Garnett? Please open up. This is an emergency.”
“It’s always an emergency,” she said, putting on a robe over her pajamas as she walked toward the door, tying a knot across her waist.
Brushing back her short brown hair, she opened the door, scolding the two young agents standing in the doorway with her gaze. One agent was Hispanic-looking, the second blond with blue eyes.
“Let’s see some ID,” she said.
Both men reached inside their coats and produced laminated FBI ID cards. Special Agents Steve Gonzales and Joe Trimble.
She barely glanced at them. “You people don’t know when to leave someone alone, do you?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Garnett, but Mr. Reid…” began Gonzales in a voice a bit soft for the large FBI agent. He was quite tall for a Hispanic, almost six three, with a slight receding hairline. He reminded Susan of actor Jimmy Smits.
She cut him off. “I’ve worked almost forty-eight hours without a break. What does he want to do? Kill me?” She thought of the irony of her remark after she had blurted it out.
“Look, ma’am,” tried Agent Trimble, as tall as Gonzales, but with wider shoulders and a baritone voice, palms facing Susan. “There’s been another event. Everyone’s in a frenzy back at the office. We tried to call you but no one answered. That’s why Mr. Reid sent us to—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, “give me a minute.” She closed the door and went through the motions of dressing, grabbing the first thing she could find. It turned out to be a pair of faded jeans, a white T-shirt, and a heavy woolen sweater. She opened the door a minute later, her laptop carrying case hanging from her left shoulder. “Let’s go, boys. Don’t want to keep Mr. Reid waiting, do we?”
The agents exchanged glances as she rushed past them. They followed her out of the apartment building. Agent Gonzales opened the rear car door for her. She tossed the carrying case across the backseat and got in, staring at her apartment complex, wondering when it would all end.
The sedan pulled onto the road. Trimble drove. Gonzales also sat in front, placing an elbow on the back of his seat while turning sideways, attempting a smile. “We’ll have you back in no time, ma’am.”
Susan nodded absently, her eyes still on the old brick building, where she had moved in after selling her Bethesda home—along with many other items from a life too painful to remember. She had tried everything to forget about her past, including going from traditional furniture to contemporary, from conservative clothes as a college professor to jeans, shirts, and sneakers as a hacker catcher; from a leather attaché to a backpack laptop carrying case; from long hair to her punkish cut. But the past would not let go of her. The memories refused to fade away, suffocating her, haunting her, torturing her. She dreaded the midnight hours, sleeping alone, on her side, hugging a pillow, missing Tom’s embrace, his warm breath caressing the back of her neck as he hugged her from behind.
Soon, she thought, wiping away a tear.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” asked Steve Gonzales.
Susan nodded. “Got something in my eye, and the name’s Susan.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Susan sighed and continued staring out the window.
4
Cerro Tolo, Chile
Ishiguro Nakamura sat on a field of grass separating the observatory building from the massive radio telescope dish, atop a peak in the Andes Mountains, in the heart of Chile. He zipped up his sky jacket. Although December was the middle of the summer in the Southern Hemisphere, temperatures still dropped to the forties at night because of the altitude.
A starry night enveloped the long mountain range. The lack of city lights plus the high altitude made for spectacular star-gazing sessions. This was the reason why Cerro Tolo had been erected here many years ago, high above the cloud coverage that often blocked the view of the green valleys leading to the Pacific Ocean in this long and narrow country. The peaks of a hundred mountains projected through the clouds, their jagged outlines still visible in the night as trillion
s of distant stars shed their minute light on the planet, like a field of candles, pulsating in a surreal universal dance, radiating their energy on the majestic Andes.
Using a ten-inch telescope mounted atop a tripod, Ishiguro inspected this breathtaking sight, focusing on the southern constellation Centaur. This galaxy was 139 light-years away, which meant that the light reaching his telescope at this moment in time had traveled for 139 years.
He looked down at the Toshiba portable computer on his lap and used the pointer to select an icon on the screen. He clicked it, starting a slide show. The first image on the color screen was of the same constellation but as viewed by Cerro Tolo’s main radio telescope at full power last night, when Jackie had zoomed in to get a closer view of the origin of that mysterious twenty-second signal. Ishiguro admired the constellation as it had looked 139 years ago.
This was the beauty of star-gazing, especially with the new generation of telescopes. By probing deep in space, Ishiguro actually looked back in time. But 139 light-years was insignificant relative to the vastness of the universe. He shifted his telescope to a point in the cosmos a little farther out, the nebula of Andromeda. To the naked eye it looked like a wisp of faint, hazy light shaped like a curlicue, near Andromeda’s knee. Through his telescope, the hazy light became a swarm of churning stars, over a hundred billion of them, some young, others shining with amazing brightness, prior to their inevitable deaths. A star spent its life battling the gravity that pulled all of its mass toward the nucleus. These nuclear reactions at its center, resulting in incredibly high temperatures and outward pressure, kept the star from collapsing, balancing the inward gravitational pull for billions of years. The star’s nuclear reactions, however, slowly evolved its mass into heavier elements, until it no longer had a source of nuclear energy to hold itself together, seizing in convulsions, swelling, vomiting its outer layers in spectacular displays of scorching interstellar matter, before spilling its white-hot heart across the cosmos, seeding the universe with carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, the basic elements for life.
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