Fool's Experiments (38 page)

Someone burst into the treatment room: a hospital guard. This had better be good, Glenn thought. "Can I help you?"

"Are you Colonel Adams?" the guard asked. He was on the pudgy side and huffing a bit from a dash through the halls. "The Pentagon is trying urgently to reach you, sir."

The Pentagon? Glenn could not guess why. "Where's a phone I can use?"

"There's supposed to be a voice mail on your cell phone." The guard wheezed again. "Maybe it's about that LA thing."

"LA thing," Glenn repeated.

The guard nodded. "Terrorist incident. Massive explosion."

"Take me someplace I can check my messages," Glenn said. Cheryl remained under her helmet, oblivious. He followed the guard to a dark office. He closed the door.

The first message was from Kevin Burke. Al was out!

Three clicks brought up CNN on Glenn's cell phone. The tiny screen showed an aerial view of a crater. Linda's lab was at the epicenter—and gone.

He felt ill.

The bombing was almost certainly why the Pentagon was so eager to reach him. He went back to voice-mail mode, and skipped for now through Kevin's many messages. Finally he came upon a different voice.

"Code alpha foxtrot X-ray niner four. Repeat, code alpha foxtrot X-ray niner four. This is not a drill."

"Out, now," Glenn shouted.

Under her NIT helmet, Cheryl could only hear Glenn. "It's going really well. I know you want to get back to your office, but I can stay."

"Out
now,
or I yank the helmet off your head."

That got through to her. "Ten seconds." She gave her hurried good-byes to Sheila, here where she responded, then popped the helmet. "Glenn, what was the rush?"

"I got an emergency evac notice. A missile armed with a nuke is headed toward Washington. I'm ordered to my assigned remote bunker. Continuity-of-government planning." Cheryl's stomach lurched. Where is Carla? Doug? Why aren't there sirens, warning everyone? Why hadn't the tech burst in here at Glenn's shout? What could she—

Cheryl pulled herself together with a shudder. "Why are you telling me?"

"No time, Cheryl. I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"

Cheryl swallowed hard. "What do you need?"

"I'm stealing a NIT helmet. I need you to make the connection work, long-distance." He glanced at the observation room. "I took care of the tech."

He needs me to trust him. Cheryl ignored a thousand questions. "We can take the helmet controller out of this shielded area. The problem is the helmet-to-controller link uses WiFi. That's low-power stuff. Short-range."

"Don't explain. Just
do
it! A nuke hits D.C. in maybe twenty minutes."

"Then why are you still here?" she blurted.

"To maybe save a half-million people! I need the helmet."

Shit! She stared at the helmet. WiFi had a range of about a hundred feet. But WiMax...

Cheryl dashed into the observation room, stepping over the tech slumped on the floor. The room had several computers. She began popping out network interface cards, looking for logos and trademarks. New computers came WiMax ready. WiFi, WiFi, WiMax, WiFi, WiMax.

One computer had an active display; the rest were dark or running screen savers. The active computer had to be controlling the helmet. She replaced its WiFi card with a WiMax card. Her other scavenged WiMax card replaced the WiFi card from the helmet itself.

"Eighteen minutes, Cheryl."

She slipped on the helmet, just long enough to see that it still worked. She had replaced the network cards hot, keeping the session active to save time. She hadn't fried any circuits.

Crap. The hospital WiMax repeaters, if any, would all be near the hospital. Would Glenn go outside the hospital's network range? Impossible to know.

"Clock ticking here," Glenn said.

"I know."

BioSciCorp used wireless broadband service. The provider was AT&T; AT&T would have WiMax access points wherever Glenn was headed if anyone did. She just had to get the helmet logged onto the AT&T network. Her security and access codes were backed up on the thumb-drive/key-fob in her pocket—handy when one's laptop crapped out on a business trip.

Cheryl pressed the thumb drive into an open USB port on the helmet controller, unlocked the tiny drive (alrac00: "Carla" typed backward plus her birth year).

Carla's sweet face threatened to crowd out everything else. That poor girl had been through so much.

No! Help Glenn help her! Clearing her mind, Cheryl downloaded her codes over the wireless link into the helmet. "Done. I'll get you onto the Internet as you go. Give me five minutes."

"Thanks." He took the helmet and left her.

In a nuclear target zone. In a high-security psychiatric hospital, with a sandbagged tech ready to wake up any minute. With a poor, sick woman staring at her.

Never mind any of that. Cheryl had promised to trust Glenn, the nuke was only getting closer, and she had a job to do.

The tech was stirring. Cheryl cracked him on the back of the head with a keyboard, and he slumped. She unplugged the keyboard cord and with it bound his hands behind his back. She stuffed a mouse pad in his mouth and tied that in place with another keyboard cable. She dragged him into the treatment room with Sheila. Grunts from there wouldn't generate curiosity.

One way or another, Cheryl only needed to stay free for a few minutes.

The helmet control software ran on a high-end laptop, to save space on the desk, she assumed. She popped the laptop from its docking station, switching it to battery power but leaving Windows running. This wasn't the movies; if the machine logged off, there would be no clever thirty-second hack attack to get back in. Whatever Glenn hoped to accomplish would fail.

Cheryl carried the laptop across the hall to an empty office. Outside the shielded area, the laptop synched itself to the hospital's wireless network. It took her six minutes, not five, but she patched through to the stolen helmet. Now it's all up to Glenn.

She tried not to think of the nuke that was streaking toward her.

The hospital guards watched for escaping patients, not thieving visitors. With his suit coat draped over his forearm and hand—and the helmet—Glenn sauntered out with no questions asked. He got into his car, tossed coat, helmet, and cell phone onto the front passenger seat, and peeled out of the parking lot.

In front of the hospital, the flag stood out stiffly from the flagpole. As best he could judge, the wind was blowing east- northeast. Good.

Fifteen minutes.

He sped north at a crazy speed, weaving through traffic, sirens wailing behind him. He groped about the passenger seat until he found the phone. He turned on its speakerphone and retrieved voice mail again.

"Call me. I'll wait outside. It's urgent," Kevin Burke said. Almost certainly, Kevin was dead. Kevin, Linda, the security team, the intel analysts, and how many innocent bystanders?

Next message. Kevin's voice held a bit of panic. "It's out, and I don't know what to do."

Glenn swerved around a slow-moving pickup truck, missing it by inches. A horn blasted, southbound traffic. He cut back to his lane, barely avoiding the oncoming minivan.

Next message. "Linda is going after it with the helmet."

The next voice mail was the Pentagon evac order. Cursing, Glenn hung up. It was pretty much what he had feared. Linda had gone after Al, and the creature had swatted her. Instead of a brain wipe like AJ's monster, it hit her with a big bomb.

And now it's thrown a nuke at me.

At least Glenn
hoped
Al had thrown the nuke at
him.
He had disobeyed a direct order to evacuate. He had involved Cheryl in his desperate scheme. It only made sense if Al was trying to swat him, Glenn, personally. With no way to locate Glenn exactly, Al had targeted the area where he worked and lived with a much bigger flyswatter.

Al probably had no idea D.C. was the center of government, if it even knew what a government was. Either way, it had launched what the nuclear-war strategists called a decapitation strike. Take out all the leaders without warning.

The Pentagon was taking the incident as a decapitation strike. There had been no public alert—CNN could hardly have failed to mention that. With so little notice, someone downtown had made the desperate decision to sacrifice the few who might escape the blast radius lest the leadership's exit be blocked by panic and gridlock.

Glenn passed a tractor-trailer on the right, on the shoulder, wheels slipping, gravel spraying from his tires. Fourteen minutes.

The CIA hospital was to the north of Leesburg, Virginia. He was on a two-lane stretch of Route 15. Ahead was one of the few Potomac crossings on this western fringe of the D.C. metro area. Behind, the sirens were closer.

He ran a red light, pounding on his horn, racing toward a narrow steel trestle bridge. Mouthing apologies, he clipped a sport-ute crossing the river from the Maryland side. In his rearview mirror, the SUV smacked into the trestle, rebounced toward the center, and spun out. The car behind rammed it, and...

Bridge blocked.

Glenn left behind the tiny town of Point of Rocks, Maryland, and sped northwest.

Ten minutes.

Seven minutes.

Warheads on descent can be steered—if they get guidance information. If you didn't wait too long. The heat of reentry ionized the air around the warhead, blocking communication.

Glenn wished he could remember how close to impact the blackout happened. Five-six minutes? If he had waited too long ...

He skid-turned down an isolated side road and braked to a stop. He slid on the helmet. If Cheryl had not gotten it connected...

She had.

The familiar scenes of cyberspace lacked only one thing: Al. Glenn had no idea how to find Al. Al would have to find him.

My job is to
make
that happen.

He remembered the playful otter, hating it. It morphed back in his mind's eye to that original, hungry shark. Red blood seeped from its toothy maw.

Glenn focused on the shark. He imagined piercing the shark with razor-sharp, barbed harpoons. He imagined it snared in a trawler net, unable to swim, its gills pulled tight, suffocating. He imagined it overtaken by a large ship, sucked into the propeller, the spinning blades mincing it to chum.

Whose idea was the satellite link over which Al had escaped? Almost certainly, Doug was correct about Al's nonverbal manipulations. If so, the DII link had been Al's idea, not Glenn's own. No, not the specifics, but the
idea
of a connection. The concept of a way out. Al the Otter had insinuated a need for help—and Glenn had obviously provided it.

Eyes covered, Glenn could not see the dashboard clock. Maybe six minutes? How soon until reentry and the loss of all hope?

And there
it
was!

A creature took form in Glenn's mind: the monstrosity Ralph had hinted at, with the gaping jaws of a shark superimposed. There was a moment of connection, a bit of vertigo, glimpses from several points high above the Earth. Glenn recognized Chesapeake Bay, the sprawl that was the D.C. area. The frame shifted, recentering on a spot in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

And then, in a momentary tessellation of imagined pixels, all that was gone.

Glenn ripped off the helmet. Al had taken the bait.

Two minutes.

He had recorded a voice-mail farewell to Lynne. He had never been one to speak the things that were in his heart. Now he never would. In the time he had, he could say not even a millionth of what needed to be said. All she meant to him. She would not get his message until—after. All that made it bearable was that what he did here might
give
Lynne that after.

He had recorded a message for General Lebeque. There wasn't enough time for that, either, scarcely enough time to take the blame for everything. For the hubris of championing an AL project. For being duped into abetting Al's escape. For not ordering Al turned off at Doug's warning. For whatever Cheryl had done, trusting him. For drawing the nuclear wrath of this monster,
Glenn
's monster, upon them all.

"Talk to Doug Carey and Cheryl Stem," Glenn told the general. "If anyone can make sense of this mess, it will be them."

One minute, Glenn guessed.

The fields before him were the vibrant green of young soy plants, but his mind's eye beheld endless sand. Night replaced day. A broken-down Humvee replaced Glenn's idling Audi.

A fiery orange streak, descending.

I'll see you soon, Tony, Glenn thought. I'll—

An impossible flash, stabbing through closed eyelids. An unimaginable rumble. Violent shaking.

Doug found himself on the floor, tangled in bedding. An earthquake? The mid-Atlantic region didn't have quakes. And had he dreamt that flash?

Before falling into bed, exhausted, he had unplugged the bedroom phone. So why wasn't he hearing, faintly, beeping from the downstairs extension he had left off-hook? And why was the LED face of his bedside clock dark?

He was groggily assembling clues when battle-armored troops rushed into his bedroom.

Doug wore only underwear, having scarcely managed to drop suit, shirt, and tie on a chair before falling into bed. Soldiers swept him from the house and into the front yard, barely letting him grab the clothes—and roboarm—he clutched to his chest. One of his ... escorts? ... captors? had his shoes. He hoped.

"The Brass" wanted him. Major Someone had said. Now.

A crowd of neighbors stared at Doug and his house. There was a sharp shove in the small of his back. "Quit it!" Doug snapped. "Whatever's going on, I prefer to face it wearing pants."

"Pants are your priority?" Major Someone grabbed Doug's elbow and spun him around to face the house.
"That
is what's going on."

In the distance, towering over Doug's house, loomed a black and angry mushroom cloud.

Where
Glenn
had been, the land had been transformed. Many nearby sensors no longer reported, and more were unable to penetrate the obscuring cloud. Some orbiting sensors dropped offline, and not all returned. Radio frequency emissions surged. Network traffic spiked.

The entity considered it all.

Weapons were an interesting phenomenon. They merited closer scrutiny.

Cheryl supposed she was in a situation room. Giant flat-screen displays lined the walls. Men and women in uniform, and uniformly grim faced, rushed about consulting in intense whispers. In one comer, an American flag hung limp on a pole. A large oval conference table, its halo of chairs unoccupied, took up the center of the space.

She remembered the blast wave hitting, and then waking crumpled on the floor. There hadn't been much time to marvel she was still alive before security teams sweeping the CIA hospital found the bound tech. They locked Cheryl into a padded room like Sheila's, tossing around the phrase "enemy combatant," and left her to ponder her fate.

So why had a squad in combat gear taken her away? Why brought her here?

And the biggest question of all: Why
wasn't
she dead?

The answer to all her questions was, "Wait."

On a chair in a quiet comer of the room, Cheryl started to shake. She'd overheard enough to deduce the missile had retargeted from D.C. at the last minute. Ground Zero was a field in the Maryland panhandle. The fallout was blowing east-northeast. If the prevailing winds held for a few hours, the worst of the fallout would blow out to sea without directly dusting any major city.

Carla went to day care after school. When Cheryl didn't come for Carla, the office would contact Cheryl's mother. Cheryl's family would worry about her, but
they
were almost certainly safe.

With no idea how, Cheryl knew Glenn had had something to do with the missile swerving. And that she would never see him again.

No one would tell Doug what the military wanted with him.

The chopper
thp-thp-thpped
southwest, the mushroom cloud to their right. It had begun to lean away, mostly eastward. Away from Washington. That, at least, was good.

Chaos reigned beneath. Cars weren't moving, but Doug couldn't tell why. Unless—

"An EMP?" It would explain the motionless cars and the dark clock in his bedroom.

"Sort of," one of his escorts responded. His name tag read: Garcia. "Yeah, there was a pulse, but not near the city. But the EMP zapped most of the power lines and substations that feed energy into northern Virginia."

So: a blackout, not visible from above by daylight, and no traffic lights, and gridlock.

Had Doug been thinking clearly, he would have seen that. Roboarm, now that he had it in place, worked. An EMP that fried his bedside clock would also have fried the arm. The phrase "nuclear disarmament" flashed into his head, but that wasn't remotely funny.

"It could have been worse," he mused. But it was bad enough: At least hundreds dead immediately, and who knew the long-term toll from fallout. "Why wasn't the District itself the target?"

Garcia threw up his hands.

Then they were beyond the metro area, still flying southwest. They crossed a swatch of mostly undeveloped land, with scattered houses and vast fields surrounded by low white fences. Horse country. They shot over the Blue Ridge. They flew along the Shenandoah Valley. At some point they must have crossed into West Virginia.

How the hell did this involve Doug?

The chopper finally started down. They were in the middle of nowhere, but Doug saw glints in the sky that he guessed were fighter planes patrolling.

He was still clueless when, passed through layer after layer of armed guards, after a ride down a long elevator shaft and then more armed guards, he was led into a bunker beneath the Appalachians. He was gestured through double doors to a room filled with colonels and generals. And in a comer, forlorn—

"Cheryl!" Doug called.

She looked up. Then they were running to each other, holding each other, shaking. "Why are we here?" they asked almost in unison.

"I can answer that."

Surrounded by aides, a three-star stood in the doorway. Doug recognized her from a telecon: General Lebeque. Doug said, "So this has something to do with Glenn."

"That it does," the general said.

And to the many questions that swirled in Doug's mind a new one was added: Why did that brief exchange make Cheryl look so sad?

A cue that Doug missed sent everyone else to the table. Lebeque motioned him and Cheryl to a pair of empty chairs.

As the meeting unfolded, Doug began to feel Cheryl's grief.