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Ishiguro Nakamura had selected 210 Sun-like stars within a distance of 140 light-years from Earth as his target area. Each star system ranged in size from one to a hundred times the magnitude of our Solar System. Depending on its size, Ishiguro assigned it a number of hits. Each hit represented a full frequency scan of ten seconds. Under Ishiguro's model, a star system the size of our Solar System would get ten thousand hits evenly scattered across the entire system in the hope of intercepting a stray radio signal between planets. That translated to just over a day of high-speed monitoring. Ishiguro wished he could spend more time on each system, but using this model, which certainly left a lot of uncharted territory, would still take his team almost seven years to complete the entire project.

“This is the signal,” Jackie said, moving the cursor to a series of lines on a graph in the middle of the glaring screen, one of a dozen high-resolution monitors arranged in a circle inside the old observatory building, in the middle of which stood the observation post for the visual telescope. “It only lasted twenty seconds and we intercepted it at a frequency of 1.420 gigahertz.”

He barely suppressed a smile. “Dead on the frequency of hydrogen.”

“And quite strong.” Jackie grinned.

“I see,” Ishiguro said, his scientific poker face accentuating his sharp features. “That bandwidth is much narrower than the narrowest natural maser lines, suggesting that it could be artificially generated.”

“And the signal was also pulsed and highly polarized, further supporting its artificial origin.” Jackie pointed at the screen.

“Have you checked for terrestrial interference?”

Jackie nodded, taking another sip of diet Coke. In addition to the 350-foot-diameter radio telescope at Cerro Tolo, Sagata Enterprises—at the request of Ishiguro—had also built a second radio telescope fifty miles to the south. This remote-controlled radio telescope was only seventy feet in diameter and served the purpose of filtering out Earth-generated signals. Anything from microwave ovens to satellite downlinks made this naturally quiet section of the electromagnetic spectrum highly noisy. The seventy-foot radio telescope, with its limited range, could not pick out the distant signals emanating from Ishiguro's target search area. Therefore, all signals acquired by the smaller radio telescope were assumed to be of terrestrial origin and were filtered out of the acquired signals from the main radio telescope, leaving only signals generated in deep space.

“I didn't call you until after I had filtered it. It's definitely from our target area.”

“Have you found a signal? Where is it?” asked Kuoshi. The young corporate liaison seemed quite nervous.

Ishiguro ignored him. “Have you mapped it?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer. His wife was the only student at Stanford who could match Ishiguro's vast knowledge of modern astrophysics. She was not only a superb scientist, but also a phenomenal researcher, and very thorough in her analysis of field observations. She was also gorgeous and in prime shape. Unlike Ishiguro, who had collapsed into the sedentary life of a scientist, Jackie never stopped jogging, which she did as a way to keep herself crisp and fight the dullness that often plagued this type of long-term research.

“Ishiguro-san! Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” demanded Kuoshi.

Ishiguro shot him a look. Out of all the weeks for him to visit, he had to be here during their first interesting observation in months.

“Chill, Kuoshi,” said Jackie before Ishiguro got a chance to reply. “Why don't you go fetch us some drinks from the fridge?”

The corporate liaison stomped away cursing in Japanese.

Ishiguro smiled and winked at his lovely wife. She threw him a kiss. One of the main reasons he had fallen in love with her was because although Jackie looked Japanese, her personality was everything
but
Japanese. “Gotta keep those Jap bureaucrats in their place.”

“Please do remember that they're footing this bill.”

“And if they want their money's worth, they better keep out of
our
research.” She dropped her voice while adding, “And out of our marriage.” Sagata Enterprises had requested transferring Jackie to run the operation at Nobemaya. She had turned it down and also reminded their superiors that Ishiguro and she worked as a team. When Sagata had threatened to terminate her employment unless she transferred, Ishiguro had turned in his resignation. Sagata came back with an apology and a request that they continue their research at Cerro Tolo.

“Nobody's separating us.” She ran a hand through Ishiguro's hair, just as she did when they made love, narrowing her eyes as she did so. Lovely, brilliant, and passionate. Jackie Nakamura warmed what would otherwise be a desolate and remote location in the cold Andes Mountains.

Ishiguro cleared his throat when he caught two technicians glancing their way. “So,
dear,
do you have a point of origin?”

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.