01-01-00 (7 page)

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 trillions 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.

Ishiguro admired this galaxy, roughly 2.7 million light-years away, still quite close relative to other galaxies, but far enough for Ishiguro to take his next trip back in time. He advanced the slide show to an image of the nebula of Andromeda, taken by the radio telescope, noticing stars that no longer existed but from which light continued to shine through the vastness of time and space. He admired the enlargement in the center of the spiral galaxy, swelled by blue-white blazing suns, creating a stellar rainbow toward the outer edges of the nebula, feathery rings of violet, green, and dull red fading in the hazy distance.

Ishiguro continued on his journey through time and space, focusing next on the Pinwheel Galaxy, fifty million light-years away, a faint smudge of light through the ten-inch telescope, but a magnificent sight when viewed on his screen. He held his breath in silent admiration of this celestial cloud, alive with supernovas, imploding stars whose vast energy caused gas and elements to condense, then ignite again in a violent cycle that triggered the formation of new stars.

For a moment the astrophysicist felt like a cosmological archaeologist, digging through the layers of history, inspecting the relics from times past, preserved by the vast distances that light had to travel. He compared the electromagnetic energy across the entire spectrum, as captured by the radio telescope, from the time galaxies were formed to the present, making observations, taking notes on his engineering notebook, proposing theories of universal expansion, of the fading glow from the Big Bang, wondering, admiring, thinking, dreaming.

The Stanford graduate shut off the PC and lay back on the grass, gazing at the stars, dreaming about the birth of the universe, about how it all begun, about the Big Bang, the moment in time when the infinitely small universe, compressed into a space many times smaller than a proton, burst outward with the power of a trillion stars, setting time and space to zero, marking the cradle of the heavens. Shaped by the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear fusion, this infant cosmos began to expand. Quarks, electrons, and antimatter formed. Matter and antimatter collided. Quarks combined, creating protons and neutrons, farther expanding the universe, shaping the laws of physics that Ishiguro had mastered at Stanford. Electrons combined with nuclei, triggering the birth of the first elements, hydrogen and helium, which, shaped by the enlarging forces of the universe, molded the first stars. The nuclear fusion of those first-generation suns formed heavier elements, beryllium, iron, zinc, copper, incorporating them in second-generation stars, and continuing in a perennial nova-supernova cycle that formed the first galaxies, the first nebulas, always expanding, always growing, always changing.

And it's still expanding,
he thought, suddenly frowning when hearing hastening footsteps on the cobblestone walkway between the radio telescope and the observatory building.

“Ishiguro-san! Ishiguro-san!”

The scientist sighed, peering at the intrusion. Ishiguro considered his time alone with the stars sacred. These short periods of isolation, away from the drudgery of the daily problems of running Cerro Tolo while keeping his corporate sponsor apprised of their progress, was really the reason he had taken on the study of the universe as a career. He needed this time alone to think, to look inwardly, to absorb the vast knowledge that was out there for the taking, for the interpreting, for the analyzing. If only he had more time, like Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, and Johannes Kepler, to be alone, to let his mind wander, to consider new possibilities, new concepts, to appraise new philosophies, to ponder on past theories and formulate new ones that fit the most recent observations. If only—

“Ishiguro-san!”

“
Yes,
Kuoshi-san?” the scientist asked patiently, forcing control into his intonation. He had come to dread these week-long visits from the corporate types. At least Kuoshi wasn't as inflexible or radically bureaucratic as the last corporate liaison, who got transferred to another job eight months ago. But there was something about Kuoshi that troubled Ishiguro, though he couldn't figure out what. It seemed that there was more to Kuoshi Honichi than the role he played as corporate liaison. “
What
is it now?”

“We tried to radio you, but—”

“I never take my radio on my nights off, and
this
is precisely why.” Ishiguro stood and began to collect his gear. “So, tell me.”

“Another one!” the corporate liaison hissed. “We've detected another signal … from the same origin!”

Ishiguro suddenly forgot all about his contempt for the corporate robot standing in front of him. Leaving the telescope and his laptop behind, he snagged his engineering notebook and headed toward the walkway.

“What about this equipment?” he heard Kuoshi screaming from the field.

“We'll get it later!”

“But this is expensive hardware! What if it rains?”

Ishiguro smiled inwardly. How typical of a corporate executive to worry about a thing like that while on the verge of making the discovery of the millennium. “You haul it in then!” he shouted while going inside.