AMPED (11 page)

Desh recounted what had happened with Ross Metzger. How they had purchased a private physics company,
Advanced Physics International,
about two years earlier while the current facilities were being built, and how the lab was raided by mercenaries, with Ross being killed. Someone out there knew of their existence. Someone who was lethally competent.

Van Hutten rubbed his chin in thought. “I take it the cold fusion reactor hasn’t turned up, or it would have been all over the news.”

“That’s right,” confirmed Kira. “But this isn’t surprising. The energy it produced was barely above break-even. Enhanced Ross was convinced it could be dramatically improved, but whoever took it would have no idea how to do this.” She shook her head and a grim expression settled over her face. “To be honest, I think the raid was more about sending a signal to us than about stealing this particular invention.”

“Do you have any leads?”

“None,” replied Desh. “And the only suspect we came up with was Ross Metzger himself. But we quickly ruled him out.”

“The guy who was killed?”

Desh nodded. “The raid was nearly flawless. So good I can’t help but think it was the product of an enhanced mind or an insider,” he explained. “In either case this would point to Ross. But Ross was the most stable among us. The one who handled the therapy’s ill effects on his personality the best. He was enhanced over and over and his personality was largely unchanged, unlike the rest of us. He’d be the
last
of us to go rogue.”

“And
this
was what ruled him out?” said van Hutten. “Not the fact that he was
killed
during the attack?”

Kira smiled. “You’ve experienced how easy it would be to fake your own death while enhanced. You have absolute control of your autonomic nervous system. You can see to it you don’t have a pulse whenever someone is checking for it. If Jim Connelly was in the room he could tell you all about it.”

“Like we mentioned earlier,” said Griffin, “it’s our best trick. Everyone you’ve met today is thought to be dead. If Ross had decided to go rogue and remove himself from the board, it’s the first idea he’d have.”

“But in this case, Anton, you’re right,” said Kira. “His death did rule him out, because he couldn’t have faked it. He would have needed a gellcap, and he didn’t have one. I produce them and keep meticulous inventory. They couldn’t be more secure, and there’s never been one that was unaccounted for.”

“So the short answer,” said Desh, “is that we have no leads or ideas whatsoever.”

Van Hutten paused to digest this. “So you have an unknown but powerful enemy out there gunning for you. Have you ever considered coming out of the closet? Maybe not to the public at large, but at least to the government?”

Griffin laughed and then immediately looked guilty about it. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to make light of your idea. And it’s not as though we haven’t discussed it now and then ourselves. But Kira’s therapy offers absolute, unlimited power to whoever controls it. Along with a side effect that can gradually turn even a Gandhi into a selfish, power starved dictator. Would you really want our government and military to have knowledge of this particular golden egg, and with apologies to Kira, the goose who lays them? Can you even imagine?”

“Yeah,” said van Hutten sheepishly. “I clearly hadn’t thought this through. But after hearing your argument, the image that comes to my mind is a huge bloody carcass in a steel cage being lowering into the world’s most shark-infested waters. It would be the feeding frenzy to end all feeding frenzies.”

“
Now
we’re on the same page,” said Griffin in amusement. “Take away the steel cage and I think you’ve got the picture exactly.”

11

“Arm the JDAM, Lieutenant,” ordered Jake as the chopper he was in settled down for a landing several miles from the target. A car would be picking him up momentarily to drive him to the site.

“Roger that,” came the response from the bomber pilot. “JDAM is armed and ready.”

“Captain Ruiz, how is the perimeter looking?”

“The perimeter is clear, Colonel. I repeat, the perimeter is clear. You are good to go.”

Jake took a deep breath and held it. “Engage target, Lieutenant,” he said.

“Target engaged,” came the reply.

And six miles above Colonel Morris Jacobson, a five hundred pound bomb streaked angrily away from the jet that had restrained it, like a rodeo bull when its gate was pulled open. The munition hovered for just a moment as its onboard computer got its bearings from the continuous stream of GPS data being fed to it. Then, satisfied that it could achieve its mission parameters and arrive within ten feet of dead center of the mirrored glass building, and only then deliver its devastating payload, it made a slight turn and accelerated downward.

12

Madison Russo finished making love to her boyfriend of four months, Greg Davis, and a warm sense of both physical and emotional contentment settled over her. Only two days earlier he had said “I love you,” to her for the first time, and given that this same sentiment had been threatening to burst from her for weeks, this was a very good thing.

Her life couldn’t be going any better, she decided. And falling in love was only partly the reason.

In high school she had been socially awkward, and while her figure and looks were slightly above average, her confidence was well below. And winning the state science fair hadn’t exactly cemented her reputation as one of the cool kids. Given that her intelligence was already intimidating to almost every guy her age, she could have bottled her science fair victory and sold it as
male
repellent. Upon graduation from high school she had yet to be kissed.

But this situation changed quickly in college. As a physics major she was around other bright people who shared her passion: other bright people who were predominantly men. And the further she went forward in her major the greater the men outnumbered the women. The incoming class for the physics graduate program at the University of Arizona consisted of eighteen men, her, and one other woman who was now her closest friend. While many red-blooded males in physics departments around the world welcomed relationships with women who could understand their work, most had to seek relationships outside of the field. It was either that or get used to being very, very lonely. But as for Madison and her friend, they tended to get their pick of the litter.

But she still hadn’t been happy during her first three years in graduate school. There was more to life than dating, and she had struggled to find a thesis project. Everything in cosmology these days was string theory. It was the cool kids’ table from high school translated into academia. If string theory wasn’t your thing—and it was definitely
not
hers—then you were a second class citizen. She found herself foundering, and there were times when she contemplated dropping out of the program with a master’s degree and going into industry.

But then, just this year, new developments in the emerging field of gravitational wave astronomy had come along—just when she needed a new direction the most. Gravitational wave detectors had previously cost hundreds of millions of dollars, had required oscillation of the mass being detected, and their sensitivity—if one could call it that—had been laughable. But a new breed of detector had emerged. A breed that took advantage of novel theoretical principles, could be built for just a few million dollars, and had off-the-charts sensitivity.

In fact, if anything the new technology was
too
sensitive, generating the equivalent of a library of congress full of data each day. If not for supercomputers capable of many trillions of operations each second nothing meaningful could have ever be extracted from the morass, unless one was looking for the Sun, which Madison was pretty sure had already been found.

She had leaped onto this new bandwagon immediately. This powerful tool was sure to launch careers like so many bottle rockets on the 4th of July, and catapult gravitational wave astronomy to an unforeseen level of prominence in the cosmological quiver. And she was perfectly positioned to be in on the ground floor. Given the ocean of data a single detector could generate, if she used the most powerful tool of all, the one between her ears, she was confident she could find a way to make a major breakthrough.

The U.S. physics community, having been denied the Supercoliding Superconductor—ensuring Geneva’s Large Hadron Collider would become the particle physics capital of the world—was hungry to take a leadership position in this emerging field. Centers around the country had embraced the new technology, even before all the bugs had been worked out, and once perfected, additional waves of adoption had occurred overnight. Now almost seventy percent of all detectors in operation were located in America. While this advantage wouldn’t last long, U.S. physicists couldn’t have asked for a better head start. And The University of Arizona had been in the very first wave. Madison had truly been in the right place at the right time.

As she basked in the knowledge that her life had come together more perfectly than she could have dared to hope, her computer monitor on a desk ten feet away began blinking. The light from the full screen was vivid in the darkened room. Greg Davis groaned beside her. “You’re not going to check that, are you?”

She smiled. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

“I think we need a new rule. We turn off our cell phones during sex. I think we should turn of computer monitors also.”

“But this isn’t during sex,” she pointed out. “It’s
after
sex.”

“Well, given how often that false-alarm generator of yours goes off, a case of
false-alarm-us interuptus
is only a matter of time.”

“And you’d like to make sure that doesn’t ever happen?”

“Right. I mean, you wouldn’t interrupt Da Vinci while he was painting a masterpiece would you?”

“So you’re suggesting you’re the Da Vinci of sex? Wow,
really
?” She rolled her eyes. “So what are you worried about Leonardo—that your brush might go limp?”

Davis laughed. “Not at all. You just don’t want to interrupt a master at work.”

Madison kissed him briefly and then grinned. “We could always stop having sex,” she said. “Then you’d have nothing to worry about.”

“As great as that sounds,” he responded wryly, “I’m going to have to pass.” He shook his head and gestured toward the computer. “Go ahead. I know it’s killing you not to check it out.”

He glanced at the clock on the end table nearest him. “We can probably catch the late movie if you’re still interested, but we’d better drag ourselves out of bed and get ready. How about if I take the first shower while you take a quick look at your data.”

Madison had her robe on and was seated at her computer almost before he got the sentence out. Davis just shook his head and wandered into the bathroom.

Madison’s desktop was tied into the university’s supercomputer, which sifted through the billions and billions of pages of data generated by the physics department’s detector at incomprehensible speed. For months now she had been perfecting a program that would alert her if it spotted anything truly out of the ordinary. And Davis had been right. She received several alerts each day, and each time they were false alarms. But even so, these false alarms pointed out flaws in her programming. With each one her program got a little bit tighter, her filters a little better.

She looked at the data from a few angles, wanting to determine as quickly as possible the ordinary occurrence she had failed to take into account
this
time. But after several minutes of thought and study, her jaw dropped as low as it could go.

Nothing about this occurrence looked ordinary.
In fact, the data were impossible
.

“Nah,” she mumbled out loud. “Must be a glitch in the detector.”

She ran a quick diagnostic. The detector was working perfectly. But how could that be?

Madison Russo was checking her calculations for the third time when Greg Davis emerged from the bathroom, clean, fully clothed, and ready for a late night on the town.

She frantically began to run other crosschecks on her data, her eyes so wide they looked unnatural.

Davis watched her in fascination, knowing better than to interrupt—if this were even possible. He suspected he could have played a trumpet in her ear and she wouldn’t have noticed.

 
After several minutes she finally turned away from the screen for just a moment and he said, “You found something big, didn’t you?”

Madison nodded, her stunned face communicating awe—but also more than a hint of fear.

“What is it?” he asked breathlessly.

“Something that will change
everything
,” she whispered. Then, exhaling loudly, she added, “Forever.”

13

The JDAM penetrated the two story structure and erupted into an orange-yellow fireball nearly twice the size of the building before collapsing into a raging firestorm. Every inch of the mirrored glass perimeter shattered and the inside of the building was vaporized in an instant.

Over a mile away the explosion shook the car Jake was in and the resultant fireball was impossible to miss against the night sky, even at this distance, and even if his eyes had been closed at the time.

The moment it hit, Jake felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. There was no end to possible threats from WMD, but none were like this one. Given Miller’s ability to dole out superhuman intelligence and Desh’s training and skills, he had eliminated what he was convinced were the two most formidable people on the planet.

This was a rare moment to savor. The execution of the entire operation had been flawless.

Jake arrived, congratulated Ruiz and his team, and waited patiently while a dozen firefighters arrived in three large trucks to battle the resultant blaze. He had contacted the Denver Fire Chief using an alias—one with considerable authority that could quickly be verified—and insisted that the firefighters on the scene leave immediately once they had conquered the blaze, after which Jake, Ruiz, and a select group of his men would move in, scrub the scene as best they could, and look for remains that would prove that Kira Miller’s short time on earth had come to an end. Given that ground zero was basically at a point halfway down her throat, this would likely prove quite challenging.