Class Fives: Origins (26 page)

If he had indeed just added his efforts to some dark, destructive purpose, any responsibility rested on other heads than his. He was, he liked to consider himself, like the man seated at the bench of a workshop designing and fabricating a unique firearm. It technically didn’t matter to him if that weapon would ultimately be used to capture a bad guy or assassinate a President of the United States. Those choices of how it was to be used were in the hands of those who ordered it, not his.

Joe had always been able to tell himself that he was merely a mechanism, doing the task for which it had been designed, and doing it very well - not to mention just how lucrative it could be. He not only slept very well at night, he was able to do so on silk sheets in a very large, plush bedroom.

In fact, he reminded himself, by the time he arrived home and checked the balance of his offshore account, he would be able to sit and enjoy staring at the impressively large number, aided considerably by the final payment for this task, which would have been transferred in by then.

Perhaps, he considered, he would finally take a little vacation. Maybe the Caribbean. Hell, maybe he’d buy himself a little island down there. He’d always wanted to own a bit of real estate. And if he could find something that was outside the jurisdiction of any other country, what might he be able to work on, to explore, to produce without having to be quite so surreptitious? It would be nice to invite his customers down to watch his works in progress without all the paranoia and security concerns.

As the tail ramp of the large plane began to slowly rise, he finally turned away from the window of the small terminal building and stepped off. Either way, he thought, his part was done. He had built the whatever-it-really-was and seen it handed over to those who had been contracted to deliver it to its destination. If something went wrong now, his customer, the mysterious Dr. Montgomery, could deal with it. It was at last out of Joe’s hands.

By the time he had crossed the large waiting room and passed through the sliding doors into the cool night air beyond, he was already letting his mind flip through the correspondence he’d been receiving while he had devoted all his energies to this single project. Montgomery had wanted it completed in record time and Joe had managed that. Another mark of pride he could take in his skills.

He walked briskly across the wide lot toward where his car was parked in a far corner, very close to the exit to the highway.

He would make it home in an hour or so, be able to kick back, relax and maybe catch part of some game on TV. He would open a beer, put his feet up and just savor that feeling of having accomplished something unique once again.

As he began to draw close to his vehicle, parked just under the dim halo of the overhead lamp, he noticed the man, leaning against the other car nestled right next to his own.

A tiny flicker of alertness shot up in him, wondering if it was mere coincidence that another human being just happened to be waiting for something in such an isolated part of the parking lot, or if the man’s presence had anything to do with him.

As he continued to approach, he at last began to make out that it was the same guy who had come to visit him once before, to deliver the plans those many weeks ago. He was tall and rather bulky, possessing a completely bald head, which made his appearance somehow unsettling, despite the fact that he was quite pleasant and polite.

He noticed Joe approaching and pushed himself upright, keeping his hands folded before himself, his stance now beginning to look like a relaxed version of what the military types called “parade rest”.

Of course, Joe realized. The plans. Dr. Montgomery would want them back. And that made perfect sense.

Joe raised an arm casually and unconsciously his gait became a bit looser, a bit more relaxed.

“Hi,” he called out as he approached.

“Good evening,” the bald man called back, pleasantly. “Everything go all right?”

Joe nodded as he strode forward.

"It’s loaded and on its way,” he said, a satisfied, perhaps modestly smug smile spreading over his lips.

“Excellent,” the man said as Joe closed the distance between them.

Joe was about to ask if the man wanted to just follow him back to his workshop so he could retrieve the plans, and perhaps stick around for a beer and a quiet, self-satisfied celebration of the end of this most unusual but rewarding job, when the bald man moved suddenly.

The hands clasped before him shot straight up, the man’s knees bent slightly, the hands joined before him at the end of fully extended arms.

Joe had just an instant to feel a flush of confused alarm before the first shot blew through the center of his chest, exiting beside his spine and carrying a fist-sized chunk of meat with it.

He took one more faltering step forward and his knee unlocked, sending him crashing onto his face on the hard, cool, rough asphalt, forcing a sudden, deep groan from his lungs.

The bald man took two swift steps to where the body lay crumpled, aimed the gun and fired five more shots into it, deliberately piercing both lungs and, probably, stabbing one straight through the heart. For the final shot he took a moment to lean slightly down, holding the barrel of the gun no more than two feet from the back of Joe’s head, before he squeezed the trigger.

Without hesitation he dropped to one knee and quickly searched the corpse, extracting the set of keys, the wallet, even pausing to remove the watch. He had already searched the man’s car and stripped it of anything that might cause the least connection to be made to his employer.

This would look like nothing more than another random robbery gone terribly wrong.

He straightened, took a moment to scan the body, verified that it was now little more than a large slab of meat, then moved away across the parking lot toward where his own vehicle was waiting.

Mentally he noted that another source of potential security weakness had been closed off. This link in the chain had been broken. Only a very few more, and any possibility of tracking any bit of the project back to his employer would be utterly impossible.

The remaining steps until the experiment was ready to be activated, at least as far as he understood the security aspects of it, now rested mostly in the hands of whatever counterparts to himself his employer had established at the other end of the transit line, somewhere inside Russia. Most likely former Spetsnaz, he thought once again, former Red Army Special Forces soldiers. There were certainly enough of those available for private hire, he knew. In fact, that entire country had become little more than a nation of mercenaries, available to anyone at the right price.

Then he centered his thoughts back on what remained for him to do. Not too many steps left now, he realized. It had mostly been accomplished, at least on this end. After that, his main task would be to supply personal security to his employer until the event had been accomplished, and after that…. Well, that was in other hands than his.

Just as he settled into his own vehicle he did a quick calculation. One hour to reach the engineer’s workshop, a few minutes to gather the plans, then off to the other airport where his chartered plane was awaiting him, ready to take off at a minute’s notice. He would be able to touch down by midnight and be back at the bunker by the small hours of the morning.

He pulled out of the space and maneuvered his way around the lot. As he cruised toward the exit he caught sight of the body, laying sprawled just behind the man’s car. He heard a faint voice, and his eyes snapped up to the rear-view mirror. A pair of dark shadows were wavering in the dim glow of the overhead lamps. Men, running this way. Good, he thought.

He snapped on his turn signal, paused to allow himself to look both ways down the long, utterly deserted stretch of open highway, then eased onto it. Just like any other good, law abiding citizen, he told himself.

He allowed himself a half smile at the thought, and pushed on the gas pedal.

At that same moment, on the other side of the planet, the foreman watched as the last section of thick, heavy plastic sheets was dropped into place atop the wide metal framing that had been sunk and anchored deep into the marshy, sodden ground, creating a totally flat, smooth surface that stretched out, encompassing an area slightly larger than a soccer field. At the very center was a circular section where the swamp beneath remained open to the air above.

It would take another hour or so for the teams of laborers to sweep, mop and clean the entire sprawling surface. Then they could begin unloading the sections of light, but remarkably strong, silver material that would be placed around the edges of the newly available flat surface and then connected carefully, each section zipped to the next. By the end of the day they would begin installing the pumps and hooking them to the thick power cables that ran just below the surface of the marsh, all the way from the underground nuclear generating station a hundred yards away.

The foreman had briefly wondered, when he’d first been told about this hidden source of limitless energy, what it was doing out here in the middle of nowhere in the first place, but as a former non-commissioned officer with the Red Army, he knew better than to ask for explanations.

There was a special small team already working to get the radioactive monstrosity up and running, and he’d overheard them complaining to one another about the sheer age of the thing. It had to be thirty years old, left in the ground and abandoned for some unknown reason, though the presence of the vast expanse of blackened trees for miles in every direction was clearly not making them feel at all comfortable with this job. Still, the foreman knew they would bite back any uneasiness and complete their work without complaint. After all, they were being paid a stunning amount of money for this project, enough to seal their mouths and let them soothe any pangs of conscience with thoughts of what they would do with this sudden wealth.

By tomorrow the dome would be inflated and shortly thereafter they could expect the delivery of the central device, which would have to be mounted and raised to the top of the enclosed space. Once it was hooked to the power source and a good supply of energy was confirmed, it would be more or less done. After that the almost one hundred workers, pulled from villages and small towns hundreds of miles away, would be loaded back into the tracked vehicles which had served as both transport and rough living accommodations during the construction, and carried back to the distant railroad tracks where the special train would be waiting.

They would board it with a sense of accomplishment and visions of new wealth awaiting them as it pulled away toward the west, leaving this forgotten place behind.

The train wouldn’t blow itself to pieces until it was well away, having changed trackage at least twice so the line could not be traced back to anywhere near this place. Another tragic accident on the admittedly poorly maintained railroad system of the sprawling, economically struggling country. There would be no survivors, of that the foreman was certain. His skill with explosives was almost as good as his expertise with an AK-47.

And after that, he considered, he would join the dozen other former Special Forces soldiers to form the security detail for the site, until…. well, he told himself, whatever it was supposed to do, happened. And once that was accomplished, their own task would be finished. Of course he was well aware that he himself might be facing the same fate as the nameless, expendable groups of laborers whose deaths where already programmed into his own private work schedule, but he was a professional at what he did. He would have his own means of blocking and repelling any potential attack, should his mysterious employer attempt to guarantee his ultimate silence through his untimely death. He wasn’t enough of a fool to think that he, of all those pulled secretly into this project, would be thought worthy to survive. If the scientists even now working hurriedly to get the reactor running were already marked down for death, he had no reason to think he would receive greater consideration.

But he had his own transportation standing by, hidden out of sight not far from this place, a small, single-man tracked vehicle with an impressive range. And he had insisted he receive his payment up front. The moment it had arrived in his foreign bank account, he’d had it transferred. And then transferred again. And again. It was now so deeply buried in the network of electronic records of cash that truly ran the world’s economies, that only he would ever be able to locate and access it.

He had, he told himself, thought of everything. Whatever this project was, he would definitely survive it as a very wealthy man. Vaguely, he considered once again if there might be some way to access the initial payments made to all these workers and the scientists, and somehow route it to his own account. But he dismissed the thought. That would make him nothing more than greedy, and he wasn’t that. He was a patriot, at least in his own way, he assured himself. But then, he thought idly, there was no reason that patriotism couldn’t be well rewarded.

He saw the dozens of workers standing idly around at various places on the thick, suspended plastic surface, and reached to raise the whistle to his lips. No time to waste gawking at their work, he thought. Still a lot to do.

9

Gravity

Crawford closed the door and crossed the office to the plush leather chair facing the desk behind which Senator Marcos currently stood.

“Sit down, bring me up to speed,” Marcos said.

At least he didn’t waste a lot of time with glad-handing, Crawford thought. But he was still a politician and they were always a problem.

Crawford settled into the seat and opened the leather folder to regard the first page of notes inside, as Marcos took his own chair and leaned back, propping his elbow on the arm, his chin on his delicately placed fingers and his expression of what he thought resembled sage wisdom.