The Fall (10 page)

Art-Z pointed at the screen and said, “Payback's indeed a bitch. Nice hack job, Bonnie. I see you still haven't lost your touch, or your good looks. You been working out or something?”

“I'm married, Art.”

“Did you get a boob job, too?”

“Art!”

“Yeah, I got that you're married and all. Just not to me,” he replied, leaning back and petting the cat, regarding Angela with strange detachment.

He wore a pair of loose shorts, a Green Lantern T-shirt, and flip-flops. He also smelled a little, just like he did in the old days. And just like the old days, Art-Z was extremely pale from days—or weeks—without stepping outside. The interior of his small house at the end of a narrow road in the middle of a forgotten neighborhood in South Miami was in a permanent state of darkness. Heavy drapes kept sunlight—and outsiders—from peeking into the hardware that governed his cyber kingdom. And his lack of contact with the physical world for weeks at a time meant living off a diet of canned or frozen foods, plus copious amounts of coffee and energy drinks.

“We were kids, Art,” she replied, her tired eyes taking in the information on the screen.

“Yeah. We were. That was then.”

“And this is now.”

“And this is certainly now,” he said with a heavy sigh.

After a moment of silence, Angela asked, “So … seeing anyone?”

He slowly shook his head.

“You probably would if you had a better ride,” she observed, remembering the electric scooter parked in the garage, quite diminutive next to her Triumph.

“Hey, it gets me around.”

“I'm just saying.”

“Plus it's good for the environment.”

“Whatever.”

He leaned forward and tapped the screen with an index finger. “I thought you said these guys were from Los Alamos.”

Angela frowned, feeling foolish for having believed Hastings. His pair of mismatched nerds were actually from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and home of the Large Hadron Collider. “What can I say, Art? That's what I was told.”

“Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie, when are you going to stop trusting The Man? Look where that's got you. Lost your husband and your career, and you're claiming that your pretty face's about to be on every news outlet labeled as a mastermind terrorist.”

“Lucky me,” she mumbled as she read on.

“For now it looks like you're in the clear,” he said, monitoring the Florida State Trooper's Web site as well as the FBI's.

“Trust me. I'm not. I think Hastings is just keeping his little manhunt low-key to avoid attracting attention.”

“Either that or perhaps you're imagining things. Maybe drank too many energy drinks?”

“Stop fucking around, Art. I'm in serious shit.”

“Easy, there. Just making sure you have your head screwed on right,” he said before pointing at the screen. “So, CERN, huh? That's the particle accelerator people in Europe.”

She sighed. “That's them all right. They're both resident scientists there.”

“So,” asked the hacker, glancing in her direction. “What's that got to do with your husband vaporizing in midair and you being hunted by this general's private army?”

Angela crossed her arms and shot him a look. “If I knew
that
I wouldn't be here basking in your wonderful personality.”

The hacker grinned and turned back to the screen, where they continued to read through the history of each scientist, including past patents, and current projects.

“Here,” said Art-Z. “The woman, Doctor Olivia Wiltz, did spend ten years at Los Alamos, as did her older colleague, Doctor Richard Salazar, and apparently they're still associated with Los Alamos even though they spend most of their time at CERN these days. Wiltz was an associate director in the weapons physics division.”

“And Salazar was the director of the weapons systems prototype fabrication division,” she added.

“That's all good, Bonnie. But what's that got to do with your husband going bye-bye?”

She frowned. “Well, for one thing, the suit I'm developing is intended to be used as a military weapon. Maybe these guys are the ones who were going to take it into mass production?”

“Sure, but what in the world are they doing at CERN? That's quantum physics stuff. Particle collisions and that sort of microscopic shit.”

She also didn't get that weird connection. “Let's see if we can figure out what sort of work they're doing there.”

They dug into CERN's core, gaining access to the experiments, the data, and eventually the results—again, all thanks to the passwords that they had extracted from their tablet computers.

“Just a lot of particle collision experiments,” she said, pointing to a window of results from CERN experiments two years earlier. “These guys were deep-analyzing the data from the detectors in the Large Hadron Collider to understand the particles created during collisions in the accelerator.”

“Yep. And they were playing at both ranges of the spectrum,” Art-Z said, moving the pointer to a list of experiments that used general-purpose detectors to understand the largest range of physics possible.

“Yes,” she said, “while this other set of experiments focused on what they called forward particles, protons that rub each other instead of actually colliding, but transferring energy to each other in the process.”

Angela read on, reviewing the data from experiments that tried to explain the link between cosmic ray and cloud formations, all using antiprotons from CERN's Antiproton Decelerator.

“My head's starting to hurt,” confessed Art-Z, sitting back and rubbing his eyes. “This goes well beyond my pay grade, Bonnie.”

Angela ignored him, reading about a related experiment that analyzed hypothetical particles radiating from the sun, a joint project between CERN and the International Space Station.

“Look,” she said. “There are a number of experiments connected to quantum physics and sun radiation being conducted in Columbus.”

“What's Columbus?”

“The research facility module for European payload at the International Space Station. It's being run by the ESA, the European Space Agency, which has pretty deep ties to CERN. They're going beyond the collider to look at the effect of particles coming from the sun.”

“And our friends Wiltz and Salazar are all over these experiments, designing them, conducting them, and analyzing their results,” he said.

“Well,” Angela observed. “I agree with the designing and conducting part. They are really brief when it comes to results. In fact, for most of these CERN-Columbus experiments, the results section is almost nonexistent.”

“Could it be because they didn't work?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “Think about the cost of creating CERN and the Columbus module. Very expensive not just to build and deploy, but also to operate. Each of these experiments has to be costing them millions, maybe even tens of millions, to conduct. There has to be very tangible results from them, Art. They're just not reported here.”

They continued to dig for another thirty minutes, Art-Z on one computer and Angela on an adjacent one, both connected to the same back door and also to the vast library of scripts that her former boyfriend had amassed through a lifetime of hacking. Each script was analogous to a tool in a large tool box. The right one would help unlock an entryway. The wrong code had the risk of setting off an alarm. The trick was knowing which to use, when, and for how long before switching to another one.

Slowly, as they worked their way through the guts of the European particle physics laboratory, it became evident that the information in the CERN databases didn't go beyond the particle accelerator experiments. That's when Angela stumbled upon a hidden directory in one of the tablets.

“Well, well, what have we got here?” she said.

“What is it?” Art-Z said, looking over to her screen.

“A link to another database.”

“Where?”

“DARPA,” she replied, referring to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military's premier and most secretive R&D agency. “My guess is that Hastings and his gurus only used the CERN and Columbus experiments to corroborate whatever theories they were working on. After that he locked his gurus and the results in the one place he could control. We need to break into DARPA next.”

The hacker looked into the distance before regarding her with his dark stare. “Breaking in isn't the hard part. CERN—hell, even Los Alamos—is a cakewalk, Bonnie. DARPA … man, I know guys—really
talented
guys—doing time because they hacked into the place only to have the Feds up their asses within the hour.”

She put a hand to his bearded cheek. There was fear in his eyes. “Look, the last thing I want to do is compromise your location. You've been generous enough to help me. But I need to find out what happened to my husband, and the only path I see is to get some answers, and those answers, for better or for worse, are very likely hidden somewhere in those DARPA servers.”

Art-Z took a deep breath and said, “There are places that no one should try to hack, no matter how good you are. You of all people should know that. I warned you last time not to screw with the FBI, and I'm telling you now not to mess around with DARPA.”

“I'm already in deep shit,” she said, “so it really doesn't matter if I get caught like the last time. But no one knows about you, yet. So I'd completely understand if you—”

“Shut up, Bonnie,” he interrupted, gently getting her hand off his cheek before lowering his gaze to the black feline sleeping on his lap. “If you're seriously willing to put it all on the line,” he added, lifting his eyes and locking them with hers, “then there might be another avenue. But we're going to need help.”

“What kind of help?”

After hesitating, he said, “Between you and me, we have plenty of cyber muscle. What we lack is muscle in the real world.”

For the first time that evening, Angela Taylor smiled. “And I know just the place where we can find it.”

The hacker didn't return the smile. Instead, he rubbed the base of his neck, frowned, and said, “I was afraid you'd say that.”

*   *   *

Highways gave way to familiar streets, familiar buildings, familiar sights under the glow of a moon and accompanying stars that should have been hidden by the missing tropical storm.

Jack watched this strange world go past his side window with mixed emotions, uncertain what lay ahead. He had seen enough to be convinced that something was seriously wrong with his senses, which screamed that this was not the same Earth he had rocketed from earlier that day. But that couldn't be possible.

Could it?

He shook his head, wondering what in the hell was wrong with him. How could he be suffering from a concussion when he felt perfectly fine, albeit a bit dehydrated?

And the more he thought about it, the less he felt he could be suffering from any form of PTSD, especially after what he had gone through with the SEALs. This jump was a walk in the park compared to Afghanistan and Colombia.

But he had to admit to himself that no one had ever done a suborbital jump before, and perhaps there were serious physiological consequences that only now would become known … thanks to him.

Jack pinched the bridge of his nose.

He could almost imagine himself hooked up to tubes, probes, and wires as scientists tried to figure out why he had gone cuckoo.

Fuck me,
he thought, his mind searching desperately for a single shred of an answer to explain anything, from the absence of Claudette, to the frozen telemetry on his faceplate display when he was obviously falling, and a world that had literally abandoned him.

Stop torturing yourself.

He tilted his head at that last thought.

Torturing?

Jack suddenly realized that in a strange way, what he was experiencing was a form of imprisonment of his mind. His perception was being held hostage by whatever neural damage he had likely incurred during the fall, and his SEAL training taught him that one way to survive long periods of captivity was by forcing happy thoughts into his mind, by recalling the good times.

He chose to remember when he had first met his wife, the feisty Dr. Taylor during his initial weeks at the Cape. Angela was the only daughter of Miguel “Mickey” Valle, founder of the legendary Paradise Motorcycle Shop in South Miami, where she grew up among bikers and hackers before earning degrees in engineering from nearby Florida Institute of Technology and a doctorate from MIT. It had not taken very long for the slender brunette and former criminal hacker with high cheekbones, light-olive skin, and amazing hazel eyes—and who seemed to live on energy drinks—to get under his skin. And what made it impossible for him to give up the hunt was the way Angela tried to hide it all by minimizing makeup, keeping her brunette hair very short, wearing faded jeans, black T-shirts, and riding boots and jackets. But even her tomboy-biker tough looks couldn't hide a natural beauty that Jack found simply irresistible. And his persistence paid off in the end. After a long courting period, the couple was married on the beach among a colorful collection of characters from Angela's side of the fence, from bikers to hackers. Across the aisle, the groom's side was limited to Navy personnel, mostly his SEAL brothers, plus Pete, who stood as best man for the short ceremony. Following an adrenaline honeymoon rock climbing El Capitan at Yosemite National Park in California, the couple settled into a little bungalow-style house in Cocoa Beach, just minutes from their work at the Cape.

Jack reminisced while looking up at the moon and the stars, which instantly reeled him back to his screwed-up reality.

Sitting in the passenger seat while Palmer calmly steered the rig down Highway 528 through Cocoa heading for the bridge leading to Cocoa Beach and the Atlantic Ocean, Jack got the sudden urge to punch someone—and have someone punch him back very, very hard. Maybe that's what he needed instead of some happy fucking thoughts: a good old-fashioned bar fight to get his head screwed back on.