The Fall (25 page)

Angela turned away from him, biting her lower lip, a part of her wanting to go back inside the house and have Dago and his pals beat the crap out of Olivia until she talked.

But she couldn't bring herself to do that.

There had to be another way.

Angela looked up at the skies again, spotting a break in the thick coverage just above the horizon as the remnants of Claudette began to dissolve. She stared through the parting clouds at the early morning light shining beyond the sliver-like opening.

What would you do, Jack?

As the tip of the rising sun loomed through the widening gap, glowing down from the heavens, it suddenly came to her.

“Follow my lead,” she said, making her decision and heading back inside, where Olivia sat alone in an armchair in the living room looking quite frail, her wrists and ankles bounded with zip ties to keep her from trying to run away.

Dago took a seat on the sofa next to her. Art-Z sat in the dining room doing what he did best: ignoring everyone while working on a laptop he had interfaced to Olivia's home computer and her tablet.

“You will not get away with this,” Olivia warned, lifting her angered gaze, speaking in heavily accented English. “You do not know Hastings like I do. He will find you, and when he does—”

“Whatever he does to me won't be in the same league as what Riggs and his soldiers are going to do to you—
and
your daughter—after Hastings learns that you told us everything … that you betrayed him.”

Dago shot her a puzzled stare. Even Art-Z looked up from his hacking to see where this was headed.

Olivia's thin and pale face twisted in obvious confusion. “Told you…? What do you mean … I have not
told you
anything.”

“That's the thing, Olivia,” Angela said, slowly approaching her. “
You
know that, and
I
know that. But
Hastings
doesn't know that, does he?”

The Swiss scientist dropped her thick brows at Angela.

“See, Olivia, I already know about SkyLeap's production schedules and your glass particle accelerator. I know that you worked at CERN before transferring here to continue your collider experiments. I also know the location of your building.”

She paused for effect, then added, “See my bearded friend over there?” She extended an index finger at Art-Z, who offered a half grin while waving once. “He already broke into SkyLeap through Hastings's phone, and we achieved that through a hack in your tablet.”

“My … tablet?” Her eyes gravitated to her mobile system on the dining room table. “How … when?”

“Back at the Cape. When you and Salazar were granted access to our network, I took the opportunity to upload a little virus into your tablets. I figured that if you wanted to stick your little nose into my business, I should have the right to peek into yours. So sooner or later, the general's going to track this to you. And when he finally does…” Angela ran the tip of her thumb across her neck, just like she had seen Jack do for effect.

“Oh, my God,” she said, dropping her gaze back to the floor.

“Olivia,” Angela continued, “you look like a decent person trapped between a rock and a hard place. And I'm very sorry that you and your daughter ended up where you are. But I'm also in the same place now. My husband has vanished and I have a pretty good feeling that you know
exactly
what happened to him. The more I know, the easier it will be to expose Hastings, who I believe is working outside the purview of the government. But you need to help me,
now
. In return, I promise you my friends and I will do everything we can to help you and your daughter.”

Slowly, Olivia lifted her bloodshot eyes and leveled them with Angela. “Swear to me that nothing will happen to Erika.”

Angela filled her lungs and exhaled slowly, before saying, “I swear it.”

Looking away, the Swiss scientist said, “Your husband … he is not dead. He is alive.”

I knew it,
Angela thought, relief washing her tired mind while looking at Dago.

“How, Olivia? How did it happen?”

Olivia opened her mouth just as glass broke behind them, from one of the large windows facing the backyard—an instant before blood erupted from her chest.

 

8

CONNECTING THE DOTS

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.

—Steve Jobs

He worked alone, aware that eventually he would have to bring others into this, perhaps even Hastings. But not yet.

Certainly not until he understood.

Sitting at a lab table on the second floor of a building that hadn't seen much use since the Pentagon shut down Project Phoenix, Pete inspected the suit he had found in Angela's house, comparing the design with the half-dozen versions he had retrieved from the storage room in the basement.

He stared at the outer shell, carefully going module by module, writing the differences in his tablet computer and complementing his notes with high-resolution photos taken with the same tablet. He photographed and jotted down all noticeable refinements from those early prototypes, from the improved helium boosters and the TDRSS antenna in the power boots to the latest-generation magnetic locks carefully stitched into the flexible insulation material to keep the jumper's legs together during reentry. He ran his index finger through the holes punched by the bullets, which actually allowed him to see the insulation and ventilation layers sandwiched beneath the quarter-inch-thick material.

He made a long list of observations, though everything so far continued to be polished versions of every component in those old OSS prototypes.

Pete moved on to the inner compartment of the outer shell, verifying the location of each module against the original design, from the suit's built-in batteries lining the top of the power boots to the electronics for communications, navigation, and finally, the OSS's black box, a matchbox-size recorder housed inside an inch-thick shell of reinforced carbon-carbon designed to survive a catastrophic event, like the jumper burning up on reentry.

“Hello, little one,” he said, setting the black box aside before resuming his inspection, spending almost an hour on the long helmet, fascinated by its shape and its carefully packed electronics, making it the central command of the suit. At the time of the project's cancellation, the helmet had been in the drawing stage. All of Jack's jumps had used modified versions of prior NASA helmets, which were domelike in shape, not elongated, and certainly not housing this number of modular high-tech components.

He extracted them from their respective recesses along the inner section of the long tail, which unlike the front of the helmet, hadn't been damaged during the fusillade, before Pete could react and stop his soldiers from firing, ordering them to use stun grenades to flush Angela and Jack out of the house.

Again, he photographed everything and kept careful notes of the precise location of each module he removed, setting them on the large lab table with individual tags so that eventually, at the right time, his most-trusted scientists could perform a deeper analysis and reproduce this marvel of engineering.

Incredible,
he thought, moving to the ablation shield layering the top section of the helmet, ignoring the bullet holes, remembering long meetings with Angela, Jack, and other scientists about the tradeoffs between a single thick thermal shield layer versus multiple thinner layers that would be ejected as they were consumed during reentry. His index finger reached the edge of the thermal protection section and felt the dozens of helium nozzles that would have ejected every spent layer.

So that's what we chose.

And he also noticed the blunt shape of the thermal protection shield, again remembering long discussions about the tradeoffs.

The more Pete inspected the suit, the more it brought him back to a happier time, to those glorious days of Project Phoenix, to Jack and Angela before Afghanistan, before the funeral and her resignation.

Before Hastings pulled him into his ranks, turning him slowly but steadily into his right-hand man, while also converting NASA into the general's very own agency to develop and deploy military satellites of every sort, from surveillance and communications to prototype lasers and plasma guns currently undergoing tests in orbit—plus the airship-to-orbit technology to deploy them all.

Pete looked into the distance, proud of this low-cost but highly efficient—and highly stealth—method of inserting classified equipment into orbit.

ATO, which was developed by a subcontractor in Orlando, took advantage of a conventional high-altitude balloon, which would lift a floating dock station and its payload up to forty-five kilometers above the ground in the middle of the night before a low-thrust rocket mounted on the dock station accelerated the payload horizontally to orbital velocity, reaching altitudes in excess of one hundred kilometers over a few days. And they had ATOs created for every size of payload, from small satellites to those who would have filled the old space shuttle's cargo compartment.

But in the process of creating and deploying Hastings's vision, Pete had to make choices, easy ones at first, minor lies to Congressional panels to secure funding, channeling tax dollars to secret projects—baby steps that strung together over a few years brought him right into the core of the general's world of deception and manipulation.

Damn, Jack,
he thought, realizing how quickly and how far he had drifted from the straight and narrow after losing his best friend.

Jack's relentless conviction to always do the right thing no matter the cost had always been a strong positive influence on Pete that dated back to their teenage years growing up in Jersey, continuing as adults, even as they followed different paths after high school, but always finding a way to stay in touch, to align their vacations, holidays, to always find time for adventures, from rock climbing to skydiving.

But now his old friend was apparently back—at least some bizarre version of him—and his return also brought along disruption on other levels, from this amazing technology to his relationship with Angela.

He frowned, emotions broiling in his gut.

Just when he thought he had finally turned the corner and earned her love and trust—which had been easier to do since Angela no longer worked at NASA, allowing Pete to hide Hastings's dirty work—Jack had literally dropped out of the sky.

And for the second time in Pete's life, Jack had snatched her away.

Focus.

Pete moved to the suit's upper shell, starting with the breastplate, which was flexible and could be folded into four sections for easy stowage inside the helmet, and unlike the bottom section, it had miraculously escaped unscathed. He compared the designs, documenting all differences, though again, they were mostly refined versions from the vintage suits at the time the project was canceled.

An hour later, he sat back, frustrated.

Nothing in the suit told him—as far as he could tell—how Jack had achieved a dimensional jump.

Keep digging.

Rolling up his sleeves, Pete dove in again, spending another two hours scrubbing every square inch of the suit, inside and out, finally noticing an interesting difference he had missed the first time, and which he almost missed again had he not run a finger along a seam on the inside upper shell.

He lifted the corner of a Velcro cover about two inches square ingeniously disguised as a seam, removing it completely, exposing a round socket-like recess in the suit about the size of a quarter and about a half-inch thick.

What was in there?

He flipped the small cover and stared at its inner side, filmed with a purple substance, translucent, like a membrane.

Now that's new.

Pete looked again at the recess in the suit and back at the inside cover, noticing a circular mark matching the size and shape of the recess. Something was in there, and it somehow interfaced with—

He noticed a small black square on a corner of the small cover, and he got up and walked over to a nearby microscope, centering the membrane under a 50X lens and turning on a twelve-inch monitor next to the microscope.

The screen came on, displaying what looked like a grid embedded in the purple film. He panned around the surface, locating the tiny black square.

“A computer chip,” he mumbled, noticing a pair of leads extending from one end of the chip, connecting it to the fine grid, which he now recognized as gold wires crisscrossing the membrane, in a way resembling an antenna of sorts.

He also located an optical connector on top of the chip, which he guessed would interface this antenna to the missing round module.

And he could think of only one place where that module could be.

He stood and looked back at the lab table, at the suit, realizing its possibilities, its potential if he could indeed find a way to not only get it operational but also reproduce it.

Don't get ahead of yourself,
he thought, returning to the table, his eyes shifting to the reinforced carbon-carbon shell of the OSS's black box, where he hoped to find some answers.

But irrespective of what he learned from the transcripts of the conversation that took place between Mission Control and Jack, Pete knew that he would need not only Angela back but also the module he guessed she had taken from the suit before escaping the house.

Slowly, he walked to the windows overlooking Launch Complex 39, originally built for the Apollo program and later modified for the space shuttle.

Those had been NASA's glory days, when the agency led the way in technological innovation, when the best minds of the country competed for a chance at participating in the latest cutting-edge projects.