The Fall (31 page)

But Jack didn't hang around, rushing around the man as he fell to his knees, charging after Angela, reaching for his SOG knife, closing the twenty feet as she continued fighting, trying to break free.

The man, almost a foot taller than him, turned around as he heard Jack, dropping Angela on the pavement before kicking her in the gut to keep her from running off.

As she rolled on the ground by his feet, clutching her stomach, heaving, the mercenary reached for a massive blade with a serrated edge with his right hand, almost as large as a Colombian machete, which he held incorrectly with the blade protruding from the top of his fist, limiting his ability to strike blows to forward slashes.

Amateur hour,
Jack thought, his training forcing him to ignore Angela, focusing on the threat, seeing him clearer now, stepping out of the shadows, arm muscles pulsating with tension, his face tight, nostrils flaring.

Jack stopped a few feet from him while turning sideways, keeping most of his weight on his rear leg.

The man struck first, as Jack had anticipated, slashing the knife in a semicircle aimed at Jack's abdomen, trying to gut him. Jack shifted his rear leg back, easily getting out of the way, letting the blade pass a couple of inches from him before stepping forward, right hand grabbing the man's wrist and twisting it, extending the elbow into a horizontal line, which he palm-struck with all his might, pushing his body into the blow, driving the heel of his hand hard into the exposed joint.

The elbow's ligaments gave, snapped, dislodging the joint as the man grunted in pain, dropping the knife, disbelief flashing in his eyes while staring at his arm twisted at a sickening angle.

Jack held on to the wrist and forced the dislocated elbow behind the man's back, forcing him into a deep crouch. He was about to palm-strike his neck to knock him out, but stopped. Instead, he dropped his gaze to the operative's exposed right knee.

This one's for Angie, motherfucker,
he thought, pulling back his front leg before snapping it sideways, heel first, toes pointing down.

The side kick landed on target, striking the side of the knee, which also snapped, cracked, ligaments bursting, followed by another grunt.

Jack finally let go as the large mercenary collapsed, before shifting to the front and kicking him straight across the right temple, knocking him out.

He paused, eyes searching for more surveillance, finding none, before leaning down to pick up Angela, cradling her, before taking off after Layton, still walking into the large parking lot, unaware of what had just happened.

Jack increased his step as Angela inhaled in short, raspy breaths, trying to get air into her shocked system. They reached the edge of the parking lot, ignoring the looks he got from a pair of students a half block away emerging from one of the buildings.

“Professor Layton,” Jack said as he got within ten feet of the man, who turned around and froze, staring at Jack, then shifting to Angela in his arms, and back to Jack.

“Please help us,” Jack added as he walked up to him.

Layton looked closer, recognition flashing in his eyes. “
Angela?
Is that you?”

“Hi … Jonathan,” Angela said, before inhaling deeply again and coughing.

Slowly, Jack set her down, keeping an arm over her shoulder for stability as she swallowed and coughed again. She was slowly coming around, a hand on her abdomen as she winced, obviously in pain.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I just need … a minute.”

“And who are you?” Layton asked, inspecting Jack.

“He's.… he's my husband.”

“Your
husband
? I thought he died years ago.”

Angela slowly shook her head. “So did I, Jonathan. So did I.”

*   *   *

The process was similar to the one they'd used to mine the information from Hastings's phone.

Only easier.

Olivia's phone wasn't as sophisticated.

First they'd disabled the GPS locator, doing it while on the run, before finding a motel in Jupiter, a small town south of Melbourne, far enough to give themselves some breathing room after their recent close encounter.

Next, they retrieved the address for the boarding school in Orlando, and Dago dispatched two of his guys to fetch Erika, who was now in danger.

Armed with a six-pack of Red Bulls, Art-Z and Angela dug in, using the two surviving laptops plus Olivia's table to break into the phone's SIM card and the flash memory, working systematically, byte after byte, extracting contacts, calendars, bank accounts, passwords, texts, and a host of other private information, some of it locked in a collection of security apps, which Art-Z cracked in seconds.

“Damn,” said Dago, once more sitting behind them, though this time drinking a Budweiser, which Art-Z had acknowledged as a more appropriate beer for the man. “I use one of those apps to protect my personal data.”

Art-Z exchanged a glance with Angela and slowly shook his head.

“Where did you get the app?” asked the hacker.

“Well, the app store, of course. Where else?”

“How much did you spend on it?”

“Wasn't free, if that's what you want to know. It was five bucks. Not cheap.”

“You know what really amazes me, Bonnie?”

Angela shrugged while working one of the laptops. “Surprise me.”

“People spending five dollars on some security app for their phones to safeguard the passwords to their life savings. Think about it. You get what you pay for.”

“So how do you protect your stuff?” asked Dago.

Art-Z looked over his shoulder. “When this is over, I'll show you how to really protect yourself from … people like me.”

“Fair enough,” replied Dago. “And when this is over I'm going to teach you how to ride a real bike.”

“Please,” Angela said, ripping into the SIM card. “First you want to kill each other and now it's a fucking lovefest.”

“Speaking of lovefests,” Art-Z said, pointing at the screen, which displayed the contents of the phone's internal flash memory. “Looks like the general's been busy enticing foreign investors into his network.”

“As if pilfering the taxpayers' coffers wasn't enough,” Angela replied, reading through Olivia's text messages with a half-dozen foreign financial firms, most of them in Russia, Africa, Mexico, and the Middle East.

“I'm not sure he's after their cash, though,” said Art-Z, also reading through the messages, which focused on access to mines owned by the financial institutions.

They counted four mines in the messages, which Angela pulled into a list.

Mwenezi District Mine—Zimbabwe

Mina del Toro—San Luis Potosí, Mexico

Jagersfontein Mining—South Africa

Pripyat Swell—Ukraine

They spent the next thirty minutes reading through hundreds of lines of text from Olivia's interactions with suppliers, including the operators of the mines. Although each mine produced multiple minerals, Art-Z found one that was common to all, and which was mentioned by name multiple times in the messages.

“What's armalcolite?” Dago finally asked, sipping his beer and planting his face in between Angela and Art-Z while reading the screen.

“A type of moon rock,” Angela explained after doing a quick Internet check to confirm her recollection. “Originally brought home by the crew of Apollo Eleven. And it was also found later on around the Earth in these mines.”

She stared at the images before asking, “But what's that got to do with the OSS? There's no armalcolite in my design.”

“I don't know, Bonnie,” Art-Z said, reaching the end of the text messages, which focused on the delivery aspect of securing the mineral and shipping it to SkyLeap, but without any indication of what Olivia or anyone else did with it.

“But,” the hacker added, pointing to the data in the SIM card, which included an encrypted supply chain tracking system for items considered critical to the project. “The armalcolite wasn't delivered directly to SkyLeap. It first went right up the street, to this location.”

“What's there?” she asked.

Art-Z pulled up Google Earth and zoomed into the GPS coordinates.

“Looks like a warehouse in the middle of the woods ten miles away.”

Angela stared at the tin roof of this very nondescript building surrounded by what looked like a tall chain-link fence, though it was hard to tell from the satellite image.

“I think we just found our next target,” she finally said, staring at the image, hoping like hell that within those walls lay the next clue to the whereabouts of her husband, whom she now knew was still alive, still breathing, still
existing
.

*   *   *

“This isn't supposed to exist,” said Layton, looking at a flat screen connected to a microscope in the rear of a lab on the second floor of the F. W. Olin Engineering Complex building, where they had retreated after their skirmish with the mercenaries that Pete had dispatched to keep an eye on the professor.

Jack had objected about hanging around the campus, but Angela had insisted since they not only needed the professor's help but also the lab equipment to decipher the glass token. They had finally reached a compromise by coming here instead of Layton's building over at the Harris Center for Science and Engineering several blocks away.

Still, Jack had made them wait almost thirty minutes, circling the parking lot of the engineering building in their stolen truck until he was convinced that they were clear. Interestingly enough, they never heard any sirens for emergency vehicles—meaning a containment crew had come and extracted the disabled operatives.

Finally, Jack had driven them to the front of the building and let Layton and Angela out before circling the parking lot for another ten minutes, convincing himself that perhaps it was a reasonable risk.

“Where did you find it?” he asked, looking over at Angela.

“Long story, Jonathan. What is it?”

“A glass particle accelerator—something still on the drawing boards.”

She made a face. “That small?”

“Amazing, isn't it?” he said, pointing at the screen. “Here's the narrow channel between two glass plates, each three centimeters in diameter. Both plates have these lines of teeth, six hundred nanometers wide and spaced by six hundred nanometers.”

Jack got close to the screen, deciding it resembled rows of fine teeth along lower and upper jaws.

“The way they're positioned creates tens of thousands of microscopic cavities arranged in a circle, like a miniature version of CERN's Hadron Collider, though that one uses copper, the current standard for making particle accelerators. But while the smallest distance between copper cavities is around thirty centimeters, with glass, as you can see, we are exponentially smaller. In addition, copper cavities require large amounts of alternating electrical current to change the polarity of the cavities to accelerate passing particles. Glass cavities, on the other hand, can use light, which is electromagnetic radiation.”

“An electric field and a magnetic field leapfrogging each other at high frequencies,” she said while Jack tried to keep up.

“Correct, Angela. But the size of the cavity and its distance to the next cavity determines the type of light required to achieve optimum acceleration. In this case, a wavelength of twelve hundred nanometers—the six hundred nanometers for each tooth and another six hundred nanometers of distance between them—is required so that the phase of light, and its associated electric field, would rotate one hundred and eighty degrees as it passes through each cavity, switching the voltage from positive to negative, just like in a traditional copper accelerator, but at a much higher frequency and with a microscopic footprint.”

“Jack,” Angela said. “There's the number twelve again. A wavelength of twelve hundred nanometers is required to achieve a harmonic synchronization with the cavities in the glass.”

“Which is the frequency of gamma rays,” said Layton.

Angela nodded and added, “And which show up as violet or purple in the electromagnetic spectrum.”

“That's great, Angie,” Jack said, “but I still don't get how it all fits. The altitude, the temperature, the G-meter, the vertical velocity, the weird electrical storm, and now this. How does it all work together to allow a dimensional jump?”

Layton stood abruptly and blinked. “A
what?
”

Angela sighed and motioned the physics professor to sit back down before saying, “I think it's time we tell you a little story.”

 

11

MISGUIDED MEN

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

It had happened by accident.

Like so many scientific breakthroughs.

In 1928, upon returning from a month-long vacation, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered a strange fungus on a culture he had left at his lab—a fungus that had killed all of the surrounding bacteria in the culture. Penicillin was born that day, and modern medicine would never be the same.

In 1944, American engineer Percy Spencer walked in front of a magnetron while working at Raytheon and noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. A year later, the microwave was invented.

In 1938, DuPont scientist Roy Plunkett was searching for less toxic refrigerants to replace ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and propane. When opening a container of one of his samples, he noticed that the gas was gone, leaving behind a strange, slippery surface with high resistance to heat. Teflon.

And the list went on, from Velcro, electricity, and radioactivity to vulcanized rubber, smart dust, the Big Bang, and even Coca-Cola and Viagra.