The Fall (36 page)

He fell to his knees, hands reaching for the blade, trying to pull it free as he drowned in his own blood, as Jack reached him an instant later, gripping the handle while kicking him in the chest, yanking out the blade and stepping back as blood spurted from the wound.

The operative tried to speak, but Jack knew it was futile. Their eyes locked for a moment before he rolled on his side in convulsions.

Jack left him there and rushed to the truck, getting in, and drove it around to the front of the building, where he bumped the horn twice.

Angela rushed out of the double glass doors and climbed in, followed by Layton, who hauled a leather briefcase.

“What took you so long?” she asked, scooting over on the bench seat, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder.

Before he could reply, she added, “What happened to your face?”

“Bumped into someone,” Jack said, stepping on the gas, wishing to get the hell out of Dodge before word got out.

“Jack?”

“There are three less mercenaries looking for us now.”

“Oh,” she said, understanding, putting a hand on the side of his face. “Are you okay?”

“I'm good. Really. Don't worry.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “It's my job to worry.”

“And it's my job to keep us safe, which means we need to get away from here. So, where to?” he asked, steering the truck.

“First to Orlando International,” she said, taking a closer look at the spot right in between his right temple and his eye where the woman had landed that kick.

He appreciated the gesture but was starting to get annoyed, though he didn't let it show as he asked, “Why the airport?”

“We're dividing and conquering, Jack. Jonathan's headed for Cambridge to meet with one of my former MIT colleagues, an astrophysicist who just agreed to help us work out the details of your upcoming jump.”

Jack processed that before asking the obvious question: “What about your classes, Jonathan? Isn't that going to signal back to Pete that we're up to something?”

“I'm close to retiring,” Layton replied while leaning forward to look at Jack. “I don't keep a regular schedule, plus I have a staff of junior professors and grad students handling most of my academic load. No one's going to miss me for a couple of days.”

“Besides,” Angela added. “I'm sure by now Pete's wondering if Layton knows something. Too many disabled operatives in the area, especially the ones following him last night. It's probably good for Jonathan, and for us, if he left town for a few days.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “What about us? Where do we go after we drop him off?”

“Daytona Beach,” she said.

“Why?”

“Jonathan's brother is a New York lawyer. He has a beach house there he rarely uses, and where we shouldn't be disturbed while we work.”

“Work on what?”

“On your new suit.”

Jack turned toward the highway, constantly checking his rearview mirror, having had some time to think about a way back and realizing just how difficult it would be, even if he had a functional suit.

“Okay, Angie, assuming we can build a new OSS … how are you planning to get me high enough to be able to use it?”

“That's the thing, Jack. We think you may not need to go as high. Just enough to achieve the desired trans-dimensional harmonic.”

Jack thought he remembered hearing something about that when Angela and Layton were scribbling those incomprehensible formulas on the whiteboard.

“And that's what I need to work out,” said Layton. “But I require access to MIT resources, including the supercomputers, to run some calculations.”

The ride to the airport took less than forty minutes, time Angela and Layton spent engaged in a deep discussion of theoretical physics combined with astrophysics and computer engineering. Jack tried to keep up for the first minute but soon gave up as the conversation quickly went beyond his pay grade. Instead, he left them to their discussion on the semiconductor chip embedded in the purple glass and its connection to solar energy while his thoughts drifted to his wife back at home, wondering not just how she was managing in his absence, but how his vanishing was being handled by NASA. After all, the whole world had been watching his jump.

Jack was pretty damn sure that Hastings and his gurus knew exactly what had taken place, but that didn't mean that the rest of NASA had figured it out.

But if someone could, he was certain it would be Angela.

Following that train of thought, however, it meant that if Angela did indeed suspect that Jack had not burned up on reentry, if she had somehow connected the dots and realized that he had gone someplace else, and tried to go public with it, then she was in obvious danger because Hastings would likely go to any length to protect his secret.

Which made it so much more imperative that he find a way back.

Before he knew it, they had reached the airport, and Jack silently chastised himself for having gone on autopilot, immersed in his thoughts while half of Pete's posse could be right on his tail.

I need to be more careful,
he thought, resuming his scan, once more becoming aware of his surroundings, checking the traffic behind him as he took the exit for the airport. He circled it twice, making sure they were clean, before heading for departures and dropping Layton off by the American Airlines check-in.

“Let's touch base in a couple of days,” he said, walking away, briefcase in hand, disappearing beyond the automatic doors.

Angela once again snuggled against Jack's arm as he steered the truck back toward the turnpike, hugging his right bicep.

“So,” he said. “Want to bring me up to speed?”

“It's a recording device, Jack,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The chip embedded in the glass token. It not only controlled the type of harmonic required to achieve a jump, it also recorded the event, including your vitals during the entire event, plus the energy levels of the accelerator and the speed of the particles.”

“Why?”

“Our best guess is that Hastings and his gurus were using the jump to collect data, to learn, to even understand the physiological effects. That's why they hid the token in the suit. They wanted to gather information on their miniature particle accelerator while you fell out of the sky. The token became active the moment it was energized by solar gamma rays as you dropped from sixty miles high. And this also explains why Hastings had insisted on Alpha-B, which would have narrowly missed the desired trans-dimensional harmonic, keeping you just on the edge, between worlds, while still providing them with mounds of data in the token's memory. We think that if your wife had left Alpha-B in the jump profile, per Hastings's instructions, you would have certainly seen some strange colors around you, like that purple halo, but continued on through a normal reentry, landed as expected, gone home a hero, and never known that the real mission objective was data collection.”

Jack thought of the roller coaster that had been his life since jumping, and for a moment wished that was the way it had played out. But that would have meant letting Hastings get away with it, and the man had to be stopped.

“But they never got the data,” he said.

“Well, we think they did, up to the point that you vanished. The token used an encrypted channel in the TDRSS link to also send telemetry, but not to NASA. So while the folks at Mission Control kept tabs on you through one TDRSS channel, someone else was also following your jump but gathering a different set of parameters through a second, and well-hidden, channel.”

“Incredible.”

“And because of the descent profile change, Hastings and his gurus also got a clear signal that their technology works when you achieved the trans-dimensional jump.”

Jack reached the highway and headed north, toward Daytona Beach.

“About the suit … how are you planning to build one?”

She leaned the side of her head against his shoulder while patting him. “Building you a pressure suit isn't the hardest part. Dago and his guys are already gathering the materials.”

“Then?”

“The token was connected to a power source, Jack, and from what we can tell, it was on the underside of that Velcro cover. The residue we found on the token suggests that it was made of the same material as the token but designed to be some sort of solar antenna, to capture gamma rays. The bad news is that we left it behind with the outer shell.”

“So … my old buddy has it,” he said, checking his rearview mirrors as he accelerated onto the entrance ramp.

“Yep,” she said. “And we're going to have to get it back.”

*   *   *

“We're going to have to get it back in order to put it all together,” Dr. Gayle Horton said, pointing at the display above her microscope. “Here are the connectors where the energy is channeled to the missing component.”

Pete nodded while staring at what had to be the single most important discovery of the century.

“What really amazes me,” she continued, “is the energy level of this material. Just to put it in perspective, a liter of regular unleaded gasoline has the energy equivalent of thirty-five kilo joules. The handful of experiments I have conducted so far have yielded the equivalent of thirty
million
joules. And there's still plenty of energy stored in it.”

Pete inhaled deeply, trying to process the orders of magnitude. A joule was the traditional unit of measurement for energy in the metric system, which was the force of one newton acting through one meter. In electrical power terms, one watt was the power of a joule of energy per second.

He sat back. “This is … unreal. What have you learned about its composition?”

She grabbed the tablet next to the microscope and browsed through a few graphs. “I've confirmed the presence of armalcolite. The full composition is a strange combination of germanium, armalcolite, and dolomite.”

“Dolomite?” he asked, trying to remember what that was.

“It's a crystal that's used on a number of applications, from furnaces to controlling the pH in saltwater aquariums, but the most interesting one is in particle physics, where detectors can be built under layers of dolomite to enable detection of exotic particles. Dolomite is particularly good at insulating against interference from cosmic rays. In this case it looks like the three compounds fused at an extremely high temperature. I'm firing up one of the furnaces we used to test shuttle tiles to try to reproduce it.”

Pete liked hearing that. If they could reproduce the material, it would put him one step closer to a complete solution. He was already engaging two more scientists to develop a prototype version of the damaged suit, including a new helmet. With luck, they might be able to reverse-engineer the individual components in a few weeks and create a working prototype a month later. And that, combined with the jump profile he had extracted from the black box, would give him most of the pieces of the puzzle.

Except for the missing component,
he thought, before thanking Gayle and walking back to his office.

His scientists were doing their part, but he couldn't say the same for his operatives. The field reports were not encouraging.

Six professionals had been brutally disabled—one even killed.

Pete had read the encrypted message on his phone and nearly thrown it out of his office window an hour earlier.

The only good news was that the mercenaries were quite adept at cleaning up after their own mess. Aside for unconfirmed reports of fistfights, the FIT campus was pretty much undisturbed. No bodies were found. And of course, there was no sign of Angela or Jack, or even Professor Jonathan Layton, one of the key assets he had under surveillance.

So they've gone after her academic contacts,
he thought, pretty much deducing that his former girlfriend was digging, and given her level of technical brilliance, it was just a matter of time before she connected the dots.

But Pete needed her on
his
team, connecting
his
dots, helping him unlock the apparent marvels of this game-changing technology. Unfortunately, any chance of doing so peacefully had ended when he'd arrived at her house in Humvees packed with armed soldiers.

He looked out his window at the Launch Complex 39 and the ocean beyond it, having forgotten just how damned skilled Jack was, and combining his operational talents with Angela's mind only made them that much more formidable.

They had managed to escape his initial attempt to take them at her house, in the process neutralizing a dozen soldiers. Then they had deceived him—along with the Coast Guard and Homeland Security—with that ocean explosion stunt, before making fools out of a professional Serbian surveillance team in South Miami, and once again at FIT, where Jack had apparently disabled two independent professional teams, one Russian and the other Canadian.

But everyone had a weakness, something that could be exploited.

And then it suddenly came to him, as he stared at the distant ocean.

It couldn't be that easy,
he thought, rubbing his chin, considering the concept, realizing that the best plans were often the simplest.

Follow the technology trail.

And he began to make calls, to dispense instructions, orchestrating a new plan that neither Jack nor Angela would see coming for a while.

Until it was too late.

And this time there would be no mistakes.

*   *   *

They reached the beach house just past midnight, punching in the code Layton had given them to gain access to the gated community, before driving up to the house, where Jack got out, and entered another code by the keypad next to the double garage doors, which began to lift.

Angela drove their truck inside and Jack immediately closed the doors, hoping no one had seen them this late at night. One thing he'd learned about living in Florida was that the majority of residents were retirees who usually went to bed in the early evening hours.