The Second Ship (14 page)

Suddenly, the screaming stopped, leaving the doctor curled on the floor, small whimpers escaping from her lips. Dr. Stephenson moved over beside the prostrate woman, kneeling down to gently stroke her forehead.

“If there is one thing I don’t tolerate, it is anyone questioning my competency. If I say a technology is ready for release, it is ready for release. I don’t learn about technologies. I master them. For example, I know that in a few minutes you will feel better. You will have no memory of this little lesson I have administered except for a conviction that your concerns about the new project are completely unfounded.”

Dr. Stephenson ceased petting her head and moved back to his desk. “Now let us continue with your instruction.”

Dr. Nancy Anatole’s face contorted until it seemed the skin would split to reveal the bone beneath it. Unable to bear the screaming any longer, Jennifer switched off the playback.

Heather was stunned. Sick to her stomach. Sick to her soul.

“Oh my God.” Jennifer’s hands trembled as she closed the laptop. “Heather, what was he doing to her?”

Heather leaned on the back of the couch, her legs unsteady. “I don’t know. He wasn’t even touching her.”

“We have to help her.”

“I wish we could,” said Heather, her thoughts spinning. “But she may not be the only one who needs our help. Did you hear what they were saying? It sounds like Stephenson is getting ready to release another of the alien technologies. We haven’t even figured out what’s wrong with cold fusion yet. Dr. Anatole sounded scared of this second one in a way she wasn’t of the first.”

Jennifer shuddered. “How can we stop it? No one is going to believe a couple of high school kids.”

A lump rose in Heather’s throat. “Jen, I think we have to consider showing the tape to the authorities.”

Jennifer shook her head. “But that would lead to questions we couldn’t answer. They would want to know how we got it. They would find out about the ship.”

Heather stared into her friend's eyes. “I know. I’m sorry. But I don’t see any other way.”

Over Jennifer’s shoulder, lightning arced among the dark clouds that clutched Mt. McKinley’s peak. Unable even to cry, Heather stared out at the hauntingly beautiful scene, drinking it in, one last time.

Chapter 27

The predawn wind was cold. Damned cold. Its cutting bite brought tears to Mark’s eyes and then froze the wetness on his lashes as he stepped out his front door and jogged to the passenger side of Colleen Johnson's red Jeep Cherokee.

It irked him that he didn’t have his own car. As he slipped inside, he was met halfway into his seat with a kiss that would have steamed his glasses if he had worn any. One thing he had to admit: as uncool as it was to need to have his senior girlfriend drive him everywhere, she sure had a way of taking the sting out of it.

After last night, he could use a little of that kind of attention to take his mind off other worries. It had taken him nearly two hours to talk Jennifer and Heather out of the idea of giving the recording to the authorities, an action that would certainly result in the three of them spending several years in federal prison. Only his argument that their dads might also be implicated changed the girls’ minds.

The US government did not take kindly to someone making unauthorized recordings of highly classified material. Their intentions wouldn’t matter.

“Whacha thinking about?” Colleen asked as she sped along Pajarito Road toward school.

Mark smiled, putting his hand onto her knee. “Nothing, really. Just trying to get my head together this morning. Why are we off so early? School’s going to be locked up.”

“I have a surprise for you.” She glanced over at him and winked. “Bill, the custodian, said he’d leave the side door open for me. Anyway, I think you’ll find it exciting.”

Mark grinned. While people talked about Colleen’s “bad girl” image, she was really just fun. She was far and away more exciting than any girl Mark had ever dated. She had also surprised him by not being as wild as people said she was. Oh, she was willing to make out in public places for the thrill of it, and the way she kissed and moved her hands and body across him made him feel like a young bull that wanted to paw dirt and snort twin blasts of steam from his nose.

But when it came right down to it, Colleen always pulled back from going all the way, something Mark had no experience with but was more than willing to try. Colleen was more of a serious tease than a truly naughty girl, but man, could she ever torture him with the teasing. It reminded him of something he had once heard a famous comic say: “Man, if this is torture, chain me to the wall.”

So, if Colleen had a surprise for him, Mark was willing to play along.

They weren’t the first car at the school, but you could never really beat the custodian in, no matter what time you showed up. Colleen drove past the entrance to the school parking lot, bringing the jeep to a stop in the side lot. As he slammed the door, she grabbed his hand and led him surreptitiously around the side of the building, glanced around quickly, and then ducked in a side entrance.

“Ooh. Feeling pretty frisky this morning, eh?” Mark crooned.

Her laughing blue eyes crinkled at the edges as she whispered back, “You have no idea. Now come on.”

Turning a corner, Colleen led the way into the dark gymnasium. She pulled a small keychain light from her purse and then moved on across the court, pulling him into the boy’s locker room. As Mark grinned and reached for her, she pulled back.

“No, you have to wait a second. This is a surprise. Now turn around and close your eyes. Promise me you won’t open them until I tell you.”

Mark laughed softly. “Okay, okay. I promise. Just don’t take too long.”

“Just make sure they are closed tightly. I don’t want you spoiling everything after I’ve gone to all this effort to make it happen.”

“Don’t worry about me. I wouldn’t dream of messing up your surprise.”

Mark stood there facing the lockers, although he couldn’t have seen very much even if he had his eyes open, with as little light as the keychain flashlight provided.

A slight noise behind him brought goose bumps of anticipation to his arms and neck. What could the little vixen be up to? His imagination supplied a variety of intriguing answers to that question as he waited.

The large canvas ball bag came down over his head, arms, and waist so fast and with such force that by the time he realized that it wasn’t Colleen grappling him, he found he could barely move, much less fight back. Several sets of strong arms tackled him to the floor as he struggled against the canvas, but it might as well have been a straightjacket. He felt a knee on his back and another on his neck as yet another person pulled some sort of strap tight around the outside of the bag, binding his arms tight against his side.

“What the hell? Get off me, you assholes,” Mark yelled, although the sound came out muffled.

“Dream on, punk.”

Mark recognized the voice. It was Doug Brindal, senior star quarterback of the Hilltoppers football team, ex-boyfriend of one Colleen Johnson. A trail of little dots started to connect as a light dawned in his mind.

He felt his body lifted by four sets of hands, no doubt some of Doug’s good buds who had volunteered to lend a hand. His head banged hard against a corner as they carried him along, and he heard the doorway back into the gym swing open. Something screeched, and he was thrown down hard on a metal rack. From the hard, curved lumps and narrow rods he felt pressed against his chest, it could only be one of the wheeled basketball racks.

He yelled again, but this time a chorus of laughter was all that greeted him. “There’s nobody here to hear you but us, Smythe. No teachers or coaches to save your sorry ass from getting a lesson you’ve had coming all year.”

“You tell him, Doug!” Mark recognized this new voice as belonging to another senior member of the football team, Bob Fedun, a hulking 230-pound defensive tackle. “Every basketball wimp needs a lesson, and you seem to think you’re somewhere above your true station in life.”

Mark focused, channeling all his enhanced neural pathways, coordinating his muscles into one concerted effort. The bag bulged, accompanied by the sound of canvas thread popping at the seams, but the straps that had been looped around the outside held.

“Hey, watch it,” Doug yelled. “This cheap bag is starting to rip. You guys hold him tight while I give this strap a couple more wraps around his body. That’s it. Now slide him back this way. I want him hunched over the end of this thing like he was humping this line of basketballs. That’s right.”

Unable to get any leverage, Mark felt himself being tied firm. His feet were pulled apart and tied just above the wheels, while his upper body was bent forward along the line of the rack and strapped down tight against it, his arms pinned to his torso.

Doug’s panting voice came close to his ear. “Okay. Give me that knife.”

With a loud ripping sound, the top of the canvas bag was torn away from around his head.

“You son of a bitch,” Mark spat out. “If you don’t let me loose, I’m going to—”

A vicious pull on his hair jerked his head up so that he could see the knife blade inches from his throat. “You’re going to what? Kick our butts? I don’t think so, Smythe.”

The others laughed loudly.

“Tape his mouth,” Doug said. A long strip of duct tape accomplished the task.

The gang worked rapidly. Pulling his pants down around his ankles, they pulled out a large permanent marker and carefully lettered the words FOOTBALL RULES, one word on each butt cheek.

Doug pulled Mark’s head up by the hair one more time, grinning into his face. “I believe you know my girlfriend.”

Colleen bent down, her beautiful, full lips just inches from his own.

“Did you really think I would dump Doug for you, just because you can play a little basketball? Don’t get me wrong. You’re cute, but get serious.

“Doug’s father was number one in his class at Cal Tech. He got his PhD in chemistry by the time he was twenty-three. He started his own company and made his first million before he was twenty-five. Now he runs a division at the lab just because he likes it.

“Your father, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a master’s degree. He’s just a technician. Do you really think I would slum over to your side of the tracks?”

Her laughter was musical.

Doug let go of Mark’s hair. “Okay, enough of this. It’s showtime.”

The wheels of the rack squealed as it was pushed rapidly across the gym. A door banged shut as they left him alone in the dark locker room.

Mark continued to struggle against his bonds but to no avail. There were too many straps and too much tape to allow him to break free, and the duct-tape gag made it difficult to breathe, much less yell loudly enough to be heard.

After what seemed like an eternity, but which must have been only an hour, distant sounds in the hallway alerted Mark to the arrival of the first wave of students. There was no mistaking the unique crescendo of squealing laughter, yells, and banging lockers of a school hallway in full-throated cry.

Almost as soon as the sound began, the door banged open and his tormentors were back, wheeling the cart out into the gym and toward the hallway door.

Doug gave the command. “Ready. Go.”

With a shove, the gang of four opened the gym door just enough, pushing the cart, Mark’s butt first, out into the hallway. In the sudden suffocating silence that followed, and before the gym door could swing closed behind the cart, Mark heard their footsteps racing back through the gym toward the far exit.

“Oh my God!” someone yelled.

The hallway of Los Alamos High suddenly exploded into a chorus of laughter that rattled the wall lockers in accompaniment. There, amidst the commotion, too stunned to move, Jennifer and Heather stared at the words printed on the naked posterior of Marcus Aurelius Smythe.

Chapter 28

Jennifer’s hands played her keyboard like a concert pianist at work on a grand piano. It occurred to Heather, as she watched her friend, that despite her protestations to the contrary, Jennifer must have also picked up some neural enhancement that refined her finger dexterity.

Heather glanced over to where Mark had pulled up a chair next to Jennifer’s computer desk. He had laughed off the embarrassing incident at the school, refusing to tell anyone who the perpetrators were, but she knew him. Inside he was seething.

If the boys who had roughed him up knew anything about him, they would not sleep for the rest of the school year. Mark was a bulldog. Once he got motivated, he didn’t let up until he emerged victorious.

“Jen says you’ve started working out,” Heather said.

Mark glanced over at her. “Yep. Dad wasn’t using his old free weights, so I got him to give them to me. A little extra muscle mass on this body wouldn’t hurt.”

“Just don’t go getting so muscle-bound that you look like one of those magazine guys.”

Mark laughed. “Nope. I just want toning and strength.”

“And those books on aikido you bought?” Jennifer asked.

“That’s just for flexibility.”

Heather nodded. “Uh-huh. And just how much time are you spending trying to stay flexible?”

“No more than two hours a night.”

“Every night?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Sounds like you’re going to be one flexible dude.”

“Well, it relaxes me after a hard day of school, basketball practice, and homework.”

Heather looked at Mark closely. He seemed relaxed. Obviously he had a plan in the works and was comfortable that it was progressing on schedule. She changed the subject.

“I’ve got an idea how we may be able to tip off the authorities about Stephenson.”

Jennifer spun her chair to face Heather. “All right. I guess I’m ready to hear this.”

“I’m all ears,” said Mark, leaning forward in his own chair. “Uh, by the way, would you stop? I’m getting whiplash.”

Heather stopped pacing. “Sorry,” she said and sat down on the corner of Jennifer’s bed. “We can send an e-mail message to the National Security Agency.”

Jennifer’s jaw dropped open. “Have you completely lost your mind? They would trace an e-mail in a heartbeat, right back to our three little teenaged butts.”

Mark nodded. “I hope that isn’t the whole plan. I’d get plenty of workout time in the prison weight room.”

Heather scowled. “Of course that isn’t the whole plan. Do you honestly think I would spend a whole week coming up with that?”

“Just making sure the numbers in your head haven’t stopped adding up.”

Heather ignored the jibe. “We’ve got to get a message to someone in the government with the ability to look into highly classified stuff. And from what I’ve found out, the NSA is the king of the secret world. They have computers tracking every e-mail and phone call on the planet.”

Jennifer nodded. “Yes. And that makes it safe for us to e-mail them, how?”

“Look, I didn’t say it was going to be easy. What we’ll have to do is send the e-mail from an untraceable source.” Heather paused, looking directly at Jennifer. “We’ll have to hack our way into some remote system on the Internet, then drop a virus. The virus will send the e-mail after it has covered its tracks.”

“Oh great,” said Jennifer. “There are just a few problems with that scheme. First, it’s highly illegal.”

“Well, I think we burned that bridge a long time ago,” Mark injected.

“And,” Jennifer continued, “the government, along with major corporations, has gotten pretty darned good at tracking people putting viruses on the Internet. As a matter of fact, they catch almost all of them.”

“We’re just going to have to be better than those people,” said Heather with a shrug.

“And,” Jennifer continued, “last but not least, e-mail isn’t secure. When that message gets sent, every major government is going to know what it says, even if it’s addressed to the NSA. And you can bet Dr. Stephenson will find out.”

“I’ve been thinking hard about that. Let’s talk about the e-mail security first,” Heather said. “Anyway, the virus is going to have to sense when it has hopped around the net enough to send the e-mail. The e-mail needs to include an encrypted computer address containing where the real message is stored. The first one to break the encryption on that message will be the first one to find the computer where the real message is.”

“What if the NSA doesn’t break the code first?” asked Jennifer.

“They’re supposed to be the best in the world at that. We’ll just need to hope that the US government isn’t wasting all that money. They will also have one more slight advantage. Anyone else will have had to pick up the e-mail from spying on the net and identify it for analysis. That should put the others a little behind, since the NSA will directly receive the e-mail clue.”

Jennifer shook her head. “The NSA is supposed to have more PhD mathematicians than anyone else and the best code-cracking super computers. How can our encryption stand up to that?”

Heather grinned. “That’s the beauty of it. I’ve been reading up on encryption theory. The best schemes are mathematically based. That’s why all those mathematicians work at the NSA.”

“I feel much better now,” said Jennifer, making Mark chuckle.

“Don’t you see? Even though the encryption methods I could research were not the classified ones, they were produced by some pretty darn good mathematicians. And I can see the solutions, automatically, easily. I don’t even have to think about it.”

“Now you’re freaking me out,” said Mark.

Heather smiled. “And I can do far better.”

A sudden light dawned in Jennifer’s face. “So you come up with an encryption that is difficult, but not impossible to break. Then we encrypt the e-mail message and count on the NSA to crack it first. What about the back trace they’re going to put on our virus?”

Heather shrugged. “We’ll launch the virus from some public place. You’re going to have to come up with a way of countering their trace.”

“I don’t know. The guys hunting us will be the best in the business.”

“Yeah,” said Mark. “They’re going to be on our asses like pigs on shit.”

Jennifer frowned. “Lovely image.”

“We’ll need to be able to see how the back trace is coming,” Heather said.

Jennifer rubbed her chin. “I guess I could have the virus leave a little agent program on each infected computer before it jumps to the next. That little guy’s job would just be to report on his health by posting a code to some public chat site we could monitor.”

Heather’s eyes widened. “What a great idea. I could design an algorithm to generate a unique code for each agent. All it would need to contain would be a unique ID, a time stamp, and the address of the computer it was on.”

Mark rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Jen just has to monitor those codes to see when they drop off the net.”

Jennifer nodded. “But the antivirus companies are going to try to kill off our virus.”

“That won’t be a big problem,” said Heather. “We don’t need it to last forever, just long enough to send the clue e-mail.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer. “But as that antivirus starts wiping out our little agents, it will make it hard to tell whether or not they are dying from the trace or just from the antivirus.”

“Actually I think that will help us,” Heather said. “I’ll be able to spot the difference in the patterns.”

Mark stood up. “Problem solved then. Sounds like you two have some work to do.”

“Not yet, buddy boy,” said Heather. “A couple of last details. Our laptops and handheld computers are going to have incriminating data on them. I’ll come up with another encryption algorithm that I think will be unbreakable, and then I need Jen to add that to our virus program.”

A confused look settled on Jennifer’s face. “Add it to our virus? How does that have anything to do with protecting the data on our systems?”

A sly smile settled on Heather’s lips. “Look. It won’t work to just have a program on our machines that encrypts any data we don’t want others to know about. If someone looks on our computers and finds a bunch of data with a super sophisticated encryption scheme, they’ll just want to know where we got the encryption. Game over.”

“Okay?”

“We let the virus encrypt some data on every machine with the unbreakable code. On our machines it will encrypt important stuff. On everyone else’s computer, it’ll just encrypt random garbage.”

Jennifer clapped her hands. “Then if anyone snoops around, it just looks like we got an infection like everyone else.”

“Yes. We’ll just need to make sure we get our computers infected from the Internet after we launch our virus.”

Jennifer closed her eyes. After several seconds she opened them. “I think it’ll work.”

Mark walked over and patted each of them on the back. “That’s it then. You two hop right on it and report in to me with your progress.”

“Not quite,” said Heather with a smile. “I need you to do something for us.”

Mark shook his head. “Why doesn’t that shock me?”

Heather continued. “With your enhanced language skills, do you think you could learn some Russian?”

Mark perked up, looking intrigued. “Russian? That’s a rather odd choice, isn’t it? What have you got up your sleeve?”

“I haven’t got it all worked out yet. Can you just do it?”

Mark grinned. “Sounds mysterious. I’ll give it a shot.”

“Good,” said Heather. “Jen, I’ll try to have the algorithms ready for you tomorrow.”

Jennifer nodded. “In the meantime, I’ll make sure I know everything I can about computer worms and viruses. I want to feel comfortable before I write a single line of code.”

Mark paused at the door and glanced back at his sister.

“Doc, don’t wait until you’re comfortable. By that time the sun will be a red giant. We need something by the time Christmas vacation is over.”

The eraser she threw bounced harmlessly off the door as Mark ducked out of the room.