The Second Ship (32 page)

Chapter 71

David Kurtz burst into Jonathan Riles’ office in such a hurry that the door banged against the doorstop, rippling the surface of Riles’ coffee.

Riles looked up from his papers. “Yes, David? What has your panties in a bunch?”

Although the hair on Kurtz’s head gave Albert Einstein a run for his money on a normal day, this afternoon it looked like he’d stuck a fork into a 220-volt socket. He tossed a stack of printouts on top of the other papers on Riles’ desk.

“We have a situation that requires your immediate involvement.”

Riles did not bother to glance at the readouts, focusing his steely gaze on Kurtz. “You have my full attention.”

David Kurtz paused, something the most brilliant computer scientist on the planet almost never did. “Since the speculation is so outlandish, I’ll stick solely to the facts. We have received another message from the author of the New Year’s Day Virus, and this one came in on the SIPRNet.”

“Have you traced the source?”

“We have.”

“And?”

“It originated right here in the building, on a subnet on the third floor.”

“What?”

“I’ve run a complete trace, including a full message log and router dump. There can be no doubt.”

“Shit. Have you isolated the subnet?”

“I have taken that subnet and the thirteen connecting subnets off-line, physically disconnecting them from all other systems while we work this.”

“Step it out another level.”

“Sir, that will take a quarter of the systems in the building off-line.”

“I don’t care. Do it.”

Kurtz pressed a button on his secure cell phone, spoke a couple of words into the mouthpiece, and then flipped it closed. “It is done.”

Riles rose from his chair, pacing to the digital display that took the place of the window that would have existed in a non-classified facility. He touched the screen, and the scene changed to a pristine beach in Maui.

“Now, David, tell me about this message.”

“Yes, sir. Since the encryption pattern exactly matched the New Year’s Day Virus, our IP sniffer picked it up instantly. It decrypted to five words: Rho Project Nanite Suspension Fluid.”

“On the SIPRNet in our building?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How is that possible?”

“There’s no way to do it from outside. The SIPRNet systems do not have a physical connection to any non-SIPRNet line. Also, this message did not propagate to any other systems like the virus did. It just originated on one of our networks.”

Riles turned away from Maui. “David, I want every single person with access to that part of the building restricted to site immediately. Place an emergency recall to anyone who is not currently in the building and get their asses in here ASAP. Get the interrogation team briefed and moving. Once we have everyone that could have possibly touched the system here and accounted for, nobody leaves until they are polygraphed. If the message didn’t come from outside the building, then I want to know which one of our people is responsible.”

Kurtz turned toward the door.

“David.”

Kurtz stopped to look back at Riles.

“That means everyone who could have touched any part of those subnets.”

“I’ll be the first to take the poly,” David Kurtz responded, then turned and walked out the door.

The door closed behind David Kurtz with a soft snick as the latch engaged. Jonathan Riles stared at the dark wood of the closed portal. He had just ordered over a hundred people to undergo an emergency polygraph that he did not think for a second would turn up anything. Still, if Jonathan Riles was anything, he was thorough. So he would do his duty. Tomorrow would be soon enough to delve into the other disturbing possibilities that whispered at the edge of his mind.

Walking back to his desk, he glanced down at the words on the topmost of Kurtz’s stack of papers.

Rho Project Nanite Suspension Fluid.

The words did nothing to ease his state of mind.

Chapter 72

The noise in the Pit was deafening. It seemed that half the state had turned out to see the basketball state championship game between the Los Alamos Hilltoppers and the Roswell Goddard Rockets. Even people who normally did not follow high school basketball had become enthralled with the story of the junior phenom, Marcus Aurelius Smythe.

Indeed, his entrance into the University of New Mexico basketball stadium generated a welcome that a victorious Caesar would have found thrilling. Heather was stunned by the crowd response, which rose to such volume that she began to wonder if her ears would start bleeding.

Sitting here in courtside seats with her mom, dad, and the Smythes, the thrill that surged through her enhanced nerve endings was tinged with just a hint of dismay. That Jack and Janet Johnson stood cheering immediately behind her only heightened her concern.

Janet put two fingers between her lips and sent out a whistle that caused Mark to turn his head toward them and smile. If Heather’s ears had not been bleeding before, they certainly were now.

Although the crowd’s size was surprising, both Heather and Jennifer had been expecting a response after Friday’s article in the sports section of the Albuquerque Journal.

“Junior Point Guard Sets the Court on Fire” the sports headline had blared. Immediately below the headline, the picture showed Mark spinning between defenders, the ball passing between his legs in mid-dribble. Jennifer had almost succeeded in making her brother feel guilty about the attention he was drawing when Janet had walked by in the school hallway.

“Mark, congratulations on the wonderful article. Jack and I are so excited for you.”

With those few words, the brief hint of guilt disappeared from Mark’s face, vaporized as thoroughly as rainwater on a volcano.

And so, here and now, they all stood together cheering in unison with thousands of others to whom Mark was a total stranger. Surreal.

Jennifer’s sharp elbow interrupted Heather’s reverie. Her eyes moved across the stadium to the spot at which Jennifer pointed.

“I didn’t know George Delome was friends with Raul,” Jennifer said.

At the far end of the floor, near the entry hallway from the locker rooms, Raul stood in close conversation with the Hilltoppers’ team manager.

“George is a member of Raul’s Bible study group.”

Just then the horn blared out, sending George scurrying across the floor toward the bench. Although Heather could not hear what was said, it was quite clear that Coach Harmon was less than pleased with George’s delay in getting the water bottles distributed.

While he may have been tardy to this point, the alacrity with which the pudgy boy scurried along the bench setting out the individual bottles behind the player positions was impressive. He paused momentarily behind Mark’s spot, fumbling through the bag to grab a bottle, but then he was on down the rest of the line in manager record time.

“What a geek,” Jennifer said, shaking her head as she watched him trip over some equipment at the far end.

Heather nodded. What Raul saw in the fat kid was beyond her. Maybe he just took pity on him.

The crowd cheered, signaling the tip-off and that the game was underway. Both teams opened up red hot, but the Rockets had no answer for Mark. They quickly abandoned their man-to-man defense, switching to a box-one zone. That let them keep a player man-to-man on Mark while everyone else played zone defense.

Nevertheless, by the end of the first quarter, Mark had already scored fifteen points and had four assists. Hilltoppers, twenty-six. Rockets, twenty.

The Hilltoppers continued building on their lead in the second quarter as Mark worked his magic, his spinning drives bringing the crowd to their feet.

Then he began to falter. Three times in a row, as he brought the ball down the court against the Rocket full-court press, Mark lost the ball to quick double teams. Even his shot deteriorated. Just before halftime, he shot an air-ball fifteen feet from the basket. As the buzzer sounded, he walked off the court shaking his head in disbelief.

The halftime score showed that the Hilltoppers still led, but their twelve point lead had dwindled to a mere two.

“What’s up with your brother?” Heather asked.

“No idea,” said Jennifer. “Maybe he’s taking my warning about playing too well to heart.”

“I don’t know. It didn’t look like he was trying to mess up.”

Jennifer shrugged. “You’ve got me. Let’s go get some popcorn.”

By the time they made their way up to the concession stands, conquered the impressive line, and returned back to their seats, the second half had started. If anything, Mark was playing worse than he had at the end of the first half. His movements seemed sluggish, even awkward.

To Heather’s surprise, Coach Harmon even yelled at him during a timeout, sitting him on the bench for the last two minutes of the third quarter. Mark just sat there beside the coach on the bench, shaking his head. He even refused the water that George Delome brought to him, despite the portly manager’s attempts to get him to drink.

The fourth quarter opened with Mark still sitting on the bench, as his team gradually fell farther behind. Finally, with just over six minutes left in the game and the Hilltoppers trailing, sixty-six to seventy-eight, Coach Harmon called a timeout and signaled for Mark to get back in the game.

Whatever the cause of his sloppy play for the last two quarters, the benching seemed to have helped clear Mark’s mind. His ball-handling sharpness was back, perhaps not to his normal level, but impressive nonetheless. And as he played, the Hilltoppers clawed their way back into the game.

With thirty seconds left on the clock, the fans in the stadium were on their feet, screaming their lungs out as Mark brought the ball up the court, trailing by one point. Even Jennifer was screaming so loud that Heather thought she might cough out a tonsil.

With the clock ticking down under ten seconds, Heather held her breath as Mark drove into the lane. It seemed that every one of the Goddard Rockets swarmed over him, slapping at the ball as he moved among them.

Mark dived forward, launching a pass between two Rockets to a wide-open Bobby Kline, who caught it cleanly at the top of the key. As the clock ticked to one, Bobby launched a jump shot that seemed to leave his hands in slow motion, arcing up toward the basket as the horn sounded, ending the game. The shot hit the rim, looped around the inside twice, and then rose back up to the balance on the edge before finally dropping through.

If the stadium had been loud before, the sound that filled it now was deafening. People rushed onto the court in a swarm, lifting Bobby on their shoulders and patting Mark and the other players on the back until they disappeared into the throng.

After the hubbub subsided, the rest of the evening passed very slowly. The team stayed to watch the 5A championship game, after receiving their own trophy and hitting the showers, and the Smythes and McFarlands stayed to watch that game too. The question on everyone’s lips was asked of Mark again and again throughout the evening.

Finally, Heather got her turn. “What happened in the second and third quarter?”

“I don’t know. I was just out of it for a while.”

“Yeah. Well, it’s a good thing you got it back together. It sure was looking bad for our side.”

Mark grinned. “It’s a good thing Bobby hit that shot or I don’t think I could have lived it down.”

“You still played the best game of anyone out there.”

“Somehow I don’t think the team and the fans would have seen it that way if we had lost that game. I’m just glad Bobby pulled it off.”

By the time the last game ended and the McFarlands pulled into their own driveway, Heather was exhausted. At least they had gotten home before the Smythes. Poor Jennifer would have to wait for the team bus to make its way back to the high school before they could pick up Mark and make their way back home. Heather was just glad it wasn’t her.

Awakening bright and early Sunday morning, Heather felt more rested than she had in days. Apparently, sleeping the sleep of exhaustion was good for her. By the time she had showered, eaten breakfast, and gotten into the car to head to church, a sense of well-being enveloped her. A quick stop at the convenience store put an end to that.

As she waited for her mother to make her way through the checkout line, Heather’s eyes spotted Mark’s picture on the front of the National Inquisitor. It was a close-up of Mark’s glassy stare as Coach Harmon leaned in nose-to-nose yelling at him. But it was the headline that almost made her drop her soda.

High School Prodigy’s Pre-Game Drinking Binge Almost Costs Team Championship

Not good, she thought. Not good at all.

Chapter 73

A cold draft swirled across the floor, sweeping dust bunnies from hidden nooks and chilling Jack’s feet as he leaned forward, scanning the papers occupying the center of his desk. That was the thing about drafty old attics in wintertime. No matter how many space heaters you strategically positioned, the draft won.

Janet’s head emerged through the trapdoor, followed immediately by a very shapely, black-leotard-clad body.

“So what have you got for me?”

She shrugged. “Just as we thought. Mark’s water bottle was drugged. It had been emptied, but traces of the Mickey were still present. It’s a good thing he didn’t drink any more of that stuff or he would have had more pressing problems than an off night on the basketball court.”

“And the fat team manager kid?”

“One of the school nerds. The interesting thing is that he’s one of a small group of outcasts that have joined a Bible study group headed up by Raul Rodriguez.”

“Rodriguez? The son of the Rho Project scientist?”

“Yes. He’s an interesting story. Two months ago he was dying of terminal brain cancer. Then, on his deathbed, his cancer suddenly went into complete remission. Looking at him now, you’d never guess he’d been sick.”

“So you think Raul got this other kid to drug Mark’s water? What’s the connection?”

“Heather. Raul has the hots for her, and from what I can tell, she likes him back. Mark doesn’t even try to hide his distaste for that friendship. It’s obvious that Raul doesn’t like Mark either.”

Jack nodded. “The name Rodriguez has been popping up a lot this morning. But before I get to that, did you get a chance to read the secure fax from Riles?”

“No.”

“The NSA has gotten four new messages from the Rho Project informant. All of them originated on different parts of the SIPRNet inside the Puzzle Palace.”

“How is that possible?”

“It isn’t. Riles had every one of the associated subnets taken off-line, people polygraphed, the works. Nothing. Even more interesting, they traced each of the messages. All of them seem to have just appeared on the network.”

“Has someone managed to physically tap the cables?”

“No. And more than half of the messages seem to have originated on fiber-optic cables.”

“So I guess Riles is freaking.”

Jack laughed. “Absolutely. He’s not the type to tolerate unexplained intrusions on his security systems.”

“So they don’t have any leads?”

“Not anything they can lay their fingers on. There was one very interesting anomaly. What do you know about the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s a big, two-million-pound bottle of heavy water over a mile below ground in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ontario. The whole thing is surrounded by a sixty-foot-thick array of photomultiplier tubes and is suspended in a huge tank of light water.”

“Why do they need such a big detector, and why put it so far below ground?”

“Neutrinos are very hard to detect. They can pass through almost anything, including the Earth, and give off almost no sign that they were ever there. They put the detector way below ground to block out other types of cosmic radiation. It lets them focus on the Cerenkov radiation that the neutrino and heavy-water interactions produce.”

“So what’s the point of measuring them?”

“That’s what gets interesting. The neutrinos are a side effect of certain high-energy interactions. The reason Riles got interested was that his team monitored reports of unusual neutrino flux measurements.”

“Let me guess. The times corresponded to the times of the SIPRNet hacks.”

“Bingo.”

“So what technologies would cause that?”

“As far as we know, nothing on the planet could produce that kind of neutrino flux.”

“Can its source be traced?”

“No.”

“So we’re dead-ended.”

“Not quite. There’s the content of the message itself. It contained exactly the same five words on each transmission. Rho Project Nanite Suspension Fluid.”

Janet moved over to look down at the fax. “So we know the message appeared on an un-hackable secure network, that at the same time, a fancy detector picked up signals that cannot be produced by anything on Earth, and that the message talks about a Rho Project technology.”

“Specifically nanites. Three guesses as to the name of one of the nanotechnology specialists working on the Rho Project science team.”

“Dr. Ernesto Rodriguez?”

“Bingo again.”

“And his son has just made a miraculous recovery from terminal cancer.”

“Too many miracles for my taste.”

Janet was pacing now, weaving her way through the sparse furniture, letting her fingertips trace around its edges like a feline. God, she was sexy.

“One thing doesn’t make sense. If the next Rho Project technology to be released is some sort of nanotechnology, then why is someone warning us about it? It’ll be reviewed when it’s released.”

“Apparently our mole on the project thinks it’s dangerous enough to go to extraordinary lengths to make sure he gets our attention.”

“What about the direct approach? Can’t Riles just inquire through black-ops channels about the research?”

“It’s so compartmentalized that none of the normal channels are working. He’s afraid that if he presses, someone will put a stop to his little inquiry before he has anything to back up his suspicions. Despite everything, that is still all we have. Suspicions.”

“You want me to focus some extra attention on Raul?”

“While I look into his father. Find out everything you can about his illness, his recovery, any medical history after he got well, his friends. Everything.”

As Janet began climbing down the ladder, she paused to look back.

“It’s odd, isn’t it?”

“What’s that?”

“How a sweet young girl like Heather McFarland can be such a weirdo magnet.”

Jack only nodded.