The World Keys (The Syker Key Book 2) (4 page)

His moderately competent assistant was trying to get his attention. “You have a meeting with the CEO of Stellar Global Funds at nine o’clock tonight. Even with this traffic we should be in New York with lots of time to spare.”

“Yes, Declan, I remember,” Rob lied. He didn’t need to remember, that’s what the assistant was there for.

***

Jessica couldn’t believe it.

With some help from Jack she was able to find the asteroid that he had calculated could be headed to Earth. The problem was it wasn’t one asteroid. There were thousands. Tens of thousands.

And Pan said this was deliberate.

From the relative safety of her environment suit, she could see the expanse of rock stretching out for hundreds, thousands of miles, but without the Key they would have been almost impossible to see. They were all black, or at least mostly black. Not painted, but scorched.

How in the name of God was she going to redirect them all?

She returned to Colorado. This time they had chosen a location where she wouldn’t boil to death after putting the suit on, and the cool mountain air of Colorado was a nice compromise between boiling to death in the Austin Mini and freezing in the outside air.

After lifting her visor, she looked John in the eyes. He knew. And he had no more answers than she did.

***

It was like chasing ghosts, Arthur figured.

With Pan’s help he had been able to steal a username and password where needed, get into the various banking systems and follow the money.

Someone had infected the pizza sent to Jack Weston, and Pan was able to track that person down. Once Arthur knew who it was, he was able to find payment in his bank account and track that back. That’s where it got fun.

His salary was being paid by the government, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So much for following the money. But Arthur had an idea.

Everybody receives orders from someone, all they had to do was track them down. A little more assistance from Pan and Arthur was able to get into the telephone company systems and track down every message sent to the FBI agent.

He found it: “Jack Weston. 15 Sirocco Close, Williams, Arizona. Salmonella.”

Simple enough. So who sent it? Unknown, but thankfully the phone company kept all sorts of records.

Sitting at a phone company computer in the middle of the night, carefully avoiding the security guards, he managed to trace the message back to a mobile phone in New York. A mobile phone that wasn’t in use anymore, and unfortunately one that was not on a contract.

Another dead end. Or...

Even the off contract phones are serialized, and the phone company knows who sold them. Arthur was thankful for his typing skills at this point, because there was a hell of a lot of typing pulling on these threads.

There, a 7-11 in Manhattan. The message was sent at 6:45 pm, and according to the phone company the phone had been activated at 6:42 and hadn’t been used since that one message was sent. Single use phone indeed.

Thankfully everybody had cameras these days, especially in New York.

A quick jaunt to the 7-11 Headquarters in Dallas, and he was in luck. All the camera systems were centrally accessible. He suspected it was the result of a lawsuit from a few years before, but it didn’t matter, because he found the footage he was looking for.

Only one person purchased a phone between 6:05 and 6:50. He took a printscreen, then sent a message to Pan.

How do you feel about breaking into the FBI?

He could actually feel Pan smile at the idea.

A moment later both of them were in the empty field office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Without speaking Arthur explained that a small field office was less likely to have night staff. Pan smiled at his friend. It was totally logical.

Again Pan was able to provide a username and password for the FBI’s systems. Damn that Key of Knowledge was handy.

Arthur scanned the image of the man into the system, and in less than two minutes it spit out a name. Declan Smythe.

Something else happened too, Arthur could even feel it, but Pan was clearly sensing something strongly. Somewhere in that labyrinthian computer system alarms started going off.

“Let’s get out of here.”

They disappeared. There should not have been any evidence they were there; they were careful to pick a location without cameras, yet as soon as that name was returned, something deep within the computers picked it off.

Arthur decided to see how deep that ran. The two of them went to a phone company terminal in Manhattan and decided to look up Declan Smythe. This time, no alarm. Okay, so the little systems they had set up appeared to only affect the government systems. This guy was pretty well protected.

Next, the bank. Who made deposits into his account?

It took Arthur an hour to find his account, flitting from bank to bank, betting that it would be one of the big ones in Manhattan, and he was right. So who was paying him?

Not the government. Finally progress! Deposits were made by a numbered company, that was easy enough to trace, but by God did they bury it deeply. They could see there were logging systems in place to track who had accessed certain records, so unlike the phone company they scanned for intruders here. No matter, the logs appeared to be check daily, so they were safe for a few hours.

Pan said he had an idea and disappeared.

The funds that ended up in Declan’s bank account originated ten companies up, eight of them numbered companies who’s apparently sole purpose was the redistribution of funds. One advantage to these global banking systems was that at this level he was able to track the transactions from one terminal. He was thankful for the small mercy.

But it was the last company on that list that was important: Gaston Holdings, PLC.

Holy. Shite. That could not be a coincidence, since it was Johann Gaston that had tried to kill Pan not once, but twice.

Pan returned with Jack in tow, and Arthur understood what he was doing. Arthur showed them the name. Pan merely grimaced.

Arthur gave up his seat to Jack, and for seventeen minutes they watched him track down the logs of their transactions and delete them. Damned handy having a programmer on the team.

Twice they were interrupted by security guards, but Pan was literally able to make them appear invisible. All they had to do was stop making noise for a few moments while the guard did his business.

Then it was time to leave.

Pan took Jack back to the apartment, but Arthur decided to go somewhere nice and anonymous and start digging into Gaston Holdings.

He liked working in coffee shops on warm, sunny days, probably like just about anyone, and this time he picked a small Kafenion in southern Greece. Sometimes it was a challenge finding one with Internet access, but thankfully it was becoming more common.

He looked out into the morning sun splashing off the Mediterranean. He’d lost track of the days, but judging by the fishing boats firing up he’d guess it wasn’t the weekend. Arthur liked Greece, too. It was warm, the locals enjoyed their disgusting Uzo as much as he enjoyed his bitter, and he’d always found it easy to make friends here.

In some ways it reminded him of a simpler time, though he was well aware of the danger of viewing the past with the proverbial rose colored glasses.

His Greek was a little rusty, but he managed to get a coffee ordered without making a total ass of himself. Then it was down to business. Arthur opened his laptop.

They were big. Almost nobody knew about them, but their holdings were immense. They could single handedly wipe out the debt of several small nations, or large ones for that matter. Or collapse the economy of those same nations.

Arthur suspected the latter had been employed a time or two.

Based in Bern, Switzerland. Great. That meant more secrecy, and he suspected that the Swiss had much greater control of their records.

It was time to start pulling on more threads.

There were simply too many asteroids.

John doubted that the three of them could muster enough energy from the Key to move them all. It wasn’t magic after all, just redistribution of energy, and there was only so much of it.

But every second he delayed the threat became worse.

If he thought Earth was defenseless now, what shape would it be in after he spent all that energy redirecting a bunch of rocks? It wasn’t starting to look promising.

“Well, I know what I’d like to do with a couple of those damned asteroids,” Jessica said, removing the last of the space suit.

John gave her an inquiring look.

“There are a few places on the planet I sure wouldn’t mind get a visit from them.”

“Such as?”

“HAARP, Wall Street, Washington, the EU headquarters-”

John stopped her. “Holy shit, you’re right. Do you think you could move one of those asteroids straight to Earth?”

Jessica stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. Then slowly a smile creeped onto her face. “What did you have in mind?”

John smiled back. “Well, my plan to take out HAARP was going to take another month to work. I think you just came up with a way to shut it down right now.”

Jessica grinned widely, apparently liking the idea. Then her smile faded and she sighed. “I have to put the space suit on again, don’t I.”

***

Something had been nagging at Chuck. There was a power fluctuation that had been growing ever so slightly, a variability in the energy curve. He doubted anybody else would have seen it, but his obsession with clean signals had paid off. There was a minor drift, like a top that was slowly starting to fall.

Fortunately he had built some extra controls into the system to accommodate such fluctuations before they hit the array. He was at risk of tripping a breaker, but better to trip a few breakers than melt down the array.

He wasn’t worried beyond trying to find the source, but it was enough for one day. He was tired, and decided to call it a night.

At that moment fifteen large meteors struck the Earth’s atmosphere in brilliant displays of fire and light.

The meteorites struck strategically in places where they would be seen by tens of thousands of people around the world, but do little or no actual damage.

Except in Alaska.

At 9:04 PM local time, the HAARP array melted under an air blast from two hundred feet up as a two hundred and fifty foot diameter meteorite blasted into Earth’s atmosphere at a hundred times the speed of sound. Twenty technicians and guards lost their lives, including Chuck Magnuson.

***

Jessica was panting. The exertion was enormous, and she wasn’t sure how much more of that she could have done. And that was fifteen damned rocks. Out of tens of thousands. If all of them struck the Earth at the same time the destruction would be enormous. Spread out over time, they had a chance, but time wasn’t their friend.

She knew, or hoped, that because of the mass of sightings around the world, the government would in no way be able to fall back on a false flag attack, claiming terrorists had destroyed a government installation. The public would hopefully know better, since everyone had seen the meteor storm for themselves.

It was going to be a very busy time for meteors, and there was an unexpected side effect she thought about: Everyone was going to be watching the skies now.

All she had done was teleport them a few light minutes from just inside the orbit of Mars directly to Earth, very, very carefully landing them in unpopulated areas, but at the same time areas where they’d be seen. Except for HAARP of course. That was deliberate. And she was glad to be rid of the monster.

After depositing the last rock from high above the Earth, Jessica just floated and watched the blue marble below her. It was a breathtaking sight, seeing the whole of the planet in your sight. She could sense the hundreds of satellites above and below her, and could even see the International Space Station. She hoped they weren’t looking her direction, since a NASA space suit was a pretty bright light in direct sun.

From up here the world’s differences seemed so petty, insignificant. If only every person could see the world like this, she was convinced things would be different.

It broke her heart to think of the destruction coming if they couldn’t find a way to stop it.

Something twigged her attention. The Key was showing her something, something in the electrical field. There was a problem, and destroying HAARP hadn’t solved it.

Something else at the south pole was bleeding into the ionosphere.

***

Janet Godfrey was a scientist, not a photographer, but she was glad to have her tiny Nikon with her on the International Space Station. Besides her children would probably have killed her if she hadn’t taken it. After she heard about the meteors striking the planet below, she trained her camera on the skies, trying to find any evidence of more incoming threats.

Instead she saw something bright and unmoving, and zoomed in. Thankfully she had decided to put it in video mode, and captured...it? Them? Someone in a space suit, it had to be. And in a blink it was gone.

She replayed the video on the camera, and digitally zoomed right up. It
was
a space suit, one of NASA’s. She couldn’t believe it, but being a bit of the rational sort, filed it away under “things she didn’t understand, yet.” Emphasis on “yet.”

Janet knew that NASA would love to put a lock on something like this, but dammit she was from Mother England and was not about to let any damned Yankee tell her what she could and could not do with her footage.

So after posting the footage on Facebook to all her friends and family, she tweeted it to the twenty five thousand people following her. She grinned wickedly. She knew NASA would be upset. What were they going to do, fire her?

Within the hour her followers mushroomed to over five million.

***

“It’s a disaster, a fucking disaster!” Rob screamed.

How the hell had this fallen apart so quickly? He almost called the Vice President and demanded that the Internet feed to the ISS be cut, but he realized that cat was already out of the bag.

Declan sat in the background calmly. He was probably used to the odd outburst, but Rob was livid this time.

A few minutes earlier Rob had had his proverbial ass chewed out by his superiors, calling his management of the situation incompetent. He was hard pressed to disagree, but clearly it was the result of incompetency on the part of those who worked for
him
.

HAARP was gone, destroyed apparently in the same meteor storm that was seen everywhere around the planet. Someone had hacked into the FBI and found Declan. And to top it off one of the damned scientists on the ISS had taken video footage of something, then leaked it out to the Internet.

If he could have, he would have ordered the scientist be terminated right there on the station.

Instead, he did the next best thing. He called someone in Hollywood who owed him a favor. “Listen, that footage? You’re going to pick it apart and explain conclusively that it’s faked.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“I don’t give a flying fucking grandmother how! Just fucking do it!” and he slammed the phone down. He didn’t like losing his temper, but it was an extreme situation.

Actually, that wasn’t true. He loved losing his temper. It was therapeutic. But you couldn’t show people that, they tended to get self righteous about it.

HAARP was another problem. It meant they were down to only one facility. It was up to the Antarctica installation now.

But that space suit. Declan reminded him that NASA had reported three missing suits. So this could be one of them, but who was using it? Rob knew his superiors had the technology to teleport, but if it was them they would have told him.

Somebody else was playing with them, and Rob determined that if it was the last thing he did, he would make sure every single last damned one of them would die. Painfully, if he could manage it.

***

John was laughing, and it annoyed Jessica.

Sitting in their apartment, watching the video from the ISS of her in her space suit on the television, John clearly saw some humor in the situation that Jessica did not.

He hugged her. “Honey, don’t worry about it. It’s probably going to end up working in our favor!”

She was still beet red from embarrassment, she was sure. She could feel the hot flash on her face.

He kissed her and looked her in the eyes. “Jessica, listen to me, I was right there with you and just as awestruck, so if it was me in the suit we would have been in the same situation.”

He was right. He usually was, even though she hated to admit it and would certainly never tell him that. At least he never bragged about it.

“So now what?” she asked. “I don’t think we can use the same trick on that other site.”

When Jessica had told him about the southern version of HAARP running in Antarctica, he wasn’t surprised.

“You’re right, it would be too obvious. Unfortunately it probably means we can’t touch it without attracting too much attention. At least one of them is gone, it could give us a fighting chance.”

Still, Jessica was worried. The footage of her hanging out in space in a stolen space suit was going to attract the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people.

And she suspected she knew who, someone her father had just spent the last few days studying.

***

Arthur returned home. Catherine was there alone, and he gave her a tired kiss. He was exhausted. She knew him pretty well, and had tea ready for him. The centuries had certainly not diminished the love he felt for his wife, and he smiled at her. She had long been the most comforting part of his life.

“Thank you my angel,” he said, bringing the cup to his lips.

“Any luck?”

“Information overload, yes, luck? I don’t know. I certainly know a lot more about this organization, but I don’t know if any of it can help us just yet.”

He decided he needed to discuss his findings with his old friend.
Pan
, he thought.
I could use your help.

A few seconds later Pan appeared in the living room, and he plopped down, exhausted himself. “Should we compare notes?” he said half sarcastically.

Catherine got up and served Pan a tea as well, and he appeared grateful. “Catherine, my dear, you are an angel of mercy.”

“Pan, these things I’m finding, they’re too neat, too perfect. I’m seeing conspiracy, coincidence, blind luck, things that would be too improbable to believe if I hadn’t found it myself.”

Pan nodded, understanding. “There’s a very simple reason for that Arthur. What you’ve found are breadcrumbs left by whoever is in control. And those breadcrumbs are the fallout from time travel.”

Arthur gave him a surprised look. He could feel his wife do the same thing as she sat down beside him. It was ridiculous on the face of it.

“They’re using time travel as a means to manipulate the present, but they have a problem.”

“What problem is that?” Arthur asked.

Pan thought about his answer for a moment. “It’s almost like a case of wishful thinking. They can manipulate people and events that they feel serve their purpose. But their subjects have to be ignorant of the control system for it to work.”

“So?”

“We’re not ignorant of it, and frankly because we’ve all been touched by the Key in some way or another, we appear to be a little immune to it.”

Catherine appeared to consider something. “But not just immune,” she added. “They can’t even see us, so to speak, isn’t that right? It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Exactly, otherwise they would have dealt with us centuries ago and made sure we could not have gotten to where we are now.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“So what does that mean now?” Arthur asked.

“I’m not sure,” Pan admitted. “It could mean we have an opportunity to act without them having much of a chance to stop us. Hell, it’s not like we have much of a chance of success even if they left us alone.”

Arthur mulled it over. It was the slightest glimmer of hope.

“So one problem we didn’t know about is not a problem, but we still have no idea how the hell to protect the planet,” Catherine said.

She was right. They needed hope and a clue, and so far they hadn’t had either.

It was time to get back to work.

***

Jack was in heaven.

Well, technically nowadays it was called
the
heavens. Jessica had agreed on a slight diversion of their effort to put Jack into the space suit and let him see the Earth from space. At least she’d teleported him well out of visual range of the ISS, but he didn’t care. If he had been in range he would have waved.

He asked,
thought
, Jessica to turn him around so he could see the stars, and a few seconds after his eyes adjusted he had trouble catching his breath. He lifted his glare shield.