AMPED (2 page)

After a few torturously long minutes of absolute silence she heard someone enter the far end of the large lab. Was it David? If not, her only chance was to remain as quiet as possible and hope she wasn’t spotted.

Blood pounded in her ears. Not being able to see an inch in front of her was unnerving on a primal level. She had been in any number of deadly situations against incredible odds, but she couldn’t remember ever feeling as helpless, or afraid, as she did now.

A faint light source accompanied the person into the lab—
a partially covered penlight
. Her heart swelled with relief. It had to be David.

The form was moving quickly in her direction, slamming into small obstacles as it did so. But as it neared she could vaguely make out a bulky, monstrous shape; a shape that couldn’t possibly be David. A shape that couldn’t even be
human
.

She opened her mouth to gasp when what she was seeing finally registered. It was David, all right. But he was running with a large body draped perpendicularly over his neck and shoulders, in a classic fireman’s carry.

An instant later she realized that the man he was wearing like a two hundred pound scarf was Ross Metzger.

He was unconscious. And quite possibly even dead.

***

Desh thrust the tiny flashlight into Kira’s hand as he reached her location. “Lead us to an office,” he whispered, his movement remarkably steady given the dead weight draped around his shoulders and neck. “Hurry.”

Kira began picking her way between the equipment, with Desh behind her.

“Ross?” she asked simply.

“Gunshot to the stomach. I applied a makeshift bandage, but he doesn’t have much time.”

Less than a minute later they arrived at a row of large offices. Kira chose the fourth one down and threw open the door. Desh carefully lowered Metzger to the floor just outside. He searched his friend’s pockets, hoping for matches or a lighter, but came away with only a cell phone. He handed this to Kira and followed her into the office.

“A large group of Commandoes breached the facility,” whispered Desh. “A few dismantling the cold fusion reactor. Ross was able to draw the others into his lab as well. He was shot, but he managed to crawl out and scan his thumb to seal up the room.”

The battery-powered steel outer walls of the lab had just finishing sliding into place, taking the men inside by surprise, when Desh had arrived.

“Before Ross lost consciousness he told me there were at least six of them, all in black,” continued Desh grimly. “And all with night vision equipment. He said he could tell from their equipment and weaponry that they weren’t affiliated with the U.S. military or black-ops, but were high priced mercenaries. The cream of the crop.”

“Mercenaries hired by whom?” whispered Kira.

Desh shook his head helplessly. He had no idea. And he had no idea how they had managed to pull it off, either. What they had done should have been
impossible
. No team was
that
good. They had breached a facility protected by electronic security second to none—without setting off a single alarm. They had killed main and backup power using timing a Swiss watch would envy.

Desh guessed they had only made one mistake. One of them must have tripped a sensor in Ross’s lab when they had begun to dismantle the reactor, which had alerted him. Since breaching the company after hours without an alarm going off was impossible, Metzger must have thought the sensor had malfunctioned.

A deeply troubled expression marred Kira’s flawless complexion. “How long before they break out of Ross’s lab?” she whispered.

“Five minutes—ten minutes tops.”

“Five or ten
minutes
? I’ve seen the specs. It should take them hours—at best. You think they’re
that
good?”

“Better,” replied Desh simply. “But they’ll have to be cautious while they’re pulling their Houdini, just to be sure I’m not waiting to pick them off as they exit. So maybe ten to fifteen.”

Desh fell silent as he thought through their options. These men were sure to be running this op by the numbers, which meant they’d have at least one man watching the exit and one watching the parking lot, each with night vision equipment of their own. A blind man going up against a sighted adversary had about as much chance as a naked man going up against a tank.

Desh knew he only had one hope: he had to even the playing field.

If only they had brought a gellcap, the ultimate in emergency protection, things would be different. But they had become convinced they were safely off the radar. And they had decided that amplifying their intelligence outside of a secure facility, invoking their brilliant but often sociopathic alter egos, wasn’t worth the risk.

 
Kira lit up both cell phones in her possession and handed Desh the penlight. He began rifling through desk drawers. He stopped when he found a pocket-sized packet of facial tissue. He carefully removed all of the remaining tissue and cracked open the door, shining the penlight down the hall in both directions. The coast appeared to be clear.

“Stay by the door,” he instructed Kira. “I’m gonna torch the place. It’ll nullify their night vision advantage and set off alarms.”

The facility conducted ultra-high temperature experiments on a regular basis, so while powerful hoses were located in each lab, an automatic sprinkler system had not been installed.

“Good thinking,” said Kira.

“If we’re lucky they’ll decide to take their reactor and call it a night.”

Desh glanced at Kira’s worried but dazzling face and could tell her mind was racing. “Hold on a second,” she said. She tapped the screen of Ross’s phone three times and held it to her ear.

The call was quickly answered and a young woman’s voice came over the phone. “9-1-1. What is your emergency?”

“
There’s a huge fire at Advanced Physics International on Industrial Parkway!
” she blurted hysterically. “
Send fire trucks right away! And an ambulance. There’s a man here with a gunshot wound to the stomach. Hurry!
” she finished, ending the connection.

Desh nodded in admiration. “Well done,” he said, stacking a loose pile of facial tissue on the floor near the desk. He didn’t have matches, but he had been trained to improvise with whatever was at hand. He removed the cover from the back of his cell phone, popped out its thin, wafer sized battery, and scraped the plastic away from the positive and negative leads on one edge with his pocket knife. He then laid the blade across both leads, creating a short that shot sparks into the stack of tissue. An ember was born almost immediately, and seconds later he had nursed it into a flame. He carefully fed it sheets of loose paper and in less than a minute the flames were licking up the sides of the wooden desk.

Finally, Desh tossed the cell phone battery into the adolescent fire and retreated to the door. The outer part of the battery quickly melted away to unleash the lithium inside, which was violently combustible and erupted the fire to double its size.

The light from this office bonfire was more than welcome, but the heat was already becoming intense. Even so, within five minutes he needed this entire section of offices to become a raging blaze; a wall of fire reaching up to the ceiling.

Desh used the penlight to verify the hall was still clear and then hefted Metzger back into position slumped across his neck and shoulders.

“We need to help it spread,” he said to Kira, and then rolled up some paper and held it against the edge of the fire. When it took, he moved rapidly to an office two doors down, seemingly oblivious to the weight he was carrying, and tossed the makeshift torch onto a pile of stapled papers on the desk. Kira took his lead and did the same to an office two doors down in the opposite direction.

They waited almost five minutes as the fire leaped from one office to another, growing exponentially at a staggering rate.

“Let’s go,” said Desh finally, heading toward the building’s entrance. “We’ll stay close to the fire and keep it at our backs. Night vision will be useless and we won’t have to worry about attacks from behind. But stay alert to everything in front of us,” he cautioned.

The building was becoming ever hotter as the blaze continued to double in size every minute or so. The bigger it got the faster it spread, and they found they had to keep farther and farther ahead of the invisible wall of unbearable heat that extended outward from the raging wall of flames. Worse, air quality was quickly deteriorating, and every lungful of air seemed to have a lower oxygen content, and a higher smoke and soot content, than the one before. They began coughing.

Desh made a command decision. The fire was giving off enough light now that they could leave it a much greater distance behind them. It was time to go for broke. He communicated his thoughts to Kira and covered the remaining thirty-five yards to the main lobby at a slow jog.

They arrived about twelve minutes after they had started the fire and took cover behind an oversized marble reception desk, crouching low to avoid being seen. Desh lowered Metzger to the floor and considered their options.

If a merc or two were still manning the entrance, their night vision would now be useless, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t spot Desh and Kira the old fashioned way. It just meant that both sides would now be able to see, taking away a huge advantage from the mercs but still leaving them with superior weaponry and a far superior tactical position.

Desh’s eyes swept the periphery of the lobby, calculating possible approaches. Finally he peered cautiously around the reception desk, wondering if he would be greeted by immediate gunfire.

His eyes widened in excitement. Firemen were streaming into the building, pulling on oxygen masks as they did so. And there was no sign of armed mercenaries. If any had been guarding the door, they appeared to be gone. Tension poured from Desh’s body.

He shot Kira an expression of relief and motioned for her to take a look. She did so and blew out a long, grateful breath, while Desh pressed two fingers against the carotid artery in Metzger’s neck.

A horrified look came over his face.

Metzger hadn’t made it. They had been just a few minutes away from getting him to an ambulance. But they had been too late.

As hardened as Desh was, he reeled from the loss. For a few seconds he couldn’t breathe, as though he had been sucker punched in the gut. His reaction told Kira everything she needed to know. A tear escaped from her eye and rolled down her face.

Desh forced his mind back from the depths of despair. They weren’t out of the woods yet. He would have to mourn the loss of his friend another time. He and Kira had a long night ahead of them. They couldn’t afford to be questioned and would need to slip away while everyone was distracted.

Desh lifted his friend so the fire wouldn’t take his body, and he and Kira headed toward the entrance. While it was possible the assault team was still in Metzger’s lab surrounded by flame, Desh was nearly certain that they had escaped.

But who were they? Where had they gotten their information? And what was their ultimate objective? He had absolutely no idea.

All he knew for sure was that Kira and their group were no longer off the grid. That they had been caught with their pants down by a lethal and exceedingly capable adversary. And that this unknown adversary was almost certain to strike at them again.

PART ONE

“Internet servers worldwide would fill a small city, and the K (the world’s most powerful supercomputer) sucks up enough electricity to power 10,000 homes. The incredibly efficient brain sucks up less electricity than a dim lightbulb and fits nicely inside our head. The human genome, which grows our body and directs us through years of complex life, requires less data than a laptop operating system.”

—
Mark
Fischetti
, Computers vs. Brains

Scientific American
, November, 2011

1

Seth Rosenblatt paused on his way to the parking lot to take in his surroundings. No matter how many visits he made to this place, how many times he walked the tranquil, idyllic wooded grounds, he always felt awe-struck and privileged to be here, where giants had stood on the shoulders of other giants to see ever farther into the previously impenetrable secrets of nature. Here was a cloistered retreat that had welcomed and financed the likes of Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Kurt Godel, Alan Turing, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Freeman Dyson. For a physicist there was no more hallowed ground.

He soaked in the ambience of Princeton’s fabled
Institute for Advanced Study
one last time before walking to his rental car, wanting to put off leaving the grounds for as long as he could manage, especially since he was going straight to the airport for a brutal flight to Tokyo. He hated flying. He hated lines and pat downs and cramped seats with too little legroom for his lanky body. He hated stale, recycled, dehydrating airplane air. A trip from the East Coast to Japan, with a stop in California, seemed never-ending.

Just as he entered the nearly deserted lot where he had parked, a white minivan appeared out of nowhere and began hurtling toward him. Rosenblatt froze, waiting for the driver to see him and take corrective action. Precious seconds passed before he was finally able to comprehend the incomprehensible: the driver hadn’t just failed to see him for a brief moment; the driver had seen him and was intent on turning him into
road kill
.

His muscles tensed for action but he knew at a visceral level that it was too late: he couldn’t possibly remove himself from the vehicle’s path in time. He closed his eyes and braced for the bone crushing impact.

Mercifully, the impact never came. At the last instant the minivan swerved sharply and screeched to a halt in front of him, its side doors only two feet from his face.

Rosenblatt’s profound terror transformed into pure rage, directed squarely at the asshole who had dared to scare him so intensely. “
What in the hell are you doing?”
he bellowed.
“Are you crazy?”