Halon-Seven (54 page)

He shook his head. “As much as I’d like to share, I’m afraid that’s classified. But it’s for your protection. And I need to be clear. What we’re going to discuss must stay between the three of us, at least for the moment. Meade was very specific in requesting that this information not be disseminated—his words, not mine.”

Hondo still had a finger in his ear, wiggling it to relieve pressure. “That sounds ominous, mate.”

“You’re telling me,” Reese agreed.

Cyrus didn’t respond. It was important to him that he be given their word, formally. He just waited for their response.

“You know me, I can keep a secret. I won’t tell a soul. You have my word,” Hondo confirmed.

Cyrus could tell by the look in Hondo’s eyes that the man was somewhat unnerved by his need for a formal agreement on that matter. Hondo was realizing that the matter had gravity.

“I promise,” Reese said simply.

Satisfied, Cyrus turned to the heavy steel door that was the only way out of the concrete chamber. He entered a twelve-digit code into the touchscreen panel beside the door handle and waited. A moment later, the light at the top of the LCD touch screen went green and there was a hissing sound, as the airtight seal around the door released.

When he pulled the door open, Cyrus could see the surprise register on both Hondo’s and Reese’s faces. They were both shocked to find that the door was nearly six inches thick and contained a powerful retractable pressure seal which had pulled back into the door when the lock had disengaged. Hondo was grimacing again and had his finger in his ear once more. The release of the door’s seal had changed the pressure in the room. Cyrus felt his own ears pop again in response.

They stepped into a wide concrete hallway that was brightly lit with overhead fixtures. A man sat on a battery operated golf cart a few yards away. “Good day, Mister Cooper,” the man said with a smile. “Room 16D has been reserved for you and is ready when you are.”

“Thank you,” Cyrus replied. He motioned for Reese and Hondo to step onto the golf cart. Hondo took a spot on the seat beside the driver, and Reese took one end of the front-facing rear seat.

The driver’s mention of room 16D raised a question in Cyrus’s mind. He had no idea how large the underground installation might be. He’d only been here once before, shortly after reviewing the life altering set of files that Walter Meade had left. Along with the files, Meade had included the access code for an undocumented platform as well as the communication protocols he needed to use prior to teleporting to the underground facility. Other than a few additional scraps of information, Cyrus knew precious little about the secret installation.

Cyrus stepped on board the cart and slid into the seat beside Reese. A moment later, the cart pulled away. It gained speed and went cruising down the seemingly endless concrete corridor.

Reese leaned in close to Cyrus. “I’ve been dying to ask. What did you say to Clayton that caused such an about face? One minute he thinks he has you over a barrel, and the next he’s pulling his men back and walking away with his tail between his legs,” she whispered.

Stifling a grin, Cyrus looked back at her and shrugged. “I simply reminded him that a man in his position would do well to think twice before blackmailing a field-proficient operative with an eidetic memory. In very nonspecific terms, I suggested that such an individual was likely to run across sensitive information, in the course of an operation, that might reflect poorly on the chain of command. I explained that such exposures are commonplace and often unavoidable. The problem is that an operative with a photographic memory can’t help but file away every disparate bit of information. And sooner or later, he’ll start to connect the dots. It’s a hazard of the profession.”

Reese’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You blackmailed him? You must have something nasty on him!”

Cyrus considered the still unexplained disappearance of Clayton’s prior boss, Monica Fichtner. Though complicated, the bad blood Cyrus had with the Coalition could be traced back to her. To date, no one had discovered the location of Fichtner’s body. It was believed by some that many of the improvements Clayton had since made to the organization were thanks to a healthy fear of a similar fate.

“Sometimes people just need a little motivation to do the right thing,” Cyrus offered in cryptic reply.

The cart took another corner and stopped before an innocuous steel door with a nameplate marked simply
16D
.

“Here you go, sir,” the driver said, and waited for his passengers to step from the vehicle. “When you’re through, just dial the operator and another cart will be dispatched to return you to room 144X.”

Now Cyrus really wanted to know how large the facility might be. It had a switchboard operator, apparently multiple golf-cart taxies, and at least 144 rooms. That didn’t allow for the odd letter suffix to each room number, which could add nearly endless combinations and who knew how many additional rooms. What might other rooms hold?

Shaking his head, Cyrus pushed those concerns aside. Entering a code into the touch screen beside the door, he led Reese and Hondo into room 16D. He was about to reshape their understanding of the world. The mysteries of this facility would wait for another time.

Room 16D wasn’t much larger than the room in which they’d first arrived. This room was about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. There was a long rectangular conference table in the center, surrounded by comfortable office chairs. The far wall was dominated by a massive LCD flat-panel display. The remaining walls were bare concrete. The overhead light was modified. The lights projected brightly into every corner of the room. But there was a remote control at the near end of the table that allowed the lights to be dimmed for use in conjunction with the screen on the opposite wall. Beside the remote were a series of cables extending from the surface of the conference table. Cyrus immediately set about connecting his laptop to the cables.

Reese took a seat to his right and Hondo at his left. More than half a dozen empty chairs surrounded the rest of the table.

“Are we expecting guests?” Hondo asks after regarding the empty seats.

“No,” Cyrus confirmed. “It’s just us. But we need to discuss this here. The data on this USB drive can be accessed only while connected to the network at this facility. It’s a proprietary failsafe.”

A moment later Cyrus had his laptop booted up. He dimmed the lights and powered up the wall-mounted flat-panel display. Taking the USB thumb drive from the pocket of his jeans, he pressed a button on the device that caused the USB port to extend from the end. He put his thumb on a small sensor on the surface of the tiny drive. There was a chirp and a small LED strobed green. Then he plugged the drive into the side of his laptop.

“I don’t know how to preface this, so I’m just going to jump in. Reese knows some of these details, and I covered some of this back at the warehouse with Bayer. While some of this is a refresher, some of what I’m about to explain will correct points we didn’t fully understand earlier. Other parts are entirely new. Meade’s flash drive has changed my perspective on everything,” Cyrus explained.

With a tap of his keyboard, the first image arrived on the screen at the end of the room. The photo was a very old, poor quality, and black and white. “This is Rumsfeld Pellagrin and his team of three assistants, shortly after Pellagrin recovered a particularly interesting meteorite along the east coast of the United States in 1903. The meteorite came to be known as sample J-189D. Pellagrin was just 23 years old at the time.”

A new slide appeared showing Pellagrin and a number of others at work in what now looked like an antiquated lab. Pellagrin was studying the recovered meteorite. “The specifics of the discovery are too much to get into right now, but the properties and characteristics observed from the study of this meteorite led to our current understanding of physics.”

He changed to the next slide. It showed Pellagrin again in the lab, this time with a man whose head was ruled by a wild shock of unkempt hair. Both men appeared to be in deep examination of a pair of meteorite fragments. “Pellagrin and his friend here, Albert Einstein, worked closely for a number of years. It’s not common knowledge, for reasons that are about to be made clear, but Einstein did not develop his famous theories of physics in a vacuum. His theoretical work wasn’t entirely theoretical after all. Many of his theories were the result of real-world observations, and the study of the meteorite Pellagrin discovered in 1903.

“Of particular importance to us, the study of this meteorite led to our understanding of quantum physics and quantum teleportation. Both sciences necessary to make Meridian function.”

Noting the slack jawed expression from Hondo, he knew this was all news to his friend. The surprise in Reese’s eyes was likely due to the enlightening bit regarding Einstein. While she knew of Einstein’s involvement in the early days of Pellagrin’s work, J-189D’s effect on science was only beginning to fully sink in.
Just wait,
he thought. They were just starting down the rabbit hole.

“In 1907 another meteor impacted twelve kilometers outside of Moscow. The strike was witnessed by dozens of people. The Russian military immediately recovered the meteorite and, appropriately enough, it ended up in the hands of Russian scientists.” He switched to a slide showing three Russian scientists posing behind an unremarkable looking fragment of rock. In the background of the image, they could see a woman who appeared to be setting up a piece of scientific equipment.

“After a great deal of study, the outer layers of the meteorite were deemed unremarkable and were later stripped away. But at the core, they found something very different.” He presented the next slide showing an entirely different, irregularly shaped chunk of stone.

“They began testing this piece of ore and quickly decided it was capable of emitting massive amounts of energy. When they briefly applied heat to the meteorite, the stone would become superheated and continue to emit that heat until forcibly cooled. When electrical current was passed into the ore, the charge pulled from the stone was many times in excess of the charge applied to it.”

He loaded another slide showing the meteorite attached to a single small power lead on one side and a primitive voltage meter on the other. The voltage meter was pegged, and smoke was rising from the device. “It wasn’t until Rumsfeld Pellagrin gained access to the Russian research that he realized what the meteorite was truly capable of. Unfortunately, by that time the Russians had already suffered a mishap with the meteorite that resulted in a massive release of energy that wiped out their entire research facility and all of its personnel.

“Though interesting, the specifics of the accident aren’t what we need to focus on, if we are to understand the larger picture. What is important, is that following the Russian mishap, Rumsfeld Pellagrin secretly traveled to Russian and was able to recover the core of the meteorite the Russian scientists were studying.”

Hondo raised a hand calling for a stop in the monolog. “Wait a second,” he said. His face was scrunched in confusion. “You said that Pellagrin went to Russia following the explosion and retrieved the rock that caused the explosion? It wasn’t destroyed in the blast?”

The question brought a smile to his face. “No,” Cyrus clarified. “Pellagrin discovered that what they thought was a detonation was actually a massive unbridled release of the energy stored in the meteorite. There was no conventional explosion—though the entire research facility was simply wiped from the face of the Earth.

 
“Pellagrin took the meteorite and returned to the United States. It was the study of the ore that consumed the rest of Pellagrin’s life. But as Pellagrin aged, he took on a protégé. A young man named Walter Meade. Meade formally took over Pellagrin’s work when the man passed away in 1957.”

Reese nodded in understanding. “That’s when Walter came into the picture.”

 
“Yes. At that point, Pellagrin had built a pair of prototype teleportation platforms and tested them only once. He’d only been able to generate enough power to fuel the devices a single time. With the power requirements so high, the platforms had been mothballed until decades later when Meade went back to work on them, this time powering them with a pair of nuclear reactors.

“Still, a nuclear power source for each platform was out of the question. At least if they were to be deployed as far and wide as Meade intended. And so the project stalled once more. By this time, Meade had put years of research into the Russian meteorite, in addition to the American sample J-189D.

“Meade based his work on that of Pellagrin, who took his initial cues from the Russians. And they all took the detonation in Russia as a warning for just how careful they needed to be with the ore.”

Cyrus’s eyes gleamed as he thought about a particular revelation. “One of the most crucial discoveries was made in 2006, when Meade performed a scan of the Russian meteorite using a new Benzol-based scanning technology. He discovered that inside the chunk of ore was a single, perfectly round sphere, about the size of a marble or a ball bearing.”

Cyrus put another slide up showing the meteorite as a before image.

“This confirmed what Meade had concluded, based on earlier tests. Despite the odd characteristics exhibited by the ore, its composition was not altogether unlike most rock structures found on Earth. He’d never been able to explain how or why the meteorite exhibited the properties that it did.

“But once he had that scan, he knew that the rock’s outer composition was just a shell. The orb on the inside was what he was really after.”

Cyrus put up the next slide. It showed a single black orb with a lusterless matte black finish. The object was a fraction of the size of the original meteorite, and it was absolutely uniform in shape.

“This is what was at the center of the meteorite. A perfect sphere—no seams and no markings of any kind. Ultimately, this is what Meade referred to as Halon-Seven.”