Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (41 page)

Reaches his large black SUV and has to shout at some guy who tries to get in on the passenger side
, yammering about food for his family. The dark presence lets itself be seen, a gaping featureless mouth. The man recoils and runs.

Highway 17 is a snarl, not great at the best of times but
getting worse by the hour. On a fast bend there’s a wrecker with cables extending over the roadway edge. Half a mile beyond there’s a car off in the dirt, the driver, a woman, slumps in her seatbelt with blood on her forehead and a forever gaze in her still-open eyes.

Porterfield
is there finally, gets out and takes a wizz along the side of the house. He’s knocked loudly on the door and Tharcia has opened it, sleepy from her bed in pink Panda pajamas. Soon as she recognizes him, she tries to close the door in his face but he is ready and jams a foot in, muscles his way inside.

She’s backed against the stairs, h
e forces the service papers into her hands and is yelling, “I am your father young lady and I’ll see you in court. The judge will order you to County adoption with me to set this straight.” At this time, six FBI Special Agents in flak jackets burst through the door and take both to the floorboards.

The Agents have photos of Porterfield, he’s a match,
resembles Terrorist #1 on the Watch List, a euro-ethnic male. Porterfield gets cuffed, he’s coming in. Tharcia, Terrorist #2, is yelling Clay Clay Clay but he is not there and the agents think she’s yelling at Porterfield. They ride in separate vans and head down Highway 9 to detention facilities in Santa Cruz. Traffic too congested to head over the hill to larger facilities in San Jose and minutes count.

Porterfield
in one van swears loudly about his lawyer, that he is Tharcia’s father. The agents listen without comment. The hunch-shouldered demon within keeps itself hidden, gnashing with anger, barely resigned to wait. So close.

Tharcia
in the other van says nothing. After cuffing her for the ride in, the female agent draped Tharcia’s ski parka over her shoulders.

Once in the underground parking lot, Porterfield is t
aken away separately, yelling and struggling. Tharcia, barefoot in pajamas, parka and handcuffs, is led by the female agent and two others up a back elevator to the sixth floor, along a corridor of private offices and into an interrogation room. Her cuffs are fastened to a metal bar in the center of the table. The plastic chair is cold under her butt. She tries to snuggle deeper into the parka draped over her. The female agent stands outside the room, waiting for the interrogation team to arrive.

Tharcia looks around. There is only the metal table
and chairs, bolted to the floor. Ceiling-mounted video cameras point at her from several angles. There is a frosted glass pane in the door, she can see fuzzy heads sometimes. A large mirror set into the wall has to be an observer port. In it she sees Vardøger perched on her shoulder. His hands are still clasped over his eyes but today he appears in a blue work shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, Fossil shades like Clay’s. Seeing the little goblin makes her smile. As with her every move and facial expression, this smile is recorded. The female agent enters with two male agents, both in suits. The men sit across the table from her. The female agent stands by the door.

“I am Special Agent Jeremy Rolf, this is Special Agent Charles
Verlett. You have already met Special Agent Stephanie Willits. You are Tharcia Anne Harrison?”

Tharcia looks at all three. “That is my name, yes.”

“We have charges against you under the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Our mandate is the prevention of terrorist attacks within the United States and reducing the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism. Is that clear to you?”

“I understand. Are you thinking I’m a terrorist?”

“Among other charges, you are charged with unlawfully entering the United States Pentagon.” Special Agent Rolf looks at her evenly. “Do you understand that is very serious?”

“I didn’t go there willingly. I was kidnapped.”

“You have been witnessed and videotaped arriving at that location in the company of someone wearing an elaborate disguise,” Rolf continues. “You have been witnessed arriving at that location in the company of a female. Are you saying that was involuntary?”

“Yes. That man came to my house and grabbed me.
Same as you guys. Only right then he changed into that big lizard with wings. It was no disguise. Next thing I knew we were there. I didn’t know I was at the Pentagon until I saw it on the Internet several days later.”

“You didn’t know you were inside the U
.S. Pentagon?”

“No idea. Hey can I go to the bathroom?”

The second interrogator, Verlett, growls at her. “The facilities on this floor are out of order. The sooner you get a few questions cleared up, we’ll move you to another level.”

Tharcia looks at the malevolent eyes
but says nothing. She has him figured for the bad cop.

Special Agent Rolf continues his line of questions. “So you are saying you were forcibly placed and detained in the Pentagon?”

Tharcia nods.

“Please speak up,”
Verlett prods.

Agent Willits,
standing near the door, explains. “For the transcript, Miss Harrison.”

Verlett
speaks to her with stern authority. “The professional interrogators will conduct all questioning.” Willits sends back a stony glare.

“Yes,” says Tharcia
calmly. “I was forcibly detained there.”

“Then,”
Agent Rolf says, “several days later, you left. How did you get away?”

“Lian let me go.”

“Who is Lian? Is that the ringleader?”

“Lian is the person you saw in the Pentagon. The kidnapper. I did not know him before.”

Agent Rolf consults his notes. “How does it happen that he makes a trip from Virginia to California, abducts you from your home, and you both appear at the Pentagon, in Virginia?”

“He says he’s a Supreme Angel.”

“A Supreme Angel?”

“Yes. One of the beings
the Creator made before he made the world.”

“How do you know this?”

“Lian told me.”

“Who is Lian? What is his full name?”

“I only know him as Lian.”

“What language were you speaking at the Pentagon?”

“They tell me it is Sumerian.”

“How did you come to learn Sumerian?”

“It was part of my language course.”

“You’re enrolled at the University here?”

“It was a set of CDs I play in my car.”

“We have examined those CDs, Miss. There are no Sumerian lessons.”

Tharcia laughs. “Oh, that. Yes when I looked later it said
Boudoir François
. Bedroom French. But one night I got scared out of the house by weird noises. I played a CD in my car to pass the time, you know, and what came on was this strange-sounding language lesson. I remember some of it. I couldn’t find it later.”

“Can you say something to us in Sumerian?”

Tharcia utters a string of nonsense syllables.

“What was that? Please translate what you said.”

“I said that I don’t know any more about this than you do. I was taken there unwillingly. I didn’t know I was at the Pentagon.”

Verlett
goes to Agent Willits by the door, and whispers the words,
drug screen.
Willits steps out to make a call.

There’s an hour’s worth of other questions, but finally
Tharcia is led by Agent Willits and Agent Verlett down a flight of concrete stairs at the end of the building, to a small room on a lower floor. The shackles are removed and she is asked to take off her parka and hang it on a peg.

Agent
s Willits and Verlett in the room, eyeing Tharcia watchfully. A woman enters wearing a white lab smock with the name Dearborn embroidered on the breast pocket. She hands Tharcia a small glass cup with a plastic snap-on lid.

“Go in there and give us a sample in this cup
,” Dearborn instructs her. “Place the cup on the ledge and wash your hands. Then come out.”

Tharcia hesitates. This is more invasive than having Lylit inside her head, or
Vardøger perched on her shoulder. But she figures, no choice, get it over with. As she sits in the tiny stall trying to get the cup lined up, she hears whispered voices through the thin walls. Special Agent Verlett speaks to her loudly around the partition. She half expects him to walk right in.

“Miss we’re going to ask you at this time to prepare for a strip search. This right was granted to law enforcement without warrant by the Supreme Court of the United States in April
of 2012. Will you cooperate?”

Tharcia pulls up her pajama bottoms,
places the cup on the ledge as instructed. She looks in the small mirror, expecting to see Vardøger perched on her shoulder, but the little goblin isn’t there! Frantic, she leans sideways to bring her other shoulder into view. He has moved, he’s now sitting on her left shoulder. The tiny hands that cover his eyes do not hide a sublime smirk.

Verlett
’s voice booms from outside the stall, “Miss Harrison, will you cooperate with a strip search? If you do not we are empowered to restrain you.”

“
Vardøger,” Tharcia whispers.

The little goblin
removes his hands, his eyes come open, he sees her in the mirror and smiles a toothy grin.

“Ah,
Puss Cakes. You have wishes for Vardøger?”

Scarcely above a whisper, Tharcia mouths the words
in lightly-accented early Sumerian. “Take me to Lian!”

“This proves it! The girl transported herself instantly from California to Virginia. This field is most definitely a transit portal.”

Shackleford is on a video call with General Solberg, Lieutenant Alan Jackson of Pentagon Security, Marina Kutsenova, and two recently-hired team members. Arnold Friedman was invited, but has not joined. They have reviewed the security cam sequence of Tharcia’s return. She is barefoot, wearing pajamas with pandas on them. After her abrupt appearance, she falls to hands and knees, gets herself up and walks to a bench near the intruder. Now, he’s a 20-foot lizard with wings. They speak rapidly the nonsense language. Teams are working twenty-four hours a day to debug fresh-minted translation software. An intern from the security detail had suggested ancient Sumerian. Although some of the patterns match, it will be a while before there will be a speech-to-text converter that will let a linguist translate into dependable English. The brief phrases Tharcia spoke and translated while in FBI custody have provided some guidance.

“Now, does anyone need more proof?” Shackleford, in his home office, looks
at the postage-stamp faces on his screen. “The adversaries have a transit portal. We can knock out the generator at the other end if we can hit the vortex navel with a sufficiently large warhead. That will enable us to determine from which country the portal originates.”

From a distant
node on the commlink, General Solberg speaks. His face takes over the main panel. “Let’s review what we know. My team has been in touch with the FBI in Santa Cruz, California. The white-haired girl escaped from an FBI containment room. She didn’t walk out. I have a video of the containment booth where she was held.”

The video starts to play on all screens connected to the call. It shows FBI agents and the subject in pink Panda pajamas entering an
examination booth. It shows her manipulating a sample cup.

“General is this quite necessary?” Marina Kutsenova, on the call
from Martin Shackleford’s Baltimore living room, is incensed at this invasion of the young woman’s privacy.

“I’m sorry everyone, this clip arrived unedited from the FBI. Please bear with us.”

“Of course it did,” Marina mutters, clearly heard on the link.

In t
he video, the white-haired girl studies herself in the booth’s small mirror. She speaks silent words at her reflection, and disappears from view. Moments later, a woman in a lab smock and a female FBI Agent crowd into the cramped space, looking everywhere, lifting the toilet seat, removing the tank cover, opening and closing cabinet drawers. Solberg halts the playback and his image returns to the screen. The general’s face is drawn with fatigue, his eyes have a hollow look. Although his speech is slower, his words are crisp.

“The recording does not capture what she said, we believe it to be a coded signal. But to who? Lip readers have no information for us thus far, this may have been spoken in the
Sumerian language she uses with the ringleader.”

“There is something else,” Jackson interjects, “absolutely startling. Don’t know how this fits in but…”

“Out with it, man,” Shackleford hisses.

“The urine sample the girl left. They checked it. It’s a good grade of single malt Scotch.
No human waste products. Scotch.”

Solberg files the stray fact and
moves on. Disclosures like that are no longer out of the ordinary, not in the least, not anymore. “Martin, I have questions. It is one thing to assume that this portal, if it is a portal, extends from an unknown location to terminate at the Pentagon. We identify two other locations where the Harrison woman is known to originate prior to appearances in the courtyard. One is the FBI detention center we viewed. The other is her residence in California. Her third arrival, in the company of the other woman, we cannot match with any departure point, we don’t know where she originated from that time. But my question is this. What creates those other locations? We have found no equipment at the locations we know about. Does that rule out the necessity for equipment to be present?