Origin - Season One (17 page)

“To Darkstar?” Jack said. “I thought that was impossible.”

“Improbable, but not impossible,” Marius said. “I’m not saying he could follow the line back here. But if he knows Darkstar is still in orbit, we could have a major problem.”

“Do we know where he is now?” Jack asked.

“Sitting in a jail cell in Penn Hills. Local police brought him in last night on a DUI charge.”

“I’ll deal with it,” Jack said.

“You going to bring him in?” Marius said. “That’s what we’re supposed to do, right?”

“Like I said, I’ll deal with it.”

Marius picked up the recorder but made no effort to leave.

“What is it?” Jack sighed.

“When’s Titov getting here? I’m so fucking nervous I can hardly think. Carl came upstairs yesterday to ask me about something and I thought I was going to have a goddamned nervous breakdown. I’m no good with shit like this, Jack.”

“He’ll be here tomorrow.”

“I just don’t get what’s going on. First Carl, and now the FBI? And what does the Fed have to do with all this? They were talking about some kind of investigation.”

“It’ll all makes sense in a couple of days, Marius, believe me. Just hold it together a little longer.”

Jack put a hand on his shoulder and gently escorted him to the door.

Chemin des Gagnon, Quebec

Wednesday 19 July 2006

0115 EDT

Francis reached the road shortly after one in the morning. When his feet hit the tarmac, he stopped, put down his backpack and spent the next few minutes going through a vigorous stretching routine to cleanse his muscle tissue of lactic acid.

He had left the cabin and headed not for the lake, but away to the east, toward the smaller road which rejoined Route 155 a few miles to the south. It had been a steady series of peaks and valleys across uneven ground and thick woodland. Several times he had come across a logging track or hiking path, and once he had scared himself half to death when he almost ran into an elk calf.

Satisfied there would be no backlash from his limbs somewhere down the road, he walked south at a pace just below jogging speed. He reached a junction twenty minutes later with a small dirt road leading downhill through a break in the trees. He followed it, studying the ground as he went, then climbed the bank at the edge of the road, picked up a stick and began to tap the grass around him.

He found what he was looking for a moment later. It was on old, rusting ammunition container with a length of thick rope inside that disappeared into the ground through a hole in the bottom. As he pulled it, the rope sprang from the ground in a straight line for several yards before going taught. He walked down the bank, planted both feet firmly on the ground, and pulled.

At first, nothing happened. Francis pulled until the veins in his neck bulged and his feet began to sink into the soft ground. There was a series of ripping sounds as roots snapped, then a large rectangular section of the bank simply gave way and slid forward, revealing what looked like a square mineshaft.

Sitting inside it was a black Land Rover Defender with balloon tires and two giant spotlights mounted to the grill. The license plate was Canadian. Francis squeezed himself into the narrow gap, climbed in and started the engine.

Twenty minutes later he pulled back onto Route 155 and headed in the direction they had come from the day before. By five in the morning he was nearing Three Rivers. An hour after that, he reached Quebec City.

– – –

The man behind the counter at the Radio Shack repair desk studied the drive for a moment then handed it back. “I’m afraid we don’t sell anything old enough to read ESDI drives, sir. This interface was phased out years ago. You know what computers are like, old by the time you get them home and all that.”

Francis thanked him and was about to leave when a younger man stepped out from behind the partition wall at the back of the room and said, “Can I have a look at that, sir?”

Francis handed him the hard drive and the man inspected it briefly.

“My dad’s got a pawn shop down in Beauport. Last time I was in there he had an old IBM PC that would read this. I doubt he’s sold it.”

Forty-five minutes later Francis was standing in a room that appeared to have been overlooked by time itself. The long, narrow shop had shelves running all the way to the high ceiling along both walls. Nothing he could see looked as if it had been made before 1990. There was nobody behind the counter, but someone was having a coughing fit out back. He waited for another minute, then rang the bell above the front door again.

The man who emerged from behind the curtain at the back of the shop was red in the face from strain. He looked about eighty and his clothes could have come off one of the store’s many shelves.

“Bonjour,” he said.

Francis returned the greeting, explained his predicament and asked him about the IBM PC. The man, who introduced himself as Mr. Mouliner, considered the question as if it bore a great deal of importance. After a moment he walked back through the curtain, calling for Francis to join him. They unburied the old machine together and Francis carried it out to the counter.

When it came to money, it seemed the man had no more joined the human race in ushering in the new millennium than his shop had. He wanted 350 Canadian dollars for the relic and made it clear that he would go no lower. Francis considered trying to explain that it was all but worthless, and put the idea aside. It wasn’t exactly true anyway, when you considered what he needed it for in the first place.

– – –

He found a small motel off Highway 40 outside the town of Pont-Rouge and wasted no time setting the computer up. Using his laptop to access the motel’s wireless Internet service, he spent two hours navigating various “how-to” guides online before he finally managed to get the drive to register.

He had been expecting to find any of a number of things on it. What he did find had not been one of them. It contained about two hundred files in twenty-one folders with names that meant nothing to him. A few of the files had
zip
and
rar
extensions to identify them as compressed archives. These were no good as the computer had no decompression software. The rest were image files, and these he
could
open.

The first few he tried resulted in an error message to say that the resolution of the monitor was too low to display them. When an image
did
finally appear on the screen it was a grainy black-and-white photograph of a submarine in drydock. Francis knew exactly what it was, a Russian Victor-class nuclear powered attack sub. He found several other images of the same submarine, pictures of satellites, rockets, space probes, mining equipment, several dock cranes, a Caterpillar diesel generator and one of a building in Zurich with Fraumünster Abbey in the background. Nothing classified, nothing secret and nothing that meant anything to him. One of the folders was named “DPFCS images” and contained four picture files, but according to the computer, these required a password to open.

The last folder on the drive was named “notes.” It contained about fifty plain text files. Francis double-clicked on the first and waited for it to load. What appeared on the screen was this:

August 1 1988 – Preliminary inquiries confirm the unsuitability of western-based launching platforms on grounds of security. The political situation also discounts Russian facilities. This leaves only the Chinese, who present a number of other problems, primarily technical reliability.

He closed the file and opened another at random:

August 7 1994 – Third test of receiver array completed with mixed results. Decoding is causing the buildup of excess heat. This may be overcome by conditions in orbit, but the risk is too great. Will have to get Bonn to re-design the board using additional processors.

He read two dozen more of the short diary-like entries looking for anything that might provide a clue: a name, a location, or just a reference to something he understood, but it was pointless. As fascinating as the entries were, none of it made any sense. At least not to Francis.

Exasperated, he shut the computer down and took a seat on the bed. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept, but it must have been days. His mind racing, his body exhausted, he fell into a dreamless sleep.

Penn Hills, Pennsylvania

Wednesday 19 July 2006

0400 EDT

“Sir, I need you to hold the board below your chin.”

Mitch swayed slightly and closed his eyes again. The lights in the room were far too bright, making his already-pounding head feel like it might actually explode. He had to focus all his attention on not throwing up, which meant one steady breath after another. Everything else was a distraction.

“Mr. Rainey, you need to hold the board a little higher!”

The woman was losing patience with him. She stepped forward and the board in his hands rose until it bumped his chin. The stirring began somewhere in his bowels and worked its way up to his stomach. His mouth was suddenly flooded with warm saliva. He took a deep breath in a last-ditch effort to hold it down – then his torso contracted and he keeled over, dropping the board as he fell to his knees.

The policewoman realized what was happening, but she was a couple of seconds too late. The first salvo hit the floor a foot in front of her polished, black rider boots and covered everything below her knees in a thick slimy coating of partially digested Big Mac and chocolate milkshake. She took a step back, slipped, and almost sat down in the mess before pinwheeling her arms and recovering.

“Jesus Christ!” she said and moved toward the door.

Mitch raised his head and looked at her through wet, bloodshot eyes. Before he could say anything he was firing a second salvo. This one went straight into his lap. The sudden stench of stomach acid and vodka hit him like a prizefighter’s southpaw and he began to dry heave. It felt like someone had poured lighter fluid over his abdomen, set it on fire and then kicked him there a few times for good measure. The policewoman was shouting to someone through the open door but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Someone else came into the room, but Mitch made no attempt to look up. A large hand grabbed his left arm and pulled him upright. “Sir, you need to sit up and lift your head.”

It was a man’s voice and the tone was one of concern, not anger. Mitch opened his eyes and raised one hand toward the ceiling.

“Lights,” he said. “Turn off the lights.”

A moment later the strip lights in the ceiling went out.

“Is that better? You think you can keep it down?”

Mitch nodded. The man put one foot to either side of him, one hand under each of Mitch’s arms and pushed him along the floor until his back was resting against the wall.

“I’m going to leave you in here until we can get a doctor to have a look at you,” the man said. Mitch raised a hand in a gesture of thanks, then leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes again.

He could remember everything right up to the blue lights in the rear-view mirror, and then the film went blank. He remembered stopping at a McDonald’s somewhere near Hancock, crossing the border into Pennsylvania; he remembered the liquor store in Somerset and the woman behind the counter. She had tried to sell him an extra bottle at a twenty-five percent discount. If she had tried just a little bit harder, he thought, he might be dead now instead of just wanting to be.

Once he had decided to get drunk, and damn the consequences, it had been the advice of his friend, and now partner in crime, that he had taken. Mike had once joked that, god forbid, should he ever become an alcoholic it was going to be vodka or nothing because vodka was all kick and no hangover. If Mitch ever saw Mike again, he would have to ask him where that unhelpful piece of total bullshit had originated.

The plan had been to call Mike back at some point. Mitch had stopped at a rest area just off the interstate somewhere in the Kooser State Park to make the call. But his nerves had failed him and he had gone back to the car for the bottle and started drinking, which had really been ‘Plan B’ all along. And it had worked. Only when he finally
did
try to call, there hadn’t been a single bar of reception on his phone.

That most useless of all tricks, hindsight, strongly suggested that that was where he should have called it a day. Instead, he had gotten back in the car, put the bottle between his legs and set off to meet his destiny in the town of Penn Hills. By the time he saw the blue lights of the highway patrol motorcycle, the bottle was empty, his head was somewhere in the upper stratosphere and his Volkswagen was doing about twenty miles an hour with two wheels on the road and two in the dirt.

It might have been five minutes later, or it might have been five hours, when the door opened and the lights came back on. Mitch guessed it must have been somewhere in between because his head still ached like a bitch, but his stomach had settled and the lights no longer felt like laser beams. A man was standing in front of him with a black case in one hand, dressed in the orange coveralls of a paramedic. He walked around the mess in the middle of the room and knelt beside Mitch. “Sir, how are you feeling?”

“Like an idiot,” Mitch said.

“Sure. And how about physically? Are you having any trouble breathing?”

“No.”

The man took a pen light from his breast pocket and pointed the beam into both of Mitch’s eyes. He produced a syringe and before Mitch could protest, stuck the needle into his upper left arm and pressed the plunger.

“That should make you feel a little better,” the medic said.

“About myself?”

“No; that’s something you’ll have to deal with on your own,” the medic said. “If you want my advice, try speaking to the families of any of the 17 thousand people that died last year in this country from DUI-related accidents.”

Mitch had no answer to that. He’d been too busy feeling sorry for himself to consider that side of it. It was a sobering thought.