Seven Unholy Days (23 page)

44

MIDNIGHT DAYLIGHT CENTRAL TIME

0500 GREENWICH MEAN TIME

80 NAUTICAL MILES SOUTH-SOUTHWEST OF

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND

Hart burst into the cockpit and heard the pilot talking into his headset. “Roger that, Approach. Descending through ten thousand to three thousand. Expecting left base for runway z
ero-two.”

“Affirmative, two-one-six. Contact tower at outer marker on one-eighteen-point-three. Good day, sir.”

“What are you doing?” Hart said.

“I’m landing at Keflavik International to top off the tanks, sir.”

“You will do nothing of the kind. I know full well that this aircraft has the fuel necessary for the trip without stopping and you will fly it directly to Moscow.”

“No sir. I will not. After we land, you’re welcome to hire a
nother pilot if you like, but I will not start across the North Atlantic with anything less than topped-off tanks.”

Hart wailed like a wild animal and scurried back to the ca
bin. The pilot made a mental note to seek other employment at the earliest possible opportunity, and checked the weather again. Conditions between Iceland and Europe looked good at the moment, but the North Atlantic tracks were notorious for changing their minds for the worse. He wasn’t a particularly religious man but he said a prayer anyway, and started working the pre-landing checklist.

DAY FIVE

SATURDAY

I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying,

How long, O Lord, holy and true,

dost thou not judge and avenge our blood

on them that dwell on the earth?

Revelation 6:9-10

45

4:30 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

              I woke from a fitful sleep and a torrent of bad dreams to find myself on one of the mattresses, not remembering how I got there. The room was dark. So was the hallway outside other than the scant light that spilled into it from the control room at the other end. I couldn’t remember what I had dreamed, but its melancholy ambiance carried over into my conscious state. As I lay there in the quiet, hot dark, a dreadful realization settled over me so strongly that I said it out loud. “I have no life.”

I had no family beyond distant relatives whom I didn’t know. There were women I dated, but none I loved and to my knowledge none who loved me. My address book was filled with business acquaintances. I lived in a spectacular and a
bsurdly large house on top of a mountain that overlooked the Pacific on one side and lush green valleys on the others. I had every toy money could buy and more money than I could possibly spend. My adulthood had been spent in the relentless pursuit of more. More money. More stuff. More “success” at what I did. I had it all. And I shared it with a dog. Something was wrong.

After washing my face in the bathroom I plodded and stretched my way into the control room. Abdul was at his st
ation but sound asleep, head flopped back and snoring. I checked my laptop for email and found none, then slipped outside for a little air.

The night was crystal clear and the temperature had dropped enough to call it pleasant. I could hear the diesel eme
rgency generator on the backside of the facility, clattering over the insect life of the summer night. The generator didn’t power the outside lights and the absence of light pollution made for a dazzling overhead show. A shooting star slashed across Orion and faded at Pleiades. The moon was a small crescent settling into the western horizon. I sat on the edge of a little pier on the waterway and gazed at the majesty of it all, feeling even more insignificant. After a few minutes I caught an aromatic whiff behind me. Tark and his pipe.

“Morning, Matthew. Hope you rested well.”

“I’m feeling much better, thanks.” Physically, that was true.

“Any contact from AC?”

“Not a word.”

“FBI?”

“I talked to Brandon himself last night, gave him the skinny on the earthquake prediction. He said they’d work on it, that he’d personally task the right people on it. Nothing since.”

“I think we should turn the power back on.”

“We’re into CEPOCS and I can fix it outright within a few hours, but that’s the President’s call.”

“Maybe he’ll have the courage to order it. Whoever we’re fighting is moving according to a plan that’s been in place a long time, not in response to what you or anyone else is doing. He’ll go for the fifth seal today, no matter what.”

“Refresh me.”

“Martyrs, slain for the Word of God.”

11:10 AM GREENWICH MEAN TIME

(6:10 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME)

1500 MILES EAST OF REYKJAVIK, ICELAND

Hart had taken up residence in the co-pilot’s seat. “Why do you not go around this weather?”

“Too late for that, sir. All we can do is ride it out and hope we make it through.”

Hart’s voice had lost its earlier edge; the pilot was now his best friend. “What do you mean, you hope we make it through?”

The Gulfstream pitched violently into a sixty-degree left bank. No sooner had the autopilot leveled the wings than the altimeter spun counter-clockwise as the aircraft hit a radical a
rea of low pressure and started a dive as lift deteriorated. It hit the bottom of the air pocket like concrete, shuddering hard enough to flex the wingtips several inches.

“Flying the North Atlantic in summer is a two-man affair. It’s a full-time job keeping up with the weather on radio and r
adar. You wanted a solo flight. You got it. Warmer air from the south hits cold northern air and creates mammoth disturbances in weather patterns. On top of that, we’re right on the axis of the jet stream.”

“What does that mean?”

“We have a wind blowing right up our tailpipe at three hundred knots. That kind of tailwind pushing us into this thunderstorm is not a good mix. I’ve never been in anything like this and I’m not sure the airframe can—”

A lightning bolt slashed diagonally in front of the small jet, accompanied by a thunder bumper that shook it so violently that oxygen masks dropped in the cabin. Then they hit the path of the lightning bolt, essentially a vacuum. The right engine sucked for air, and for a half-second, found none. The result was a flameout. Lights flashed and the plane’s computer spoke. “Engine failure. Engine failure. Engine failure.”

The pilot silenced the alarm, killed the autopilot, and stomped the left rudder pedal in an attempt to compensate for the tremendous yaw to the right caused by having only the left engine operational. He looked over and saw that Hart’s dark complexion was now alabaster.

“What now?” Hart screamed, sweat dripping off his nose.

“We keep trying to ride it out.”

“Are we going to make it?”

“I don’t know, sir. I really don’t.”

46

10:10 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

             
“Matt Decker, I think you should see this,” Abdul said. I walked to his station and he had two identical pictures of the white horse we’d put on the Fox web site, displayed side by side on his monitor.

“I set an alarm to let me know if this web page changed and the alarm did sound. When I looked at the page, I could not see a difference. I still had the copy of the page on my own hard drive from when we created it and inserted our horse picture, so I compared it to the current version online.”

“And?”

“The difference is in the picture.”

I looked it over for a half-minute and said, “I don’t see it, Abdul.”

“There is no difference to see, but there has been a change. Our picture was a JPEG format. Now it is BMP.”

That was curious. JPEG picture files are widely used because it’s an excellent compression algorithm that produces good quality with reasonable file sizes. BMP files, usually called bitmaps, consume a lot more disk space and thus more bandwidth when used online.

“Have you checked with Fox to be sure they didn’t make the change?”

“I have emailed them and they said they did not do anything since we uploaded our page.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Abdul?”

“If you are thinking steganography.”

Steganography involves hiding files within files. The tec
hnology got its first big public exposure after 9/11, when the government found out the terrorists were sending coordination messages to each other via pictures on the Internet. The secret file is embedded inside another carrier file–typically a picture or sound file–and the unlock mechanism that separates the single file back into its individual components is encrypted for security.

“It’s exactly what I’m thinking,” I said. “You got a decry
ption app handy?”

“I have Steganos.”

“Let’s try to bust it up and see what happens.”

He started clicking and after a few seconds said, “We were right. It is a steg file! It’s encrypted, but the password prompt looks like a clue.”

I leaned over his shoulder and studied the screen. The password prompt said:

VERY GOOD WITH THE FIRST. NUMBER THREE WILL LEAD YOU HOME. YOU HAVE THREE TRIES.

The cursor was blinking. Waiting.

Tark burst into the room. “I just got an email from headqua
rters. They traced the call from Jana. It came from a house outside Omaha, Nebraska.”

“Nebraska? You sure about that?” I said.

“Yep, they’ve called the FBI and passed everything on to them. You get a chance to check out your new contact yet?”

“Yeah, he looks clean.”

“Reckon you should contact him or Brandon on this Nebraska lead?”

“I’ll take a chance and trust Bond for now. Brandon doesn’t check his email regularly and it’s a monumental pain to get him on the phone.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Abdul, print that screen, please,” I said. He did and I gave it to Tark. “We’ve found a hidden file he posted on the Internet. We need to figure out the password to get inside it. Here’s what we have to go on. You mind taking a look at this problem while I work on something else for a little bit?”

“Not a bit, my boy. I’m on it.” He reached for the pipe pouch and left the room in big pounding strides.

I fired off an email to Larry Bond, telling him what we had and asking if he had anything else for us. I’d saved a picture of Jana Fulton to my hard drive the night I researched her and everyone else, and I pulled that picture up and wondered if she was okay. I also wondered if a woman could possibly be as beautiful in the flesh as she was in that picture. Nebraska. Last I heard, the Feds were still confining their search to New York and Los Angeles.

I hit the Internet and tried to research the issue a bit more, but everything other than a few government and news sites yielded “server cannot be reached” errors. I went back to the Fox site and checked for updates. There were none. A banner ad for a site selling “As Seen on TV” products was blinking at the top of the screen. I sat staring at the obnoxious rectangle and it hit me. The Feds were wrong. Bad wrong.

My FBI liaison Larry Bond wasted no time replying to my email:

Matt,

Cryptos examining password issue now. Will advise of progress or suggestions. Field agents in Omaha presently investigating source of Fulton call. Suspect captured in Earth, Texas is cooperating but of surprisingly little help. He is part of a religious movement loyal to a “messiah” who is supposed to usher in a new era. Movement operates in classic compartmentalized cells, so individuals and smaller teams have no idea about the activities of others. They do know some major part of the plan is supposed to happen TODAY, however. They claim no knowledge of what the event is and special interrogation team reports confidence in veracity is Delta level. I’m told you will understand what that means.

Larry

I printed the message and took it to Tark. “What’s Delta le
vel veracity?” he said.

“It means the interrogators are positive the suspects are tel
ling the truth.”

“How can they be positive? Lie detectors?”

“Not the kind you’re thinking about. After the World Trade Center, some laws were quietly passed and a few executive orders issued that gave the Feds enormous latitude when dealing with suspected terrorists. Special interrogation teams were formed and these guys were given carte blanche to get the answers they needed. All in the name of national security, of course.”

“You telling me they made it okay to beat people and such?”

“Torture,” I said. “They legalized torture. Beating isn’t the half of it, although that’s certainly a part. Electrical shock. Chemicals. No holds barred, get the answers.”

“Good heavens, I had no idea.”

“Pretty amazing, huh?”

“Obama tried to do away with it while he was in office, but sometimes what a president doesn’t know can’t hurt him.”

Tark shook his head and returned to his Bible. “You still got that time line handy?”

“Sure. What’s on your mind?”

“Just a hunch.” I got the printout from the control room and handed it to him. He relit the pipe and puffed and squinted, slow at first, then it shifted into high gear.

“You see something, don’t you?”

“Yep, Matthew. I believe I do.”