The Fall (29 page)

“Again, not even close. He has far more evidence on me than I have on him. All he has to do is release one of the videos, and I would be discredited from any courtroom.”

“But you were deep undercover,” Pete said. “You had to—”

Riggs shook his head. “That's not how it works. We always knew that any firsthand account would be useless because it would not only be segregated, removed from the mainstream because of my limited role. And we also knew about his use of videos to quickly incriminate anyone who betrayed him.”

“So what were you trying to accomplish?”

“My mission was to dig up evidence beyond my own experience, perhaps finding bank accounts, maybe proof of misappropriation of tax dollars.”

Pete shook his head. “The man orders people killed for a living, like Dr. Wiltz and Angela, and the FBI was trying to get him on some sort of embezzlement charge?”

Riggs was starting to get visibly annoyed. After a heavy sigh, he said, “He operates like a mafia boss, with a lot of buffers between him and the crimes he commits, plus he owns those who commit the crimes. The concept was to bring him down like Al Capone, who also couldn't be touched for murder, finally taking him down on tax evasion charges.”

“So, how do you get useful information?”

“By getting to people like Dr. Wiltz before Hastings could silence her. The problem is that the FBI used that approach before, trying to turn his best people into informants, and it resulted in suicides because he had their families under surveillance. Most people with their families on the line would rather take their own lives than risk a dead son, or daughter, or wife.”

“Damn,” Pete said, slowly processing this amazing revelation. “Maybe Angela was able to dig up something before Hastings attacked the house?”

Riggs raised his eyebrows. “That's a possibility. She seems to be quite … resourceful.”

“Yeah, and you should meet her husband.”

Riggs almost laughed. “We did, briefly. I loved the way he told off the general. Doesn't happen often, and those who dare don't tend to live long.”

“Well,” Pete said, “speaking of living long, the only way I see my friends and I surviving this, and also you and your family, is to bet that Angela discovered something in that house.”

Riggs narrowed his gaze at him.

Pete leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. “Do you know anyone who has gone against Hastings and lived long enough to talk about it?”

The FBI agent considered that for a moment.

“That's what I thought. Now, let me ask you this: do you really think that your family will be safe in the long run under protected custody? You just told me that Hastings may have moles inside the Bureau.”

Riggs remained quiet awhile, before mumbling, “What do you think she may have discovered?”

“I have no idea, but it doesn't really matter for us. We just need to find a way to help her. Angela has a gift, Riggs—a gift for solving complex problems, and believe me, this one is as complex as they come. But she needs time and data.”

“Time and data?”

“That's right. She needs access to data, to information, and also the time to process it like a scientist. In order to enable her, we need to provide her with the access she needs and with enough elbow room to analyze the information she collects.”

The FBI agent locked eyes with him before asking, “All right, what do you have in mind?”

*   *   *

He listened to it three times while taking notes, stopping and rewinding the recording at several key spots, replaying them again and again, until he got a good grasp of the jump, leaving no doubt in his mind that something pretty unusual had taken place.

Starting with listening to his own voice.

That was Pete Flaherty all right.

It was … me.

He sat back, staring at the system interfaced to the OSS's black box, which he had set up in a room adjacent to the lab where he had dissected the suit.

Pete felt a bit amazed that this very special technology had literally fallen from the skies right into his lap. And the realization only served to reinforce his initial decision to keep Hastings out of it.

Listening to the way Hastings had tried to butt in, just as Jack was about to jump from the pod—and apparently going against Angela's instructions—only helped confirm his concerns that the general would have been all over this one, perhaps to the extent of taking it over completely, like he had apparently done in Jack's world.

And besides, what value did Hastings bring?

More guns?
Pete had close to a hundred mercenaries in his payroll scrubbing the state of Florida, and that was on top of over a hundred of his own men patrolling just about every road between Miami and the Cape.

More surveillance?
Pete remained in direct contact with the Department of Homeland Security, who had allocated the use of three Predator teams, each consisting of four Predator UAVs with their own crews, feeding all of the data to Commander Heather Vickers at the POC in Patrick Air Force Base, who sent him hourly updates.

More intelligence?
Pete had certainly learned a few tricks from Hastings over the past five years, and he not only owned people in the CIA, the NSA, and even the FBI, but had also planted his own informants in the heart of the Pentagon, very close to Hastings.

More scientists?
Pete currently managed over five hundred of the best scientific minds of the time—and all loyal to him.

More money?
He couldn't help but laugh at that one. The budget allocated to NASA this year alone, after all of the shell games he and Hastings played with the Pentagon's vast budget, was large enough to hide one more project among the dozens of secret developments underway.

He shook his head.

All Hastings would bring to this party would be his gigantic ego, his arrogance.

No upside but plenty of downside,
he thought.

And besides, Pete had gotten word via his own moles inside the Pentagon about Hastings's secret visits to an oncologist in recent weeks. A little more probing on the results of a biopsy had yielded renal cell carcinoma. The general had cancer in his kidneys. Although it was apparently treatable, and someone with Hastings's resources would have easy access to transplants, it still meant he wouldn't be operating at full capacity for a while.

Perhaps this is what he wants to talk to me about,
he thought, remembering his conversation with Hastings yesterday.

In any case, Pete decided to continue holding this one very close to his chest, only allowing his chief scientist—someone Pete owned—to inspect not just the entire suit but also that intriguing membrane-like patch.

And speaking of that …

He walked next door, past the soldiers he had posted to protect his secret, and stepped inside the spacious lab, where the OSS was still disassembled over three lab tables.

An elderly woman with white hair pulled into a tight bun and wearing a lab coat and wire-rimmed glasses worked on a tablet computer interfaced to a large microscope.

Dr. Gayle Horton, former scientist at Rockwell during the space shuttle era before joining NASA after the program was canceled and the high-tech giant conducted massive layoffs, looked up from her screen.

“Where did you find this, Pete?” she asked, pointing at the membrane secured to the microscope's stage, under a massive 1000X lens.

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you,” he replied. “What is it?”

“A very efficient antenna … and I think it's designed to capture energy, radiation. In the upper layers of the atmosphere, a lot of that energy is in the form of gamma rays from solar activity.”

“So, it's a spectrometer?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why?”

“Because of its strange composition.”

“What's it made of?”

“That's the thing. I'm not entirely sure. Most modern gamma ray detectors use germanium, a semiconductor with the best properties known to date for capturing gamma rays, which basically excite the crystal lattice in the semiconductor, dislodging electrons in the outer layers, triggering conductivity of tiny amounts of electricity. This forms the basis for the spectrometers that we typically use to study solar flare activity. This material, however, is … different.”

“Did you run a spectrum analysis?” he asked, referring to the industry-standard technique to identify the periodic table elements making up any compound.

“I did,” Gayle said, “and that's what so strange about it.” She ran a finger across her tablet and pulled up the results from a mass spectrometry analysis, which looked like a chart. The vertical axis showed the relative abundance of a given element while the horizontal axis listed all known elements in the periodic table.

“See,” she said, pointing at the peak for Ge, or germanium, which had the highest presence detected in the membrane. “This material is based on germanium, but that's where the similarities end compared to modern solar detectors. There are five more peaks.”

She pointed to the right side of the chart at five more elements, with the symbols Fe for iron, Mg for magnesium, Ti for titanium, O for oxygen, and OTH.

“What's that last one?”

“Stands for
other,
meaning we don't know what it is yet. But we'll get to that later. What's very interesting at the moment is that aside from germanium, the known elements in these relative abundance levels—and I need to perform a more thorough analysis to be sure—are the ones that make up armalcolite.”

Pete frowned. “Armalcolite … that's a type of moon rock.”

“Right,” she said, “along with tranquillityite and pyroxferroite. All three were first brought to Earth by the Apollo Eleven crew, and larger quantities later by the rest of the Apollo missions.”

Pete nodded. “Armalcolite was named after the Apollo Eleven astronauts,
Arm
strong,
Al
drin, and
Col
lins.”

“Correct. And it was later created synthetically on Earth. Moon armalcolite is typically an opaque mass that appears reddish to purple in reflection. The synthetic version is grayish. This membrane is more on the purple end of the spectrum, which suggests a moon origin.”

“But it's translucent.”

Gayle removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Yes, we still need to understand that difference. It may have to do with the germanium and whatever that other element is. But what's
very
interesting is this.…”

Gayle removed the membrane from the microscope's stage and placed it on the lab table before taking an LED flashlight and pointing its beam perpendicular to its surface.

The membrane came alive, trembling with what looked like miniature sheet lightning crisscrossing its surface as a purple halo materialized around it.

“What the hell's
that
?” he asked.

“
That
 … is physically impossible … at least with the laws of physics in the world of classical mechanics. I just bombarded its surface with a very small amount of UV radiation contained in this LED beam and the reaction, which I was able to measure using a traditional spectrometer, was several orders of magnitude larger.”

“Meaning…?”

“Meaning it gives out far more energy than it receives,” she said.

“But—”

“This is beyond our traditional laws of physics, Pete. The only other form of reaction that comes close to yielding this amount of energy is in nuclear fission, the basis of nuclear reactors used to generate electricity.”

“But this isn't that.”

“No. It's not, but the energy yield is in the same class. Now, I think there's a limit to how much energy this little membrane can give out when excited by light. And like in a nuclear reactor, at some point its stored energy will be spent.”

“Like the rods in a nuclear plant?”

“Yes. A kilogram of uranium-235, for example, will yield about three million times more energy than a kilogram of coal, but eventually, just like the coal, it will have to be replaced with fresh material. I think this membrane operates in the same way. It's a very sophisticated energy source. You saw what it just did when excited by a very small amount of energy. Imagine what it can do up in space, beyond the atmospheric shield, exposed directly to the UV and gamma radiation of the sun's energy.”

Pete sat next to Gayle and crossed his arms, trying to piece this together.

“But the suit has its own independent battery packs to power its systems,” he finally said. “This isn't connected to any of that.”

“Correct. The energy is channeled directly into something else, perhaps whatever round device you indicated was missing. And whatever that is, it can handle the energy that this generator puts out, which, as I've said, can be quite significant, depending on the level of external excitation. But I need more time.”

“How much longer?”

Gayle slowly shook her head. “Pete … I'm not sure you understand the significance of this … discovery.”

He wasn't sure how to respond to that.

“Look. There are inflection points in science, moments when a new discovery threatens to obsolete prior technologies, even established infrastructures. The electric bulb killing the gaslight industry. Internal combustion destroying the steam engine industry. Digital photography taking down Polaroid and other film photography giants. There's the automobile, the airplane, the Internet, and so on. This one, if it turns out to be capable of being mass produced, could completely change the way we look at energy. The initial spectrometer analysis suggested that a small LED energy yielded enough power to run a couple of city blocks for a day. At the moment, I feel I'm only scratching the surface. I need to run control experiments with various light sources, from the visible spectrum to gamma rays, and measure reactions. I also need to determine the full composition of this material, including confirming the presence of armalcolite and figuring out that last missing element.”