Wormhole (15 page)

With all her worry about Heather, somehow Anna had known her daughter was OK, a deep well of knowledge that came from her connection with her only child. But the loss of Jennifer and then Mark had wilted Linda like a two-week-old rose. Anna had looked into her friend’s eyes and seen suicide growing behind those empty green orbs. Fred had seen it too. Both of them had fought against it, but it was like Pickett’s Charge, more
than a century-and-a-half after that bloody day at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and every bit as futile.

Linda’s late-night online chat with their kids had changed all of that. She’d been too frightened of losing the communications link to run to get Anna, and both Fred and Gil had worked all night at the lab. After Heather, Mark, and Jennifer had signed off, Linda had come running, banging on Anna’s door until she’d stumbled down the stairs in her purple nightgown and slippers.

They’d sat on the couch, talking, crying, laughing, and holding each other until dawn brought their husbands home. Then, after a quick synopsis of last night’s excitement, Anna had insisted on making a hearty breakfast to clear their minds and to give them all the inner warmth and strength she felt they’d need for the decisions that lay ahead. After all, their babies were out there, young adults, but their babies still, and they were in some sort of trouble.

There was no way in hell Anna, Gil, Fred, or Linda was going to let those lovely young people fend for themselves. Not in this lifetime or the next. They were much too young and inexperienced in the ways of the world for that.

“Looks great, sweetheart,” Gil said, motioning her to sit down.

“Wonderful,” said Fred, scooping a stack of steaming pancakes onto his plate.

“Yes it does,” said Linda. “I guess I’m just a little too excited to eat, though.”

“Nonsense.” Anna speared a golden pancake with her fork, placed it on Linda’s plate, added butter, and scooped a ladle of syrup in a lazy S pattern over the top. “No more talk of the kids until after breakfast. The sooner we all get to it, the sooner we can get down to business.”

Gil’s chortling laugh brought their heads around. “No use arguing. I’ve been through this before. Best enjoy a good meal and good company. Anna’s hard to redirect once she gets the bit in her teeth.”

Despite everyone’s desire to talk about what they were going to do about their children, they began to eat, and as they ate, the warm glow of the delicious breakfast amplified the happy knowledge that their kids were still alive and well.

After the dishes were rinsed and put in the dishwasher, all four adults retreated to the living room, settling onto the L-shaped couch, sinking into the soft tan leather as their minds worked on the problem at hand.

“OK, Anna. It’s time.”

Gil’s voice broke through her practiced comfort zone like a hammer hitting glass. He placed an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close to his body, her forehead brushing the brim of his
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
hat. Anna felt the world spin out of her control, something it never did. Not now. Not ever.

Then she was crying, her face buried in Gil’s strong shoulder, her arms wrapped around his neck, awash in a misery she’d denied for six months. For God’s sake, she was Anna McFarland, mother, caregiver, the one who fed strength to her friends and family. What was happening to her?

Then Linda was there. And Fred. Their arms wrapped around her and Gil, hugging them so close it seemed they would all become one.

Gil was the first to speak. “Anna. Are you ready for this discussion?”

Anna pulled back, bringing her head up to stare directly into her husband’s eyes.

“Yes.”

Gil nodded, his deep voice acquiring an authoritative note.

“As excited as we all are to learn that they’re still alive, it’s time to think about how we get our kids out of whatever they’ve gotten themselves into.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Fred.

“And if we’re feeling like we’re in over our heads, imagine what Heather, Mark, and Jennifer are going through.”

Each of the others glanced around, catching the look in one another’s eyes before returning their gaze to Gil.

Anna felt the words pulled from her lips. “So what do we do about it?”

“We call the FBI. Obviously our kids have been kidnapped, coerced into a situation beyond their understanding. We need the best of the best to deal with this.”

Linda shuddered. “But I swore we wouldn’t contact the authorities.”

Fred reached over and placed his hand on hers. “They’ve gotten involved in something beyond their control. No matter what you told them, we need to bring in the professionals.”

The room fell silent. Then Anna’s and Linda’s eyes met. Anna nodded slightly, an action mirrored by her friend.

“OK. Whatever it takes to get our babies back.”

Gil reached for the wireless handset, lifted it from the cradle, and dialed 411.

“Hello, operator. I need a number in Washington, DC. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, I can wait.”

Denise Jennings ducked into the break room, glancing over at the Bunn coffeemaker sitting on the counter beside the stainless steel sink. A thin layer of dark-brown liquid covered the bottom of the glass pot.

Damn it! Didn’t anyone else make coffee when the pot got low?

She briefly considered reprogramming Big John to find the obnoxious culprit, shook her head, pulled the filter basket, and dumped its contents into the trash can. Thirty seconds after that, fresh coffee began pouring from the Bunn into the empty pot.

Jesus. How hard was that?

Five minutes later she returned to her lab, steaming mug in hand, swiped her ID badge through the electronic reader, leaned forward for the retina scan, and, hearing the lock click back, opened the door. Ignoring the handful of staff not at lunch, she
turned right into her office, closed the door behind her, and sat down at her desk. Sipping from the “I’m crabby in the morning” mug, she typed in her computer password. She’d done it so often that the sixteen-character mix of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and special symbols, though it changed weekly, presented no significant one-handed challenge.

As the log-in screen was replaced by her desktop display, Denise froze. Big John had opened a popup dialog:

Denise Jennings...Eyes Only

Just below the text, another login and password prompt blinked at her. Denise stared at the prompt for several seconds, dread building in her gut until she felt nauseated.

Her fingers danced across the keyboard, the password dialog fading away, replaced by the familiar Big John response window.

Datapoint Acquired.
Correlation to Jack Gregory Query = 0.943732
Event:
McFarland/Smythe Call to FBI.
Reported computer chat contact with:
Mark Smythe
Jennifer Smythe
Heather McFarland
Next chat contact scheduled today, 22 April, 22:30 Hrs.

A 94 percent correlation to her Jack Gregory query.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

As much as she’d hoped her handoff of information to Freddy Hagerman had ended her involvement, that clearly wasn’t happening. Big John had his hooks in her, and apparently he didn’t
intend to let go until he’d bled her dry. Denise had been so busy she hadn’t gotten around to canceling her high-priority intelligence information request yet. So, of course, Big John made sure he returned critical information before she did, information that could send her to prison if she chose to ignore it.

Denise closed the window and leaned back in her chair, her heart thumping against her rib cage like one of those movie aliens trying to chew its way out. Well, she wasn’t going to jail. If it took playing both ends against the middle to assure that, so be it.

Denise picked up the phone on her desk, punched in the internal five-digit number, and waited.

“General Wilson.” The NSA director’s voice seemed to echo through her head.

“Sir. This is Denise Jennings. We’ve got a situation.”

Lieutenant General Robert “Balls” Wilson leaned back in his chair at the end of the conference table, hands clasped behind his head. As smart as Admiral Riles had been, Denise knew that Balls Wilson had him beat. Air Force Academy, Rhodes scholar, All-American linebacker, Caltech PhD in computer science, combat fighter pilot, former commander of NORAD, the first black NSA director was a seriously formidable individual.

He insisted that his staff address him by his fighter pilot handle, Balls, a play on the sports implication of his last name, reveling in the fact that it made some people uncomfortable. Denise was one of them. Still, she had to admit she liked the man. As far as she could tell he sweated liquid charisma.

Arrayed around the table were Levi Elias, generally regarded as the best intel analyst the NSA had, Dr. Bert Mathews, the computer
scientist who had been chosen to fill Dr. Kurtz’s shoes, and Karl Oberstein, the NSA’s chief of operations.

“OK, Denise, show us what you’ve got.”

Nodding to the general, Denise picked up the remote control, pressed the green power button, and walked to the front of the room. The digital display that formed the entire wall came to life, its high-definition background image a lovely high-resolution shot of Earth from space, an image so crystal-clear it had no counterpart in the civilian world, having been taken by one of the most sophisticated spy satellites ever created. If the satellite had been focused on the parking lot outside the Crystal Palace, not only could you have read the license plates, the multispectral imagery product could have told you how long the car had been parked there, from the heat of the engines. It could have shown you which parking spots had been recently vacated, from the differences in temperature of the ground that had been under the vehicles.

Denise pressed a sequence of buttons on the remote, pulling up the presentation she had spent the last two hours preparing.

“Balls. Gentlemen. I asked for this meeting to show you something that Big John brought to my attention this morning. The subject of the correlative data search was Jack ‘the Ripper’ Gregory.”

Seeing that she had their rapt attention, Denise flicked to the first slide. It showed the text message she’d received earlier in the day.

“I received this Big John alert shortly after noon today. What you need now is some context for the message so that you understand its importance.

“Several weeks ago Big John began reporting a sequence of data correlations with the Gregory search, data points that by themselves seemed very tenuous.”

Denise changed to a series of slides showing what Big John had identified as connected events.

“I’ll run through these quickly and then discuss the implied connections. The first of these events was the New Year’s Day virus from a little over a year ago. The virus came to the NSA’s attention for two reasons. It had the ability to encrypt data in a manner that our best methods couldn’t break. It also revealed the location of a computer that held another encrypted message, this one breakable, with text that alluded to dangerous activity within the Los Alamos Rho Project. This was the event that caused Admiral Riles to send Jack Gregory’s team to Los Alamos.”

Next came an image showing Jack Gregory and Janet Price standing and cheering at a basketball game.

“This was taken at the New Mexico State Championship basketball game that same year. I’ve circled in red the people occupying the seats next to Jack and Janet. They are, from left to right, Gil McFarland, Anna McFarland, Fred Smythe, Linda Smythe, Jennifer Smythe, and Heather McFarland. You’ll recognize some of those names from my first slide. The other person mentioned in Big John’s message today was Mark Smythe. He was a young allstate basketball player, playing in the state championship game.”

Balls leaned forward. “I remember reading about that kid. Fantastic young point guard as I recall. ESPN was comparing him to a young Steve Nash.”

Denise clicked to the next slide. “This is an article that appeared in the
Albuquerque Journal
a short while later. A local EPA inspector named Jack Johnson, Gregory’s cover name, had shown up at the Los Alamos hospital with an injured girl by the name of Heather McFarland. The story goes on to say that Jack apparently encountered a crazed homeless man who had been attempting to kidnap Heather McFarland. The two men fought,
with Jack getting cut on the arm before the homeless man ran off. That man has never been seen again.”