Wormhole (42 page)

“All clear.” Mark’s voice from the basement allowed Heather to reduce her guard for the first time in weeks. Even though she knew it wouldn’t last, for right now it felt damn good.

“You want the shower first?”

Mark shook his head as he looked her up and down. “You and Jen each take a bathroom while I keep watch. You both look like hell.”

Neither Heather or Jennifer bothered to argue. In twenty minutes they were back downstairs, dressed in jeans and blouses that were a couple of sizes too big, but far better than the lab coat and orange prison garb.

“Your turn. I’ll take watch while Jen hacks their laptop.” Mark handed her the Mark 17 SCAR-H and two spare magazines.

“Check the fridge while you’re at it,” he called out as he headed upstairs toward the master bedroom. “I could eat an elephant.”

Heather followed Jennifer into the office, a room just off the foyer that had a clear view to the spot where the curving driveway disappeared into the trees that surrounded the house. Jennifer slid into the seat in front of the laptop, held down the power button for several seconds, and waited for the laptop to power off. That done, she inserted the subspace USB dongle into a USB port on the Dell laptop’s right side.

Jennifer brought up the BIOS screen and set the computer to boot from the USB device, bypassing the user log-in and password. As the Windows desktop appeared, she smiled and cracked her knuckles.

“Damn, I’ve missed this.”

As Heather watched, Jennifer began her web search, memorizing the locations of key facilities she wanted to access. Satisfied, she began a completely different kind of search, this time using the dongle’s subspace receiver-transmitter.

“Check for Jack’s messages first,” Heather said. “Then you can start your hacks.”

Jennifer nodded, shifting her attention back to the web browser.

Jack had a standard operation procedure of posting encrypted messages on a handful of Facebook accounts, using encryption software Jen and Heather had designed. And while they no longer had a copy of the program, it only took a couple of minutes to download the latest version of the Java Development Kit and install it on the laptop. From there until she had the program up and running would be a matter of minutes, not hours.

As Jennifer set to work, Heather walked over to the window and peered out. Except for a few birds pecking at the grass near the driveway, nothing moved. Heather walked out of the office, unlocked the front door, and stepped outside. Moving into the trees, she paralleled the narrow lane that led from the driveway into the woods. Fifty feet later, the lane turned hard left and headed toward the road that linked lanes just like this one to the highway. The distant squeal of children at play in a backyard dominated all other sounds.

Turning away from the lane, Heather made a 360-degree loop through the woods surrounding the house, her movements generating no more noise than a field mouse’s, despite the too-big Nikes that encased her feet. Finding nothing of concern, Heather reentered the house through the front door, locking it behind her. She turned to see Mark coming down the stairs, clad in better-fitting jeans, a black T-shirt, and a pair of gray New Balance running shoes. More importantly, for the first time in weeks, he’d shaved. The weight he’d lost had taken his already low body fat to near zero, making the muscles in his arms stand out like cables beneath his skin.

“How’s your head?” Mark pointed to the Band-Aid at the edge of her hairline.

Heather reached up to touch it. “I’ll live. You ready to eat?”

“What’ve they got?”

“Haven’t checked yet.”

Mark turned toward the kitchen, with Heather in tow. “House like this, a couple of miles away from a store, they’re bound to have a full fridge.”

It wasn’t full, but close enough to bring a smile to Mark’s face. The leftovers included chicken wings, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and half a pan of green bean casserole. Heather made plates for herself and Jennifer, leaving Mark to finish off the rest.

When she set the plate, hot from the microwave, down beside the laptop, Jennifer didn’t even notice.

“Brunch is served.”

“Yeah, OK. Give me a sec.”

Having watched Jen in some of her programming Zen states before, Heather left it and walked back to the kitchen. If it got cold, Jen could heat it back up if she wanted to.

Retrieving her own plate from the microwave, Heather sat down beside Mark, who had amazingly almost finished clearing his first plateful. The smell of the food made her mouth water so she was afraid drool would leak over her lips as she took the first bite. It didn’t, and the meatloaf tasted as good as it smelled. But somehow, Heather couldn’t swallow.

Standing up quickly, she strode to the sink, leaned over, and vomited into the garbage disposal. Immediately Mark was beside her, his arm around her waist.

“What’s wrong?”

Heather spit, tried to answer, and then succumbed to another retching bout. It was stupid. Jack and Janet had warned them about this, the aftereffects of killing a man. Somehow she’d thought, since she’d already seen Mark kill men, that she’d be immune to the reaction. But now that she’d dropped the mental guard she’d maintained throughout her captivity, the thought of the Navy SEALs she’d killed and the guards at the NSA facility flooded her mind. America’s finest. Heroes serving their country. They had families too. But she’d killed them all. And even though she thought she’d done what she’d had to, that didn’t make it better.

Turning on the cold water, she rinsed out her mouth and washed her face, then flipped on the disposal. When she turned back to face Mark, he didn’t bother to say anything, just pulled her close and wrapped his strong arms around her body. As he
held her, tears leaked from Heather’s eyes, gaining volume until they formed streams down her cheeks.

“Oh, Mark. I’ve seen our futures. And most of them, the most probable ones, are so...so dark. And not just for us. For everyone.”

“Look at me.” Mark leaned back until his gaze held her, pulling her out of her visions and into his eyes. “I don’t give a shit about those futures. None of them. I’m the now. And I’ve got a message for anyone trying to bring on that darkness. They try to take this away from me and they’ll be sorry.

“I know this doesn’t make mathematical sense, but I want you to forget about any future that doesn’t go our way. Even if it’s 99 percent likely, throw it away. We can’t waste energy fighting to prevent bad outcomes. The only way we’re going to get through this is by focusing on what we want to happen. Visualize that. Find us a way through.”

Heather steadied herself, wiped her eyes, and nodded. When he tried to pull her close again, she stopped him.

“I’m OK now. I think I’ll try to eat again.”

As she seated herself in front of her plate, Heather did what Mark had asked. As she began to chew, she pushed all the dark visions out of her mind. As her grandfather had always said, “If you’re going to bet the long shots, then let those ponies run.”

Eileen Wu was frustrated. The four a.m. drive from her Annapolis apartment to Fort Meade hadn’t bothered her, at least not until she got to Meade. The post was still bottled up tight, and with all the NSA recalls plus the continued arrival of military and government investigation teams, she hadn’t actually made it through the gate until 6:35.

The NSA parking lot was a nightmare. The parking garage that concealed the Ice House had been sealed off, forcing everyone out into the huge exterior lot, and, despite the early hour, Eileen had been forced to cruise the full rows until she found a slot to squeeze her car into a half mile from the facility.

Her mood didn’t improve when she got to the building and discovered she would not be allowed down to her lab until after the forensics teams had finished the crime scene investigation. Worse, they hadn’t even started the actual investigation yet. The
security folks had refused to allow the investigators and medical examiners access until their clearances could be confirmed. Even after their security credentials were verified through the Joint Personnel Adjudication System, JPAS, security again refused to grant access. Yes, they had top-secret clearances, but they weren’t cleared for SCI, sensitive compartmented information, and the Ice House was an SCI facility.

As for Eileen, no amount of reasoning, arguing, or even ranting and raving made the slightest bit of difference. She wasn’t getting access until the forensics teams were finished. She’d even tried the old “I’m doing the electronic forensics investigation” ploy. Nope. The cone of silence had descended, and nobody was listening.

Even a direct appeal to General Wilson hadn’t helped. He was already involved in forcing through security waivers to get the crime scene unit access to the Ice House, and she just wasn’t at the top of his priorities right now. She’d get her chance at figuring out how someone had penetrated the facility’s electronic control systems, but only after all the dead bodies were removed.

By the time she was allowed into the building, it was already four thirty in the afternoon. She paused in the foyer to take in the scene. The building was a mess. The tile floor was littered with chunks of concrete, broken glass, and wood from walls and furnishings riddled by bullets and explosive ordnance.

Eileen wound her way to the stairwell through a maze of yellow tape designed to keep people out of the areas where investigators were still working. The bodies had been removed, but the smell remained, the stench of death clogging her nostrils. Everywhere she looked the standing water was red.

Looking away, Eileen shifted her focus to making it to the stairwell without throwing up. If anything, the stairwell was worse, indicative of the pitched battle that had raged inside as the Delta team fought its way down to the bottom.

At the first sublevel, Eileen stepped through the open stairwell door and breathed a sigh of relief. The corridor between the labs was still wet, but the water wasn’t colored with blood. The doors to the labs had been propped open to let the halon gas dissipate, and although this had allowed some of the water from the hall to run down through the raised flooring, water damage to the electronics should be minimal.

Turning into her lab, Eileen made her way directly to the workbench that held the dissected Gregory laptops. At first glance it appeared undisturbed. Then she noticed it. One of the USB dongles was missing from where it had been connected to the electronic breadboard. Glancing to the other side of the table, Eileen muttered a curse through clenched teeth. Both dongles were gone.

Without thinking, she lifted the phone from its cradle. Shit. No dial tone. And she’d had to leave her cell phone outside the secure area.

She thought about walking back outside to call in a report, then discarded the idea. First she needed to do a thorough inspection to see if anything else was missing or had been tampered with. She had no intention of being unable to give complete answers to the questions that were going to be thrown at her. As busy as Balls was trying to figure out exactly what the hell had happened here, he wouldn’t be happy about getting a bunch of half-assed information.

Sliding into her chair, Eileen began the methodical analytical work for which she was famous. And as she worked, the disturbing imagery and smells from the rest of the building finally slipped from her head.

“Jack’s been busy,” Jennifer said as Mark and Heather stepped into the office.

“Nothing surprising about that,” Mark replied, noting the clarity in his sister’s eyes, something that was very good to see.

“Remember the Navajo cop who hid Jack and Janet on the Santa Clara Reservation?”

“Tall Bear.”

“Right. Apparently he’s become a real player in the Native People’s Alliance, a new federation fighting for tribal autonomy. With all the crap that’s going on out in the country, the NPA has declared independence. Tall Bear, as recently elected president of the Navajo Nation, pulls some serious clout. There’s talk of him becoming the first president of the NPA.”

Heather shook her head. “What’s this got to do with Jack?”

“He’s hooked us up with the American equivalent of the French Resistance. If we can make it to a reservation, the NPA has agreed to take us under its wing.”