Wormholes (5 page)

“We needed details you would have—”

“I’ll get the goddamned witness details, and you’ll just gather information, do you hear me?” He reined himself in. He was smart enough to realize that this case might hinge on lab results. And he knew Gaston and Cameron were untouchable for the moment. They’d solved a lot of high-profile cases. But there would come a time when they would be vulnerable. “Just tell me what you got.”

Unperturbed, Gaston sorted through his notes and Cameron opened his notebook with the measurements.

“Hole’s the same size all the way through. Exactly 38 centimeters,” said Cameron. “Also at the same angle, a couple of degrees from horizontal. It’s all one hole made by a single … uh … well, we don’t know what.” He went on to detail the measurements. Then Gaston outlined what they had to do back at the lab — mainly chemical analyses for explosive residue and microscopic studies of the surfaces to detect marks that would indicate the kind of projectile.

“So what the fuck do I tell the media? The cameras are ass-deep downstairs wanting to come up.”

“Tell them we don’t know.”

“Goddamnit, Gaston, give me your best guess. I’m not gonna stand there with my thumb up my ass!”

Gaston and Cameron looked at each other. “Tell them it may be an unexploded projectile of some kind,” said Cameron. “We don’t have the projectile.”

“No evidence of terrorists?”

“Nope,” said Cameron.

“I’ll say act of God,” said Barnes. “Maybe a meteor or frozen crap from an airplane. Okay?” The lieutenant could see by the two criminalists’ faces that it wasn’t okay. But he didn’t care. He yawned, indicating that he felt confident he’d exerted his control over the two. “Okay, do the samples, file a report and turn over the whole mess to … hell, I dunno … to the FBI and the insurance company. Yeah. Act-of-God kinda thing.”

“Barnes, wait a minute.” Gaston held up his notes. “Those explanations just won’t fly. We’ve got something really strange here. We’ve got something really unexplained. This could be a new kind of weapon, like a cannon, or maybe some laser beam.”

The lieutenant sighed, as if he were about to explain something to a moron. “Look, Gaston, nobody was hurt. We got no evidence of foul play. We just got a building that has a hole in it. We’ve got a couple of dozen open murder cases to deal with. Just file a fucking report, will you?”

The lieutenant left to do his own interviews of the man and woman. Gaston quietly gathered his notes and they walked back into the office, passing Balch and Mercer, who followed Barnes to a private office.

This was something different. Gaston almost tasted his need to investigate this case further.

“That was one lucky man. That Balch guy,” said Cameron enthusiastically to hide his sense of foreboding. He began to busily wind up the string and gather their tools, signaling, he hoped, their final departure.

“How’s that?” Gaston said distractedly, as he continued to stare at the two holes in the office wall.

“Well if the hole had been larger, the guy would be sucked all the way through. Or if it had been smaller and the suction larger, he’d have been squeezed like toothpaste.”

“I’m sure he figures this was his lucky day.”

“What do you think, then? Meteor? Airplane crap like the lieutenant said? Or some terrorist with a big cannon? Or maybe a secret laser beam? Like maybe from that Livermore Lab. They do fusion stuff with big lasers. There wasn’t any debris. Maybe it got burned up. Yeah.”

“Or maybe sucked out. Maybe. What we do next is follow the trajectory. Let’s see where this hole goes.”

“Where it goes?” Cameron looked dubiously at Gaston, following him into the outer office with his arms full of cameras and tools, a piece of string trailing behind him. “What the hell does that mean?”

“We might find something interesting at the impact point.”

“C’mon, man, what impact point? Let’s just do like the lieutenant says and give this to the Bureau. We’re not required to go beyond the scene. Let the insurance guys handle it. Then we can watch them jack around with it. We got no reason to go on with this thing, Ralph.”

“I’ve got an idea I want to try first.” Gaston took out his wallet and thumbed through a sheaf of cards and slips of paper. He took out a card and scrutinized it for a moment. Then he picked up the phone receiver.

“Don’t you pick up that phone,” Cameron ordered, as he began piling up tools and camera equipment for Gaston to load into the cases. “I see that damned stubborn look in your eyes. Like in that other case. It’s just been a month since the last time … the dead guy … you know what the hell I’m talkin’ about.”

But Ralph Gaston was punching in the number.

“You pick up that fucking phone, you’re not ever comin’ to my house again!”

Ralph smiled and set the card on the desk, listening to the phone ring at the other end. The card read “Deus Foundation” and gave a New York address and phone number.

• • •

“Patrick, I’ll give you just ten more minutes, then you just have to go to bed.” Patrick’s mother stood at the door from the kitchen, peering into the darkened back yard, barely able to make out her son.

“Mom, you should come look,” came back the voice from the darkness. “This is radical!” His mother had used the long version of his name, but she hadn’t really hollered it, so he knew he still had some time.

“I’m sure it is.” She closed the screen door, smiling. Patrick had fallen in love with his new telescope. She hoped the enthusiasm lasted. It got him outside and she liked it better than video games.

“Mom! I’m not kiddin’! Come look! There’s a cloud on the moon! Get Dad!” Patrick closed one eye and peered once more into the Celestron telescope at the great, bleak expanse of the half moon spread out before him. He could see the vast maria, or flat plains, and the violently produced punctuation marks of the immense craters. And across one of the maria was a wispy cloud of what looked like mist or steam. It must have been huge. He’d planned to look at the moon just to calibrate the new telescope and then on to the planets. But he’d seen this fog thing.

“The moon doesn’t have an atmosphere,” a deep voice behind him said. “It’s probably just a cloud in front of the telescope. Let me look.” Patrick backed away and let his father peer into the eyepiece. After a few adjustments of the eyepiece, his father settled in and looked for a long time. First casually, then more intently. “Hmm,” he said. “You may have something here, pal.” Patrick itched to get back to the telescope, but his father wouldn’t relinquish it, so he looked up at the moon to see what he could see with the unaided eye.

Finally, his father stood back and Patrick peered once more at the strange sight. It was still there, floating above the surface, seeming to emanate from a single spot. “I’m gonna send out a message. See if anybody else has looked at it!” He left the telescope to his father and ran into the house. Within a minute, he’d logged into his Twitter account. He laboriously pecked out a query about whether anybody else had seen the cloud on the moon. He knew he might be ridiculed. Nobody looked at the moon. Nothing important happened on the moon.

“I
sn’t he ready yet?” Cameron shivered and clasped his arms around himself to ward off the cold, damp wind swirling over the darkened platform. Skinny ballistics experts weren’t supposed to find themselves standing atop a thirty-story tower of the San Francisco Bay Bridge in the middle of the night. “Damn, I thought we were gonna get this thing over quick.”

Dacey stood beside him, somewhat warmer in her climbing suit, and together they peered out over the glittering San Francisco cityscape. She had to admit it was probably the most incredible view she’d ever had of a city. The streaming lights of the cars on the busy streets, the colorful neon of Chinatown, the faint gleam of the windows on the skyscrapers, the shimmering reflections of the city from the bay waters, the halo of light the city cast into the night sky. It was well worth the cold.

Ralph Gaston and Gerald Meier ignored the weather, busy conferring with the warmly jacketed bridge maintenance supervisor who had brought them up the small creaking elevator inside the steel tower. He’d been only too happy to help them in their quest. He loved his bridge and was deeply concerned that something violent had been done to it.

Dacey was surprisingly calm, considering she was about to climb over the side of this steel tower and be lowered down its face like a spider down a wall. Cameron continued to gripe about the cold. He was a funny guy and they’d hit it off the minute they’d met.

But what
was
she doing here?

It had been two weeks since she had gone down into the crater in Oklahoma, since she had hog-tied Gerald. Two weeks since she woke up the following morning to find Gerald sleeping in his van out front, probably because he couldn’t spring for a motel. She’d taken him in, fed him breakfast, then taken him to the university to show him her data. He reminded her of Bobby Lister in high school, the quiet, nerdy kid in calculus. Lister had helped her ace the course and she’d taken him under her wing as a friend.

And it had been two days since Gerald called her up out of the blue to tell her he’d found something in San Francisco that reminded him of the Gillard crater. A hole through an office building. Sitting at her desk, running her fingers over the glass-smooth piece of granite from the cavern, she’d scoffed at first. “Come on, Gerald, a hole in an office building?”

But he’d sent a seismogram — a trace of the ground motion in San Francisco that day — and that had convinced her something strange was up. Whatever made the hole in San Francisco had burrowed underground. And it had left the same characteristic jagged up-and-down lines on the seismogram as had the event that made the Gillard hole. She’d gotten the Gillard trace from the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado. Neither of the traces were earthquakes, or an underground explosion. Damnit, they looked like some giant gopher rooting around, grinding through the earth, south to north.

So it was seismic squiggles on a computer screen that brought her to this high, cold bridge tower … and the fact that she had applied for a grant from the Deus Foundation, and it couldn’t hurt her chances to cooperate with an existing grantee! But she also knew that deep down it was also the haunting agonized faces of Anita Lafferty and the kids, especially Jenny. This phenomenon had torn a hole in their lives. She couldn’t fix it, but she could damned well find out what it was!

“Maybe he’s still lining it up,” said Gaston coming up to stand beside them, concentrating on the tall, graceful Bank of America building that jutted above the skyscrapers around it. As a ballistics expert, he was always calculating trajectories, and he couldn’t fathom how a projectile that had pierced a building would travel all the way to the bridge. But they had seen evidence of an impact through their binoculars.

“Call him,” demanded Cameron.

“I just did.”

“Call him again. He’s probably screwing around with the gadget and we’re up here freezing.”

“Then it would slow him down. We’d be up here longer.”

“Shit.” Cameron jogged around the platform, stopping to look at the winch that had been bolted on the city side of the platform. He shook his head and kept jogging.

Gerald came up to stand beside Dacey, and she looked over at him with more than a little interest. His bearded face was dramatically lit by the city glow, his dark curls shining. He turned to her, his gaze intent with concern.

“You okay with this?”

“Piece of cake, Gerald. I’ve climbed down rock faces taller than this. And it’s a motorized winch. Piece of cake.”

“Well, you saw the crater in Gillard. You saw the hole in the building. You can tell us a lot, maybe.”

Dacey could tell he was trying to convince himself as much as her. He was worried about her. That was sweet.

Gerald looked up at the three-quarter moon, shining steadily.

“Lot of strange things going on. You hear about the cloud on the moon?”

“The one the kid found? The gas vent? Hasn’t everybody? You think that’s one of your mysterious ‘appearances’?”

But before he could answer an intense green laser beam pierced the night, emanating from the distant building and striking the bridge tower somewhere below them.

“There!” Gaston smiled, but he didn’t have to point. The glittering beam seemed almost a shaft of solid matter, for it did not spread, but maintained its tight columnar shape. It seemed to declare its own identity in the darkness, to assert its presence as a power that was alien to everyday routine.

“Man, this is gonna be all over the news tomorrow,” said Cameron. “Barnes is gonna be pissed as hell we kept on with this investigation.” He paused and with great relish concluded, “Well, fuck ’im!”

“Wow!” said the bridge supervisor, his sunburned, wrinkled face breaking into a broad grin. “That sure is somethin’ all right. A laser, eh?”

“Yeah, an argon laser,” said Gaston, leaning over as far as he could to see where the beam struck the tower. My friend uses it in his laser light shows, but he said he’d use it to help me trace this trajectory.”

“You were right, Ralph,” said Cameron. “The path does end on this tower. And looks like the thing would’ve hit the tower. Good sightin’.”

But Gaston had already moved off, following Dacey and Gerald. Dacey was strapping herself into the bridgeworker’s harness that had lain in a pile in the middle of the platform.

“Y’know, you coulda taken a picture of the tower, like through a telephoto lens,” said the supervisor as he helped Dacey buckle the leather harness firmly around her chest and under her legs.

“Then we wouldn’t have the trajectory,” said Gaston. “I want to know how much this projectile dropped over this distance. If Dacey can find a dent, she can measure how far it is below the beam. Then, we can figure out the mass of the projectile. Maybe even trace fragments.”

Dacey liked Ralph Gaston, too, even though the quiet man was very different than her in personality. Neither of them would let this mystery rest until they had figured it out.

As Gerald checked out the buckles and straps that held Dacey into the harness — with almost obsessive care — Gaston flipped open his cell phone and punched in a number. After a moment, there was an answer. “Elton, it looks good. Yeah. You sure you’re sighted right down the middle of the holes? Yeah. Okay, I’ll call. Bye.” He slipped the phone into his belt pouch.

Cameron had been inspecting the winch, and he stepped over to Dacey and also began to assiduously check the straps, buckles and clasps of the harness, as well as the bag of tools on Dacey’s belt.

“Guys, guys, it’s all right,” Dacey waved her hands at them and strapped on her trusty battered helmet. “You’re like a bunch of mother hens.”

Despite her protests Cameron continued his examination, yanking hard on the heavy metal shackle to which the cable would attach.

“I could go,” said Gaston.

“I wouldn’t let him go,” explained Cameron. “I just didn’t trust him. I figured because of him being a fairy and all, he’d think he could fly.”

Gaston’s elaborate sigh at his friend’s teasing brought smiles that helped ease the tension, as Dacey moved to the edge of the platform and the technician snapped the steel cable onto the harness.

“We use this harness, this cable, for painting and inspection all the time. It’ll hold about five hundred pounds.”

“I’ll remember that when I’m hanging by it,” said Dacey. She donned a headset the supervisor gave her and they tested the intercom link. Then Dacey swung out over the dizzying precipice, bracing her feet on the edge of the platform. Below her, the huge support cables of the bridge arched downward to the bridge deck, where miniature cars and trucks flowed in a steady stream across the bridge. Dacey realized she was panting and had clenched her hands around the cable in front of her. The fact that she wasn’t rappelling down good old rock made her edgy. This was cold, unfriendly steel and below her, a highway and cars. She willed herself to relax, to put her confidence in the cable. The very, very thick steel cable.

“Ready?” she heard in her ear. It was Gaston, speaking into his own microphone. “Cameron says you don’t have to do this. He could do it.”

“Then he can do it.” There was pause.

“He says, ‘Hell, no.’ He was just being polite.”

She smiled. “Then lower away.” The workman flipped a switch and the winch whined to life lowering her inch by inch down the side of the massive tower. She fended off the cold gray-painted steel face with her hands as she went, rivet by rivet, down the side. She twisted and looked down. The laser beam splashed its green color against the tower far below and to the right of her. She’d have to swing back and forth to reach the spot. As she’d done so many times before on a rock face, she began to walk herself to the left across the face of the tower, swinging back to the right, to see how far she could get.

“What are you doin’?” she heard Gaston in her ear.

“I’m going to have to swing over to line myself up. I’m just testing.”

“Well, you’re scaring Jimmy.”

“So
damned
sorry,” she laughed. After another thirty feet, she had lowered to about the level of the laser beam. She ordered a halt and twisted to look back at the building. It was a remarkable sight, the intense green light streaming from the distant building. Many of the lights in the building were on, as the tenants had stayed late to watch the experiment. She turned back to the vast steel wall before her.

“Okay, I’m going to start at the level of the beam, then work down until I find an impact mark.” She began to walk herself to the left, swooping back to the right. Walking left, swooping right … left … right, until she began to build up enough momentum to swing herself over to the laser beam. One last bounding stride to the left and she knew she had enough momentum. She swung wide right and into the laser beam and was astonished to see flash past her eyes a hole as large and perfect as the one through the building.

“Jesus!” she huffed as she swung back left.

“Jesus, what?” asked Gaston.

“There’s a hole here, too. Same level as the beam.”

“Wow!”

Dacey pushed left with her legs and hands to give herself enough momentum to swing wide right once again. Sure enough, she swooped into the green brilliance and the hole was there. Whatever had made these holes was unaffected by gravity!

Suddenly, the laser beam was overwhelmed by a white glaring light and a powerful thudding sound behind her. A news helicopter had drifted in to hover between her and the beam. She waved the helicopter away. The cameraman leaning out of the helicopter waved back. She waved again. She heard the faint pop of gunfire from above him. The helicopter swooped away and the laser beam returned.

Dacey pushed out and looked upward, although she knew she wouldn’t be able to see anything. “What was that? Did you shoot at them?”

“Jimmy brought a gun. He says it was just blanks. I made him put it away.”

“Well, hell, it worked!” Dacey resumed the swinging. Sweat trickled down her forehead from the exertion. She swung up to the hole and grabbed for it. An excruciating pain shot through her fingers and she yelled and grabbed her hand and allowed her swing to dissipate. The two slices had cut right through her gloves and to her fingers. They were the width of the tower steel’s thickness, and they bled profusely, like being cut by a razor. She rummaged in her tool bag and pulled out a cloth, wrapping her fingers tightly. Through the pain, a realization: the hole was sliced as cleanly as the sliced-off rock that rested on her office desk!

“What happened?” asked Cameron.

“The edges are sharp,” she said, not wanting to worry Gerald more. She set her jaw and resumed the swing. Using the bloody cloth as a cushion, she grabbed the edge of the hole again, careful not to draw her hand along the edge. She could see that the ultrasharp edges were fraying the cloth, but she was determined to see this hole up close. She hauled herself up even with the hole.

The cut edge of the inch-thick steel plate gleamed in the laser light like polished metal. Holding onto the hole, she carefully stuck her leg through, hooked it gingerly into the hole and leaned out so her helmet camera would get a good shot of it. She could feel the extreme sharpness of the edges through her thick climbing suit pants. She couldn’t stay like this long. She grabbed the hole and brought the helmet camera in for closeup shots. She also fished out a tape measure, payed it out and held it up against the hole. Diameter of 38 centimeters. Same as in the building, if she remembered Gaston’s briefing correctly. She reported the measurement to Gaston.