30,000 Feet above Boise, Idaho
Beck looked up just as Jack came into the cabin area. “Bad news?”
Thompson’s normally unreadable face wrinkled with concern. The colonel flung himself into the seat across from Beck. “Just got a message from our guys. Choppers took off about five minutes ago and the unit commander just got another message from Willy.”
Beck said nothing, waiting for Thompson to continue.
“They’ve been spotted. Gerrit cleared the landing site of claymores, but they set off an alarm system as they were moving toward the lab. Says they need help now. Not sure they can hold out.”
“Anyway backup can get there quicker?”
Thompson shook his head. “They’re already slamming pedal to the metal. They can’t go any faster.”
Beck leaned on the arm of his chair, chin resting on a tightly clenched fist. “They can’t hold Kane off for that long.”
Thompson nodded. “Willy hasn’t been able to break into Kane’s system yet.”
“Can Willy tell what might be happening once he breaks in?”
“The only good news so far. He reports that he should be able to verify that what we started in Albuquerque is piggybacking on Kane’s transmissions. The Trojan horse we sent in should be going to work on Project Megiddo right now.”
“So what Gerrit and Alena are doing at the moment may be all for nothing.”
Glumly, Thompson leaned back in his chair. “Everything they do now may be just a big smoke screen, one last attempt to save Joe. We still don’t know where Kane’s main servers are stored. My people-once they get there-have orders to blow the place.”
“No updates on Joe?”
“Nothing. Don’t even know if he’s there, let alone whether he’s alive.”
“I say again-is this sacrifice they’re making for nothing?” Beck seemed to express how both men felt.
The colonel nodded. “Not exactly. Primary mission has been accomplished. They breached Project Megiddo in New Mexico. Gerrit knew what the cost might be going in. We still had to send them in. Even if Joe wasn’t there. We had to make it look good.”
“Well, it looks like they did a bang-up job. Kane’s sending everything he has to take them out. We’ve got him fooled.”
Both men looked out the passenger window. Below, dots of light lay across the high desert as they flew over Idaho’s capital city. Beck stared out into the blackness, feeling helpless as he thought of what Gerrit, Willy, and Alena faced. Sometimes he wished he were God. But that would be stupid. Beck had enough problems dealing with the troubles of this investigation, let alone carrying the burdens of the world.
In his own investigation, he learned to respect what Gerrit’s father had tried to achieve. First, Thomas O’Rourke tried to shoulder the whole load after learning how his research would be used by Kane and his people. The father tried to protect his son by trying to bring him back to MIT where he could be protected.
Instead, Gerrit went off to war, unaware of what his own father was struggling with back home, angry that he couldn’t make his father understand. Unknown to Gerrit, his father knew quite well what was at stake. Like some international thriller, Thomas O’Rourke struggled against a growing technological invasion that threatened the entire international community. Ironically, it was the father’s death that brought his son home. And then Gerrit struggled to find out why his father died, not knowing his ignorance was the only thing keeping him alive.
Beck hoped Gerrit lived long enough to learn what his father had sacrificed.
This thought took him to a night many years ago when Joe told him he’d recruited Alena to be a part of the team. At first, Beck told Joe he was crazy. They knew what she had done in her past and he thought the risk too great. Joe fought him every step of the way, even though he knew what the woman had brought on Joe’s own family.
“People change. Redemption is always possible if a person is willing to confess his or her sins and make amends.” That was all Joe would say.
It looked like Joe might have been right about her. Maybe. And Beck hoped Gerrit would still be able to work with Alena once he knew the entire story about his father and that night many years ago.
Gerrit would handle it one of two ways. He’d learn to work with her and put the past behind him.
Or he’d kill her.
This whole conflict might be moot if Gerrit and Alena didn’t survive tonight. Help was still minutes away.
He prayed they lasted that long.
Gerrit pulled the pin and rolled a flash-bang into the darkened lobby. Lights inside the building had gone dark the moment he blew the door. They must be waiting inside.
He wanted to even their chances of survival. He counted off the seconds before the explosion. As soon as it went off, he peeled around the doorway and entered the lobby to the left. Alena swept past him toward the right. Once again, he and Alena had to pass through the kill zone.
Red emergency lights flashed on. He quickly scanned the lobby. No movement.
“Gerrit, follow me! Tell Willy to stay right behind us.” Alena’s sharp command caught him unaware for a moment. She brushed past him and, using her M4 rifle, blew the lock off a door leading from the lobby. “Forget the elevator. It’s no use.”
Gerrit scanned the lobby once more. Empty. Where was everyone? This place had to have a small army working inside.
She kicked the door open and rolled another flash-bang down a bank of stairs. They turned away from the blast, standing on either side of the doorway, until it triggered below. After the explosion, Alena dashed down the stairs with speed Gerrit thought bordered on recklessness. He quickly tried to catch up, knowing that there had to be more security below.
A pulsating red glow illuminated the stairs in the same way the lobby had been lit up. Somewhere, a lockdown system had kicked in, triggering emergency lights and automatically locking all passageways through the building.
She moved through the building like someone who’d been here before. How did she know the door above led to these stairs? There were no markings in the lobby.
A chill began to work its way through his chest. Unless…? What were the chances Richard Kane had two traitors in their midst? Gerrit had watched her in action, and he found it hard to believe she worked for the other side. She had been genuinely shocked to find Redneck had been a plant. The look on her face was as if Redneck had betrayed her-personally-not just the group she worked with.
He forced these thoughts from his mind. Needed to concentrate on finding Joe and getting out of this building alive. Later, when they had time, he’d confront her.
Gerrit motioned for Willy to rejoin them. “Move ahead of me, but stay behind Alena. I’ll cover our six, make sure no one climbs down our back.”
Nodding, Willy moved ahead, trying to stay up with Alena.
The stairway snaked back and forth, carrying them deeper belowground. He’d lost track of how many flights of stairs they traversed. Four or five? The last landing led to a concrete slab, bordered by a wall of cement. A single metal door stood at the foot of the stairs. Off to the left, a keypad.
He moved closer to Alena. “The only way we can get through that door is to blow it with the det cord I have left.” He heard a backup generator pounding away nearby, and the keypad lit up.
Alena looked at him earnestly. “Gerrit, do you trust me?”
The thought that troubled him earlier came back in a flash. He paused for a moment, thinking hard about his answer. “Yeah. I do.”
“I’ll tell you everything later. Right now, just trust me to do the right thing.” She strode over to the keypad and punched in a series of letters and numbers. The lock clicked and she opened the door, then held it open. “Stay close.” She peeled through the doorway to the right, and Gerrit moved to the left, leaving Willy behind.
At first, the place seemed empty.
They stared at each other and then scanned the room once more. A cluster of consoles and monitors, grouped together at one end of an expansive room, stood next to a forest of tall computer servers. Each workstation was linked to a series of cables that rose to the ceiling, strung together like strands of spaghetti until they reached the servers. The cables came to a glass wall, through which they passed into what appeared to be a climate-controlled and dust-free environment.
Kane’s nerve center.
The workstations looked like a duplication of NASA’s control center, everyone’s desk facing the mammoth screens like so many pagans worshiping their god. On these screens, streams of data code and file directories were broadcast. In the far corner, a half-dozen men and women cowered, their white lab coats broadcasting that they were technicians-not soldiers.
Willy came in behind them and whistled. “Oh my! What do we have here?”
Gerrit moved toward the huddled technicians, ordering them to lie on the ground. He found a box of plastic ties and used these to bind up the technicians. Within minutes, he had the group bound hand and foot.
Willy was already at one of the consoles, his laptop tied to a USB port. “I can get a signal down here. They must have a wireless system set up to reach upstairs. I am going to start sending out data from their system to ours.” Willy glanced at one of the screens. “Uh-oh.”
“What?” Gerrit moved closer. “It looks like they’ve accessed NSA, Langley…and the Pentagon.”
He and Willy watched a stream of data flow across the screen, files created in directories clearly marked. He saw the names of countries, with subdirectories identified by public and private entities.
Willy quickly zoomed on to the main directory listed as United States, and an array of subdirectories formed into two categories, public and private. After clicking on Public, Willy scanned down the list until he reached Intelligence Agencies. Clicking on the one for NSA, files began to pop up by division, listing organizational structure and personnel.
Willy chose one file identified as NSA’s Central Security Services (CSS) and clicked on the personnel file. A page opened, listing the names of executives in that branch. Some names were in red and others in black. As more data streamed in, some of the names switched from black to red as they viewed the list.
Gerrit pointed. “Click on that one listed as Director, NSA/Chief CSS in red.”
Willy complied, and the screen flashed color as hundreds of source documents started to open. Gerrit stared at the screen and recognized the director’s face, a brigadier general from the Unites States Air Force.
“Oh, man.” Willy clicked on a file where video and voice files seemed to have been merged. “Look at this, Gerrit.”
The time stamp on what appeared to be surveillance footage indicted this information has been downloaded earlier in the day. They watched the brigadier general sitting at his desk inside NSA. He was on a telephone, and they could hear the conversation as it was instantly converted to text. Words appeared at the bottom of the screen as they were spoken, like watching a foreign film with subtitles.
Willy looked at Gerrit. “I would imagine that phone has been encrypted by NSA. This means Project Megiddo is able to break through NSA’s firewall, gain access to their in-house camera system while simultaneously intercepting and recording this guy’s telephone conversation. We’re talking top-secret, NSA-protected stuff that anyone in Kane’s organization can access at any time.”
Gerrit stared at the screen Willy zoomed in on, then glanced at the group huddled in the corner. Several of the bound technicians kept glancing at one man, an older gentleman who just stared at the ground. The man seemed to be listening closely to what Willy said to Gerrit.
Striding over the group, Gerrit pulled out a knife and sliced the plastic cuff binding the man’s legs. “You, get up and follow me. Now!”
The man with gray hair and thick-rimmed glasses stood, his hands still bound in front, looking belligerently at Gerrit. He had the look of someone in charge.
Gerrit grabbed the man’s arm and dragged him over to where Willy worked on the computer. “Tell my friend what you have just done here.”
Barely hiding his look of contempt, the man glared back, saying nothing.
Gerrit drew near and whispered into the man’s ear. The man’s face paled and he turned toward Willy. “What do you want to know?”
“You just launched Project Megiddo?”
The man looked surprised. “I…we started about an hour ago.”
“Where is the data stored?”
“Here. On our servers.”
“Anywhere else?”
The man shook his head, but Gerrit distrusted the look in his eyes. “With the right passwords, others can remotely access the information, but it is all stored here. I swear.”
Gerrit knew the man was lying, but they didn’t have time to push him further. He edged closer, threatening. “Where’s Kane?”
The man’s eyes shifted to another door at the far end of the room. “There.” He pointed with his chin.
Gerrit dragged the man back to where the others were sitting. “Stay here and you won’t be hurt. Move, and you die. Understood?”
The man nodded and sank to the floor.
Hurrying back to Willy, Gerrit said, “Keep getting this data pulled from the system, or as much as you can retrieve. Once help gets here, we’re going to level this place to the ground.”
Willy nodded.
“And Willy, if you hear any movement through the door, dive for cover and call me. I don’t want to lose you. Hear me?”
“You got it, Mr. G.” Willy moved closer, whispering, “What did you tell that guy to get him to talk to us?”
“It’s a secret, Willy. You better hope I never have to use it on you. Now get to work.”
Again, Willy nodded, his focus now the computer screen. “You got it, Mr. G. ’Cause I certainly don’t wanna tick you off.” He shot Gerrit a smile. Willy did not seem intimidated.
An instant later, they heard rifle fire in the building. It came from the ground floor above them, echoing down the stairwell. They had only minutes to finish the job.
“Alena. You ready?”
She backed away from the bound prisoners. “Willy, keep an eye on them.”
Gerrit dashed to her side and pointed toward the locked door at the end of the room. “Can you work your magic again?”
Without answering, she ran to the door, waited for him to get into position, and then punched in the code. The sequence seemed to work again because the door clicked open. He reached in his backpack and pulled out a dark-green flash-bang. “If it’s dark again, we’ll crisscross, hit the deck, and count to three. Then I open up with this.” He showed her the stun grenade.
She nodded and reached down for the handle, pausing to see if he was ready, then flung it open.
Completely dark inside. Gerrit rushed in, followed by Alena.
They dived for the floor as a flash of gunfire opened up. He heard Alena crawl to the right as he edged to the left in the ensuing blackness. As the gunman opened again, Gerrit registered the layout in front of him-a large room, office and doors at the far end, farthest away from the door they just came through.
Something else registered in his brain. Yellow light from the gunfire illuminated a man standing next to the gunman, a man with a mane of long silver hair.
Richard Kane.
Gerrit counted to three and hurled the flash-bang deep toward Kane.