Breakpoint (4 page)

Jimmy nodded vigorously while he chewed. “Got a statie up in Boston I know who's workin' the MIT explosion, says he'll walk us through it if we come up.”

Susan smiled and shook her head admiringly. “So let's go.”

“We're on the seven-thirty JetBlue shuttle in the morning, boss.”

Although she was beginning to wonder exactly which of them was in charge, all she could say was “How do you happen to know the State Police detective on that case in Massachusetts?”

“Cousin. All us Mick cops are related.”

Laughing, Susan almost choked on her last bite. “All right, if I have to be up at five-thirty, I'm going home.” She picked up the empty plates and put them in the sink. Then, gathering up her coat and bag, she walked to the door. “See you at the shuttle. Nice work today, and on the food. But unless you want me to call you Jimmy Olsen instead of Jimmy Foley…I'm Susan. Don't call me boss.”

As the door shut behind her and she walked to the elevator, Susan Connor could swear she heard Foley say, “Right, Chief.” Walking to her car, she conceded to herself that it might be valuable to have a cop assisting her, since this project was clearly going to require fieldwork and in the U.S. Even if Foley didn't seem to be appropriately deferential. That was not a new problem. Susan looked so much younger than she was and Rusty had promoted her rapidly despite her lack of experience in government. Of course, she thought as she drove by the security guard house, some of it might be due to her own attitude. She'd always resented men who seemed to make things look easier than they were, who got ahead on a winning smile and a pleasing patter. Maybe she should give Foley a chance. He did cook well.

2245 Mountain Standard Time
22,300 Miles Above the Pacific Ocean

The twelve-thousand-pound New Galaxy satellite sat still relative to the Earth below. Its antennae were simultaneously sending and receiving gigabits of digital packets via radio and laser channels. When reassembled on the planet below, the packets would turn into e-mails, data streams, voice conversations, and television programs. Few of the packets were processed onboard, only those routed to the satellite's housekeeping computer. With that minor exception, the packets merely passed through New Galaxy, quickly, quietly, from Los Angeles to Tokyo, from San Francisco to Sydney. In the frozen near-vacuum of space, as billions of data packets soared through its large antennae, New Galaxy made no sound that could be heard. Even when its ion xeon gas thrusters fired bursts for a microsecond to keep the station in the geostationary orbit, there was only silence.

At 2248 mountain time, the satellite received an update message, a series of packets on the antenna and frequency used only by PacWestel, New Galaxy's owner. From the header information on the packets, they were routed to the satellite's onboard housekeeping computer, decrypted, and reassembled into a message. The message was longer than any of the satellite's normal instructions. It filled the format line in the station-keeping program and then dropped an executable code into the computer. The code was in the same format as the many maintenance messages that adjusted the antennae or ran diagnostics on an onboard system, but it wrote over the existing program, eliminating certain limitations. The code adjusted the ion xeon thrusters to the six o'clock position and performed a xeon gas release. The thrust time in the code was not the usual three seconds. It was 300.00 seconds.

Quietly, New Galaxy moved farther away from Earth, its speed accelerating as it did. Then the last instruction on the update message was executed: New Galaxy went into energy-conservation mode, shutting down all systems for 999 days. When the systems rebooted, New Galaxy's antennae would not be facing toward Earth. The satellite would be well on its way to escaping the solar system.

2310 MST
Space Tracking and Detection Center, U.S. Space Command
Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs

“…so I had to leave home with the Avalanche down by one,” Captain Fred Yang complained to Master Chief Sergeant Brad Anderson.

“That's what TiVo is for, Captain. By the way, you missed the shift-change briefing.” Anderson was fifteen years older than the captain, who was technically in charge of the center for the next eight hours.

“I know, I know. I'll read in by running the change software. Nothing ever happens here anyway. I don't know why we have to be inside a mountain. It's so twentieth century, so Cold War…” Captain Yang mumbled as he sat down at his console and started keying in. For several minutes, Yang stared quietly at the screen, and then he said, with a note of concern, “Sarge? The change-detection program says we have three fewer birds aloft. And the ones that are missing don't make any sense.”

Sergeant Anderson had just picked up the ringing green phone, the drop line to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. He placed a hand over the mouthpiece before answering it. “Captain, we get debris all the time, old birds flaming out in the upper atmosphere. It's no biggie.” He turned to the phone while Yang pounded away on a touch screen. “Yes, sir, this is Spacetrac. No, we haven't seen anything unusual over the Pacific. Why?” Anderson wrote down what they told him. “Okay, we'll keep an eye open. Right.” He hung the phone on a hook next to four other color-coded drop lines, then spun his chair toward the young captain.

Yang stood up from his console. “Sarge, New Galaxy 3, Netstar 5, and Pacific Wave 7 are not old birds with decaying orbits.”

“No kidding. NG-3 just went up last month, right after Sinosat-12.” The sargeant got up and walked toward Yang's screen. “What are you talking about…sir?”

“They're gone. Not deorbited. Goneski.” Yang pointed at the screen.

“What the…,” Sergeant Anderson said, sitting down at the captain's position.

As Anderson began typing in commands, the white phone rang. Yang answered as the sergeant worked the screen. “Spacetrac…yeah. We just noticed that, too…. Well, I thought there might be a problem with that bird…that one, too…. We're checking. Sure. Get right back to you.”

Anderson looked up at the captain questioningly. “It was DISA in Virginia,” Yang reported. “They said they lost connectivity with some commercial comm sats in the Pacific. I thought the Pentagon had its own satellites.”

Anderson reached for a headset. The Defense Information Systems Agency was the phone company for the entire Defense Department, globally. “Yeah, they rent space on private satellites, a lot of it. They can't fight a war without them.” As he spoke, he flipped through the Space Command directory, then hit the touch pad to connect. “Maui, this is Spacetrac, Colorado Springs. We need a visual on three geosyncs immediately…. We have the Commander's override priority and we need to look at these birds now!”

At the summit of Mount Haleakala, nine thousand feet above the waters of the Pacific, Space Command's Maui Space Surveillance Site turned its optical telescopes and laser-tracking devices to three parking orbits twenty-two thousand miles overhead. Fifteen minutes later, the results of their search were clear. “Spacetrac, Maui here. There are no satellites in those locations, turned on or stealthy. Nothing but cold, black emptiness,” the civilian contractor from Raytheon reported back to Cheyenne Mountain. “We can broaden the search, use the Deep Space trackers if you got the juice to pull them off their current missions.”

“Thanks. We may have to do that. Get back to you,” Sergeant Anderson, said and took off the earpiece. “Captain Yang, I think you'd better do this yourself.” Anderson got out of Yang's chair.

“Do what, Sarge?”

“There is a preformatted message in the system you need to send to the Commander and to the Pentagon, Flash precedence. The subject line is ‘Major Incident in Space.'”

0745 EST
Logan International Airport, Boston

“No, don't go that way. It's rush hour. Take the Ted and we'll loop back through the B School,” Susan directed as Jimmy Foley drove the rent-a-car out of the Hertz lot.

“Oh, yeah, forgot. You know your way around here. Went to college here. And graduate school, right?”

“You did your homework,” Susan replied as the car entered the tunnel. “Yeah, I lived in the freezer that was then Boston for seven icy years after growing up in Atlanta. Summer lasted a week up here. It's better now with global warming kicking in…. Now the real test of your knowledge: Ted Williams, the guy this tunnel is named after, holds a record for a season batting average…”

“Four-oh-six in 1941,” Jimmy snapped back before she could finish the question.

“NYPD—shouldn't you be a Yankee fan?”

“I am. But Ted Williams was a Marine fighter pilot. World War Two and Korea.” He held up his hand to show off a ring. “Semper Fi.”

Susan silently damned herself for not getting around to reading Foley's personnel file. Rusty had simply assigned him to her, no questions allowed, but still she should have spent some time learning about the newest of her ten-person team. She wondered how much Foley had read about her.

“It's amazing to think what guys like Williams did without steroids,” Jimmy added. “Think what they could do now if the league wasn't so backward in their thinking about PEPs.”

“PEPs?”

“Performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals. Every other occupation is using drugs to make them better—why not baseball, why not athletes?” Jimmy asked. “Why the big fuss that the Chinese did gene-doping in the Beijing Olympics?”

“It's not natural,” Susan replied.

“Tell me you don't use Memzax. All the trivia you have at the tip of your tongue, you must. You don't use Daystend when you have to stay awake for days in a crisis? They're PEPs.”

“Of course I do, now that our staff doc prescribes them and the government pays for them. I couldn't afford Memzax on my own, and my health plan sure won't pay thirty dollars for a single pill,” Susan admitted, “but in my job I need to have instant retrieval of lots of information. Memzax works, Detective.”

“Okay, so in your job you memorize things and drugs are okay,” Jimmy argued while driving. “An athlete's job is to send a ball sailing out of a park like that one there.” They were passing Fenway on the Mass. Pike. “And they can't use drugs to do their job?”

“You sound like Margaret Myers,” Susan said, and chuckled.

“Who's that?”

“So, Sherlock, you haven't done all of your homework on me. She was my dissertation advisor at Harvard,” she said as they crossed the little bridge into Cambridge.

“Got me there, Bo—I mean, Susan. Damn these fuckin' drivers up here. I just went for L and S to get us out of this jam. Forgot I'm driving a rental.”

“In fact, we're seeing her after lunch,” Susan announced. “She's an expert on technology policy and the interaction between government and science. I thought she might have some thoughts about your theory on the six incidents. She knows somebody on every major research campus around the world. As Jimmy pulled the car up to a police line, she added “Okay, so I'll bite. L and S?”

“Lights and sirens. It's why we become cops. To get the lights and sirens.” And then he smiled, again flashing dimples.

0805 EST
Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts

The police lines surrounded the charred hulk of what had been a modern, redbrick building. The windows were broken out and the brick singed around them. One section of outer wall had collapsed and bricks were scattered across the side street. The firetrucks were gone by now, but Susan spotted a large van with “State Fire Marshal” on the side. The March wind chilled the few who stood around the fire scene. Ice patches were scattered across the asphalt. Steam rose from a mobile canteen truck dispensing coffee. It was the kind of aggressively gray winter day that Susan associated with Cambridge, with forcing herself down snowy sidewalks to Harvard Square.

“Susan Connor, Intelligence Analysis Center, this is Lieutenant Tommy McDonough, Mass. State Police,” Jimmy said, breaking into her flashback. The state cop actually looked a little like Foley, she thought. The two of them could have been investment bankers, in their black overcoats and red ties.

“Pleased ta meet yah. Let's go inside or we'll freeze like them firemen. The New Reactor Diner ovah there is pretty good. Warm anyway,” McDonough said, pointing to a classic silver-sided diner on the other side of the traffic circle.

They squeezed into a tight, fake-red-leather booth and were quickly served coffee in chipped mugs. McDonough pulled out one of the newer PDAs and flipped up its screen to review his notes. “Friday night, after eleven. Initial explosion triggered secondary fires. First unit responding called in three alarms. Building fully involved. Everybody got out okay, but…” His voice dropped in volume. “Some of the staff that works there days arrived and tried to go back in. Kinda loosely wrapped, these MIT types. Digit heads.” He looked around the diner at the patrons, most of whom were hunched over laptops. “Fire marshal got an operating theory, and that's all it is at this point, that there was an undetected gas leak that really built up a big cloud before static or some other spark set it off. That blast knocked an exterior wall out and severed the water line for the sprinklers. They had sophisticated halon gas suppression in some of the labs, but most of the place went up quick, like a three decka, you know what I mean? Question is how come there was a big, undetected gas leak. Shouldn'ta just happened all on its own.”

Foley, who had been taking notes into his own PDA, looked up. “That's good, Tommy, thanks. What'd the building do, what's its purpose?”

“CAIN. Center for Advanced Informatics and Networking. They were the U.S. end of an international project with Japan, France, and Russia involving gridded supercomputers. CAIN was also big in a project involved in reverse engineering the human brain. They're mainly famous now as the ones there that created the Living Software,” McDonough said matter-of-factly. Susan was learning not to underestimate this clan of Irish cops.

“And all of that's gone?” Susan asked.

“Shit no,” the lieutenant shot back. “Pardon my French. No, the Living Software thing wasn't just here. Others have it, too. The supercomputers here, well…the professors are trying to figure out how to get them outta the building and see if they can clean 'em up. Good fuckin' luck with that, huh, Jimmy?”

“No leads? Forensics on the gas pipes? Anything on the videotapes? Pissed-off staff been fired or screwed over? Nut-job protest groups got a reason to hate the center?” Jimmy asked.

“'Course we're runnin' all that kinda stuff down, Jimmy, but it ain't lookin' good, I'll tell yah. The pipes and all that at the blast scene are atomized. Cambridge cops had video, course, but nuttin' on it. No one went postal. Apparently, everybody loved to work there. Changin' the world, they said.” McDonough scanned the diner again, then whispered, “Nut-job groups? Cambridge is nothin' but nut jobs, you ask me. People's Republic of Cambridge. But none that had it out for the center, not that we found.”

“Could we put on hard hats and walk through some of it?” Susan asked.

“Sure, but listen, Jimmy, after that, my mother made me promise to take you ovah her place for lunch. Wants ta hear about your dad. And see you, of course,” McDonough said, putting away the PDA.

Foley looked questioningly at his boss. “You should do that, Jimmy,” Susan said firmly. “Besides, I have to meet up with Professor Myers, and that's likely to go on and on. I'll hop on the Red Line two stops and we can meet up later at the Charles.” She turned to McDonough. “This has been very helpful, Lieutenant, but there is one thing I do have to ask.” She paused. “Why is it called the New Reactor Diner? Spicy hot food?”

“Hell, no, the food sucks here,” McDonough bellowed, laughing loudly. “The diner's name's cuz these MIT nut jobs have a fuckin' nuclear reactor other side a the alley.” In the nearby booths, a dozen heads briefly popped up from laptops and looked around as if sniffing the air for something. And then they went back down, down into cyberspace.

Susan thought about what could happen if another white van filled with RDX went down the alley. As they walked into the ruin of the building in yellow hard hats, a video-surveillance camera across the street zoomed in on their faces.

1055 EST
Summers Hall, Allston Campus
Harvard University, Boston

“So it's all very well to say that big government is bad and that big government backing big science projects is worse,” said the woman behind the podium. “I know some of you think the American corporation is the highest achievement of efficiency that humanity has ever produced…but when you say all of that, my dears, remember not only that big bad old government created the internet but that the private sector would never, repeat never, have done so. There was no single company, no group of companies that either would have or could have accomplished it, including the single very large phone company we once had in this country.”

Margaret Myers stepped out, taking the microphone with her, as she spotted Susan in the back row of the amphitheater-style class room. “The private sector found all sorts of things to do with the internet, and that has changed the way we live, but they would never have built it.” Thinking of Susan's role in the Islamyah crisis, she continued, “The private sector would also have continued producing gas-guzzling cars, paying for overseas oil to make into gasoline, until the last drop of oil was pumped and the last dollar was spent on it. Only because of the government of Islamyah and its research and its investments in companies in the U.S., can we say that half the cars in this country are now powered by either hybrid engines or by ethanol from corn, sugarcane, and switch grasses.

“So your assignment for next week is a short essay, no more than two thousand words, on some technology problem of your choice that only a government can solve in the first instance, thereby creating opportunities for the private sector to build on. See you next week.” Students immediately flocked around the short professor, asking questions, introducing friends, offering things for her to read. Susan thought her friend and one-time advisor looked older, more gray in her curls, her broad shoulders beginning to slouch. Still, she radiated a physical and intellectual strength and presence that lit up the room. Susan knew that some students would hang on, following Myers back to her office, so Susan signaled that she would meet her there.

The lecture hall and the professor's office were across the river on the Boston side, in Summers Hall, part of Harvard's new Allston Campus. The picture window in the office offered a stunning view of the old Cambridge campus, causing Susan to be lost in thought until Myers shut the office door behind her. The two embraced. “I hoped you would get a chance to work on the internet bombings when I heard about them,” Myers began. “I can't help but think that there is something bigger about to happen.”

“Bigger than severing the cyber connection between the Americas and the rest of the world? Bigger than causing communication satellites to disappear? That's already a big deal to some of us, Margaret,” Susan replied. “We have a theory that China is involved. And now we think that other fires and explosions at scientific institutions over the last few months may be connected.”

“Yes, of course, dear. And I know you know that the internet wasn't fully severed, just drastically reduced. I'm sure our Pentagon friends are busy even now trying to shift more of the load to their own military satellites.” Myers dropped her lecture notes and papers on a coffee table already covered with other stacks of paper. “I know the theory that they are trying to distract us while they do something else, Taiwan maybe. But I can't help but wonder if we're looking at it wrong, if China might be doing it because they know more than we do about our technology, that we are about to leap ahead and leave them in the dust.” Myers swept her arm across her desk, toppling a mound of books and journals, “Oh, no. That was my next book, sitting here in pieces. I'll pick it up tomorrow.” She plunked down in a large wooden chair. “Susan, I'm afraid of those who want to whip up a war with China. We should share our technology with them, with everyone. That is the nature of scientific inquiry.”

“Depends on the technology.” Susan smiled and bent down to pick the books and paper off the floor. “What's this next book on?”

“Transhumanism,” Myers said, rescuing a loose-leaf binder from the floor.

“What?” Susan felt a pang of disappointment. She had sought out Professor Myers for her understanding on the attacks, but she'd just been reminded that Margaret was often into some academic theory not necessarily related to the real world.

“I'm sorry, Susan. I know you spend all your time now running around the Middle East and saving us from bad guys. No time to keep up with things here.” Myers dug out a journal and handed it across the desk. “I did a piece for
Sociology and Science
last fall. Transhumanism is the philosophy that espouses using genomics, robotics, informatics, nanotech, new pharma…to change humanity into a new species.”