Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) (5 page)

Which brought John’s mind to bear on election year politics.  The off-year elections were little more than a week away and everyone was supposed to be consumed by them, including his boss.

He stood and told Mrs. Felter, “Whenever the President has a minute.”

The secretary shook her head.  “No, Captain, go right in.  He’s cleared his schedule.”

Again John was surprised.  The President clearing his schedule was a major event; then he realized that in the time he’d been in this office absolutely zero people had come in.

John’s eyes went to the door of the outer office, recalling the Marine there.  Well, as simple a way to control access as there was: just say no.

The President was standing at the window again, this time facing John.

“Well?”

“I don’t see anything wrong with the math.”

The President laughed.  “Like I said, the PSA just shook his head, said ‘not possible’ fourteen times in three minutes.  He’s agreed to retire.”

Oh, just like that, John thought.  You have to keep in mind at all times about working at this level that you served at this man’s beck and call; due process consisted of being given time to clean out your desk.  Presidents were famously loyal to their staffs when they were carrying out the Man’s orders.  And famously abrupt when dealing with fools and backstabbers.

“The math, Captain,” the President reminded John of where he was and what he was supposed to be doing.

“I’m a college freshman math teacher, or I was six years ago.  I can say that I didn’t see anything obviously wrong with it.  But then, if Hawking and Guth and the others didn’t, I’m less than likely to see anything they missed.  Still, it’s a lot to swallow.”

The President grinned.  “I’ve heard a few calumnies about me and the modern age.  I don’t know where they get these ideas; I swear I don’t.  I grew up with an Apple II in my grade school classroom.  I played every computer game available at the time.

“I have two teenage daughters.  One’s seventeen and the other is fourteen and we have a boy who is twelve.  I can turn a computer on.  I’ve played Nintendo, Playstations, Xboxes and just about every kind of computer game you can imagine.  I’ve played Magic with all of my kids; I have a Level 85 World of Warcraft toon.  The fact is that those mathematical minds that came into my office Friday afternoon are the best and brightest on the planet.  There is something here.”

“We need to see it work,” John told him, trying to sound reasonable and sober.

The President nodded soberly.  “I have.  Here, come around the desk.”

When John hesitated the President gestured impatiently.  “Don’t get on your military high horse, just come around and look over my shoulder.”

John walked around and saw the President point at a large computer monitor.  “This is the live shot from their web cam.   I’ve had my computer on it for days now.”

John took a few seconds to figure out what he was looking at.  Once, a long time ago, as a young boy, he’d watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the moon; there had been light and dark, and it had been hard to see what was what.  This was pretty much that.  A moonscape.

“Last Tuesday NORAD declared an alert,” the President told John.  “A missile was detected by radar rising from an area northeast of downtown LA, from the San Fernando Valley, near Pasadena.

“Actually, they issued an alert based on SWAG from one of their majors about the ballistics of the radar track; I’ve ordered him promoted to lieutenant colonel.  No staging was detected, there wasn’t an infra-red signature either, so a lot of the analysts were only too happy to write it off as a ‘ghost.’”

The President obviously didn’t think much of ghosts.  “Here.”  He moved the cursor over a button on the screen that said, “Replay Launch.”

John watched a group of people wave into the camera, then the camera turned to a VW Bug, circa 1965 vintage.  John could see a camera inside the Bug looking back at the POV camera.  Then the scene flipped, the camera inside the car taking pictures of the group outside.  All young graduate students and perhaps a post doc or two, John thought.

Then the camera switched back to the exterior view of the Bug.  There was a turbine whine and the Bug lifted up from the ground, moving slowly.  The pitch of the turbine sound slowly increased, and the VW moved faster and faster, until it vanished into the distance.  Straight up into the air.

The President clicked on another button, labeled “Farewell, cruel Earth!” and this time John saw a shot out the VW’s window as it left the group of students behind, lifting into the air.

John had a lot of flight hours during his career.  True, he had flown tankers and not fighters or bombers, but a few times he’d flown relatively high.  He couldn’t fault the graphics; even when it was obvious the pictures were from much higher than he’d ever been.

“What do you think?” the President asked.

“Is it real?”

“NSA says yes.  CIA says they’re looking into it.  NASA says it’s fake, everything is fake.”

“For a long time NASA’s been top dog,” John said mildly.

“Yeah, you do have to consider the source.  And of course, there’s the cold political hardball reality: what has NASA done for me lately?  Besides spend money like water?”

The President gestured and John went back to his usual side of the desk.  “I have a mission for you.  Tomorrow at 0530, be at Base Operations at Andrews.  They will have an aircraft for you.  Fly to Burbank, they’ll chopper you to Caltech.  Talk to this Professor Kinsella; get a feel for her and her project.

“Monday next, we have a meeting scheduled here in the White House.  There’s too big of a downside not to have solid information up front; I need good intel, Captain.  That’s your task.”

“And if I go, do I get time off for good behavior?”  John was a little ashamed of himself for the question.  But as an excuse, he had to admit to being stunned that the day before the crucial off-year elections, the President was going to have a meeting about this, instead of campaigning.

“You will go,” the President said simply.  “If it works out, I’ll make you my liaison with the project.  That’s two plus years.  When you get done with that, I will personally promise you that the Navy will give you your choice of available assignments.  One that needs a star or two on your shoulder boards.”

There would be a presidential election between now and then, John thought.  But the President could ask his successor, if he lost, to help John.  Could, if he lost.  A lot of ifs, ands and maybes.

“What does this Professor Doctor Kinsella look like?”   John asked.

The President looked at him, as if making up his mind one last time.  “The Brain Trust kept repeating that one shouldn’t be put off by secondary issues.  I assume they mean she’s young.”

John nodded.  “I noticed that when I was reading the report.  It was a lot wittier than someone my age would be comfortable writing.”  He waved at the computer screen.  “The web site is also jocular.  I suspect that Professor Kinsella is an iconoclastic troublemaker.”

“Go and talk to her.  Spend the rest of the week.  Come back Saturday; I’ll have a Special Missions jet to return you, her and a couple of others here.”

The President steepled his fingers.  “This is Top Secret, for the time being.”

John laughed and shook his head and gestured at the computer screen.  “Not with eggheads involved.  They believe in freely sharing information.  They’ve put it on the web,” he said, waving at the computer.

The President shook his head.  “This is worth billions or trillions, Captain Gilly.  If this is true, we will not only be a world superpower, but a space superpower.  A whole lot is riding on doing this right.”

John kicked himself; he’d gotten so caught up in the Star Trek end of things, he’d forgotten about National Security!  Good God!  The implications were earth-shattering!

“You will tell your wife that you are on TDY to check out something for me in San Diego.  I’ll call you on your cell phone, periodically, for reports.  NSA is bringing over a special laptop for you to take with you.  Amongst other things, everything on it is highly encrypted.  It will include copies of this report and a number of other things.  The Internet links for the web site, among them.”

The next morning at five thirty, John was sitting in Base Operations at Andrews Air Force base, watching a pilot preparing their flight plan a few feet away.  John’s cell phone went off and he answered properly.

The President said simply, “Well, what have you got for me so far?”

For the millionth time John thanked his lucky stars that he wasn’t a fool, and had spent more than a little time online himself, learning the ins and outs of the Internet.

“Well,” John said dryly, “the young part is right.  I went to the Caltech faculty web page.  Late last summer, just days after her 21st birthday, Doctor Stephanie Kinsella was frocked as a tenured professor at Caltech; she’s had her doctorate for almost five years.  Her mother is from Boston, a Logan; I’ve never heard of them myself, but they are supposed to be old money.  Her mother is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music.  Her father is Jamaican and came to America as a small boy, subsequently graduated cum laude from MIT, a degree in marine engineering.  He worked his way through college as a barista at a coffee shop in the days before Starbuck’s.

“That was then; now Malcolm Kinsella is the President, Chairman and CEO of a real estate investment trust that owns about a quarter of Southern California.  Their last 10Q showed them with about a hundred and ten billion dollars of assets.”

“She’s twenty-one?”  The President sounded a little stunned.

“Twenty-two, Mister President.”

“Howie, John; call me Howie on the phone.”  John looked at his phone in consternation.  “Well, I’ll get back to you later, John.  Thanks for the heads up.”

A moment later the pilot came up to John, eyed the fruit salad on his chest.  “You’re a Naval aviator, sir?”

“Yes, Captain,”  John told him.

The young Air Force captain grinned.  “My squadron commander told me to deliver you sunny side up to LA Burbank; that’s as opposed to scrambled, sir.”

John grinned.  “Well, let’s get the road on the show.”

To say what happened next was a surprise was an understatement.  John expected a Special Missions Gulfstream or something like that.  What he got was an F-16D that rode into the sky at two and a half g’s, tanked over Kentucky, then went way high, coming down again to tank over Arizona.  An hour and forty minutes after he left Washington, DC, he was walking across the Burbank airport tarmac to a chopper that was already spooled up, ready to go.

John settled into his seat, wanting to laugh.  The problem with going from east to west, particularly in a hot jet, is you arrive long before you left.  They’d left after six eastern time; it was barely five on the West Coast when they arrived.

“How long to Caltech?”  John asked the pilot after he put on the headset.

“Oh, ten or twelve minutes, sir.”

The pilot talked for a second to traffic control.  “We’ll lift here in a few.  I was told to tell you that someone from the JPL liaison office will take you to breakfast, after your meeting.  That person will have keys to a rental car; they have already checked you into a suites hotel and you’re scheduled for a Saturday AM departure.  I’ll be around to pick you all up then, and bring you back here.  I understand that I’ll need a bigger bird.”

“Breakfast after Professor Kinsella?”  John asked mildly.  “What time is my appointment with her?”

“0530, Captain.  Not to worry, I’ll get you there, five, ten minutes early.”

“That’s a hell of a time in the morning to roust some poor civilian out of bed,” John said mildly.

“Sir, this is a highly classified operation — as a result we don’t have a lot of people working it.  I can tell you by my personal observation, sir, that Professor Kinsella is working twenty hour days, and typically is at her desk by 0400.”

John nodded, filing that piece of information away.  Twenty hours made for very long days — on the other hand, you got ten or twenty percent more done in a day than the rest of humanity.

When he knocked on the office door it was a formality.  It was open and the young woman whose picture John recognized was sitting at a desk, typing into a computer.  The monitor was outsize with eighty percent of the screen taken up with graphs and equations; only one small window was devoted to what the doctor was typing.

“Doctor Kinsella?”  John asked, and she nodded.  “I’m Captain John Gilly, USN.  If you have a few minutes you could spare, I’d like to talk to you.”

She looked at him, and then ostentatiously leaned to her left.  “An impressive chest full of medals, Captain!  Some of them, I believe, you didn’t get commanding a desk.”

“While a number of officers have certainly spent their careers avoiding blue water, I’m not one of them.  You know why I’m here?”

She nodded.  “Come from da’ man.  Gonna see what the lil gul done made.”

“Would you prefer I call you ‘Doctor’ or ‘Professor’ Kinsella?”  John asked, ignoring her comment.

She looked at him, smiling slightly.  “Some of my colleagues have considerable difficulty using my first name.  Getting my doctorate was cookie cutting and was never in doubt.  Not so my collegial title.  Use that; I love the sound of it.”