Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (27 page)

Keisha had already created a crosshairs overlay on the castle ruins and was expanding the image again when she stopped. “We talking about searching in the same time frame as the other sites? Nine thousand years, more or less?”

“I would think so. Why?”

“Sea level was a lot lower.”

Ironwood knew that. “End of the last ice age.”

“Remember Polynesia? That atoll was underwater.”

“Because of a volcanic eruption.”

“Well, that probably contributed to the change in elevation, but nine thousand years ago, sea level was maybe sixty, seventy feet lower than it is today.”

“You think we should start this search underwater?”

Keisha turned back to the screen and tapped the remote against her open hand. “Thinking about the one in India . . . the pathways leading up to it . . . the way it was positioned to look over the river that used to be there . . . If we’re talking about the same philosophy of building, and we’re thinking there’s an outpost in this area, I wouldn’t look for it
under
the castle.”

“Where, then?”

Ironwood watched the large screen as she used the remote again and the aerial image shrank, then shifted until the crosshairs fell over a striking rectangular gouge in the coastline, almost exactly between the two peninsulas.

“Take a look at the color of the water.”

Ironwood saw what she meant. In the span between the promontories, a distance of about a mile, the sea was a pale milky blue. Just off the tips of both, it changed almost instantly to the dark green cast of deep ocean.

“You think the outpost’s somewhere between the two promontories?”

“That’s where I would’ve built docks and warehouses,” Keisha said. “But . . . if I was going to build an outpost like the one in India,
this
is where I’d carve in the paths leading from the docks to the site.”

The crosshairs shifted again, moved over the rectangular gouge.

Ironwood stared at the small smudge that was the ruins of the castle, built over the ruins of the fortress where King Arthur might have been born. It would be so satisfying to find an alien outpost under those ruins—but there was a reason he paid Keisha as much as he did.

“You know what you’re doing. You make the call.”

Keisha waved the remote through the air, and a circle appeared on the display, with the odd gouge dead center.

“Okay, ladies,” she called out to the others, who, with the exception of Frank, were now watching the big screen. “Start your engines. We’re doing a targeted outpost search. Those cliffs. One hundred meters back from the edges, starting inland, radiating out. Let’s build the grid. Frankie—you, too.”

At the lunch table, Frank scooped up his M&M’s, stuffed some into a shirt pocket, and the rest into his mouth before shuffling over to his own station.

“Gonna stick around, boss?” Keisha asked.

Ironwood was tempted. “How long to search the cliffs?”

Keisha hit some keys, watched some numbers change at the bottom of the screen. “They’re about ninety feet above current sea level, so if we start there . . . say ten search grids? Nineteen with overlaps. Half-meter slices moving up. Two minutes a grid . . .” She did the math. “If there’s nothing there, we’ll know in about twenty hours.”

“And if there’s something?”

“Hey, if it’s in the
first
grid, we’ll know in two minutes.”

“Give me a call. I’m just upstairs.”

Keisha held up the remote. “At least get the party started.”

Ironwood smiled and took the control.

“The big blue button at the top,” Keisha said. She turned to her team. “Switching to SARGE.”

Ironwood pressed the button, and all the colors on the display changed to the arbitrary false shades that made it easier to distinguish different materials.

“Aaannd . . . they’re off!” Keisha said, as the screen began flickering with the rapid appearance and disappearance of the wireframe diagram of an outpost.

Ironwood handed back the remote and left them to their fun.

Fifteen feet above them, David Weir remained, uninvited, and saw everything as it happened.

Merrit’s eyes stayed on the casino’s security screens as his hands moved over the security console’s switches, sliders, and keyboard to follow the advance and retreat of video frames illustrating David Weir’s journey through the retail arcade more than an hour ago.

Seeing Weir go into a souvenir store, he called up surveillance footage from inside it, then watched as Weir purchased a sweatshirt and two baseball caps, received a large shopping bag, and then stuffed his knapsack and jacket into it.

Merrit went back to the arcade camera records. This time he followed Weir in the midst of shopping tourists as he moved through the mall, his face blocked by a ball cap. For every store window Weir stopped to check out, Merrit zoomed in to examine the items on display, but found no pattern other than crude misdirection. Whatever Weir was up to, the kid knew he would be tracked, and had done all he could to delay his inevitable detection.

Finally, Weir reached the end of the arcade and slipped into a men’s room. There was no coverage inside. Was he switching to a new disguise?

After fast-forwarding five minutes, it became obvious Weir wasn’t coming out.

“What’s he doing in there?” J.R. said.

Merrit suddenly had it. “Stay here. Keep watching that door.” Weir was no longer in the men’s room because there was another way out—a locked door marked
MAINTENANCE
, which led to the hotel’s service corridors, below and above its public areas.

“Where’re you going?”

Merrit was already on his way out. He didn’t know how Weir had figured it out, but he did know where he was going.

The last place on Earth he’d ever see.

The dimensions of Heaven matched those of the room beneath it.

The difference, David noted, was that up here, the only solid floor space was the metal-railed balcony ringing the outer walls and linking to an open network of crisscrossing metal catwalks. Below the balcony and catwalks, a grid of thick wires was suspended above undulating, clear plastic panels, whose undersides formed the ceiling of the room below. The grid of wires supported sixteen cameras, each pointing straight down at the plastic panels.

Though clear from above, the plastic panels were mirrored when viewed
from below so the network of overhead cameras would not be detected as their focus shifted from table to table, dealer to dealer, player to player—their God’s-eye view searching for any sign of cheating. In casino lore, that was why a room like this was “Heaven.”

This particular Heaven had been easy to enter. From the maintenance area of the men’s room, David had taken a backstage staircase to the hidden level set between the casino’s main floor and the first convention floor. From there, a second set of blank-walled corridors had led him here. Protected only by a card reader, the door had snicked open the moment he’d held his reprogrammed keycard to it.

He edged farther along the balcony to reach the control station for the centralized surveillance system: a four-monitor console with rocker switches, a dial for cameras, and a single joystick. No indicator lights, though. The cameras trained on the room below were not switched on.

David ran a finger over the controls. One rocker switch was labeled
TEST
.
Perfect
. A manual option. He switched it on.

Then he turned a camera dial to select a camera. Number 14. Using the joystick, and watching on one of the console’s four monitors, he moved it until—

He saw the air force hard drive on one of the computer workstations in the room below.

Then he saw Ironwood and a woman with beaded dreadlocks tracking flickering images on a wall-sized computer screen. Satellite imagery of a coastal area. Unfamiliar to him.

Without audio, David could only observe, not listen, as the huge display abruptly changed color, then changed again.

A moment later, Ironwood left, but David stayed, watching what he knew had to be a search program flashing into action, comparing the imagery on-screen to a three-dimensional shape unknown to him.

The speed with which the algorithm worked was stunning. The image changed every two minutes, presumably the amount of time it took the algorithm to finish with one search grid and move on to the next.

Using the joystick, David moved camera 14 to focus on each of the room’s other workstations, and discovered that their smaller screens—each with its own intent attendant—held portions of what was on the larger screen.

Minutes stretched to an hour, and he took the opportunity to further study details of the Red Room. A thick bundle of cabling ran from the workstations to what seemed to be a retrofitted internal wall that sectioned off half of the available floor space. Whatever was behind that wall was beyond the reach of any camera.

Two hours into the search, David was back on camera 14 and saw signs that, of the eight technicians in the room below, seven were packing up their cases, getting ready to leave. One man, in torn jeans and a plaid shirt, continued working.

Half an hour later, the last man was still there, slouched now in a chair at a conference table, one knee bouncing up and down, endlessly arranging M&M’s, green only, in complex fractal patterns.

David directed camera 7 to observe the lace of candy grow, so he was watching as, moments later, the man jerked back in his chair, sending M&M’s skittering across the table to the floor. At the same time, through the ceiling, David caught a faint electronic beep.

David dialed up camera 14 and angled the joystick to get an oblique, downward view of the quicksilver, flashing 3-D wireframe model now fixed in one position on the large screen, slowly blinking on and off.

The man below agitatedly dug through all his pockets, stopping only when he discovered his phone in his flannel shirt. He punched in a number, and waited . . . waited.

David knew what was wrong. The phone wouldn’t work inside a room that blocked electromagnetic transmissions.

It took another few seconds before the man apparently recalled the same and bolted for the room’s one exit, presumably to make his call outside.

Whatever the algorithm had been set to find, it had found.

David saw his chance and took it.

The instant the door below closed, David had his knapsack on and was sprinting onto one of the metal catwalks, where he reached down and lifted up a ceiling panel. Easing over the railing, he lowered himself until he was hanging through the opening.

Six feet below his sneakers was the candy-littered table.

David dropped, rolled to one side as he landed, and fell off the table edge, colliding with three wheeled office chairs before he struck the floor, unhurt. At once, he scrambled to his feet and ran to the workstation connected to the air force hard drive.

The big screen was still awash in information.

Centered against a background of random color splotches, the wireframe pattern continued blinking on and off in one place. A strip of coded numbers ran along the screen’s bottom edge. David didn’t recognize the program, which meant he had no time to explore how to save a file.

He did, however, recognize elements of the screen’s layout, enough to recognize the local network operating system. He hit the
CTRL + ALT + PRINTSCREEN
keys.

A window promptly opened on the workstation display, asking him where he wished to send the print request. He was offered a choice of several printers, plus five auxiliary drives where the image file could be saved for later printing.

David selected Jack Lyle’s drive, and a smaller window popped up showing the progress of the write request. It was startling how slow that progress was: three minutes to write the data on the big screen to his drive. The nine-foot display wasn’t simply showing an image file. It apparently contained a massive amount of other data.

He tapped his fingers against the side of the workstation, considering his next move. This combination of software and hardware had found its target within a few hours. Even if he erased the results, they’d be easily reacquired. He’d need to do something more to be sure Jess MacClary had information that Ironwood didn’t—and couldn’t—get.