Protocol 7 (21 page)

“This is mad,” he said as he cabled and linked the last of the modules together. “Utterly mad.”

“Not as mad as this,” Ryan grumbled from the far end of the room, where he was trying to mount the curved dome of an ancient satellite disk on its pedestal.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Hayden said as his last shred of patience disappeared. “What the hell is the matter with you?” He joined Ryan with a grumbled curse; five minutes later they had the unit assembled, squatting on the landing and pointing expectantly upward at the starry sky over the estate.

“Will that thing actually work?” Simon asked incredulously.

“All right, so it’s old,” Ryan said defensively. “But the laws of physics haven’t changed this century, you know. Will work just fine.” It sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as the others. “It’ll do the job.”

“Let’s get to it,” Hayden said, casting another look at the clock.

“All right then,” Ryan said, settling in front of the old-fashioned keyboard. “Here goes nothing!”

He hit the ON switch, and the linked modules all sprung to life at once.

“Huh,” Andrew said. “How about that.” He immediately hunched over the tiny holo-display, columns of figures and cones of wave front projections sliding past him in a mute, miniature parade.

Simon stood by the fireplace and watched the whole operation, focusing on Andrew’s every move. He didn’t say a word; he didn’t dare disturb him.

Samantha flinched as the servomotors in the satellite dish made a tense little grinding sound, and the hemisphere rotated, tipped, rotated again—and found its target. An instant later, the flat screen flickered to life, and a monochromatic, grainy image faded in, then faded out, then faded in again and stabilized.

It was the image of a fifty-year-old cargo ship, a large one, seen from a thousand feet or more in the air. The vessel was obviously under power, cutting through a moderately choppy sea at a considerable speed. White foam churned along its prow; a wake peeled off its stern in a long, narrow “V.”

“Behold,” Andrew said, barely glancing up from his display. “The S.S. Munro, cruising near the Southern Sea, under the command of one Dominic Donovan, carrying the Spector I to its unknown test site.”

“Unknown,” Simon muttered, “until now.”

“Right,” Andrew said. “Because now it’s ours.”

Hayden paced behind him nervously, trying to contain himself. “Not yet, it’s not,” Hayden said. “And it won’t be if you don’t move. Are you getting any juice to those modules yet?”

Andrew turned to him, his usual disposition buried in tension. “If we’re going to do this correctly,” he said between clenched teeth, “you’re going to have to give me a few minutes. I need a little time to catch the proper algorithms. You know better than I do that we’ve only got one chance…Professor.”

Hayden shook his head in disgust and turned away to pace the room again.

Simon moved closer to Samantha, who was watching them work with large unblinking eyes. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Is it working?”

“It comes in two steps,” he said very quietly, careful not to disturb them. “First: commandeer one or more satellites to locate the Munro. Find the ship, find its data stream. And Andrew’s already done that.” He nodded at the aerial shot of the ship as it surged through the water. “That image is coming from the STS-192, an environmental survey bird orbiting at twenty-seven thousand feet, now completely under Andrew’s control.”

“Not quite,” Andrew said. “Got the satellite, found the ship, but getting that datastream…still working on that.”

Samantha looked from the screen to Andrew to the screen again. “My god,” she said.

“Step two,” Simon continued, “is the hard part. Now that we have located the ship, Ryan has to decrypt the data it’s sending and receiving, match the algorithms it’s exchanging with the military, and replace it with our own datastream to take control of the ship.”

“Can he do that?”

“Theoretically, yes. He’s the world’s leading expert on this process; it’s called Remote Access Intervention.”

“But I’m not going to be able to do it at all,” Ryan said acidly, without looking up, “if the two of you don’t stop disturbing me.”

“Sorry.” Simon clamped his mouth shut, and Samantha shrank even deeper into the overstuffed chair.

After a moment, Simon put a hand out and touched her on the wrist. “Come on,” he whispered as quietly as he could. “Come help me in the kitchen.”

“All right.” She carefully placed her glass of wine on the side table and followed him toward the basement kitchen.

He didn’t really want to talk—not yet. He simply wanted to draw her away from the mounting tension in the great room and get a sense of how well she was holding up.

She seemed appreciative as they walked downstairs and entered the underground kitchen.

“Do you want to check the freezer for smoked fish?” he asked casually as he walked into the pantry. He already knew what the latter contained; it hadn’t changed a bit since his childhood days. Oliver had always had a deep love affair with French cheeses of every kind; he stocked them in abundance, along with everything else he thought might go well with them: smoked fish, fruits, fresh vegetables, and wine. None of it had appealed to him as a child, but now he was rather relieved to see all of that and more on the meticulously maintained shelves.

Searching through the pantry, he almost smiled at the thought of how age had changed him. Over the years, he had grown to appreciate what his father had loved, and he was pleased to see that Leon had continued to satisfy Oliver’s habits.

Beyond the pantry was a large room built specifically to house an extensive wine collection. It was also packed with shelves of preserves, some of which looked questionable. He randomly grabbed several items from the shelves as he heard Samantha’s voice: “You’ve got your pick.”

“Sounds good,” he said, walking out with several jars and a large block of cheese.

Samantha was peering into the walk-in freezer, looking curious. “What has he got in there?” he asked.

She pulled out a long, thin platter and showed him a beautifully filleted salmon, fresh and pink. Clearly Leon had been busy. “Let’s see what we can do with this,” she said.

As they started to assemble a quick dinner for the team, they heard Ryan’s voice from upstairs. “Synchronizing!” he shouted.

Turning to Samantha with a desperate look, Simon asked, “You’ve got this?”

“Sure. See what’s going on. I’ll take care of it.”

Before he had reached the steps to go upstairs, he heard Andrew’s response to Ryan. “Give me a couple of minutes. I’m almost there.”

Simon re-entered the great hall to find Hayden hovering over Ryan, more intense than ever. “You’ve got to make sure the algorithms are in sync,” he said. “Otherwise the communication will shut down.”

“I’ve got it,” Andrew said, carefully holding his finger above one of the little buttons, trying to synchronize the time to push the appropriate button on the device.

Andrew looked up at the flat screen, staring at the Munro as it cut through the open sea. “Almost there,” he said to himself, not daring to smile.

Simon’s gut sank, realizing they were about to hijack a secret multi-million-dollar government vehicle from the British military. There was no way to stop now, no way to turn back. They had gone too deep and were already in grave danger.

There would be no solace for the team. From this point forward they were committed. And once the British military found out, they would be on their tail without pause and forever.

All three men watched Andrew as his finger rested on the button of the small device he had rigged to the stolen modules. The room fell absolutely silent except for the crackling noise of the wood burning in the fireplace and the random clatter from the basement kitchen. They watched Andrew, anxiously waiting to see when he would connect to the vessel.

For the first time, he noticed a thick bar at the top of the flat screen display. Half of it was red; near the middle of the screen it turned blue. As he watched it, the red portion grew a bit, consuming a fraction more of the blue. It looked exactly like an old-fashioned download indicator, the kind he’d seen on the very first computer he’d ever owned.

Ryan risked a glance at him and saw what he was looking at. “That’s the turnover indicator,” he said. “I invented it myself. As soon as it’s all red, we’ll have fully synced the algorithms…and the ship will be ours to take.”

“Thirty seconds to completion,” Andrew said in a low voice.

Simon understood what they were saying. Once the algorithms were fully integrated, the information they would be sending could not be traced; the Munro would recognize Andrew’s instructions as if they were genuine commands sent by the military. They could turn the ship, stop it, send it to wherever they wanted, and no one on the vessel—not the navigator, not the Captain, not even the on-board AIs—would think to question the commands.

Four men, sitting in a cottage in Corsica, using twenty-year-old contraband equipment, were about to take control of a top-secret military operation without anyone’s knowledge.

The red bar grew longer and longer, and then the last of the blue blinked away.

The S.S. Munro—and the Spector I that slept in its hull—was theirs.

They all stood speechless for a second, trying to take in the reality of the moment. Simon finally broke the silence. “As my father used to say, ‘Dis-information is power.’”

Hayden looked at him with a serious expression and then slowly nodded as he frowned. “It’s the truth,” he said. “Back in the beginning, thirty years ago or more, we called this ‘The Information Age.’ But it’s not. Never was. We learned damn quickly that just having all that information didn’t mean a thing. We learned that it’s not what we know; it’s what we believe. Your dad was right: dis-information is power. Change the reality and you change the outcome. Controlling destiny.”

Ryan looked up at them with a new kind of horror and elation in his eyes—like a child who had just done something without understanding its consequence.

“Control your destiny,” he echoed.

“Wow,” said Andrew, taking a deep breath. He too was just beginning to realize what they had done.

The window of opportunity had been locked open.

They were on their way.

* * *

Simon cleared his throat abruptly. “Let it sit for a while,” he said. “Let’s make sure we’re a hundred percent.”

The others looked at each other, then looked back at him.

“It’ll be okay,” he said soothingly. “Let’s have dinner, then we can send the new coordinates to the ship.”

Ryan inhaled deeply and placed both hands behind his head. He looked pale and shaky, as if he hadn’t taken a breath in an hour.

“Good idea,” Andrew replied, wiping sweat from his forehead. He stood up as Samantha walked into the room, trying to balance several large platters of food.

“Let me help you there,” Simon said with a smile. “It’s been a while since you had to pull off the two-armed double truck.”

She almost laughed. Simon was teasing her about her short-lived job as a waitress—the only gig she could get back in college to pay for her tuition. It was a mandate of her parents that she learned the hard way, even though they could easily have helped her. It was a disaster and they both knew it. “You know,” she said, “the same bastard may have fired me three times, but at least I learned how to do this. It’s second nature to m—oops!”

Simon dove to catch one plate as it slid from her forearm. He got a hand under it just before it hit the Armenian rug. They all laughed—all of them, even Sam—and the tension that had filled the room for an hour suddenly burst like a bubble.

They were careful to put the food at the far end of the table, well away from the computer modules and the flat screen. And for the next twenty minutes, the old friends shared a meal and a bottle of wine and tried to forget that they had just changed their destiny.

* * *

Hayden didn’t talk very much during the brief meal, far less than the younger people at the table. He was in no mood for small talk. He finished quickly and excused himself with a grunt, then moved away from the table to the warmth of the fireplace at the far end of the room where he could gaze uninterrupted into the flames and just think.

Deep down inside, Hayden knew the truth. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how clever they were, they would eventually be discovered. And deep down inside, at least it didn’t matter—not to him.

His life was over.

Two decades of scientific research flashed before his eyes. Tonight, his career as a scientist had taken a turn that he hadn’t expected—one he thought never would, no matter what his mad dreams might have been. Whatever he had been before was finished now. The technology he needed, the funding necessary for his level of dedication…no one would ever give it to him, ever again.

He suddenly felt very old, and at the same time brand new.

There was a burst of laughter from the table behind him. He hunched his shoulders as it sent a chill down his spine. The others were famished from their traveling, relieved and exhilarated by their easy success. But the journey ahead would be extreme and challenging for all of them, and it was quite possible that they wouldn’t have another moment like this together in the coming weeks. He was glad they could have this, at least. He wished he could share it.

He stared into the fire. It had dwindled to a few pieces of glowing orange wood. I would have thought Leon would have kept a better eye on this, he thought absently. After all…

Hayden suddenly looked up, looked around, thought back.

“Simon,” he said, breaking through the easy conversation. “Where’s Leon?”

* * *

Something twisted in Simon’s stomach. He stood up from the table a little too fast and said, “You’re right. Where the hell is he?”

He turned and almost ran from the room. The others sat very quietly now, listening to Simon move swiftly from room to room, calling the caretaker’s name.

“Leon! Leon!”

There was no answer, and no halt to the search.