Tyrannosaur Canyon (24 page)

She felt incredulous. Was that all he could say, that she needed sleep?

"Can you do that, Melodie?" came the soft voice. "Lock it all up, clean the computer, go home, get some sleep, eat a nourishing meal. We'll talk again in the morning."

"All right."

"Good." A pause. "See you tomorrow."

AFTER HANGING UP the telephone, Melodie sat in the laboratory, feeling stunned. After all her work, her extraordinary discoveries, Corvus acted as if he hardly cared-or didn't even believe her. I commend you. Here she'd made one of the most important paleontological discoveries in history, and all he could do was commend her? And tell her to get some sleep?

She looked up at the clock. Clunk went the minute hand. Eleven-fifteen. She looked down at her arm, at the bracelet winking on her wrist, her miserably small breasts, her thin hands, her bitten nails, her ugly freckled arms. Here she was, Melodie Crookshank, thirty-three years old, still an assistant without a tenure-track job, a scientific nobody. She felt a growing burn of resentment. Her thoughts flashed back to her stern university-professor father whose oft-stated goal was that she not grow up to be "just another dumb broad." She thought of how much she had tried to please him. And she thought of her mother, who resented having a career as a homemaker and wanted to live vicariously through her daughter's success. Melodie had tried to please her too. She thought about all the teachers she'd tried to please, the professors, her dissertation adviser.

And now Corvus.

And where had all this agreeableness and pleasing gotten her? Her eye roved about the oppressive basement lab.

She wondered, for the first time, just how Corvus planned to handle their discovery. And it was their discovery-he couldn't have done it on his own. He didn't know how to work the equipment well, he was practically a computer illiterate, and he was a lousy mineralogist. She had done the analysis, asked the right questions of the specimen, teased out the answers. She had made the connections, extrapolated from the data, developed the theories.

It began to dawn on her why Corvus wanted to keep it all so very secret. A spectacular discovery like this would set off a furor of competition, intrigue, and a rush to get the rest of the fossil. Corvus might easily lose control of the discovery-and with it lose credit. He understood the value of that concept, credit. It was the cold cash of the scientific world.

Credit. A slippery concept, when you really thought about it.

Her mind felt clearer than it had in months-maybe years. Maybe it was because she was so tired-tired of pleasing, tired of working for others, tired of this tomblike lab. Her eye fell on the sapphire bracelet. She took it off and let it dangle in front of her eyes, the gems winking seductively. Corvus had driven one of the best bargains of his career, giving her that piece of jewelry, thinking it would buy her silence and a mousy, feminine agreeableness. She shoved it in her pocket in disgust.

Melodie now began to understand why Corvus had reacted the way he had, why he had been so unforthcoming-even disturbed-on the telephone. She had done too well with her assignment. He was worried that she had found out too much, that she might claim the discoveries as her own.

Like a revelation, Melodie Crookshank knew what she had to do.

7

THE M-LOGOS 455 Massively Parallel Processing Object Unit System was the most powerful computer yet constructed by the human race. It sat in a perpetually air-conditioned, dust-free, static-free basement deep beneath the National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Mead,
Maryland
. It had not been built to predict the weather, simulate a fifteen-megaton thermonuclear explosion, or find the quadrillionth digit of pi. It has been created for a far more mundane purpose: to listen.

Countless nodes distributed across the globe collected a gargantuan stream of digital information. It intercepted more than forty percent of all traffic on the World Wide Web, more than ninety percent of all cellular telephone conversations, virtually all radio and television broadcasts, many land-line telephone conversations, and a large portion of the data flows from governmental and corporate LANs and private networks.

This digital torrent was fed in real time into the M455MPP at the rate of sixteen terabits per second.

The computer merely listened.

It listened with almost every known language on earth, every dialect, every protocol, almost every computer algorithm ever written to analyze language. But that was not all: the M455MPP was the first computer to employ a new, highly classified form of data analysis known as Stutterlogic. Stutterlogic had been developed by advanced cybernetic theorists and programmers at the Defense Intelligence Agency as a way of sailing around the great reef of Artificial Intelligence, which had ship-wrecked the hopes of so many computer programmers over the last decades. Stutterlogic was a whole new way of looking at information. Instead

of trying to simulate human intelligence, as AI had sought unsuccessfully to do, Stutterlogic operated under a wholly new kind of logic, which was neither machine intelligence nor Al-based.

Even with Stutterlogic, it could not be said that the computer "understood" what it heard. Its role was merely to identify a "communication of interest," or a CI in the jargon of its operators, and forward it to a human for review.

Most of the CIs that emerged from the M455MPP were e-mails and cellular telephone conversations. The latter were parceled out among one hundred and twenty-five human listeners. Their job required an enormous knowledge base, fluency in the language or dialect in question, and an almost magical sense of intuition. Being a good "listener" was an art, not a science.

At 11:04.34.98 EDT, four minutes into an eleven-minute cellular telephone call, module 3656070 of the M455MPP identified the conversation under way as a potential CI. The computer, having captured the conversation from the beginning, rewound it and began analyzing it, even while it was still in progress. When the CI concluded at 11:16.04.58 it had already passed through a series of algorithmic filters that had parsed it linguistically and conceptually, scrutinizing the voice inflections for dozens of psychological markers, including stress, excitement, anger, confidence, and fear. Object programs identified the caller and the receiver and then went out to examine thousands of databases to retrieve every particle of personal information about the two interlocutors that existed in networked electronic form anywhere in the world.

This particular CI "greened" (that is, passed) this first round of tests, and it was assigned a rating of 0.003. It was then passed through a firewall to a subsystem of the M455 where it was subjected to a powerful Stutterlogic analysis. This analysis upgraded its rating to 0.56 and passed it back to the main database module with "questions." The database loops returned the CI to the Stutterlogic module with the "questions" having been "answered." On the basis of those answers, the Stutterlogic module raised the rating of the CI to 1.20.

Any CI rating over 1.0 was forwarded to a human listener.

The time was 11:22.06.31.

RICK MUZlNSKf HAD begun his vicariously lived existence as a boy listening for hours at his parents' bedroom door, hearing with sick fascination everything they did. Muzinsky's father had been a career diplomat and Rick had lived all over the world, picking up a fluency in three languages besides English. He had grown up on the outside looking in, a boy with no friends and no place to call home. He was a vicarious human being, and with his job in Homeland Security he had

found a way to make a good living at it. The job paid extremely well. He worked a total of four hours a day in an environment that was free from dim-witted bosses, moronic coworkers, incompetent assistants, and deficient secretaries. He did not have to deal with people at the coffee machine or the Xerox machine. He could clock in his four hours in any way he wished during each twenty-four-hour period. Best of all, he worked alone-that was mandatory. He was not allowed to discuss his work with anyone. Anyone. So when someone asked him that inevitable, obnoxious question, What do you do for a living? he. could tell them anything he liked but the truth.

Some people might consider it crushingly dull, listening to one CI after another, almost all of them asinine exchanges between idiots, full of empty threats, psychotic rants, political outbursts, brainless pronouncements, and wishful thinking-the self-deluded ramblings of some of the saddest, dumbest people Muzinsky had ever heard. But he loved every word of it.

Once in a while a conversation came along that was different. Often it was hard to say why. It could be a certain seriousness, a gravitas, to the utterances. It could be a sense that something else was being said behind the words being spoken. After a few listenings, if the feeling didn't go away, he would then call up the information associated with the conversation and see who the interlocutors were. That was usually most revealing.

Muzinsky had no role in following up on the CIs that he identified as threatening. His only role was to forward those CIs to an appropriate agency for further analysis. Sometimes the computer even identified the agency the CI should go to-should Muzinsky pass it-as certain agencies seemed to be listening for certain cryptic things. But he passed only about one CI in every two or three thousand conversations he listened to. Most got forwarded to various subagen-cies of the NSA or Homeland Security. Others went to the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, CIA, ATF, INS, and a host of other acronyms, some of whose very existence was classified. Muzinsky had to match each CI with the right agency and do it fast. A CI could not be allowed to bounce around, looking for a home. That was what led to 9/11. The receiving agencies were now primed to handle incoming intelligence immediately, if necessary within minutes of its receipt. That was another lesson from 9/11.

But Muzinsky had nothing to do with that side of things. Once the CI left his cubicle, it was gone forever.

Muzinsky sat at the terminal in his locked cubicle, headphones on, and punched the READY button indicating he was free to receive the next CI. The computer sent him no preliminary data or background information about the

call, nothing that might influence his mind about what he was about to hear. It always started with the naked CI.

A hiss and it began. There was the sound of a phone ringing, an answer, a thump, the sound of breathlessness on the other end, and then the conversation began:

"Melodic? How's the research going?"

"Great, Dr. Corvus, just great."

8

JUST BEFORE THE turn on the Forest Service road leading to Perdiz Creek, Maddox slowed and pulled off the highway. A pair of headlights had appeared behind him, and before he actually made the turn he wanted to make sure they didn't belong to Broadbent. He shut off his engine and lights and waited for the vehicle to pass.

A truck rapidly approached going a tremendous clip, slowed only slightly, then sped past. Maddox breathed a sigh of relief-it was just some old, beat-up Dodge. He started the car and made the turn, bumped over the cattle guard, and continued down the rutted dirt road, feeling a huge lifting of his spirits. He rolled down the windows to let in air. It was a cool and fragrant night, the stars shining above the dark rims of the mesas. His plan had worked: he had the notebook. Nothing could stop him now. There would be a certain amount of law enforcement excitement around the area in the coming days after Broadbent reported his wife's abduction, but he'd be safe up at Perdiz Creek working on his novel... And when they came by to question him, they'd find nothing-no body, nada. And they never would find her body. He'd already found a perfect place to lose it, a deep water-filled shaft in one of the upper mines. The roof above the shaft was shored with rotting timbers, and after he deep-sixed the corpse down the shaft he'd set off a small charge to bring down the roof-and that would be it. She'd be as gone as Jimmy Hoffa.

He checked his watch: nine-forty. He'd be back at Perdiz Creek in half an hour, and he had something to look forward to.

Tomorrow, he'd call Corvus from a pay phone to tell him the good news. He glanced at his cell phone, tempted to call him right away-but no, there could be no mistakes now, no risks taken.

He accelerated, the car lurching along the potholed dirt road as it climbed

through a series of foothills. In ten minutes he had reached the area where the pinon-juniper forest gave way to tall ponderosa pines, dark and restless in a night wind.

He finally reached the gate in the ugly chain-link fence that surrounded the property. He got out, unlocked it, drove through, and locked it behind him. A couple hundred more yards brought him to the cabin. The moon hadn't risen and the old cabin loomed up pitch-black, a stark outline blotting out the stars. Maddox shivered and vowed to leave the porch light on next time.

Then he thought of the woman, waiting for him in the darkness of the mine, and that thought sent a nice, warm feeling through his gut.

9

SALLY'S LEGS ACHED from standing in the same position unable to move, her ankles and wrists chafing under the cold steel. A chill flow of air from the back of the mine penetrated her to the bone. The dim glow from the kerosene lantern wavered and spluttered, filling her with an irrational fear that it would go out. But what got to her most was the silence, broken only by the monotonous drip of water. She found it impossible to tell how much time had passed, whether it was night or day.

Suddenly she stiffened, hearing the rattle of someone unlocking the metal grate at the mouth of the mine. He was coming in. She heard the grate clang shut behind him and the chain rattle as he relocked it. And now she could hear his footsteps approaching, becoming louder by degrees. The beam of a flashlight flickered through the bars and a moment later he arrived. He unbolted the bars over the door frame with a socket wrench and tossed them aside. Then he shoved the flashlight in his back pocket and stepped inside the small stone prison.