the Afrikaans messages.
He played the two messages again, listened intently.
16-HIM 19:56:09 ENGLISH--ENGLISH
VOICE 3: Everything is in place. Everything is in place.
Confirm that it's the third. Confirm that it's the third.
22-JUN 20:51:59 ENGLISH--ENGLISH
VOICE 3: Mission is a go. Mission is a go.
One thing was certain. It was the same voice on both
messages.
A man's voice. American. Southern accent. Speaking
slowly, deliberately.
Fairfax pushed his glasses up onto his nose, started typing
on his keyboard.
He brought up a voice analysis program.
Then he compared the taped voice's digital signature--
or "voiceprint"--with the signatures of every other voice in
the DIA's mainframe, every voice the Agency had ever secretly
recorded.
No.
DATE
DIVISION
SOURCE FILE
1. 29-May SPACE DIV-01 SAT-SURV (FILE 034-77A)
2. 07-Jun SPACEDIV-01 SAT-SURV (FILE 034-77A)
3. 16-Jun SPACEDIV-02 USAF-SA(R)07 (FILE 009-21 D)
4. 22-Jun SPACEDIV-02 USAF-SA(R)07 (FILE 009-21 D)
5. 02-Jul SPACEDIV-01 SAT-SURV (FILE 034-77A)
6. 03-Jul SPACEDIV-01 SAT-SURV (FILE 034-77A)
Matthew Reilly
Spiked displays whizzed across his screen as the program
accessed the Agency's massive database of voiceprints.
And then the computer beeped:
6 MATCHES FOUND
DISPLAY ALL MATCHES?
"Yes, please," Fairfax said as he hit the "Y" key.
Six entries appeared on his screen:
Okay, Fairfax thought.
He discarded the third and the fourth entries--they
were the two messages that he'd just played. Their division
designator, spacediv-02, meant his own section, Section 2.
The other four messages, however, were the property of
Section 1, the main unit of Space Division located across the
hall.
The source file for the Section 1 messages, SAT-SURV,
stood for "Satellite Surveillance." Section 1, it seemed, had
been tapping into foreign satellite transmissions lately.
Fairfax clicked on the first entry:
29MAY
13:12:00
SATELLITE INTERCEPT (ENGLISH!
VOICE 1: They did the test this morning. The vaccine is
operational against all previous strains. All they need
now is a sample of the latest version.
Fairfax frowned. The messages in Afrikaans had also
mentioned a vaccine. And a successful test.
He hit the next entry:
area 7
7-jun 23:47:33 satellite intercept (english
VOICE 1: Virus snatch team is en route to Changchun. Nan
are CAPTAIN ROBERT WU and LIEUTENANT CHET
Both can be trusted. As discussed, the price
delivery of the vaccine to you will be one hundred
and twenty million dollars, ten million for each of
twelve men involved.
Changchun, Fairfax thought. The Chinese bioweapons
production facility.
And a hundred and twenty million dollars, to be divided
among twelve men.
This was getting interesting.
Next:
2-JUL 02:21:57 SATELLITE INTERCEPT
(CHINESE--ENGLISH)
VOICE 1: Copy that, Yellow Star. We'll be there.
What is this--? Fairfax thought.
Yellow Star?
But that was the ...
He clicked on the final message:
3-JUL 04:04:42 SATELLITE INTERCEPT ENGLISH
VOICE 1: WU and LI have arrived back at Area 7 with the vin
Your men are with them. All the money has been
accounted for. Names of my men who will need to
be extracted: BENNETT, CALVERT, COLEMAN, DAYTON,
FROMMER, GRAYSON, LITTLETON, MESSICK, OLIVER
and myself.
Fairfax was looking at the names on the last messaj
when suddenly the door to his subterranean office was flung
open and his boss--a tall, bald bureaucrat named Eugene
Wisher--stormed into the room, followed by three heavily
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armed military policemen. Wisher was in charge of the operation
going on across the hall--the tracking of the newly
launched Chinese space shuttle.
"Fairfax!" he bellowed. "What the hell are you doing
in here!"
Fairfax gulped, eyed the MP's guns fearfully. "Uh,
wha-- what are you talking about?"
"Why are you accessing intercepted transmissions from
our operation?"
"Your operation?" Fairfax said.
"Yes. Our operation. Why are you downloading information
from the mainframe that pertains to the classified operation
going on in Section 1?"
Fairfax fell silent, deep in thought, while his boss kept
yelling at him.
And suddenly it all became very, very clear.
"Oh, Christ," he breathed.
IT TOOK SOME EXPLAINING--AT GUNPOINT--BUT AFTER FIVE
minutes, Dave Fairfax suddenly found himself standing in
front of two DIA Assistant Directors in the operations room
across the hall from his windowless office.
Monitors glowed all around the room, technicians worked
at over a dozen consoles--all of it related to the tracking of the
newly launched Chinese Space Shuttle, the Yellow Star.
"I need a personnel list for Special Area 7," the twenty-five-year-old Fairfax said to the two high-ranking DLA
chiefs standing before him.
A list came.
Fairfax looked at it. It read:
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
SPECIAL AREA (RESTRICTED) 07
ON-SITE PERSONNEL
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET
NAME
UNIT
NAME
UNIT
COMMAND UNIT
Harper, JT (CO)
7TH SQUADRON
Alvarez, MJ A
Arthurs, RT C
Atlock, FD B
Baines, AW A
Bennett, B E
Biggs, NM
Boland, CS
Boyce, LW
Calvert, ET
Carney, LE
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NAME UNIT
Price, AL
Rawson, MJ
Sayles, MT
Sommers, SR C C B C Stone, JK Taylor, AS Willis, IS Wolfson, HT C B C A
CIVILIAN STAFF
Botha, GW MED
Franklin, HS MED
Shaw, DE MED
"Anybody else see a pattern here?" Fairfax said.
All of the men named in the intercepted transmission
were from the unit designated "E"--or in military parlance
"Echo."
"The only man in 'E' who isn't mentioned," Fairfax
said, "is this one, 'Carney, LE.' I can only assume that he's
the man speaking on the tape."
Fairfax turned to the two DIA chiefs standing beside
him. "There's a rogue unit at that base. A rogue unit that has
been communicating with the Chinese government and its
new space shuttle. All the men in Echo Unit."
"--echo unit. report--"
"--This is Echo leader" the voice of Captain Lee "Cobra"
Carney replied.
Cobra spoke with a slow Southern drawl--measured,
; icy, dangerous. "We're in the Level 3 livin' quarters. Just
swept the two underground hangar levels. Nothin' there.
Workin' our way down through the complex now, coverin'
the stairwell as we go."
"--Copy that, Echo leader--"
"Sir," another of the radio operators turned to Caesar
Russell, "Charlie Unit just arrived back from the lake.
They're outside, and they have the boy."
"Good. Losses?"
"Five."
"Acceptable. And Botha?" Caesar asked.
"Dead."
"Even better. Let them in through the top door."
gant and the others headed for the fire stairwell at
the eastern end of Level 4.
"I know this isn't exactly relevant to the present situation,"
Mother said as she and Gant walked side by side, "but
I've been meaning to ask you about your little date with the
Scarecrow last Saturday. You haven't said anything about it."
Gant gave Mother a crooked grin. "Not looking for gossip,
are we, Mother?"
"Why, hell yes. That's exactly what I'm looking for
Old married hags like me get off hearing about the sexual
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gymnastics of pretty young things like you. And I was just,
you know ... interested."
Gant smiled sadly. "It didn't go as well as I would have
liked."
"How do you mean?"
Gant shrugged, kept walking, gun in hand. "He didn't
kiss me. We had a great dinner at this quiet little restaurant,
then we walked along the banks of the Potomac, just talking.
God, we talked all evening. And then, when he dropped me
home, I was hoping that he'd kiss me. But he ... just ... didn't. And so we stood there awkwardly and said we'd see
each other later, and the date just ... ended."
Mother's eyes narrowed. "Oooh, Scarecrow. I'll kick your ass ..."
"Please don't," Gant said as they came to the door leading
to the stairwell. "And don't tell him I told you anything."
Mother ground her teeth. "Mmm, okay ..."
"In any case, I'd rather not think about it right now,"
Gant said. "We've got work to do."
She opened the firedoor a crack, peered through it, her
gun raised beside her face.
The stairwell was dark and silent.
Empty.
"Stairwell's clear," she whispered.
She opened the door fully, took a few steps up the stairs.
Mother moved into position behind her, both of their
eyes looking up the barrels of their guns.
They came to the Level 3 landing, saw the door leading
into the complex's living quarters.
There was no one here.
That's odd, Gant thought.
There were no soldiers stationed on the landing, not
even a sentry left there to block their movement up through
the complex.
Very odd, she thought. If she had been in charge of the
opposing forces, she would be flushing every floor for the
President, and ensuring that she blocked off the stairwell
while she did so.
area 7 285
Obviously, the 7th Squadron operated differently.
With the stairwell unguarded, Gant and her team made
swift progress upwards, came to the Level 2 hangar bay.
The Level 2 hangar--untouched, so far, by the mayhem
of the day--was practically identical to the one above it, the
only difference being that the collection of planes inside it
was far less exotic. While the Level 1 hangar contained its
pair of Stealth bombers and the SR-71 Blackbird, this one
only held two AWACS surveillance airplanes.
Which was exactly what Gant wanted.
TWO MINUTES LATER, SHE WAS INSIDE THE LOWER CARGO HOLD
of one of the AWACS planes, unscrewing a heavy lead panel
in the floor.
The panel came free, revealing an electronics compartment
--and in the middle of that compartment, secured
firmly in place, was a very sturdy-looking fluorescent
orange unit, about the size of a small shoebox. The orange
box appeared to be made of some superstrong material.
"What's that?" Juliet Janson asked from behind Gant.
The President answered for her. "It's the plane's flight
data recorder. The black box."
"Doesn't look very black," Ramrod Hagerty said sourly.
"They never are," Gant said, extracting the small orange
unit from its nook. "It's just the name they're known by.
Black boxes are nearly always painted bright orange, for
better visibility in a wreck. That said, they're usually found
another way--"
"Oh, very good ..." the President said.
"What?" Hagerty asked. "What?"
"Ever wondered how they find the black box so fast after
an airplane crash?" Gant said. "When a plane goes down,
debris is spread all over the place, yet they always find the
flight data recorder very quickly, usually within a few
hours."
"Yes ..."
battery-powered transponder inside them. That transponder
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emits a high-powered microwave signal, giving the box's location
to crash investigators."
"So what are you going to do with it?" Hagerty asked.
Gant called up through the hatch above her. "Mother!"
"Yeah?" Mother's voice floated back.
"You found that signal yet?"
"I'll have it in two seconds!"
Gant gave Hagerty a look. "I'm going to try to impersonate
the signal coming from the President's heart."
IN THE MAIN CABIN OF THE AWACS PLANE, MOTHER SAT AT A
computer console.
She pulled up the screen showing the microwave signal
coming into Area 7 from the low-orbit satellite. It was the
same screen Brainiac had found inside the other AWACS
plane earlier, depicting a twenty-five-second rebounding
signature.
50
75
Gant came up from the cargo hold with the orange
colored black box. She plugged a cable into a socket on its
side, connecting it to Mother's terminal. Immediately, the
spike graph appeared on a small illuminated LCD screen on
the black box's top.
"Okay," Gant said to Mother, "see that search signal,
the upward spike? I want you to set it as the 'find' frequency
on the black box."
When crash investigators search for a black box, they
use a radio transmitter to emit a pre-set microwave signal
called the 'find' frequency. When the black box's transponder
area 7 287
detects that signal, it sends out a return signal, revealing
its location.
"Okay ..." Mother said, typing. "Done."
"Good," Gant said. "Now set that rebounding frequency
--the downward spike--as the return signal."
"Okay, just a minute."
"Will the signal strength from the black box be powerful
enough to reach all the way up to the satellite?" the President
asked.
"I think it'll work. They used microwave signals to talk
to Armstrong on the moon, and SETI uses them to send
messages into out
er space." Gant smiled. "It's not the size
that matters, it's the quality of the signal."
"All right, done," Mother said. She turned to Gant. "So,
Fearless Leader, what exactly have I just created?"
"Mother, if you've done it right, when we activate the
transmitter inside this black box, we'll be mimicking the
signal coming out of the President's heart."
"So what now?" the President asked.
"Yes," Hagerty said meanly. "Do we just switch it on?"
"Definitely not. If we turn it on, the satellite will pick up
two identical signals, and that might cause it to detonate the
bombs. We can't risk that. No, we've just laid the groundwork.
Now it's time for the hard part. Now we have to substitute the black box's signal for the President's."
"And how do we do that?" Hagerty asked. "Please don't
tell me that you're going to perform open-heart surgery on
the President of the United States with a pocket knife?"
"Do I look like MacGyver to you?" Gant asked. "No.
My theory is this: somehow Caesar Russell got that transmitter onto the President's heart ..."
"That's right. He did it during an operation I had a few
years ago," the President said.
"But I'm figuring he didn't turn it on until today," Gant
said. "The White House's scanners would have picked up an
unauthorized signal as soon as it was turned on."
"Yes, so ..." Hagerty said.
"So," Gant said, "somewhere in this complex, Caesar
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Russell has a unit that turns the President's transmitter on
and off. I'm guessing that that unit--probably just a handheld
initiate/terminate unit of some kind--is sitting in the
same room as Caesar himself."
"It is," the President said, recalling the small unit that
Caesar Russell had turned on at the very start of the challenge.
"He had it when he appeared on the television sets before,
at the beginning of all this. It's red, handheld, with a
black stub antenna."
"Right then," Gant said. "Now all we have to do is find
his command center." She turned to Juliet. "Your people
have checked out this place. Any ideas?"
Juliet said, "The main hangar. In the building overlooking
the floor. There's a whole command-and-control room