Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4) (19 page)

Inside the dimly lit NSA situation room, Rathmore stood up. “Come on, get this guy out of here.” Professor Yamane’s claim of knowing a war was about to break out between two of the world’s largest countries was laughable. Rathmore turned to another wall of monitors and ignored the one with the sniffling professor.

“Wait a minute,” Murik said. “Why would Russia and China go to war with each other, and why today?”

“As a distraction,” Professor Yamane said, as if he were discussing the weather. “There is a group, a very influential one, that wants to stop the US government from getting the Sphere.”

“So they arrange a last-minute war between two of the most powerful nations on Earth?” Rathmore scoffed. “Forget this delusional quack! He’s wasting our time.” He turned back to the monitor showing the satellite images of Gale’s plane and followed the projected flight paths.

“Are you sure?” Murik asked.

“Aren’t you?” Rathmore shot back. “Russia and China aren’t going to war, period. And this guy wants us to believe it’s
today
? Talk about a distraction. He’s messing with us. He’s on their team.”

Murik cut off the connection.

A message appeared on Rathmore’s primary monitor. King’s Veiled Ops unit was twenty-two minutes from intercepting Asher’s flight path.
Do not close in!
Rathmore typed back. If King was on Booker’s payroll, this part of the mission, their best lead, was about to blow up.

Even without his doubts about the Conductor and King, Rathmore was strangely nervous about Gale’s plane. Although it was being tracked from ground radar, numerous satellites, and the Hornets, he knew Booker was a sly and resourceful adversary.

“Where are they going to land?” he asked again.

The technicians were monitoring the computers that were continually updating projected flight paths and landing sites. Already teams were scrambling to be ready to hit the ground from Panama to San Diego.

“What th
e‒
!? ” Rathmore shouted, checking another screen. “What’s happened to my feed?” he yelled at the techs.

“That’s strange,” one of the techs murmured while switching through a series of monitors.

Rathmore stood and paced from screen to screen. “I don’t like the word ‘strange’ coming up in any of my operations. Show me the plane! Where the hell is my plane?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You don’t
know
! You get
paid
to know!” Rathmore said, more alarmed than Murik had ever seen him. “Come on, show me something people. Show. Me. Something!”

“It’s got to be a glitch,” Murik said.

“Asher’s Gulfstream has disappeared from the satellite images and from radar.” Rathmore chewed up each word and spit it out. “That’s one hell of a glitch.”

“See if the Hornets have a visual,” Murik said, expecting it all to work out. “Planes don’t just disappear.”

“Negative,” came the response from the flight leader of the Hornets. “The plane went into a cloud. It did not come out. We pursued and passed through to the clear. Target seems to have vanished.”

“Is there weather? Was there another plane? This is
impossible
!” Rathmore whined.

“Clear and calm conditions, sir. No other crafts in the vicinity.”

“Where are they?” Rathmore demanded. He looked at the map, lit up with lights showing the positions of the Hornets. Circles extended out in various colors indicating estimated range, distance, etc. “How close to the nearest land?” he asked, noting they were still over open ocean. “I don’t give a damn if it’s a rock the size of a parking space. What about ships, a rowboat, a flock of seagulls . . .
anything
? Tell me everything that’s down there, and tell me NOW!”

The satellites zoomed in. Scans of the area showed no land, no ships, nothing.

“It could be EAMI,” a lone technician from the far side of the room said, so quietly that Rathmore thought the woman might have sneezed.

“Excuse me, did you have something to say?” Murik asked her.

“I know it will not be a popular hypothesis,” the woman said, slowly walking over toward Murik and Rathmore.

“What won’t be?” Rathmore asked, upset by a distraction during this emergency.

“EAMI,” she repeated. “Eysen Anomaly Matter Interference, it’s—”

“I know what it is,” Rathmore barked. “And you’re damned right it won’t be popular. You expect me to believe that the Sphere somehow made a plane disappear right in front of the satellites, six trained pilots, God, and everyone?” He scoffed and turned back to the satellites scanning the ocean. “Show me the last images we have of the Gulfstream heading into the cloud.”

The woman looked at Murik. “I’m in here for a reason,” she said.

“I know,” Murik replied. He knew her from an earlier cross-collaboration conference he’d attended concerning the Gaines case. She was the NSA’s, and therefore the US government’s, leading expert on the Eysen-Sphere.

“Even when we believed the Sphere had been destroyed,” she began, opening a projection view from her INU, “we knew Booker Lipton had obtained substantial amounts of information and technology from the object.”

Murik nodded. He knew that. “I’m very familiar with the EAMI theory.”

“Then don’t you see that this is a dramatic example of just that?”

“But the Sphere is not on that plane.”

“How do you know that?” she asked.

“If it was, then why did they get discovered at the airport? Why wouldn’t EAMI have saved them much earlier?”

“Well, we don’t know the limitations of EAMI.”

“Fine, but what about the fact that Gaines was in Hawaii the day before? He would have had the Sphere with him. In fact, we have a witness who saw Gaines and the Sphere in Hawaii, so Asher didn’t have it. The Sphere is not on that plane.”

“We don’t know the range of EAMI,” she countered.

“We don’t know
anything
about EAMI,” Rathmore snapped, rejoining the conversation. “EAMI is all made-up conjecture and fanciful tales to explain Booker’s latest technology and how we’ve failed to get inside his organization, discover his secrets, blah, blah, blah.”

Rathmore’s face contorted as if he’d just stepped on a large nail.

“EAMI is to placate those members of Congress who fund us and want to know just how Gaines and Asher got away so many times the first go-round,” he continued. “It may work with Congress, but not in the real world!” He walked back to the other side of the room. “Imagine what the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is going to say this time! We had Asher at the damned airport, and now she’s dead again.”

“I doubt she’s dead,” Murik said.

“She might as well be.”

“If it
is
EAMI, Asher’s status and answering to Congress are going to be the least of our worries,” the woman said, so quietly that only Murik heard her. He immediately went to the communications screen to raise the sniffling Professor Yamane again.

Savina was impressed with how fast Booker had responded, considering everything that was going on, but not really surprised.
He did personally try to hire me, and he must know the Foundation is trying to get his Sphere,
she thought.
I wonder if he realizes that we also have one?

She pulled into the secure office park and stopped at the gate to present her identification. Two officers with automatic rifles efficiently circled and inspected her car, including the underside. After they had also looked into her trunk and waved some type of electronic monitoring wands over the vehicle, they waved her through.

That’s a lot of security when Booker isn’t even here in person,
she thought as she found a parking space. Her assistant had conveyed the message that Booker would speak to her, but only across a secure, scrambled video line. With everyone who wanted to get to the man, especially now that Gaines was known to be alive, it made sense he would only have this kind of communication at a facility he owned.

She waited in a soft chair, glad the place was on her way home. Savina was uncharacteristically tired. Normally her metabolism kept her in high-gear and able to work fifteen-hour days, but the decision to circumvent the Judge had weighed on her heavily.

Savina sat for at least ten minutes in the overly-air-conditioned room, collecting her thoughts. She wasn’t exactly betraying the Judge or the Foundation. She still believed in the mission, and even that the Phoenix Initiative was necessary, but there were two Spheres, and Booker had spent billions of dollars, perhaps tens of billions, and employed hundreds of the world’s best minds, who had been mining the secrets of the Sphere for seven years. They were clearly ahead, and there was so much to know and too much at stake.

Now, based upon what had happened to her, she could no longer view the Sphere as simply the most advanced “computer” ever created. Savina was desperate to better understand the Sphere and the power it possessed before launching the world-altering Phoenix Initiative.

The screen finally came to life, but instead of Booker Lipton, she found herself staring at the smiling face of the Judge.

“Savina, what are you doing here?” he asked in friendly surprise.

She jumped up out of her seat. “I-I was, um,” she stuttered, recovering quickly. “A colleague set up a meeting concerning the gravitational waves and it’s something I’m exploring with the Sphere.”

“Well, I suppose that is
mostly
true,” the Judge said, still smiling.

It was mostly true, but either way, Savina realized with a sinking feeling that she had walked into a trap. “Judge, I didn’t think—”

“No, you didn’t,” he cut her off sharply. “Oh, the irony. Perhaps the smartest woman in the world, and she
did not think
.”

“I never thought you would allow me to meet with Booker.”

“Yes, you were correct about that. Do you know who Booker Lipton is? He is the goddamned anti-Christ!” The Judge glared at her. “I have spent
years
trying to save the world from him. And he is so close . . . so
very, very
close, to being able to destroy it all.”

“What if he’s trying to save it, but in a different way than you are?”

“The Foundation has explored every conceivable solution to what the world is facing. The Phoenix Initiative is the only viable option. It
will
work.”

“But the Sphere? What if it doesn’t allow us to just see across time, what if we can use it to
change
time?”

“That’s what I’m trying to do. We’re trying to change the future before it destroys us all.”

“No, not like that.” Savina paced up to the giant screen, unconsciously trying to make her controversial point stronger. “If we could go back and manipulate something that happened in the past and change it, then we could possibly prevent the plague completely.”

The Judge knew Savina to be a practical scientist, free from any beliefs not backed by strict observable facts, but as a leading-edge physicist, she also worked with theories. “I assume this is a theory.”

“Only because I do not possess all the necessary data,” Savina conceded. “But it is real, and that’s why I need to talk with Booker. His people have to know about this. He’s got the two top experts on gravitational waves on his payroll.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Come on, Judge, it’s a small community of physicists. I can put together a roster for you of who he’s got working on UQP, but I suspect you already have that list.” She smiled. “Look at the names in a pattern based on their expertise and you’ll see what Booker is after, or what he already has.”

“And what is that?”

“Time travel.”

The Judge balked. “It’s not possible.”

“Of course it is. The proof is all around us. We’ve done it with particles. What about photons, light, the age of the universe, inflation, I could go on.”

“That is quite different than actually doing something constructive, something that can result in change or anything concrete, for that matter,” the Judge said.

“If it isn’t possible to manipulate time, then how does the Sphere tell us what’s going to happen? You may not realize it, but you’ve already built the Phoenix Initiative and put the entire fate of civilization at risk, all based on time travel.”

“You’re correct,” the Judge admitted. “I don’t know. That’s why I have
you
working on the Sphere.” He wanted to believe her, he
needed
to trust her, but she’d tried to get to Booker. She could ruin everything, yet the Sphere was critical, and no one on the Foundation’s team knew as much as she did. “Why didn’t you ask me before running off to Booker?”

“What would you have said?”

“You should have asked.”

“Are you going to let me talk to him?”

“What if I let you talk to Gaines instead?”

“Gaines?” she asked, surprised. “Do you know where he is?”

“I expect he’ll be in your lab by this time tomorrow,” the Judge replied. “So you see, there was no need to go behind my back, no need to try to talk with Booker, who probably knows less about the actual object than I do.”

Savina nodded quietly, suddenly unsure of her fate. She knew the Judge could use his power ruthlessly, but she had never known anything but kindness from him. “Then I guess I should spend the next twenty-four hours making sure we’re ready for Gaines.”

“Yes, that sounds like a wise course,” the Judge said, staring sternly. “And Savina? I’m sure you’ll not be bothered by the Foundation Security officers who will now be escorting you around the clock.”

Savina swallowed hard. “I understand.”