Death Angel (23 page)

Lights flared brighter as the beam went dark. He could hear the sound of the mechanisms that controlled the laser gun’s movements. Its barrel tilted downward, aligning its snout with the walls of the Pit.

The walkway above was open and spacious; what cover there was could not long withstand the hellish fury of the beam. But the tank floor at this end of the laser target range was an obstacle course of different-sized armatures and mounts for the mirrored metal plates.

The plates were of all shapes and sizes. Some were thin flat squares, others were disks, and still others were half globes, concave and convex. They were mounted at varying heights and tilted at different angles. Interspersed between them were slabs and pillars of sensor-laded machinery for measuring the specifics of each tested blast beam. Together they formed a maze.

Jack moved inward toward the heart of the array. He zigzagged, doing broken-field running, advancing, checking, doubling back, and then darting off at a tangent. The laser gun fired a series of short blasts, trying to pin him. A number of beam shots were completely off, missing him by a wide distance. Jack guessed that the beam operator
had more trouble seeing him in the Pit than he had on the walkway.

It was a good feeling, a morale booster. No time to get complacent, though. A sudden stab of the beam seared the air a few feet away from him. Jack jumped back, covering behind a vertical instrument board. Not pausing, he dove headfirst across an open space and came up in a roll.

A crash sounded as the top of the instrument board was sliced clean off and fell to the floor.

Jack’s seemingly random movements concealed a hidden purpose. By fits and starts, he was working his way toward the center of the maze where a massive armature held a vertical slab of mirrored metal the size of a plate-glass window.

He jumped up from behind a cabinet and stepped into the open, showing himself for a few beats. He leaped forward, hurtling toward the upright slab of mirrored metal.

The beam lanced through the space he’d occupied a split second before. It swung after him in a sizzling sweeping arc—and then he was behind the square of mirrored metal, hunkered down behind it. He breathed a silent prayer that the alloy’s designers knew what they were doing when they wrought their miracle metal.

The blood-red beam swung toward him. He tensed himself for a heart-stopping second—

The beam struck the plate of mirrored metal, the alloy specifically designed to be laser-resistant. Like a mirror reflecting a ray of light, the mirrored metal reflected the laser beam.

A red lance speared the mirror shield and bounced off.

Mirror metal threw the dart back at its source.

The beam thrust deep into the guts of the machinery that generated it, stabbing a sunfire stiletto into the energizer’s complex array of coils, pipes, conduits, circuitry and hydraulics. It was like stirring up a man’s guts with a red-hot poker—to similar effect.

The energizer housing shuddered like some intricate clockwork mechanism throwing a gear and tearing itself apart from within.

The laser’s complex array of fail-safe devices switched on. Power leads went dead. Internal baffles and shielding screens dropped into place. Valves closed.

The beam winked out.

Jack Bauer feared that the energizer would terminate itself with a massive cataclysmic blast. Instead—it just stopped. Dead.

Medusa turned to stone by the power of her own ruby-red gaze.

2:35
A.M
. MDT
Laser Research Facility,
Ironwood National Laboratory

Medusa was dead.

So was FBI SA Hickman. His body lay outside the front entrance of the LRF blockhouse. He had been shot through the heart at point-blank range—so close that his jacket and shirt were scorched where the bullet had penetrated.

SECTRO Force guard Harry Stempler’s body was discovered on the first-floor landing of the fire stairs at the front of the building. Like Hickman, he’d been shot at close range.

Dr. Hugh Carlson was missing.

Dr. Glen Nordquist was alive but in critical condition.

OCI Assistant Director Debra Derr and a SECTRO Force squad had had trouble getting into the LRF and the
blockhouse. The scanner badge readers accessing the locales were inert, unresponsive. They had been deactivated. The massive system failure was the result of sabotage. Each scanner had to be manually overridden to free up entrance to the portals.

Jack Bauer’s problem was the opposite. He’d been locked inside the blockhouse, in the Snake Pit, unable to get out. The intruder who’d lured him and McCoy into the testing range had made his escape sometime while Jack had been playing his deadly game of laser tag with Medusa.

Jack had had to shoot out a window of the viewing module and climb through it. In the control room he’d found Nordquist lying in a pool of his own blood, battered, strangled, but still alive. Of Carlson there was no sign. Jack had administered what first aid he could to Nordquist while waiting for help to arrive.

The security contingent’s forced entry into the blockhouse was soon followed by the arrival of an ambulance from City Hospital. Emergency medical treatment had been administered to Nordquist, who now lay on a stretcher in the control room, conscious and aware of his surroundings.

Grouped around him were Jack Bauer, CIA liaison Orne Lewis, OCI Assistant Director Debra Derr, SECTRO Force Commander Brock Whitcomb, and Dr. Frederick Brand.

McCoy’s death had left Derr Acting Director of OCI. She’d been joined by Brock Whitcomb, Ironwood’s highest-ranking SECTRO officer. He’d been summoned to INL to deal with the crisis. Like his troops, he wore a sky-blue uniform. His cap and tunic were blazoned with Commander’s badges. He had jug ears, a spade-shaped face, small round eyes, and a brown mustache.

Dr. Brand was a young intern at City Hospital working the night shift with an EMT ambulance that had been the first to respond to the call for help from Ironwood. He had thin blond hair, tired eyes, and a pale, fine-boned face.
Much of that pallor came from the grueling work schedule that is part of every intern’s apprenticeship. But some of it came from the carnage on display at the blockhouse. His eyes were narrowed and his jaw set. Red dots of color showed in his cheekbones.

Jack Bauer, Derr, Lewis, and Whitcomb stood together in a loose arc. Dr. Brand stood facing them. A couple of EMT paramedics stood nearby, waiting to take their cue from him. Between the two groups lay Nordquist on the stretcher.

“I’ve done all I can for him here,” Dr. Brand said, indicating Nordquist. “He needs medical treatment that can be given only at City Hospital. Speed is vital. Any delay is dangerous.”

Nordquist looked bad. He had been beaten on the head by a blunt instrument.

His oversized cranium looked bigger than ever, thanks to the bandages that had been applied to his torn, lacerated scalp. His body looked correspondingly shrunken where it was outlined beneath the white blanket that covered him where he lay on his back on the stretcher.

His glasses had been broken during the assault. Without them his gaze was soft-focused, diffuse. Dried blood from his head wounds streaked his face. Purple-black bruises mottled his long, scrawny neck, marking the strangler’s grip that he’d somehow survived.

Brand turned to the paramedics hovering nearby, motioning them to the patient.

The duo took up positions on either side of the stretcher, gripping metal tube frame rails preparatory to wheeling him away. “No,” Nordquist said, his voice a weak croak.

Dr. Brand leaned over Nordquist. He spoke clearly and distinctly, as though addressing one who is hard of hearing. “You’ve been seriously injured, sir. We’re taking you to the hospital now.”

“Not until you’ve heard me out. You’ve got to be warned,” Nordquist said.

“You can tell us later after you’ve been treated.” Brand’s voice had the tone used by medics on difficult patients whose wishes are about to be ignored.

“Later is too late—for you, me, and untold thousands.”

Jack Bauer caught Brand’s eye. “Let him have his say.”

Brand shook his head. “This man is in no position to make an informed judgment. He’s suffered a serious head injury and other major—”

Bauer had heard enough and stepped up to the doctor, their faces only inches apart. “He’ll speak and you’ll stand back and shut your mouth!”

The madness had begun about an hour earlier, when Nordquist’s computer insulted him.

The last test firing was long done. Scientists and technicians had left the blockhouse building, leaving Nordquist and Carlson alone in the control room.

Nordquist sat at his workstation, hunched over his computer. He was rapt in contemplation of the streams of fresh data cascading across his flat-screen monitor. Caught up in intense concentration, he was more or less oblivious to what went on around him. He had tunnel vision when concentrating on his facts and figures, his beloved equations. He lost track of time, space, and his surroundings.

The screen was filled with columns of fresh data ceaselessly scrolling past. He skimmed the numerical stream, his mind selecting the significant and weeding out the irrelevancies. He was all but mesmerized by the glittering digi-curtain unreeling before him.

Suddenly—a force reached in from outside and took control of his computer. The data cascade vanished, winking out.

Nordquist stifled a groan. What new glitch was this? Had his computer frozen?

Or worse, crashed?

It happens—even at Los Alamos. Sometimes especially at Los Alamos. That’s why each facility’s computer network had multiple backups, fail-safes, and protective devices.

This observation gave him no comfort. Nordquist demanded the same thing of his machines as he did of his staff: perfection. What he got inevitably fell short of that goal. But he refused to compromise his standards.

What happened next left him slack-jawed and gaping. The computer was not frozen. In the middle of the screen appeared two words:

HELLO, STUPID.

Nordquist was mentally caught off-balance—a rarity for him. His mind temporarily slipped gears, unable to process what it was seeing. Sense returned after a few beats, bringing some sort of comprehension.

Someone had managed to hack into his computer.

No one was more aware than Nordquist of the countless, relentless computer attacks launched every minute of every day against the national security infrastructure of the United States. Lone nuts, wise-guy kids, gifted amateurs, attention seekers, vandals, megalomaniacs, criminal conspiracies, and even and especially organized attacks by foreign powers—

It happened all the time. More than the public dared suspect. Or could be allowed to know. But this! It went beyond attack into insult.

HELLO, STUPID.

Just the kind of “exploit” some smart-assed young punk would find amusing, to disrupt vital scientific research just to insert a mocking taunt!

But how had it managed to penetrate to the heart of the INL computer net with all its safeguards and firewalls? It
was like some penny-ante burglar cracking into the gold vault at Fort Knox. Nordquist was unaware that he was talking to himself, muttering under his breath. His self-absorbed funk was jarred by an unexpected interruption.

Laughter sounded nearby. He glanced up, starting. Dr. Carlson stood behind him, looming over him. He’d thought that Carlson was at his own workstation several desks away.

Nordquist’s cheeks burned at the realization that Carlson had seen the demeaning message now showing on his screen. Humiliation was almost instantly superseded by icy rage. Carlson had forgotten his place in the pecking order. Having his face rubbed in the dirt would remind him of his inferior status.

Nordquist pushed his chair back from his desk, swiveling around to face Carlson. There Carlson stood, big, bluff, hale, and hearty; showing every sign of immense enjoyment. Nordquist fixed him with what should have been a withering glare.

Carlson seemed impervious to it, his bland pudding of a face radiating great good humor. “Get the message, Glen?” he asked.

Glen? Glen! Of all the effrontery! The offense of this uninvited familiarity was compounded by its being ventured here in the LRF, the heart of Nordquist’s undisputed domain.

“I wish you could see the look on your face. It’s priceless—worth every bit of the years, the long years, that I’ve waited to see it,” Carlson said.

He had a chip on his shoulder and meant to unburden himself. He went on, “Years of playing second fiddle to the great Glen Nordquist. Years of yes, sir; no, sir; how high do you want me to jump, sir? Being passed over for promotion while you took the top slot that should rightfully have been mine. Doing the heavy lifting of the research work while you put your name on the papers and patents and hogged all
the credit. Years of eating dirt, of having to sit and take it and keep smiling while you poured it on.

“Look who’s smiling now. Me—Hugh Carlson. I’m calling the shots now. I have been for some time. Literally, in some cases.” He laughed to himself at that one.

“You thought you were so damned smart!” Carlson spat. “All of you, including the Board of Directors, the Senate Appropriations Committee heads, the Pentagon generals, the high-level bureaucrats. You all knew better than Hugh Carlson. ‘That Carlson—bright enough, but not Project Director material. Capable in his way, but unsuited for the top slot.’

“Such a damned smart bunch of horses’ asses! All the while, right under your noses, I’ve been stealing you blind! If you call it stealing to take the fruit of one’s own labors—”

Nordquist opened his mouth to ream Carlson out, to say something, anything to halt his obscene diatribe.

Carlson beat him to it. “Shut up, Glen. Don’t say a word. Save your breath—you’ll need it.” He laughed at that, too.

“I had to bite the inside of my mouth until it bled to keep from screaming during the Sayeed affair. Screaming with laughter,” he said. “You thought you’d discovered a spy in the lab. So much fuss! Why, Sayeed was a pygmy compared to me; an insect!

“All he did was steal some of the Argus parameters—as if any scientist worthy of the name couldn’t have deduced the numbers by himself!

“He was a big help to me, though. His clumsy efforts—he did everything but advertise his presence with a neon sign—actually helped me by throwing the bloodhounds off the trail. Argus, Perseus? Mere toys. Baubles compared to the real crown jewels.

“Ten years ago when I first came to work for you, I set my plan in motion. I saw the way of it, the lay of the land. Scientists, we who can split or fuse the atom, create or destroy like the gods themselves—

“And yet we’re relegated to the back of the bus. Hirelings for the big bosses, the number crunchers and bean counters, the bottom-feeding money boys who suck the oyster dry and leave the empty shell for the rest of us peasants to fight over. They rule the world and revel in its treasures while we worry about mortgages and budgets and nagging wives.

“Not me. Not Hugh Carlson. The workman is worthy of his hire. From the moment I set up shop here, I’ve had only one objective: control. I got my hooks into the computer network early. Suborning, subverting, invading. Taking it over. Control the computer controls and you control all.

“That message on your screen is a sample of my handiwork. Our security watchdogs are experiencing my power all over Ironwood right now—like you are—and they don’t even know it. With a few keystrokes I can nullify the built-in surveillance programs and fail-safes. No vault is secure from me. Divert any surveillance. Subvert any scanner.

“OCI was doomed from the start. Their network is an open book to me. Their system intersects ours at innumerable points and each one of those points is a highway right into their sanctum sanctorum, their holy of holies, where they keep the records of their constant snooping on all of us scientists. It’s easy to crack their vault—when you’re smart. But such control is only a means to an end.”

“And what would that be?” Nordquist asked, keeping his tone mild, noncommittal, the way he’d talk to a crazy person, humoring him. He figured that Carlson had cracked up, suffering a nervous breakdown. Unfortunate that it had to happen when the two of them were alone in the control room, with no one close by to call on for help.

Carlson’s eyes glittered in a face shiny with sweat. “While you’ve been fooling around with your petty little mirrors and ray guns, what have I been doing? Stealing the crown jewels. The day long ago that the PAL codes came to us for an overhaul and revamping, I saw the light. And it was
brighter than a thousand suns, as Oppenheimer put it when the first Trinity A-bomb test was a success. In my hands were the secret codes that unleash atomic destruction.”

PAL—permissive action link. The complex digital codes required to launch nuclear missiles, they neutralize the fail-safe mechanisms designed to prevent unauthorized launches of missiles with atomic warheads. The cyber keys to unlock the seals of atomic Armageddon.

There was more. No land-based missile in America’s atomic arsenal could be launched without the PAL codes. But there was always the danger of the codes falling into the wrong hands by disaster or design.

From the need to prevent such a nightmare eventuality, PALO was born. PALO—the PAL overrides. The PALO codes were an auxiliary backup system. Inserted into a computerized launching sequence, they could override the PAL codes and shut down the launch, preventing the firing. They were the ultimate safety fuse to forestall unauthorized personnel from deliberately or by mistake unleashing a nuclear holocaust and triggering World War III.