Split Second (3 page)

4

Jenna Morrison heard a
bloodcurdling scream and realized a moment later that it was coming from her
own mouth.

The two intruders slid along the
smooth trailer wall until they were directly in front of where Jenna had been
moments earlier, surveying the carnage.

Simkin and Nathan Wexler were both
dead, although Wexler’s head was a bloody pulp, unrecognizable, turning him
into nothing but a torso and a pair of bloody, shattered legs. Crimson liquid
had sprayed everywhere and puddles collected at various locations in the
trailer, drawn there by the inexorable pull of gravity.

“
God-
dammit
!
” shrieked one of the men,
sounding almost as anguished as Jenna, who had only avoided vomiting because
she had nothing in her stomach. “
Fuck!
”

“Jenna, come with me,” said one
of the men, turning to her. “I’ll protect you.”

Her eyes were unfocused and she
made no sign of comprehension.

“Jenna, come on!
Jenna
,” he repeated for a third time. “Snap
out of it!”

The man’s words were
incomprehensible to her. She felt numb, paralyzed, and it seemed as though she was
hearing everything through ten miles of cotton, including the never-ending
barrage of gunfire going on in the woods outside. Her mind and her psyche were
unable to process Nathan’s barbaric and sudden death.

Just that morning she had been
with her sister and niece in Chicago. Only hours ago with Nathan in her cozy
home in La Jolla.

And now?

Now she was in the bowels of
hell
. In the middle of a war zone. In a
beautiful state park in California that might as well have been Afghanistan or
Iran.

Nathan was dead! Just like that.
The love of her life. With his mighty intellect spread all over the back of a
cupcake
truck. How could this be
happening?

She only gradually became aware
that the world had taken on a green glow, several seconds after the man who had
spoken to her had finished affixing night vision goggles to her head, his actions
having failed to register with her at all.

“Jenna, come on!” he implored once
again. “God-
dammit
!” He slapped her in the face,
hard. “
Come on!
Getting yourself killed
won’t bring back Dr. Wexler,” he said, slapping her a second time.

This time the pain finally
registered and she was sparked back to reality once again. His last sentence
now drilled into her returning consciousness.

He was
right
. She couldn’t bring Nathan back. But she could find out what
this was all about and why it had happened. She could,
somehow
, make sure those responsible roasted in hell.

“My name is Andy,” said her
rescuer, having looked into her eyes and realizing his slaps had pulled her
back from the abyss. “Andy Cavnar. I’ll make sure you’re safe from these bastards.
But you have to come with me.”

She allowed the man to pull her
toward the exit, letting her eyes focus for the first time, surprised by just
how vivid the neon green world appeared through the night vision headset.

They slid out of the truck with Cavnar’s
partner in tow. She vaguely became aware of the ferocious whipping of
helicopter blades thundering through the cool night air. She realized a moment
later that the large aircraft responsible was hovering above the treetops, not twenty-five
yards away, showing up with surprising clarity in her goggles.

Cavnar rushed her away from the
trailer, but they were still on uneven, acutely sloped terrain, and Jenna
collapsed to the ground, unable to fight off a bout of dizziness that had
suddenly engulfed her.

Dizziness that saved her life.

Four men were now sliding down
ropes that had dropped from the helicopter, firing as they did so, spraying the
area she was in at chest height. One of her two escorts was nearly torn in half
as she hugged the cool, pinecone-strewn ground, while Andy Cavnar fell to the forest
floor beside her, shot in the leg.

Even before the four rappellers
touched the ground they were engaged from behind, giving Cavnar a reprieve and Jenna
the few seconds she needed to regain her senses, and her equilibrium.

Cavnar fired at the four men,
now caught in a crossfire, as another group of four began to descend from the
helicopter. He paused for a moment, shoving his partner’s compact submachine
gun into Jenna’s hands. “Go!” he commanded. “Run!”

Jenna took a deep breath and
clutched tightly at the weapon. Crouching low, driven by adrenaline and a
stronger survival instinct than she had guessed she possessed, she half-ran,
half-skidded down the wooded slope as quickly as she could, while Cavnar
brought his gun into the battle once again.

Jenna turned every so often to
look over her shoulder. The gunfire had become sporadic, as though the two forces
had annihilated each other, with no one left standing. One of the dying combatants
had managed to put a bullet into the helicopter and it was belching black smoke,
forced to limp away so it wouldn’t crash into the trees and burst into a
fireball.

After five minutes of racing
down the slope she arrived at the road, having traveled from one of its corkscrew
turns to a lower one. Bats were darting about everywhere, their hidden lives
revealed to her night vision equipment. Normally this would have freaked her
out beyond measure, but after what she had just gone through she could spare no
adrenaline or fear for these nocturnal animals, who were no doubt feasting on
insects and were careful to avoid humans. At least she hoped.

After she had walked along the
pavement for twenty minutes headlights suddenly emerged from a higher elevation.
Without thinking she closed her eyes and rushed to the middle of the road,
parking herself there with her right arm fully extended in front of her face, her
palm facing the oncoming vehicle. If the driver was paying any kind of
attention, he or she would stop. If not, she would be road kill.

Sure enough, the driver saw her
with plenty of room to spare and brought the car to an abrupt halt in front of
her.

She pulled off the night vision
apparatus and ran to the driver’s side of the car. The driver was a chubby man
in his early thirties, already going bald. She raised her automatic weapon and
pointed it at him, pushing away all feelings of guilt. “Get out!” she demanded,
loudly enough to be heard clearly through the closed window.

The driver looked at her in
horror and disbelief, but there was no denying the reality of the submachine
gun in her hands, nor the cuts and blood spatter that adorned her body.

“Now!” screamed Jenna as the
driver continued to hesitate, paralyzed by fear. One part of her mind remained
purely clinical, taking note of how quickly the survival instinct could turn an
otherwise civilized scientist like her into a barbarian. It was remarkable, and
horrifying.

The man stumbled out of the car
with his hands up.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she
said as calmly as she could manage. “But I do need to borrow your car. It’s a
matter of life and death. Believe it or not, I’m a victim, not a perpetrator.”

The man appeared to not believe
this for a moment, but remained silent. He was likely praying for his life, she
guessed, even if he had been an atheist moments before.

“Give me your phone,” said Jenna.

He handed it to her and she
shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans.

“I can’t have you calling the
cops just yet,” she explained. “But I promise you you’ll be okay. I’ll call one
of your close contacts in three or four hours and tell them where to find you,
and where I’ve left your car. Like I said, I just need to borrow it.”

She handed him the night vision
goggles. “Here,” she said. “Use these until sunrise.”

She was happy that she didn’t
have to leave this poor guy stranded in total darkness. At least that was
something
.

She wondered if any more cars
would be passing by at this time of the morning, and if so, if the displaced
driver would try to copy her gambit and flag one of them down. She doubted it.
Right now he would want to lie low until the morning light and then assess his
situation. He wasn’t nearly as desperate as she was. Staring into approaching
headlights to stop an oncoming car wasn’t for the faint of heart.

She made the balding man walk
ten feet away with the goggles in his hand before she entered his car and
adjusted the seat and mirrors. She lowered the window a few inches. “I am really,
really sorry about this,” she said. “But I promise you, you’ll get your car
back soon.”

And with that, Jenna Morrison powered
the window fully closed again, stepped on the gas, and shot off into the
darkness.

5

Jenna focused on hurtling down
the mountain as quickly as the laws of physics and the narrow, twisty roads
would allow, which at least demanded her rapt attention, leaving her less time
to dwell on her predicament or dredge up horrifying images of Nathan with his
legs ruined and his head all but torn from his shoulders.

She had been exposed to the
aftermath of endless gun battles in movies, of course—who hadn’t?—but she was
surprised to learn that movie gore didn’t even come close to the utter devastation
of the real thing. The caliber and power of modern weapons all but
disintegrated the target, something movies didn’t properly convey. Thankfully.

Even though she needed to marshal
all of her concentration to keep from flying off the road for the second time
in under an hour, she still burst into tears several times before she reached
the bottom.

Finally, using the last
remaining vestiges of a powerful will that had been tested beyond its breaking
point, she managed to push Nathan from her mind and find a way to begin to concentrate
on the problem at hand.

Who were the men who had
ambushed the Hostess truck? Were they trying to rescue her and Nathan?

On the surface, it would appear
that way. Simkin had not shot wildly, but with hideous purpose. Andy Cavnar, on
the other hand, had tried to protect her. Had paused in a gun battle to make
sure she ran to safety.

So what now? Go to the police?
Homeland security? The press?

All of these places?

Maybe. But first things first.
She needed to return home. Because there was only one thing of which she was
certain. This all had been triggered by Nathan’s discovery. Simkin had
destroyed the data on Nathan’s computers rather than let someone else have it.
And then he had destroyed the creator of this data as well, just as completely.

Prior to this they had sucked out
every file Nathan had stored in his cloud account, and then annihilated this account
as well.

They had been
very thorough. But what they didn’t know was that Nathan would never store something
this important in the cloud. It was one of his quirks. He was a bit paranoid. He
was thought of as the up-and-coming whiz kid. A brash boy genius. And while, at
twenty-nine, he was hardly a boy, he was also far more accomplished than this
age would suggest, and there were many who resented his success. And most of
the scientists in his line of work were brilliant hackers. So he refused to
take any chances with the cloud. He did back up his most important files every
night—just not to cyberspace like most people.

Jenna had
thought this precaution was just one of his quirks, but perhaps this behavior
was more prudent than she had realized.

Any work Nathan thought was
original, and especially work he thought was groundbreaking, was stored locally
and password protected. He routinely saved a copy to the hard drive of his
desktop, and a backup to one other location, to a flash drive hidden inside the
house. An expensive model, capable of wireless downloads, so Nathan wouldn’t
have to shove it into a computer port. The flash drive served as a sort of
private cloud storage outside of the cloud. Convenient, but not requiring him
to dip even a toe into cyberspace.

He had programmed
the drive so that if three incorrect passwords were entered in a row, all data
would be wiped clean. Even Jenna didn’t know the password. Unfortunately, she
suspected that someone with financial resources and determination could
eventually find a way to circumvent Nathan’s safeguards.

She wasn’t
about to take this chance. Not given what had happened. So her first order of
business was to retrieve the drive. She could turn it over later to experts,
who could also find a way to get at the data, and she would discover what had
been so important—what had ended Nathan’s life and destroyed her own. She
wouldn’t rest until she knew.

California was
still bathed in blackness when she arrived at her house—
their
house—the location of a joyous reunion just hours before, but
now a painful reminder of all she had lost.

She entered the master bedroom,
fighting back tears once again. Resting on Nathan’s dresser was a toy commonly
called Newton's cradle. Named after the peerless physicist, this device
consisted of five gleaming silver balls, hanging down in a line between two
suspending bars. The device was a favorite of physicists, demonstrating
conservation of momentum and energy. When the ball at one end was lifted and
released, it would strike the stationary spheres with a distinctive clicking
sound, transmitting a force through them that would push the last one upward,
which would then pendulum down again, repeating this action in the opposite
direction. This would continue through multiple cycles until heat and friction
had bled the system of energy.

But Nathan had modified this
apparatus, incorporating a flash drive into its base. Jenna carefully removed
the tiny stick, roughly the size of her thumb, not surprisingly, since these
storage units were also commonly referred to as
thumb drives
. These devices could have been downsized further, but the
tinier an object the easier it was to lose, so this size had become fairly standard.

Jenna rushed out of the bedroom,
lost in thought, trying to determine her next move. But after taking two steps
into her living room she stopped abruptly, gasping in horror.

An intruder was standing inside the
front door, patiently waiting for her to return from the bedroom. Not a cop.
Like the others that night, he was lean and gave off an aura of deadly
professionalism.

Either their original abductors had
left one man behind to watch the house, and he had seen her arrive, or one of
the two sides in this clash had had the presence of mind to rush someone here
after learning she had escaped, just in case she returned.

Unlike the initial group of three
intruders, this man wasted no time in raising a gun and pointing it at her with
a menacing intensity. His eyes widened in excitement when he spied the flash
drive in her hand.

“Bingo!” he said happily. “Who says
long shots don’t pay off?”

“
What do you want with me?
” screamed Jenna at the top of her lungs, as
the calm rationality to which she had been trying to cling shattered.
“Leave me alone!”

“All I want is that thumb drive.
Give it to me. Once I verify I can open it, you’re free to go. Is it password
protected?”

Jenna nodded yes, taking deep
breaths as she fought off alternating emotions of fury and loss that threatened
to cause a total meltdown.

“Do you know the password?”

Jenna blinked rapidly, as if she
didn’t comprehend the question.

“
Do you know the password?
” the intruder barked impatiently.

“Of course,” she lied as her mind
began functioning properly once again, not a moment too soon.

He held out his hand. “Give me the
stick. And the password. And I promise you’ll be left alone. Forever.”

She didn’t reply for several seconds
as she searched frantically for a way out.

“This is the best deal you’re going
to get, believe me.”

In a burst of inspiration, Jenna seized
on a plan. It was desperate, for sure, but no more so than
she
was, and it was likely the only chance she had.

“Why on earth would I ever trust you?”
she asked, buying a few seconds of distraction while she moved two steps closer
to a nearby end table.

Before the intruder could answer
she arrived at the table and quickly snatched up the large goblet of wine she
had set there hours earlier, just before Nathan had playfully triggered a drum
roll, her last positive memory before she was dragged through all nine circles
of hell.

“Back off!” she screamed, extending
the flash drive over the pool of red liquid so it was all but touching it. “I
drop this in and the data is gone forever. It’s the last copy, and the only man
who knows what’s on here is dead.”

The intruder couldn’t keep the
panic from his face as his prize hung precariously above the elegant crystal glass.

Jenna could read the recognition of
the situation in his eyes. He had been badly outmaneuvered. He had decided to
try to get the password from her, to simplify his life, rather than shoot her
and take the drive. But now he was screwed. She had created her very own
dead-man’s switch. If he shot her now the memory stick would fall into the wine
and be destroyed.

The truth was she wasn’t certain
about this. For all she knew the drive was waterproof. But even if this was the
case, would it be able to survive
alcohol
as well? She didn’t know, and fortunately, the intruder seemed to have accepted
her semi-bluff without question.

“Toss your gun
and car keys over to me,” she demanded, pressing her advantage. “Now! Or I’ll
drop it in,” she finished, nodding toward the tiny stick in her right hand. Her
left hand, which held the large crystal wineglass, had a slight tremor as it
was, and the man had to fear the wine might splash upwards and ruin the drive by
accident.

“I’ll do it,”
she warned again.

“Look, give me
the drive,” said the intruder as calmly as he could. “If you destroy it,” he added,
his upper lip curling into a snarl, “I will kill you. Guaranteed.”

He raised the
gun higher and extended it toward her head to emphasize the point.

“But if you give
it to me,” he continued as pleasantly as he could, “I’ll let you go. I won’t
hurt you. I promise.”

“A promise from
you means
nothing
to me!” spat Jenna through
clenched teeth. “After what I’ve seen tonight, I think you’ll kill me the
second you get this. So I have absolutely nothing to lose.” She raised her
eyebrows. “Can you say the same?”

The man looked
uncertain.

Jenna’s expression
hardened even further. “You have thirty seconds to toss your keys and gun over
here. If you don’t, I’ll destroy your prize, and you can explain what happened
to your boss.”

She could tell
from his sick expression that she had him. And he never took his eyes off her
hands, which were still shaking enough to make him fear that an accident might
occur at any time.

“You’re down to
twenty seconds,” said Jenna. “I
will
do it, even knowing you’ll kill me. You think that
scares
me? The love of my life was just murdered in front of my
eyes. I’ve lost
everything
tonight!
At this point, I don’t have much reason to live. I almost hope you don’t do
what I ask, so I can destroy this drive and have you put me out of my misery.”

Jenna said
these words so convincingly that even she wasn’t sure how much of this was a
bluff and how much was reality.

She paused for
a few more seconds. “Ten,” she said simply. “Nine. Eight. Seven—”

“Wait!” said
the man facing her, panic sweeping over his features. “Say I let you go. How do
I know you won’t destroy the drive the second you’re gone?”

“You don’t,”
said Jenna. “You’ll have to take my word for it.”

“Do I
have
your word?”

Jenna nodded.
“You do. I’m as interested in knowing what’s on it as you are. So you lose this
round. You give up your gun and keys and let me leave. But the information
you’re after lives. And given how resourceful you and your gang of thugs seem
to be, I’m sure you can still catch me and retrieve it, right?”

“You make an
interesting proposition. But if I’m going to let you leave here, I need your
word on one more thing. I need you to keep whatever you find on that drive
privileged information. You can’t let it become widely known.”

“Why not?”

“Think whatever
you’d like about me, but trust me on this. It would be bad for
everyone
. My guess is that only a few
people in the world are capable of understanding what’s on there anyway. But
treat the information with total respect, even if you have no idea what it
means. Like it was a simple recipe for a hydrogen bomb.”

Jenna’s eyes
widened. “Is it a catastrophic explosive?”

He shook his
head. “No. Nothing like that. But trust me, it would be
bad
if it got out. Do you believe me?”

She stared
deeply into his eyes, and for some reason she did. Perhaps the picture was
getting a tiny bit clearer. Both groups wanted Nathan’s discovery for
themselves, but would do anything to make sure no one
else
got it.

“Tell me what’s
on the drive,” she said.

He shook his
head. “I can’t. I’m not supposed to give you any information. Not even what I’ve
already told you. I only did because you’ve put me in an impossible bind here,
and I’m forced to make decisions on the fly. So promise me you won’t destroy
the drive, and you’ll keep its contents privileged, and I’ll let you go. Push
me any further and I’ll destroy it myself.”

“Okay. I
believe you. Whatever is on here is dangerous, and I’ll take precautions. I’ll
treat it like the recipe for the bomb. What you said.”

And she would,
she realized. At least until she achieved a full understanding of the
situation. Then she would make her own assessment of whether this discovery warranted
absolute darkness or the brightest of sunshine.

Jenna was
fifteen feet away from him. Without saying a word or coming any closer, he
tossed his gun and keys gently toward her. They landed on her soft beige carpet
a few steps away.

“Now your
phone,” she said, realizing she couldn’t leave him the ability to make calls.

Anger spread
over his face, but he tossed his phone at her feet as well.

“Now get in the
coat closet and shut the door while I gather all this up,” she demanded, not
about to lower her guard while in his view and take the chance he might rush
her.