The Sixth Idea (23 page)

A
nnie had a death grip on the steering wheel of the rental as she squinted through the driving snow that was turning the expressway back to Rochester into a luge course. Her stomach flip-flopped every time she saw the traction control light flash on the dashboard, but at least Roadrunner wasn't freaking out, which he usually did during difficult driving conditions—he seemed totally preoccupied with the documents from Donald Buchanan's portfolio. Occasionally he would make little sounds and carefully shuffle the fragile old pages around, holding them closer to the faint library light above his visor.

“Don't hold out on me, Roadrunner. Did you figure out what the Sixth Idea is?”

He sighed and gently lowered the pages to his lap. “It's a theory. These are notes, schematics, formulas—I'm no nuclear physicist, so half of this stuff might as well be Sanskrit.”

“What about the half that isn't in Sanskrit?”

“It's all about the electromagnetic pulse the bombs generated. He was trying to find a way to harness the destructive energy and direct it specifically to selected targets. Wipe out the electrical and communications grid of a city, a country, a continent, without the mass destruction and toxic fallout of a multimegaton bomb. It would have been pretty bad news back in the fifties—nothing electrical would work. That's probably why Lydia's grandfather focused on building a generator in his book. But can you imagine an EMP strike today? The entire world runs on electronics and computers, and they'd be fried in an instant. Planes would literally be falling out of the sky, and that's just for starters. It would be catastrophic.”

Annie caught her breath. “Oh my God. Everything would be gone in a heartbeat. No air travel, no transportation of any sort, no phones, no food, no water, no medicine, no money.”

“Yep. The supply chain would be toast. We'd be thrown back two hundred years. You take away electricity, computers, electronics, it would be the end of the world as we know it.”

Annie grunted. “You've got that right, and people have been paranoid about it for years. And hackers have been threatening to do it for years.”

“Yeah, but if hackers took down a big power grid, they're just temporarily immobilizing the software that runs the system. Like the Stuxnet virus that shut down Iran's nuclear centrifuges. Iran eventually got them back up online. EMP destroys the hardware, the electronic components, from computers to transformers to cell phones. Everything would have to be rebuilt, and if you had a weapon like Donald Buchanan was theorizing . . .”

“You could strike again and again, as soon as there was something rebuilt.”

“Right.”

“But that's impossible. Nothing but a huge nuke can generate that kind of destructive EMP. Making a stealth, precision weapon out of it is science fiction.” Annie stole a glance at him. “Isn't it?”

Roadrunner tipped his head. “Well, the concept of a nuclear bomb was science fiction at one time, too. So was space travel. Science has a way of eventually catching up with fiction. And I could point out the obvious—people who had anything to do with the Sixth Idea or even any mention of it are suddenly getting killed. Why would you kill a bunch of innocent people over something that doesn't exist?”

Roadrunner had made a good point, but Annie didn't like the nihilistic tone their conversation was taking. Then again, she hadn't liked much about this entire day, especially the cemetery visit. “Why do you think Donald Buchanan left all these cryptic notes for his daughter? What would she do with them? We don't even know what to do with them.”

“I don't know. Maybe he thought these papers would be some kind of leverage in the future. He was working for the government. Maybe he didn't trust the government any more than we trust it now.”

“Well, that's some solid thinking in any era.” Annie finally exited the freeway and headed toward their hotel. As she pulled into the parking garage and nosed into a slot, Roadrunner made a strange sound.

“What is it?”

Roadrunner flicked on the overhead dome light and handed Annie a sheet of paper with a hand-drawn schematic. “What does that look like to you?”

Annie studied the paper for a long time. “It looks like a crude version of the first logical map of ARPANET.”

Roadrunner bobbed his head. “One of the progenitors of the Internet.”

Annie scowled. “This doesn't make sense. These guys were building bombs, not computers.”

“What if they're one and the same? Computers produce electromagnetic pulses.”

“Yes, but we're talking millivolts, not megatons. The only thing a computer's EMP can hurt is its own motherboard if it's not arrayed properly.”

Roadrunner shrugged nonchalantly, but Annie could practically hear the wheels grinding in his head. “Yeah. I suppose you're right. But what if you could tie millions of computers together all over the world and plant some kind of a doomsday switch, a chip or a virus or something, that would consolidate and amplify each computer's electromagnetic pulse? You could push a button, and boom—game over.”

“That is something I don't even want to think about. Come on, let's get up to the room and send this to Harley and Grace. I'll call and let them know.”

Annie dialed the Monkeewrench office as they walked through the lobby, her eyes lingering on the bartender, who was opening a bottle of champagne for a young couple, which seemed like a great idea at the moment. If anything warranted a glass or two of
champagne, it was surviving a visit to a creepy mausoleum at dusk and retrieving a possible blueprint for a modern apocalypse. She shivered, still imagining the ghosts of cobwebs dancing around her face and neck. “Gracie?”

“Annie. Are you back at the hotel?”

“Yes, and we had quite the excursion, thank you very much. We picked up a little present for you and we're sending the package. Are you up in the office to get it?”

“Yes, send it as soon as you can.”

“Give us ten minutes, we just got to the room. But don't get your hopes up too high. We have notes and sketches and that's about it. No answers.”

“That's fine, Annie. Thank you. Thank you both.”

Annie let out a dramatic sigh. “Well, I'm not going to lie—you and Harley owe us.”

“It was that bad?”

Annie heard the smile in Grace's voice, which made her smile, too. “We endured unimaginable horrors, and as it turns out, Roadrunner is extremely superstitious. He made me stop at a gas station to buy flowers for a dead man who wasn't even there. Is Lydia all right?”

“Safe and sound. She's resting in the bedroom next to the office.”

Roadrunner held his hand out. “Let me talk to Grace for a minute.”

“Roadrunner wants a word, sugar. We'll see you in a couple days.”

“Grace, is Harley there with you?”

“I'm right here, buddy. We have you on speaker.”

“Good. Listen, I've spent the past two hours going over the
paperwork we picked up in the tomb. It's not exactly light reading, so I wanted to give you a leg up on what I got out of it: it looks like Donald Buchanan was trying to weaponize EMP.”

“EMP was a result of big-ass nuke detonations,” Harley said. “You can't get more weaponized than that.”

“No, I mean he was trying to figure out a way to generate EMP without the big-ass nukes and use it as a precision weapon to strike specific targets. You know, like destroy Moscow's power grid without the fallout and destruction of a nuclear strike. At least that was an example in Donald Buchanan's papers.”

Harley grunted. “So basically, bomb whoever your enemy du jour is back to the Stone Age without the bomb. Damn. Donald Buchanan was a hacker at heart back when computers were just little infants.”

“Funny you said that. Because in all this theoretical physics stuff I found something we all know—a rudimentary schematic of ARPANET. Donald Buchanan was working on the basis for the Internet a full decade before it was even on anybody's radar.”

In the Monkeewrench office, Harley and Grace were silent for a long moment.

“Hello? Harley? Grace? Are you guys still there?”

“We're here,” Grace said quietly.

“Listen, I know it sounds a little wacky, but what if computers could be engineered to become a delivery system for EMP? Like through the Internet?”

When Grace finally hung up, she and Harley stared at each other as mental tumblers clicked into place. “Silver Dune. They've been giving away computers all over the world for decades.”

“And manufacturing processing chips at American Iron Foundry up in Cheeton. The government took over American Iron Foundry during World War Two so they could build their bombs. What if the government is still running the place under the Silver Dune umbrella? Holy shit, Grace, ninety percent of the computers in the world use their chips. What if those chips are doctored up? Everybody in the world with a computer or a cell phone is potentially sitting on a mini version of an EMP bomb, and if you could link them all together through the Internet . . .” Harley took a deep breath. “Man, is this the greatest, most insane conspiracy theory ever?”

“It's definitely insane. And totally improbable.”

They both flinched when the security alarm tripped.

Downstairs, a soft alarm sounded through Harley's mansion and Gino and Magozzi froze. “What does that mean?” Gino asked.

Behind them, the elevator door opened and Harley clomped toward the computer station set up in the foyer. “It means the security program picked up an anomaly on one of the cameras. Threat assessment is low, which means it's outside the immediate perimeter.”

“How do you know?”

“Because if the threat was imminent and inside the gates, you'd be hearing an alarm louder than a Metallica concert.” He poked at the monitor. “Okay, here it is, live feed on screen sixteen.”

Magozzi and Gino crowded behind Harley. The security monitor showed a man walking down the empty sidewalk on the mansion side of the street. He slowed, then stopped as he approached the edge of Harley's property. As if posing for cameras he knew were there, he tipped his head upward in their direction. “What the hell?” Gino finally whispered. “This guy wants to be seen or what?”

Magozzi's borrowed shoulder unit squawked—one of the officers keeping an eye on Harley's and the neighborhood in general. “Detective? I've got eyes on an individual approaching the gate.”

“We see that, Officer. Keep your position and keep watching.”

“Yes sir.”

Gino, Harley, and Magozzi continued to stare at the screen. Bizarrely, the man on the sidewalk suddenly looked up directly into one of the cameras positioned on the gate, then raised his hands palm-out to indicate he had no ill intentions. Presumably.

Gino's brows crept up his forehead. “Holy shit. That's Arthur Friedman, our BOLO. Just a wild guess, but this guy didn't just stumble on us and Monkeewrench in an Alzheimer's stupor.”

“Jesus Pete,” Harley muttered. “The last of the original eight. And he's a dead man walking out there on the street. We've gotta get him in here. Just make sure he's not carrying a nuke or a death ray gun in his pocket.”

“Gino and I will take care of it. Where are Grace and Lydia?”

“Upstairs. They're going to stay put until we figure out what this is all about. Listen, guys, I don't have time for details, but we just got off the phone with Annie and Roadrunner. They're back from raiding Donald Buchanan's crypt. Gino, I think we've got you beat in the crazy-train, outlandish-theory division.”

Gino puffed up indignantly. “My outlandish theories are almost always right. Partially.”

“Let's hope ours isn't, but Arthur Friedman is probably the only guy on the face of the earth that can fill in some blanks.”

M
ax was sitting in the back of a utility service vehicle. There were appropriate tools in the van, but none he would use, other than a safe filled with ample stacks of cash and passports from all over the globe and the usual array of electronics. Unfortunately, the electronics were useless here—he knew all about Monkeewrench, their skills and talents, and it would be impossible to breach any communications. It would also be impossible to access and kidnap Lydia Ascher, which was his most recent directive. His job here was going to be old-school: Wait. Watch. Terminate his mission if things got too hot, or wait for somebody to terminate the mission for him.

It had initially surprised him that Monkeewrench was harboring Lydia Ascher, but the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. They worked with the cops all the time, Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth in particular, who had drawn the unfortunate card of several homicides that apparently had roots too deep for any one
person to possibly divine. And there was really no place safer than the corporate headquarters of a group of paranoid computer geniuses. He knew a lot of people just like them—some were white hats, some were black, but all of them were nuts. In fact, he knew of one in central Africa who had a crocodile-filled moat around his compound.

Max was pleased with his quickly accumulating bankroll, but also increasingly disheartened. His jobs had always been simple, well-paid tasks, but this particular job was quickly outgrowing his level of skill and compensation. Protect or kill, those were orders he could understand. But then they'd switched the game on him and he was now being ordered to kidnap and interrogate his charges about something called the Sixth Idea.

He thought about Alvin Keller, a helpless, sick old man who'd most likely died from sheer terror right in front of his eyes. And then there was Lydia Ascher, an innocent young woman. If he managed to get her into his custody, what would happen to her if she was turned over to someone like Ivan for further interrogation?

With this new shift in the focus of the mission and the increasingly distasteful tenor of events, he found himself thinking more and more about Montana, about retirement, about finally disappearing from the face of the earth. Whatever this Sixth Idea was, he didn't want anything to do with it.

The problem was, without a very compelling reason to terminate this mission, he was stuck here, because the people who hired him demanded results. And if results weren't delivered, he would be the one getting terminated permanently.

He checked his watch, then started up the van. He knew he would be under very sophisticated scrutiny from inside the house,
and an idle service vehicle sitting around on a curb for too long without workers performing a task wouldn't escape that scrutiny.

But as he was about to pull away from the curb, he saw a lone figure walking slowly up the sidewalk, approaching the mansion's locked front gate. He was a tall, thin man in an oversized coat and his gait was unsteady and weary. The man stopped at the security box at Harley Davidson's gate and pushed a button.

Max took his binoculars from the case and focused on the man, whose face was lit up by the lights that flooded the yard and the sidewalk beyond. There was no question—this man knew exactly where he was going and what he was doing.

And Max knew exactly who he was. He dropped the binoculars on his lap and shook his head in disbelief. This was probably no laughing matter, but he couldn't stop smiling. Son of a bitch.
Son of a bitch!
he thought to himself. Arthur Friedman had fooled them all.