Madison had her robe on and was seated at her computer almost before he got the sentence out. Davis just shook his head and wandered into the bathroom.
Madison’s desktop was tied into the university’s supercomputer, which sifted through the billions and billions of pages of data generated by the physics department’s detector at incomprehensible speed. For months now she had been perfecting a program that would alert her if it spotted anything truly out of the ordinary. And Davis had been right. She received several alerts each day, and each time they were false alarms. But even so, these false alarms pointed out flaws in her programming. With each one her program got a little bit tighter, her filters a little better.
She looked at the data from a few angles, wanting to determine as quickly as possible the ordinary occurrence she had failed to take into account this time. But after several minutes of thought and study, her jaw dropped as low as it could go.
Nothing about this occurrence looked ordinary. In fact, the data were impossible.
“Nah,” she mumbled out loud. “Must be a glitch in the detector.”
She ran a quick diagnostic. The detector was working perfectly. But how could that be?
Madison Russo was checking her calculations for the third time when Greg Davis emerged from the bathroom, clean, fully clothed, and ready for a late night on the town.
She frantically began to run other crosschecks on her data, her eyes so wide they looked unnatural.
Davis watched her in fascination, knowing better than to interrupt—if this were even possible. He suspected he could have played a trumpet in her ear and she wouldn’t have noticed.
After several minutes she finally turned away from the screen for just a moment and he said, “You found something big, didn’t you?”
Madison nodded, her stunned face communicating awe—but also more than a hint of fear.
“What is it?” he asked breathlessly.
“Something that will change everything,” she whispered. Then, exhaling loudly, she added, “Forever.”
13
The JDAM penetrated the two story structure and erupted into an orange-yellow fireball nearly twice the size of the building before collapsing into a raging firestorm. Every inch of the mirrored glass perimeter shattered and the inside of the building was vaporized in an instant.
Over a mile away the explosion shook the car Jake was in and the resultant fireball was impossible to miss against the night sky, even at this distance, and even if his eyes had been closed at the time.
The moment it hit, Jake felt as though the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. There was no end to possible threats from WMD, but none were like this one. Given Miller’s ability to dole out superhuman intelligence and Desh’s training and skills, he had eliminated what he was convinced were the two most formidable people on the planet.
This was a rare moment to savor. The execution of the entire operation had been flawless.
Jake arrived, congratulated Ruiz and his team, and waited patiently while a dozen firefighters arrived in three large trucks to battle the resultant blaze. He had contacted the Denver Fire Chief using an alias—one with considerable authority that could quickly be verified—and insisted that the firefighters on the scene leave immediately once they had conquered the blaze, after which Jake, Ruiz, and a select group of his men would move in, scrub the scene as best they could, and look for remains that would prove that Kira Miller’s short time on earth had come to an end. Given that ground zero was basically at a point halfway down her throat, this would likely prove quite challenging.
A call came in on Jake’s cell phone from his second in command, thousands of miles away. “How’d it go?” he asked Kolke, his tone upbeat.
“Not well, I’m afraid, Colonel. The assault teams went in, but came up empty in both cases. Neither scientist was in his home or office.”
“Any chance this was just coincidental?”
“No, sir. They’d been warned. Their computers were either gone or wiped. They knew we were coming.”
Jake’s expression hardened. He didn’t care about missing the two scientists. Now that he had cut off the head of the snake, they had become nothing more than harmless bit players he needed to interrogate for the sake of thoroughness. But the fact that they were warned introduced just the slightest uncertainty into the results of the operation he had just conducted. Shit. “How long after I gave you the signal did your men arrive?”
“The soonest twenty minutes. The latest forty-five.”
“Any evidence of disarray or hasty packing?”
“None.”
Jake frowned. This was getting more troubling by the second. Still, if the destruction of Miller’s headquarters had set off a warning signal the two scientist’s had received immediately, they would still have had time to disappear. They could have kept a suitcase packed and money on hand as a precaution. Given Miller and Desh’s paranoia, each cell member was almost certainly prepared to disappear at a moment’s notice.
Even so, the possibility that they’d been warned before the JDAM hit couldn’t be ruled out either. And if this were the case, it could only mean that Miller and Desh had known he was coming.
Jake walked the short distance to where Captain Ruiz was watching the firefighters at work through a pair of high-powered binoculars. “Captain, I want to go through this entire op from start to finish. I need to be sure there’s no chance they slipped the noose somehow.”
“Slipped the noose, sir?” said the captain dubiously. “We recorded their heat signatures the entire time, right up until the instant the building was turned into slag. They couldn’t have escaped. And they couldn’t have survived.”
“I appreciate your assessment, Captain, but let’s do this anyway. You saw both of them enter the building. And the physical match was unmistakable, correct?”
“Correct.”
Jake stared off into space for several seconds in thought. “Okay, I assume this was before you were fully in position. Any chance they saw you as well?”
“None at all, sir. I was five miles away at the time. We had just identified this facility as the likely target and wanted eyes on the scene as soon as possible. While in route, we discovered there was a street camera close enough to get clear images of the facility’s entrance. So we commandeered it.”
Jake reeled as though from a physical blow. His eyes widened in horror, and for a moment he looked to be in danger of exploding into a bigger fireball than had the building behind them.
It was impossible for the captain not to notice his superior’s reaction and he swallowed hard. “Colonel, it was real-time video,” he said defensively. “And it was Miller and Desh. Their images couldn’t have been any clearer.”
Jake nodded and walked quickly away, knowing that this was the only way to prevent his mounting fury from escaping and lashing out unfairly at the young captain.
Their quarry had escaped. He was sure of it.
But it wasn’t the captain’s fault. He hadn’t been briefed on the Rosenblatt intel. It was Jake’s fault, and his blood almost boiled from a mixture of frustration, anger, and self-recrimination.
He had been duped. Miller had been on to him even before the captain and his team were in place around the facility. But how?