The Folcroft Four identified a curious pattern at fourteen, minutes and nine seconds after two in the morning and, thanks to Mark Howard’s programming, wasted three seconds looking for a match between the name “Jacob Fastbinder” and various name databases in North Carolina. There was no significant match. Another curious pattern was identified, and the name search expanded across the United States and around the world. Other Jacob Fastbinders were found, analyzed and discarded as being unrelated to the Jacob Fastbinder in question.
With the odds calculated against success as being borderline, the next identified pattern was almost too far-fetched for the Four to pursue, but their latest upgrade had nearly doubled their processing power and the Four calculated they had 0.156 unallocated seconds of processing time to spare during this quarter minute, so they went on a wild-goose chase. They hit pay dirt.
The Folcroft Four were not pleased or proud of their accomplishment They were only machines, after all. They just sent the results Upstairs and kept looking for more patterns, however oddball.
The President picked up on the first ring. “Smith, do you have any idea what’s going on here? I’ve got people disappearing across the country! Mass kidnappings in Topeka, Tucumcari and Jefferson City! I never even heard of Jefferson City!”
“Yes, Mr. President. And Fort Worth.”
“I didn’t know anything about Fort Worth!” the President exploded.
“One of the new emergency federal command authority stations belonging to the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Mother of God, they’re supposed to be impenetrable. The director’s going to get his butt bounced out of the District of Columbia if he doesn’t have a good explanation.”
“I’m sure he’s still trying to get information himself. The station went off-line abruptly.”
“That’s not supposed to happen—”
“Mr. President, I believe this is the work of people who were once in league with Jacob Fastbinder. A subterranean transport is being used, one that is far more capable than the one CURE disabled in New Mexico. That would explain the penetration of the DOHS station.”
“I thought Fastbinder was dead,” the President said. “You told me you killed him.”
“Fastbinder may be dead, unless he was rescued by the new earth drill. We never suspected its existence. Senator Herbert Whiteslaw is probably involved.”
“Who else?” the President demanded. “Whiteslaw’s a talker, not a doer. There has to be somebody else behind all this madness.”
“There is, sir,” Dr. Harold Smith said, gazing at the photograph blown up on his computer screen. It was a pilot’s license photo of a blond young man with an easy grin.
“We learned a moment ago, Mr. President, that Jacob Fastbinder had a son.”
“Fastbinder was somebody’s dad?” Remo demanded.
“Even he didn’t know about it until a couple years ago,” Howard explained. “The Folcroft Four had a hell of a time making a match on the face from the White Sands video, then a couple of minutes ago, bingo. His name is Jack Fast, born seventeen years ago to a real estate agent whose name appears on a lot of the title transfer documents from the startup of the Fastbinder U.S. division. The kid never had contact with his father until Fastbinder moved to New Mexico permanently. Looks like the kid showed up on his doorstep. Fastbinder had a DNA test done the same week, and the lab results show the kid is his. The mom named the kid Jack Fast.”
“Why do we care about a snot-nosed teenager, even if he is Fastbinder’s snot-nosed teenager?” Remo asked. “What harm could he do?”
“This kid could do plenty,” Howard said. “His profile is almost unbelievable. He’s some sort of child prodigy. He was in the local papers for building his own mainframe when he was eight years old. He staged all kinds of elaborate practical jokes on the locals. He flew a flying saucer over the town, he put a fake sea monster in a local retention pond. He had a pilot’s license when he was eleven, hacked into the New Mexico secretary of state’s office when he was twelve. When he got his driver’s license he built systems for hacking into his hometown’s traffic signal system in real time and adjusted traffic patterns to suit himself.”
“You mean, so he always got the green? Man, he could market that thing and be richer than Ron Popiel,” Remo said. “So Fast is a chip off the old block.”
“He’s more than a chip. Jacob Fastbinder didn’t accomplish in his whole lifetime what this kid’s done since puberty,” Mark Howard said. “You want to know who could build an earth drill that’s better and faster than Jacob Fastbinder’s? The answer is Jack Fast.”
“Okay, so what’s this smart-assed pizza face up to? Stealing the weapons from White Sands I understand. The whole thing with the albino cavemen doesn’t make sense.”
“Well, that’s the real reason we called you. The situation with Fast and the Cavemen has exploded since we last talked.”
Remo and Chiun, sitting in the rental in the BP truck stop, exchanged looks. “Junior, we last talked ten minutes ago. How much could happen in ten minutes?”
“Just wait’ll you hear how much. Dr. Smith is getting off the line with the President now.”
A moment later, Smith added his especially somber voice to the call. “The albinos and the earth drill have staged vicious and violent attacks in the past half hour. So far we know they have committed murder, thievery and mass kidnappings. They occurred in Topeka, Kansas, Apache Flats, Missouri, and Tucumcari, New Mexico.”
Remo was stunned. “How?”
“In at least two of the cases, their trail has been traced to previously unknown access caverns into well-known mines and natural caverns. My own rough estimates say that upward of three hundred albino assailants surfaced for these attacks.” He sounded tired. “Clearly, the albinos’ population and geographic coverage is more vast than any of us imagined.”
“How’d they exist down there for so long without the surface world knowing about them?” Remo muttered, but before anyone could answer, Remo’s gears shifted. “Did you say the earth drill was involved in one of the attacks?”
“Seven minutes ago the earth drill burrowed into a the subterranean bunker that was home to a new emergency federal command authority station, one of seven recently installed by the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Which is for what purpose?”
“The AFCA stations are tools of authority for use in case of nationwide catastrophe,” Smith said. “If there was a nuclear exchange or some sort of terrorist attack that shuts down communications and infrastructure nationwide, the AFCA stations should survive. They’re equipped with the best-shielded equipment and logistical experts. Even if EMC blasts destroyed every electronic chip on the continent, the AFCA stations would supposedly survive. They would get messages via shortwave from whatever the top surviving federal authority was and pass on those messages to the their geographical district.”
Remo was on information overload until he put some of the pieces together. “If I’m an electronics whiz like Jack Fast, then I’m drooling to get my hands on that stuff.”