“Not the plan. There’s some concern that a strong military presence might send the wrong message and draw attention when it might not actually be needed. Send in a lot of soldiers and people start wondering what you have to hide. That said, though, Boardwalk and Neptune Teams are five hours behind us. They’ll hold back unless we call for them, and the USS California is in range in case we need to open a can of industrial-strength whoop-ass. However, the president has asked us to go in first, quick and quiet. No one except the Gateway staff are supposed to know we’re here. We don’t want anyone or anything connected with Gateway to make the news, feel me?”
Top snorted. “The Chinese and Russians probably have every eye in the sky they own looking at this. This whole area’ll probably be featured on Google Earth before we’re wheels down.”
“Got to love the concept of ‘secrecy’ in the digital age,” said Bunny. “Ten bucks says that some hipster blogger will be there to meet our plane.”
It was almost true, and that was somewhere between sad and scary. With the vertical spike in digital technology, anyone with a smartphone had greater capabilities of discovering and sharing sensitive information with the world than the combined professional world media of ten years ago. Social media could be used for a lot of good things, but it’d turned everyone into a potential spy or source. And, yeah, I really do know how paranoid that sounds, but it is what it is. I’m a cheerleader for the First Amendment except when I’m in the field, at which point I have the occasional Big Brother moments. My shrink is never going to go broke.
Top asked, “We have thermal scans of our base and the others?”
“They’re next to useless,” I said. “The mountains there are thick with metal ores, so that screws things up.”
Top sat back and folded his arms. He had dark brown skin crisscrossed with pink scars. Most of them earned since he’s been working for me. “Seems like they’re throwing us into a situation about which we have shit for intel.”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“The day must end with a Y,” muttered Bunny.
I opened my laptop and called up a few random images of Gateway that Bolton and Bug had each found. There were some preliminary floor plans that might as well have been labeled GENERIC LAB, and some photos taken by satellite showing unhelpful pictures of prefab buildings nestled against a snow-covered mountain.
Bunny made a face. “We could give an Etch-a-Sketch to a rhesus monkey and he’d come up with better intel.”
“No doubt,” I said. “Bug found some shipping manifests that at least tell us what’s been brought out there. Lab equipment, drilling gear, six generators — two active, two emergency backups, two offline in case — and all of the other stuff necessary for establishing a moderately self-sufficient base. Staff of seventy. Ten on the science team, twenty support staff that includes cook, medical officer, site administrator, and some engineers. The rest are military but we don’t know what branch, so I asked Bug to run a MindReader deep search to find out. We’re waiting on additional intel now.”
The whole DMS was built around the MindReader computer system. Without it we’d be just another SpecOps team. MindReader had a superintrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One thing it did was look for patterns by drawing on information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing. MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer’s memory, but MindReader rewrote the target’s software to completely erase all traces of its presence. Bug was the uber-geek who ran MindReader for the DMS. I sometimes think Bug believes that MindReader is God and he’s the pope.
Bunny asked, “What happens if we knock on their door and some goon from the People’s Liberation Army Special Operations Forces answers?”
“Then all of us become a footnote in next year’s black budget report,” I said.
Bunny sighed. “Like I said… this only happens to us on days ending in a Y.”
I wish I could call him a liar.
INTERLUDE TWO
“Why do you hate your father?” asked Dr. Greene.
“You’ve met him,” said Prospero. “You tell me.”
“Let’s focus on your feelings.”
Prospero Bell sat cross-legged on the couch. He’d spent time setting the angles of his knees and ankles just so. He still wore his green jacket with the gray hoodie underneath. Each time he showed up for a new session there was more detail in the monster on the hood, and he’d begun adding colors to indicate light through water, as if the monster were submerged beneath a sunlit sea.
Prospero sighed. Heavily and dramatically. “Look, it’s not that complicated a thing and it’s wasting my time. But, since you’re probably going to badger me until I talk about it, here it is. Do I hate my father? Yes. Is it because he divorced my mom? No. Mom’s a complete wacko. I love her and I can’t even stand to be around her. So, no, it’s not that. So why can’t I stand him? Gosh, let me think. How about the fact that he’s always mean to me. Always. He hates me and he doesn’t mind showing it.”
“Your father loves you, Prospero.”
“Oh, please. I’m young but I’m not stupid. It’s not me he loves. It’s this.” Prospero tapped his head. “He loves what’s up here because he knows it can make him a lot of money.”
“Your father is a very intelligent man,” said Greene.
“Sure, but I’m smarter by at least an order of magnitude. We all know it. And I’m getting smarter all the time. And, sure, Dad’s smart, but he only uses his brains to build weapons of war. Am I against war? Not really. Wars happen. But to spend your life making it easier to kill people, and easier for very few people to kill large numbers of people, then, yeah, I don’t like that.”
“Because of the potential for loss of life?”
Prospero’s green eyes seemed to look straight through him. “No. I don’t care about people. I’m not one of them.”
“Then why?”
“Because it’s a waste of intellectual opportunity.”
“Fair enough,” said Greene, interested. “What else?”
“Well, Dad doesn’t believe in anything. Not God or a larger world. Nothing. And he hates it because I do. He thinks it’s a waste of my time. A distraction. He’d rather me spend all my time in the lab.” Prospero snorted. “Have you seen the latest upgrades to my lab? Dad broke through the wall so that I now have the entire basement. All of it. He got rid of his billiards room to put in new sequencers and to give me table space to build whatever I want.”
“That’s very generous.”
Prospero shook his head. “I kind of like you, Doc, so I’m going to pretend you’re not that naïve. We both know that Dad will keep giving me as much scientific equipment as he can cram into the house in the hopes that I make another toy for him.”
Greene nodded. Twice in the last sixteen months Prospero had built small electronic devices that, from things the father let slip, had great potential for military application. Greene did not understand the science, even when Prospero tried to explain it to him. Something about a short-range field disruptor and something else about a beam regulator. Whatever they were. Oscar Bell had been extremely excited about both, and from the things Greene had picked up, was able to obtain contracts to develop them for the Department of Defense.