“Update it for the twenty-first century,” Cabrillo said before disconnecting, “it’s a much more dangerous world now.”
THE FREE ENTERPRISEwas steaming through the frigid ocean water on a course toward the Faeroe Islands. The team was starting to relax—after they delivered the meteorite they’d have a break for a while. Once they repositioned the ship to Calais, they would simply wait for a call if needed. The mood aboard the ship was light.
They had no idea a greyhound of the sea disguised as an old cargo ship was following.
Nor did they know that both the Corporation and the might of the U.S. government would soon be aligned against them. They were in ignorant bliss.
“IT’S IMPORTANT,” TD Dwyer explained to the receptionist.
“How important?” the receptionist asked. “He’s preparing for a White House meeting.”
“Very important,” Dwyer said.
The receptionist nodded and buzzed Overholt. “There’s a Thomas Dwyer here from Theoretical Applications. He claims that he needs to see you immediately.”
“Send him in,” Overholt said.
The receptionist rose and walked over to Overholt’s door and opened it. Overholt was sitting behind his desk. Closing a file, he swiveled around and slid the file into a slot in a safe behind his desk.
“Okay,” he said, “come in now.”
Dwyer slid past the receptionist and she closed the door behind him.
“I’m TD Dwyer,” he said. “I’m the scientist tasked with the analysis of the meteorite.”
Overholt walked from behind his desk and shook Dwyer’s hand, then motioned him over to a pair of chairs around a seating pit. Once they were both seated, he spoke.
“What have you got?”
Dwyer was less than five minutes into his dissertation when Overholt stopped him.
He walked over to his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Julie, we need to schedule Mr. Dwyer to accompany me to the meeting at the White House.”
“Could you ask him his clearance, sir?” Julie asked.
“One-A critical,” Dwyer answered.
“Then we can go in the front,” Overholt said to Julie, “as planned.”
“I’ll call over, sir.”
Overholt walked back to the chair and sat down. “When it’s our turn I want you to deliver your findings without hyperbole. Just lay out the facts as best you know. If you are asked for an opinion—and you probably will be—give it, but qualify it as such.”
“Yes, sir,” Dwyer said.
“Good,” Overholt said. “Now, just between us, lay out the rest of it, harebrained theories and all.”
“The gist of the theory is this: There is a possibility that if the molecular structure of the meteorite is pierced, a virus could be released that might have dire consequences.”
“Worst case?”
“The end of all organic life on earth.”
“Well,” Overholt said, “I can safely state you’ve ruined my morning.”
IN THE OREGON’S control room, Eric Stone was carefully watching a monitor. He would pin down the location of the meteorite, then it would seem to move. Using all the various locations, Stone was trying to vector in on the object. Then he punched in more commands on the computer keyboard and glanced at a different screen. Stone was using space the Corporation rented on a commercial satellite.
The image filled the monitor but the sea was hidden by a heavy cloud cover.
“Boss,” he said to Cabrillo, “we need a KH-30 shot. The clouds are too thick.”
The KH-30 was the Defense Department’s latest supersecret satellite. It could peer through clouds, even into the water itself. Stone had been unable to hack into the system despite repeated efforts.
“I’ll ask Overholt the next time we talk,” Cabrillo said. “Maybe he can railroad the National Reconnaissance Office into giving him time. Good try, Stone.”
Hanley was staring at the track map on another monitor. The Oregonwas flying through the water but the other vessel had a good head start. “We can overtake them before Scotland anyway, if they stay at the current speed.”
Cabrillo glanced at the monitor. “It looks to me like they’re on a course for the Faeroes.”
“If that’s the case,” Hanley said, “they’ll reach port before we can overtake them.”
Cabrillo nodded and considered this. “What’s the location of our jets?”
Hanley pulled a world map up on the screen. “Dulles, Dubai, Cape Town and Paris.”
“Which aircraft is in Paris?”
“Challenger 604,” Hanley answered.
“Direct it to Aberdeen, Scotland,” Cabrillo said. “The runway at the airport in the Faeroe Islands is not long enough to handle it, and Aberdeen is the next closest city. Have it fueled and ready if we need to use her.”
Hanley nodded and walked over to a computer to enter the instructions. The door to the control room opened and Michael Halpert entered. He was holding a manila folder in his hands. He walked to the coffee machine, poured a cup and then approached Cabrillo.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said wearily, “I’ve exhausted the database. There are no terrorists or other criminal elements that go by the nickname the Ghost.”
“Did you find anything?”
“One Hollywood actor who fashions himself a proponent of the dark side, an author who does vampire books, an industrialist, and 4,382 various e-mail identities.”
“The actor and the author are definitely out,” Cabrillo said. “All the ones I’ve met are too stupid to plan lunch, much less an assault on a terrorist ship. Who is the industrialist?”
“One Halifax Hickman,” Halpert said, reading from the file, “an ultrarich Howard Hughes type with a vast variety of business interests.”
“Find out everything you can about him,” Cabrillo ordered. “I want to know everything from the color of his underwear on through.”
“Will do,” Halpert said as he walked out of the control room again.
It would be twelve hours before Halpert exited his office.
And when he did, the Corporation would know a lot more than it did right now.
IF TD DWYER claimed he was not nervous he’d be lying.
The group that was assembled around the conference table were the blue-ribbon winners in the nation’s power struggle. More than a few of them appeared nightly on the news programs, and most were recognizable to anyone not living in a cave.
The people assembled were cabinet officials, the secretary of state, the president and his advisors, and a scattering of four-star generals and intelligence leaders. When it was Overholt’s turn to address the group, he gave a quick overview of the situation and then introduced Dwyer for questions.
The first question came from the heaviest of hitters.
“Has this possibility ever been verified in a laboratory?” the president asked.
“It is believed isotopes of helium were detected in buckyballs that were inside fragments recovered at the meteor crater in northern Arizona as well as at an underwater site near Cancun, Mexico. However, the studies were conducted by university laboratories and the results were not completely conclusive.”
“So this is all a theory,” the secretary of state said, “not hard science.”
“Mr. Secretary,” Dwyer said, “the entire field is a new one. It has only been around since 1996, when the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three men credited with discovering buckyballs. Since then, with funding cutbacks and such, the field has been mainly explored by corporations with an eye toward commercial applications.”
“Is there a way to test this theory?” the secretary of state followed up.
“We could recover some debris and puncture the atoms in a controlled setting,” Dwyer said, “but there is no guarantee that we would recover a sample with the virus intact. Some parts might contain it, some might not.”