Nightstalkers

CHAPTER 12

The Research Triangle at the junction of the towns of Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh, North Carolina, started out using the brains from nearby Duke and the University of North Carolina to do just that: research. Then more businesspeople with financing were bought in, more patents were sold, and a shift from pure research for knowledge and science to research for profit took over the region.

There is a difference.

Southeast of Chapel Hill, and southwest of Durham, near Jordan Lake, is a large gated community set pretty much in the middle of nowhere: Senators Club. In the most exclusive part of the exclusive Senators Club, Doctor Winslow was preparing for a dinner party, the day after having secured his future at the dog park.

He stared at himself in the mirror while the electric toothbrush buzzed in his mouth. He used it three times a day for the full two minutes, just like the instructions said. He was good about instructions and he always read them first, while whatever he bought was still in pieces in the box. He wondered about people who’d buy something and start putting it together like they’d been born just knowing how to assemble a bookshelf. They were the people who left off screws that didn’t fit, as if the manufacturer had sent no plans, no instructions, and didn’t have a purpose for everything in the box.

Over the buzz inside his head, he could hear the caterers preparing for the party and his wife’s excited voice telling them what to do. As if they didn’t do this for a living and she wasn’t just a nuisance. He supposed such nuisances were part of the perils of their job description. But why hire professionals if you were going to flit around them and tell them how to do the jobs you hired them to do? He had married Lilith even though she rarely read or followed instructions, leaving it dependent on her moods. He glanced at her sink in the bathroom bigger than most people’s living rooms. Her toothbrush sat on its charger and it had never run for the full two minutes. He’d timed her on several occasions and she’d never broken one minute. Always moving on to the next thing before the first was properly done.

His vanity was pristine and Lilith’s was covered with bottles and brushes and cords to blow-dryers and irons and things whose purposes he couldn’t imagine, and he ran a lab that made some of the most sophisticated scientific equipment in the country — in the world, for that matter. But his wife’s vanity and its machines were as much a mystery to him as relativity was to her. She wasn’t a dumb woman, almost smart, but he’d caught her reading in the huge Jacuzzi tub one time with a lamp clamped to the towel rack above her head to shine down on the pages while the cord stretched across the room to the nearest plug.

She had a doctorate, too, but he never thought of her that way. It was in some arcane field that served no useful function: interdisciplinary philosophy. Sometimes he resented that they shared the same title of doctor, as if the top of her heap of education somehow equaled his.

He rinsed and walked to the large closet to the right of the bathroom (also bigger than most people’s bedrooms) that was all his. His wife left his laundry hanging on the hook outside the door and never invaded this inner sanctum, like a redneck would value his man-cave with his naked-girl racing calendars, old fridge full of beer, and gun rack.

He stopped at the first built-in and admired his six-piece watch winder, rhythmically rocking back and forth, keeping the elegant timepieces inside running. It was his favorite thing in the house. It cost more than most people’s watches and its entire purpose was to keep the timepieces running because they weren’t on his moving wrist. It was actually the height of indulgence for a man who’d grown up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, spending his childhood in the barn, wrist always moving over and over, never stopping, in between morning chores and evening chores and going to school and to sleep at night, as if he were the machine he now admired doing the work for him.

He always saved the “choosing of the watch” for after he was dressed, the crowning event in his ritual.

He opened the drawer where his socks were neat little bundles arranged by color and use: dress, casual, and workout, with subdivisions in each. There were times when he knew his wife wouldn’t be home when he opened all the drawers and cupboards in the huge closet like some secret cross-dresser on a quiet afternoon and just stared at the perfection of a place for everything, and everything in its place. He loved how the colors of his dress shirts worked from white to light to dark from left to right, matching the suits hanging over them. And the ties on the motorized rack could roll up, rank after rank, like soldiers going to war, also ranked by color.

But he was always drawn back to the socks. His mother had tried to keep up, but the farm had taken too much out of her and she’d drawn the line at sorting socks. Everyone has their limits. She cleaned, she had her own rules, but his socks she dumped in his drawer in one tangled mess. Luckily he was an only child, so he didn’t have to sort his out from a sibling’s. But the amount of time he spent looking for two that matched? In grad school he’d sat through a boring lecture by writing an algorithm for the hours he’d wasted on what should have been solved before the drawer.

He reached into the drawer and moved aside the neat pile of socks dedicated to matching his various golfing outfits and picked up the laptop. He felt a rush of excitement, like the redneck would if one of those girls on the calendar actually entered his man-cave.

He’d finally broken a rule, but it was going to make him rich. Technically, richer than he’d been once upon a time, but why quibble over some zeros?

His students thought ten million was a lot of money, but he knew it wasn’t. Not when you had to fill the watch winder with six timepieces of quality and then support the timepieces with the lifestyle worthy of them and buy a house in Senators Club. And then fill that house with things required of a house in Senators Club.

It was a big house.

He’d been surprised when he’d received that e-mail from Craegen out of the blue.

But sometimes life gives you opportunities and you have to make the best of them.

Craegen had been ambitious; Winslow remembered that much about him. The e-mail was a boast, a slap at a professor who years ago had blown off a young freshman who had been too eager and not paid his dues. Somehow Craegen had gotten a bootleg copy of the original Rift program. And he was going to do it, figure it out, be acknowledged as the genius he was by doing what no one had done before: bring it under control. Winslow’s eyes had glazed over as the slaps in the face had come one after another. Near the end Craegen had temptingly written some of the algorithms. Incomplete, but enough to let Winslow know he was for real, which was the staggering blow.

But now he had what had once been Craegen’s. It had never occurred to Winslow to ask the strange man how he had gotten the drive or where Craegen was or how he even knew about the e-mail. Such details weren’t essential. What was on the drive was the key.

It had all been very cloak-and-dagger yesterday and last night, full of dire warnings, and the garbage can full of dog shit had not been fun, but the prize overwhelmed even the five hundred thousand he’d forked over.

Winslow paused for the first time, a slight ripple of concern slopping through his brain. The money had been surprisingly easy to obtain, but that had been cloak-and-dagger, too. Winslow’s mother had warned the children that they should never, ever borrow money. But Winslow’s mother had died in the farmhouse, as the auctioneers were selling everything off and Winslow was away on his full scholarship ride. Winslow knew Lilith would not be pleased if she knew whom he had gone to for the loan and the terms he had agreed to. But it wasn’t about the money. Even he was aware of that.

Perhaps it was a midlife crisis?

What is a midlife crisis for a physicist? Not a red sports car or dewy-eyed grad students. He’d already been through both those, the latter several times.

But the Nobel?

The ultimate prize for a physicist whose career was on the way down, because they aged like ballerinas, the youngest and the brightest getting all the attention. He’d struggled through enough productions of Swan Lake with his wife to see that the leads never had crow’s-feet. Not around their eyes anyway. The old physicists tended to stick ever tighter to what they thought they knew, never reaching out for the new for fear of learning that what they’d believed for decades was wrong.

He could admit he was wrong if this turned out right.

He’d arranged the dinner party to empty out the lab this evening except for Ivar, so the student could move the final pieces downstairs at UNC. He trusted Ivar to an extent, because behind his bland expression, Winslow could see the intelligence minus the same hungry ambition eating away at most grad students’ chests. The perfect combination to be used. Winslow found it a bit amusing that Ivar had taken the lack of an invitation to the party as a deliberate slight, when it was really an invitation to share greatness. Rather, more to touch it, as there would be no sharing. One did not share with students. One took.

Ivar was willing to work eighty hours a week like the rest of them for no pay so they could get their doctorates, so they could work other kids behind them for eighty-hour weeks while they tried to invent something they could sell to the corporate world they all professed to despise, or, even better, DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, since everyone knew the government overpaid for everything.

But Ivar was meticulous, so the professor felt reasonably secure knowing the kid was the one in the special lab he’d secretly designed earlier today in a remote corner of the basement of the physics research building for the beginning of this. It was the perfect setup, used years ago for experiments with toxic and radioactive materials and perfectly shielded. More importantly, Winslow needed someone he could trust and who had the smarts to deal with things, since this was the first time he had ever gone off the grid; the first time he hadn’t followed the instructions.

The laptop Winslow now held was old, one that had been in the lab forever. Passed beneath the fingers of countless grad students and postdocs. The top was layered with faded stickers of bands long defunct. The key to the laptop was that it was linked to the mainframe that Ivar should have finished moving by now, so its own capabilities weren’t important. It was just the originator of the program. The mainframe in the secret lab was going to do the crunching and run the program. Winslow dug deeper in the sock drawer, behind the specially padded ones he’d used during his running phase. He retrieved the hard drive, meticulously labeled by Ivar: Dr. Winslow.

Ivar labeled everything that came in and out of the lab and had already fastened the label on the drive during the five minutes Winslow had left the disk in the lab in order for its contents to be copied into the mainframe. Ivar hadn’t even asked about the ASU label, his level of curiosity nil.

Winslow dug his thumbnail under the label and peeled it off. He pressed open the slide on the left edge of the laptop and gingerly pressed the hard drive in. He smiled as he watched the computer buzz to life, much like his toothbrush.

He pulled out his cell phone and sent the e-mail he’d saved in draft, with the specific instructions on what Ivar was to do in the secret lab at the same time. Based on the e-mail he’d received from Craegen, and his own examination of the algorithms, it would take weeks for the program to crunch the algorithms and be ready to activate, but they’d be weeks well spent. He put the laptop back in the drawer, making sure the power cord was still connected and leaving the lid open enough so it would stay on. On second thought, he wedged a pair of socks in between the top and the blank spot next to the touch pad, ensuring that it wouldn’t accidently close and shut the program down. He covered the laptop with socks. Then he had second thoughts. The laptop might overheat, buried like that, and no one came in here anyway. He cleared the socks off the top.

He put on his suit pants, shirt, tie, and jacket. Then he went back to the sock drawer. He could see the slight glow from the partially open laptop as he did the choosing of the socks. It made him smile. He pulled out his favorite pair.

Then he hovered over the watch winder, mesmerized as it rocked back and forth.

Tonight was a Rolex night.

Ivar was splitting his attention between watching the mainframe monitor set on a table in the middle of the room, waiting to start a replay of this evening’s Duke — UNC alumni charity basketball game, and labeling things. It was after eight and he knew the game was probably over, but he’d studiously avoided accessing any social media on his iPhone or laptop so that he wouldn’t accidently find out the score.

Unfortunately, by not checking either, he also hadn’t received the e-mail from Doctor Winslow about changing the setting on a critical dampener and shutting down the Internet connection from the mainframe to the old laptop once they both initiated.

For lack of a nail.

It was a saying that would have been lost on the student.

Instead, he was using a label maker. Things had to be organized. This room was below ground level, in the subbasement that was mainly used to store old tables and chairs and desks. Even the building’s maintenance people rarely came down here. Why Doctor Winslow had chosen this room off the beaten path, Ivar didn’t consider worth pondering. Winslow could have explained to him why he’d chosen this particular room — that the room was shielded and that a single trunk line brought in power and Internet and a landline for a phone — but Winslow didn’t believe in explaining to grad students. Besides, Ivar’s main concern was that all this gear, new and old, lacked labels. He’d just spent two hours simply hauling the last of it down here from the main lab upstairs.

Ivar glanced over at the monitor. All within parameters. Organized. Doing what it was designed to do, which Ivar knew was something that could be very, very original, although the professor had been rather vague on what the end result should be.

Since he had to miss the game live, he should have been invited to the dinner party, Ivar thought as he labeled a drawer Label Maker. It held the extra cartridges to load into the machine. He saw no irony in this.

He checked the clock on the wall. The game had to be over by now. Even if it went to overtime, which would be cool, but fuck those Duke Blue Devils anyway. He’d attended a lecture up there in Durham and one could feel the snobbery slithering off the Duke professor at being made to talk to a bunch of dumb UNC grad students. Everyone had been looking forward to this off-season charity game because it would be played by some of the most famous graduates of both programs.

Okay, Ivar decided. He sat down on the old Naugahyde couch and picked up the remote.

Game time.

Behind him, the first crackle of a golden spark arced around the mainframe.

Inside Doctor Winslow’s sock drawer, the screen of the laptop shimmered out of the darkness and took on the faintest hint of gold.

Deep under Area 51, it sounded like a hundred angry grasshoppers had been loosed in the cavern holding the Can. Several cycles ago, someone had remembered from an undergraduate physiology class that a clicking sound activated the reticular formation with a higher degree of success than any other form of alarm. They had then taken that to the extreme, just in case both people on duty had fallen hard asleep or into a coma during their duty shift.

Both, however, were awake, and while one turned off the clicking, the other activated the alarm to be transmitted to the Nightstalkers, Japan, and Russia.

Nada was sharpening his machete, Eagle was reading, Kirk was fiddling with his PRT, Doc was taking pills out of bottles and placing them in various slots on a fishing tackle box (which he had discovered was the perfect way to carry the max array of possible pills efficiently), and Mac was toying with a Claymore mine, modifying the contents.

“Really,” Mac said. “They have to print ‘front toward enemy’ on the front? How stupid are people?”

Nada didn’t even look up. “In Afghanistan, one of the Afghan army fellows pulled in his Claymore after an overnight patrol base, just rolling the cord around the body of the mine, and put it in his ruck without removing the fuse. The first time he did a rucksack flop, he blew himself in two and killed three others around him. People are pretty stupid.”

Eagle lowered his Kindle. “That doesn’t connect directly with Mac’s complaint about the printing. It’s more in line with the warnings they put on plastic laundry covers: Don’t wrap this around your head: could be bad for you. I think Darwinism has to get a chance to work. The more we protect stupid people from themselves, the more we ensure the long, slow descent of the human race into idiocracy.”

Roland was doing chin-ups on the bar next to his locker. It was either chin-ups or push-ups for Roland most of the time he was in the Den. If he wasn’t breaking down a weapon and cleaning it. Moms was in the CP, doing whatever it was Moms did in the CP when she was alone.

Everyone looked up as Nada’s cell began playing the tune Kirk had heard once before. Then Doc’s, Mac’s, Eagle’s, and Roland’s went off. Barely two seconds later, his PRT began playing “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

Moms came flying out of the CP. “We’ve got a pre-Rift alert from the Can.”

They were already moving toward the exit.

Downstairs, Doctor Winslow picked at the tiny bit of salad on his plate. It was all strange stuff that he hated, without even knowing what it was called. The farm had its detractions, but normal, hearty food had not been one of them. One had to eat solid food in order to do all those chores. This food was for people who thought pine nuts and cranberries made a salad.

He had a bit of a buzz going from three glasses of champagne he’d gotten down before meeting his wife on the main floor. A quiet celebration all his own. On top of the program initiating at the secret lab, there was the added satisfaction that UNC had won the alumni game handily, and it was fun to rub it in the faces of the Dukies, one of whom was a guest.

The table held fourteen, and he had been able to concoct his favorite mix. Three couples who might be considered his peers, but he secretly knew weren’t now, because they didn’t know about the laptop upstairs and the program it was running. There were also six grad students. He always invited over a fresh batch each time, because Lilith loved seeing their faces when they had to pick up their passes from the guard at the gate and then pull up in their beat-up little cars and see the huge double staircases and the chandeliers. It was petty, but it kept her happy, and when she was happy she didn’t care what he did in his closet. Winslow would never admit to her that he enjoyed seeing their faces, too. He also enjoyed that specified on the gate passes was that they expired at midnight, adding a fairy-tale edge to all of it. Poof and they would return back to their miserable little apartments.

Lilith had called him a sadist when she walked around the table. Mixing the haves with the have-nots. His point, which he knew was a waste of time to explain to her, was that a have-not would not make it to a have if they didn’t get to see what they had. There was some pronoun confusion there on his part, but Lilith understood the base drive to cause turmoil. As Gore Vidal had once famously said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” Winslow had understood the sentiment the minute he heard it, and he always remembered it, not even needing his recorder app to remind him.

Still, the guests seemed happy and his buzz was growing and he was considering a fourth glass of champagne. He had much to celebrate although he could not speak of it. He’d never been much of a drinker, not like Lilith, who could put it away faster than you could pop the cork. Looking down the long table he could see the flush of her cheeks and the liquid glaze in her eye that meant she’d also had more than three while awaiting their first guests.

Winslow sighed. Her drinking could go one of three ways later in the evening, after the last guest departed. From the very low chance of an enthusiastic blow job, to the higher possibility of torrents of tears and recriminations on how he’d destroyed her career, her life, and her one chance of happiness, to the most likely — and optimal — result of her simply passing out on the bed, leaving him free to go back to his closet. He idly wondered — for the first time, perhaps because of his own inebriated state — what that one chance had been? He felt like she’d pretty much let her chances pass her by well before he met her.

Winslow poked at his sliver of purple lettuce and thought of her in a long gown in Sweden sitting at the table as he accepted his award and made a short (but smart) speech that was just about complete on the recorder on his phone. He knew she’d be happy then, because the Nobel, despite high-minded protests to the contrary, was a prize. And when one won a prize, it meant many others had lost. He must have smiled at the thought, because the physicist seated next to him asked:

“What are you so happy about?”

“Ah, a new experiment,” Winslow said. The four grad students who worked in his lab and his one physicist competitor from Duke all frowned, wondering what he could be talking about. Winslow abruptly grabbed his full glass of champagne and downed it. “To knowledge!”

Startled, the others at the table awkwardly followed suit.

Feeling emboldened, Winslow gestured for one of the wait people to load his glass once more.

The Snake lifted out of the Barn and Eagle wasted no time shifting the wings from vertical to horizontal. Eagle took them up to high altitude to fly a waiting racetrack, making sure the cabin was pressurized, because once they got a location for the Rift, the higher they were, the faster they could move. They all knew that on the other side of the world the Russian team was also airborne, but because of the recent theft of the hard drive, odds were the Rift was going to be on this side.

Moms was on the link with Ms. Jones, running through the things they always ran through on a Rift alert. Air Force refuelers were being scrambled at all points of the compass to top off the Snake if the distance to the target was greater than the craft’s range. For the moment, the number-one priority of the entire US military and the Support staff at Area 51 was to back up the Nightstalkers. At various military posts around the country and overseas, Quick Reaction Forces were being alerted, with no clue what they might be involved in.

Mac was kicking back in his seat and on the team net. “Hey, Doc. What’s the number, given that we got human error already involved courtesy of our stupid Courier?”

“I’d say it’s grave, perhaps at four.”

Kirk looked across at Mac and raised his eyebrows in question.

“Doc got a Rule of Seven,” Mac explained. “We could be in the middle of some heavy shit, bullets flying, Roland flaming things, and Doc will be trying to figure out how bad it could get. He says true disasters, like the Titanic, or a plane crashing—”

“Hey!” Eagle yelled from the cockpit. “None of that.”

“—require a minimum of seven things to go wrong, one of which is always human error. So far we ain’t never hit higher than a five, but that was pretty bad.”

“Forget the Rule of Seven and focus on the Rule of One.” Nada was writing in his Protocol, having figured out a way to save six seconds during loading. “It don’t take seven things to kill you. Once is bad enough.”

The waitstaff came out with dinner, pretending it came from the kitchen, which was a joke because Lilith couldn’t boil water without burning a hole in the pan, despite the Viking stove and whatever fridge, some big name, that she absolutely had to have. Lilith was on her feet, chattering, as if she might have to dash to the kitchen to correct something.

Winslow would have laughed, but instead he turned to the cute grad student, Mary, next to him and thought she might be someone who would dash in to tend to something, but not food. Mary was short, toned, and had wavy red hair that attracted lots of attention.

“When are your orals?” Winslow asked Mary.

She blinked.

“They can be right now,” the drunker professor to her other side said.

His wife glared from across the table. “Remember, you don’t have a prenup, dipshit.”

So they all started talking about prenups, which didn’t bother Winslow because he knew Lilith would gut him before she’d get a divorce.

“We don’t have a prenup, do we, darling?” Lilith said. That silenced the table.

His wife held up her glass and a waiter refilled it.

“I do love my Champers,” she said, calling the champagne by a name that generally set Winslow’s teeth on edge. She lifted the glass, some spilling over the edge of the Waterford crystal. “If I leave you, I get nothing, correct?” She looked around the table, stopping at the three pretty grad students, each for a moment. “Nothing.” She smiled coldly. “Which is why I will never leave.”

Everyone started asking for their dessert. The haves had seen this before, while the have-nots were appropriately embarrassed.

The professor raised his glass to Lilith, thinking, I’ve got to get rid of her. He glanced at Mary and thought she might make a nice third ex-wife. But his mind kept sliding back to the computer. He put the glass down and went all the way upstairs to take a leak, but really to look at the laptop. He realized he was staggering slightly and there was a slur in his speech, but he didn’t care. He paused in the closet and checked the computer. He was surprised to see the golden glow on the screen.

No data. Just the glow.

He knelt in front of the laptop, as if worshipping it, mesmerized by the glow.

He had no idea how long he had been like that when he suddenly shook his head, snapping out of the trance. His wife probably thought he was off with one of the grad students. He hurriedly got to his feet and made his way downstairs, taking the closest staircase this time, making sure he had a firm grip on the handrail.

As soon as he recovered his seat, he indicated for his champagne glass to be topped off once more.

This was going to work!

Nada was checking the time, and he looked forward, toward Moms. Her head was cocked at that strange angle she had whenever she was on the direct link to Ms. Jones.

Moms slapped Eagle on the shoulder as Russia and Japan triangulated with the Can under Area 51 to get the first rough approximation of the pending Rift. “North or South Carolina.”

Eagle hit the thrusters and they were racing east.

UNC was ahead and only two minutes to go. The DVR cut to commercial and the jerks at the cable company didn’t allow fast-forwarding on some things. Ivar picked up his iPhone and checked his texts and e-mails, relayed from the small wireless transmitter he’d hooked up to the Internet line running into the lab.

“Frack!” Ivar exclaimed as he saw Doctor Winslow’s e-mail about the dampener. It was time-stamped over three hours ago.

Ivar looked at the computer. There was the slightest of golden haze around the mainframe. Anxiously, he checked the monitor and breathed a sigh of relief. All within parameters.

He went over to the keyboard and began to type in the code that should have been typed in three hours previously.

Winslow could barely sit back down. He felt drawn to the computer with an urgency he couldn’t comprehend. Lilith was still fuming at her end of the table. Winslow tried to remember what had initiated it. Something about prenups?

Lilith fixed him with her gaze. “Stephen here wants to know more about your experiment. Your new experiment. You know, the one you haven’t told me about.”

Winslow glared back. Stephen the chemist was an ass. He’d correct you if you called him Steve or even Steven as if you were ignoring his silent syllables. Winslow downed his glass of champagne and thought of the laptop. The golden glow. He noted that his wife’s hand was on Stephen’s arm. He’d never considered the fourth possible end of the evening — Lilith with someone else.

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand it, Stephen,” Winslow said.

All the grad students were tracking him now, because it was one thing to be left out of the loop concerning what was going on at the lab, but it was another to see him in his cups and his wife provoking him. This would make great social media chat later.

Mary thought she was saving him by jumping in. “Yes, Doctor Winslow. What is this experiment?”

But that was just throwing gas into the fire. Winslow jumped to his feet, startling everyone. “I’ll show you.”

He took the stairs two at a time, his rage steadying him. The drawer was partly open. He unplugged the laptop and cradled it in his arms as he took it downstairs.

He was tempted to slam it down on the dining room table, but a small part of his brain that was still functioning knew that would be dangerous to the program running inside.

Stephen laughed, fueling Winslow’s rage. Stephen, who’d invented a time release for the pills that made overactive children go limp. “I hope your lab equipment is newer than that laptop.”

It was old. Under the bright light of the chandelier he could see a fading sticker for John Kerry, buried underneath a couple of band stickers. His real guests, not the students who were too young, hadn’t voted for Kerry. When a person got into houses like this, no matter what they’d chanted in their youth, most tended to change, as they had too much money. Which was funny because he’d met Lilith at a rally for liberals and he remembered what his own postdoc supervisor had told him at the time: everyone’s a liberal until they buy their first sofa. Students and liberals bought couches. For a moment, through the alcohol fog, he tried to tally how many sofas were in his house, but realized it was futile because there were rooms he’d only been in during the Realtor tour.

He heard Lilith give that girlish laugh, which meant she was now more inclined toward oral sex than evisceration and lamenting, but it was directed at Stephen, whose right arm was angled toward Lilith, under the cover of the table, which helped explain the sudden shift. He realized he’d zoned out, caught again by the golden glow.

Lilith was calling his name and he let the counting and memories go. “Yes, dear Lilith?”

“Are you going to show the rest of us?” Lilith was pointing at the laptop, the charm bracelet that she adorned with a new trinket every year, like a soldier accrued battle ribbons, dangling from her wrist.

Winslow turned the computer so that they could all see why he’d be standing on that dais in Stockholm. Everyone stared back blankly.

“Cool screen saver,” a less-than-quick grad student complimented.

“I can’t believe you got that old screen to be so bright,” another noted, as if that was what he was working on. “Did you figure out how to increase the refresh rate?”

“You fucking idiots,” Winslow said. “Don’t you see? And Lilith, why don’t you just blow Stephen right here under the table?”

The mainframe now glowed. Ivar stared at it, trying to figure out what label he could put on it. He dropped the labeler and hit the enter key for the dampener again and again.

Nothing.

The glow was expanding, covering the entire table.

Even though he had no clue what Doctor Winslow’s experiment was, Ivar had a bad feeling about the golden glow. If he screwed this experiment up, Winslow might derail his PhD.

They’d topped off once from a KC-135 tanker, somewhere over the emptiness of middle Kansas. Eagle had kept the Snake in lockstep with the bigger plane as the boom from the tanker descended in front of them, sucking in the precious fuel.

There was no discussion about who was going to jump first. Roland rigged, as Eagle began a descent when they crossed the Smoky Mountains, down into breathable air, and started depressurizing.

Moms held up an iPad from the copilot seat as Mac passed leg straps between Roland’s massive thighs. “We’ve got it pinpointed from the Japanese and Russians. Outside Chapel Hill.”

Nada took the iPad and passed it back to Roland, who paused in rigging. He checked the Google maps display, searching for landmarks he could reference on the way down. Jordan Lake was a great one for the FRP — far recognition point — that he could spot as soon as he exited the aircraft.

Then he zoomed, searching for an IRP — immediate reference point — to lock down his landing spot. Roland frowned. It looked like the target was inside a compound. “What kind of place is this?” Roland asked. “Some sort of secure research facility?”

“It’s a gated community,” Moms said.

“A what?” Roland asked.

“Bunch of houses surrounded by a fence, with a guard at the gate,” Moms said. “Sort of like Fort Bragg, except it doesn’t have the soldiers or the training areas.”

“It will have a golf course,” Eagle said.

Roland ran his finger over the screen. “It does have a golf course. You could land an entire stick of jumpers from a 141 on it.”

“I want everyone to rig,” Moms said. “We’re all going in via drop, even you, Doc. Mac, set his automatic opening device at one thousand AGL just in case. But please pull earlier, Doc, like you were trained, and follow us down. Eagle, you’re going to Wall the community’s perimeter. Put in probes to block any Firefly from getting out of that place.” She checked the time. “It’s going to be tight, but we can contain this and we have to go in quiet for concealment. Roland, right on the house, top-down, go in fast. HALO,” she added, meaning he would free-fall for most of the drop, then pull at the last minute to keep from crashing through the roof. “The rest of us are going out HAHO, right after you. So you don’t have much time on your recon before we land, because gravity rules.”

“Roger that, Moms.” Roland squatted and cinched his leg straps tight. A loose leg strap on opening shock would be literally ball-busting. Ready, he scooted out of the way as Moms climbed between the seats — careful not to hit any of Eagle’s controls — to join the rest in rigging and then inspecting each other. There were elbows, knees, parachutes, and weapons all over the place, but every member of the team had done in-flight rigging — not approved for amateurs — many times.

Doc looked very unhappy, having been forced to go through parachute training when he became a Nightstalker, but never liking it. Moms never had him jump if she could help it, but this was the exception that made the rule for the training. And it was the price he was willing to pay to be on the inside.

By the time the Snake crossed over the Uwharrie National Forest where several of them had conducted their Robin Sage graduation exercise for the Special Forces Qualification Course, the Nightstalkers were rigged, passing the iPad around, memorizing this unique target.

Winslow wiped the Champers off his face. His guests were making their excuses, scurrying to the door, eager to get away from the coming debacle. He pressed his special card into Mary’s hand and leaned close. “Call my private number in a bit.”

Mary blinked, glanced over her shoulder at his wife, and let the card drop to the floor.

Winslow was impressed. Smarter than she’d appeared. “Winslow.”

Doctor Winslow turned. A colleague, albeit from Duke. “Yes?”

“That isn’t right, is it?” And with that, the colleague was gone with the rest of them.

At first Winslow thought it was about his wife and the Champers and his telling her to go blow Stephen in front of everyone, but then he saw it. The screen of the laptop was going crazy. The gold field was writhing; that was the only way he could describe it.

Well, of course it was, he realized just as quickly.

It was working.

But why weren’t the dampeners kicking in?

“Opening ramp,” Eagle announced.

Roland walked forward, carrying parachute and reserve, a machine gun, a flamer, body armor, ammunition, and a bunch of other gear that added over 160 pounds to his body weight.

“I’m going to give green directly above the LZ,” Eagle said. “So if you don’t pull, you’ll go through the roof, but be on target.”

“Funny guy,” Roland said.

Mac started humming and the team joined in, and then, surprisingly, it was Moms who began chanting: “Roland was a warrior from the land of the Midnight Sun.”

A couple of those in the know joined in.

“With a Thompson gun for hire.”

The ramp cracked open and air swirled in. The rest of the team joined in for the next line.

“Fighting to be done.”

The ramp locked in place. Roland looked over his shoulder at the team and Moms, a big grin on his face. He gave a thumbs-up.

The green light went on and he stepped off into darkness.

Moms fell silent and so did the team.

Moms stepped forward and took Roland’s place on the ramp.

In the lead.

Winslow ignored everyone and grabbed his cell phone. What the hell was that landline number he’d installed in the secret lab? He scrolled through his contacts list and found it, under Nobel. He pressed.

It rang. And rang.

Finally a hurried voice answered. “Yes?”

“Ivar! The dampeners?”

“I’m trying.”

Winslow gripped the phone so hard it creaked, close to cracking. “They’re not in already?”

“No.” There was a pause. “Uh, it’s glowing.”

“The mainframe?”

“And it’s all around the table. It’s getting bigger!”

The professor looked at the laptop screen. It too was glowing. Pulsing. Outward. Not possible. But it was happening.

It worked.

Nobel, here I come, bitch, Winslow thought.

“What’s the particle reading?” he demanded.

“Negative twelve point six.”

“Negative? It can’t be a negative.”

Ivar had no clue what was going on, as Doctor Winslow hadn’t told him.

He typed so hard the keyboard almost broke, but it was no use. The dampeners Doctor Winslow had developed, something no one had understood, were simply not engaging.

Roland was at terminal velocity as he dropped through four thousand feet. He was alternating between watching the terrain and houses below and his altimeter.

“Ivar? Ivar?”

There was a burst of static so strong that Winslow pushed the phone away from his ear. Lilith was in front of him, in 100 percent anger/regret mode. Stephen had smartly scurried out the door with all the others.

“Ivar?”

Just static, then it went silent.

Winslow looked at the screen of the laptop.

A golden pulse surged from the screen, hitting the professor. Smoke rose from the singed spot on his shirt.

“Shut it down!” Lilith was pounding on his back.

Winslow leaned over and his fingers flew over the keys to no avail.

No Nobel?

He punched the small button on the left side to eject the hard drive.

To no avail.

He slammed the laptop shut, but the glow was bigger than the machine and nothing happened. He opened it back up to work the keyboard with one hand while his fingers on the other were still pressing to eject. His hand on the keyboard began to quiver. He tried to stop it, but watched helplessly as that hand tapped the return key and he saw the screen begin to shimmer with lights, brighter than the gold behind them, and these tiny lights started to move toward him out of the screen like when he was a kid and holding a mason jar for the fireflies.

They flew out of the screen as he saw his hand being sucked into it. He had a moment of feeling good, feeling superior, because he actually thought of Ivar and that meant he wasn’t completely selfish.

Roland pulled at eight hundred feet AGL. He had pinpointed the target house, noting several cars moving away.

He touched down on the peak of the roof as gentle as Santa delivering goods to a child who’d been nice — even though the one in this house was almost certainly naughty.

Winslow saw the gold sparks flash by. The last thing he saw was Lilith’s face, screaming something and swatting futilely as the six sparks circled her briefly then raced out the front door.

Then Winslow’s arm went into the screen.

Followed by the rest of him.

The big platinum Rolex fell with a thud onto the keyboard.

Roland popped the quick releases, letting his chute slide onto the roof as he readied the M-240 machine gun. He was scanning, quickly doing a three-sixty, when he saw them come out of the walls of the house and scatter in different directions.

“I count six Fireflies leaving the target,” Roland announced. “We’ve got Rift.”

Lilith collapsed in shock. The hired help had left after serving dessert, the guests scattered at the confrontation, so there was no one left in the house as the Fireflies left.