Cutting Edge

25

The Alaska Airlines 737 touched down at Boston Logan International Airport at 10:33 the next morning. It was a firm landing, and the thump of the main wheels on concrete jolted Lund out of a sound sleep. The jet cleared the runway, and as soon as the flight attendant made an announcement that phones could be turned back on, Lund did so and saw a message from Kalata: Call me.

She did, and he answered right away, even though it was four hours earlier in Kodiak. Picking up calls at zero dark thirty came with the job. So, correspondingly, did sleepy voices.

“Damn, Shannon. You know what time it is?”

“My plane just landed — I got your message.”

“You’re just now landing? I didn’t think it took so long to fly to Arizona.”

“Flight delays,” she said, not knowing or caring if he knew where she’d really gone. “Did you get in touch with Ashley Routledge?”

A yawn, then, “Who?”

“Simmons’ girlfriend.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, I found her. Works over in the education office, a real cute brunette.”

Lund rolled her eyes. “I’m insanely jealous. What did she say about Simmons? Was there anything strange going on in his life?”

“She did mention one thing — like you guessed, it had to do with Trey DeBolt.”

Lund felt a clench in her gut like a tightening fist. She’d asked Kalata to look for any relationship between Simmons and DeBolt.

“Apparently the two were pretty tight,” Kalata continued. “Turns out, the day after DeBolt was evac-ed out, Simmons was scheduled to be in Anchorage for a two-day training session of some kind. As soon as he arrived he tried to track down DeBolt. He went to both hospitals but couldn’t find him. About that same time we got official word here on station that DeBolt hadn’t survived his injuries. Ashley called Simmons and told him. She said he got really upset. He went back to the Air Force hospital in Anchorage and raised a ruckus — nearly got himself arrested. Nobody there seemed to know anything about DeBolt or where his body might be. When he got back to Kodiak, he started making phone calls and sending emails — the hospitals, the mortuary section. Routledge showed me a few, and they were pretty accusative. She said he was frustrated that nobody would listen to him, and making noise about contacting CGIS. Then he fell off Mount Barometer. That’s about it — I hope it helps.”

Lund tried to think of something to say. “Okay, Jim, thanks for looking into it.”

“Anything else I can do for you? Anything at all?”

“I’ll be in touch.”

“I hope your dad is—” Kalata’s words were cut short by the end button.

She looked out the window as the jet pulled into the gate. She combined the new information with what Doran had discovered on the mountain, and what Fred McDermott had told her about a Learjet trying to cover its tracks with false flight plans. Her suspicions only deepened. What had happened to DeBolt after he was evac-ed out of Kodiak? How had he survived his injuries and ended up in Maine of all places? Then Lund came to a more disturbing realization.

William Simmons, who was no investigator, had been the first to start asking questions. He’d seen inconsistencies in the story of what had happened to a gravely injured Trey DeBolt. Many of his questions were the same ones Lund herself was now asking.

And today William Simmons was dead.

When Benefield got the message that DeBolt was still at large, he took it poorly. The general sent an invective-laden response to his team suggesting, in colorful terms, that they ought to do better. He surfed news outlets to assess the investigations into a pair of fires, one at a small clinic in Maine and another at a DARPA research facility in rural Virginia. Neither inquiry seemed to be making headway, although as generals knew better than anyone, what was fed to the media was rarely the full story.

More encouragingly, Benefield’s phone had rung only once since last night. To an FBI investigator he expressed a commander’s regret over the loss of life in Virginia, and commented in passing that he had only recently visited the troops there. That was what he called them—troops. As if they’d all taken the oath of service and been inducted into active duty. Nothing was mentioned about the tragedy in Maine, and he was sure it never would be. That venue had been established very carefully via a series of shell companies, each a dead end in its own right. It had been the riskiest part of the entire project, and illegal on any number of levels. But of course it had been essential.

More than ever, he hoped Patel would have the abort codes for him tonight. And if he didn’t? Then Benefield would have to find another way to sever META’s remaining loose ends.

Less than a mile away, Atif Patel began his morning with matters unrelated to META. He had long ago decided that his pursuit of the project, secretive as it was, would only succeed if he could maintain the veneer of a normal professional life. So from his hotel desk he corresponded by email with a Cal professor regarding a paper they were co-publishing, and had a lengthy phone conversation with a graduate student who was preparing to defend her doctoral thesis.

Absent from his schedule that day was any attempt to retrieve the codes General Benefield wanted to activate META’s kill switch. The reason was eminently simple — they didn’t exist. Patel viewed it as an insurance policy of sorts. Without his drive and vision, the gains from the META would never have been realized. His integration software was installed deep in the bedrock of some of the most highly classified and complex mainframes on earth, and he wasn’t going to let so much work be put at risk by the whims his careerist overseer. Simply put, he had lost faith in General Benefield, and by extension DARPA. When the general had insisted at the outset that an abort code be included in the software — his words, as if it were a ballistic missile or something — Patel had agreed with the conviction of a child with his fingers crossed behind his back. The agency’s sudden removal of funding was a surprise to Patel, and certainly a setback, yet he had months ago sensed in Benefield a lack of enthusiasm for the project. Timing aside, none of it was unexpected. Patel had been working with various DOD entities since graduate school, and so he knew all too well the sad truth: invariably, generals fixated on nothing beyond putting the next star on their shoulders. It was scientists like himself who reached for the galaxies.

All the same, he would have to give Benefield something tonight. He found a pad of hotel stationery on the desk, and on it he scrawled an impressive-looking series of commands, followed by a ridiculous thirty-character alphanumeric sequence — special characters included — that might someday be decoded for what it was: a simple anagram of “3decimal141GOCALTECHBEAVERS!!!.” Scrambled randomly, it looked convoluted and imposing, but of course was completely useless. Yet it would buy Patel just a little more time.

Enough time to finalize the true core of the META Project.