Lockout

CHAPTER FIFTY

St. Paul’s Hospital, Denver, Colorado (10:20 p.m. MST / 0420 Zulu)

The image of faces filtering through a deep fog had come and gone in the previous hours, but Gail Hunt still wasn’t putting it together.

And she was so tired!

Suddenly, however, a face she absolutely recognized coalesced in front of her. Steve!

What was Steve Reagan doing here, she wondered, along with the suddenly crystalline question of where, exactly, was “here”? He was saying something, and she tried hard against a sea of weariness to listen. A question maybe?

Gail forced her eyes back open. He was still there, smiling it seemed. Good ol’ Steve! She could always depend on him. She opened her mouth to acknowledge him, but there was no sound.

She tried again, understanding at least some of what he was saying, the words very distant at first. How am I? she echoed in her mind. I don’t know… how AM I?

“Fine!” she managed, the startled expression on Steve Reagan’s face confirming her voice had worked.

But now he was pushing her. Something about numbers or codes in her desk safe. Triggering codes. De-triggering codes. In my safe? Steve should know better, she thought. Never keep… in safe.

She slipped away into a drifting sleep, but his voice tugged her back.

Gail opened her eyes again and tried hard to focus. Steve seemed determined to know about codes in her safe.

“Never in… my desk safe,” she replied, not realizing the words were coming out as more of a slurred whisper than a statement. Or, had she put them there? No, only her notes. Notes in the desk safe. Maybe notes with test codes, but not real ones. Whole damn thing far too important to trust to a physical safe that could be opened. But their bird was in the desert. No need for the codes until next week.

“So,” he was articulating. “The right codes were NOT the ones we found in your desk safe?”

Why, Gail thought, would they be looking inside her desk safe?

“Not in my safe,” she said again. “Codes always in… master computer.”

She wanted to sleep, but he wasn’t letting her, and for a moment she felt a flash of irritation.

“What happened to me?” She asked suddenly, the words far more clear than before. “Where… is this?”

Steve leaned over and talked about an accident on the way to Estes Park. Her accident. Her car. So it wasn’t a nightmare. It had been real.

“Can I walk?” she asked, startling both Steve and someone standing by him. Maybe a nurse. No. Couldn’t be a nurse. The woman wasn’t wearing a white uniform, just something with bunnies on it. But did nurses wear uniforms any more?

“No paralysis! You’ll make a full recovery, but you were down there in the wrecked car for days.”

She tried to nod, but the effort hurt. Maybe pain was good, though as she thought about it, even more pain began to make itself known, and that wasn’t fun. She wasn’t into pain, as she’d been fond of telling those who wanted her to lift weights and work out more.

“Gail!”

Once again she had drifted off, and this time Steve was talking about the passwords to the master computer, and an airplane full of passengers somewhere in trouble, and they needed her codes. Why would some airliner need her codes? We’re an invisible black project. We don’t exist. They don’t need my damned codes!

But Steve was insisting, and if it had been anyone but Steve she would have snapped at him. Couldn’t he see how tired she was?

“Let me sleep,” she said, her eyes closing again, trying to push away the voice which was emphatically saying something about running out of time.

Suddenly she was back in a beautiful field under a clear blue sky, motioning to a lover to hurry with the buttons he’d been undoing on her blouse, and realizing with a surge of pleasure that it was Steve.

Building 4-104, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs (10:32 p.m. / 0432 Zulu)

“That’s all? That’s all you guys can come up with?”

Dana Baumgartner searched the eyes of the hastily assembled team of engineers pulled from their homes to find a way to do what they had labored to prevent: Physically disconnect the airborne unit that was the entire focus of the black project they were legally required to protect.

“Those were the specifications, Colonel!” one of them said in a pleading voice. “We worked long and hard to think up every way some desperate hijacker could try to disconnect us and thwart all of them.”

“Yeah,” an owlish-looking engineer interjected. “Like burying the relays for the flight controls where no one could reach them, or… or…”

“I get it, guys,” Dana replied. “But we’ve got less than an hour, and if we can’t get the disconnect code, we’ve got to tell those pilots how to disable the system.”

“Sir, it can’t be done!”

“You can’t cut power to the box, even?” Dana asked.

“Especially not that, sir. It could be catastrophic because of the different relays, sequences, and power source changes that would result.”

“I want you to stay here and keep thinking, keep working on it, just in case. Don’t approach it from the position that it’s impossible. Approach it from the idea that you left out something… left a backdoor, a way to knock it off. I refuse to hear that it’s impenetrable! Just do it. We have a lot of lives at stake, as well as the efficacy of this program and your jobs.”