"Jesus Christ, Wyman, you know I'd never be involved in anything like that. If someone's trying to kill you, it isn't us. You better tell me what the hell you've been doing to provoke this."
Ford stared at Lockwood. The man looked flustered and confused. The operative word was looked. After eight years in Washington, people got awfully good at deception.
"I'm still on the case."
Lockwood's lips tightened and he seemed to be collecting his wits. "If someone's after you, it isn't CIA. They're not that crude and you were one of their own. Of course, it might be one of those acronyms at DIA. A black agency. Those sons-of-bitches answer to nobody." Lockwood's face turned red. "I'll look into it immediately and if it's them, I'll take appropriate action. But Wyman, what in God's name are you doing? You're assignment is long over. I warned you before to leave this alone. Now I'm telling you: give it up now or I'll bust you. Is that clear?"
"Not clear. Another thing: my assistant is a twenty-year-old student who is completely innocent in this affair."
Lockwood dropped his head and shook it. "If it's one of ours, trust me, I'll find out and make a stink. If I were you, though, I'd consider who else it might be--outside the government." He added, "But I've got to ask you again: why the hell are you doing this? You don't have a dog in this race."
"You wouldn't understand. I'm here to get more information. I want you to tell me what's going on, what you know."
"Are you serious? I'm not telling you anything."
"Not even in exchange for the information I've got?"
"Which is?"
"The object didn't fall in the Maine ocean. It struck an island."
Lockwood took a step forward, lowered his voice. "How do you know that?"
"I've been there. I've seen the hole."
"Where?"
"That's the information you'll get--in return."
Lockwood looked at him steadily. "All right. Our physicists think the thing that went through the Earth was a chunk of strange matter. Also known as a strangelet."
"Not a miniature black hole?"
"No."
"What the hell is strange matter?"
"It's a superdense form of matter. Made entirely of quarks. And extremely dangerous. I don't really understand it--look it up if you want more. That's all we really have that's new. So--where's this island?"
"Name is Shark. In Muscongus Bay, about eight miles offshore. It's a small, barren island--you'll find the crater at the high point."
Lockwood turned, pulled his briefcase out of the car, shut the door. As Ford turned to leave, Lockwood stuck out his hand and grasped his, surprising him. "You keep your head down, be careful. If I find out our people after you, I swear I'll put a stop to it. But keep in mind it may not be our people . . ."
Ford turned, ducked out the garage door, and crossed the backyard into the darkness of the park. He moved toward the creek where the growth was thickest, crossed the stream, and came out on the path. He emerged on Quebec Street, straightened up, adjusted his suit, and ran his fingers through his hair. He again assumed the air of a neighbor taking the air, walking briskly, ducking into the shadows once to avoid a cruising cop car. Rounding several corners, he came to the end of the street where he'd parked his car, keeping to the shadows of a copse of trees.
Bad news. Peering through a screen of trees he could see two cop cars, light bars going, parked on either side of his rental car, obviously making the plates. Had Lockwood called the cops? Or maybe he'd left it parked too long: the house party was long over and some paranoid suburbanite had called the cops. Unfortunately, he'd rented the Mercedes in his real name--there'd been no choice.
Cursing under his breath, Ford melted back into the darkness and threaded his way through backyards and parkland toward American University and the bus stop on Massachusetts Avenue.
56
Abbey scanned the files on the 160 terabyte hard drive, sampling a few at random. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of images of Mars, spectacular, amazing, extraordinary images of craters, volcanoes, canyons, deserts, dune fields, mountains, and plains. The radar images were equally spectacular, slices through the Martian crust. But the gamma ray data were simply tables of numbers and various arcane graphs, impossible to decipher. No images there--just numbers.
One folder caught her eye, titled GAMMA ANOMALY. Inside was a single file with a pps extension--a PowerPoint presentation, and it had been created on the disk only a few weeks before.
Abbey clicked on the pps file. A screen popped up and the presentation began.
The MMO Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator:
An Analysis of Anomalous High-Energy
Gamma Ray Emission Data
Mark Corso, Senior Data Analysis Technician
This was looking good--this must be the presentation that irritated his supervisor, Derkweiler, and got him fired. His obsession. She clicked to the next page, which showed a schematic of the planet Mars with the orbital trajectories of the MMO satellite drawn around it, the multiple orbits overlaid. Then came a graph labeled Theoretical Signature of Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars, showing a nice, neat square wave pattern. The next one was labeled Actual Gamma Ray Signature, which was hard to make out, and then both were combined for what looked to her like a pretty tenuous match, with large error bars and a lot of background noise. There were peaks and valleys, but just barely, and the theoretical and actual signatures looked out of phase.
She clicked again but that was the end.
What did it mean? It was obviously an oral presentation, no written text to go along with it.
She clicked through it again, trying to figure it out. Theoretical Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars. She thought back to her freshman physics class at Prince ton and what she was supposed to know about gamma rays. They were the most energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum, higher energy than X-rays. Gamma rays, gamma rays . . . Like she told Ford, there shouldn't be any coming from Mars--or should there? She cursed herself for not studying harder.
She Googled gamma rays and read up on them. They were produced only by extremely violent events--supernovae, black holes, neutron stars, matter-antimatter annihilations. In the solar system, she read, gamma rays were naturally created in one way and one way only: when powerful cosmic rays from deep space struck the atmosphere or surface of a planet. Each cosmic ray strike tore apart atoms of matter, producing a flash of gamma radiation. As a result, all the solar system's planets, bathed in a diffuse cosmic ray bombardment from deep space, glowed faintly in gamma rays. The glow was diffuse, planetwide.
She read through several articles but it all came down to the same thing: no known natural process could create a point source of gamma rays in the solar system. No wonder Corso was interested. He'd found a point source for gamma rays on Mars--and no one at NPF believed him. Or was it all in his head? It was hard to tell.
She stared at the computer screen, rubbed her eyes, glanced at the clock. Three A.M. Where was Ford?
She sighed and got up, rummaged in the small fridge. Empty. She had drunk up all her Diet Cokes, eaten the bags of Cheetos and wolfed down the Mars Bars. Maybe she should sleep. But the thought of sleep did not appeal to her. She was too worried about Ford. She began idly looking through the data, and then Googled the Mars Mapping Orbiter. Launched a few years ago, gone into orbit around Mars a year later. An orbiter stuffed with cameras, spectrometers, subsurface radar, and a gamma ray scintillator. Purpose: to map Mars. It carried the most powerful telescope ever launched into deep space, called HiRISE, which was classified but thought to be able to see an object twelve inches across from 130 miles up. In the few months of its operation the MMO had sent more data back to Earth than all previous space missions combined.