Langley felt bile rise in his throat. All they need is the power source, the young hacker’s words echoed in his mind again and again. Cracking the atom wasn’t enough. They needed to harness something even more powerful.
The tachyon.
“Okay, I’m ready,” Rasta Man suddenly cut into his thoughts.
Despite the turmoil as his mind tried to make sense of everything, his training cut through the haze and got straight to the point. “Do it.”
Rasta Man took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second. Then, summoning his resolve, he opened them and hit EXECUTE.
Instantly, the firewall surrounding the Phoenix file collapsed and Langley knew that a hundred alerts were going crazy on computer screens throughout America’s intelligence network. Phones call would be being made, emergency calls through to the police department. Men in suits would be running to their cars. Computer analysts would be homing in on the geographical source of the hack.
“This is so cool,” Rasta Man muttered. “I can’t believe you brought me Phoenix, Al.”
Langley, never taking his eyes from the screen as a status bar showed the progress of the download onto a memory stick Rasta Man had slotted into the machine, frowned.
“What do you mean? Are you saying you’ve heard about Phoenix?”
“Of course I have.” Then it was Rasta’s turn to look confused. “You mean, you haven’t? I assumed, ‘cause you were researching Eldridge that you knew about the connection.” The status bar was half full now.
“What connection?”
“The Phoenix Project is the continuation of the Rainbow Project.”
“What?”
Just then, in the distance, the screeching howl of emergency sirens rang out. It could have been a coincidence but Langley knew otherwise.
“That wasn’t seven minutes,” Rasta Man said, panicked.
“We’ve got to go.”
Rasta Man grabbed a rucksack and swept as much of the loose pen-drives, hard drives and CDs into it as he could. The status bar pinged to 100 %. The police might have arrived earlier than anticipated, but Rasta’s computer had worked faster too.
“Let’s go.” Langley ripped the pen-drive out of the machine and dragged Rasta to the door. They moved fast, flying through the door and out into the night. Langley used the butt of his gun to smash the security light on the side of the two story building that Rasta’s apartment was beneath and then dragged him out of the back gate. The sirens grew louder and more of them seemed to echo out in every direction. In the air the distant thrum of propellers beat through the night sky but Langley ignored it and kept on moving.
Across the street a narrow alleyway tucked down between two buildings and Langley darted down it, rounded a corner and then broke into a full sprint. Rasta Man struggled to keep up. They had to put as much distance between them and the basement apartment as possible, Langley knew.
The secret of Phoenix was out, and somebody wanted to lock it away again. Langley wasn’t going to let that happen. He knew what it had cost him. His life was over. He could never return to the United Nations, nor probably set foot on American soil again. But his fate had finally been revealed.
He remembered the words he had spoken to Sergei Dityatev, thinking about what Nathan Raine had done three years ago. A man’s most important oath is not to his country. It is to his conscience.
And with that thought, Alexander Langley vanished into the night.
48:
To Kill a Sheep
“We had to induce a coma to halt the neurological trauma,” Doctor Henry Heinrich explained in heavily accented English. Short and wiry, with unkempt hair that made him look as though he’d been playing with live electrical sockets and a pair of thin-framed, rounded spectacles that constantly slid down his nose, he reminded Raine of some comedy sketch of Sigmund Freud. He had already picked up on a number of phrases which he repeated constantly, such as adding a high pitched ‘ja?’ after almost every sentence and using ‘etcetera’ to fill in gaps. Nevertheless, as a doctor in the German army and a specialist in neurological trauma, the NATO base commander had assured Gibbs that Heinrich was the best medical help Benjamin King could wish for.
“For now, he is stable,” the German concluded.
“What do you mean, ‘for now’?” Sid demanded. She stood next to King’s head, softly stroking his smooth scalp where the doctors had shaved his short hair. Muddy rivers had dried on her cheeks following the passage of tears.
Also gathered in the hospital room were Raine, Nadia and Gibbs, all standing at the foot of the hospital bed where King lay motionless, hooked up to IV lines and EEG monitors. Numerous sensor pads were adhered to his scalp and hooked up an array of plasma screens which the base hospital staff had hastily erected. The doctor had, by necessity to save King’s life, been brought up to speed on the physiological effects of tachyon radiation, such as they were known.
Raine’s eyes had been fixed on those screens but, upon Sid’s question, they wandered back to the German doctor. “The truth is, Doctor Siddiqa,” he admitted, “we don’t understand enough about what were are dealing with. Your fiancée is suffering from a form of radiation sickness. This we know, and this we had treated, ja, using the precedent set in the treatment of the Sarisariñama Expedition members. His own ‘immunity’ if you want to call it that, protected him from the severity I would have expected to be associated with such close, intimate contact with the radioactive material. If it wasn’t for such a bizarre immunity, he would most certainly be dead.”
Raine thought about Edward Pryce and the description King had read from Emily Hamilton’s journal — deformed and monstrous, his hair gone, his skin blistered, his bones twisted and deformed. All from wearing the Moon Mask. King had very nearly met a similar fate, only with a larger piece of the mask.
“It is the neurological damage which we cannot even begin to fathom,” the doctor continued. He gestured towards the three screens which displayed the MRI and EEG scans taken of King’s brain.
“A short lesson in neurology,” he said quickly. “The brain is made up of billions of neurons which communicate to their neighbours via millions of billions of synapses, which in turn make up vast neural circuits in the brain.”
“Think of it as a computer network,” Nadia explained. “Put fifty computers in a room, link them together on a wireless network which sends enormous amounts of information from one machine to another, and you’ve got yourself a network.”
“Only this network,” Heinrich continued, “has been overloaded. The tachyons have triggered some kind of electronic impulse which is redirecting these synapses and focussing them on one specific area of Doctor King’s brain, thus shutting down all his other functions. Scientists have observed similar effects using transcranial magnetic stimulators on rats, thus developing accelerated growth of specific areas of the brain. The conclusion was that they had made the rats smarter.”
“He’s already smart enough for my liking, Doc,” Raine half-joked.
“What is happening to Doctor King is not the same as what happened to the rats. The stimulating device — in this case the radiological material placed directly against his skull — is different and the way the tachyons have ‘excited’ his synapses again is like nothing that has been documented before.”