“This is mad,” he said as he cabled and linked the last of the modules together. “Utterly mad.”
“Not as mad as this,” Ryan grumbled from the far end of the room, where he was trying to mount the curved dome of an ancient satellite disk on its pedestal.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Hayden said as his last shred of patience disappeared. “What the hell is the matter with you?” He joined Ryan with a grumbled curse; five minutes later they had the unit assembled, squatting on the landing and pointing expectantly upward at the starry sky over the estate.
“Will that thing actually work?” Simon asked incredulously.
“All right, so it’s old,” Ryan said defensively. “But the laws of physics haven’t changed this century, you know. Will work just fine.” It sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as the others. “It’ll do the job.”
“Let’s get to it,” Hayden said, casting another look at the clock.
“All right then,” Ryan said, settling in front of the old-fashioned keyboard. “Here goes nothing!”
He hit the ON switch, and the linked modules all sprung to life at once.
“Huh,” Andrew said. “How about that.” He immediately hunched over the tiny holo-display, columns of figures and cones of wave front projections sliding past him in a mute, miniature parade.
Simon stood by the fireplace and watched the whole operation, focusing on Andrew’s every move. He didn’t say a word; he didn’t dare disturb him.
Samantha flinched as the servomotors in the satellite dish made a tense little grinding sound, and the hemisphere rotated, tipped, rotated again-and found its target. An instant later, the flat screen flickered to life, and a monochromatic, grainy image faded in, then faded out, then faded in again and stabilized.
It was the image of a fifty-year-old cargo ship, a large one, seen from a thousand feet or more in the air. The vessel was obviously under power, cutting through a moderately choppy sea at a considerable speed. White foam churned along its prow; a wake peeled off its stern in a long, narrow “V.”
“Behold,” Andrew said, barely glancing up from his display. “The S.S. Munro, cruising near the Southern Sea, under the command of one Dominic Donovan, carrying the Spector I to its unknown test site.”
“Unknown,” Simon muttered, “until now.”
“Right,” Andrew said. “Because now it’s ours.”
Hayden paced behind him nervously, trying to contain himself. “Not yet, it’s not,” Hayden said. “And it won’t be if you don’t move. Are you getting any juice to those modules yet?”
Andrew turned to him, his usual disposition buried in tension. “If we’re going to do this correctly,” he said between clenched teeth, “you’re going to have to give me a few minutes. I need a little time to catch the proper algorithms. You know better than I do that we’ve only got one chance…Professor.”
Hayden shook his head in disgust and turned away to pace the room again.
Simon moved closer to Samantha, who was watching them work with large unblinking eyes. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Is it working?”
“It comes in two steps,” he said very quietly, careful not to disturb them. “First: commandeer one or more satellites to locate the Munro. Find the ship, find its data stream. And Andrew’s already done that.” He nodded at the aerial shot of the ship as it surged through the water. “That image is coming from the STS-192, an environmental survey bird orbiting at twenty-seven thousand feet, now completely under Andrew’s control.”
“Not quite,” Andrew said. “Got the satellite, found the ship, but getting that datastream…still working on that.”
Samantha looked from the screen to Andrew to the screen again. “My god,” she said.
“Step two,” Simon continued, “is the hard part. Now that we have located the ship, Ryan has to decrypt the data it’s sending and receiving, match the algorithms it’s exchanging with the military, and replace it with our own datastream to take control of the ship.”
“Can he do that?”
“Theoretically, yes. He’s the world’s leading expert on this process; it’s called Remote Access Intervention.”
“But I’m not going to be able to do it at all,” Ryan said acidly, without looking up, “if the two of you don’t stop disturbing me.”
“Sorry.” Simon clamped his mouth shut, and Samantha shrank even deeper into the overstuffed chair.
After a moment, Simon put a hand out and touched her on the wrist. “Come on,” he whispered as quietly as he could. “Come help me in the kitchen.”
“All right.” She carefully placed her glass of wine on the side table and followed him toward the basement kitchen.
He didn’t really want to talk-not yet. He simply wanted to draw her away from the mounting tension in the great room and get a sense of how well she was holding up.
She seemed appreciative as they walked downstairs and entered the underground kitchen.
“Do you want to check the freezer for smoked fish?” he asked casually as he walked into the pantry. He already knew what the latter contained; it hadn’t changed a bit since his childhood days. Oliver had always had a deep love affair with French cheeses of every kind; he stocked them in abundance, along with everything else he thought might go well with them: smoked fish, fruits, fresh vegetables, and wine. None of it had appealed to him as a child, but now he was rather relieved to see all of that and more on the meticulously maintained shelves.
Searching through the pantry, he almost smiled at the thought of how age had changed him. Over the years, he had grown to appreciate what his father had loved, and he was pleased to see that Leon had continued to satisfy Oliver’s habits.
Beyond the pantry was a large room built specifically to house an extensive wine collection. It was also packed with shelves of preserves, some of which looked questionable. He randomly grabbed several items from the shelves as he heard Samantha’s voice: “You’ve got your pick.”
“Sounds good,” he said, walking out with several jars and a large block of cheese.
Samantha was peering into the walk-in freezer, looking curious. “What has he got in there?” he asked.
She pulled out a long, thin platter and showed him a beautifully filleted salmon, fresh and pink. Clearly Leon had been busy. “Let’s see what we can do with this,” she said.
As they started to assemble a quick dinner for the team, they heard Ryan’s voice from upstairs. “Synchronizing!” he shouted.
Turning to Samantha with a desperate look, Simon asked, “You’ve got this?”
“Sure. See what’s going on. I’ll take care of it.”
Before he had reached the steps to go upstairs, he heard Andrew’s response to Ryan. “Give me a couple of minutes. I’m almost there.”
Simon re-entered the great hall to find Hayden hovering over Ryan, more intense than ever. “You’ve got to make sure the algorithms are in sync,” he said. “Otherwise the communication will shut down.”
“I’ve got it,” Andrew said, carefully holding his finger above one of the little buttons, trying to synchronize the time to push the appropriate button on the device.
Andrew looked up at the flat screen, staring at the Munro as it cut through the open sea. “Almost there,” he said to himself, not daring to smile.
Simon’s gut sank, realizing they were about to hijack a secret multi-million-dollar government vehicle from the British military. There was no way to stop now, no way to turn back. They had gone too deep and were already in grave danger.
There would be no solace for the team. From this point forward they were committed. And once the British military found out, they would be on their tail without pause and forever.
All three men watched Andrew as his finger rested on the button of the small device he had rigged to the stolen modules. The room fell absolutely silent except for the crackling noise of the wood burning in the fireplace and the random clatter from the basement kitchen. They watched Andrew, anxiously waiting to see when he would connect to the vessel.