Split Second (23 page)

“I had a mole in his organization.
Jack Rourk. The man Aaron met, and shot, by the way, on Palomar Mountain.”

Blake nodded slowly, happy to have
another piece of the puzzle fall into place.

“Jack Rourk provided intel,”
continued Knight. “I knew Cargill had relocated to an underground base on
Palomar Mountain, and I knew the route they were taking to bring Dr. Wexler to
him. So I staged an ambush. Very poorly done, I’m afraid.”

“Poorly done!” screamed an outraged
Jenna Morrison. “Poorly done! That’s all you have to say about it?”

Knight winced. “It was supposed to
be a surprise. My men had planned to use gas and other non-lethal weaponry to
pry you and Dr. Wexler from Cargill’s forces and bring you both to me. I would
have explained the situation. I would have treated Dr. Wexler like
royalty
. I had planned to offer your
fiancé the keys to the kingdom if he’d join me.”

“But when it went to hell,” said
Jenna, “Cargill’s man decided that if
they
couldn’t have Nathan’s discovery, no one could, least of all you. So they
killed Nathan’s hard drive, and then
him
.”

“I’m afraid so, yes. Tragic doesn’t
even begin to describe it. And I take responsibility. The raid was obviously poorly
designed, or maybe Cargill has someone in
my
camp. All I know is that it was a disaster.”

Knight appeared genuinely distraught.
And for good reason. To him, Nathan Wexler was nothing short of the Messiah,
the second coming of James Clerk Maxwell.

“After this I sent a man to watch
your house,” he continued. “To bring you in. But when he discovered you had
another copy of Dr. Wexler’s work, he took matters into his own hands. And he
has been severely reprimanded. But at that point, if he had just explained he
wanted to talk to you, that we were the good guys, and offered to bring you in,
I doubt you’d have done it. Not after what had happened.”

“No. I wouldn’t have cooperated,”
admitted Jenna.

“So Cargill’s team scrubbed the ambush
site at Palomar,” said Knight, “and Jack Rourk was forced to reveal himself when
one of Cargill’s men captured Aaron. Jack did kill that man, yes, but those loyal
to Cargill are driven only by greed and power, and are absolutely ruthless and
despicable. They may not seem that way at first glance, but trust me, I know
what they’re capable of. And Cargill has the President of the United States
utterly conned.”

Blake decided he had only one more
loose end to clear up—at least for now. He caught the eye of the physicist who
was sitting nearby and nodded slowly. “So Nathan’s message to his friend at
UCLA is what triggered all of this, correct?” he said, turning back to face the
television and Edgar Knight’s image.

“Right. His message to Dr. Daniel
Walsh.”

“Aren’t you worried that Walsh has
seen this e-mail? What if he duplicates Nathan’s work?”

“Dr. Walsh is a very talented man,”
said Knight, “but from this e-mail alone, he has no chance of recreating Dr.
Wexler’s results. This isn’t a concern at all.”

“So you aren’t going to take him out?
To prevent this dangerous secret from eventually becoming public?”

Knight shook his head adamantly.
“Again, Walsh is harmless. Even after having read the e-mail. Rourk had told me
that Cargill was monitoring the man, to get a handle on Jenna if she tried to contact
him. Long story, but I actually sent a message to Walsh, urging him to block
any e-mails from Jenna to make it harder for Cargill to do this. But apparently,
Cargill was able to zero in on the two of you in another way, so I’m sure he’s
lost interest in Dan Walsh.”

A kaleidoscope of emotions danced
across Walsh’s face. Blake couldn’t tell if he was slightly offended by being
called harmless, horrified that he really had been monitored, or relieved that
he probably wasn’t being monitored any longer, not that he still wasn’t neck-deep
in the muck with them, anyway.

“So say we believe what you’ve told
us,” said Jenna. “Where do you propose we go from here?”

“I’d love for you and Aaron to come
in. So we can meet in person, and so you can see duplication in action. You’d
be under my protection and completely safe from Cargill.”

Knight sighed. “Then,
I can’t tell you
how much it would mean
to me to see a copy of your fiancé’s work,” he added, like a little girl gushing
about a unicorn. “The fact that Cargill has it is a disaster, but this way he
and I could at least maintain parity. If not, he’s sure to be unstoppable,
something this country, and ultimately civilization, will come to profoundly
regret.”

Blake glanced at Jenna but was
unable to read her expression.

“And just to circle back to the
beginning,” said Knight, “I don’t have the guy you say was taken. I don’t know
who he is. And I only learned who
you
were about an hour ago, when Jack Rourk was finally able to identify you from a
photo. We were surprised you really are a PI like you said. Somehow, Cargill
was able to deduce some things that we weren’t.”

“Jenna and I have to talk this
over,” said Blake. “Do some thinking. We have your number. So if we decide to
take you up on your proposal, and pay a visit, we’ll give you a call.”

“Fair enough,” said Knight. “And if
you have any questions or concerns, or if there is anything else I can do to
demonstrate my goodwill, don’t hesitate to ask. If you’d like, I can prepare a
demonstration of the technology for you and walk you through it over the phone.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” said
Blake noncommittally, and then ended the connection.

39

“That was un-fricking-believable!”
exulted Dan Walsh the second Knight was no longer on the line.

Blake grinned. Forcing Walsh to
remain silent, to bottle up his questions and enthusiasm, had almost turned him
into a mass of the octa-nitro-cubane explosive Knight had described.

“It’s like, how can this even be
real?” said Walsh, his excitement turning his dialect into that of a giddy
teenager. “How can I not have dreamt it all?”

“Good question,” said Blake. “
Do you
think this was real? Does
everything Knight said make sense to you?”

Jenna stared at the physicist
intently now as well, eager to hear his response.

“
Yes!
” said Walsh unreservedly. “If it’s made up, he’s spent
a lot
of time thinking things through.
Because he knew his stuff. The complexities are immense, and he navigated
through them flawlessly. And his Faraday, Maxwell comparison seems dead
accurate to me also. I’d bet my last dollar that everything he said, at least
the science part, was true.”

Blake nodded thoughtfully. “What
about you, Jenna?” he said. “Thoughts? Impressions?”

Jenna sighed. “I don’t know. I
agree with Dan. I’d be easy to fool, but the science sounded right. The logic
of his interest in Nathan sounded right. And his explanation of what happened
also. If I had to bet, I’d bet he’s completely on the level, as much as I
wanted to hate him.”

She gestured to Blake. “But what
about you, Aaron? What did you think?”

“I don’t know what to think,” he
replied. “It’s all crazy. Yet it sounds so plausible.”

The PI shook his head. “I used
to believe in God,” he continued, “but after losing my close friends and
staring into the face of true evil, I’ve become much less sure. But if there is
a God, how could he allow for such an utterly insane universe? The universe
resetting to where it was a split second earlier every time Knight uses his
device. Runaway duplication. And how could God allow a species as flawed as
humanity to control such universe-altering power? To develop a capability with
this much potential for misuse, this much potential for destruction?”

Walsh frowned. “Why would God,
or the universe, allow for the hydrogen bomb?” he said grimly, “which could
easily wipe out our planet. The answer is that fusion is a force required to power
stars. So if you want the sun, you have to live with the destructive potential
of the bomb. Maybe this is the same. Maybe time travel of less than a second is
part of the fabric of the universe, and if it wasn’t possible, maybe the
universes couldn’t exist.”

“Maybe,” said Blake, unconvinced.

“Or maybe God thinks this makes
for a more interesting universe,” added Jenna.

“He’d definitely be right about
that one,” said Blake. “But I begin to wonder if he also doesn’t have a demented
sense of humor, and thinks it’s fun to throw wild shit our way. I guess he’s
already hit us with the gem that most of the universe is made up of matter and
energy invisible to us. We already know time slows down the faster you go. So
why not this? Why not time travel that allows a phone from one frame in our
movie to jump to the previous frame, and join its earlier iteration?”

“The concept of this is messed
up,” said Jenna, nodding toward Blake. “It’s hard to deny that. But forgetting
the science for a moment, what did you think of Edgar Knight?”

“I’m not really sure. I wouldn’t
be surprised if he turned out to be everything he says he is. And I wouldn’t be
surprised if he wasn’t.”

“The real question is, do we
take him up on his offer?” said Jenna, turning to each of her companions in
turn.

“Are you including me in this?”
asked Walsh. “He didn’t know I was here, so I wasn’t part of the offer.”

“You’ve become a critical part
of our three-man army,” said Jenna with a smile. “Which in my book makes you
part of the offer. You’re free to go back to your life, or you can um . . .
hang out with us. Your choice.”

“Are you kidding?” said Walsh
eagerly. “I’m in. I’m with you whatever you decide.”

Both turned to Blake and raised
their eyebrows.

“I’m afraid we can’t take him up
on his invitation,” he said. “At least not yet. Greg Soyer still isn’t safe.
But now we know the score, and who has him. And why. So before we do anything
else, we have to pry him from Lee Cargill.”

“Maybe Knight could help,” said
Walsh.

Blake shook his head. “Maybe,
but we can’t ask him. I’m still not sure I trust him. But even if every word he
said was true, his camp might be infected with a spy or two. He admitted as
much. Moles within moles. The only thing we know for sure right now is that we
can trust ourselves.”

“It’s hard to argue with that,”
admitted Jenna.

“So we need to get your friend
back,” said Walsh. “But do you have any ideas as to
how
we do that?”

Blake smiled. “As a matter of
fact,” he replied, nodding in satisfaction, “I do.”

40

Lee Cargill and Joe Allen had
both made it to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs at almost the same time more
than three hours earlier. Cargill had raced there immediately following his meeting
with President Janney, and Allen had arrived just after his triumphant campaign
to retrieve Nathan Wexler’s flash drive.

Cargill was well aware that his
second-in-command had failed miserably in his attempt to recover Jenna Morrison
and her PI friend, but in the scheme of things, retrieving the flash drive had
been of such paramount importance it was difficult for Cargill to characterize Allen’s
actions as anything but a complete success.

While
the base inside Palomar Mountain was blacker than black, a secret kept from
even the highest ranked military, the one within Cheyenne Mountain was the most
famous underground facility in the world. First conceived as a cold-war defense
against Soviet missiles in the late 1950s, construction of the underground city
within the granite mountain was completed in 1967, beginning its life as the
operations center for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, commonly
known as NORAD. Although the facility was later quadrupled in size, a project that
was this time kept hidden from the public, the details of the initial
construction had been widely disseminated.

The
facility, carved out under a ceiling of granite that stretched seven football
fields high, was designed to withstand a thirty-megaton nuclear explosion.
Inside was a series of twenty-five-ton blast doors, a water-storage lake, and
state-of-the-art air and water purification systems. Fifteen three-story
buildings were initially constructed and placed on a system of giant springs,
ensuring they were protected from earthquakes and explosions. Even in the
sixties it had included a medical facility, store, cafeteria, fitness center,
and living quarters, and the four-fold expansion had added so much more.

Cargill
never stopped marveling at the engineering capabilities of the human race. The
longest tunnel ever constructed, the Delaware Aqueduct, had been completed in
1945, and ran eighty-five miles through solid rock, delivering half of the
water used in New York City each day.

Since
the time when projects such as this and Cheyenne Mountain had been completed,
the technology used for tunneling and the construction of underground
facilities had advanced by the same leaps and bounds as most every other technology.
By the late eighties, boring machines weighing millions of pounds were employed
to drill a thirty-mile train tunnel, over ninety feet in circumference, between
the UK and France, most of which was cut deep below the English Channel, and
advances made since this time made these machines look feeble.

But of
all the underground bases that had ever been built, using techniques that earlier
generations could only dream of, the most famous continued to be Cheyenne. The
idea of such a base built under a third of a mile of solid granite captured the
public fancy like nothing else, as did photos of the facility, which most often
evoked a single word:
cool
.

So Cheyenne
Mountain was featured in movies such as
War
Games
and
Independence Day
, and
in television shows such as
Stargate SG-1
,
among others.

Despite
its fame, Cargill had chosen it for his temporary headquarters because no place
on Earth was more secure, more impregnable. And while his group would have its
own wing, so to speak, they would be only one of a number of military groups,
black or otherwise, calling the mountain home. This meant that security was
redundant, handled by so many separate groups that a cancer within any one of
them couldn’t weaken the security organism as a whole.

Cargill and Allen were the only
two members of Q5, now about eight hundred people strong, currently within the
granite embrace of Cheyenne, but twenty others would soon join them—the twenty
with the most complete knowledge of their operation, although no one other than
Cargill knew it all, including his second-in-command.

Later that night, a dozen of
their top scientists would move in to begin work on unlocking the secrets
recorded on Nathan Wexler’s flash drive. And within a few days, eight of their
highest ranked and most trusted lieutenants would follow, all of whom had been
recalled from assignments and asked to stay at hotels of their choice in
Colorado Springs until their accommodations could be readied inside the
mountain.

These men, whom Cargill
collectively called the Inner Circle, all had considerable commando experience
in theaters around the world, and were all intensely loyal. At least they had
been at one time. This could well have changed for one of them.

There had been seven more in the
Inner Circle only a few days earlier. Five of these had been among the casualties
of the Palomar Mountain ambush. Jack Rourk was the sixth. And the man he had
ruthlessly murdered, Mark Argent, completed the tally of devastating losses.

The other odd seven hundred and
eighty members of their group, whose knowledge of the big picture was severely
limited and whose activities were varied and compartmentalized, would continue
to stay at the Palomar site. They would be relocated to Cheyenne in a few weeks
time, and remain there for six to eight months until their new facility was
ready, one President Janney had wholeheartedly supported. These other, lesser
members had no idea Q5 had anything to do with sending matter a split second
back into the past.

As Cargill was streaking through
the sky on his way to Colorado Springs, he had sent a bulletin to every member
of his group, providing the details of the new arrangement. If Knight had
declined to attack the Palomar base when Cargill and Allen and his top fifteen
lieutenants were there, it was inconceivable that he would do so now.

And Cargill’s bulletin had been
purposely misleading in one regard. He had said that he and Allen were staying
at an undisclosed location, and they would be interacting with the team as
needed through secure messaging and video channels, whereas the truth was that
they would also be based inside Cheyenne. The hollowed-out city was large and
labyrinthian enough that they could reside in a remote section, with its own
exit, without fear of being seen by anyone else from Q5. Knight and his mole
would be searching for them elsewhere, ensuring the rest of Cargill’s team
would remain unmolested.

Cargill knew that Knight would
keep his powder dry until he was sure he could eliminate him. Cutting off the
head of a snake was an overused cliché, but it was overused for a reason. And
in this instance, it could not be more apt: Edgar Knight and Lee Cargill were
the only two who really mattered.

After Cargill and Joe Allen had
arrived at Cheyenne, they had toured their new digs and checked into their
living quarters. Then, once the effects of the quick-acting gas had lifted, they
had spent almost two hours of quality time with Greg Soyer, both giving him their
undivided attention, and Cargill was convinced that no two hours had been
better spent.

After they were done with Soyer
they had moved to Cargill’s new office, from which he would be directing Q5 for
a while, although it was as much war room as office, large and high tech, with
all communications untraceable.

“So I never had the chance to
ask,” began Allen when they both were seated around a small oval conference
table, “how was your meeting with Janney? I know he agreed on your base
proposals, but what else happened?”

“I got
everything
I wanted,” reported Cargill triumphantly. “Most
importantly, he agreed that we’re too important to risk interference from
future presidents. So after he leaves office, we’ll be completely
self-contained, a law unto ourselves.”

“Perfect,” said Allen.

Cargill was about to reply when his
phone rang. He glanced at the caller ID. “It’s a woman named Amy Adams-Vanliew,”
he explained. “From Homeland. I asked her to call the instant she had any
credible leads on Aaron Blake or Jenna Morrison.”

“Hi, Amy,” he said, putting the
call on one of his larger monitors. A three-dimensional image of an attractive
blonde appeared. “What can you tell me?”

“Just got word that Aaron Blake
accessed an ATM machine in San Ysidro, California,” said the caller. “Less than
ten minutes ago.”

“Outstanding,” said Cargill.
“Where is that?”

“In southern San Diego,” replied
Adams-Vanliew. “It borders Tijuana, Mexico.”

“Thanks. How long until you have
the video of this transaction?”

“In minutes, if not seconds,”
came the reply. “I’ll send it to your phone the moment I get it. I’ve asked for
five minutes of footage on either side of the transaction.”

“Perfect. Thanks again, Amy,” he
said, ending the connection.

A smile spread across Cargill’s
face. “This is the break we’ve been looking for,” he told his second-in-command
with great enthusiasm. “I know this Blake is good. I know you weren’t surprised
he managed to stay off the radar after he left Soyer’s house. But nobody’s
perfect. He finally made a mistake.”

“I’ll believe that when I see
it,” said Allen, unconvinced.

“He’s not Superman,” said
Cargill. “How fast can we get a team to San Ysidro?”

“San Diego is riddled with
military bases,” said Allen. “I could scramble a team and have them there in
five or ten minutes.”

Cargill was about to reply when
his PDA informed him he had received the message he had been waiting for, with
the video file attached.

He ordered his personal digital
assistant to throw the footage on his primary screen and play it in real time,
four minutes in from the beginning.

The ATM’s cameras initially
showed no one in front of the device, which Cargill had expected. But about thirty
seconds later, a short Hispanic boy, his hair jet black and his clothing old
and worn, approached the machine cautiously. He couldn’t have been more than
twelve.

“What the fuck?” said Cargill.

The boy slipped a colorful
plastic card into a slot in the front of the ATM. He carefully consulted a
piece of paper in his hand and entered a password. The instant this was
completed the name Aaron Blake appeared in the corner of the video, indicating the
boy had entered a correct password and the ATM’s computer had now identified
him as the ex-Army Ranger they were after.

Next, the boy attempted to
withdraw five hundred dollars, which the ATM denied him. He grinned impishly—as
though he had been told this wouldn’t work but couldn’t help but try anyway. The
boy tried to withdraw a lesser amount, with the same result. Finally, satisfied
that he wouldn’t be getting any money from the machine, he requested an account
balance, which the ATM dutifully printed on a small slip of paper that it spit
out into his hand. He pocketed this and then turned the piece of paper he had
brought with him over. He held it in front of him, facing the camera.

A message had been written on
the paper in neat capital letters.

LEE CARGILL, WE NEED TO TALK.

This was followed by a phone
number.

Finally, the message ended with
the words, AND FEEL FREE TO SEND A TEAM HERE. YOU WON’T FIND ME.

The boy threw down the paper and
ran off, no doubt to collect his spoils for a job well done.

“Maybe this guy doesn’t make
mistakes, after all,” said Cargill, unable to hide his admiration.

Allen nodded. “The way he
slipped the noose inside Soyer’s home was as impressive as anything I’ve ever
seen.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“Are you going to call him?”

“Of course,” said Cargill. “But
let’s do some war gaming first. Let’s look at this from every angle, consider
the various directions in which this call might go, and plan accordingly.”

“He’ll be expecting you to call
back immediately.”

“That’s okay. He’ll keep.” Cargill
tilted his head and stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. “And maybe it’s time we
stop doing the expected.”