good.'
Niles was calming when he noticed Alice, Jack, and Carl on the walkway above the desk area, and he hurriedly moved up the stairs to the three carrying the printout and handed it to Alice.
'See what you can do with this, will you?' He saw the blank expressions on Everett's and Collins's faces and tried to quickly explain while Alice read his findings. 'That son of a bitch Reese was on the new system yesterday and observed the saucer attack in real time. Europa, our newest and most powerful computing system, says he made a damn copy of it!' Niles grimaced and snatched his glasses off, then looked at the faces before him. 'Reese is missing! He didn't report for work this morning. Jack, he has to be found and found fast, there's no telling what he's up to.' Then Niles abruptly turned and placed his glasses back on and irately called out to one of the computer team about scanning a search area too fast, then he turned back to face Collins. 'I mean it, Jack, this is no good. It's against all our rules here in the computer center,' he called out as he turned away and went back to the main floor to continue his search for the saucer.
Alice watched him go and shook her head. Then she again scanned the paper she held. She removed her glasses and looked at the two men in front of her, thinking for a moment.
She quickly walked to an empty workstation and seated herself in the large swivel chair, then opened a drawer, rummaged through it for a moment, then closed it. She repeated this with the other drawers until she found what she was looking for. The two officers exchanged a questioning glance as they watched.
Finally she looked up and smiled. 'Reese may be working for a very dangerous enemy.'
'He's on the senator's watch list, along with almost everyone with a clearance to the computer center,' Everett said.
'I take it it's unusual for him to miss work like this?' Jack asked.
Alice thought a moment while staring at the darkened computer monitor on the missing man's desk. 'Not in and of itself, no, but like everyone here, he does have his quarters inside the complex. The computer system would have notified him of an Event alert, so he hasn't checked his messages if he's off base, as per his orders.' She wheeled around in her chair. 'He's gone bad. Niles is right. He has to be found.'
'What can we do?' Jack asked.
Alice turned back to the blank computer screen and tapped a few commands into the keyboard and the monitor lit up. At the same time she reached behind her chair without looking, offering to Collins the paper that Compton had given her earlier.
Collins took the offered printout. It was columns of military times and what looked like computer commands.
'That is a printout of the last few commands that were asked of this station. SOP for someone who doesn't show up for work, then signed off base and didn't return. We automatically check their computer for what its last commands had been.'
Collins handed the paper to Everett, and he too looked it over.
'There,' Alice said, straightening up. 'All phone lines are monitored and recorded in this facility. It seems Mr. Reese used his security clearance and his position in the computer center to shut down the monitoring devices for a bank of phones in The Ark. He tried to cover his tracks, but doing that with someone like Niles and Pete Golding is a foolish thing. It took both of them all of three minutes to get through the firewall Reese had set up on this hard drive. Now, according to this'--she gestured at the screen--'there were only two calls made from the complex at the time the bartender noticed him inside the club. One was to a home inside Las Vegas City limits that we checked on already, made by a sergeant to a woman he met at Lake Mead. The other call went to a home in Vidalia, California.' Alice picked up the phone and punched a few numbers and then waited. 'Send the sergeant in, please,' she said, and hung up. 'I had Staff Sergeant Bateman in the security center run a few things for me using your network into the Europa XP-7, the new Cray system Niles was just speaking of.'
As they waited, the comp center doors slid open with a hiss and the sergeant was allowed in. He saw Alice and walked up to the small group. He stood at attention when he came to a stop and noticed Everett and Collins.
'Normally I would have gone through you of course, Jack, but as I said, you don't even know your department's capabilities yet, and this was rather important and urgent. I believe the sergeant and Europa have given you a starting point in your search for Reese, but listen to how it was found in case you find a flaw in the pattern.'
Collins just nodded, and then looked from Alice to the sergeant.
'This is what we have so far, ma'am,' the sergeant said, holding a file out to Alice.
'Just give us a verbal report. If I look at one more scrap of paper this morning...'
The sergeant nodded and looked at Jack. 'What we did was run the two numbers through NSA. They were both dead ends as no calls were actually made to those phones from Nevada. This was confirmed by AT&T, Sprint, and the actual residents of those homes. Thus we were left with a dead end. Our friend had managed somehow to scramble the hard lines leading out of the club and the transmission to the phone company's Comsat. We were stuck until we examined the security monitors from The Ark.' The sergeant handed the major a cased computer disc. 'We came up with this thanks to Dr. Cummings in Photo-Recon.'
Jack took the disc and handed it to Alice, who inserted it into the hard drive at Reese's station. Alice used the touch feature the system was set up with, and her finger touched the header
'What in the hell did we just see?' Carl asked.
The sergeant just nodded his head at the video. 'The doc fixed this up for us.'
On the screen the same video started, then suddenly stopped. The screen started flashing the frames forward one frame at a time, at the same instant the picture was computer-enhanced to zoom in on the keypad on the face of the pay telephone as Reese's fingers jerked over the metal numbers.
'We washed this through Europa and asked the computer what numbers Reese could have been dialing.' The sergeant pointed to the screen as a full-framed picture of Robert Reese appeared as he just stepped up to the phone. The frame froze and a computer-generated tracking grid covered the man's entire body. 'Now here, Europa started her measurements. We at first thought the new system had misunderstood the command, but we were in for a surprise, at least I was.'
As they watched, green numbers started appearing in rapid succession along Reese's body and changed as he moved and leaned forward into the small kiosk that the phones were tucked away in. The grid stayed fluid and conformed to his body as he moved, changing the computer's calculated measurements. As he started dialing, another grid, this one red, appeared over the keypad his fingers had just started to touch. More numbers appeared, small arrows going this way and that across the numbered pad and Reese's fingers.
'Doc Cummings explained what was happening. He said that Europa started by taking the video measurements of Reese himself, height, estimated arm length, and so on. Then it measured the height of the phone kiosk from blueprints of the complex, and the height of the keypad in relevant terms to Reese's measurements. As he punched numbers, the computer really went to work, running the constant figures his movements caused in minute increments.'
Again they watched as the numbers were now changing at a rapid pace, so fast they couldn't keep up with the calculations. When Reese stopped punching numbers, the calculations stopped. Then a window opened and on the display over a hundred phone numbers appeared. Some had the same area codes, but most looked as if they were random.
'Europa narrowed the phone numbers Reese could have called down to a hundred and fourteen just through the measurements taken of his movements in relative distance to the phone height and distance from his body and the minute distance his fingers moved over the numbered buttons on the phone's keypad.'
'That's still a lot of numbers, Sergeant,' Everett said. He looked at Jack and saw he was smiling. The major must have known what was coming.
'What did Europa use to cross-reference these numbers?' Jack asked.
'That's good, Major. Yes, she did cross-reference.'
As they watched the screen, the monitor tinted green. They could see the tape as it played again and Reese
