Black Rain

It was bigger than her, she knew that, bigger than them all, but she was the one carrying the knowledge and it left her feeling very alone, isolated, back out on that island that Hawker had so accurately described. And though Hawker was still in the dark, he had a sense of what she was going through and in some way had begun to share that weight. It had given them a bond and she had even begun to trust him.

She hated to admit it but she missed his presence, even his bad jokes. She found herself looking forward to his return, to a degree she would not have expected.

At the moment though, her attention returned to the march and the latest delay in their progress. McCarter had stopped the procession for another Discovery Channel moment, showing the others a huge rubber tree with its smooth, plasterlike wood and a trunk that spread apart like a group of massive vertical blades. A thin black line of ants were crawling along the bark, hundreds of them in single file with little leaves in their mouths.

Ants! He’d stopped the hike to watch some ants!

“Look at them,” he said. “Don’t they remind you of us, carrying their little packs?”

She shook her head. “Not unless you can show me one who keeps stopping the group and holding everyone up.”

His face wrinkled, he’d been as giddy as a schoolboy since the discovery of the Wall, with a demeanor to match. “No,” he said. “But see this little one over here bossing the others around. He reminds me of—”

She gave him the look and he stopped midsentence. With a smile he turned from the ants and reengaged in the trek, launching into a whistling chorus of “High Hopes” as he went. This time she couldn’t help but laugh.

By the fifth day, they came across evidence of a small structure. It wasn’t much more than a loose pile of stone covered with plant growth and moss, but it was enough to tell them they were in the right area. A few hours later they stumbled upon a sight Danielle could not explain, even as she gazed at it in wonder.

She stepped from the shadows of the rainforest into a large, circular clearing populated by nothing more than scrubby weeds and pale, dry grasses. The darkness they’d hiked through for the past five days cowered behind her, while the blinding sunlight poured in unchallenged. Here, the forest surrendered a dominion that held sway for hundreds of miles in every direction. But that was the smaller surprise.

Danielle squinted against the sudden brightness, using a hand to shield her eyes. At the center of the clearing a gray stone pyramid towered above the flat, open ground. Its steep walls were smooth and unmarked on three sides, while a single stairway ran up its face to a small, square roof, fifteen stories above the forest floor.

A structure of unmistakably Mayan design, as perfect as could be—and yet, for reasons Danielle, and later McCarter, found hard to explain, it seemed out of place and foreign. Not only shouldn’t it have been there in the greater sense of all they knew about the Mayan race, but it shouldn’t have appeared as it did. It should have been buried in a tangled web of living trees, vines and soil, just as McCarter had been telling the group since day one. It should have been crumbling under the weight of its own stonework, failing and dilapidated as it drowned in the thickening rainforest and its ever-constricting grip.

But it was none of these things. It stood unencumbered and menacing, defiantly unbowed. It unnerved her in a way she could not explain.

At the mere sight of it, the other members of the team began shouting, whooping and hollering in celebration and congratulating one another. Several of them began running toward the pyramid, racing to the foot of the temple as if the first to touch it would win some unspoken prize.

They sprinted past, pausing briefly to congratulate her, before corralling McCarter and dragging him off with them, victorious.

Danielle let them go, preferring to savor the moment. As she walked farther into the clearing and its blissful daylight, she felt a great sense of accomplishment. At long last, she had something concrete to point to. The temple could not disappear like the other leads had. It could not turn out to be a sham or a hoax or a mistake in translation. It was tangible, concrete and irrefutable. She would find what they were looking for and she would return to Washington a hero.

CHAPTER 19

Matt Blundin sat in Stuart Gibbs’ office, aggravated and exhausted at the end of a seventeen-hour day. The director sat across from him, leaning back in his chair, head tilted upward, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.

At 2:00 A.M. in Washington, Blundin had just finished explaining the nuances of a developing situation: a security breach and data theft that he’d only recently discovered.

Gibbs brought himself forward and exhaled loudly. “What else do you have?”

“That’s it,” Blundin said. “All we know right now is what happened.”

“I don’t give a shit about what happened,” Gibbs cursed. “I want to know how it happened, why it happened and who the fuck made it happen.” With the last phrase, Gibbs threw the report across the desk, where it fanned out and crashed into Blundin’s prominent gut.

Blundin rubbed his neck. He was sweaty and grimy after such a long day and ready to lash out. But that would just make for a longer night. He plucked the report from his lap and placed it back on the desk, out of Gibbs’ reach, then pulled a dented pack of Marlboros from his breast pocket.

He drew one out and stuck it between his lips. Two flicks of the lighter and the tip was glowing red. Only after a long drag on the cigarette did he begin to reply.

“Look,” he said, white smoke billowing from his mouth. “I can tell you how it was probably done. I can even tell you when it was probably done, but that doesn’t help us with the who, because it could have been anybody on the network, either inside this building or out.”

Gibbs leaned back, looking pleased for the first time all night. “Let’s start with how.”

“Fine,” Blundin said. “We can start there, but we’re going to end up right back where we are now.” He exhaled another cloud of carcinogens and reached for an ashtray to lay the cigarette on. “It all starts with the codes. Our system uses a matrix code generated from a set of prime numbers and then exercised through a complex algorithm.”

Gibbs seemed lost already, which came as no surprise to Blundin. Maybe this was why he hadn’t listened in the first place.

Blundin leaned forward, demonstrating with his hands. “Just think of it like a combination lock. If you don’t know the combination you can eventually figure it out by checking every number against every other possible combination of numbers. You know, one, one, one, then one, one, two, then one, one, three—until eventually you get to thirty-six, twenty-six, thirty-six and it finally opens. Only in our case, we’re not talking about forty numbers or whatever you have on one of those locks, we’re talking about a massive set of possibilities.”

“How massive?”

“Try a one with seventeen zeroes after it,” Blundin said. “So many numbers that if you counted a thousand a second it would take you a hundred years just to count that high.”

Blundin eased back in his chair. “And that’s just to count them. To crack the code, each number would have to be checked against every other number, and then tested to see if it worked.”

By the look on his face, Gibbs seemed to understand. “What about the vendor, the manufacturer who sold us this encryption?”

“No,” Blundin said. “The illegal entries were made using an inactive master code reserved by the computer in case the system locks up.”

“What about an ex-employee?” Gibbs asked. “Someone who might know the system, but quit or got fired.”

“I already checked. No one higher than a receptionist has left Atlantic Safecom since we installed the system.”

“And here?”

“Every time one of our employees leaves, their code and profile are scrubbed from the system—and like I already said, it wasn’t an employee code, it was a master code.”

Gibbs pounded a fist on the desk. “Well, goddamnit, how the hell did they get the master code? That’s what I’m asking you. I mean, they didn’t fucking guess it, did they?”