“How would you interpret that thing on the screen?”
Chen look up and her eyes widened. “Jeez. I’ve no idea.”
“It’s moving,” said Dolby. “It’s, like, emerging.”
The detectors sang, the room humming with their high-pitched whine.
“Rae, it’s garbage data,” Edelstein said. “The computer’s crashed—how can it be real?”
“I’m not so sure it is garbage,” said Hazelius, staring. “Michael, what do you think?”
The particle physicist stared at the image, mesmerized. “It doesn’t make any sense. None of the colors and shapes correspond to particle energies, charges, and classes. It isn’t even radially centered on CZero—it’s like a weird, magnetically bound plasma cloud of some kind.”
“I’m telling you,” said Dolby, “it’s moving, it’s coming out. It’s like a . . . Jesus, what the hell is it?” He closed his eyes hard, trying to chase away the ache of exhaustion. Maybe he was seeing things. He opened them. It was still there—and expanding.
“Shut it down! Shut Isabella down now!” Mercer cried.
Suddenly the panel filled with snow and went dead black.
“What the hell?” Chen cried, her fingers pounding the keyboard. “I’ve lost all input!”
A word slowly materialized in the center of the panel. The group fell into silence, staring. Even Volkonsky’s voice, which had been raised in high excitement, lapsed as if cut off. Nobody moved.
Then Volkonsky began to laugh, a tense, high-pitched laugh, hysterical, desperate.
Dolby felt a sudden rage. “You son of a bitch, you did this.”
Volkonsky shook his head, flapping his greasy locks.
“You think that’s funny?” Dolby asked, getting up from the workstation with clenched fists. “You hack a forty-billion-dollar experiment and you think it’s
“I not hack anything,” said Volkonsky, wiping his mouth. “You shut hell up.”
Dolby turned and faced the group. “Who did this? Who messed with Isabella?” He turned back to the Visualizer and read out loud the word hanging there, spat it out in his fury. GREETINGS.
He turned back. “I’ll kill the bastard who did this.”
2
SEPTEMBER
WYMAN FORD GAZED AROUND THE 17TH Street office of Dr. Stanton Lockwood III, science adviser to the president of the United States. From long experience in Washington, Ford knew that while an office was designed to show the outer man, the public man, it always betrayed somewhere the secret of the inner man. Ford cast his eyes about, looking for the secret.
The office was done up in that style Ford called IWPB—Important Washington Power Broker. The antiques were all authentic and of the finest quality—from the Second Empire desk, as big and ugly as a Hummer, to the gilded French portico clock and the hushed Sultanabad rug on the floor. Nothing that hadn’t cost a bloody fortune. And of course, there was the obligatory “power wall” of framed diplomas, awards, and photographs of the office’s occupant with presidents, ambassadors, and cabinet members.
Stanton Lockwood wanted the world to see him as a man of importance and wealth, powerful and discreet. But what came through to Ford was the grimness of the effort. Here was a man determined to be something he wasn’t.
Lockwood waited until his guest was seated before he eased himself into the armchair flanking the other side of a coffee table. He crossed his legs and smoothed a long white hand down the crease in his garbardine pants. “Let’s dispense with the usual Washington formalities,” he said. “I’m Stan.”
“Wyman.” He settled back and observed Lockwood: handsome, late fifties, with a hundred-dollar haircut, his fitness-club physique beautifully draped in a charcoal suit. Probably a squash player. Even the photo on the desk of three perfect towheaded children with their attractive mother had all the individuality of a financial-services advertisement.
“Well,” said Lockwood, in a meeting-now-under-way tone, “I’ve heard excellent things about you, Wyman, from your former colleagues at Langley. They’re sorry you left.”
Ford nodded.
“So awful what happened to your wife. I’m so terribly sorry.”
Ford willed his body not to stiffen. He never had been able to figure out a way to respond when people mentioned his dead wife.
“They tell me you spent a few years in a monastery.”
Ford waited.
“The monastic life not to your liking?”
“It takes a special kind of person to be a monk.”
“So you left the monastery and hung up your shingle.”
“A man’s got to make a living.”
“Any interesting cases?”
“No cases at all. I’ve just opened the office. You’re my first client—if that’s what this is about.”
“It is. I have a special assignment for you, to start immediately. It will last for ten days, maybe two weeks.”
Ford nodded.
“There’s a little catch I need to mention up front. Once I’ve described the assignment, rejecting it is not an option. It’s in the United States, it doesn’t involve risk, and it won’t be difficult—at least in my opinion. Succeed or fail, you can never talk about it, so I’m afraid you can’t use it to buff up your resume.”
“And the remuneration?”
“One hundred thousand dollars cash under the table, plus an aboveboard G-11 salary commensurate with your cover position.” He raised his eyebrows. “Ready to hear more?”
No hesitation. “Go ahead.”
“Excellent.” Lockwood slid out another folder. “I see you have a B.A. in anthropology from Harvard. We need an anthropologist.”
“Then I’m afraid I’m not your man. That was just my B.A. I went on to MIT and took a doctorate in cybernetics. My work for the CIA was mostly in cryptology and computers. I left anthropology far behind.”
Lockwood waved his hand dismissively, his Princeton ring flashing in the light. “Not important. Are you familiar with, ah, the Isabella project?”
“Hard to avoid hearing about it.”
“Forgive me if I repeat what you already know then. Isabella was completed over two months ago—at a cost of forty billion dollars. It’s a second-generation superconducting supercollider particle accelerator. Its purpose is to probe the energy levels of the Big Bang and explore some exotic ideas for generating power. This is the president’s pet project—the Europeans just completed the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and he wanted to maintain America’s lead in particle physics.”
“Naturally.”
“Getting Isabella funded was no cakewalk. The left carped that the money should have been spent on the halt and the lame. The right whined that it was just another big-government spending program. The president steered a course between Scylla and Charybdis, rammed Isabella through Congress, and saw it to completion. He sees it as his legacy and he’s anxious to have it running smoothly.”
“No doubt.”
“Isabella is essentially a circular tunnel, three hundred feet underground and forty-seven miles in circumference, in which protons and antiprotons are circulated in opposite directions at almost the speed of light. When the particles are brought into collision, they duplicate energy levels not seen since the universe was a millionth of second old.”
“Impressive.”
“We found a perfect site for it—Red Mesa, a five-hundred-square-mile tableland on the Navajo Indian Reservation, protected by two-thousand-foot cliffs and riddled with abandoned coal mines, which we converted to underground bunkers and tunnels. The U.S. government pays six million a year in leasing fees to the Navajo tribal government in Window Rock, Arizona, an arrangement which was most satisfactory to all parties involved.
“Red Mesa is uninhabited, and there’s just one road to the top. There are a few Navajo towns near the base
