The line had been dragged halfway across the fenced area, leaving a trail of fire. The elevator building was in flames along with half a dozen pinon trees. Dead and horribly burned people littered an area around the burning vehicle.
68
ON HIS FLAT PANEL, KEN DOLBY saw the power surge spike, and then plummet and gyrate wildly.
“Isabella!” He punched in the shutdown codes again. The screen spat back:
“Shit!”
A siren went off, a banshee wail cutting across the Bridge, and a red ceiling light flashed.
“Emergency overload!” St. Vincent yelled.
A dull boom shook the room and the Visualizer screen exploded into glass fragments, which dropped like hail to the floor.
“Isabella!” Dolby cried, clutching the workstation with both hands.
St. Vincent struggled with the console, slamming breaker circuits down. “Power’s been cut on Number One! How could it happen? Impossible!”
“The beam!” Kate cried, seizing a terminal. “It’s decollimating! I’m getting . . . a kink!”
Hazelius let out a cry. “Chen! That last message! I didn’t read it all! Did you get it?”
“I can’t find it!” Chen said. “I might have lost it—lost
“Capture the output to hard copy!” Hazelius roared.
Dolby forced the surrounding chaos out of his consciousness. Isabella wasn’t responding to any of his keyboard inputs. Something had happened—the p5s must have crashed. He turned to Edelstein. “Boot up the main computer. Ignore the startup procedures and testing sequences. Just turn the son of a bitch on.”
An electrical arc seared across the shattered remnants of the screen. A dull, shuddering explosion sounded deep in the cavern, and another. The sound of Isabella gyrated wildly, throbbing, humming, wobbling. The room filled with smoke.
“We’re creating a mini black hole,” Kate said softly.
“This is
The hiss of computer snow, then a row of screens went black.
“Oh no.”
More hissing and popping. The entire security station went dead, the warning lights winking out. Isabella moaned and wobbled.
“Are you printing it out?” Hazelius screamed at Chen.
“I’ve got it, now I’m trying to find a working printer!” She hammered on the keyboard, sweat pouring down her face.
“Oh my God . . . Don’t lose it, Rae.”
“Got it,” Chen yelled. “Printing!” She jumped up and raced across the room to a printer dump. She grabbed the paper as it spooled out, ripped it off. Hazelius grabbed it from her, folded it up and stuffed it in his back pocket. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
The room shook with another muffled boom, throwing Dolby to the floor. The lights wavered, electrical arcs sizzled along the consoles. Isabella groaned deeply, as if in agony. Dolby pulled himself up and went back to his machine.
Ford grabbed his arm. “Ken! We’ve got to get out of here!”
Dolby shook him off and tried the code again.
The main computer began to boot up its startup routines. Dolby yelled, “Alan! I told you to shut down the p5s!”
“Ken, forget it! We’re leaving!” It was Ford again.
He continued working. He had to get through to Isabella. One way or another. He had to shut her down safely. The bad magnet was decohering. The two beams were wobbling offcenter in the pipe, kinking. If they touched the edge, or grazed each other . . .
“Dolby!” Hazelius gripped his shoulder. “You can’t save it! We’ve got to go!”
“Get away from me!” Dolby swung at Hazelius and missed. He turned back to the screen and was furious at what he saw. “Alan! God damn you, the p5s are still running! I told you to shut them down!”
There was no answer. He looked around, trying to locate Edelstein in the smoky room. He wiped his watery eyes and coughed. Smoke was everywhere. The Bridge was empty. Everyone had left.
He could save Isabella. He knew he could. And if he couldn’t—what was the point of living?
RUSSELL EDDY HAD DONE IT. HE had killed. God had given him the strength. The battle was joined.
The killing of the sinner had been like plugging the crowd into an electric socket. They buzzed with excitement. Energized, Eddy strode to the great titanium door. He stood before it, turned, raised the gun. “
A roar of assent from the crowd.
“Who will stand with me to confront the Beast!”
Another delirious roar. Eddy felt a bolt of strength shoot through him.
“He is the Lawless One!”
Roar.
“The Wicked One!”
It thundered uncontrollably.
“In the name of God and His only begotten son, Jesus Christ, we will destroy him!”
The mob rushed the door en masse, but the titanium would not yield.
“Stand back!” Eddy shouted. “We’re going through this door!” He aimed his gun—but a hand grabbed his fist.
“Pastor, that revolver isn’t going to work.” A man in camouflage with an AR-15 assault rifle strapped to his back stepped forward. “You see that setup over there?” He pointed to three conical devices mounted on tripods, pointing at the door. “That’s a wall-breaching demolition kit, all set up and ready to blast. The soldiers here were intending to blow a hole in this door. They wanted to get into Isabella as well.”
“How do you know?”
“Mike Frost, former Fifth Special Forces Group.” He crushed Eddy’s hand.
“Break us in, Mike.”
Frost circled the device cautiously, peering at the metal cones. “This puppy’s already packed with C-4. Darn lucky a stray bullet didn’t hit one of these during the fight. Those wires connect them all together, and here are the detonators.” He picked up a small cylinder with a wire attached. There were three of them, and he carefully pushed each one deep into the C-4 and packed it all back around.
“Tell everyone to get back.
Eddy quickly herded the milling crowd away from the setup. Frost played out the wires to their full length, flipped the cover off the detonator switch, and placed his finger on it.
“Cover your ears.”
69
FORD AND THE TEAM FOLLOWED WARDLAW into the computer room behind the Bridge. It was a long, barren room with gray walls and three rows of silent, gray plastic cabinets. It housed the fastest, most powerful supercomputer in the world. Its processors were humming, the discrete panels on each one clustered with blinking
