Impact

know he wouldn't sleep in the office. Eventually he would come home.

Ford waited.

An hour passed. He shifted his position, trying to stretch his cramped legs. The light went out in the top of the house. Another hour passed. Then, a few minutes past two, he saw car lights down the street and a sudden rumble from the automatic garage door as it was activated and began to rise.

A moment later headlights swept into the driveway and a Toyota Highlander eased in and glided past him; Ford ducked from his hiding place and darted behind the car into the garage. He crouched behind the rear bumper, then waited. A moment passed, the left-hand door opened, a tall man got out.

Ford rose and stepped out from behind the car.

Lockwood jumped back, staring at him. 'What the hell--?'

Ford smiled, held out his hand. Lockwood stared at it. 'You scared the daylights out of me. What are you doing here?'

Keeping the friendly smile, Ford dropped his hand and took a step forward. 'Call your man off.'

'What are you talking about? What man?'

There was a note in Lockwood's voice that Ford believed. 'The man who murdered Mark Corso and tried to kill me and my assistant this afternoon in Brooklyn, shot up a bar, and killed the bartender. You can read about it in the Times online. He was from the Agency, I'd guess. Looking for a hard drive.'

'Jesus Christ, Wyman, you know I'd never be involved in anything like that. If someone's trying to kill you, it isn't us. You better tell me what the hell you've been doing to provoke this.'

Ford stared at Lockwood. The man looked flustered and confused. The operative word was looked. After eight years in Washington, people got awfully good at deception.

'I'm still on the case.'

Lockwood's lips tightened and he seemed to be collecting his wits. 'If someone's after you, it isn't CIA. They're not that crude and you were one of their own. Of course, it might be one of those acronyms at DIA. A black agency. Those sons-of-bitches answer to nobody.' Lockwood's face turned red. 'I'll look into it immediately and if it's them, I'll take appropriate action. But Wyman, what in God's name are you doing? You're assignment is long over. I warned you before to leave this alone. Now I'm telling you: give it up now or I'll bust you. Is that clear?'

'Not clear. Another thing: my assistant is a twenty-year-old student who is completely innocent in this affair.'

Lockwood dropped his head and shook it. 'If it's one of ours, trust me, I'll find out and make a stink. If I were you, though, I'd consider who else it might be--outside the government.' He added, 'But I've got to ask you again: why the hell are you doing this? You don't have a dog in this race.'

'You wouldn't understand. I'm here to get more information. I want you to tell me what's going on, what you know.'

'Are you serious? I'm not telling you anything.'

'Not even in exchange for the information I've got?'

'Which is?'

'The object didn't fall in the Maine ocean. It struck an island.'

Lockwood took a step forward, lowered his voice. 'How do you know that?'

'I've been there. I've seen the hole.'

'Where?'

'That's the information you'll get--in return.'

Lockwood looked at him steadily. 'All right. Our physicists think the thing that went through the Earth was a chunk of strange matter. Also known as a strangelet.'

'Not a miniature black hole?'

'No.'

'What the hell is strange matter?'

'It's a superdense form of matter. Made entirely of quarks. And extremely dangerous. I don't really understand it--look it up if you want more. That's all we really have that's new. So--where's this island?'

'Name is Shark. In Muscongus Bay, about eight miles offshore. It's a small, barren island--you'll find the crater at the high point.'

Lockwood turned, pulled his briefcase out of the car, shut the door. As Ford turned to leave, Lockwood stuck out his hand and grasped his, surprising him. 'You keep your head down, be careful. If I find out our people after you, I swear I'll put a stop to it. But keep in mind it may not be our people . . .'

Ford turned, ducked out the garage door, and crossed the backyard into the darkness of the park. He moved toward the creek where the growth was thickest, crossed the stream, and came out on the path. He emerged on Quebec Street, straightened up, adjusted his suit, and ran his fingers through his hair. He again assumed the air of a neighbor taking the air, walking briskly, ducking into the shadows once to avoid a cruising cop car. Rounding several corners, he came to the end of the street where he'd parked his car, keeping to the shadows of a copse of trees.

Bad news. Peering through a screen of trees he could see two cop cars, light bars going, parked on either side of his rental car, obviously making the plates. Had Lockwood called the cops? Or maybe he'd left it parked too long: the house party was long over and some paranoid suburbanite had called the cops. Unfortunately, he'd rented the Mercedes in his real name--there'd been no choice.

Cursing under his breath, Ford melted back into the darkness and threaded his way through backyards and parkland toward American University and the bus stop on Massachusetts Avenue.

56

Abbey scanned the files on the 160 terabyte hard drive, sampling a few at random. There were hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of images of Mars, spectacular, amazing, extraordinary images of craters, volcanoes, canyons, deserts, dune fields, mountains, and plains. The radar images were equally spectacular, slices through the Martian crust. But the gamma ray data were simply tables of numbers and various arcane graphs, impossible to decipher. No images there--just numbers.

One folder caught her eye, titled GAMMA ANOMALY. Inside was a single file with a pps extension--a PowerPoint presentation, and it had been created on the disk only a few weeks before.

Abbey clicked on the pps file. A screen popped up and the presentation began.

The MMO Compton Gamma Ray Scintillator:

An Analysis of Anomalous High-Energy

Gamma Ray Emission Data

Mark Corso, Senior Data Analysis Technician

This was looking good--this must be the presentation that irritated his supervisor, Derkweiler, and got him fired. His obsession. She clicked to the next page, which showed a schematic of the planet Mars with the orbital trajectories of the MMO satellite drawn around it, the multiple orbits overlaid. Then came a graph labeled Theoretical Signature of Gamma Ray Point Source on the Surface of Mars, showing a nice, neat square wave pattern. The next one was labeled Actual Gamma Ray Signature, which was hard to make out, and then both were combined for what looked to her like a pretty tenuous match, with large