The Rift (11 page)

Gretchen scrambled through her bag and found the second phone at the bottom. She punched the receive button and saw the five letter groupings message on the screen. She nodded, then forwarded it, as she’d been instructed, to the number she’d memorized. Gretchen then sighed and forwarded the message to a second number, not part of the standing operating procedure of the Loop but part of the reality of her continued existence as part of the living. One could only go off the reservation as far as those in power allowed.

She dropped the second phone back in her bag.

The woman doing her feet laughed. “You’re naughty!”

Gretchen was confused for a moment.

“Only one reason to have two phones,” the woman said with a smile. “You have boyfriend and no want husband to know.”

Gretchen smiled back and wished she were indeed naughty.

Maybe she could find someone who could cook.

The term
LoJack
was invented to be the opposite of hijack, which was a little too cute for Neeley.

It was also too easy. Neeley distrusted easy. It wasn’t exactly one of Gant’s rules that he’d pounded into her during their years together, hiding from the covert world. It was implicit. Gant had taught her a lot, some of it skills that civilians paid a lot of money to learn such as skiing, parachuting, mountain climbing, and so on. However, he’d taught her the hard way. In adverse weather. Carrying heavy loads of gear. At night. And they’d done some of it under the most difficult circumstances of all: when trying to track down and kill someone or, worse, when someone was trying to do the same to them.

But the Support personnel interviewing the driver of the Prius stolen at the Gateway Arch had learned that the car was equipped with a LoJack system. At three in the morning and in a rush, Burns hadn’t had the opportunity to be picky. The VIN and unit number had been sent out to police across the country and it had turned up, driving across Illinois and on into Kentucky. Police were warned to note location of the transmitter but to not approach under any circumstances.

Neeley knew this was part of why Hannah had been quick to take over the mission of bringing down this Burns fellow. They had his location (the transmitter’s location, Neeley corrected Hannah, which was not exactly the same as the person) and could continue to track him. The issue was whether to take him down now or see where he was going and what he was planning to do.

While the Nightstalkers might be bitching about having the op taken from them, this really was the Cellar’s area of expertise: tracking down rogue agents from the covert world. If Neeley notched her various guns, there would be a lot of notches. Also her knives, her garrote, and her bare hands. Every niche had its artists, those who took the simple job, the craft, to levels others could barely conceptualize but that the artist could embody. Neeley was an artist in death. She had learned early on that the actual, final act, while important, was not the key to success. It was the preparation, the planning, the consideration of every possible contingency that were the keys to making sure the art went one way and not the other.

Thus Neeley was in a hangar at an auxiliary airfield at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. A field that was headquarters for the original Task Force 160, the Nightstalkers, to be confused with the Nightstalkers out of the Ranch outside of Area 51. Neeley thought the cover name using a Special-Ops unit another too-cute idea.

Then again, she thought as she looked at the various displays, she could simply be getting more paranoid, less patient, and just too damn old for this BS. She was seeing ghosts behind every operation lately, although the reality was there were indeed ghosts and shadows and double and triple crosses. She found the Nightstalkers’ outrage that the Cellar was taking over this Sanction a bit ironic considering how straightforward most Nightstalker missions were compared to Cellar operations. They might be bizarre and weird, but they were usually clear as to who or what the bad guy/thing was.

The Cellar was the Cellar. Few had ever heard of it. Few needed to hear of it. It was whispered of in the world of covert ops and in the halls of Washington, much like not-so-nice parents might tell their children of a horrible beast hiding in their closet that would come out and torment them if they were bad.

The airfield was near a large fenced compound, where rows and rows of grass-covered concrete bunkers with rusting steel doors had once held a large number of nuclear warheads, a leftover from a supposedly bygone day of the Cold War. Fort Campbell was also the home base of the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). It straddled the Tennessee-Kentucky border, about sixty miles northwest of Nashville.

Neeley had landed via Gulfstream just a few minutes ago and she was in a Tactical Operations Center (TOC), set up by TF-160. The signal was on I-24 approaching Nashville. From there, it could go in several directions: southwest toward Memphis (doubtful since it would have turned south earlier), south toward Birmingham, southeast toward Chattanooga and Atlanta and beyond, or east toward Knoxville. It might even backtrack north toward Indianapolis, but that was doubtful because it could have turned earlier.

Since LoJack worked on FM, it was line of sight. TF-160 had a Quick-Fix helicopter in the air, at high altitude and several miles behind the Prius, tracking it. Neeley looked at the large computer display as the Prius reached where I-24 and I-65 joined together above Nashville. In a few minutes they’d have an idea which general direction it was moving on to.

No one else in the TOC had any clue why they were following the car. The orders had come in from higher and thus they would obey. It was a mind-set Neeley was used to but sometimes found disturbing, because the people at the top sometimes might have their own agenda. She’d traveled to South America earlier in the year with Roland to deal with two high-ranking CIA agents who’d manipulated data for their own personal advancement.

Neeley trusted Hannah with her life. She had to. Time and again she’d gone on missions, trusting only Hannah’s word.

But.

Gant had told her to trust no one.

Ever.

But he’d trusted her. He’d died in her arms.

If it were easy, anyone could do it. The schizophrenic nature of covert operations where the simple operation could actually be a double-cross, which could actually be a cover for a triple-cross, which might simply be some bureaucrat trying to advance their career, not giving a damn how many operatives died because of the lies and manipulations that took their toll.

What was truth?

Neeley’s phone buzzed. There was no question who it was, since only one person had her number. Neeley pulled the phone out but paused before activating it. The weight of that thought, that there was only one person who had her cell number, had never pressed down upon her with so much force.

She hit accept. “Yes?”

“Someone is using the Loop,” Hannah said without preamble. “Mrs. Sanchez was contacted by one of her former personnel. The message is heading to a third cutout.”

“Someone’s being very careful.”

“The message originated in the Knoxville, Tennessee, area,” Hannah said.

“Who do we know there?” Neeley asked as she looked at the map display and spotted Knoxville, to the direct east of Nashville along I-40.

“We’re checking the files,” Hannah said. “But it seems to be coming from the outside to the inside.”

From a civilian?
Neeley wondered. She’d been a civilian once herself. A civilian who’d walked into an airport with a bomb packed inside a gaily wrapped package, before the time of 9/11. That was when she met Gant and left the civilian world far behind.

Neeley stepped back into the TOC and looked at the screen. The flashing dot indicating the Prius had just passed downtown Nashville. It then moved onto I-40 east.

“My Sanction is heading in that direction.”

“Yes. That is why I called.”

Something was off. Neeley had known Hannah too many years. “This is a Sanction, correct?”

“Correct. The Sanction has three confirmed murders.”

“Should I allow the Sanction to get to wherever and whatever his objective is?”

A long two seconds. Silence followed. “I’ll get back to you on that as quickly as I can.”

The phone went dead and Neeley stared at it for a very long time, ten seconds, while her mind went into dark corners.

Which wasn’t unusual.

Ivar’s locker was squared away, his deployment gear was packed according to Protocol, and now they were driving alongside that third-longest airstrip in the world at Groom Lake, aka the heart of Area 51. Doc was at the wheel of a jeep, only slightly more modern than Colonel Orlando’s had been, which meant it was ancient. Ivar had to wonder why the Nightstalkers used such antiquated vehicles here.

Doc had been talking, almost nonstop, all morning and into the afternoon, bombarding Ivar not only with the history of Rifts and Fireflies, but also dipping deep into his own well of knowledge to discuss various theories.
His
theories on Rifts. It wouldn’t have taken Frasier, the Nightstalkers’ shrink, to point out that Doc was overcompensating, threatened by another scientist’s presence on the team.

Ivar, being a physicist, of course, didn’t make such a psychological analysis of the situation. He just thought Doc was acting pretty much like every professor he’d ever worked for on his path to get his own PhD. Self-centered, convinced they had all the answers when they didn’t even know what most of the questions were, and, most of all, being about one-upmanship.

Aka a dick.

Two massive hangar doors cut into the side of Groom Mountain were partially open, and Doc drove right up to them, guards waving them through after scanning their eyes. Ivar caught glimpses of aircraft he didn’t recognize scattered throughout the hangar, but Doc drove straight to the far wall. Two guards scanned their eyes once more and then allowed them access to an elevator.

“They rely a lot on eyes being the true window into our souls here,” Ivar said.

“Save it for Eagle,” Doc said shortly. “He likes that kind of philosophical stuff.”

They got into the elevator.

“It takes a while,” Doc said as the doors slid shut after they entered.

“How far down?” Ivar asked as the elevator began to accelerate into the Earth.

“Two miles.”

That took ten minutes and it seemed Doc had run out of things to talk about, so the only noise was the whirring of the elevator’s engine. Actually, Doc never ran out of things to talk about or ways to spread the wealth of his knowledge. His mind had slipped into a dark rut—more a valley, actually—which it always did whenever he went down to the Can. The left side of his brain, the numbers side, was calculating the tons of pressure accumulating around them as they descended and how small a mass of protoplasm his body would be crushed into if it all collapsed.

Sometimes being smart had its disadvantages.

“The Can is a Super-Kamiokande,” Doc said as he gave up, knowing he’d be crushed into a tiny, tiny object if everything imploded.

“Like the one in Japan?”

“Yes. Early on when they started digging into Groom Mountain to develop the base, they did soundings and found a large, natural void deep underground. No one thought it was of much use until we realized we needed to build the Can.”

“And the Can detects Rifts.” Orlando would have been proud, because Ivar made it a statement, not a question.

The elevator came to a halt and Doc opened the metal gate. A corridor carved out of solid rock beckoned. They began the two-hundred-yard walk down it, fluorescent lights flickering overhead.

It ended, opening to a cavern eighty yards in diameter.

“The Japanese have one, we have one, and the Russians have one,” Doc said as they walked out onto metal grating suspended over still dark water.

“So you can triangulate.” Another statement.

Two people were on duty, staring at computer monitors with the glazed look of someone who spent 99.9 percent of their time doing nothing with nothing happening. Ivar understood that. He’d spent a lot of bench time doing the exact same thing.

Doc and Ivar walked over. “The Can picks up muonic activity, which Rifts give off when they begin to form. Gives us thirty-eight minutes of warning at least. That’s the fastest from first indication to activation recorded. We usually get more time.”

Ivar looked over the shoulder of an operator. Four large displays were further broken down into data boxes with various electronic readings, graphs, and charts. He began to ask questions of the two operators, much to the irritation of Doc, who finally walked away to a stack of printouts and began going through them.

Even the operators eventually had enough of the questioning and turned back to their screens. Ivar walked out onto the metal grating that extended over the dark pool of water covering the stainless steel tank, which was sixty meters wide and deep. Along the walls of the tank, over 20,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) were patiently waiting for incoming muons. PMTs are extremely sensitive light sensors that can detect a single photon as it travels through and reacts with water. They were all linked together with the output displayed on the computers at the workstations.