Crane turned toward the door.
“Wait!” Asher said in a low, urgent voice.
But at that moment the door opened. And Admiral Spartan stood silhouetted in the light of the corridor, a red all-access passcard in his hand, flanked by marines with M1 carbines in their hands.
21
Spartan looked from Crane to Asher and back again, his expression unreadable. Then he took a step into the room.
“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.
The room fell uncomfortably silent. Crane glanced at Asher, who had the stunned look of a deer caught in a pair of headlights.
When there was no answer, Admiral Spartan turned to the marines. “Take him outside,” he said, pointing at Crane.
One of the marines beckoned Crane forward with his rifle barrel. Crane swallowed painfully. The wonder of the last several minutes had evaporated, replaced by a painful sense of vulnerability.
He stepped into the hall with a sinking feeling. Spartan closed and locked the door behind him.
Crane waited in the narrow passageway, the marines standing silently on either side. His mouth was dry, and his heart raced uncomfortably in his chest. Sounds of raised voices began to filter through the door; he listened intently but could not make out the words. What is happening? He wasn’t sure who to feel more worried about: himself or the old man in his room.
Five dreadful minutes passed. Then the door opened and Spartan emerged. He glared at Crane. “Come with me, Doctor,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“You will find it easier to just follow orders” was the clipped response.
Crane’s eyes strayed back to the rifles in the hands of the marines. Clearly, he had no recourse but to obey. He marched down the corridor behind Spartan, the marines swinging into place behind him. A few passing technicians stopped to stare at their little parade. “Where—?” Crane began again, then stopped himself. Anything he said now would just dig the hole even deeper. Far better to say nothing, nothing at all…until he had to.
But the silent questions remained. How much does Spartan know? What did Asher tell him? They’d no doubt looked guilty as hell: three conspirators, meeting in secret…
This was, at heart, a military operation. He’d signed an awful lot of agreements up on the oil platform: God only knew what kind of personal rights he’d waived. It occured to him, with an unpleasant chill, that even if Spartan didn’t know everything he no doubt had the means, the techniques—and, most likely, the right—to find out whatever he wanted.
They stopped before an elevator. The guards took up positions on either side while Spartan pressed the down button. Within moments the doors whisked open; Spartan stepped in, waited for the guards to usher Crane inside, then pressed the button for deck 7—the lowest non-classified level on the Facility.
What was it Asher had just told him? Spartan may soon take full command of the operation, with Korolis as his enforcer. Crane struggled to regulate his breathing, appear calm.
The elevator drifted to a stop and the doors rolled back onto deck 7. Spartan stepped out and led the way to an unlabeled door. He opened it with his red passcard while the marines once again took up positions on either side.
The room beyond was small and bare, the only furniture a long table with two chairs set along the near side. Behind the chairs were two huge, free-standing lights, their bulbs backed by metal reflectors. They were both aimed at a spot on the far wall—a spot that was approximately head level. Seeing these lights, Crane felt his heart begin to race even faster. His worst fears were confirmed.
“Walk over to the far wall, Dr. Crane,” Spartan said in an expressionless voice.
Crane walked slowly to the wall.
“Turn around, please.”
Crane did as ordered.
There was a sudden, metallic snap as both lights burst into brilliance, almost physically pinning him against the wall with their candlepower. He squinted and instinctively raised his hand to his eyes.
“Stand still, Dr. Crane,” came the voice of Spartan, invisible behind the wall of white light.
Crane’s mind began to work frantically. Stay calm, he told himself. Stay calm. What did he have to worry about? He was a member of the medical staff. He was supposed to be here. It wasn’t like he was a spy or anything…
But then he remembered the deadly serious security at the Barrier, the fear he’d just seen on Asher’s face.
From behind the wall of light came a single click. There was a moment of stasis. And then, one after the other, the spotlights went out.
“Have a seat, Doctor,” said Spartan. He was seated at the table now, and a folder Crane had not noticed before was open in front of him.
Warily, heart still hammering, Crane took the empty seat. Spartan put his hand on the folder and pushed it toward him. It contained a single sheet of paper with about four paragraphs of text beneath a Department of Defense letterhead.
“Sign at the bottom, please,” Spartan said. And he placed a gold pen carefully on the table.
“I already signed everything when I was topside,” Crane said.
Spartan shook his head. “You didn’t sign this.”
“May I read it first?”
“I wouldn’t suggest it. You’ll just frighten yourself needlessly.”
Crane picked up the pen, reached for the paper, hesitated. A little distantly, he wondered if he was signing an admission of guilt pro res before he’d even confessed to harboring secret knowledge. He realized it made little difference. Taking a deep breath, he signed the sheet and pushed it back to Spartan.
The admiral closed the folder and squared it sharply on the table. Just at that moment, a knock sounded on the door.
“Come in,” Spartan said.
The door opened and a naval officer stepped inside. He saluted Spartan, handed him a white envelope, saluted a second time, then turned and left the room.
Spartan held up the envelope, letting it dangle from his thumb and index finger. Then—almost teasingly—he extended his arm toward Crane.
Crane took the envelope gingerly.
“Open it,” Spartan said.
After a moment’s hesitation, Crane tore away one edge of the envelope and upended it into his hand. A plastic wafer—like a credit card, only thicker—fell out. One side was clear, and he could see a forest of microchips embedded within. He turned it over to find his own face staring up—as he had looked minutes before, blinded by the lights. There was a bar code beneath this photograph and the words RESTRICTED ACCESS printed in red beside them. A brass clip was fastened to one end.
“That, along with retinal and finger-matrix scans, will allow you past the Barrier,” Spartan said. “Keep it safe, Doctor, and on your person at all times. There are very severe penalties for losing such a card or letting it fall into the wrong hands.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Crane said.
“I’m authorizing you access to the classified section of the Facility. Over the advice of Commander Korolis, I might add.”
Crane stared at the ID card as relief flooded over him. Oh, God, he thought. Oh, my God. This place is making me paranoid.
“I see,” he said, still a little stupid from surprise. Then: “Thank you.”
“Why?” Spartan asked. “What did you think was happening?”
And Crane could have sworn that—just for an instant—a bemused smile flitted across the admiral’s features before they dissolved once again into impassivity.
22
Forty miles off the coast of Greenland, the Storm King oil platform hovered stoically between squall-dark skies and the angry sea. A passing vessel—or, more likely, a reconnaissance satellite, its orbit re-tasked by a curious foreign government—would notice nothing unusual. A few riggers moved slowly around the platform’s superstructure, appearing to work the derricks or inspect equipment. But by and large, Storm King seemed as quiet as the surrounding sea was restless. It looked as if the giant platform was asleep
.
But within its steel skin, Storm King was a hive of activity. The LF2-M Deeply Submersible Resupply Unit—the Tub—had just returned from its daily journey to the Facility, two miles below. And now almost three dozen people were in the Recovery Chamber, waiting, as a giant winch hoisted the unmanned supply module up through an oversized hatch in the lowest level of the oil platform. Gingerly, the ungainly vessel was plucked from the ocean, then swiveled away from the hatch and lowered into a receiving bay. Under the watchful eye of a marine, two supply officers unsealed the hatch in the Tub’s nose, revealing an access bulkhead. Opening this in turn, the officers began unloading the Tub, removing everything that had been stowed inside at the Facility. A remarkable diversity of objects emerged: large black waste containers, bound for the incinerator; carefully sealed confidential packets; medical samples in biohazard boxes, heading for testing too exotic to be performed in the Facility itself. One by one, the items were passed out to the waiting crew, who in turn began to disperse throughout the oil platform. Within fifteen minutes, the Recovery Chamber was empty except for the marine, the winch operator, and the two supply officers, who closed the access bulkhead and sealed the Tub’s forward hatch, readying it for the next day’s journey.
One of the waiting crew, a Science Services courier, had come away from the Recovery Chamber with a half dozen sealed envelopes under his arm. The courier was a relatively recent arrival on the platform. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and limped slightly as he walked, almost as if one leg was a little shorter than the other. He gave his name as Wallace.
Returning to the science facilities set up on the rig’s Production Level, Wallace moved briskly from lab to lab despite his limp, delivering the first five envelopes to their intended recipients. But he did not immediately deliver the last. Instead, he retreated to his tiny office, which was tucked away in a far corner.
Wallace carefully closed and locked the door behind him. Then he opened the envelope and let the contents—a single CD—drop into his lap. Turning to his computer, he eased the disc into the drive. A quick examination of the contents revealed a single file, labeled “108952.jpg”—an image, probably a photograph. He clicked on the file icon and the computer obediently displayed it on the screen: sure enough, a ghostly black-and-white image that was clearly an X-ray.
But Wallace was not interested in the image—only in something it contained.
Although his credentials had been excellent and the checks on his background impeccable, Wallace was nevertheless a new arrival on the Deep Storm project, and thus held a low security rating. This meant, among other things, that his computer was only a dumb terminal, slaved to the rig’s mainframe, without a hard disk of its own and crippled from running executable CD files. As a result it could run only approved software; no rogue programs could be installed on the machine.
At least, that was the theory.
Wallace pulled the keyboard to him, opened the primitive text editor that came pre-installed with the operating system, and typed in a short program:
Wallace examined the program, running through its steps in his head and making sure the logic was sound. He gave a grunt of satisfaction, then glanced once again at the X-ray image.
Each screen pixel of the image occupied a single byte in the jpeg file on the disc. His short but powerful program would strip out the two least significant bits from each byte, convert them from numbers to their ASCII equivalent, then display the resulting letters on the screen.
Quickly, he compiled and ran the program. A new window opened on his monitor, but it did not contain the X-ray image this time. Instead, a text message appeared.
REQUEST DELAY ON MAKING 2ND BREACH ATTEMPT PENDING NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN CLASSIFIED SECTION
He read, then reread the message, lips pursed.
With computers, it was possible to hide secret messages almost anywhere: in the background hiss of recorded music or the grainy texture of a digital photograph. Wallace was using the ancient spy technique of steganography—hiding secret information where it wouldn’t be noticed instead of encrypting it—and bringing it into the digital age.
He cleared the screen, erased the program, and placed the disc back in the envelope. The entire process had taken less than five minutes.
Back in the science labs sixty seconds later, a radiologist looked up as an envelope was quietly slipped onto his desk.
“Oh, yes, I’ve been waiting for this X-ray,” the radiologist said. “Thank you, Wallace.”
Wallace simply smiled in reply.
23
Passing through the Barrier into the restricted section of the Facility was much less traumatic the second time: with the newly minted ID card clipped to his breast pocket and a near-silent Admiral Spartan at his side, the process took just a few minutes. The MPs guarding the airlock stepped back smartly; the two made the brief descent to deck 6; the hatch sprang open onto a narrow corridor. Spartan stepped out and Crane followed.
The last time he had been down here, he’d been running to a floridly psychotic Randall Waite, and he’d had little time to notice anything. This time, Crane looked curiously around. Yet as they passed through the corridors the only outward indication they were inside the classified area was the abundance of warning signs on the pearlescent walls, the marines that seemed to be posted everywhere—and the heavy rubber seals around all the door frames.
Spartan led the way to a waiting elevator, ushered Crane inside. Unlike the elevators in the upper floors, the control panel here had buttons for only decks 1 through 6. Spartan pressed the button labeled 2 and they began to descend.
“You still haven’t told me,” Crane said, breaking the silence.
“There are a lot of things I haven’t told you,” Spartan said without looking at him. “Which one are you referring to, exactly?”
“Why you changed your mind.”
Spartan considered this. Then he turned and gazed impassively at Crane. “You know I’ve read your dossier, right?”
“Asher said as much.”
“The captain of the USS Spectre was most impressed with your conduct. He said you single-handedly saved the sub.”
“Captain Naseby likes to exaggerate.”
“I have to say, Dr. Crane, I’m a little unclear on what you did.”
“The mission was classified. I can’t speak about it, sir.”
Spartan gave a mirthless chuckle. “I know all about the mission. It was to provide firsthand intel on the construction of a uranium enrichment plant on the shores of the Yellow Sea. And, if necessary, destroy it with a dirty torpedo in such a way as to make it look like an accidental explosion.”
Crane looked at Spartan in surprise. Then he realized the government probably had very few secrets from the military leader of something as classified as the Facility.
“I didn’t mean the mission,” Spartan continued. “I meant, I’m unclear as to your role in saving the vessel.”
Crane was silent a moment, remembering. “Crewmen began to die,” he began, “in a particularly horrible way. Their sinuses were eaten away, and their brains turned to a kind of furry jelly. It happened in a matter of hours. Two dozen died on the first day alone. We were operating under a communications blackout, couldn’t leave our patrol. There was panic on board, talk of sabotage, of poison gas. When a dozen more died overnight, chaos resulted. There was a breakdown in the chain of command, incipient mutiny. Lynch mobs began roaming the sub, looking for the traitor.”
“And your role?”
“I realized that what everyone assumed to be the effect of some kind of poisonous gas might instead be mucormycosis.”
“I’m sorry?”
“A rare but deadly fungal disease. I was able to cobble together the necessary materials to test tissue from the dead crew members, and I found their bodies were riddled with Rhizopus oryzae, the fungus responsible.”
“And that’s what was killing the crew of the Spectre.”
“Yes. A particularly noxious
variant of the fungus had incubated in the bilges of the sub.”
“How did you stop its spread?”
“I medicated the rest of the crew. Brought them into a state of controlled alkalosis that the spores could not tolerate.”
“And saved the ship.”
Crane smiled. “Like I said, Admiral. Captain Naseby likes to exaggerate.”
“It doesn’t appear to be exaggeration. You kept your head, found the cause, then worked with the materials at hand to effect a solution.”
The elevator doors whispered open and they stepped out. “What does that have to do with our current problem?” Crane asked.
“Let’s not be disingenuous, Dr. Crane. The parallels are numerous, and you can see them as well as I.” Spartan walked briskly to an intersection, turned down another corridor. “I’ve been monitoring your progress, Doctor. And I’ve decided it would be prudent to afford you another level of trust.”
“That’s the reason you’ve given me classified access,” Crane said. “It’ll help me crack this more quickly.”
“The reason, as you say, lies beyond that door.” And Spartan pointed to a hatchway at the end of the corridor, flanked by the omnipresent marines.
At a gesture from the admiral, one of the marines cranked open the hatchway and pulled it wide. Crane began to move forward, then stopped again. Beyond the hatch lay a well of blackness.
Spartan stepped through the hatch, then glanced back. “Coming?”
Crane ducked through the dark hatchway. He looked around in astonishment.
They were in a long, narrow observation chamber, overlooking a vast equipment hangar that stretched beneath them. Technicians sat in two long lines on either side of Crane, monitoring banks of terminals. There was a beeping of electronics, the clatter of keys, the murmur of hushed voices. Beyond the glass wall of the observation chamber, down on the hangar deck, other technicians in white coats scurried around, pushing equipment or making notations on palmtop computers. But Crane ignored all this. His eyes were focused on the thing suspended by incredibly heavy cable, just over the floor of the hangar.