6:15 am Eastern Standard Time
Windemere Inn and Suites
Worcester, Massachusetts
“Nice place,” a voice said.
Troy opened his eyes. His head felt like a woodpecker had been hammering on his skull all night. It seemed like his veins were pulsating behind his eyes, and that he could see them there, like red neon signs, but the words were a scribble he couldn’t read.
His mouth was dry, and his tongue had grown a coat of hair.
Welts on his face, from the punches he had taken, were throbbing a bit. They weren’t bad, he had certainly sustained worse, but he could feel them there. If he had to guess, at the very least, he was going to have a shiner under his right eye, and maybe a little something on the left side near his cheekbone.
Across the dreary motel room from him, a man sat near the open sliding door to the terrace. He was smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke outside. That was against the motel rules, of course. Did this man care? No.
The man was Alex.
The last time Troy had seen Alex, he was crashing a stolen helicopter onto the Brooklyn Bridge, then getting taken away by a swarm of cops.
In the first weak light of dawn, Troy could see past him. They were high on a hillside, and the narrow terrace gave a panoramic view of the city of Worcester, complete with the Holy Cross football stadium. Troy could also feel the cold air seeping in through the open slider. It was late autumn in New England and getting chilly.
“My brother picked it,” Troy said. “He said the pictures looked okay.”
Alex shrugged, as if he didn’t care one way or the other.
“In a few minutes, your phone is going to ring. We should probably talk first.”
Troy ignored that statement. He got the sense that Alex liked to feel like he was ahead on everything. He liked to turn up while you were still asleep. He liked it when he knew things that you didn’t know. Troy wasn’t in the mood for it this morning.
“How did you get in here?”
Alex took a hit from the smoke. “The door wasn’t locked.”
Naturally. Troy vaguely remembered being inside the room and out on the terrace smoking cigars with his brothers, the bride’s brothers, and their cousins and friends. All was forgiven, and the whole group was having a grand old time.
They were all brothers forever now, the marriage a medieval bond between two clans. The coming child was claimed by everyone. There could never be a divorce. The young newlyweds were trapped. This was no longer about their relationship. It was bigger than a marriage. But Troy didn’t remember anyone leaving, and he didn’t remember going to sleep after that.
He stared down at himself. He was wearing dress slacks, a white dress shirt, and his nice black wingtip shoes—while lying in bed.
He looked at Alex. “Still smoking, I see.”
Alex shrugged again. He was dressed in a hunting jacket, wool pants, and green LL Bean boots. Except for the cigarette, he could be in a fall fashion catalog. Troy thought back to when he first met Alex. The man was dressed like a Sikh, and he said he was from Kansas.
“How was the wedding?” Alex said now.
Troy shrugged. “Eh…The bride was eight months pregnant. We got in a fight with her brothers and cousins. There was a big wedding cake and we knocked it over, you know, during the fight. But it ended up on its side, so they managed to save half of it. The half that didn’t touch the floor.”
There was a long pause.
“Other than that…”
Alex nodded. “Yeah. Typical wedding. How was the cake?”
Troy shook his head. “I didn’t have any.”
“Sure,” Alex said. “Gotta stay in fighting trim.”
Troy sat up by the side of the bed and sighed. His head spun for a moment, then stopped. On the bedside table was a can of Rock Star Zero, a couple of blue pills, and a banana.
“Why are you here?” Troy said.
“Missing Persons sent me,” Alex said, using the old military nickname for the one-eyed Special Operations colonel, Stuart Persons. Persons was in classified intelligence now. Apparently, so was Alex. Troy wasn’t sure what his own relationship to them was.
He had, however, received his first payment from the United States Foreign Medical Aid Program. Eight hundred dollars for consulting services rendered deposited into his checking account. He supposed that meant he was still in.
“You mean Stu?” he said.
Alex nodded. “Yeah.”
“Last time I talked to him, he disavowed any knowledge of your existence.”
Alex didn’t touch that. “He’s concerned.”
“What did I do?” Troy said.
“You didn’t do anything. You did hear about the attack last night?”
Troy shook his head. “I was at a wedding.”
“Ah. Well, you could practically have heard it from here. That’s what the phone call is going to be about.”
“Stu is going to call me?”
Alex shook his head. It was a brief shake, a fragment of a shake, one suggesting it was common sense that of course Missing Persons wasn’t going to call.
“Your boss. In Europe. It’s early afternoon there. His people want him in on this.”
“How would you know that?” Troy said.
He almost asked the question more of himself than Alex. Alex knew a great many things. So did Missing Persons. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the ultimate string puller was Persons, and that he somehow gave assignments to intelligence agencies in Europe. If that was true, it was something he would never divulge to Troy. But Alex would know.
“It was a bombing. It took place about a hundred miles west of here, in the Berkshire mountains. There’s an advanced physics laboratory out there. Or there was, until last night. I mean, it’s still sort of there, in a sense. The atom smasher they had was blown up and burned, and the central facility, including the control room, was completely obliterated. The place is a dead loss.”
Tentatively, Troy reached out, took the Rock Star, and opened it.
“Mostly, the facility was underground. It runs for about six miles along the length of the collider under a ridgeline of the mountains. There are still fires burning down there that no one has been able to reach. There are chemicals on site, various dangerous substances, that make it unfeasible to send firefighters down. Could be a couple of days to a couple of weeks before the fires burn themselves out. That’s what I hear.”
Troy sipped the Rock Star. It tasted like citrus. There was no sugar in it, just some dangerous chemicals. It was loaded with caffeine and B vitamins. It was fizzy, and he liked the flavor. He swore by these things.
“Or twenty years,” Troy said. “Or never. Anybody get killed?”
“Unknown,” Alex said. “There are three guards missing, and there were four technical personnel who were deep inside the facility, working overnight on a faulty high-tech gizmo of some kind. It’s not official yet, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they’re dead. There were multiple explosions, combined with an accelerant which sent a firestorm straight along the length of the tunnel. Whoever devised the charges knew exactly what they were doing. Anyone out in the tunnel, working on the collider in that narrow space, should have been incinerated.”
Troy said nothing.
“In any event, as of twenty minutes ago, no one had heard from them.”
Troy peeled the banana.
“Who owns the place?”
“You know how these things go,” Alex said. “It’s a joint project of certain research universities, the Department of Energy, and maybe a couple of entities that prefer to remain silent partners. It was a medium-security facility. That’s how the bad guys got in so easily. Its stated purpose was to create the conditions for an elusive sub-atomic particle to appear, one that research suggests should be everywhere in the universe but isn’t.”
“That’s it? Why would someone want to blow it up?”
What he didn’t say was, Why would anyone care about such a particle? He would say it, but he was too tired. He didn’t care enough. Alex probably wouldn’t care either.
“In your experience, is anything ever what it appears to be?” Alex said.
Troy shook his head. “No. I guess not.”
On the night table next to the bed, Troy’s cell phone started to buzz. He must have put it on vibrate. It made that annoying sound where the vibrations made it rub against the surface of the table.
He picked it up. Miquel Castro-Ruiz.
Troy pressed the green button. He glanced at Alex, but Alex was looking away, out the door at the fall morning in Worcester.
“Hola,” Troy said into the phone. He was beginning to learn Spanish. He figured he should learn some European language, and they were based in Madrid at the moment, so that was a starting place. Everyone there seemed to speak five languages.
“Buenos días, Señor Stark,” Castro said. “Did I wake you?”
“No,” Troy said truthfully. Alex woke him five minutes ago. “I’ve been awake for a little while.”
“I imagine you have heard about the terrorist attack?”
“Yes. Yes, I have.”
“How far are you from there right now?”
“About a hundred miles.”
There was a pause over the line while Castro calculated miles into centimeters or milliliters or some damn thing.
“Are you free to go there?” Castro said. “I would like to know the lay of the land, as you would say.”
Troy would never say that, but okay.
“Yeah. I can do that.”
“No need to get involved or search deeper. It’s just that they’re holding the intelligence very tightly. Jan cannot get us any information, images, or films at this time. Nothing that isn’t already in the news. I would like to know the site from your eyes. Even if they bar you from entry.”
“I’ll go,” Troy said. “I imagine I’ll find a way into the site.”
“I imagine you will too,” Castro said. “That’s why I hired you.”
“Are we worried about it?”
“Not worried. But of course, we have our own similar facilities here.”
“Of course.”
They exchanged a few more pleasantries, not much, and then Troy hung up. He liked that about Miquel Castro. The man didn’t dilly-dally with a lot of unnecessary chatter.
Troy looked across at Alex again.
Alex stood and pitched his smoke out the open door. “Ready to take a ride? Apparently, you have this motel room until tomorrow. I’ll have you back before your family gathers for mid-afternoon brunch.”
Troy wasn’t ready to take a ride, not really. He was ready to go back to sleep. He was hung over and the last thing he wanted to face was the remains of a terrorist attack.
“Is this part of the charity consulting gig?” he said.
Alex nodded. “I didn’t stop by here to reminisce about the old days, as enjoyable as that might be. I was sent here to pick you up.”
Troy shrugged and stood up. He was still dressed for the wedding, more or less.
“Remember the time we stole that helicopter?” he said. “And you crashed it onto the bridge, with the rotors shredded off and flying everywhere?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “That was fun. Also the time you left me that dead Albanian gangster in the woods. He had half a pack of Turkish cigarettes on him. It got me smoking again. But I don’t blame you for that.”
Troy nodded. “Yeah. Thanks. Those were good times. Let me just change my clothes.”
* * *
Smoke was rising near a low range of mountains on the horizon.
Troy hadn’t spoken much on the two-hour ride out here. Instead, he just stared from the big blue Jeep Alex was driving at the barren trees of the forests lining the road. It made him think of a time after a nuclear war.
Everything lifeless, as far as the eye could see.
“There’s also a no-fly zone for ten miles in any direction,” Alex said. “They’ve been chasing news helicopters out of here all morning and jamming drone signals. If we were kids, I’d suggest that we take a walk through the woods and salvage some of the nifty high-tech hardware that’s crashed back in there.”
Troy glanced up through the t-top roof of the Jeep. A line of helicopters were circling behind them, like insects: off to the east, headed north, and then in the distance, turning to the west. They were so far away, you couldn’t even hear them.
Just ahead, there was a checkpoint with three Massachusetts state police SUVs. The first two SUVs were parked facing each other, bumper to bumper across the roadway. The third was parked behind the other two, facing forward. The formation was almost impossible to ram through without a tank.
Alex pulled the car up to the cop and handed him two IDs. “Agent McKinley, Homeland Security. This is Agent Roosevelt.”
Troy barely looked at the cop, a big crew-cut duffer, probably graduated from the Marines into the state police twenty years ago. He gave the guy a half-hearted wave. He felt nothing about the alias, or the fact that Alex hadn’t mentioned it until now.
It didn’t matter. Of course they were going to get in. They were spooks. They could be anyone at any time. If the cops ran the IDs through a computer, they’d almost certainly be real.
The cop gestured along the road. “Drive down in that drainage ditch and come out the other side of our roadblock. Two miles up, there’s a command center and a staging area. No one goes past that without hazmat suits.” He handed the IDs back. He hadn’t bothered to check them at all.
Alex took the cards. “Thanks.”
Alex plunged the Jeep into the long ditch, trusting the four-wheel drive. They bucked and slid and scraped along the overgrown bottom until they were past the police, then climbed back up the steep embankment. They drove on, the road well-paved and smooth ahead of them.
“Why does Persons want me on this job? It has nothing to do with Europe.”
Alex shrugged. “Well, he figured right now your new outfit doesn’t have a mandate. You’re just doing trust falls and icebreakers, team building exercises, so you might want something to sink your teeth into.”
Troy looked at him. He wasn’t in any mood for humor. The pills Alex had given him earlier had pushed back his headache, but now the headache was surging forward again and seizing the initiative.
“Even so.”
“No one knows what it has to do with,” Alex said. “It’s too early to say. But there is this. About ten months ago, a fire burned through a physics research facility in Northeast England, outside Newcastle. It was a small place: old and obsolete. Anyway, that’s what everyone thought. It had been developed by the government there back between 1959 and 1961. The stone age of this kind of research. The atom smasher was only 150 meters long. The English government released the place to a nearby college in the early 1990s. The kids could conduct experiments that had been done a thousand times before. That kind of thing.”
“Okay, so who did it?” Troy said.
“The original thought was local kids did it. Teenagers. Vandals. They broke in, partied a bit, left some beer cans and broken bottles around, then set fire to the place, maybe accidentally, maybe on purpose. No one was there, no one was hurt, the place was old. Maybe it was no big deal, except to the students who were going to lose the opportunity to do these experiments. And the college couldn’t tout the supercollider anymore to attract such students.”
He paused as the car rolled quietly along the road. “Turned out whoever did it were pros and deliberately torched the place. They used an industrial flame accelerant, similar to jet fuel, which is wholly consumed. It was a sophisticated attack designed to completely destroy the place and make it look like teenagers had done it.”
“To destroy an old, out of date facility?” Troy said. “What did they want, the insurance money?”
“Again, nothing is ever quite what it seems,” Alex said. “The place had equipment there, built long ago, to generate and concentrate microwaves. The students, if that’s what they were, had concentrated the microwaves to such a degree that they were able to fire them like a weapon.”
Now Troy was interested. “What did they fire them at? You know, when I was a kid, we had a dartboard. But we’d get bored and start throwing the darts at each other.”
“I knew that about you,” Alex said. “I didn’t even have to be told. No, they used inanimate objects. It started small, with marbles, pill bottles, things of that nature. Then the cardboard roll at the center of the toilet paper. Books. Shoes.”
“They would put the target on a small platform and direct this microwave beam at it. And when the beam hit the target, the target would disappear. It wouldn’t melt. It wouldn’t explode. It wouldn’t burst into flame. It would just be gone. And there would be no residue of it left over. No charred remains, no chunks, nothing. It would be gone like it never existed in the first place.”
“Where would it go?” Troy said.
Alex shrugged. “The past? The future? Some other reality? No one ever figured that out. The kids would just have a blast erasing things from the here and now.”
Troy nearly laughed. “Come on.”
“A Ph.D. candidate wrote a paper on what they were doing. All of this came out after the fact. It was heavily redacted throughout, and the kid’s name was removed. We’ve got the paper, but that’s where the trail ends. The British government has nothing to say on the matter. The university claims they don’t know anything.”
“Could be a forgery,” Troy said.
“Could be,” Alex said. “Then why torch the lab?”
“Torch the lab first, for kicks, or for practice, or for whatever reason. You’re a disgruntled ex-student or former employee with access to flame accelerant. Then someone else releases a fake paper to create a mystique around the event. Not really for any reason other than to foster a legend. People do that kind of thing all the time. The person who wrote the paper probably didn’t know the person who torched it and probably never even set foot in the lab.”
Troy was tired, so he wasn’t in a mood to play along. Frankly, he was a little surprised that both Missing Persons and Alex bought into this idea of microwaves zapping physical objects into the ether. But only a little. Spooks loved their unexplained mysteries. See, because somebody, somewhere, was behind it, pulling strings.
“Anyway, Persons sees a pattern developing,” Alex said. “Two attacks on physics research labs. Maybe a little far-fetched, maybe not. He wants our input. They have the security footage here but haven’t released it anywhere he can get his fingers on it yet. So he sent us to take a look.”
“I thought Castro wanted me to take a look, and you were tagging along.”
Alex eyed him but said nothing.
Up ahead was a cluster of heavy, dark green tents in a large dirt parking lot or clearing. There were at least two dozen vehicles—drab green Humvees, a drab green troop transport, several small white vans with the letters NAL across the side in blue, two fire engines, police cars, and several nondescript sedans. A chain link fence with bright yellow aluminum slats inside the links had been hastily erected across the road. You couldn’t go past the fence—you also couldn’t see past it.
National Guardsmen were congregated around an open-air pavilion with a white, billowy top. A handful of people here were slowly dressing in hazardous material garb, medical personnel hovering around them with checklists on tablet computers.
A young Guardsman in a uniform about a size too large for him stood in front of the Jeep, pointing off to the right. Alex followed the kid’s hand gestures.
“Reassuring,” Alex said. “His gun weighs about as much as he does.”
Troy said nothing. He had no opinion about other branches of the military. He had no opinion about young kids dipping their toes in to get money for college. He was gradually trying to have no opinion about the military at all—who was in it, what they were doing, and why. He didn’t care anymore. Or so he told himself.
They got out of the Jeep. Alex seemed to know exactly where he was going. They were side by side now, Troy six inches taller and much broader than this strange partner of his. They walked toward a dark green tent nestled behind some larger ones. Two National Guard, a young man and a young woman, stood at the entrance.
“I’m Agent McKinley,” Alex said to them. “Homeland Security. This is Agent…”
He waved his hand at Troy.
“Roosevelt,” Troy said.
“They’re expecting us,” Alex said.
The Guardswoman mumbled something into her radio. Alex was already moving past her. Troy followed, ducking his head as he passed through the entrance.
The tent was a movie theater of sorts. There were nine white wooden folding chairs, arranged in a three-by-three square, facing a projection screen on a tripod near the wall of the tent. A guy in a bright orange fleece jacket greeted them.
“Homeland Security?” he said. “Great.” He mentioned his name, but Troy didn’t catch it. “I’m security for North Adams Labs. You see I’m wearing blaze orange. Normally we’re supposed to wear blue. I recommend orange to everybody this time of year.”
They stared at him.
“Hunting season,” he said.
Troy nodded. The guy’s job had just gotten blown up, apparently on his watch, and he didn’t want to get shot accidentally by a hunter.
“I’ll run the footage. If you want it to slow down, back up, or freeze, you just let me know, okay? So please,” he gestured at the folding chairs. “Have a seat.”
They sat, and in a moment, the footage came on. It showed a white NAL van entering a gate, using a swipe card. A hand reached out from the van, waved the card at the sensor, and the gate slowly rolled sideways and open.
“I just want to say,” the projection man said from behind them. “That’s very clever. That’s not one of our vans, but it looks identical. Our vans have tracking chips inside. GPS units to determine their location. Gasoline consumption, productivity, driver road safety, you name it. It’s all tracked. The van you see has no chips. Also, the windshield is subtly smoked so you can only see the silhouettes inside. There were two people in the front, but we have no idea who they were. They never exited the truck.”
“How did they beat the sensor?” Troy said. “That card he waved must have an ID, some kind of number or other…”
“They exposed a previously unknown vulnerability in the system,” the guy said. “Also very clever. Their card was just an infinite series of zeroes and ones, generated randomly. Apparently, the infinity aspect of it opened the loop and never allowed it to close again. The system eventually decides yes or no. But if the loop never closes, it never gets to decide. It turns out if it doesn’t decide within a few seconds, the default is yes. We have the sequence to ten thousand digits, but it doesn’t matter. No one had any idea that it would work that way.”
“Someone did,” Alex said.
“Yes,” the guy said. “It’s possible someone modified it to work that way. Smarter minds than mine are trying to determine that.”
“It was an inside job,” Troy said. That much seemed clear already.
The guy said nothing in response.
As they watched, the van moved slowly across the compound and came to a large iron door. The door opened and the van pulled inside. Now, the footage changed again. It gave a view from a high corner of what looked like a warehouse or loading dock area.
A couple of men in blue uniforms stood nearby, shifting their feet. Their breath rose in plumes. It was cold last night.
They approached the van. Suddenly, the rear door burst open. A very large man wearing a black helmet came out in a black jumpsuit. He pointed what looked like an automatic rifle at the guards and had them on the floor in a few seconds. By the time the men were on the ground, three more people had emerged from the van. The man in the helmet made an odd hand signal: forefinger and pinky up, thumb pointing straight out.
“Freeze on that rifle,” Troy said.
The film stopped.
“Can you zoom in on that and enhance it?”
“I can zoom, but to enhance, that’ll take the computer lab. I understand they’re working to improve the definition of the entire video.”
“All right, well zoom in on it in that case.”
The video zoomed in on the rifle the man was holding. The definition was bad, but for the life of him, Troy couldn’t identify the gun. Troy had handled just about every semi- and automatic rifle available in America, or a variant thereof, and most of the ones available in other parts of the world. The one in the man’s hands looked like a toy.
“This is going to sound crazy, but I don’t think that’s really a gun. I think that big guy was bluffing, and it worked.”
“Maybe an Airsoft,” Alex said. “Like one of those war simulation guns.”
“Maybe,” Troy said. “I don’t know.”
“Well, if you think that’s the case, then watch this.”
The film rolled on. Suddenly, another guard appeared from a door in the back and to the left. He had a handgun trained on the big guy. The big guy dropped to the ground, and the smallest of the invaders, what appeared to be a woman, shot the guard with a taser. The guard went down like a pile of bricks.
“Nice movement,” Troy said.
“And a non-lethal weapon,” the projection man said. “We lost four people in the tunnel, but it’s possible these terrorists didn’t know they were there. Why would they? The video looks like they’re trying not to hurt anyone.”
The video rolled on. The woman and what appeared to be two young men disappeared into a doorway. While they were gone, the big man rolled three motorcycles down a ramp from inside the van. Then he dragged the three guards inside the van.
In a few moments, not very long at all, the team that dispatched inside the facility were back. The big man made the odd hand signal at them again. There seemed to be a symbol on his jumpsuit.
“Freeze and zoom in on the big guy’s jacket. He’s got a logo or something there.”
The camera zoomed in on him. The logo was a slightly lighter black, against the deep black of his jumpsuit.
“Anything?” Troy said.
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “Almost like a medieval German rune. I’d almost say it was an SS, but that would be pushing it. Nobody’s going to wear a Nazi symbol to a job like this. Especially these guys. They knew from the outset they were being filmed.”
In a moment, the last of the three motorcycles had gone out into the night.
“Are they tracing those bikes?” Troy said.
“Trying, sure. One passed a camera on an exit off the Taconic Parkway, then may have turned up again two hours later on street security footage near a strip club in the South Bronx. Another definitely crossed from the Massachusetts Turnpike, onto the New York State Thruway system, heading west near Albany. The third one just evaporated. No sign of it anywhere.”
“Now what?” Troy said.
“Now we fast forward to the last moment. A little under ten minutes passed from the moment the last motorcycle left the building until the explosion. From the time the van first entered the bay door, until the last bike was gone, was only four minutes and change. They were moving quickly.”
Troy nodded. Although they looked somewhat rag-tag and mismatched, they were fast, no nonsense, and devastatingly effective. They had high-level intelligence about the place before they arrived, and it was all accurate information.
“It was an inside job,” he said again. “Maybe not the personnel who actually carried out the attack, but someone got them the intel.”
It seemed like a simple matter from here. Figure out who the most likely candidates were—the most disgruntled, the ones with access to security protocols, the ones who might have reasons to sell secrets—then bring them in and grill them mercilessly. In a short while, they would crack and the whole façade would come tumbling down. Any investigator or secret policeman worth his salt knew what to do.
Troy looked at Alex. He had brunch with his newly extended family back in Worcester. If they left now, they could make it.
“We have two employees in mind,” the projection man said, as if he could read Troy’s thoughts. “We’re guessing they were the men in the front of the truck.”
Troy nodded. “It’s them.”
“They’ve gone missing,” the man said.