The knock on Falcon’s door sent panic through his system. People didn’t come to see him unless it was an orderly or nurse. His stomach tensed almost to the point of making him throw up.
He gasped for air, hearing Karla Raven’s voice ask, “Falcon? You got a minute?”
Falcon glanced around, awash in fear, and thankfully realized his house was in perfect order. “I’m working on something.”
“We’ve got a problem. All of us. We need you, Falcon.”
He managed to rise, checked three times to make sure his fly was zipped, and walked to the door. Opening it a crack, he peered out with one eyeball. “Maybe you could come back later?”
Chief Raven stood with her arms crossed. Behind her Edwin Tyler Jones, his dark face fierce, fixed him with gleaming eyes.
“One of those days, huh?” Raven almost grunted, pushing him—and his door—out of her way.
Falcon retreated to the head of his bed where it was pushed into the corner. He crawled back onto the safety of his pillow. “I really don’t want company today. I’m just not feeling—”
“You gonna feel worse!” Edwin declared as he dragged the desk chair out and plopped himself backward in it, his chin resting on the chair back. “Skipper’s in trouble.” Then, his arms reaching around in front of him, his thumbs began tapping at a smartphone, of all things.
“Where did you get that?” Falcon was so amazed he almost didn’t register it when Karla placed a knee on the bottom of his bed and then climbed on to seat herself cross-legged within the sphere of his personal sanctuary. Falcon’s hands began twitching, a sense of violation and fear rising.
“Hey,” Karla said softly. “Relax, Falcon. We need you. We really need you.”
“For what?” His mind began to loop through the possibilities, none of them good.
She held her hands wide, as if to make them nonthreatening. “Gray vanished last night. She and that electrical thing she made—”
“The doohickey.”
“That’s right, Falcon. The doohickey.” She was peering at him intently. “Look, I can see that it’s a bad day for you. Is the major here?”
“Haven’t seen him.”
“Can you call him?”
“He only shows up when he isn’t busy.”
“Great,” Karla muttered under her breath. “Even imaginary army guys aren’t around when you need them. Next time hallucinate a Marine, will you?”
“Okay,” Edwin said from his chair. “Got the web.” His thumbs were dancing on the small screen like a hillbilly jig. “Gonna take a while. I got to talk to my website.”
“You’ve got a website?”
“Chief, I got more websites than a black widow that spent her life addicted to divorce.”
Falcon swallowed down a dry heave. “Edwin, you really shouldn’t talk that way. It makes you sound less than you are.”
“Yeah, Falcon, and you’re sitting in here doing the antisocial leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-puke gig, and you’re the only person smart enough to figure this thing out. You help us? Maybe I don’t talk like no street bro, got dat?”
Falcon squeezed his eyes shut, wishing desperately that the major would get back from whatever he was doing. Battling for control, he took deep breaths.
It’s just anxiety. Just anxiety.
“Falcon,” Raven’s voice was both soothing and commanding. “Here’s what we know: Last night, just after two thirty, I was in the hall outside Gray’s door. Something happened. It was like an electrical shock, a wave maybe, something that made my body tingle all over and—”
“Give me a chance, I’ll make your body tingle all over,” Edwin interjected.
“Try it, and I’ll reach down your throat, get a good hold, and rip your lungs out past your teeth.”
“Yo, mama.”
She turned her attention back to Falcon. “It kind of knocked me silly. The lights went out, and I just sort of went limp. Gray’s door, it was almost . . . I don’t know, humming?” She made a face, struggling for words. “And there was a pop—a hollow sound like a light bulb being crushed.”
In spite of himself, Falcon leaned forward, curiosity vying with panic. “You felt this?”
“I was in the hall right outside her door.”
“You didn’t hear any screaming, voices?” He wished he could close his eyes, ignore the intruders.
Edwin winked at him, saying, “Chief Raven, she’s just PTSD, Falcon. You’re the schizo.”
“Edwin!” Karla warned.
But Falcon chuckled, halfway down the road to hysteria. “Good thing the major’s not here. He gets really mad when people call me that.”
“Now I’m scared,” Edwin shot back. “Worried some hallucination gonna whip my ass.”
Falcon turned back to Karla. “How did you know she was gone?”
“I made my way back to the nurse’s station. Seymore was on duty. The lights flashed on in the hall about the time I got there. Seymore was on the phone, couldn’t get anyone to answer. Then the security monitors flickered on, and Gray was gone . . . and so was the doohickey.”
He watched Raven’s frown as she tried to explain. “I mean, Gray had just been there moments before. Nurse Seymore said Gray had been at it all night. Tapping a wire to that damn machine, then turning it a little, as if adjusting it.”
“Pointing it,” Falcon said as the notion popped into his head. “Like an antenna?”
“Could be. But everyone has said it’s not a radio.”
“And you still say nobody passed you in the hall?” Edwin asked.
“No way. I was incapacitated, but I wasn’t out. Believe me, this chick’s been choked out, knocked out, concussed out, drugged out, passed out. You name it. There’s always that sense of where am I? How long’s it been? But not last night. I was there, I just wasn’t hooked up.”
Falcon nodded. “They’ve discounted any way out of that room? Hole? Tunnel? Passage?”
“So far as I know.”
He was thinking now, the panic and nausea subsiding. “And the rumor is that she was caught in a top-secret lab at Los Alamos. Kind of like, ‘pop’ and there she was.” He watched Raven’s eyes as he said, “I wonder if it was the same hollow kind of a pop like you heard last night?”
“You saying the bitch teleport?” Edwin asked. “Yo, beam me up, Scotty? Shiiiit!”
“Language, Edwin, or I’m going back into my delightful paranoia.”
Not even looking up from his phone, Edwin said with perfect diction, “Here lies the noblest of Romans, for it was not that he loved Caesar less, but that he loved Rome more.”
“What?” Raven demanded.
“Shakespeare, Chief.” Edwin spared her the briefest sidelong glance, then went back to the smartphone where his thumbs continued to tap. “Lost a fucking bet to Falcon. Gotta read a play a week.”
“Teleport?” Falcon said thoughtfully, his mind playing with the concept. “Not impossible, just highly, highly improbable.”
“Come again?” Karla demanded. “Falcon, there’s no starship Enterprise up there.”
“No, but there is quantum teleportation down here. Has been for some time. DARPA has been experimenting with it based on entanglement theory. It’s called QKD. Quantum key distribution. But it’s currently restricted to the laboratory and the quest for absolute integrity in communications.”
“Hey, I know that.” Edwin’s face lit up. “You talking quantum cryptography. They started doing that for bank transfers. I just figured it’s another coding I got to learn to break the system.”
“You can’t,” Falcon told him, wishing he could close his eyes and let the pieces of information float on the backs of his eyelids. “Think of it like a foil packet around grape juice. Once you rip it open, you can’t reseal it.”
“Then you have to reroute the packet.”
“Precisely.” Falcon arched an eyebrow. “I can’t wait for Theresa to drop in next time. She’s a much better physicist than I am.”
Raven had shifted so her back was against the wall; her muscular arms lay propped on her pulled-up knees, her hands dangling. “You think that’s what we’re dealing with? Seriously? Gray teleported out of her cell?”
Falcon slowly shook his head. “To date, entanglement only works with atomic particles. We’re talking photons, not human beings and complex machinery.”
“Not necessarily,” Edwin said, his thumbs finally still. “My old backdoor still works, and NSA still hasn’t found that little worm I programmed that rides along its secure network. Now, I can’t go further than this with a smartphone, but I got a DARPA program, code name ‘Beemeyup.’” His eyebrows lifted. “And they’re running it out of a secure lab down at Los Alamos, through a company called Skientia.”
Falcon chuckled. “Very good, Edwin. But probability still dictates that Gray escaped or was taken out of her room by much more prosaic means. It’s just up to us to figure out how.”
Karla gave Edwin a thoughtful look. “But this lab in Los Alamos is working on teleportation?” Her eyebrow twitched. “Gray was arrested in a lab in Los Alamos. Falcon? What are the probabilities of that?”
“Highly suggestive,” Falcon mused, eyes half-lidded. “Without damage to the room suggesting ingress or egress, we’re stuck with only two explanations: she and the machine went out the door, and past you, or she went out some other way. It’s all a function of time and space. And, if she went out the door, past you, past Nurse Seymore, she’d still have to pass all the other security systems and personnel out through level four.”
Raven tilted her head back until it thunked against the wall. “The problem is, they’re going to blame the Skipper for it. Here’s the scenario: Ryan developed an interest in Gray, and after banging his balls off, she convinced him to help her escape. The electrical thing is going to be written up as a diversion used by Ryan to turn off the security and monitoring while he escorted Gray and her machine out of the women’s wing, through the hub, and past the four rings of security.”
“Impossible,” Falcon said softly. “It physically couldn’t be done in that period of time.”
“You know that.” Karla flipped her hands in a gesture of futility. “I know that. But how do we prove it?”
“From in here, we don’t,” Edwin said. “Chief, they gonna shut this phone down real soon. But, even before they do, this is like using a toy hammer to knock down a brick wall. I gotta have more horsepower.”
“It would take an army of experts to get us out of here,” Karla added. “I’m not even sure DEVGRU could do it without blowing the place apart.”
“We have the necessary people,” Falcon said as he mentally compared names with abilities. “Assuming the following: that Edwin could obtain access to the Grantham Barracks computer system and sabotage the security; that Chief Raven could obtain the keys to the central courtyard door; and that Major Swink can fly whatever sort of helicopter they bring in to evacuate me for my medical emergency.”
“You’re going to have a medical emergency?” Karla elevated an eyebrow.
“Appendicitis would be the easiest,” Falcon told her. “It isn’t always accompanied by elevated body temperature.” He was already playing it out in his imagination, seeing the pieces that would have to fall in place in perfect order. “Meanwhile, Edwin, you might want to shut that phone off and pull the battery. We might need it.”
“So, you’re kidding right?” Edwin asked.
“That’s the only way we can find out what happened to Gray. If we don’t, everyone in here is going to worry that they’ll be abducted next. Stories of vivisection, lobotomies, and every other paranoia will be let loose.”
“And the Skipper needs us to prove he’s innocent,” Raven added.
“Break out? That’s crazy!” ET cried.
“Yes, Edwin. But, if I’m not mistaken, we do crazy rather well in here.”