Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

She couldn’t stop smiling. She felt like the yearning, libidinous gymnast she’d once been, waiting by her locker for the high school quarterback to whisk her away in his cherry red Camaro.

She blushed at the memory. That was a hell of a good day, too.

The last staff meeting had just concluded. All of the department heads showed up, eager and grinning—always a good sign. Every department reported in as ready. Each division head guaranteed that every hardware and software system had been stress tested and double-checked, and that all personnel were ready and in place. Everything had gone according to plan. Everything was on schedule.

To hell with RAPTURE.

TRIBULATION was about to change the world.

—

“And to hell with you, Dr. DAVID Rhodes, you worthless, back-slapping, glad-handing, thieving prick ,” Parsons said in a quiet whisper.

Rhodes took RAPTURE from her. He had talent enough for that. His soft, manicured hands were strong enough to stab her in the back and twist the knife. He’d stolen all the credit for her work, her genius. He’d stolen her baby.

Sure, it was just another case of politics and patriarchy biting her in the ass again. But it was his name that would have gone down in the history books. Would have. She laughed to herself.

But nobody remembers second place. That’s just first place for losers.

RAPTURE wouldn’t be first.

TRIBULATION would have that honor.

She would have that honor.

And Rhodes would be standing around with his tiny dick in his even tinier fingers wondering how she had stolen it from him.

Parsons crossed over to the Viking refrigerator in the break room and pulled out a cold Fiji water, savoring her moment to come.

Rhodes would look like the biggest idiot in the world. The ultimate dupe. The completely clueless chucklehead that let a woman kick him in his diminutive nutsack.

She cracked open the bottle and took a long pull of cold, clear water.

And to think she’d nearly walked away from it all.

“You’ll never make a good decision while you’re angry,” her Sunday school teacher mother had always said.

For once, the old bag had been right.

Parsons was practically out the door—already circulating her incredible CV—when the call came that changed her life.

She could hardly believe it. At first, she thought it was a test. Maybe even a trap laid out by the Feds.

It wasn’t.

It took some time for him to prove himself and to earn her trust. But he did. He proved that he had the funding. He showed her that he was risking as much as she was, if not more. He certainly had the motivation. And he had a plan.

A hell of a plan.

But most important of all, he believed in her. He told her how significant she was, and he wasn’t just blowing blue smoke up her skirt. He’d followed her research and knew about RAPTURE, and all about Rhodes and how he had played the Jacob to her Esau and stolen her birthright. How he’d known about all of it she could never figure out. But that just spoke to her about the power of his reach and his incredible resources.

Her patron clearly understood her contributions to the work. He was no scientist but possessed an impressive command of the subject for a civilian. He told her how her name would rank in the pantheon of all great scientists—not just women scientists, but all scientists. He appealed to her vanity, no doubt, and she was vain. Except it wasn’t vanity because what she believed about herself was absolutely true.

And it was. She was a genius.

So she finally agreed to the plan. He would build an alternate facility, not too close to Oak Ridge, but not so far away that she couldn’t be there on a regular basis to oversee the work. He would provide a list of vetted scientists, programmers, and engineers but she would have the authority to hire and fire them. He would provide all of the security, and all of the materials, and all of the resources needed. All she ever needed to do was send him her list of needs, human or material, and he would provide it.

Her contributions were materially minimal but the most significant. She would continue to plow ahead at Oak Ridge and push the RAPTURE project forward, extracting every ounce of information and insight from it that she could and then bringing it over to the TRIBULATION program. Of course, there were certain expectations he put upon her. But they were reasonable, given the outcome.

First, he told her, TRIBULATION must be completed and ready to deploy on a certain date and time. No exceptions. He named both.

“Do you agree?”

“Of course.”

“And you believe it’s absolutely possible?”

“I do.”

“Are you willing to bet your life on it?”

“I am.”

“Then you just did.”

The threat was neither unexpected nor particularly frightening. It also showed that he was serious, which she admired. Parsons was certain she’d meet the deadline, as certain as she was the sun would rise in the morning, or that energy could be neither created nor destroyed.

—

She expected to get paid something at some point but was surprised that thirty million had already been deposited into an encrypted account for her. This was immediately available for transfer to another account of her own choosing, and in any denomination or medium of currency she preferred.

If for whatever reason he decided to cancel the project, she would keep the money without condition.

It was also expected that she would say nothing about TRIBULATION to anyone outside of the lab where it was being built. After TRIBULATION was launched, she still couldn’t reveal her involvement for exactly three hundred and sixty-five days.

“Why?”

“For your protection, and mine. Time to allow us to find places to hide in the world where we can never be found.”

She didn’t question it further. A year wasn’t much of a delay in relation to the fame that would accrue to her forever afterward. Her brilliance would be her defense if she decided to come back into the world. And if she decided to remain in hiding? Well, she wasn’t looking for celebrity anyway. Only the universal acknowledgment that she had won, and TRIBULATION would prove that.

A final expectation was that she would carefully and surreptitiously sabotage progress on the government’s RAPTURE project. The reason was obvious. The only possible threat TRIBULATION faced would be the launch of RAPTURE, the only other true, universal quantum machine on the planet.

But what utterly delighted her was the fact that Rhodes’s reputation would be ruined.

—

TRIBULATION would change the world because nearly every form of modern military and civilian operations, intelligence gathering, information processing, and communications all relied heavily, if not exclusively, on digital data.

All of that data was the lifeblood of global human activity and, increasingly, of individual human activity, no matter how pedestrian or mundane. Whether it was Alexa on your kitchen table, the phone in your pocket, or the hearing aid in your ear, computers were proliferating at an alarming rate—tens of billions of ordinary items were coming online; the so-called Internet of Things.

For all of the convenience, efficiency, productivity, and promise that the digital age was providing, the great sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head was the insecurity of all of that data. Data was the gold stored in every device. Relentless thieves, including governments, criminal syndicates, and individual hackers, hungered to steal that gold.

Early on, cyberthieves succeeded. New defenses were raised. Cybersecurity was born.

By the early part of the twenty-first century, an extremely secure form of cybersecurity had been achieved through sophisticated encryption algorithms. These algorithms were analogous to a passcode, like a three-digit number for a lock on a gym locker. A simple three-digit locker passcode only has one thousand possible combinations.