James Tabor - The Deep Zone

“I’d like to give him a decent burial,” Bowman said, “but we can’t afford the time. We’re behind already.”

She took one of Bowman’s hands. It felt solid and rough and surprisingly warm. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He looked straight at her. His fingers closed around hers. She liked how that felt. A little shock sparked in her chest, a windy feeling, something she hadn’t experienced for a long time. Not since Redhorse , she thought.

“I know,” Bowman said. “But it doesn’t matter, really.”

That, she had to admit, was true. She held his hand tighter.

The cave made its low, unceasing moan, and from a great distance came the crash of vast rock breaking and smashing.

NATHAN RATHOR, A SMALL MAN WHO HAD NEVER BEEN physically strong and who had grown up in a family with servants, disliked doing things for himself. Some tasks, however, could not be delegated. Thus, after the last Sit Room teleconference with Donald Barnard, Rathor had sat in front of his restricted, eyes-only computer for the better part of an hour. Not much caught Nathan Rathor off guard, but Barnard’s comment that the team down in Mexico had a good chance of succeeding with its mission had. Knowing little about caves, and less about the team itself, Rathor had assumed it was the longest of long shots. But Barnard obviously knew something he did not—and that was unacceptable. The thing was, though, that Rathor could not delegate any of his sycophantic undersecretaries or special assistants to do this. Only he could tackle this job.

Rathor had told his staff to get dossiers on all the people on the team heading down into that cave. Thick files had come back quickly on every one of them except the security man—Bowman, if that was his real name—about whom not even Rathor’s best people had been able to find anything. Bowman aside, the more he learned about those people, the more concerned Rathor became. He was not stupid by any means, and he could see what this unique assemblage might be capable of.

If those people came back with some of that exotic extremophile, and if BARDA’s people really could fabricate new antibiotics, Barnard, not Rathor, would be the hero of the day. It would be insulting, but far from the worst possible thing that could come out of this, as Rathor well knew. The worst possible thing would be… well, better not to even think about it, given all the planning and money and painstaking preparation he and certain associates had put into this project. Not to mention the level of risk they were all tolerating. Plans, money, groundwork—all those were really only the body of the machine. Risk was the motor that made it run. When he was still quite young, Rathor had experienced the epiphany that avoiding risk meant consignment to the dustbin of life. As he grew older, he understood the epiphany’s corollary: that rules were for sporty games and fools. The competitions of life were deadly earnest, and in those, the greatest risk of all was losing.

As a cabinet-level official, Rathor had access to the government’s most sophisticated technology. Well, not its most sophisticated stuff—that was reserved for the secretaries of defense and state, and he knew it, and it infuriated him. But the things he did have access to still amazed him.

One of them that he had greatly enjoyed was the NSA’s version of Google Earth. Actually, Google had replicated the NSA program from cobbled-together bits and pieces of information. Google’s version never worried the spooks, whose software was about three generations ahead, and who had access to satellite data the lefty geeks at Google could only dream about. Even Rathor’s stepped-down version of the program could let him see, on a clear day, the license plate on a New York City yellow cab.

If people only knew .

Rathor often played with the observation tool. The NSA net collected images not only from orbiting satellites but from countless terrestrial cameras as well. Many were visible to the public—cameras that caught people running red lights and committing burglaries, cameras that monitored prisons and hospitals and government proceedings, on and on. Millions of cameras. People knew about all those and, as sheep always do, had accepted the change in their surroundings without a bleat of protest. Well, maybe a bleat here and there, but nothing the government couldn’t handle.

People did not know about countless other cameras, for two reasons. One was that their existence came from a top secret DARPA project called DarkEye. The secrecy would be breached eventually, of course—all such veils were, sooner or later—but by the time that happened, those who counted would have already moved on to the next generation. The other reason was that people could not see this network of cameras. They weren’t even really cameras. They were energy-transmitting nanobots that could be aggregated into microscopic, crystal-like clusters. These recorded—and transmitted—energy, which could be converted into viewable images. They were easy to place, self-powering, and virtually invulnerable.

Ground and low-elevation images from the nanocams were refreshed every three seconds. With a little canvassing, Rathor could, if he got lucky, look through windows at women in various stages of undress and, if he got even luckier, doing remarkable things to themselves with little machines or big men. In some cases he didn’t even have to look through windows. Pulling images from nanocams implanted in cellphones and ceilings put him right in the rooms with the women. Of course, he could—and did—afford beautiful women who performed unbelievable acts in the flesh. But there was something about penetrating the private space of others that excited him, and so he did it.

Given all this, it should have been easy to pull up images of this thing called Cueva de Luz, but he could not. He was able to isolate images of the surrounding region with enough resolution to show individual leaves on trees. But as soon as he moved to within a quarter mile of the cave entrance, the screen broke up into grainy distortion patterns, like gravel tossed onto ice. He tried every method he knew to get real-time images of this cave, with no success. Rathor’s temper was never far below the boiling point, and it was hard not to rip the keyboard loose from its cable and smash it against a wall.

He switched over to Google Images and found some stills of the entrance, distant but recognizable. It was immense. You could drive a train through that , he thought. Two trains . He zoomed in, hoping to get a look inside the cave, but he could get no farther. He saw the dim outlines of huge rocks and, in the center of the screen, blackness that must have been the passage leading down into the cave. It was only a picture, but something about it made him shiver.

You could not pay me enough to go in there .

Later that evening, instead of being taken straight to his mansion in Vienna, Virginia, Rathor dismissed his driver, telling the man he would be working late and would spend the night in his residential suite there at HHS. He did retire to his suite shortly after that, but rather than working, he spent a few hours drinking Beefeater martinis and enjoying YouPorn on a secure laptop computer. Shortly after one in the morning, Rathor changed into casual clothes: khakis, plaid shirt, golf jacket, walking shoes. He left his personal and government cellphones on the dresser in his suite’s bedroom, called for his own car, and drove to the Lincoln Memorial. At this hour, the entire mall area, including the Great Emancipator’s monument, was always deserted.

Rathor took his time, surveying the area for several minutes. Then he got out and walked toward the memorial, climbing the three sets of triple steps. Golden columns of light glowed between the memorial’s thirty-six graying marble Doric columns, one for every state in the Union when Lincoln died. Giant Lincoln, frozen in ice-white Georgia marble, contemplated eternity in the monument’s main chamber. Rathor came here not infrequently, sometimes during visiting hours, sometimes after. What could be more natural than a patriotic cabinet member looking to the Great Emancipator for inspiration and guidance?