Greg Ahlgren - Prologue

So many people have been generous in providing comment, suggestions, encouragement and assistance for this book that it would be impossible to list them all. However, a special debt of gratitude is owed to David Sims whose literary and creative talents helped jumpstart this project, to Debbie Elliott for her assistance in preparing and assembling the manuscript, and especially to Bennett Freeman, whose scientific, creative and literary input has been invaluable.

The air conditioning was broken again. It wasn’t so much the heat that was bothersome as the stultifying oppressiveness once the circulating pump quit. The lack of airflow made the atmosphere in the Brandigan Applied Sciences Building on the MIT campus thick and clammy. As Campus Security Officer Yolanda Jackson walked down the hall on the 21 stfloor an unseen hand tightened around her lungs. Her breathing became raspy and shallow. She knew she should have grabbed her inhaler from her patrol car parked around the corner, but who knew that the air conditioning would be out? It was too late now. Her asthma would have to wait.

Without looking, she touched the two-way radio on her duty belt and contemplated reporting the failed air conditioning. But at three in the morning she’d only be able to raise an indifferent dispatcher at Campus Maintenance who would ask all sorts of questions before telling her he’d have an H-VAC guy give her a call in an hour or so. Better to wait until the end of her shift and fill out a maintenance report form that she could leave with her supervisor. Let it be someone else’s problem.

Besides, tomorrow was Sunday and she planned to take Jamal and Lionel to Salisbury Beach. They’d spend more time on the rides than playing in the surf. The rides were so damn expensive, but she had promised. She wished Luther’s check had arrived on time. She had delayed leaving for work in case it was in the afternoon mail. It wasn’t. She was annoyed, because the judge had repeatedly warned Luther that his checks had to arrive by Thursday.

Officer Jackson didn’t mind night shifts. It was quieter, and in the seven years she had held the job, the worst she had encountered was a drunken undergrad intent on taking out his academic frustration on the nearest uniform.

Night shifts were more checking doorways and buildings, and fewer interactions with students. It was not that she disliked students, but the nights passed quickly and she could work while Jamal and Lionel slept. They were now old enough to be left alone.

At night, if she got no calls, she only had to check each building in her patrol area twice, randomly walking two or three floors. This was the second time through Brandigan this shift. She had walked the 8 thand 12 thfloors hours earlier and hadn’t noticed the air conditioning out.

As she passed the Astrophysics Department Office and rounded the corner, she noticed that the door to the faculty lounge was ajar. Even as she instinctively reached down and turned off her two-way radio she smiled. There would be no intruder in the faculty lounge of the Astrophysics Department at 3:00 on a Sunday morning. Someone had obviously left the door open when leaving on Friday.

She pushed open the door, stepped into the lounge and flipped the light switch. She frowned when the room remained dark. The air conditioning and interior room lights must be on the same defective circuit. Maybe she should radio Maintenance after all. Any electrical problem presented a risk of fire. Surprising that the hallway lights were unaffected.

She pulled out her long black flashlight with her right hand and slid the button forward. The beam played across the lounge and caught an orange stepladder open in the middle of the room. The ceiling tile above it had been pushed aside exposing the crawl space with its tangle of wires and piping. A stale stench from the opening assaulted her nostrils. Maintenance must have already started to investigate the problem. Probably they had left it for Monday. She aimed her flashlight around the rest of the room and was about to back out and close the door when she saw what looked like a shoe protruding from behind a leather couch against the side wall.

Without thinking she commanded, “All right, stand up and step out here. Let’s see some identification.”

As soon as the instinctive words were out of her mouth she regretted her decision. Even though it was probably a student playing God-knows-what-prank, she realized that she should have stepped out of the room, closed the door, and radioed for help. If she were a District Police Officer she would have done that. But of course if she were a District Officer she would have had a gun. Her whole body tensed.

The crouching figure slowly rose up and stepped out. Yolanda Jackson relaxed when the figure turned toward her, caught in the flashlight beam.

“I still need some identification,” she rasped, trying to keep her voice stern. “What are you doing here?”

The figure stepped toward Yolanda and smiled. She never felt a thing. As if in slow motion she saw the figure’s right hand reach toward her through her jittering flashlight beam, and she looked down at her left side just above her belt. A dark stain was already spreading over her uniform shirt. She tried to turn the flashlight back on herself but her hand went numb. She heard the flashlight clatter to the floor. The last thing she saw before her vision faded was the light beam stumbling across the far wall as the flashlight rolled away from her. She felt herself losing consciousness and thought she was falling. She tried to reach out with her left hand and was grateful that someone caught her under her arms. She thought of Jamal’s baseball game just four days earlier. She arrived in the second inning after he had already batted and gotten a hit. She thought it pointless to die to cover up some silly prank. She vaguely heard, rather than felt, her black shoes being dragged across the floor and she felt as though she were being lifted up. Then everything faded to oblivion.

The tower clock in the Brandigan Applied Sciences Building was striking six as Paul deVere stared in the retinal scan on his dashboard, starting the car. He gripped the steering wheel—steering wheels gave him a feel of control, a solidity the joystick didn’t have.

He’d learned to drive on a steering wheel car, as had many men of his generation, and still liked its feel. That was really why he’d bought the new 2026 Ford Phaser, it was one of the few cars that still offered the steering wheel option. He could even remember driving a manual transmission, but you couldn’t find those any more than you could find tail fins.

“An old guy’s car,” his wife laughed on the day he bought it.

“Screw you,” he’d muttered, but not loudly enough so she might think he was offering. That the steering wheel prevented her from using his car was all to the good. Besides, at 53, with thinning hair and a slight paunch, wasn’t he entitled to an old guy’s car?

He nosed out of the MIT Department of Astrophysics parking lot and onto Charles Street. He had to catch himself from turning left across the bridge, as he usually did after work, and turned right instead, heading home toward Concord. Just past the statue dedicated to the Glorious American Communist Revolution, he turned right onto Massachusetts Avenue and continued west. The statue was one of the few concessions the autonomous Northeast District (formerly New England, New York and Pennsylvania) allowed the American Soviet government.

He flipped the switch under the dash to activate the tracking sensor. His friend and fellow Astrophysics professor, Lewis Ginter, had invented it. “Never hurts to be too careful,” Ginter had said. “No reason the bastards should know more than they have to.”