Douglas Preston - Impact

Ford nodded. "Following you so far."

"So it was in an elliptical orbit. The apogee, the farthest point from the sun, is where it probably started its journey."

"I see."

She hit a few keys, and a schematic of the solar system came into view. She typed in a command and an ellipsis appeared. "Here's the orbit of Object X. Please note: the apogee is right at the orbit of Mars. And here's the kicker: if you extrapolate backward, you find that Mars itself was right at that point in its orbit when X began its journey toward Earth."

She sat back. "Object X," she said, "came from Mars."

A long silence enveloped the hotel room. Ford stared at the screen. It seemed incredible. "You're sure about this?"

"Triple-checked it."

Ford rubbed his chin and sat back. "Looks like we need to go where they know about Mars."

"And where's that?"

Ford thought for a moment. "Right now they're mapping Mars. Over at NPF, the National Propulsion Facility in Pasadena, California. We should head over there, poke around, see if they've found anything unusual."

Abbey cocked her head and looked at him. "You know, Wyman, there's one thing I don't get. Why are you doing this? What's in it for you? Nobody's paying you, right?"

"I'm deeply concerned. I'm not sure why, but my internal alarms are going off like crazy and I can't rest until I figure this out."

"Concerned about what, exactly?"

"If that was a mini-black hole, the planet was just kissed by the Grim Reaper. We came this close to extinction. What if there are more where that came from?"

47

Harry Burr waited in the car park of the upscale Connecticut mall, leaning on the fender of his yellow VW New Beetle, smoking an American Spirit cigarette. The message had come in the night before, urgent . Burr had never had an assignment that wasn't urgent. When somebody wanted somebody else dead, it was never "take your time, no rush."

He rolled the cigarette thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger, feeling the sponginess of the filter, watching the smoke curl up from the glowing ash. A foul habit, bad for his health, unattractive, working-class. Tweedy professors didn't smoke, or if they did, it was a briar pipe. He tossed the butt on the cement floor of the parking garage and ground it up with a dozen twists of the sole of his penny loafer until it was a shredded tuft. He would quit, but not right now.

A few cars passed and then one slowed as it approached him. It was an ugly American car, a late-model Crown Victoria, black, naturally. His employers, whoever they were, watched too many movies. He loved his New Beetle and it was perfect for his work. No one expected a contract killer to arrive in a Beetle. Or wear a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches from L.L. Bean with chinos and argyle socks.

As he watched the black car ooze up, Burr didn't know and didn't want to know who was hiring him, but he was pretty sure it was quasi-official. He'd had a fair amount of that kind of work lately.

The Crown Vic stopped and the smoked window--smoked window!--rolled down. It was the same Asian man he had dealt with before, in a blue suit and sunglasses. Still, he went through the little password charade. "You leaving this space?" he asked.

"Not for another six minutes."

They loved that kind of stuff. In response, a hand extended with a fat manila envelope. Burr took it, opened it, riffled the brick of money, tossed it onto the passenger seat.

"Above all, we want that hard drive," said the man. "We're raising the bonus to two hundred thousand dollars for the drive, intact. You got that?"

"I got it." Burr smiled blandly and waved the car away. The Crown Vic departed with an ostentatious squeal of rubber. Nice , he thought, draw a little attention to yourself, why dontcha?

He slid back into his car and opened the envelope, pouring out its contents: fact sheet, photographs, and money. A lot of it. With far more to come. This was a good job, even an excellent one.

Shoving the money into the glove compartment, he scanned the photographs and perused the assignment letter. He whistled. This was going to be easy. Get a hard drive and kill a geek. There must be something pretty sweet on that hard drive.

He plucked a glossy product photograph of a hard drive out of the batch and gazed at it, shoved it back, sorted through the others, and then scanned the fact sheet. He'd review it more thoroughly tonight, do the research, make the hit tomorrow. He could hardly imagine now what it was like in the days before Google Earth, MapQuest, Facebook, YouTube, reverse white pages, people search, and all the other privacy-busting tools on the Internet. In half an hour he could do what was once a week's worth of research.

Harry Burr laid the papers aside and indulged in a little self-reflection. He was good, and not just because he was prep-school educated and could recite the Latin first declension. He was good because he didn't like killing. It gave him no pleasure. He didn't need to do it, he didn't have to do it, it wasn't like eating or sex. He was good because he felt for his victims. Knowing they were real people, he could put himself in their shoes, look out at the world through their eyes. That made it so much easier to kill them.

And finally, Harry Burr was efficient. Back when he was another person, a snot-nosed, prepped-out prick in Greenwich named Gordie Hill, his father had taught him all about efficiency. He had a store house of quotations he would roll out: if you're going to do it, do it; if you make a lot of money, no one will care how you did it; if you intend to win, one way is as good as another. "The victor will never be asked if he told the truth," was what the old man said when he walked out of the kitchen after shooting his mother. Never to be seen again. A few years later Harry learned his father had been quoting Hitler. Now that was funny.

Harry Burr smiled. He was "damaged," or so he was led to believe by the parade of school psychologists, social workers, counselors, and all the other professional advice-giving-for-one-hundred-dollars-an-hour folks after his mother's murder. So why not make a career of being damaged? He plucked the crumpled cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket. Fishing the last one out, he lit it and put the empty pack back in his pocket. What was it St. Augustine said? "God give me chastity, but not right now." One of these days he'd quit, but not right now.

48

Abbey waited behind Ford as he knocked on the open door of the office of Dr. Charles Chaudry, director of the Mars mission. She felt itchy and hot in the new suit Ford had made her wear, especially in California in June.

The director rose and came around his desk, hand extended.

"My assistant, Abbey Straw."

Abbey shook the cool hand. Chaudry was a handsome man with a lean, chiseled face, dark brown eyes, springy on his feet, athletic, personable. He sported one of those tight little ponytails that seemed endemic to Californians of a certain age.

"Come in, please," said the man, his tenor voice almost musical.

Ford eased his frame into a chair and Abbey followed suit. She tried to hide her nervousness. Part of her was thrilled at the cloak-and-dagger business, the pretense with which they'd gained access. This Ford fellow, who looked so buttoned down and mainstream, was actually a subversive at heart. She liked that.

The office was pleasantly large and spare, with windows looking out over gray-brown mountains that rose abruptly behind the giant parking lot. Two walls of books added to the comfortable, scholarly atmosphere. Everything was as neat as a pin.

"Well now," said Chaudry, folding his hands. "So you're writing a book on our Mars mission."

"That's right," said Ford. "A big, beautiful photography book. They tell me you're the man in charge of mapping and photographing the surface."