Douglas Preston - Impact

She read through several articles but it all came down to the same thing: no known natural process could create a point source of gamma rays in the solar system. No wonder Corso was interested. He'd found a point source for gamma rays on Mars--and no one at NPF believed him. Or was it all in his head? It was hard to tell.

She stared at the computer screen, rubbed her eyes, glanced at the clock. Three A.M. Where was Ford?

She sighed and got up, rummaged in the small fridge. Empty. She had drunk up all her Diet Cokes, eaten the bags of Cheetos and wolfed down the Mars Bars. Maybe she should sleep. But the thought of sleep did not appeal to her. She was too worried about Ford. She began idly looking through the data, and then Googled the Mars Mapping Orbiter. Launched a few years ago, gone into orbit around Mars a year later. An orbiter stuffed with cameras, spectrometers, subsurface radar, and a gamma ray scintillator. Purpose: to map Mars. It carried the most powerful telescope ever launched into deep space, called HiRISE, which was classified but thought to be able to see an object twelve inches across from 130 miles up. In the few months of its operation the MMO had sent more data back to Earth than all previous space missions combined.

And it looked like a lot of that data, maybe all of it, was on the hard disk.

She reordered the folders by date. At the very top was a recent one--very recent--labeled DEIMOS MACHINE.

That sounded intriguing. She opened it and saw there were more than thirty files in it, with names like DEIMOS-BIG and VOLTAIRE-ORIG to VOLTAIRE-DETAIL with a suite of files labeled VOLTAIRE1 through VOLTAIRE33.

She clicked through them all, one after another, staring at the blurry, false-color images, each one clearer than the last. They were all of a strange-looking construction, a hollow cylinder surrounded by spherical projections sitting on a five-sided base. Sunken in dust. It looked like something from a movie set or an art project of some kind.

She began clicking through all the Voltaire images, and finally the bigger files at the top, DEIMOS-BIG and VOLTAIRE-ORIG, staring at the images with growing comprehension. Her heart began to accelerate as it dawned on her just where this strange construction had been photographed. She could hardly breathe. This was incredible, unbelievable--

She heard a footfall outside the door, a thump, the click from the lock, and the door swung open.

She sat up. " You won't believe --!"

Ford cut her off with a harsh gesture. "Shut that down and pack up. We've got to get out of here. Now ."

57

Harry Burr looked around the lobby of the cheap hotel, smelled something, checked his shoes for dog shit. Nothing--somebody else must've tracked it in. He had had plenty of time to cool off on the trip down to Washington. He'd been so close: Christ, he'd even seen the girl rip the drive from the back of the fridge on their way out, but they'd jumped in a damn cab before he could catch up to them and finish the job.

They hadn't completely escaped him. He'd been able, with the hack number on the cab's roof and a little help from a friend on the D.C. force, to trace them here. He went up to reception and rang the little bell, and a few moments later a doughy man-boy with a belt three sizes too tight, squeezing a tight ring in his fat, shuffled out from the back. "Help you?"

Burr put on an appropriately agitated air and spoke in a rush. "I certainly hope you can. I'm looking for my daughter. She ran away with a man, a real scumbag, met her in church if you can believe it, the pervert." He paused to take a breath. "I think they spent the night here, got some pictures of them"--he fumbled in his suitcase and pulled out glossies of Ford and the girl--"here they are." He paused, gulping in breath.

Smacking his lips, the man slowly bent over the two photographs and looked. A long silence ensued. Burr resisted the impulse to poke him a twenty, which was clearly what the man was waiting for. Burr didn't like paying for information--you sometimes got bad information that way. People who gave you information from the kindness of their dumb little hearts always gave you good.

Another smacking of the lips. Mr. Phlegmatic raised his eyes and met his. "Daughter?" he asked, with a skeptical note in his voice.

"Adopted," he said. "From Nigeria. My wife couldn't conceive and we wanted to give a little girl in Africa the opportunity. Look, have you seen her? Please help me, she's my little girl. That scumbag met her at our church, he's twice her age and married, too."

The eyes dropped back to the picture and a long sigh came out, like a bag being squeezed. "I seen 'em."

"Really? Where? Are they staying here?"

"I don't want any trouble."

"There won't be, I assure you. I just want to save my daughter."

The clerk nodded, masticating a piece of gum. His face reminded Burr of a cow with its cud. "If there's trouble, I'll have to call the cops."

"Do I look like a man who'd cause trouble? I'm a professor of English literature at Yale for heaven's sake. I just want to talk to her. What room?"

No answer. Now was the time to apply a little cash. He flipped up a fifty, which the clerk pawed out of his hand. With a grunt he went into the back office and came out with the register. He opened it on the desk and turned it around, pointing with a fat finger. Mr. and Mrs. Morton.

"Mr. and Mrs. Morton? They took only one room? Number one-fifty-five?"

The man nodded.

Harry Burr made the face of a father thinking about something he'd rather not think about. "What about ID, didn't they have to show ID?"

"Sometimes we forget to ask," he said lamely.

Burr checked the map of the motel and noted that room 155 was in the motel's back wing, first floor. It was a cheap motel, all the rooms with separate front entrances and no back doors. So much the better.

He straightened up. "Thank you, thank you very much."

"No noise or I call the cops."

"Don't worry." Burr went out to his idling car, pulled out of the drive-through, reached in the glove compartment, and felt the reassuring grip of the Israeli Desert Eagle .44 magnum semiautomatic, his working firearm. He grasped the suppressor and affixed it to the muzzle and laid it on the seat next to him as he eased the car around to the back of the motel.

There wouldn't be any noise if Burr could help it.

58

"Out the window? Are you nuts?" Abbey stood in the door to the bathroom, hands on her hips.

Ford ignored her. He pulled open the cheap sliding aluminum window in the bathroom. He shoved Abbey's suitcase out, pushed out his own. "Now you."

"This is crazy." But Abbey obeyed, ducking her head out and wiggling through the window. Ford handed her the laptop and drive and then he squeezed out. They were behind the motel. There was a weedy service drive, a chain-link fence, a drainage ditch, and then a large parking lot surrounding a frowzy mall. The sky was gray and a light drizzle fell.

Abbey picked up her suitcase. "What now? Call a cab?"

"To the mall."

"It isn't open yet."

"We're not shopping. Just follow me."

"Why are we running?" Abbey asked. "What've you done?"

"Later."

Abbey followed Ford across the driveway. He tossed their suitcases and his briefcase over the fence. "Go."

"This is ridiculous." Abbey grabbed the chain links and climbed over, dropping down the other side. Ford scrambled up and over.

"Keep up."

He took off at a jog across a trash-strewn strip of grass, jumped the drainage ditch, and headed into the parking lot. Abbey heard a faint squealing of tires and turned to see a yellow New Beetle tearing down the service road behind the motel. It screeched to a halt, the door burst open, and a man jumped out, kneeling.