BETA - Project Avatar, page 2
Dee breathed the sweetest sigh of relief she had ever experienced.
Then, seeing the gunman slumped on the seat beside her with his bloodied head, Dee’s concern turned to Ed, who was still pinned underneath him. She unclipped her seatbelt and stood up.
The Englishman was just emerging from the cockpit, adjusting his tie. “I’ll have a look at your friend,” he said. “I’m trained as a medic.” He paused for a moment, looking down at the two bodies piled in the seat, covered with the shattered remnants of the champagne bottle and its contents.
“That is rather a sad end for a Dom Pérignon.
Chapter 2
Five minutes later John was ministering to the unconscious Ed on the aisle floor at the rear of the plane, with his sleeves rolled up and his jacket neatly folded over the back of the seat beside him. He held the lid of Ed’s left eye open and shined a penlight into the unresponsive pupil.
“Please tell me he’s not going to die,” Dee said, almost whispering.
“His vital signs are all good, but I’d say he won’t be back on his pegs for a while.” He glanced up at her. “Your husband? Boyfriend?”
Dee smiled. “Just a colleague. But I’ve known him for years and he’s a sweet guy.”
“He’s in shock, possibly even a coma. We should take him to a hospital as soon as we land.”
“I don’t understand—why Ed? He’s so harmless.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t strain yourself looking for a deeper meaning,” he said as he stood up. “That sort of blighter likes to cut up rough.”
The old general approached them, rolling down the aisle with a paunchy waddle that seemed intended to take up more space than was his due. Behind him, near the broken cockpit door, his aide was checking the duct tape that bound the three hijackers. They lay on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, bundled as tightly as cocoons. All three of them seemed to be coming around now.
The general gave Dee and John a friendly grimace. “You two were pretty quick on your feet back there,” he growled. “That’s the way we do it.”
She wasn’t sure whether to say “you’re welcome” or “thank you,” so she just smiled and nodded.
He turned to John, “Henley-Wright.”
John nodded. “Yes—rather calls for a drink of something, I’d say.”
“That’s for damn sure!” the general said. He raised a bandaged and bloodied right hand to Dee. “Brigadier General Tyrone Grimmer. And if I’m not mistaken, you’re Dee Lockwood.”
She raised her hand politely in response. “Have we met before?” As if she would forget a guy like this.
The general gave an amused frown. “My men and I had a hand in organizing the conference. We’re aware of who’s attending.”
“This man will need an ambulance as soon as we land,” John said.
“Already called it in,” the general told him. “They’ll be on the landing strip.”
Dee turned to confront the old man. “General, how did three hijackers get onto this plane?”
“We’ll be looking into that.”
“Were they invited to the conference?” she continued.
“At this point, I’m afraid that’s classified information.”
She glanced at John, but he was pointedly ignoring the conversation, refastening his cufflinks.
She gave her most innocent smile and changed the subject. “I noticed that your insignia are Special Forces—are you attached to NSA, or some other branch?”
“That’s classified.”
Dee rocked back a little on her heels. Though a civilian contractor, she had a respectably high security clearance. Yet here was a United States general—someone she was supposed to work with—who wouldn’t say what he was a general of.
“Well . . . okay. Is there anything we can talk about?” Dee asked.
The general showed a few teeth on one side of his mouth. “We could talk about getting that drink.”
He nodded and wheeled away, receding back down the aisle with the rolling gait of an old sea captain. John looked up from smoothing his lapels and smiled brightly. His expression suggested he had been deep in thought.
Dee began to sputter: “Well that’s the strangest . . .”
“Are you in software?” he asked her.
She exhaled and let it go. “Cryptography.”
His eyebrows arched. “Wait a moment. Lockwood, was it? Didn’t you design the crypto protocol they’re using over at the Fed nowadays?”
She gave him an ironic smile. “That’s classified.”
“Ha! Jolly good.” He extended his hand. “John Henley-Wright. Of Picomens, Limited.”
Dee shook the hand absently, pursing her lips and flipping through her mental files. “Picomens? I’m afraid the name doesn’t ring any bells.”
“Oh, we’re a tiny software firm in the U.K. Government contracts, bureaucratic stuff—all very boring. I’d love to give you a full disclosure, but I’m rather new there and I’m still a bit foggy on the whole thing myself.”
“So you can’t say what your company does?” Dee goaded him.
“Well, government contracts of some sort. I’m more on the security end.”
This was a strange planeload of people. “So you’re a military man, then?”
“Oh, heavens no! Well, perhaps in younger days, but who wasn’t?”
She looked away and moodily blew a stray wisp of hair out of her face. Ed is the only person I really trust on this plane, she thought, looking at her friend, bloody and unconscious at her feet. When she glanced back at John, he gave her a huge boyish smile, as if to buck up her flagging spirits. Whatever he might do for a living, she had to admit, he was full of charm.
“You’re looking a little frazzled, poor thing,” he said. “There, I see the flight attendant is up and about. Perhaps we can coax her to prepare us a restorative tumbler of something.”
She forced herself to smile. “Why not?”
The plane arrived right on time, dropping smoothly onto an isolated government landing strip in the endless desert, deep behind a military security perimeter.
Dee knew that May afternoons in the Arizona desert could run the gamut from driving snow to scorching heat. Today, with the sun already reddening over the shimmery horizon, the air was dry, still, and mild.
The promised ambulance was on hand, and it whisked Ed away seconds after the plane braked to a halt. The attendants, who were military medics, refused to let Dee accompany him. The general’s aide confirmed the impossibility of her request. He hovered behind her left shoulder as Ed was loaded into the ambulance. His nametag said G. Oliver, but she wasn’t sure how to read his insignia of rank. He didn’t seem at all inconvenienced by the bloody bandage around his head.
“Will I have to make a statement to the police?” Dee asked him, watching the ambulance drive off.
“We’ve got matters under control,” G. Oliver assured her. Then he turned crisply and walked over to the general.
Dee didn’t see what became of the three hijackers. She was loaded into an aging but serviceable government staff car, an enormous black New Yorker. John took the seat beside her in the vast interior, and the general led the way in a separate car while his aide stayed behind to oversee matters on the plane.
“What kind of place is this?” she wondered aloud.
The buildings were large and widely spaced, built in the form of ferroconcrete blocks with a few miserly windows. The buildings appeared to date back to 1970 or so, but the road looked brand-new. The setting was as isolated as a lunar crater, with nothing but sage and tumbleweed, and on the hills the silhouettes of saguaros raising their asymmetrical arms to the heavens. In the distance, she saw lonely buttes that might have been traced out of an old Roadrunner cartoon.
“I take it you’ve never been here,” John said. “Everyone comes here sooner or later. I’m not sure if it has an official name, but they all seem to call it ‘Hotel Uncle Sam.’ If memory serves, the place used to be used for testing something big and nuclear. But it’s all on the up and up now.”
“Is it radioactive?” she asked.
“Well, over that way it is, but on this end it’s just fine.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Or so they say.”
“I was expecting a conference hall. This is more like what I’d imagine a secret torture center might look like.”
He laughed. “Oh, you’ll love it here.”
The car let them off outside a steel door large enough to admit a good-size tank. It was sealed tight, and in one corner was a much smaller steel door with a soldier on guard. As they approached, the soldier opened the small door for them and they passed abruptly from the dry desert air into a sumptuous climate-controlled ballroom.
Dee stopped inside the doorway, adjusting her senses to the unexpected glamour. The general and John paused politely to let her take it in.
Her mouth fell open as she advanced a few more steps.
The room was three stories tall and, though windowless, was appointed in finery with no expense spared. The walls were tastefully painted and hung with huge framed paintings, the floor was a vast expanse of elaborate hardwood parquet set with sofas and wingback chairs upholstered in soft leather, and two enormous crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The room was empty except for half a dozen liveried servants at the doors, though their close-cropped hair and broad shoulders suggested that not all their training was in the serving of food and wine.
The general lifted an impatient finger, and two of the men snapped to attention.
“Sir!” they cried in unison.
“How many are here so far?”
“Sir, seventeen, sir!” one of them barked.
“Good. That’s almost everyone. Bring me the list.”
“Sir!”
“And a Rob Roy. You know how I like them.”
“Sir, twist of lime, sir!”
“That’s it, son. Step to it. And you—show these two to their rooms. We had a hell of a flight.”
The long, echoless corridor to her suite appeared to have been bored into a solid block of concrete, then tastefully finished with gold lamé wallpaper. Her obscenely luxurious rooms could have been a honeymoon suite at the Bellagio: full bar, Jacuzzi, 60-inch flat screen, and an Olympic-size bed with satin sheets. A little window of sorts gave a narrow view through the thick wall into the golden desert evening.
Exhausted, nerves frazzled, she could think of little but dinner and a hot bath, in no particular order. Flopping down on her back on the bed she pulled her feet up one at a time to wriggle out of her Prada loafers. She had three pairs with her—today she was wearing the black. She paid a lot of attention to her clothes, but she was not one to sacrifice sensible footwear, not for any occasion. These loafers were narrow and elegant and had everything going for them except high heels. In a pinch, she could probably break a seven-minute mile in them.
Reviewing the bizarre events on the airplane prompted Dee to call her friend Abe for advice. She began rummaging through the elegantly tooled patent leather shoulder bag which also held her small laptop computer—the single most important inanimate object in her life.
She took out her smartphone and began dialing Abe’s alert number—a dummy number he never actually answered. She was interrupted when the little cartoon figure of herself appeared on the LCD screen, just as it had earlier on her laptop.
“May I dial that number for you?” it asked in its cheery, piping little voice.
Dee winced and began disabling the application. Then she thought about poor Ed, lying in some ICU with only strangers around him, and guilt stayed her hand. She had, after all, promised to test the app for him. She fished in her bag for her Bluetooth unit and plugged it into her ear.
“Okay,” she told it. “Call Abe.”
The little caricature grinned so widely, its head looked about to split in half. “One moment please.”
“And can you wipe that silly grin off your face?”
The little image promptly complied.
Dee was surprised at the application’s voice command abilities. She hadn’t really expected it to understand a request like that. Curious, she decided to put it through its paces.
“Let it ring twice and hang up,” she said. It gave no reply. Very slowly she said, “Do you understand the command?”
The cartoon character gazed at her without smiling and blinked its huge eyes. “I let it ring twice and hung up. What should I do next?”
Impressive, Dee thought. “Just wait,” she said. “He’ll call back on another line.”
The cartoon character gave a little nod. “Did you understand me?” she asked it.
“Yes,” said the cartoon. “We're waiting for a call from Abe.”
Dee was sitting bolt upright now on the edge of the bed. Holding the phone in both hands, she stared at the little figure. This thing was incredible. No wonder Ed’s company was so excited at the prospect of a product release.
“That is amazing,” she murmured.
The cartoon figure blushed. “Thank you.”
The phone rang once, and she answered. A box popped up offering her a video link, and she took it.
Abe’s head filled the screen, crackling with static. His face, framed in stringy blond hair and stubble, was bloated by the fisheye effect of the webcam.
“Hey, Dee.”
“Are you okay? You look sick.”
“No, I’m okay. But, you know, I’m in Amsterdam, and it’s, like, two a.m. So I’m, um, really stoned.”
She rolled her eyes. Same old Abe. “Well, maybe I’ll just let you get back to it, then.”
“No, no. I can talk, I’m fine. I mean, you wouldn’t have called if you didn’t, um, want to talk.”
Abe was the smartest person Dee knew, and she knew a lot of very smart people. He was also the man who put the “un” in “unreliable.” She had a strong inclination to hang up on him. But she wouldn’t, because she wanted to hear what he had to say about today’s alarming events.
“This line is secure?” she asked.
He paused for a moment. Then his pale, red-eyed face gave a huge, indignant snort.
She had to smile. “All right, sorry, it was just a question.”
Abe maintained, for his personal use, some of the most secure communication lines in the civilian world, if not the world, period. She had never met a cryptographer who was better at the craft than she—except Abe. He was also one of her oldest friends, the last of her close-knit group from college days. But unlike Dee, Abe didn’t live in a world of comfortable contracts in government and business and banking. He lived in a sort of virtual shadow world of his own devising. Harmless, to the best of her knowledge, but almost untouchable by any entity on earth.
The static in his digital image probably meant that the pixels had passed through a thousand piggybacked digital connections, circling the world via an untraceable web with myriad strands, before coalescing magically and untraceably on her little smartphone screen.
He moved his head a little, and she could see hints of a small and very messy hotel room. Drum and bass throbbed faintly in the background. “Yeah,” he said. “I think the line’s all right.”
“Okay, don’t get huffy. Listen, Abe, you’re not going to believe the day I’ve had. My plane was hijacked!”
“No shit? Are you all right?” he said.
“Oh yes, I’m fine but . . .”
“Hey, I was just surfing the news—how come I didn’t see anything?” he interrupted.
“It didn’t go very far. The whole thing was put down in about ten minutes. And it was just a small private jet on its way to this conference in the middle of nowhere.”
“So you were on, what, a little Gulfstream or something, with five passengers, and two of them were hijackers?”
“Three of them. Out of eight.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said, rubbing his stubbled chin. “Unless . . . was there a VIP on board?”
She wriggled back against the silken wall of pillows on her immense bed and propped the smartphone on the bedside table where it could watch her sink into creature comforts. Her lazy gaze paused on the elaborate bar. Was there time for a cocktail before dinner?
“There was a general,” she said. “Tyrone Grimmer?”
“Sounds familiar. What is he, NSA?”
“He wouldn’t say, but have you heard of a D.I. unit that wears really, really dark red berets? Almost black.”
Abe’s drooping pink eyelids rose, and he gave her a fish-eyed stare. “Midnight-red berets? That’s UMBRA!”
“What’s UMBRA?”
“They’re a black ops unit involved in intelligence. But I’ve got to admit . . . I don’t know much more about them than that. They’re deeply shrouded.”
Dee pouted thoughtfully. This was an unusual moment. Abe knew something about almost everything, and in conspiratorial matters he knew more than most. His extensive skills and paranoid leanings had put him at the hub of a loose collection of hackers, programming geniuses, telecom aficionados, intelligence insiders, moles, cranks, and lunatics that spanned the globe. He referred to them as “the Substructure,” as if they were an actual organization, which they probably weren’t.
“Is that an acronym?” she asked. “UMBRA?”
“Yeah.”
“What does it stand for?”
“I have no idea.” Abe began eating something he had apparently just found on a nearby table. She tried not to identify what it was. He continued, “If those hijackers tried and failed to kidnap an UMBRA general, then they’re the stupidest guys that ever lived. Let me guess that their whereabouts are currently unknown.”
“That’s true,” she said absently. “You know, though . . . there was another mysterious person on the flight. Have you ever heard of Picomens Software Limited? A U.K. firm, probably an MI-6 contractor?”
“Uh . . . maybe. They’re kind of new, right?”
“They must be. In fact, I was half convinced the company had been made up on the spot today. What about John Henley-Wright—heard of him?”
