Chasing Fire Read online

  “But your work is important.”

  “These other companies all have thousands or tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of employees. BE has dropped completely off the radar in the tech world.”

  “But SEER—”

  “It’s such a secret project that most of our employees don't even know about it.”

  “Dez and Adya are running your company?”

  Chase and his partner, Desmond “Dez” Jefferson, a brilliant African American engineer, had met at Stanford’s renowned AI Lab, known as “SAIL.” They’d founded Balance Engineering, then created Rapid Artificial Intelligence, “RAI,” the most advanced form of AI ever devised. It’d made them famous in the tech world, and also wealthy. After selling their invention for billions, they’d plowed the windfall into their next project, SEER. However, this one they kept secret. Only six people knew it existed.

  “How do you know this stuff?” Chase suddenly asked, trying to sound calm.

  “You can't contact them,” the Astronaut said, ignoring his question.

  “Why not?” Chase asked, incensed.

  “Because if you analyze all the data, consider every angle, you will find that your company is indeed a target.”

  “And you’ve done all that just since we contacted you?”

  “I’ve done it all just since you arrived.” The Astronaut led them off the trail again to avoid an opening in the canopy which would have left them visible to the sky. “I expect Balance Engineering’s headquarters will be hit by the Fire Bomber sometime within the next three days.”

  Sixteen

  Still in Mission Control, Tess and Travis finally received the report answering the second most important question of the investigation: How were the bombers able to totally destroy buildings with apparently such limited effort and minimal amounts of explosives?

  She read the summary while the technical adviser who’d delivered it waited. Travis, still on the phone, would read it later.

  Tess wanted to clarify several points, even though the underlying conclusion left little doubt that the Fire Bomber had penetrated US intelligence at the highest levels, but she already knew that. The alarming part, that had her as close to panicking as Tess could ever be, was that the Bombers, or the people controlling them, also had a level of sophistication only possessed by the top three militaries in the world. And, even worse, the Fire Bomber understood how to stop the very thing she was charged with protecting.

  She wanted to pace, she wanted to scream, she wanted to smash something—anything. “So they’re using Doomsday,” Tess said calmly, referring to the ARMA2020 Poly Explosive which the few with clearances high enough to be privy to its existence called “Doomsday” rather than by “the APE Bomb” acronym that the manufacturers had hoped it would be known. “But they’ve enhanced it beyond . . . ”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the adviser began. “As you know, Doomsday, made by SkyNok, is a third-generation material created with a patented and classified manufacturing technique, and combined with tactically engineered components. The result is a lightweight and pliable material, packing ninety-two times more force than any prior forms of compound-explosives. However, that wouldn’t be enough to bring these buildings down.”

  “Then how?”

  “We don’t know yet. There are forensic teams still scouring every bomb site and labs analyzing debris around the clock, but they aren’t getting anything conclusive on other explosives yet.”

  “But there has to be another explosive, right?” Tess asked, keeping her voice level while walking to a monitor with a view of the outside.

  “Yes. All the experts agree you can’t cause this kind of destruction without something significant paired with Doomsday.

  “What if they found a way to increase the Doomsday’s potency, for lack of a better word?” Travis asked. “Have we talked to APE’s manufacturer?”

  “Is that possible? Tess asked.

  The advisor nodded. “I guess so, but it’s hard to imagine that they could push the yield on Doomsday to the point of that kind of destruction.” He motioned to photos of the leveled buildings.

  “What if the Fire Bombers are bringing more Doomsday into the building than we think?” Travis suggested.

  “But all the evidence points to there being one bomber at each location,” Tess said. “It could be the same person, logistically speaking.”

  “I think we should look at that,” the advisor said. “They could be using cloaking methods to get into the building undetected. Nothing more than shadows has been picked up on monitors, and satellites are getting nothing.”

  “Either way, ten people, or just one person, walking into any building in the world and dropping some Doomsday . . . However they’re doing it, that kind of power, to bring down a building . . . Piece by piece they could destroy a city, the entire economy . . . ”

  “Yes,” the adviser said, looking distraught. “Doomsday might have been the right name after all.”

  Powder checked his watch: two-thirty AM. Time to move, he thought while doing one final review on the plans. I wish they would tell me why we’re doing this one. He didn’t like being in New York City under normal circumstances—too many people—but getting ready to blow up a building there particularly bothered him. This target has nothing to do with the mission, and that puts everything in jeopardy.

  Typically, Powder received his orders less than twenty-four hours before a scheduled strike, then operated using someone else’s reconnaissance. Although that’s how they’d done it during his time in special forces—relying on intel being fed to him during an ongoing operation—it made him crazy. If someone gets killed, I don't mind taking the fall, he thought, double-checking the equipment and his full-to-capacity hundred-pound pack. I’m on the right side of history. I believe in this . . . this war.

  His smiled disappeared as he chewed on beef jerky. He started moving toward the building. At this hour, it was unlikely he’d encounter anyone, but being in the city that never sleeps, Powder took precautions. His short black hair, disarming smile, and swimming pool-blue eyes made him look like the most trustworthy guy in the world—anything but a terrorist. He also wore a security uniform to further the honest image.

  His mind raced back to the resentment. But this has nothing to do with our war. This strike is a vendetta, and something that I shouldn't be involved with.

  He had considered refusing the order, or going up the chain of command and demanding an explanation as to why this strike was necessary. He’d even rehearsed telling them that he was cool with the risks of the other jobs because he understood the purpose—it all made sense. Powder was not a stupid man, and for the better part of the last twenty-four hours he’d been trying to figure out how this job fit.

  But, in the end, he had decided to follow orders, for no other reason than that he was a good soldier, and being that was more important to him than almost anything else.

  Twenty-two minutes later, he was unpacking Doomsday and setting up the sacrificial laptop that would control the mayhem about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting and unrelated target. These people, unlike all the others, had done nothing wrong.

  War is hell.

  Seventeen

  It was nearly midnight in Mt. Shasta, California, when Chase and Wen finally got ready to sleep. The Astronaut had taught them so much in the hours they’d been together that their minds felt numb.

  “I keep replaying the surveillance footage over in my mind,” Chase said to Wen as they lay in the darkness of a small, one-room cabin, referring to the video feeds the Astronaut had tapped into from Denver International Airport. They’d identified the bluetooth man and the gift shop man as following them. The Astronaut was able to use facial recognition programs to ID them as former US military—dropouts with no record since discharge. But the shooter who’d taken out the bluetooth man, the one Flint had claimed worked for him, was not identifiable.

  Chase needed to know for sure that he was one of Flint's
people. There was something in the footage that bothered him, but he couldn’t figure out what. They’d watched it seven or eight times; it had been like seeing an action movie—a dozen angles, from different cameras, skillfully edited by the Astronaut—one in which Chase had the starring role, a hero about to be killed by enemy agents, only to be saved by . . . by who?

  “Do you think he was with Flint?” Chase asked, reaching out to touch Wen softly.

  “Yes.”

  “But was Flint's man trying to shoot me?” The troubling theory had been eating at him even before they saw the footage, and the surveillance video had not proved conclusive either way.

  “He hit the bluetooth man from a distance of more than one thousand feet and from an impossible angle with a kill shot. If he was aiming for you, you’d be dead on that terminal floor instead of the bluetooth man. Flint's man saved your life.”

  Chase wanted so much to believe her.

  They fell into each other’s arms kissing, caressing. The adrenaline of the day finally easing, and although exhausted, they made love. In the uncertainty of their situation, they found truth in each other.

  Bull and Lenny were already exhausted when their flight landed at LAX. Sleep had been spotty ever since “the discovery,” and stress had been constant. They’d switched planes twice for the cheaper fare, and there’d been a screaming baby in the row in front of them who hadn’t stopped wailing for the entire three hour flight.

  A fellow hacker called Skrunch met them and helped load their carry-on luggage into her 1984 VW Rabbit GTI. Bull told Lenny that Skrunch had gotten the moniker because after staring at a computer monitor 24/7 in a dark room, her face had kind of permanently scrunched up. Lenny stared at her, and had to agree it fit her.

  Skrunch navigated relatively light traffic as they headed to Chesterfield Square, a seedy section of South LA. Her “apartment” was in a half-abandoned building. Homeless, drug dealers, junkies, squatters, and a few other hackers occupied the bulk of the dilapidated parts while a few struggling families tried to maintain some level of normalcy in the units still remaining in fairly livable condition.

  Lenny didn’t like the place, didn’t care for Skrunch, and thought south Florida—where he had relatives—would have been a better place to hide than South LA. But Bull was in charge, and he didn’t want to upset her—or, for that matter, endanger his family. The more Bull showed him about what she’d found, the more he understood that the people who owned the secrets would murder all his relatives and everyone in their neighborhood.

  While Skrunch asked too many questions that Bull artfully blew off or steered back to inquiries about Skrunch’s own exploits, Lenny sat lost in paranoid thoughts. He recalled a hacker they knew, a twenty-six-year-old “kid” who’d made a decent living doing identity theft and then selling security back to the victims to prevent identity theft. In his off-time, the kid spent way too much time gaming and watching vintage sci-fi flicks. All went well in his small life until, one night while fishing, he somehow became entangled in a series of blind communication websites and discovered that a gas explosion which had taken out a row of homes in California had actually been a professional hit, a hit that linked into some kind of deep government cover-up. They’d killed eight and injured thirteen “just to be sure.” The kid didn’t know what to do with the information—how to cash in—and asked a few people for advice. Less than twenty-four hours after he made the find, the kid’s body was found floating in the Ohio River.

  Lenny shivered.

  “What’s your problem?” Bull asked, noticing his discomfort.

  “Nothing,” Lenny replied defensively, realizing they were suddenly alone for the moment.

  “You’re putting too much negative into this. We’re gonna make big. Stop worrying so much.”

  “Okay.”

  She regarded him skeptically. “Okay, like hell. You’re thinking about the kid and the gas explosion, aren’t you?”

  “No.” He didn’t look at her when he answered. Lenny raked his greasy hair with shaky fingers. He needed a long, hot shower and a cold Coke.

  “You are.” She laughed in that way people do sometimes when they know they’re right and someone is lying to them. “Well stop thinking about it. The kid was an idiot, blabbed like a baby, and anyway, no one knows where we are.”

  “Skrunch.”

  “I told you, don’t be worrying about Skrunch. She’s one of us. And besides, she doesn’t even know what we got.”

  “She knows enough to know we’re in trouble. She knows it’s big—big spelled with a capital “B” and an “F-U.”

  “We’re here for one night. Time enough to sleep. We need to sleep, you know.”

  Lenny nodded. Gone in the morning, he thought. And then the little threat from Skrunch would look like a tea party . . . Gone in the morning.

  Eighteen

  The Astronaut showed up with the sunrise. Chase would’ve liked three more hours of sleep, but Wen appeared as if she’d just returned from a relaxing vacation, now ready to tackle anything.

  “There’s been another bombing, a few hours ago,” the Astronaut said as Chase pulled on a shirt and found his shoes. “AutoSun, a vehicle software firm in New York.”

  “Any injuries?” he asked, unsure why the Astronaut was still helping them. He’d sold Wen the Antimatter Machine and never should have seen her again, but he was an extraordinarily odd man, and had apparently taken a liking to Wen. At least that’s what her theory was.

  It didn’t matter, they needed him. “The man is a super-IQ-hero!” Wen liked to say in a cheerleading tone of voice.

  “No injuries,” the Astronaut said in his mechanical voice. “Same as the others. Middle of the night. Warning, phony evacuation.” He handed them each an apple, a couple of muffins, and protein bars.

  “Have you checked to see if it helps identify the pattern?” Chase asked, nodding his head in thanks for the food.

  The prior evening, during their long conversations, the Astronaut had put forth a theory that the bombings were no act of terror, but rather an orchestrated attack on something specific. “Because all the targets, thus far, have been tech companies,” he’d explained, “all we need to do is find a common denominator between what each company does. Then a pattern will become clear and the motive should unlock. That will enable us to narrow down the list of suspects.”

  Chase and Wen had been thinking along the same lines, as had the FBI and everyone else going after the answer, but the Astronaut had a special gift for patterns—he could see details in data that even computers missed.

  “When I plugged AutoSun into the system,” the Astronaut said, “it actually scattered our previous build.”

  “That’s crazy,” Chase said, chewing on a muffin. “Inputting another incident, with all the pertinent details, should narrow the results. You’re telling me it broadened them?”

  “It’s as if they bombed AutoSun just to confuse us.”

  “That’s an awful lot of trouble,” Wen said, pulling her pack on.

  Chase looked puzzled and impatient. “We might have to just throw out the new results and leave AutoSun out of all future queries—”

  “That will invalidate the findings,” the Astronaut said. “You can’t just choose which data set to employ.”

  “No offense, but SEER might have better luck correlating the facts and patterns than whatever you’re using,” Chase countered.

  “I’ve told you, SEER is too risky to use right now,” the Astronaut said firmly. “Remember, SEER is likely a target.” He motioned them toward the door.

  “You told us you believed Balance was a target, not SEER. No one knows about SEER.”

  “These people know about everything,” the Astronaut said, as if Chase was a fool not to understand this.

  “Then it may be too dangerous not to use SEER,” Chase shot back.

  Wen gave him a disapproving look.

  “I’ve told you my reservations,” the Astronaut said, maint
aining his patience. “But, of course, it’s up to you.” The Astronaut turned to Wen, took both her hands in his, looked into her eyes, then quickly turned away and blinked several times. He squeezed her fingers tightly, and whispered, “Don’t let him. Please don’t let him.”

  Chase heard the savant’s words, but ignored them. He had no doubt the Astronaut was a wizard with math and computers, but Chase wasn’t sure the brilliance carried over to simpler things.

  The Astronaut allowed a hug from Wen, then waved to Chase. He’d arranged for them to use an old Nissan 4X4 pickup, and although it didn’t look roadworthy, the Astronaut had given the engine a complete inspection and his stamp of approval.

  “I’ll see you in Heaven,” were his final words to them, referring to the ultra-classified intelligence computer/satellite network. As they drove out of the trees, Chase took on the Astronaut’s paranoia and suddenly felt as if all his enemies could see them again.

  Nineteen

  Flint Jones used the cab ride from New York’s LaGuardia Airport to the AutoSun blast site as a chance to study the treacherous puzzle threatening the US economy and Chase’s life.

  The pieces don’t fit, he thought. Too few clues. They should have this guy by now . . .

  In order to keep up with the Fire Bomber, Balance Engineering had leased him a jet and pilot; nothing as fancy as Chase’s Bombardier-8000, but it got the security chief where he needed to go. The trail of destruction left in the Fire Bomber’s wake had stunned the normally jaded Flint. That such a weapon existed at all was scary enough, but that it had fallen into the hands of radical economic terrorists terrified him.

  He pursued the Bomber because his job of protecting Chase required it. That Tess desperately needed to know the identity of the people behind the bombings, added to his urgency.