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Looking out the windshield, Wallace shook his head in amazement at the difficulty of the trail. As he fought the violent movement of the vehicle, he attempted to read through a pile of police reports.
“The police reports from Huntington,” he said, holding up the papers for Moore to see in the rear seat. “I've got at least three so far that mention that the locals used to scare kids out of playing up here with some story about a mad trapper who lives up here.”
He held up another sheet of paper. “This is how well that works. Two kids from the high school report it's a popular pastime on Halloween to drive the logging roads in the Huntington area and scare the hell out of freshman by leaving them out here to walk out in the dark.”
“That's a nice campfire story,” Moore said as he absorbed the shock of another turn. “State police already checked those out. There hasn't been a missing person reported in this area since the sixties. There was two of them in the same year.”
Wallace looked down at the pages. He muttered to himself disappointed, “I guess all the freshman make it back out.”
The transport took a massive jolt and buckled hard to one side. Hong ably switched into reverse and worked them out of a drop-off that the truck had fallen into.
“Well, you say this cabin is probably older than that.” Wallace looked back at Moore in the rear seat. “What happened back then?”
Moore began flipping though pages and absently reached for a cigarette from his shirt breast pocket. He had it dangling from his lips as Corbett turned next to him with the expression of a man starving in the wilderness who had suddenly found himself sixteen inches from a large plate of spaghetti bolognaise. Corbett’s jaw relaxed and his lips parted slightly as he examined the delicious shape of the cigarette.
“In June of sixty-four,” Moore spoke as he read from one of the forms in his hand, “fifteen-year-old white female named Molly Spencer came up here for a camping trip with four other students from the high school. Everybody's stories matched. She got scared in the tent, and went to sleep in the back seat of the car with the doors locked. When everybody got up the next morning, she was gone. The keys were still in the ignition and the doors were locked with her sleeping bag and things still inside. No sign of forced entry. The other kids had to walk down off the mountain to get help because they didn't want to break the car windows.”
At the instant Moore began to roll his thumb over the lighter, Hong caught sight of him in the big school bus mirror that gave her a view of the passenger's cab above her visor. “You light that thing in here and I will beat you out like a brush fire.”
Moore glanced up from the report, noticed the lighter in his hand and haphazardly tossed it in his pocket. Much to Corbett’s dismay, who watched him snatch the unlit cigarette from his lips and use it as a reading aid.
Corbett urgently reached for the pamphlet in his zippered jacket.
“Two months later,” Moore continued, “another girl in Huntington gets in a fight with her mother about her clothes, storms out and starts hitchhiking for her aunt's house in Seattle. She was last seen getting into a light-blue pickup truck with a white teenaged male with red hair and a slight build that nobody knew.”
“Small town, Huntington. He must have been from somewhere else.” Wallace considered that for a moment. He said idly, “If the redhead kid was old enough to drive in the mid-sixties, that puts him in his fifties now, maybe early sixties.”
Everyone in the cab strained forward in their seats to see the cabin as they approached. The trail had not originally been intended for vehicles and the entrance to the cabin was in the opposite direction, facing a thinning area in the trees where more light would reach it. The wooden siding was bending and blackened from age, a cedar shake roof covered with moss. A single window on the side of the cabin was made opaque by a decades-old film of mildew.
A sheriff’s four-wheel drive blocked the road and Hong allowed the transport vehicle to grind to a halt. She left the engine running to drive the generators and set the air parking brake with a pop and a sudden hisss! from underneath. She reached for the door handle and exchanged a quick glance with Wallace.
Holding the door handle, she paused and took a deep breath. “I always hate the hideouts.”
Wallace looked over at her.
Before climbing out of the cab she said, “This is where they get to be themselves.”
While Hong and Codepheater lowered the ramp to offload Egor from the rear of the ENFORSUR transport, Wallace moved toward the dilapidated cabin. Workmen, sheriff’s deputies in coveralls, wearing booties over their shoes, were using small gardening spades to excavate around the cabin.
The area had been cordoned off with strings tied to stakes that divided the areas around the cabin into a scientific grid system. Police photographers placed small arrows and scale rulers next to each piece of evidence as they took pictures, while videographers meticulously filmed the entire process. The precautions were never enough, Wallace knew too well. It was always a shock how poorly crime scenes were preserved by the time the evidence was shown to a jury.
Wallace approached the cabin and stepped onto the rickety wooden porch. Inside, the stale, musty odor was overwhelming. Technicians in white clean-room were poring over a large pile of pornographic magazines, carefully turning the glossy pages with tweezers and dabbing them with brushes of fingerprint powder. The majority of the pile had succumbed to the Pacific Northwest weather in the leaking, uninsulated cabin and had moldered into a giant glob. On the floor were hundreds of cigarette butts of different brands that had been smoked to different lengths, as well as several rusting tin beer cans intermingled with newer, aluminum ones.
Jack Corbett stepped into the close confines of the cabin with Wallace. Turning to acknowledge him, Wallace noticed something in a crevice in the wallboards. He unfolded a pair of surgical gloves from his suit jacket pocket and pulled them on before removing a small spy camera from the wall.
Wallace then turned to the wooden tabletop where someone had carved words with a knifepoint. He read out-loud, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength?”
Corbett stepped next to Wallace and read the tabletop himself. “Yeah, that's from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. They're the mottos of Big Brother.”
“Big Brother? You mean, the Big Brother?” Wallace asked. “The one who intrudes into everybody's life and uses drugs to get everybody to act like robots?”
“No,” Corbett shook his head, “you’re thinking of Aldus Huxley's Brave New World. Big Brother just pretty much operates on totalitarian terror and brainwashing.” He pointed to the camera in Wallace's hands. “It's what Stalin would have done if he had those.”
“That all you did was read books up there in those sniper nests?” Wallace asked.
“Unless they ran me cable.”
Wallace moved aside and allowed Corbett to view the tabletop, examining the markings.
“Injun Country,” Wallace read another one of the carvings out loud as he looked out through the mildew-stained window. “You think this is old native land or something?”
Corbett shrugged. “Indian Country was a term they used during the Vietnam War. It's what the GIs called hostile territory.”
“He would be old enough to have served in Vietnam.” Wallace considered that for a moment. “If he was the redhead kid in sixty-four, you think our bad guy could still be fighting a war that isn't over for him?”
Corbett shrugged, moving to leave the cabin and follow the others. From the small front porch he examined the cabin exterior once again. He said, “I think he's fighting something.”
Behind the cabin, and dug slightly into the hillside, were three cinder-block holding cells with wrought-iron bars. The doors had been opened and technicians in white clean-room suits and booties were carefully examining the interiors.
In one, the nude body of a young woman with the bluish-white skin of death hung from a bar in the center of the cell, all of her limp weight dangled from a set of handcuffs on her wrists while her head hung far back on her neck—much further than the living muscle allows a human head to tilt back, to where her thin neck appeared flat. Her feet had been tied with strips of cloth and hung from the same bar so that her body was not touching the filth-encrusted floor of the cell. From where he stood, Wallace could mercifully not see her face, but he was able to see that she had been gagged with strips of torn bed sheeting.
“What happened?” Wallace asked the technician who was applying fingerprint powder to the handcuffs the girl was hanging from.
“Undetermined at this time.” It was impossible to corner forensic technicians into making guesses. They lived in constant dread of being contradicted on the witness stand and qualified everything they had not proven conclusively in a laboratory.
Wallace tried anyway. “What's your initial assessment?”
“Looks like she got sick with the gag on,” the technician admitted with unusual candor as he was distracted attempting to lift the latent print. “She asphyxiated on emesis.”
“Asphyxiated on emesis?” Corbett asked Wallace.
Wallace explained quietly, “She choked to death on her own vomit.”
Behind the Straw Chambers the forest floor was littered with white medical sheets to keep the press helicopters that circled overhead from filming what was under them with long-range lenses. Hong and Codepheater were with Egor where the machine stood on a slight hill, overlooking the scene. Codepheater carried a laptop computer on a lightweight table that was supported with a strap around his neck like a ball-park vendor’s tray.
Egor stood on the embankment as red, low voltage laser beams projecting from his chest danced over the white medical sheet below him.
Wallace stepped up to Codepheater. “What’s the hold-up?”
“I dunno. He's not locked up,” Codepheater quickly tapped a few keys on the computer.
Hong stepped out in front of the robot and looked at the indicator lights on its chest. “He's still processing something.”
“Well, squirt some oil on him, Diane,” Wallace looked across the vast number of white sheets. “We've got a long day ahead of us.”
Hong looked over Codepheater's shoulder at the control pad, then turned to Egor. She looked up at his robotic face while he kept his camera eyes focused on the white sheet at the bottom of the small hill. “What is it, big fella? What are you thinking so hard about?”
Wallace stepped around the robot and down the embankment to stand next to the detective who was examining something underneath the sheet. With a nod from the big FBI agent, the detective removed the protective sheet.
“She's still stiff. Probably died some time last night,” the detective said, nodding towards the body he had exposed. He moved the sheet to show her right arm where a set of stainless steel handcuffs were attached to her wrist. Lifting the sheet further he showed her horribly contorted left thumb. “Looks like she broke her own thumb to get out of the cuffs. Got out of one of those detention cells and then came running over here where she cut her own throat on a tripwire strung between these trees. Slit her throat like a razor.”
“Pretty as a prayer book,” Wallace said as he admired her extremely attractive face. Coated with her own blood from the neck wound, and her face distorted and discolored from the blood pooling in her cheek once she lay dead, it was still clear that she had been extremely attractive in life. She looked to be in her mid-twenties, a small woman, hardly over a hundred pounds. Her naked body looked more like a pubescent teenager than a grown woman.
Wallace asked Codepheater without looking away from the girl, “So who is she?”
Codepheater typed on the keyboard around his neck and brought up a different screen. He quickly scrolled through some information, looking over at Egor and then back at the display. “LeMar, you're not going to believe this.”
“Oh, I don't know about that, Codepheater.” Wallace did not feel up to arguing about the use of his first name. “I’d believe about anything at this point.”
Codepheater turned to Hong. “This is Mary Mann. This is that missing programmer from the EXAP Center.”
“Who's Mary Mann?” Wallace looked up at them. “What's the EXAP?”
“The EXAP is God.” They turned to see a man standing over the embankment in a military fatigues and tactical vest with a sharp, silver crew cut. “Returned to Earth.”
On the collar of his fatigues were general’s stars and the name tag above his shirt pocket read: Tower. On both sides of the general were other men in tactical fatigues wearing black balaclava hoods that hid their faces, and carrying submachine guns. Tower slowly and methodically lowered himself down the embankment, digging in deeply with the heels of his combat boots as he stepped.
“It sees everything, it knows everything,” the general explained casually. “It's the crown jewel of the Information Age, with the power to send us all back into the Dark Ages. It's the big processor down at the University of California in Berkeley that Hong's robot uses to do all its magic. Put together by a bunch of beatniks who got tired of just wasting mommy and daddy's tuition money and thought it'd be a cute fraternity prank to design a machine that could bring about the end of life as we know it.”
Tower stopped next to Egor. Looking over the machine he said distastefully, “It's not like a regular computer that has a chip in it that determines how fast it can process. The EXAP accelerates the more you give it to process. It could accelerate to infinity. It could go through all of the stored electronic data on this planet faster than flipping on a light switch.”
Tower looked around at the assembled people in the wet blue-green forest littered with white sheets. “It's read your email, it's gone through your bank records, it knows the sound of your voice off your answering machine and it knows what you look like from all the store surveillance cameras. It can detect every minute radio wave on every one of the billions of different stations and channels and cell phones floating through the air. Everywhere there's the tiniest trace of electricity it can accelerate it into a readable signal. Even the electromagnetic field created by the magnesium electrons jumping across the synapses that make your heart beat.”
The general put his fists onto his hips and glared hard down at the much smaller Hong. “It doesn't waste time with encoding and decoding data. No, sir, at those speeds it can detect the flow of individual electrons as they're running through the power cord and know what's on a hard drive. There's no security that could ever protect a system from it. It's a mathematical impossibility.”
“Only what those bright, young geniuses didn't think about when they were designing it,” Tower said angrily, “Is that if it fell into the wrong hands, it could flash the BIOS of every server connected together to form the Internet. It could crash the power infrastructure providing electricity to every major metropolitan area across the globe. All the emergency services communications. It could get through every security firewall of the New York Stock Exchange and scramble it to cause a panic that would collapse the United States economy. ATMs and credit cards would be worthless, and as the federal depositories were cleaned out to feed the run on the banks, people would stand in lines for days to withdraw US dollars that weren't good for anything except to feed a fire.”
The other soldiers moved to form a well-rehearsed perimeter around the general as he explained sarcastically, “Fiji could invade the United States, while we tried to organize a counter-offensive over a communication net that broadcast dead airspace . Using tanks that couldn't acquire targets and aircraft that didn't respond to flight controls. It could scroll through the launch codes of our entire intercontinental ballistic missile fleet.” Tower held out his hand in front of Hong. He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”
Wallace turned slowly and looked at the white sheet that covered Mary Mann's body. He climbed the hill to stand next to Tower. Even the lean, imposing general was no match for Wallace’s height. He then turned to Egor, looking up at the robot's dull camera lens eyes. Eyes that were not the window to the soul that human eyes were, but cold and lifeless as marbles, shaded and unshaded by shutters as the light in the Washington woods changed.
“Who found this place?” Wallace asked.
Moore shifted nervously. He looked over at Hong and then said, “Nobody found this place. It found us.”
“That's different,” Wallace said without turning away from Egor. “How does a crime scene find the police?”
Moore said, “This morning we got these coordinates from FBI Headquarters in Washington D.C.. They asked us to come out here and see what was here. I don't think they knew what we were gonna find.”
“Are you trying to tell me that a computer in California found one of its programmers lying in the woods a thousand miles away in the middle of nowhere?”
No one had any answers. Wallace regarded General Tower for a moment, and then looked at Jack Corbett, the representative from the State Department. Finally, he returned to Egor’s camera eyes and said, “You’re not the Tin Woodsman at all. Looks like you found yourself quite a brain.”
Chapter 4
The crime-scene tape was removed, and the white ENFORSUR transport truck crawled off the road and into the ditch and onto the narrow trail on the far side. The cab twisted and climbed independently from the main body of the vehicle, allowing it to travel over the difficult terrain like a convoy of monster trucks. Diane Hong wheeled the steering wheel furiously as she attempted to fit the large truck between the trees along the sides of the trail. A few of its six tires missed traction on the rutted trail as boulders scraped the bottom, which was two feet off the ground. As they traveled, pine branches scraped the windshield and Hong was constantly forced to stop, reverse and work her way around impossibly tight corners. In the passenger's seat, Wallace steadied himself from the violent lurches and buckles on the center console and the door handle. Jack Corbett sat in the center of the rear seats between Moore and Sondaricker.
“Jesus Christ,” Corbett muttered as the transport took a hard jolt. “What in the hell were these people driving back here?”
Sondaricker told him severely, “Don't blaspheme around Special Agent Wallace.”
The truck slid to one side and as he was forced to lean against Sondaricker, he did nothing to hold himself, but only turned and watched with a slightly bemused expression as she struggled under his weight.