Phantom zero, p.3
Phantom Zero, page 3
Still, Trent had a point.
“I want you guys involved, but we have to get to that point the right way.” Before Trent could lecture him anymore, he said, “We’re gathering intel right now. Besides, I’m hoping that if we’re quiet for a while, they’ll turn their attention away, and we’ll have a little more elbow room.”
“They hired Spetsnaz assassins to kill Mischa,” Trent said. “They’re not going to look elsewhere.”
“And they didn’t kill Mischa,” Zero said patiently, “but they drove her underground, at least as far as they know. Maybe they’ll decide that she’s scared off, and she’s not going to be a problem anymore.”
“And then you can take it completely out of their hands.”
Zero set the current dish, a ceramic serving bowl that had most recently contained his own recipe of spicy mashed potatoes, on the rack and turned fully to Trent. “Did they put you up to this? Is that what this is? Mischa and Sara want you to convince me to let them get involved with the intel-gathering?”
“No,” Trent replied, not intimidated by Zero’s sudden intensity. “I’m trying to convince you to let me be a part of the intel-gathering while also warning you that there’s no way on God’s Green Earth that you’re going to convince Mischa and Sara to sit with their hands folded like good little girls.”
It bothered Zero a little that he didn’t intimidate Trent anymore. It bothered him a little more to realize that he was bothered that he couldn’t intimidate him. It lent too much credence to Trent’s insinuation that Zero preferred to cut everyone else out and do things himself.
Insinuation? That’s an honest observation, Zero.
Still, in this case, he was right. “Trent, I can’t let Mischa and Sara run this show. They’re not ready. Alan’s proved himself untrustworthy. I don’t have a problem with you, but before I let anyone else get involved, I need to make sure they can’t get involved in a way that’s going to hurt this family even more.”
Once more, Trent took Zero’s intensity in stride. “All right. I’ll stop bugging you about it.” He met Zero’s eyes, and Zero was a little disquieted to feel the force of Trent’s personality instead of the other way around. “Just keep in mind that they’re my family too. I’m going to be involved in this. So will Mischa. So will Sara.”
He handed Zero the next dish. They finished the chore in silence, Trent comfortable now that he’d said what he needed to say, Zero about as far from comfortable as he could get now that someone else had echoed his deepest fears and insisted that they were inevitable.
It just wasn’t the same. Yes, Trent was family, and yes, Mischa and Sara were like his little sisters, but they weren’t his daughters. They weren’t his children. He hadn’t watched them grow from infants to toddlers to children to young adults. He hadn’t watched their innocence get torn from them and handed back as a twisted mockery of what it once was.
Yes, Maya was an agent, and a damned good one, but that was different. Maya was a well-adjusted adult who had risen above her trauma. Mischa was a child, whether she liked to believe it or not. She was shrewd and dangerous, but she didn’t have the wisdom to know how to manage an operation like this. Sara was a wonderful person, and before all this shit with Meridian went down, she was on her way to rising above the trauma, but now that progress had vanished. If she turned back to her old habits, there was no guarantee she’d be able to leave them behind again.
A lump formed in his throat. He just wanted them to be safe. Ever since Amun had tracked him down and stolen him from his home over six years ago, Maya and Sara had been forced to endure torture, kidnapping, death threats, eviction from their home, pursuit by deadly enemies, and even sex trafficking. He just wanted them free of this.
Mischa too. She wasn’t the superhuman they all thought she was. She was a deadly combatant, maybe the deadliest of all of them, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t also an injured teenage girl. She shouldn’t be exposed to this kind of responsibility. She shouldn’t be facing men who sold women into sexual slavery. She just…
His phone rang, pulling him from his thoughts. Todd.
Jesus, not now.
He answered. “Hey, Todd. I don’t suppose this is a call I can take later, is it?”
“No, I’m afraid not. There’s been an attack on air travel.”
“Air travel?”
“Yes. Turn Channel Six on. They’re airing a story right now that I need all of you to watch.”
Zero looked at Trent. “Put the news on.” To Todd, he said, “I’ll call Maya.”
“I’m here, Dad,” Maya said. “On my way upstairs.”
A second later, Maya charged up the stairs. Alan followed her, his face ashen. Zero didn’t like that look. “What’s going on?”
Trent whispered, “Holy shit,” and Zero turned his attention to the television in the living room.
His jaw went slack as he watched the flaming remains of an A380, the world’s largest jetliner, crash into an airport’s control tower.
The news reporter informed them in a voice that couldn’t quite maintain professional detachment that the crash they’d just witnessed at LAX was the first of many that had happened all over the country. “There have been ten major airliner crashes, two of them midair collisions. Over two thousand people have died. The FAA has grounded all flights, commercial, private, and military.”
“The planes have no navigation and no communication,” Todd informed them, “and I guess the airliners’ flight systems are scrambled too. The air traffic controllers can’t communicate with them. I guess they were able to call some of the flights with cell phones and get most of them to the ground, but they’re still figuring out what to do with a lot of the flights. Most airports can’t handle fully loaded jetliners, and the ones that can are full past capacity.”
“Have them call the Air Force,” Zero said. “They can use airbases.”
“The military’s having the same trouble,” Todd said. “A B21 bomber just had to ditch on the polar ice cap because their flight controls froze.”
“Jesus,” Alan said. “This is global.”
Zero looked at him, and he pointed at the television. Zero gasped when he saw the screen. It showed a Mercator projection of the world with nearly forty red X’s around the globe where airplanes had crashed. Numbers scrolled telling viewers about the number of people who had died, and the number of flights still stuck in the air looking for a place to land.
Zero’s heart sank. Not now. Damn it, not now.
“So you all know I need you ASA-flipping possible,” Todd said.
“We’re on our way,” Maya said.
“Hey, Todd?” Zero said, “I hate to ask, but I need to sit this one out.”
Maya and Trent looked at him incredulously. Todd was quiet for a moment before saying, “Are you serious, Zero? This could be the biggest crisis we’ve ever dealt with. You should know that’s saying something.”
Zero sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. Every crisis they dealt with was the biggest crisis they’d ever dealt with. It never ended. Everywhere Zero looked, there were enemies.
But he had another crisis to deal with, and if he turned his attention away from that crisis, his daughters’ lives could be in imminent danger.
“I can’t leave Mischa and Sara alone,” he said.
Todd was aware of the conflict between them and Meridian, and aware of how that conflict started. He didn’t back down, though. “They won’t be alone. Alan’s there.”
Zero’s jaw tightened. “I can’t leave Mischa and Sara alone,” he repeated.
Alan’s face fell, but he didn’t argue. Maya and Trent shared an inscrutable look with each other, but whatever they were thinking, they also declined to share.
“Jesus,” Todd muttered. “Okay. I’m not going to say I agree, but I understand. More importantly, I can’t have my field agents conflicted handling this. So if you’re telling me you can’t focus on your job, then I’ll let you stay home. Trent, you and Maya get to headquarters.”
“Wait, what?” Trent said. “Something this big is happening, and we don’t want Zero?”
“We’ll be fine,” Maya said. She kissed Zero on the cheek. “Love you, Dad. If something changes, we’ll call you. Be easy on Mischa and Sara, okay?”
I’ve been easy, Zero thought petulantly. Amazing how stubborn those thoughts were, even when he was literally staring at a crisis far more important than anything else going on.
“You got it,” he said aloud. “Good luck you two.”
Maya and Trent left the cabin, jogging to Maya’s SUV and flinging dirt onto the cabin as they sped down the dirt driveway toward the road beyond.
So now Zero’s oldest daughter was speeding off to yet another extremely dangerous assignment, and his youngest two daughters were numbers one and two most wanted to the world’s most powerful mafia.
Once again, Zero’s family was caught between a rockslide and the fiery pits of Hell.
CHAPTER FOUR
Maya’s heart thudded as she and Trent rushed through the chaotic headquarters building of the Executive Operations Team. The tragedy was already sobering enough, but what would come next? The loss of communication and navigation for every aircraft on Earth left everyone vulnerable. Not knowing who their enemy was or how they planned to use this vulnerability frightened her more than the simple fact that air travel was temporarily impossible.
Next to her, Trent looked grim but not frightened. His serious but calm look relaxed her a little. It didn’t make sense but seeing him appear to be ready to face whatever was coming their way made her feel better.
That temporary reprieve vanished when she walked into Todd’s office and saw his and Penny’s haggard faces.
“How can we not know?” Todd exclaimed, pacing back and forth in front of Penny’s desk. Behind the desk, the monitor showed a similar Mercator projection as the one they saw on the news a few minutes ago. Two more red X’s had appeared.
“It’s not obvious?” Todd asked. “They just shut down every radar on the planet!”
“That’s the thing,” Penny countered. “They didn’t shut down every radar. Or every radio. Television and news radio broadcasts are unimpeded, and my GPS was working when I calculated traffic times to get here. This—” She stopped when she saw Maya and Trent. She managed a smile that she obviously didn’t feel. “Hello you two.”
Todd looked up. He didn’t bother with a smile or a greeting, just pushed his naturally blond hair out of his baby blue eyes. “Okay, so here’s the situation: At six-twenty-five Pacific time this morning—that’s nine-twenty-five local—the FAA’s air traffic control system went tits up. LAX noticed it first, mostly when an A380 crashed into the control tower, taking out a regional jet on the way.”
“Yeah, we saw that,” Trent said.
“Mmhmm. That’s something like six or seven hundred dead just from that one crash. Within five minutes of that crash, every major airport in the United States was reporting a loss of contact with their aircraft concurrent with a seeming loss of control by those aircraft.”
“Yeah, I was going to ask about that,” Trent said. “How did those aircraft lose control? Were flight systems compromised?”
“Everything that relies on navigation was, yes. Primary flight systems weren’t, but autopilots and autothrottles were completely lost, along with radar. Some aircraft reported problems transferring controls back to the pilots, which is what the FAA believes led to the mid-air collisions.”
“What about now?” Maya asked.
“It looks like things have calmed down in the U.S. They’re using cell phones to talk to each other. For some reason cellular communication isn’t affected, nor are GPS and radio technologies unrelated to aircraft. Penny’s trying to figure out why that is.”
“And this is happening everywhere? Every country?”
“Everywhere. Within an hour, every single commercial airport and flight on Earth was compromised. The FAA’s trying to get other agencies to switch to cellular communication too, but there are places in the world where that isn’t possible. That’s why we’re still seeing… Oh, for God’s sake.”
Another red X had appeared on the screen, this one over the small South Asian nation of Bhutan.
“Jesus,” Trent whispered.
“And this is affecting military aircraft too?” Maya asked.
“Not every military,” Todd replied. “But most of them. North America’s militaries are screwed, same with Russia, China, and the EU. Japan, oddly, is fine. They were able to use their military airbases to land a lot of civilian aircraft. Same with Australia. Brazil’s systems went to shit, but Argentina and Chile are fine.”
“That’s probably just a margin of error thing,” Trent guessed.
“That’s what I believe,” Penny said. “It doesn’t make sense for them to target ninety percent of all available air control systems and leave the other ten percent. Still, it’s shocking that someone could do this so thoroughly and so successfully and leave no trace of themselves.”
Her voice was trembling, and her lower lip was quivering. Maya wasn't sure she'd ever seen Penny this scared, not since their last stand against Mr. Bright and corrupt elements of the CIA. The EOT's technical genius and technology and communications specialist wasn't used to being out of control in her field of expertise. Seeing something like this probably made her feel helpless, the same way Maya felt helpless when she and Zero encountered that massive Russian terrorist who nearly defeated both of them at once to accomplish his sworn mission to capture Zero and take him to his unknown boss, so she could take revenge on him for an unknown crime.
Lovely. I really wanted to be reminded of that right now.
“It doesn’t make sense for them to stop GPS for jetliners but not for passenger cars,” Todd said. “Or radio for airplanes but not for television.”
He was pacing irritably. Like Penny, Todd hated not being completely informed about everything happening in the world around him.
“Has anyone claimed responsibility?” Maya asked.
“Yeah, some group calling themselves Lucifer’s Gift. Here, I’ll play the recording of their demands.”
The four of them listened in silence as a thin, reedy male voice warned humanity that it would suffer the fate of all liars and secret keepers and demanded that the U.S. government give up all classified information within forty-eight hours, or they would suffer even greater consequences. Maya felt an absurd urge to laugh. Terrorists reminded her of bratty teenagers sometimes. They sounded like lame edgelords who lived in a fantasy world where everyone was expected to bow down to them.
Only this lame edgelord had already killed thousands of people.
“He didn’t say who he was or why he was doing this?” Trent asked.
“Other than the vague allusion to Lucifer in the Garden of Eden, no.”
“And you can’t tell who he is?” Maya asked Penny.
“Well, that’s some good news,” Penny replied. “I ran the recording through voice analysis and ran that through the NSA’s database. We do have a name. Dr. Adrian Keller.”
“Tell us about Dr. Keller.”
He's a software developer. He founded an information management company called Morningstar, Inc. seven years ago."
“What does an information management company do?” Trent asked.
“Exactly what it sounds like. They collect it, organize it, analyze it, and store it.”
“So like the CIA.”
“More like the NSA. Just as the NSA can advise the CIA and other operational arms of the intelligence and defense communities, an information management company might advise its clients as to the appropriate conclusions to draw from the data they’ve analyzed. Usually, however, they just work with the data and let their clients decide what they want to do with it.”
“How common is it for someone to outsource information management?” Maya asked. “I’ve heard of software made for companies to do this in house, but to outsource it to a third party?”
“It’s more common than you might believe,” Penny replied. “It’s a lot of tedious work, and many organizations would rather focus their efforts on their core competencies.”
“Loving the business education,” Todd said, “but let’s loop this back to business. Morningstar was shut down by the FTC two years after its founding for misuse of client data. Dr. Keller was found innocent of criminal fraud but had to pay millions of dollars in reparations as a result of a civil suit. The company folded, and he disappeared from the wider world.”
“He can’t have disappeared completely,” Maya said. “What he just accomplished is too big for one person to have done on their own. He had help.”
“Most likely, yes.”
“What do you need us to do?” Trent asked.
“Morningstar’s headquarters are located in Wyoming in the Great Divide Basin about thirty miles northeast of the town of Wright. The company’s officially listed as defunct, but Dr. Keller is still listed as the landowner of the property. If I were you two, I’d start there.”
Maya nodded. “Very well. If you can give us an aircraft, we’ll head over right away.”
“The plane’s already fueled and ready to go,” Todd said. “You’ve got all the equipment and gear you’ll need in there. Good luck.”
Maya and Trent got to their feet but before they left, Todd said, “Maya, are you sure you don’t need Zero on this? I understand about your sister, but if you say you need him, then I can put Mischa and Sara in protective custody until the three of you get back.”
That was a tempting offer, and Maya almost accepted it. On the other hand, Zero was and would continue to be conflicted. Maya wasn’t happy about the situation with Merdian, but she could set it aside for the sake of her job. She didn’t think her dad could.
And this was a chance for her to show Todd—and herself—how much she’d grown. This was a chance to prove that she was more than just Zero’s daughter. She was Agent Specter.
