Bliss snorted. "Overrated. I beat that on my second try. I expected more."
"Super Mario Sunshine, the-"
"Corona Mountain level," she finished for him.
"How fast did you beat that level?"
She considered. "It"s not about how fast, okay? Only gamer newbies or people who don"t game care about time. It"s about how. For Super Mario Sunshine, you can only get to Corona Mountain by clearing the seventh episode of all other areas. But the real challenge is the boat controls. You have to propel a boat by facing backwards and turning on the spray nozzle, then navigate through a section of platforms with either retracting spikes or fire. But you have to figure out how to use the Hover Nozzle."
Hu tried another. "What about level forty of Dead Island?"
"Not really a fan of zombie games."
"But you play them."
She gave him another of those coquettish smiles. "I play everything."
"Did you beat level forty?"
"Yes. On my third try."
"The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for NES? The underwater bomb disarm section?"
"Set the Way-Back Machine, but sure. When I was eight, I think."
"You"re making me feel old."
Another smile. "You"re not too ancient."
"What"s the hardest game you"ve ever played?"
She had to think about that. "None of them are what I"d call skull-crackers. If I had to put one up at the top, maybe Super Ghosts and Goblins. I underestimated it because it was harder than I"d heard."
"But you beat it?"
"Yes, and it taught me a lot about making a.s.sumptions." She paused. "Excuse me, but are we really going to dissect every single game I ever played? I mean, is there a point to this?"
Instead of answering directly, he said, "Do you have any practical experience with game design?"
"Some."
"It"s not in your resume."
"It was just for fun."
""Fun"?"
"Well, for the challenge. I, um, hacked into the game programs for Halo, Battletoads, and Gears of War and wrote new levels."
"Why?"
"Like I said-"
Hu shook his head. "I want the real answer."
Miss Bliss took a moment, stalling by adjusting her clothes and shifting to find a more comfortable position on the bench seat. "I ... have a few friends who are gamers."
"Gamers of your caliber?"
"Pretty much."
"And-?"
"I wanted to see if I could create game levels that they couldn"t beat."
"Could they beat them?"
"The first few, sure. But the more recent ones? No."
"Can those levels, in fact, be beaten?"
"Sure. Otherwise it wouldn"t be a game."
Hu smiled.
"What?" she asked.
"I think you"ll enjoy where I"m taking you."
"Meaning-what?"
Hu threw a different line into the water. "What do you hope to accomplish?"
She didn"t turn. "Specifically-?"
"In life," he said. "With your career."
Her response was casual, with no trace of defensiveness. "I don"t know. I"m keeping my options open."
"And yet you applied for a job with us."
"Sure, I applied for a job because the job description, though necessarily vague, was designed to hook someone like me. You dangled the bait of this being either under the DARPA umbrella or connected to it in some way. That"s where I want to be."
Hu nodded. "And you think you"d flourish in a DARPA setting?"
She cut him a quick look as if she"d caught something in the way he"d inflected that question. Her eyes searched his for a long moment before she answered.
"DARPA ... or something like it," she said carefully.
Dr. Hu smiled as the Escalade drove through an opening in a rusted chain link fence. Frowning, Miss Bliss looked out at the building embowered by that old fence. It was a ma.s.sive airplane hangar of the kind built seventy or eighty years ago. Many of the gla.s.s panes were busted out and the gray skin was peeling and long in need of fresh paint.
Miss Bliss began to ask, but Hu held up a finger.
"Wait," he said.
The Escalade curved around and entered through a small side entrance just big enough for the SUV. Once inside, a door slid shut behind them and for a moment the vehicle was in total darkness. Then there was a shudder beneath the vehicle. The kind of tremble elevators gave. Even through the closed windows there was the sound of heavy hydraulics.
Lights blossomed around the vehicle and Miss Bliss stared in shock as the Escalade descended into what seemed like another world. Bright lights filled a vast chamber that was easily three times the size of the gigantic hangar. Where the structure above looked decrepit and abandoned, down here everything was new. Metal gleamed, computer screens glittered like jewels, hundreds of people moved here and there, many of them in white lab coats but others in blue or orange jumpsuits, green coveralls, the crisp gray of security uniforms, and even ordinary street clothes. Rank upon rank of the latest generation of t.i.tan supercomputers ran the length of the room, their precious drives encased in reinforced gla.s.s.
The Escalade reached the bottom and the hydraulic hiss faded into silence.
Miss Bliss gaped at the room around her. Even from a distance any scientist could tell that everything here was cutting edge. Bleeding edge. Billions of dollars" worth.
After several breathless moments, Miss Bliss turned to stare at Dr. Hu.
"I don"t ... I don"t..." She stopped and gulped in a breath to steady herself. "What is all this?"
Dr. Hu adjusted his gla.s.ses. "You could choose to work for DARPA," he said with a hyena grin, "or ... you could come work for us."
"But ... but who are you? What is all this?"
"It"s something so new that it doesn"t even have a name," he said. "We"ve been calling it the Department of Military Sciences as a kind of placeholder name. Something to put on congressional memos." Dr. Hu stepped out and then turned and offered her his hand. "How would you like to help us save the world?"
Part Three.
Burn to Shine.
They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.
-GASTON LEROUX, The Phantom of the Opera.
Chapter Eleven.
The Locker.
Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility.
Highland County, Virginia.
Sunday, August 31, 4:44 a.m.
On the day that she died, Dr. Noor Jehan had a premonition.
It was not an unusual thing with her, though she"d had them less often as an adult than when she was a little girl in Punjab. Since coming to America with her parents at age thirteen, her premonitions, once an almost daily occurrence, faded to a scattered few. They were rarely anything of note. She would look up a few seconds before a doorbell rang, or she"d take her cell phone out of her purse and hold it, knowing that a call was coming. A few times she bought scratch-off lottery tickets on a whim. Once she won fifty dollars and another time she won five hundred.
Like that.
Nothing that rocked her world. No insights into matters of any consequence heavier than the early arrival of a traveling aunt or the tie color of a blind date.
There were three exceptions.
The first was when she was eight years old. Noor woke from a sound sleep and cried out for her brother. His name, Amrit, burst from her and the sound of it pulled her from a dream of drowning. In the dream it was Noor who was sinking beneath black waves as the sodden weight of her sari pulled her down to coldness and invisibility and death. But as she woke, she knew-with perfect clarity and absolute certainty-that it was Amrit who had drowned.
Amrit was a petty officer about the INS Viraat, India"s only aircraft carrier-a Centaur-cla.s.s ship bought from the British and serving as flagship for India"s fleet. It was vast, strong, and as safe as an island. That was what Amrit said in his letters.
But at that moment, the young Noor sat bathed in sweat, as drenched as if she had been sinking in salt water, and knew that Amrit was lost. It was almost two days before the men from the Ministry of Defence came to their house to break her mother"s heart. There had been an accident, they said. A crane had come loose from its moorings, the big iron sweep had knocked a dozen men into the ocean. Six were pulled out alive, and six had died. They were sorry, they said; so sorry.
The second time was a month before the Jehan family packed and moved to America. Noor had been at school, copying math problems from the blackboard, when a bus suddenly crashed through the wall and killed her. Only it wasn"t like that. She woke up in the school nurse"s office, screaming about a bus, but nothing at all had happened at the school. However, that evening on the news it was reported that a tourist bus had been in a terrible accident with a tractor-trailer filled with microwave ovens. The driver of the truck apparently had had a heart attack and fallen forward, his dead foot pressing on the accelerator, his slumping body turning the wheel. The truck hit the bus side-on. Nineteen people were killed, thirty-six were injured. The following afternoon her father received a call from his mother saying that his brother, Noor"s uncle, had been a pa.s.senger on that bus and had been crushed to death.
That second terrible premonition had been nearly thirty years ago.
Noor Jehan was no longer a little girl, and she was no longer in India. Now she was deputy director of the Sigler-Czajkowski Biological and Chemical Weapons Facility, a highly specialized and highly secret government base. She headed a team that stored and studied some of the most virulent diseases and destructive bioweapons on earth. A place so secret that it was only occasionally mentioned in eyes-only reports, and even those were appended to black-budget R and D filings. In those reports the facility was known only as "The Locker."
Noor was now Dr. Jehan, with a Ph.D. and an M.D. and a list of credits and t.i.tles that, even abbreviated, wouldn"t fit on a standard business card. And although she clearly remembered her intuitions and premonitions, she now kept that kind of belief on a small shelf in a mostly disused corner of her mind. The rest of her life was dedicated to hard research, to things that could be measured, weighed, metered, and replicated according to the plodding but beautiful process of empirical science.
And yet ...
This morning-early, somewhere in that blackest part of the night when the body is chained by sleep, unable to move or even glance at the clock-Noor Jehan had received her third exceptional premonition. This one was stronger than the fantasy of drowning when Amrit had died. It was more real than the deadly bulk of a bus splintering its way through the walls of her schoolroom. No, this was so thoroughly real that when Noor finally woke in the golden light of a steamy Virginia morning, she was not sure whether she was now awake or still dreaming. Because the dream felt more real than reality.
In the dream, Noor had been right here in her office on level six of the Locker. The alarms were all going off, the lights were flashing red and white, slapping her eyes with painful brightness. People were running and screaming. The wrong doors were open. Doors that could not be simultaneously open were nonetheless ajar. The air had become a witch"s brew of toxins and weaponized versions of poliomyelitis, Ebola, E. coli, superstrain typhus, half a dozen designer strains of viral hemorrhagic fever, aerosol Mycobacterium leprae, and other microscopic monsters. All free, all released from containment systems that had been designed with what many had thought were an absurd number of safeguards and redundancies. Foolproof and failproof.
In that dream, Noor heard shrieks coming from shadowy corridors and through the open doors to side rooms. She was screaming, too. She dreamed of fumbling with the catches and seals and dials of her hazmat suit, but none of the seams would join. Then she heard the sounds of footsteps. Staggering steps, shuffling steps. The disjointed and artless footfalls of dying people; her friends and staff wandering in their diseased madness, wasting the last minutes of their lives in a shocked attempt to find a way out. But there was no way out. Soon the biological disaster protocols would reach a critical failsafe and then the main and rear doors would thunder down-each of them two feet thick and composed of steel alloys that could withstand anything but a direct hit from a cruise missile. The failsafe systems would ignite ma.s.sive thermite charges that would flash-weld the doors in place. After that, cl.u.s.ter bombs built into the very walls would be triggered, detonating fuel-air bombs. Everything, from the strongest man to the tiniest microbe, would be incinerated.
And it would all be abandoned. No one would ever dig through the mountain or try to cut through that weight of steel to try and breech this place. The Locker would officially cease to exist because, in point of fact, everything of which it was composed-human staff, lab animals, equipment, computers, furniture, and the stores of biological agents-would be carbon dust.
The dream persisted. It kept Noor down in the darkness where she had to feel and hear and smell it all. It was like being forced to watch a hyperreal 3D movie that had become reality.
The scuffling of the dying staff grew louder as they came toward her office. She knew that she should stop wrestling with the hazmat suit and close her door-and her dreaming mind screamed at her dream-self to do just that-but she did not. She fumbled and scrabbled at the ill-fitting protective garment even as the first of the infected staff members shuffled through the door.
The dreaming Noor watched her dream-self look up, watched her turn toward the people, looking to see which of her friends and colleagues came through first. Dreading to see which symptoms were presenting on familiar flesh.
But then both Noors-the dreamer and the dreamed self-froze in shock.
The person in the doorway was dressed like Dr. Kim, and wore that name tag, and even had the same tie, but this figure was wrong. So ... wrong.
It had no face.
It wasn"t that the hazy air masked it, but the thing in the doorway simply had no face. It had a head, hair, cheeks and a jaw, but otherwise the face was gone, erased, just a featureless mask of white.