Hidden Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure Read online

  NNSD Building 197, Main Campus

  Facility Access Code Accepted for Dr. Olivia Triblet

  Please stand in front of blinking green light for scan

  She shifts to the right and bends her knees to position her face in front of the blinking light. The screen changes again.

  Brookhaven National Laboratory, DOE

  NNSD Building 197, Main Campus

  Scanning…

  Please stand motionless, Dr. Olivia Triblet

  Bella holds her position until the green light stops flashing. It turns blue at the same instant a loud metallic hum signals the unlocking of the door. Bella pulls on the handle and steps into the darkness beyond the threshold.

  “I’ll wait right here,” she whispers. The door automatically shuts, the humming stops, and the screen in front of me returns to its home screen.

  Lightning flashes in the sky above us followed a few seconds later by a loud thunderclap. The storm is here.

  ***

  Following the same steps as Bella, I swipe my card, enter the eight-digit birthday code, and stand for the facial recognition scan. The green light blinks rapidly.

  Brookhaven National Laboratory, DOE

  NNSD Building 197, Main Campus

  Approval & Recognition

  Please enter building Dr. Alex Dennis

  Single entry only.

  The metallic hum unlocks, I tug on the heavy steel door and enter, where Bella’s standing just inside. We’re in a long hallway that has a series of doors on either side. At the end of the hallway, maybe thirty feet ahead of us, it appears as though the hallway splits to the left and right. There’s an eyeball camera dropped from the ceiling at that intersection. I can’t tell which way its lens is directed.

  “I flipped the light switch when the door shut,” she says pointing to the plastic switch plate on the wall. “Otherwise it was pitch black in here.”

  “Where do we start?” I ask. Both of us are speaking just above a whisper.

  “I’m not sure. We’ll have to wait for—”

  “Okay cherubs,” says the hacker, “you’re inside. Next step is finding the right lab. Hang on.”

  “Shouldn’t she have already figured this out?” Bella says, moving toward the first door to the right.

  “You’d think,” I agree, inspecting the door to the left. It’s key coded. Above the keypad is a nameplate.

  “We’ve got some good options,” Corkscrew says. “Start moving down the hallway until it splits. You’re looking for what’s called the Radiation Detector and Non-Proliferation R&D Group. It’s one of the three divisions in this building, and it was a scientist in that group who Dr. Wolf kept visiting.”

  “Who was the scientist?” Bella whispers, treading lightly on the linoleum floor.

  “The scientist was Aleksey Diozegi. I don’t have a lab number for him specifically, but—ah! There we go. I can see you now.”

  I look up to the camera above us. At this distance I can see the lens and the LED infrared detector encircling it.

  The hacker tells us to go to the left. She thinks that’s the most likely spot for Aleksey Diozegi’s office.

  “From the emails I checked this morning, he’s working with neuron detectors for arms control verification. Sound familiar? It’s like a cover for what’s really going on.”

  It does sound virtually the same as Wolf’s “process”, by which a concentrated beam of solar neutrinos could identify and melt a nuclear arsenal stashed anywhere in the world without detection. Switch neurons with neutrinos and arms control verification with destroy and it’s the same thing.

  That’s why it was so critical the process not fall into the wrong hands, why I couldn’t let Sir Spencer or Blogis have it. They’d sell it on the black market and it would end up with a country, or worse, a disparate group like ISIS or Al-Qaeda with permanently bad intentions against the United States. Whoever controlled the process could systematically destroy the nuclear weapons cache of any nation it saw fit to attack.

  And given the U.S. had to invest more than seven billion dollars to fix its fledgling nuclear program after the Secretary of Defense said they’d “taken their eyes off the ball,” there might be nobody minding the store to recognize the breach until it was too late.

  I was right to destroy what I thought was the only copy of the process when I did it. I felt good about it, even as I lay dying from a gunshot wound on the stone floor of a medieval German castle. Now I’m on the verge of opening Pandora’s box for the second time.

  “There are three lab possibilities,” Corkscrew says amidst the loud hammering on her keyboard. “One of them is up here on the left. It’s room A32. I’m working on the key code now.”

  Bella stops at the door closest to her on the left. There’s a Lucite file holder on the wall next to the door. It’s empty, but there’s a label on the folder.

  Outgoing Data: Do Not Remove Without Permission

  Thank You, RDNP R&D

  “This could be it.” Bella’s eyes widen, as does her smile.

  “Try the door,” I say. “Couldn’t hurt.”

  Bella tries to turn the handle, which doesn’t budge.

  “Hang on,” Corkscrew chirps. “Don’t go trying doors without me. I’m there. I’m trying to reset all of the door codes in the building to a single set of numbers. That’ll speed things up.”

  I glance farther down the hall and see another surveillance camera. It’s similar to the one we passed at the T-intersection.

  “You notice the smell of this place?” Bella asks, her nose crinkled. “It smells like something familiar. I can’t place it.”

  “Moth balls. You know, formaldehyde?”

  “Maybe.” She sniffs again. “No, it’s more familiar than that.”

  I inhale through my nose, trying to find the answer on the tip of her tongue. “Latex?”

  “Yes!” she pops me on the arm, making a sound louder than the whispering we’re using to communicate. “Latex. Like latex gloves or balloons.”

  “Okay,” says Corkscrew, “stop talking. Time to get busy. Punch in the number one, nine, three, and two. You’ll need it to exit the room too. All of the labs require the code to enter or exit.”

  Bella presses the combination on the keypad and it blinks and beeps, then the door lock clicks. She turns the lever and again and, this time, it opens. “So far so good,” she says.

  ***

  An overhead fluorescent light clinks to life automatically when we enter, casting a harsh light on what looks more like a police precinct than a laboratory. There are four metal desks in the middle of the room. Each desk has a matching banker’s lamp, a black multi-line phone, and a computer terminal. The desks are maybe four feet wide and two feet deep. They have three keyed drawers on the left side of wheeled and worn wooden chairs. There are no Dilbert calendars or family photographs. It’s sterile.

  I’m guessing the government hasn’t updated the decor in here for decades. The room is windowless and has a single through-the-wall air conditioner, so ancient that Willis Carrier, the man who invented modern air conditioning, may have installed it himself.

  On the far wall is a floor to ceiling white board, decorated with an indecipherable collage of formulas, equations, and hypotheses scribbled in a rainbow of dry-erase markers. On the other side of the room, is a laminate counter running the width of the room from front to back. There is a sink and a calcified glass carafe on a vintage commercial coffee maker sitting at one end of the otherwise empty, waist-high expanse.

  The door automatically closes and locks behind us.

  “Where do we start?” Bella asks. “We’ve got all of these locked desks and the cabinets. Where do you want to begin?”

  “I’ll take the cabinets,” I offer. “If the desks are locked, I’ll help you figure it out.”

&n
bsp; Bella moves to the first desk while I try the cabinets closest to the door.

  The first upper cabinet is stuffed with Styrofoam cups, as is the second. The rest have sugar, powered creamer, and coffee mugs in varying states of cleanliness.

  “Nothing in the first desk,” Bella says loudly enough for me to hear, but not so loud as to draw attention should anyone walk by the office. “It was unlocked and all three drawers are empty.”

  “There’s nothing in these cabinets either,” I’m rifling through the under-counter cabinets now and there’s nothing except for the plumbing delivering water to the coffee maker and the stainless sink.

  “The second desk has nothing,” she says. “But this third one is locked. Can you help me?”

  I cross the room to the desk closest to the white board. There’s a desk organizer with a couple of pens, a rubber band, and a few paperclips. I grab one of the clips and start bending it, pulling both bends straight and then use the edge of the desk to press a tiny ninety-degree turn at one end.

  “Are you going to pick the lock with a paperclip?” Bella says incredulously. “Seriously?”

  “Yep.” I bend down in front of the lock on the top of the three drawers. “This is a basic tension wrench. It should work on a rudimentary lock like this one.”

  “How did you learn how to do that?” Bella squats next to me, watching me manipulate the clip inside the keyhole. “Because this is a major turn-on, Dr. Alex Whoever-You-Are…”

  “YouTube,” I admit. “It’s unreal the stuff you can learn by watching videos.”

  “And I thought all of that time you spent on the computer was useless.”

  “You should know me better than that, Olivia.” I close my eyes to feed the clip through the mechanism.

  “It’s about the amount of pressure I apply to the lock,” I explain. “Too much pressure and it’ll twist the paperclip. To light, and it’s not enough to pick the lock.”

  I’m guessing the lock opens to the left so I try that first, followed by a slight twist to the right. There’s less tension to the left, so I’m right. Sliding a second straightened clip back toward the top of the hole I start raking the clip back and forth trying to set some of the pins.

  “Have you ever practiced this?” Bella asks, clearly not impressed with my skills.

  “A couple of times and it didn’t work either time.”

  “Oh.”

  One pins gives and then another. Three of them. Four. Five. “All of the pins are set.”

  There’s a loud bang of thunder, rattling the air conditioner, followed immediately by the drumbeat of heavy rain on the roof.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you stick your tongue out like Michael Strahan when you’re concentrating?” she whispers.

  “Michael Jordan.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Michael Jordan who stuck his tongue out,” I correct her. “He played basketball. Strahan played football. Plus, they look nothing like one another. And Jordan is probably ten years older.”

  “Well, who was the one in the Looney Tunes movie that played on cable over and over again?”

  “Michael Jordan.”

  “What about the Gatorade guy? The ‘I wanna be like Mike’ guy?”

  “Jordan.”

  “Shoes?”

  “Are you clueless?” I stop picking the lock and glare at her, because of both her complete lack of cultural awareness and the distraction. “I’ll take pop culture for a thousand, Alex.”

  “Alex?”

  “Nevermind,” The lock clicks and drawer slides open. “Got it!”

  “I was kidding!” Bella says.

  “About what?” I stand up to look through the contents of the drawer. There’s a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, some napkins, a plastic fork, and a couple of hot sauce packets from Taco Bell.

  “The shoes,” she says. “And the Gatorade.”

  “What about Alex?” The second drawer is full of file folders. They’re labeled with dates. I pull a stack and drop them onto the desk.

  “Trebek,” she winks and starts shuffling through the files. “These are meeting notes. Project deadlines, assignments, and stuff like that. I’m not seeing—”

  “Are you getting anywhere?” the hacker interrupts us. “Might want to speed it up. I can’t see you in the room, and I don’t mean to slip you some gangster pills, but I do see someone standing outside the door.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The most useless, but entertaining class I took in college was Theatre Appreciation. It was a survey class in a huge auditorium. There were maybe two or three hundred kids in that class. It was at seven o’clock in the morning, but the professor was so enthusiastic, I found myself sitting in his class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Starbucks in hand and anxious to learn something I’d never, ever use in my professional life. Other students must have felt the same way, because the class was always packed.

  I remember one thing in particular from the class, other than the James Lipton-esque quality of the professor’s lectures, and that’s the term Deus Ex Machina. It is the most clever and least creative of literary devices.

  Deus Ex Machina, literally translated as “god from a machine,” was how Greek or Roman playwrights would extricate the hero from an impossible situation at the end of the drama. In those plays, a god would appear on stage, by means of a crane or stairway, and miraculously save the day.

  Here now, locked inside a windowless room, with virtually nowhere to go and someone standing at our only exit, Bella and I could use a Deus or a Machina or both. But this isn’t a Greek play. Sophocles isn’t writing my story.

  “Hello?” a raspy voice calls from outside the door and Bella and I freeze. Bella’s holding one of the files. I’m still squatting next to an open drawer.

  “Hello?” he calls again. “Is someone in here? I’m Jenkins, from the Laboratory Protection Division. I’m doing my rounds, and I see the light coming from underneath the door.”

  Without thinking, I answer him, “Yes! We’re in here, just catching up on some project notes.”

  Bella glowers, apparently disagreeing with my decision to play along. Without taking her hex of a stare off of me, she joins in, “We won’t be long, Jenkins.”

  “Uh…could you open the door, please?” Jenkins asks. “Protocol requires I offer you the opportunity to let me in before I code in an entry. I don’t want to stumble onto anything above my classification.”

  I move to the door and Bella takes a seat at the desk, pretending to pore over the files on the desk.

  The six-shooter is tucked neatly in my waistband and hidden by my shirt before I enter the code, tug on the door and open it to the large, drooping security guard named Jenkins.

  “Like I said,” he steps into the room without waiting for an invitation, “my name is Jenkins. I’m one the guards here at night.”

  “Keep your cool,” Corkscrew urges. “Just remember your cover. Make something up. He’ll buy it.”

  I offer my hand, “I’m Dr. Alex Dennis and this is my colleague Dr. Olivia Triblet.”

  Jenkins takes my hand and shakes it with pudgy, calloused fingers. He nods and looks at the identification badge hanging around my neck. “May I take a look?” He lets go of my hand and glances at Bella.

  “Sure.” I extend the lanyard so Jenkins can look it over through his swollen, reddened eyes. His wide nose is decorated with the signs of alcohol abuse. He sniffs as he holds Wolodymyr’s handiwork, flipping it over for good measure.

  “We’re finished for the night,” I say. “Heading to a nearby bar for a drink after we leave. Any suggestions?” I swallow against the pulse intensifying in my neck. I take a deep breath to maintain my calm.

  “Momo’s Sports Bar is good,” he says. “It’s next to the Outback on Holbrook. If you’re hungry the Steak Tidbits are popul
ar.” He lets go of my lanyard and waddles toward Bella in a way that suggests his feet hurt. “You not from here?”

  “No,” Bella answers. “We’re visiting researchers.”

  “Yeah?” he asks, handling Bella’s identification when she offers it to him. “Where you from?”

  “The University of Florida. We work in their nuclear engineering program. We’re just here for a few weeks.”

  “Florida, huh?” Jenkins puts his hands on his hip and I notice he’s armed. He turns back to face me. “I don’t recall seeing either of you here before.”

  “We’ve only been here two days,” Bella says. “We’re just getting settled in and thought it’d be a good idea to be here when there’s not a lot going on.”

  “Makes sense.” Jenkins yanks on the wide patent leather belt holding up his pants. He turns to me, his back to Bella. “I’m just gonna need to call this one in to the Platoon Captain. You know, since badging is closed.”

  “Platoon?” I ask, trying to stall him as he reaches for the radio mic on his lapel.

  “We have three platoons in our police group. Each one has a captain in charge.” He starts to press the mic and turns back toward Bella.

  “What’s your rank?” I ask, trying to think of something.

  “I’m a—ARGGH!” Jenkins tenses, convulses and drops to the floor like a felled tree, banging his head on the desk next to Bella. He’s unconscious but not bleeding.

  “What happened?” I take two quick steps toward Jenkins and see Bella holding Mack’s homemade taser.

  “I just shoved this as hard as I could into his groin and pressed the button,” she shrugs.

  “Well it worked.” I kneel down next to Jenkins; he’s breathing. I grab his radio and his nine millimeter. “We don’t have much time now.”

  Bella joins me at the door, just as a deafening explosion of thunder rattles the building. The lights flicker and then go dark.

  The power is out. The door won’t open. We’re locked inside.