But somebody had just made another entrance. The video clearly showed the wall of the command authority station blasting open. The figures on the bunks— eighteen of the finest bureaucrats in the U.S. government—scrambled out of bed as something big penetrated the interior of the station, filling the room with flashing light that fried the camera and turned the screen black.
“Jesus.” Roca snapped at the communications officer, “did you reach them?”
“No answer!”
“Dammit!” He grabbed the phone that put him in direct contact with the director of homeland security, and at that moment the power went out.
“How could this happen?” he demanded. The station was equipped with more redundant systems than he could keep track of.
“They must have cut the umbilical to the station!” the operator gasped.
“What? How?”
The ground started shaking.
“Now what?” Roca demanded.
“Oh, shit!” The operator stared at the floor of the control and command center, horrified, and then he ran for the door. Of course he couldn’t open it. They were sealed in—for their own protection.
When the ground yawned open and fried the command center with dust and scythes of static electricity, they had nowhere to run.
Four mainframe computers were nestled deep in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium.
Other hospitals possessed mainframe computers— mostly relics of the 1970s, when a big organization needed big hardware to organize itself electronically. Mainframes such as that had since been replaced with smaller boxes that could do much more—sometimes the central boxes disappeared entirely in favor of a network of computing power.
Supercomputers continued being built, and they were used to crunch data points by the trillions. The military used computers like that to electronically organize and stage its resources—every soldier, every tank, every roll of toilet paper—and to create scenarios that used those resources. Meteorological research around the world used these computers to look for patterns in weather based on millions of concurrent measurements of temperature, wind speed, air pressure and geographical factors.
The supercomputers below the sanitarium, the Folcroft Four, were not in the service of Folcroft Sanitarium. They served CURE. They routinely, automatically hacked into government systems around the world. Harold Smith’s programming skills had made them into a data-gathering powerhouse that the Pentagon could only dream of. Mark Howard had come in with some knowledge of evolutionary programming—he was teaching the Four how to identify patterns, however disconnected the data making up the patterns, and to initiate searches based on these digitally identified hunches. New chips and new storage drives were being added routinely to the system, to keep them current with the best technology.
The Folcroft Four identified a curious pattern at fourteen, minutes and nine seconds after two in the morning and, thanks to Mark Howard’s programming, wasted three seconds looking for a match between the name “Jacob Fastbinder” and various name databases in North Carolina. There was no significant match. Another curious pattern was identified, and the name search expanded across the United States and around the world. Other Jacob Fastbinders were found, analyzed and discarded as being unrelated to the Jacob Fastbinder in question.
With the odds calculated against success as being borderline, the next identified pattern was almost too far-fetched for the Four to pursue, but their latest upgrade had nearly doubled their processing power and the Four calculated they had 0.156 unallocated seconds of processing time to spare during this quarter minute, so they went on a wild-goose chase. They hit pay dirt.
The Folcroft Four were not pleased or proud of their accomplishment They were only machines, after all. They just sent the results Upstairs and kept looking for more patterns, however oddball.
The President picked up on the first ring. “Smith, do you have any idea what’s going on here? I’ve got people disappearing across the country! Mass kidnappings in Topeka, Tucumcari and Jefferson City! I never even heard of Jefferson City!”
“Yes, Mr. President. And Fort Worth.”
“I didn’t know anything about Fort Worth!” the President exploded.
“One of the new emergency federal command authority stations belonging to the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Mother of God, they’re supposed to be impenetrable. The director’s going to get his butt bounced out of the District of Columbia if he doesn’t have a good explanation.”
“I’m sure he’s still trying to get information himself. The station went off-line abruptly.”
“That’s not supposed to happen—”
“Mr. President, I believe this is the work of people who were once in league with Jacob Fastbinder. A subterranean transport is being used, one that is far more capable than the one CURE disabled in New Mexico. That would explain the penetration of the DOHS station.”
“I thought Fastbinder was dead,” the President said. “You told me you killed him.”
