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about ten minutes. Our Public Affairs officer Lieutenant Magliano is coming out to escort you to Donna Marie.”
    â€œWho’s that?”
    â€œIt’s our power station. You’ll be met there.”
    â€œBy Dr. Lipton?”
    â€œI’m sorry, ma’am, but no one by that name works here.”

 
    3
    THE ONLY THING Gordy Widell really hated about himself was his acne, which no matter what solution or cream he tried would not disappear. His mom told him that he ate too much chocolate and his dad, before he’d hung himself in the garage after getting laid off at the GM assembly plant, told him to stop being a pussy and live with it.
    But by then Gordy was already a geek who no one understood and he’d taken off when he was fifteen and came under the care of a couple of gay guys from Rockford who moved out to Bozeman where he moved in with a computer geek even smarter and crazier that he was, and so his real education had begun.
    It was fully dark when he’d powered up his equipment, and began delicately sampling the electronic spectrum on just about every band—AM, FM, and microwave—he could think of, searching for every emission from the Dakota District’s main research campus and especially from Donna Marie, the experimental electrical-generating facility, where within twenty-four to seventy-two hours the first test run of the gadget would take place.
    â€œCould kill us all,” Barry had told them. Not a cheery thought, but Gordy didn’t really believe it. He’d been hired to make it possible for the others to stop the test.
    â€œPiece of cake,” he muttered under his breath as he studied the three main monitors.
    Brenda was sitting behind him, a finger twining in the curls at the back of his neck. She did it to make her girlfriend jealous, even though it never worked. “What’d you say, sweetheart?”
    â€œFuck off.”
    She laughed loud enough for everyone in the motor home to hear. “Do it right, Gooordyyy.”
    The problem, as Gordy had figured it, was twofold.
    First, electronic traffic coming into the facility—that included landline, cell, and satellite phones, plus computers and all the other satellite and microwave links as well as quantum-effect encrypted burst transmissions of top secret material—had to be intercepted and mined for information that was pertinent to this operation. Were Air Force security units from Rapid City en route for an unannounced exercise as happened several times each year? Were some VIPs from Washington going to show up sometime tonight? Maybe CDC or even NOAA scientists arriving for the experiment? Extra bodies that would have to be dealt with. Or had the FBI somehow gotten wind of what was about to happen, and were sending warnings: Help is on the way, batten down the hatches.
    Second, and most important, was electronic traffic leaving the facility. All of it had to be intercepted and washed of any hint of trouble. The delay of a few milliseconds between the time a signal was sent and actually received at the other end—mostly in Washington—because it had been picked up by Gordy’s computer, cleansed, and resent, would not be noticeable, at least not in the short run. It especially had to include alarm signals between Donna Marie and the main campus.
    All they really needed was ninety minutes—time enough for them to get in, neutralize the personnel, especially security so that Dr. Kemal could inject his cocktail of bacteria into the seam through the wellhead, and then get out.
    That last part was the most problematic in Gordy’s mind. But like his old man had said: stop being a pussy.
    Besides the normal cell phone services just about everything coming in or leaving the facility was relayed through the WGSS, Wideband Global Satellite System communication network, or the updated Milstar, which was the Military Strategic and Tactical Relay system.
    Egan came back.