Read Impact for Free Online Page A

the desk in front of Corso. “That’s the final police report on Dr. Freeman’s murder. It was a robbery—looks like Dr. Freeman came home at the wrong time. Bunch of stuff stolen, a Rolex, jewelry, computers . . . I thought you might like to see it. I know you were close to him.”
    “Thank you.” Corso took it.
    He walked back to his office, slipped behind his desk, and shoved Freeman’s old gamma ray plots into a drawer and slammed it. Freeman had been right, Derkweiler was the boss from hell. Still, the gamma ray anomalies that he’d seen on Freeman’s hard drive—and that he’d followed up on at work—were startling. More than startling. Freeman was right: it could be a major discovery, potentially explosive. The more he thought about the implications, the more frightened he became. He just had to keep his head down, work up the data, and present it in a cool, objective manner. Derkweiler might not like it, but what counted was the opinion of the mission director, Charles Chaudry, who was everything Derkweiler was not.
    He took up the report on Freeman’s death and flipped through it. It was written in cop-speak, using phrases like “the perpetrator committed aggression on the victim with a piano-wire garrote” and “the perpetrator searched the premises and effected rapid egress from the scene of the homicide on foot.” As he read, he felt his sorrow and horror at Freeman’s murder mingling with a feeling of relief at the random nature of the crime. And they’d caught the guy—a drug addict looking for money. The usual sad and senseless story. He closed the report with a shiver of mortality. He had been shocked that only about twenty people had come to Freeman’s funeral, and that he was the only one from NPF. It had been one of the saddest experiences of his life.
    Shucking off these morbid thoughts, Corso turned his attention to his workstation and pulled up the SHARAD data, the shallow-ground-penetrating radar which the MMO was using to map the subsurface features of Mars. He worked on it uninterrupted until the close of day, processing the data and fine-tuning the resulting imagery. He still had the hard drive back at his apartment and he could continue to work on the gamma ray data at home. Despite two security audits, still no one realized the hard drive was missing; Freeman had somehow bypassed all security checks and procedures. If the missing drive ever were noted, Corso had a plan to get rid of it immediately. But until then, it was exceedingly useful to have it at home, where he could work on it uninterrupted until late in the night.
    This discovery, he reflected, was going to make his career.

9

    Wyman Ford entered his suite in the Royal Orchid and stood gratefully in the blast of air-conditioning coming from a vent in the ceiling in the middle of the room. Through the giant picture window covering one end of the room, he could see the longtail boats coming and going on the Chao Phraya River. At noon, the sun was at its zenith and a brown pall lay over the burning city, the color washed out of everything. Even by Bangkok standards it was a scorcher.
    The last time he had been in Bangkok was four years ago, with his wife, just before she was murdered. They had stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, in a wildly extravagant suite, with strategically placed mirrors—he stamped down hard on the memory, forcing his thoughts into another channel. His eye roved the cityscape below and settled on the spires of the Temple of the Dawn, which in the dead, polluted air looked like a cluster of gilded toothpicks rising from a sea of brown.
    With a long sigh, he went to the hotel safe, unlocked it, and withdrew his laptop and an unusual USB card reader. When the computer had booted up, he took the original business card, the one he had retrieved from Boonmee, and inserted it into the reader. A window opened on his computer screen, and he downloaded the contents of the microchip embedded in the thick