Black Rain

The tip hit something solid and glanced off. The shaft cracked, ringing his hands as a black shape launched itself at him from the thicket. He saw the flash of jaws and knife-edged teeth, smelled the stench of rotting meat.

He flew backward at the impact, with twin gashes across his chest in diagonal cuts. He slammed into the ground, twisted and tried to scramble away. But daggers pierced his calves and he screamed.

He slid across the ground as the thing dragged him backward. Shouting in pain, he managed to grab an exposed tree root. He wrapped his hands around it, halting his slide for the moment and wrenching in anguish as his attacker pulled on him and his body drew up into the air like a rope stretched taut.

His face hit the dirt and he realized he’d been released. He pulled himself forward. But the reprieve lasted only a second, and he howled in anguish and arched his back as the teeth plunged into his legs once again, this time into thick muscles on the backs of his thighs.

Suddenly his body wrenched and his hands ripped free. He flew backward, scraping across the ground and shrieking in fear as he disappeared into the tangled brush.

CHAPTER 11

Darkness filled the lab’s interior, broken only by the pinpoints of colored LEDs and the glow of several rows of computer monitors. The room’s precise, symmetrical organization brought to mind a top-level government facility, like NASA’s Johnson Space Center or the darkened rooms of Air Traffic Control. But the lab was not a government facility, and the two men who occupied it were unaffiliated with the federal bureaucracy. That is, aside from the fact that they were studying information hacked from the database of the National Research Institute.

As the data ticked in and the numbers on the screen slowly changed, the two men reacted with opposite expressions. The first man—tall, charcoal-haired and in his midfifties—broke into a satisfied grin; a smug, confident look accentuated by his relaxed, commanding posture and an expensive, custom-tailored suit.

His name was Richard Alexander Kaufman. The lab belonged to him, as did the twenty-story building surrounding it, with its rakish, angled lines and a facade of sapphire blue glass.

Kaufman was CEO and principal owner of Futrex Systems Inc., one of the largest privately held defense contractors in the world. And while Futrex raked in a fortune from the yearly defense budget, it made neither missiles nor bombs. Instead, Futrex created power through the virtual world of zeros and ones; it designed computer systems, data networks and hyper-fast programs that relied on a type of architecture called massive parallel processing.

Futrex programs were used in the design and testing of weapons platforms; they linked AWACS aircraft and satellites to ships, tanks and men on the ground. It was said that battles were not won or lost with weapons but with information, and Futrex Systems enabled American soldiers on the street to see the same information their counterparts in the air and back at headquarters had access to. The military considered this particular data-stream so vital to national security that its contracts included a healthy premium paid specifically to prevent Futrex from adapting the technology for any other purpose. Because of this Futrex had no presence in the civilian world and, as they were privately held, no ticker on any stock market. The result was an oddity in the modern industrial world: a twenty-billion-dollar corporation that almost no one had heard of.

Two decades of such success would have been enough for most people, but not for Richard Kaufman. He wanted more. Kaufman wanted the next wave: an unconditional chance at success, a chance to change the world and, perhaps more important, to tell everyone that he’d done just that.

He was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. He had friends in high places and low places, he had the money, power and expertise to do anything. All he needed was the right vehicle, something he’d spent the better part of a decade searching for.

Kaufman looked to his left. “What do you think?”

The man beside him appeared exasperated. Norman Lang was close to forty but he dressed in the wrinkled casual way of a college student: corduroys and an untucked flannel shirt, now covered by a lab coat. His thin hair was buzzed and his goatee neatly trimmed.

Lang was Kaufman’s chief scientist in areas of unusual interest—the head skunk in the skunk-works, as it were. A brilliant scientist, Lang had fallen into disgrace when he’d been caught falsifying the data on some experiments, ending up in the academic world’s version of purgatory, until Kaufman had hired him.