It was almost seven o’clock when NSA sub-director Edgar Fitz Hume finally sat down behind his large mahogany desk. Tired from a very confusing day, the director found his office on the corner of a very ordinary building to be safe and comforting. In fact, the National Security Agency had chosen the Bleaker Street location precisely for its abundance of plainness and anonymity.

  Another reason was most politicians based in Washington hated the commute to NSA headquarters in Baltimore for briefings. The trip either involved a two-hour drive or a three-hour flight if you included the time required for the necessary security measures. Teleconferencing was a viable alternative, but even supposedly secure lines weren’t always secure.

  Fitz Hume had used those inconveniences and a natural tendency for DC paranoia to leverage a Senate subcommittee to authorize a satellite office a little closer to home.

  A tiny suburb outside the city limits, Forrest Lawn’s warehouse district ideally suited an organization that wanted to stay under the radar. But it had another, more personal added benefit. His family loved the area. That fact alone was worth all the politicking and vote wrangling. All in all, he was happy. Of course, that was until 24 hours ago. Now, Edgar Fitz Hume was slightly annoyed.

  Three 27-inch high definition computer monitors were arrayed evenly on his desk. Each one was top of the line, with multi-touch functionality and a direct T1 line patched directly into the NSA’s Echelon program. And since this morning, they hadn’t stopped streaming top-secret reports.

  The first monitor displayed a spreadsheet of various electromagnetic wave patterns, both unnatural and those occurring naturally. The second screen contained a topographical map of the eastern seaboard augmented with multiple overlays of white and green wave patterns. The third was an estimate of the amount of supercomputer time required to finish crunching the data involved with his present assignment.

  The current number sat at over 100 hours, along with an ominous subheading near the bottom of the screen entitled: PERCENTAGE OF FAVORABLE OUTCOME 6%.

  Staring blankly at the monitors, Fitz Hume’s searched for a way to explain his swiftly deteriorating mood.

  Impossible, the word still held it’s agreed upon definition. Edgar had employed it many times with his workers and his kids. But that blanket statement now seemed trite and unfounded, more importantly for the task at hand, small and betraying. The misuse of that word might have ruined a man's life. And right now, he needed answers.

  “Run it down for me one more time.” His hands flew up in disgust. “I’m afraid that the particulars are, escaping me.”

  Sitting across the desk from Fitz Hume was the brightest scientist in the NSA’s employ. Standing at a diminutive five-foot-seven, Samuel Mosley was one of the few black kids from Southern California whose lifelong dream was to become the ultimate science freak. Harvard graduate, sitting professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge University, Mosley had just finished a year at CERN helping prove the existence of the sixth and seventh dimensions relative to our own space-time.

  Fast-tracked his whole life, the young scientist should have already been named the National Science Director, but a lifelong passion for doing things his own way had often held him back. Even now, the usual protocols meant little as Mosley sat very stylishly in the director’s office wearing a pair of Ecko jeans and Sebago slip ons.

  Hardly professional attire, but Fitz Hume overlooked his apparent eccentricities and considered himself lucky to have recruited the thirty-year-old when he did.

  Though, that feeling was now being called into question.

  “Director,” Mosley slid his designer Ray Ban reading glasses to the top of his head. He didn’t need them for the close-up stuff anyway. “I’ve had linguistics and code-breaking efforting the data since two o’clock this morning. But no breakthroughs yet.” Samuel deposited a rather large file unceremoniously on Fitz Hume’s desk, and the director recoiled slightly. “Everything else should have been made available to you digitally about ten minutes ago.”

  The director weakly waved his hand. “Go on.”

  “At approximately midnight last night, a high band discharge of electromagnetic waves was recorded by one of our east coast listening stations. Luckily, we happened to have a bird tasked over the area that recorded the entire incident. Another lucky break, the bird had recently been equipped with a new thermal mapping pack designed by NASA. The level of data it gathered was quite astounding.”

  “Samuel,” uninterested in the ingredients, Fitz Hume only savored the pie. “What I want to know is, was this occurrence identical to the one eight years ago? This is important.”

  “Yes, Director. From what little data remains of the 2009 incident, the team was able to seize upon several similar factors.” Samuel slid his glasses back down and made a quick check of his smartphone. No new messages from the team. Dammit, he was going to kill Fred. “It’s the same type of disturbance. Only the mass is dissimilar.”

  Fitz Hume rubbed his temples. This day had always been on his calendar, but more as a joke. A memory filed away under the heading, “how brilliant people can crack under extreme circumstances.” Now it seemed the joke was on him. “What I need now is the meaning of it. Was there a message hidden within it?”

  Samuel stared at the director with an expression bordering on pity. An expression employed hundreds of times with his colleagues and students when they questioned the validity of his research or whether a guy who preferred to wear Sean John sweatpants could have a higher IQ than them.

  “There’s no real mystery director. Well… other than what ultimately caused it? We narrowed the point of origin to the town of Elmira, New York.” He paused for the director to respond then continued. “What’s got me intrigued is the level of the EM spike, half the town should have been blacked out. But as far as Elmira Water and Power is concerned, there were no service interruptions reported.”

  “And another thing,” Samuel pried open the file to a section near the end and placed a finger on a report comparing two separate but distinct EM signatures. One was dated 1946 while the other 2013.

  “Yes.” Half-acknowledging either, the Director’s attention had been drawn away by a picture of his wife and his son. Why wasn’t he home with them right now?

  Samuel saw the Director becoming distracted, but he was committed to finishing the briefing. “The amount of energy produced by this event was comparable to let’s say a 3-kiloton nuclear weapon being detonated. The fingerprints are even similar.” He pointed to a graph halfway down the page. “There are some discrepancies in the theta band that we can’t resolve. If we had been zoomed in tighter on Elmira at that time, we could have gotten more detailed readings.”

  “What would that matter? You recorded it, didn’t you? Work the data.”

  Mosley happily schooled Fitz Hume on the scientific method. “If someone was in the area activating a device, we could have had eyes on him. We could have noted a trail. Something to follow that would have given us more pieces to the puzzle. Right now, all we have are the middle pieces.”

  “We did know the time.” Fitz Hume offered bluntly. “We just didn’t know the location.”

  It was Samuel’s turn to stare blankly at the director. “Excuse me, you mean we had actionable intelligence before the event, and we sat on it?”

  “Not actionable per se,” the director spat back. “We had the ravings of a disturbed person.”

  “Who?” Mosley asked.

  “The whole thing is classified. But since he’ll be here in a couple of hours, I guess it couldn’t hurt.” Fitz Hume trailed off. In his mind, he was trying to run through scenarios where he wouldn’t need him. After all, wasn’t that the reason he had procured the Hip Hop professor from CERN? Just in case this impossible situation ever arose. Hedging his bets by having another genius that could rival him sounded great at the time. But now he found himself having serious buyer’s remorse. “But it’s complicated.”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Who?” Samuel prodded again. His curiosity was piqued by his boss’s hesitation to spill what could be a helpful clue. In his head, Mosley began to construct a list of qualified academics and only two people were better versed in electromagnetic theory then him, the Reeds.

  But they ran in different circles than the Director. On top of that, they were currently on their honeymoon in Hawaii, and there was no way Jessica would give up the Big Island for government research.

  “Foster Evers…,” the director finally mumbled. “His name is Foster Evers.”

  “Who’s that?” Mosley asked, confused by a name that held no special meaning to him.

  “Foster Evers was the researcher who studied the original event eight years ago. He was about 23 at the time, and his theories on the nature of the disturbance were seen by most as outlandish. Some said bordering on the insane.”

  “What did he think it was?”

  “A message,” Fitz Hume paused. “He thought it was a message.” The effort required to finish the rest of his answer was considerable. “He thought it was a message from outer space.”

  The two men sat there, staring at each other. Neither wanted to acknowledge the words. But for the sake of time, Fitz Hume continued. “Evers was brilliant. He had done some work for the state department, all highly classified, on their alternative energy program. His solutions were too controversial to implement, but no one could deny their brilliance.”

  “After the study wrapped, Foster got bored again and went on vacation. Later, he somehow got hooked on the idea of code breaking. When he rolled back into town, Foster began making overt inquiries about coming over to us. Well, after his successes at state, the NSA welcomed him with open arms.”

  “He didn’t produce?” Mosley leaned back in his chair.

  “On the contrary, he produced volumes. In less than two months, Foster wrote a series of decryption programs that broke half the world’s terrorist organizations’ encrypted messages. If we could intercept it, his program could crack it. Hell, back in 2008, a couple of senators wanted to rename the Patriot Act after him.”

  “So, what was the problem?”

  “You mean, besides the fact that we weren’t going to rename the Patriot Act after him?” Fitz Hume smiled. “The problem was no one could understand the programs he was writing. Foster developed his own computer code. I mean… do you understand what that means?”

  The Director wanted that last statement to sink in, though Mosley was smart enough not to need it explained. “It means you couldn’t replicate it.”

  “Exactly,” the director threw up his hands. “And that made a lot of people nervous.”

  “His own operating language? How did anyone know how to use it?”

  “Oh… he designed a simple user interface for it. Point and click. The damn thing even translated languages for the analysts. But when the guys down at R and D tried to tear it down, they were completely lost. They had no frame of reference to start from.”

  “You had no Rosetta Stone.” Samuel offered.

  Without answering, another moment of understanding fell between the two of them, but Mosley’s curiosity was far from satisfied. “I don’t get it. It sounds like he was doing everything you wanted him to do. What went wrong?”

  Fitz Hume pressed a button on his desk, and the three monitors went blank. With their glow extinguished, the director’s face became enshrouded in shadow. He closed the file Samuel had given him, deposited it in one of his desk drawers with a loud thud and slammed it shut.

  “At the time Foster recorded the original event, he’d been routing all traffic from our east coast microwave stations through his lab. He claimed he was working on a new decryption program and the constant supply of background noise would help him calibrate it.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Samuel understood the logic.

  “It was reasonable. Given his past successes, the agency was more than willing to back anything he wanted to do. But after the event, without authorization, Foster rerouted every supercomputer in the facility to his terminal. I mean, he effectively shut down the NSA for over three hours. When he finally emerged from his office, all Foster could talk about was the message.”

  “The message,” Samuel was curious as hell now. “What did he say it was?”

  “Foster only gave us a date,” Fitz Hume interlocked his fingers and placed them under his chin. “Today’s date…”

  “Nothing else?” Samuel asked with wide eyes. “Just a date.”

  “No, but Foster had plans. Lots of them. He had already begun designing a new program that would eventually break the entire thing. He requested more supercomputer time, crazy stuff. He essentially wanted to shut down the NSA for two weeks to break a code nobody saw but him.” The director rapped on the drawer where he had just placed Mosley’s extensive report. “Did you see any code?”

  “No, there was just the EM discharge.” Samuel leaned forward, thinking. “Besides, how can a code be buried in a random energy discharge?”

  “That’s what we said. Unfortunately, when Foster latches onto a problem, there’s no stopping him.” Fitz Hume slumped a little in his chair. “For a while, we let him run amok. It wasn’t until he started talking about aliens all the time that people around here got nervous. I tried to get him focused on other projects, but he was dead set on solving that problem. You see… he always had to solve the problem.”

  “Really?” Samuel laughed at the director’s choice of words and the meaning behind them. “You know what they call an unsolved problem in mathematics?” Fitz Hume threw up his hands, signaling that he did not. “Their called conjectures.”

  “Conjectures, huh?” Fitz Hume stared out of his window and thought about his shared past with Foster. “The Evers’ conjecture… that sounds about right. Well, finally, the agency had to put its foot down and tell him it was over.”

  Samuel grinned. He understood the mania of trying to solve a problem and the lengths someone would go to see it through until the end. “That didn’t go over very well, did it?”

  “To put it mildly. He threatened to seek assistance from the civilian sector.”

  Samuel had done enough classified work to know that couldn’t happen. “So, you let him go?”

  “No,” Fitz Hume’s eyes narrowed, and there was real, albeit small, regret in his voice. “We had him committed to a facility in Southern Pennsylvania.”

  “Committed?” Mosley’s breath caught in his throat, and he immediately felt on edge. “Why would you have him committed?”

  “You’ve got to understand something. Foster had just written what amounted to the pinnacle of code-breaking software. We could read anyone’s mail.” Fitz Hume slapped his palms down on his desk. The gravity of his next statement demanded a small bit of theatrics. “The problem was anyone with his program could also read ours. And here he was running around the hallways like a mad man talking about messages from outer space. We couldn’t have someone with his skill set running around unsupervised.”

  “So, you had him locked away.” Samuel was beginning to understand where the director’s regret stemmed. “And now it turns out that he wasn’t that crazy after all.”

  The director almost became enraged at that comment. His nostrils flared, and his neck turned the color of a coke can. “At least you had his research.” Samuel backed off quickly. “Come to think of it, can I see his original research on the first event?”

  Fitz Hume let out an exasperated laugh as his anger gave way to disappointment. “That was a goddam tragedy. You see, Foster was a paranoid person by nature. Unbeknownst to us, everything he created for us had failsafe protocols built into them.”

  Mosley shook his head. “What do you mean failsafe protocols?”

  “I mean. If a certain password wasn’t entered into his terminal every 72 hours, the system would automatically purge the code. And not just his computer. Three days after he was taken into custody, the entire NSA server farm was wiped clean. Everything he produced was gone, in the blink of an eye.”

  Fitz Hume slumped back even further in his chair. Samuel recognized the air of defeat written all over the director’s face. The entirety of that screw up would cripple most men in Washington. Honestly, he was surprised that Fitz Hume even found a way to survive the debacle. “You have nothing?”

  “Nothing but him. I dispatched a couple of agents to retrieve him from his padded cell earlier today.”

  “Do you think he’ll help us?” Suddenly, Samuel was extremely interested in meeting this Foster Evers.

  “I think he’ll help solve the problem. But I don’t think he’ll trust anyone here that much.”

  “Why?” Samuel asked indignantly. “I had nothing to do with his commitment.”

  Fitz Hume sighed heavily and rubbed the back of his neck. This was slowly turning into the longest day of his life. “Because you work for me. I was the one who suggested we put him away. It shouldn’t be that hard to imagine what his feelings toward me now must be.” Before either man could acknowledge that admission, a low-level staffer knocked on the director’s door.

  “Come in,” the director ordered. “What is it?”

  The staffer, a young woman in her mid-twenties, poked her head into the room long enough to deliver a message. “Saunders called, sir. He says the package is secure, and they’re an hour out of Washington.”

  He turned his attention back to Samuel. “How long has your team been burning on this one?”

  Samuel thought about it for a moment. “Most of them were on duty before the event. Given their first 12-hour shift and the 12 hours worked today, I would guess most are coming up on 30 hours straight.”

  The administrator in Fitz Hume took over. He wanted to limit the personnel involved, and some downtime would let everyone see the problem with fresh eyes. “Tell Saunders to drop him off at the Hyatt, Maria. The one near Dulles that the DOJ uses when they have a witness in town.”

  “Yes, sir.” The staffer hurried away to relay the director’s message.

  “Was that for the team’s benefit or to put off seeing him for a bit longer?”

  “Both. Tell everyone to crash for ten hours. They can start again around noon tomorrow.” Fitz Hume swiveled his chair around to face away from Samuel’s questioning gaze. The past had returned quicker and harder than he expected. Eight years ago, Fitz Hume knew Foster was wrong.

  But now, it was looking like that might have been a colossally bad assumption.

  “Does that mean me too?”

  Without looking at Samuel, he said, “You’re a manager, Mosley. I’ll leave that up to you.”

  Samuel could sense that the director was done talking, so he got up to leave. “If it’s all the same, I’ll stick around for a while. I have a few more numbers to crunch.”

  “Your choice,” with his eyes tightly shut, the director sighed. “But tomorrow, be prepared to meet Foster.”

  “I’m looking forward to it.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  Both men went silently back to doing what they were doing twenty minutes ago. One worrying about how he could solve this problem, while the other worried about how he could solve it without Foster Evers.