The Eye of God (Sigma Force 9)

She sighed with frustration. She had spent the last two hours arguing with the brass at the base, trying to get them to listen to her, and clearly she was losing patience with them all.

“Picture a bowling ball resting on a thin stretch of trampoline,” she said. “The mass of the ball would create a depression in the surface. That’s what the earth does to the geography around it. It curves space and time. This is proven by both theory and experiment, and the geodetic effect is a measuring rod for that curvature. So when the data reports a misalignment, it’s registering a wrinkle in that space-time. Something my theory posited could happen if IoG-1 collected an influx of dark energy. But I never expected such a deep wrinkle.”

A worried crinkle of her own formed between her brows.

“So what has you looking so concerned?” he asked.

“At best, I had hoped to see merely a twitch in the geodetic effect. Something less than 0.1 percent, and something brief, on the nano-scale level of time. A twist of alignment of over five percent and sustained for almost a full minute . . .” She gave her head a slight shake.

“Earlier, you theorized that the massive burst of dark energy might have torn a small hole in space-time, possibly opening a brief window into an alternate universe, one parallel to our own, one where the Eastern Seaboard was destroyed.”

She studied the screen. “Or it may be a peek into our own future.”

That was a disturbing possibility she hadn’t previously voiced.

“Time is not a linear function,” she continued, almost as if she were working something out in her head. “Time is just another dimension. Like up-down or left-right. The flow of time can also be affected by gravity or by velocity. So when space-time got ripped or wrinkled, it could have made time skip a beat, like the needle of a record player hitting a scratch in the vinyl.”

The fear in her eyes brightened.

Painter tried to stave off that panic. “Since when do you kids still listen to vinyl?”

She turned to him, the anxiety pushed back by indignation. “I’ll have you know I have a vintage jazz collection that rivals the best in the world. B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Miles Davis, Hans Koller.”

“Okay.” He held up a placating palm.

“Nothing compares to old vinyl,” she finished with a righteous huff.

He didn’t disagree with her.

He was saved from any further diatribe by the return of the technician.

“You were right,” he said to her, looking even more scared.

“Right about what?” Painter asked.

“Show me,” she said, ignoring him.

The technician crossed back to the giant screen and once again brought up the NRO satellite image and superimposed it over the photo taken by IoG-1. He flickered them back and forth, one atop the other.

“The shadows don’t match, like you thought. Not just here, but we tested some spots in Boston, with the same anomaly registering.” He pointed to the clutch of engineers and techs by his workstation. “We’re zeroing in on different points along the Eastern Seaboard and calculating the degree of variance.”

She nodded. “We need the time differential calculated.”

“We’re on it.”

Painter didn’t follow. “What’s wrong?”

She pointed to the giant screen. “The shadows don’t match between the two images. They are fractionally off from one another.”

“Which means what?”

“The two images were taken at the same time, so the shadows should match. Like two pictures of the same sundial taken at the same moment.” She stared hard at them. “But they don’t. The shadows don’t line up, which means—”

“The sun’s position in the sky is different between the two photos.”

A sense of dread drew his spine straighter.

She took a worried breath. “The Eye of God snapped a picture of Manhattan at a different time, not the one registered by our clocks as it crashed.”

Painter pictured that needle skipping over a scratch in a vinyl record.

Jada continued, “The technicians are trying to figure out what date and time correspond to the position of the sun captured in the satellite image. They’re triangulating spots up and down the Eastern Seaboard to pinpoint that exact time.”

By now the growing commotion at the engineering console had drawn others.

The lead tech straightened and stared at Jada.

“The variance is eighty-eight . . . !” Someone tugged his sleeve. He ducked to the screen, then back up again. “Make that ninety hours from now.”

That was less than four days.

General Metcalf joined him. “What’s this all about?”

Painter’s gaze fell upon Jada’s face, where he found certainty shining.

“That image.” Painter nodded to the destruction. “That’s not a glitch. That’s how the world will look in four days.”

6:54 P.M. CET

Rome, Italy

Rachel Verona woke out of a dream of drowning to the ringing of the phone. She struggled up, gasping a breath, taking a moment to realize she was not in her bed, but on the overstuffed sofa in Uncle Vigor’s office. She had dozed off while reading a text about St. Thomas.

The smell of garlic and pesto still hung in the air from the take-out meal she had fetched earlier for them both. The cartons still rested on her uncle’s desk, by his elbow.

“Can you get the phone?” Vigor asked.

With his reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, he was bent studiously over the old skull. He held a measuring compass open and poised across the length of the nasal bone. He scribbled a note on a sheet of graph paper.

As the phone rang loudly, Rachel rolled to her feet and stepped to his desk. She stared at the sliver of moon through the arrow-slit of a window accented by the arc of the comet’s long tail.

“It’s getting late, Uncle. We can finish this in the morning.”

He waved the compass dismissively. “I only sleep a few hours. And when it’s quiet like this, I get my best work done.”

She picked up the ringing phone on his desk. “Pronto?”

A tired masculine voice answered, “Sono Bruno Conti, dottore di recerco da Centro Studi Microcitemia.”

Rachel covered the receiver. “Uncle, it’s Dr. Conti from the DNA lab.”

He waved for the phone. “Took them long enough.”

Rachel stared over at the skull as Vigor spoke rapidly with the research geneticist. She recognized the source of her uncle’s impatience, noting the faint writing on the crown of the skull, marking a fateful date. She felt no misgivings at the prediction etched in bone. People had been predicting the end of the world since the beginning of time—from the ancient Maya with their prophetic calendar to the turn-of-the-millennial doomsayers back in 2000.