The Fall Read Free Page B

need for a pair of tablet-armed nerds sticking their noses in her project and scrubbing through the OSS computer network but she intended to find out. An alarm in the back of her head told her that the Pentagon brass didn’t pull last-minute stunts like this one without a powerful motive.
    But the cyber-sword cuts both ways, she thought with a slight grin. The same VIP accounts that allowed the Los Alamos scientists to connect their tablets into the OSS network had allowed Angela to load up a nice little virus into their portable devices, creating back doors that should give her access to their networks.
    You get to see mine but I also get to see yours.
    As soon as this jump was over, she would find out who they were and why they wanted to modify Jack’s descent profile during the reentry phase from Alpha-G to Alpha-B.
    She had gone over the data and it didn’t make any sense. Alpha-B would increase the angle of descent by two degrees, keeping Jack supersonic for fifteen more seconds than planned, which could potentially set him off course by as much as three miles from his designated touchdown site northeast of Orlando. The Alpha adjustments, from A to K, were created to compensate for the winds aloft during reentry and keep the jumper on a mission-specified vertical track. Part of Project Phoenix’s deliverables was touchdown accuracy to within ten feet of the intended target.
    In the end, NASA had caved and agreed to program Hastings’s Alpha-B descent profile. But just before the launch, Angela had used her secret back door into the OSS descent control algorithms to reprogram it back to Alpha-G while still keeping all systems reporting that they were set for Alpha-B.
    It’s my husband you’re fucking with, General, not one of your eunuchs, she thought, glad that she had listened to the hacker in her and programmed multiple back doors into every system in the OSS network.
    â€œJump plus ten. Pod burn complete.”
    â€œRoger.”
    Pete looked over to Angela and gave her a reassuring thumbs-up. His soft features contrasted sharply with a pair of blue eyes gleaming with bold intelligence under a full head of dark hair.
    He turned back toward his monitor. Pete’s dark skin had the handsome damage of countless weekends sailing or skydiving with Jack. Those two went back to high school in New Jersey. Although Pete was captain of the chess team while Jack led the football team, they developed a deep friendship. Then Pete got an academic scholarship to Stanford’s prestigious School of Engineering while Jack played football for Rutgers before joining the Navy, where he eventually screened for BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training at Coronado. That led him straight to SEAL Team 3, followed by five years of missions in the Middle East’s hottest spots and another two years with SEAL Team 4 in South America. When a mission in Colombia went south due to faulty combat gear, Jack signed up to test prototype military equipment for the Pentagon, feeling that he could best serve his country by working out the kinks in high-tech weaponry and gadgets before they became plans of record for America’s fighting forces. Pete, on the other hand, accepted a contract with the Pentagon to develop America’s next generation of weaponry, which led him to NASA and Project Phoenix, where he wasted no time in recruiting Jack.
    Angela watched the ends of her lips curve up on her reflection on the flat-screen monitor, remembering the first time she laid eyes on the clean-cut Jack Taylor, rapidly deciding he was definitely not her type. Angela had grown up among the tough biker crowd that hung around her father’s motorcycle shop in Cocoa Beach. The former SEAL, albeit ruggedly handsome and quite free-spirited, didn’t trigger any feelings in her. And besides, she was too damn busy developing the OSS to give Jack’s advances any serious thought. But somewhere along the way, he