A Time for War (20 page)

She only smiled in response. She turned her eyes back out the window. Obviously, in mentioning her boss, Jack had gone where even angels fear to tread. That was telling. It was not a reaction of respect but fear. That actually helped Jack get past his own concerns. A woman in danger—even if it was just a vague, intuited psychological jeopardy—was always a strong motivator for him.

The plane was on the runway. Jack heard the cello string rise an octave. The jet picked up speed quickly, much faster than a commercial passenger jet and certainly faster than the C-130. Jack was thrust forward more than he had expected. He gripped the calfskin armrests.

He looked out the window at the city as it dropped away at a sharper angle than he was accustomed to and in a different direction. He fell in love all over again with the familiar sights and the emerging lights and the ribbons of traffic, red moving away, white coming toward him, every driver the center of his or her own cosmos but
his
people. How much in love he was became clear when the plane banked west past the Golden Gate, Point Diablo and Point Bonito were lost to view, and only then he remembered there was a beautiful woman sitting across from him.

She rose when they leveled off. They were at roughly ten thousand feet and still climbing.

“Mr. Hatfield, would you like your carry-on?”

“Please.” He didn't offer to get it. He would let her do what she was happily accustomed to doing. Sometimes that, too, was chivalry.

She brought his bag and set it on the floor. She held the popcorn, unsure what to do with it.

“You can toss that,” he said. “I only wanted a taste.”

She did not react with curiosity to what was clearly a lie. The human contact was clearly over.

“Would you care for anything to eat or drink, perhaps some of that caviar I mentioned?”

“I'll take a Glenrothes single malt if you've got it.”

“Would a Jameson eighteen-year-old Limited Reserve be acceptable?”

“That would have been my very strong second choice,” he smiled.

She walked past him and Jack turned his head slightly to watch her go. Martina fit perfectly under the low ceiling. In the muted white light of the cabin he realized that her uniform had been color-coordinated with the interior of the jet. There was even a faint zigzag pattern up the back of her jacket. A design element, perhaps. It struck him more as a subtle brand, a sign of ownership.

He booted his computer and looked up the stored files on Hawke. He still had a lot of reading to do before he got to wherever he was going. He had read about the man's background, about how the company was started. He already knew about the Squarebeam debacle. He started in on the company's current assets.

Martina returned with his drink. He didn't bother folding down the computer screen. No need to insult her intelligence. She could have guessed what he was doing. He sampled the whiskey. Martina hadn't even waited for him to acknowledge it so; she had gone on to the cockpit. The drink was warm, spicy, nutty, rich. He savored it as it warmed his throat and chest, then put the glass back on the table. He was going to nurse this one for a while. Otherwise, he'd be drinking more of it than he should.

Reviewing the material, Hawke was global in every sense of the word. He had offices in twenty-eight nations and homes in many of those same places, according to a
People
magazine profile from two years earlier. Jack narrowed his examination to the man's American holdings. He wanted to get some idea which lab—domestically or internationally—might have the capability of designing or producing an advanced EMP device.

His eyes locked on one name in the list of Hawke laboratories.

“Aw, Christ.”

One facility jumped out like a coiled snake: HITV Labs. Hawke Industries Temecula Valley. It was a large industrial complex located on Nutmeg Street, just north of the intersection of Interstate 15 and Interstate 215.

The address was in Murrieta. The town Dover had said she wanted to visit.

She wouldn't go there alone and start asking questions,
Jack told himself.
She couldn't be that naïve
.

But a desk jockey could be
exactly
that green, he decided. And that curious. And that eager to redeem herself.

His damsel-in-distress glands were pumping out large doses of adrenaline. He was on a jet heading at just under Mach 2 in what he had determined to be a southeasterly direction, while his nominal partner in this was headed for potential trouble back in California.

He logged onto the jet's wireless system. Hawke might well be eavesdropping on all communications as a matter of course but that couldn't be helped. Jack sent Dover an innocuous e-mail. He got an away-message that said she was taking a few days off with limited Internet availability. He tried to call on her cell phone. The ONI would definitely be listening and wouldn't appreciate that, but he was the one placing the call, not her. It would not add an extra black mark to her record. Not that it mattered: he got voice mail. She was probably on her way. He left a message for her to call, though if he were leaving the country there was no way of knowing when he might get it.

Shit
.

Jack thought about how he had felt a little helpless contemplating this trip. That was nothing.

Considering his options, there was only one he could think of. He sent a vague text that he hoped would make sense to the person who received it. Then he sat back with his whiskey and nursed it, waiting for an answer to his message.

 

PART TWO

Resistance

 

1

Murrieta, California

Dover Griffith arrived in the middle of a massive dust storm. What bothered her was not that in itself: it was that she had been sure, after the way it began, the trip was only going to get better.

Dover had an apartment in a three-story brick complex in Suitland, 5601 Regency Park Court, building number seven. She phoned for a cab to take her to the airport then went down to meet it. As she got there—with the number of the taxi on her cell phone—she saw an older man just getting in.

“Hey!” she yelled. “That's my taxi!”

“Sorry!” the passenger waved. “Mine will be along shortly, I hope.”

“You hope? God
dammit,
that's my ride!”

Dover had enough time to call and complain to the cab company before the man's taxi arrived. The cab driver gave her a hard time because her name was obviously not Toby Dickles. She wished the other driver had been more thorough.

She made it to the airport with little time to spare and got through security with even less time to spare. She sat less than five minutes before the plane took off.

Her seat was right next to Toby Dickles. They did not speak. Except for a moment of alarm on her part and dim, dawning recognition on his, they exchanged no looks, no words. Dover was on the aisle. Every time Mr. Dickles had to use the bathroom—which was every half hour or so—he simply rose, without a “pardon me” or “excuse me,” and she had to get up. The one time she hesitated, he undertook to shimmy around her. When Mr. Dickles finally fell asleep—with the volume on the earphones turned way up, so she could literally sing along with Italian opera—he snored.

At the car rental facility in California, off Haven Road at the eastern end of the airport, she picked up her car—a Kia Rio, which came fully equipped with a CD player and nothing else—and swung onto 10. She took it a short distance to Highway 15, headed south, and ran right into the storm.

The dust was like a thick sheet of tawny-gray gauze pulled over the windshield. She could see a few yards in front but nothing else. It stretched up as far as she could see. Dover pulled over, along with most of the sane people on the freeway, turned on the radio, and found a local station that said it would pass through the region in about a half hour.

“This is part of what comes with living in our big, beautiful Inland Empire,” the newscaster said. “You get the great temps year round, you get the recreation, you get Las Vegas and San Diego and Los Angeles a couple hours in any direction. And sometimes, yeah, Mama Nature reminds us she's alive and well with a trembler or a wildfire or a wall of desert sand a thousand feet high.”

Dover turned off the radio. It was more fun listening to the wind bellow, cars poking by with drivers leaning into their horns, and the scratching sound of countless silica bits blasting across the windows and chassis. She didn't want to waste her cell phone battery so she left her phone in her bag and pulled a map from the glove compartment. The good news was her destination was about forty-five minutes straight ahead, the Clinton Keith exit on 15.

The cloud passed suddenly. There was no announcement, like the trailing off of a rainstorm or the bowling alley rumble of retreating thunder. The dust storm had rolled through and simply ended.

Now, of course, there was a careless starting up of traffic, with lurching, uncooperative moves from cars parked two rows deep on the shoulder and dismal bottlenecks where 15 and 60, then 15 and 91, crossed to the south.

Welcome to California,
she thought.

The last time she was here was before her freshman year at NYU. Her best friend, Christina, wanted to become a movie star so they took a trip to Los Angeles. They stayed at the Sheraton Universal and took the tour, where Christina fell in love with their tram guide. They hooked up, stayed hooked up for nearly a week—while Dover did the tourist sights, including Disneyland, mostly by herself—then broke up. Her friend was devastated and never went back to California. Dover hadn't been impressed enough with anything, either, especially the traffic. Now it was even worse than she remembered, thanks to a county full of people who required big, brawny trucks to get from place to place instead of little VW Beetles.

Though if there were a Beetle, Toby Dickles would probably be driving it and doing fifty-five in front of me,
she reflected. Mercifully, an offspring or nephew had met him at the terminal and hustled him away.

By the time she reached her exit, Dover wished that she had rented one of those trucks. Some of them literally created a mild shock wave as they passed, causing her to wobble, and all of them were high enough from the road so the drivers could actually see past the truck in front of them. Dover spent more time looking at rear fenders and taillights than she did watching the road. She didn't realize how tense she was until after she pulled off the freeway and stopped at the light. She was literally squeezing the steering wheel.

It was after five
P.M.
when she arrived. She had made a reservation at TemVal Motel on Whitewood Road. It looked nothing like the photographs online, which showed a freshly painted, neat little roadside motel with a kind of cowboy charm. In reality it was the kind of seedy place most people avoided.

But it was inexpensive, it was near to where she had to be, and all she intended to do there was sleep. There was a woman at the counter, which put her at ease. She was pleasant enough and apparently surprised to see someone actually staying for the night. Dover checked the lock and the sheets. They were fine. She took her wallet but left her bag in the room, plugged in her near-dead cell phone, and went out. She wanted to get her bearings by driving past the industrial park that was the home of Hawke Industries.

The game plan was to be upfront, just like Jack Hatfield. Commander Morgan and Lieutenant Commander Ward had always admonished their teams to be aggressive in the pursuit of intelligence. The mantra was “Nation before self.” As far as Dover was concerned, the ideals of national security were no less true whether she was behind her desk or in the field. Like her grandfather, she couldn't be afraid just because the enemy was out there, somewhere in the dark. If her fears were valid, this was absolutely worth pursuing—the ONI's repudiation of Jack Hatfield be damned. As long as she didn't misrepresent herself or reveal classified information, there were no restrictions on what Dover could ask or say. She didn't expect anyone to reveal any secrets. But she expected that a smart corporate representative would be as curious to find out what she knew, or suspected, as she was about them. This could be mutually beneficial. What American company, privately owned by an American, wouldn't want to know if their technology had been appropriated and was being used to kill Americans? They might even offer her a better job than she had in D.C.

I might even buy a truck,
she grinned.

As for the ONI, she had nothing to lose. What were they going to do, fire her? On the other hand, if she was right and could bring back even the hint of evidence to back her claim, then she might get her job back, the Hatfield connection notwithstanding.

Even if I have to push it up the ladder, past the commander,
she thought. Reading about Hatfield she had come to realize this much: you don't get ahead by being afraid. Not only was Dover surprised to find herself calm, she was actually energized. She had processed the fieldwork of others often enough. The prospect of doing her own was exciting, challenging.

The Hawke complex was across the street from a gas station, a fast-food restaurant, and a Starbucks, which had obviously been built there for employees: they were linked by a new pedestrian foot bridge. The Hawke facility itself was a series of charcoal-gray buildings arranged in what looked like a zigzag pattern. There were solar panels on the roof and, in the distance, air turbines that towered about two hundred feet and caught the Santa Ana winds that—she had read in the in-flight magazine—blew seasonally from the desert. There was no gate, no guard, no swipe-card access that she could see: just an open parking lot beyond marble columns topped with bronze statues, about a dozen feet high, of large hawks in flight.

What do they do out here,
she wondered,
work on the honor system?