Black Tide (45 page)

"Love to."

Felix stepped away from the pay phone and lowered his voice and said, ''Among other things, Sergeant Macklin told me that the son of a bitch had a cocktail napkin in his pocket from a bar in Maine called the Whistling Buoy. In York, Maine."

''Any idea of what he was doing there, besides getting drunk?"

After folding the pad shut and putting it into his pants pocket, Felix said, "According to Macklin, story is that he got to the Whistling Buoy about a half hour before closing time and knocked back a few, and he tipped the bartender big, saying things were going great for him, couldn't be better. And about forty minutes later, heading home, he leaves the interstate just after crossing the border into Massachusetts and wraps his car around a tree."

"So he was the man, Felix."

"Yep. He was the man. Which tells me that his partner wasn't in on the storage."

Felix started back to the Lumina and I stayed with him, asking, "Does that make sense?"

"Perfect military doctrine," he said, opening his door. "Need to know. Both guys are in on the theft, but only one guy needs to know where it's going for storage. The safe house in York. But if he gets drunk and kills himself, then the address dies with him."

I got into the car the same time as Felix. "And Corelli would know, but he was busy doing time in Leavenworth."

"Right," Felix said, taking out his keys. "There he is, in prison, with bugs and stools all around him, and if you think he was going to breathe a word that he was involved in the biggest art theft of the decade, you're nuts. He waited and kept his mouth shut and died quiet."

After Felix pulled out into traffic, he added, "It floors me, though, that Tony Russo ends up knowing that the paintings were at the safe house in York. All he knew was that Corelli had them stolen. Would love to know how that happened."

I leaned back in my seat, suddenly feeling tired. Though Tyler Beach was only an hour away, it seemed like weeks. "Simple intelligence work, Felix."

"Oh? Are you going to reveal something here, Lewis, or just spin theories?"

I didn't rise to the bait. "Just spinning theories. Corelli couldn't have known everything by himself. A couple of other guys must have known pieces of the scheme. So Tony also keeps quiet, and one year he learns from Corelli's older brother that yep, Jimmy Corelli was behind the thefts. Another year, somebody else lets him know that Corelli stole them for Cameron Briggs. More time goes by, and he finds out that Cal Maloney was in on the theft, and he delivered the paintings to a safe house in Maine, but the dumb cop gets killed in an accident."

Felix sped up as we got on Route 1, heading north out of the city, and we passed large buildings and exit and entrance ramps and concrete-and-steel bridges.

"Yeah, makes sense," Felix said. "Then Russo starts poking around, asking questions here and there, tries to find out who knows where the safe house is located."

"You got it," I said. "Then your name comes up, you start getting postcards, and Tony goes to Cameron Briggs and says hey, the deal's still on, five years later. Then maybe part of Cameron is excited about finally getting the paintings, but another part panics about all of this coming out right now, and Cameron starts tidying up. Beginning with Tony Russo. And then Craig Dummer. Giving him money to pay off his debts and moving him out of his old place, and then taking care of him one bloody night."

"Not a bad yarn, not a bad yarn at all," Felix said, and we stayed quiet as we went through the mass of cities clustered around Boston, through the strip malls and neon lights of Danvers and Saugus and Medford. Then the bright neon and concrete were left behind us. I could even make out a few stars.

When we approached the exit for Groveland, I turned and looked at Felix, and in the dashboard lights his afternoon shadow looked blue-black and he had a thoughtful look on his face.

"Felix?"

"Hmmm?"

"The swap is on for tomorrow, right?"

"Well, in less than an hour it's going to be today. But yeah, tomorrow. Why?"

"Just remember one thing when we're there, Felix."

He thought for a moment, as another mile passed underneath the Lumina's wheels. "What's that?"

"Cameron Briggs. He seems to be in the mood for tidying up. Keep that in mind."

Felix looked over at me, with a gaze that made me glad he was not my enemy.

"It's never left my mind, Lewis."

I left it at that, and I think I dozed off soon after.

At about 3 A.M. I woke up at home with a dream, another damnable flashback about where I had worked before, but it was one I had a hard time remembering. The dream had something to do with a file on my desk, and there was a voice speaking aloud in my old office at the five-sided palace. It was a familiar one, whispering to me. "Something's wrong," the voice had said, urgent yet quiet. "Something's wrong."

I lay awake for a while, staring at the ceiling in the darkness. The sound of the ocean was there as always but it wasn't particularly comforting. There are times when I wake up from bad dreams, and the sound of the ocean and the air temperature and any imperfections in my bed's mattress conspire together to keep me awake. After about an hour or so I knew that this was one of those times. I swore softly and got up and dressed and went outside on the deck adjoining my bedroom. The stars were as bright as ever but I didn't feel like looking at them. Instead I sat down on the deck floor and remembered.

Something's wrong. I sat there for a while and it came back to me, in dribs and drabs.

I had been working for the Department of Defense for a few years before I got transferred --- or, depending on your definition, shunted away to --- the group that became known as the Marginal Issues Section. It took some time to get used to the working atmosphere in Marginal Issues. In other groups and sections in the DoD, even if it was all civilian, there was a tight military structure to everything, from the style of coffee cup you could keep at your desk to the number of pencils you could requisition every month. But in Marginal Issues there was a loosey-goosey atmosphere that even George Walker couldn't quite stamp out. There was no dress code and lunches were long, and there'd be afternoons off if the weather was nice. Oh, George threatened us here and there, but there were two graces that saved us: first, where it counted, the Marginal Issues Section produced, and second, the members of the section all had some sort of cognitive talent that some higher-ups wanted to keep, even to the point of screwing up time sheets every month.

After a while in Marginal Issues, I learned that there were peaks and valleys, where you'd be working sixty to seventy-hour weeks, responding to a crisis at some flash point in the world, and other times when your desk would be clear and a two-hour lunch didn't make much of a difference. During those downtimes we were encouraged to root around and do research on stuff that interested us.

Something's wrong. I remembered the first time I heard that phrase.

It was during a month when I was doing my own project for the first time. It had to do with the Soviet space program, back when there really was a Soviet Union and people could call it an Evil Empire without laughing. Even with people on the ground (HUMINT) and satellites in the sky (SIGINT) and SR-71s and U-2s and surveillance vessels and listening posts in China and India and everywhere else, there was a lot we didn't know about that colossus of the East. We didn't know everything they were producing or doing, and the depth of our ignorance was shown that giddy year when all the walls came down. Before that year, there were a lot of mysteries in that dark empire, and one day, I started looking into one of them: the mystery of the second
Buran.

The Soviet Union once had an aggressive space program, another fact that is conveniently forgotten in the history and science books. Well, remember this fact: if it wasn't for a special class of booster rockets that blew up too often in the 1960s, they would have beaten us to the moon by almost a year, and Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would have been second-placers. But even with those booster failures, they had a number of successes, including the
Salyut
and
Mir
space stations, and it was well known that they were developing their own reusable space shuttle. This shuttle was called the
Buran
(Russian for snowflake, and I'll be damned if I know the significance of that). There were a lot of snickers in our aerospace community when it was learned what it looked like: it was almost a mirror of our own space shuttle, right down to the white paint and the black heat-shield tiles. No doubt the KGB boys had been busy stealing blueprints and such from our aerospace boys out in California.

The first test flight of the shuttle, unmanned, took place on November 15, 1988. After a couple of orbits, the shuttle landed safely at the Baykonur Cosmodrome. While the
Buran
never had a manned test flight while I was at the DoD, there was something else about that Soviet shuttle program that perked up our interest. A mystery, actually, about the discrepancy between their public announcements and the private information that we were picking up: they claimed they had built and tested only one operational
Buran,
whereas our satellites had shown two of the winged spacecraft on the ground at the same time: one at the space complex in Baykonur and the other on top of an AN-225 aircraft at a military airfield near Alma-Alta. There were a couple of test models and one
Buran
under construction at the time, but these had all been accounted for when the satellite photo was taken. This was the cause of a few late meetings and some memo barrages at the Pentagon. What was the purpose of the second operational
Buran,
and why were the Soviets keeping it under wraps?

And if that wasn't enough of a mystery, none of our satellites and none of our other snooping devices ever found that second
Buran
again.

It had vanished. Well, a few months after the second Buran disappeared, other crises popped up and resources got diverted, and the special task force looking into this puzzle got deactivated. Time and money were at a premium, and the
Buran
folder got dumped into that giant filing cabinet marked inactive --- until one rainy March day when I stumbled across it and started getting to work. I spent long hours at my desk, plugged into the DefNet system, conducting a wide-range search, also known as an Electrolux Special --- vacuuming up every piece of information that had anything and everything to do with the Soviet space program. I found some intriguing things here and there --- like a classified radio transcript of a cosmonaut stranded in Earth orbit, who, knowing he was going to die, spent his last hours cursing Lenin, the Communist Party and mission control --- and it was difficult to keep focused with such a wealth of knowledge before me.

Then I found a few bits of information that tickled my brain. For example, a few weeks after the picture of the second
Buran
appeared, some Canadian scientists near the Arctic Circle had measured an unexplained burst of energy from a
Salyu
t space station. I recorded the date and did another Electrolux Special, and something else popped up that caught my fancy: on that same date, a spectacular meteor shower was seen by an Army Special Forces team in Outer Mongolia (what an Army Special Forces team was doing in Outer Mongolia was something I didn't have the Need to Know). After some other research I found a study conducted by our cousins over at the National Security Agency (also known as None Such Agency) which determined through the monitoring of certain classified information traffic that one of the
Salyuts
was not a space station, but was believed to be an experimental laser battle station for the Soviets' own version of Star Wars.

Through some cross-checking over at NASA, I found out that the
Salyut
with the unexpected energy emission was also the one that the NSA thought was a laser battle station. Then there were two more tiny bits of information that seemed to make it all come into focus: two days before that
Salyut
energy burst and the meteorite shower, there had been a launch of what was called a weather satellite from Baykonur. But later that month the Soviets announced that the weather satellite had failed in orbit. Fortunately for them, none of our satellites had caught this particular launch. Then, a week after that meteorite shower witnessed by Army troops in Outer Mongolia (and me still intrigued about what they were doing there), a radio intercept from Glavkosmos, the Soviet space agency, talked about the "successful
Buran
excursion." Yet there had been no official --- or unofficial ---
Buran
launch at the time. 

With all of this behind me, and a lot of thinking later, I came to work one weekend and wrote a detailed, informative memo that said it was apparent that (a) the Soviets had a working laser station in orbit; (b) the second
Buran
was in fact a large-scale target model that was destroyed in orbit by the
Salyut
and was designed to simulate one of our own shuttles; and (c) the Soviets had demonstrated the capability of destroying our space shuttles and satellites in orbit, and were a few years away from being the dominant space power.