Damage Control (20 page)

He abandoned the attempt and made for the tea shop, framing a prayer. His prayer was answered before he had it fully in his mind: a big man in a dirty coverall sitting under the single fan with a book open. He had a broad face and narrow-set eyes and a permanent scowl.
Lottery Ticket.
His exhaustion showed in deep pouches under his eyes.

Persian Rug had a number of sub-assets. One was Lottery Ticket, a middle-aged industrial electrician who specialized in the installation of security systems. He was employed at Ambur and had filed good reports, albeit for large payments, and Harry had activated his meeting sequence that morning with his cell phone. When he saw the big man, his fatigue vanished.
Yes.

Harry was in a hurry and he didn’t have time to waste on the endless safety formulas of espionage.

“You made it,” the big man said. He looked around, shifted, looked around again. “I—uh—we—”

“No time,” Harry said crisply. “Next meeting will be on the same system.”

Djalik sat down in the doorway, his rifle obvious. In effect, he closed the tea shop.

“Do you have something for me?” Harry asked.

The big man put a cheap plastic shopping bag on the stained Formica table.

“I have a great deal for you. Here are some photographs. This is a video on a disk you can play on this camera.”

“We have to hurry, I must be blunt. How did you get this?”

“I am the contractor for the whole facility, yes? I can go anywhere. I downloaded the feed from the security cameras after I received your call.”

“You have been to the plant this morning?”

“I did the download remotely.” The man’s nerves were briefly replaced by smugness. “I installed the system. I left a back door?”

“How much?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

Harry took off his belt, opened it, and placed on the table five thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills. It wasn’t the time to be careful with money.

“Listen, there’s more. I can see on the feed that someone else took over the cameras during the attack. They went off, and then came back on focused on different targets. It was as if—” The agent paused, looking at Harry for some reaction, fearing he wouldn’t be believed.

“Yes?”

“As if someone else could run all the computers on the site. You’ll see it too; just after the attack starts, lights go out all over the facility. Pumps run, or stop, almost at random.”

“Is that in a report?”

“No.” The big man put the money in his pocket with a
glance at the tea-shop waiter, who was busy serving Djalik.

“Who were the attackers?” Harry extracted the first disk and the digital camera from the shopping bag.

The big man shook his head.

“Were you on site when the attacks began?”

“Yes.”

“Think. Can you tell me anything else? What did they target first?”

“It’s on the feed. First they hit security stations, then the turbines and an old storage bunker.”

“What storage bunker?” Harry snapped.

“The Building Thirty-seven complex,” the big man said.

Harry covered his alarm by looking at the controls on the camera. There were dozens of streams of video, more than he could run in the time he was allowing himself. He had almost lost his breath when the agent mentioned Building Thirty-seven.
Building Thirty-seven,
he thought.
Potential nuclear weapons storage.

The agent shook his head. “I don’t know who they were. No idea. Never saw them myself; as soon as the shooting began, I ran. By midnight, there were Indian Army units all over the facility, fighting other units outside. No one wanted to deal with the workers, so I just joined them and we all walked through the lines. It was chaotic. Indeed, it is still chaotic.”

“Is Building Thirty-seven on the feed?”

“Of course,” the big man said. He pointed at the video camera. “Do I have the contract for that building? No. But twice last year you ask me about it, yes? So I placed a new camera on Building Forty-four that covers the entrance, yes? And just happens to show the entire Thirty-seven complex, as well.”

Harry nodded, smiled. Lottery Ticket was venal, even mercenary, but he knew his stuff.

“They took something out of that building; it’s on the feed.” The man twitched. “In a helicopter.”

Harry’s smile froze. Harry forced himself to exhale. “Has anyone ever mentioned what goes on in Building Thirty-seven?”

“Never. But it is all military. I’m no fool.” The man made a motion with his hands, a mushroom cloud. “Yes?”

Harry shrugged. “Can’t say.”

Lottery Ticket shrugged, too tired to argue the point. “You are pleased?”

“Very.”

“Bonus?”

Harry reached back into his belt. His hands were shaking.

Alan drank bad coffee from a paper cup, hunched on a stool, unable to understand a word of the interrogation in front of him. The surroundings were oppressive: a dirty basement office that smelled of mold and sweat and human fear, with two filthy cells and an overflowing toilet. His back ached, and the stool ensured that he couldn’t make it comfortable. The coffee was thin and bitter, and he was deep in reaction to combat. His body was tired, empty of the surges of adrenaline that sustained him, and his mind refused to leave alone the fragmented images of the fight.

“He will tell us nothing beyond the name of his unit,” Rao said. “I can’t even make out whether he was a member of the cult or simply obeyed orders.” Rao sighed, shook his head. “This is a rotten business.”

“What about the other guy?” Alan nodded toward the man captured that morning by the police. “He was trying to blow the water tower, right? He has to be a member.”

“He’s a local worker, a migrant from the north who cuts cane. He brags that he is a member, but I cannot get out of him who ordered him to attack the tower. He says it was the earth herself, or Shiva, or the like; a senseless mix of Hindu and politics.”

The head constable stood by with a tea tray, watching Rao for any sign of approval.

“Is the tea any good? The coffee is awful.”

“Try it. Not bad at all. Tea plantations all over the hills, quite close.”

“Yeah?” Alan slid off the stool, poured the rest of his coffee into the toilet, and held the cup out to the head constable, who poured him some from a chipped brown pot. Just the smell helped, and Alan took a deep waft before a sip. Better than the coffee, at any rate. The smell of tea cut through the oppressive reek of the cells and the toilet. “Think any of the locals would know anything? Somebody who was at work yesterday and made it home?”

Rao spoke rapidly to the policeman, who put the tray down, saluted, and went up the concrete steps to the market. “Not a bad thought. I was too focused on the prisoners.”

The head constable returned, saluted, spoke. Rao heard him out. “Quite a few workers came back last night. They were released by the gate guards and passed through our lines, apparently.” He sounded as tired as Alan felt. “If I had only been here.”

“Can we interview them?”

“There might be a hundred of them.” But Rao was already getting up. “It will get us out of this stinking basement, anyway.” He gave orders, a long, steady flow, and took Alan by the elbow as if Alan was old or infirm. “This is a grave matter, Commander. But the boy knows nothing. I think he was obeying orders.” Rao looked at him, less assured than a moment before, almost haggard. “To be honest, it frightens me. Civil war, perhaps. I feel so blind.”

Fidelio waved a med kit at Alan. “I want to change that dressing and get a look at that wound, sir.”

Alan winced. “Okay.” He was almost asleep in the sun, and he stretched painfully. On the far side of the car, Rao
sat sideways on the driver’s seat and questioned a small crowd of power-facility workers.

“Whoa, skipper. Mister O’Neill looks pissed.” Fidel leaned forward.

Alan saw Harry in the rear-view mirror and turned his head. Harry looked grim. He had an armload of paper packages wrapped in string, a heavy plastic shopping bag, and Djalik, at his shoulder, had more.

“Got you some clean clothes, bud. You still a thirty-two waist?” Harry was holding the packages out to him. “The bush jacket’s great. Look at it.”

“Close enough,” Alan said, and tossed the clothes on the seat.

“Look at it,” Harry said again, with more emphasis.

Alan reached for the largest package. He flipped open his folding knife, cut the string and unfolded the paper. It was a khaki jacket.

“Come on, man! Look at it.”

Alan looked at it. It was very well made, with cloth tape sewn in minute hand stitches down every interior seam, and a broad arrow stamped on the inside pocket.

“I need to get my dressing changed.”

Harry nodded, already impatient. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Alan had endured the police office again long enough for Fidel to change the dressing on his wound. When Fidel, with a surprisingly gentle touch, was done, Alan changed into a pair of cheap green shorts, the boots, cotton socks, and a T-shirt, with the bush jacket on top.

Outside, Djalik was wolfing down a plate of biryani from a stall. He waved at two more plates on the hood. The smell stirred Alan’s hunger, and he used his fingers to shovel the rice in. Rao was talking to Harry.

“Major’s going to run us back to the airfield.” Harry smiled at Rao, but the smile was thin.

Alan thought that Harry was as keyed up as he’d ever seen.

Rao excused himself. “I need to piss like a racehorse,” he said and headed down into the police office.

Harry scooped the last of his rice with a piece of naan. “He’s a spook.”

“No shit,” Alan said. “I like the jacket.”

“He’s offered us a place to stay. The bunch of us, even the plane. Thirty miles, over in the hills to the south.”

“Wants to keep an eye on us.”

“Just so. But I want to keep an eye on him, too.”

Harry leaned over and spoke quietly. “I have a lot of stuff we need to go over. A lot. We need a place to stay. Let’s do it.”

“Get anything?”

“Yeah. I met my guy. He handed over a disk. I won’t know, and I won’t know what they prove till I can go through it. It’s killing me.”

Alan smiled for the first time in hours. “Buddy, four hours ago we were all going to die on the road trying to get here.”

“Good point.” Harry leaned closer to whisper. “My guy says that somebody took the nukes. In a chopper. Says it’s on the disk.”

Rao came up, looking cleaner. “In two hours, you will be enjoying the best food in Tamil Nadu.”

“We will?” Alan asked. His appetite had just deserted him.

Henry, aka Enrique, Valdez, also called Bobby by a few people who had known him in the Navy, was a slightly plump Latino with a build like a fireplug, a ready grin, and a genius for computers. Harry O’Neill had hired him away from another company when he had needed somebody to set up a computer-security wing, with the result that Valdez now made more money than many corporate executives. Now,
he was sitting in front of a computer, but he was looking sideways at a woman named Mavis.

“Whaddya think, Mave?” She was on a computer networked to his, and they both had up on the screen some stuff sent them from India by some Navy jg named Ong.

“I think it looks like an all-nighter.” Mavis had auburn hair and green eyes and freckles the color of the palest autumn leaves, plus an Irish accent that came and went with her own self-mockery. Being Irish was, for her, a joke. Harry had got Mavis away from the National Security Agency because Valdez was nuts about her and had said he wouldn’t come to Bahrain if Mavis didn’t come, too.

“Encrypted,” Valdez said.

“No shit, Sherlock, what was your first clue?”

The screen was filled with rows of numbers, letters, and symbols. None of it fell together to mean anything.

“Well—I say let’s run Edgar on it.” Edgar was Valdez’s own decryption program, named for the author of
The Gold Bug.

“Rickie, that’s just your ego!” “Rickie” was her corruption of Enrique. “You’ve got an ego bigger than your ding-dong, man.”

“Impossible. Anyway, if I don’t run Edgar now, I’ll just have to run it later, right?”

“To satisfy your ego, exactly. Okay.”

“Tell you what, I’ll run Edgar, you run something else.”

“Is this a test? Are we having a race here?”

“We’re trying to save time, Mave. Harry thinks maybe this’ll tell us what’s going down in India.”

She was punching keys. “Harry in India?”

“You’re not supposed to ask that.”

“Oh, sweet Christ, you and compartmentalization—!”

“It’s all because you’re a woman. Women blab.”

“Ha-ha. I can always go back to Dublin, you know. Did I tell you I got an offer from one of the German companies?”

They were both booting up decryption programs while they talked. Valdez finished first and sat there, pinching his plump upper lip between thumb and forefinger. “We’re not going to crack this in one night. Whoever did this is good.”

“We’re also good—better than good.” She sat on his lap. “What are we going to do about dinner?”

“Anomalies, that’s the best we can hope for. Maybe as a way in.”

“Anomalies have too many calories. How about we take off for the Tamarind and eat while this shit runs?”

“How about we do that.” He put her off his lap and got up. From the door he looked back at his computer screen, which was dark red except for a yellow rectangle in the middle on which, he knew, were the words “Edgar Is Working” and, below them, a bar graph of Edgar’s progress in green, on which the thinnest possible slice showed at the far left.

A long night.

From the air, the Serene Highness Palace Hotel looked like a pink fantasy rising out of a brown plain, its air of unreality reinforced by the blue of water and a fringe of brilliant green, as if it were an oasis. Behind the big pink building, a swimming pool was a blue-green sliver, and next to it a green one was a tennis court. A few hundred feet away, a single tarmac airstrip ran like a piece of black tape stuck to the flat land.

“No road,” Djalik muttered.

“Dirt road,” Fidel said. They were sitting together, both trying to see out the same window. “See, behind Disneyland there?”