Dark Zone (6 page)

“Everyone?”

“Everyone in Korea if you have to. I want it clear that people are asking about her. Don’t blow her cover; be judicious.”

“Yes, boss,” said Telach. She nodded to Rockman, who began arranging the calls with the translators.

“Have the Russian plane move in,” said Rubens. “Have them just fly in. I want them there.”

“Just go there? It’s nearly an hour from the border and they won’t be able to get fuel.”

“Just go. We’re paying them enough, aren’t we?”

“They’ll just take off if she doesn’t show up.”

“Have them wait as long as they can. Get Fashona in place.”

Rubens could send in an extraction team from South Korea, but that would blow the entire operation. More important, if that was actually necessary it would probably be too late.

He had to get Lia back, at all costs. But it was critical to do so in a logical, calm manner—and his job now was to communicate that to everyone else. The matter was as under control as it was going to get for the time being; he had to signal confidence by moving on to the next problem.

“What is going on in London?” he asked Telach.

“The police brought Dean and Tommy to the station for questioning.”

“Was the victim our messenger?”

“We believe so. He had a brown beret. But he didn’t have anything with him, not even a scrap of paper. And neither we nor the police have an ID.” Telach punched the control unit on her belt and the screen at the front of the Art Room flashed with a grainy video image of a man with a brown beret walking along a park path. She watched the sequence intently, then jabbed her thumb hard on the controls to stop it a few frames before the man was assassinated.

“That’s the messenger?” said Rubens.

“Yes,” said Telach. “Whoever shot him was in the bushes on this side of the park. It’s about two hundred and fifty yards away. Well planned. Probably escaped through the fence there, into that apartment complex.”

“What’s Johnny Bib working on?” asked Rubens.

“His team is slated to review the Biowar file,” said Telach, referring to a mission Deep Black had recently completed. The Biowar mission had taken the Deep Black team around the globe to Thailand and Burma (or Myanmar, as the dictators there preferred), where they had stopped a designer virus. “They’re in the process of setting up interviews with scientists so they can get background information on the virus biology before proceeding.”

“Give him the information about the two Web domains, the sites on the World Wide Web that were supposedly used to send messages. Tell him to find out what he can about them.”

“We already had the information checked on. It was authentic,” said Telach.

“Yes. But I want Johnny Bib to look at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rubens glanced at his watch. He had a meeting at the White House he couldn’t miss—just couldn’t miss. And yet he couldn’t leave the Art Room now, not with Lia’s fate unknown.

“Should I alert the embassy in London?” Telach asked. “To get Dean and Karr out?”

“Yes. Suggest to Tommy—no, better make it Dean. Tell Dean to call the embassy. As soon as the call is placed, alert them there and get someone to pick them up. No sense having them waste more of the day with the police.”

By “them there” Rubens meant the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Lia’s moving!” said Rockman from his console.

Telach went over quickly. Rubens followed as well. “Moving or being moved?” he asked.

“Impossible to tell.”

Rubens looked over the runner’s shoulder at the terminal building schematic on the computer screen. Lia’s position was marked by a small green dot that moved to the right along one side of the building. The dot stopped near the area they had identified as the reception area—but not quite inside.

“Still no audio,” said Rockman.

“Did you get through to anyone there?” asked Rubens.

“The civilian manager,” said Rockman.

“He assured us there was no problem,” said one of the translators nearby. “But of course he would say that.”

“Keep making the calls,” said Rubens. “Prudently, please. Polite concern, nothing more. They are very sensitive, and at the moment they have what we want. Where’s the Russian plane?”

“On its way,” said Rockman. “We may have to bribe the people at the terminal again.”

“Do it.” Rubens looked at Telach. “Whatever it takes, Marie.”

“Thank you,” said Telach.

Rubens wanted to stay, but the meeting was far too important.

Surely his boss could handle it. Rubens’ place was here.

“We have the terminal manager back,” said Rockman. “He says there was a mix-up in papers, but she is fine.”

“Tell him there is another plane on the way. Imply very strongly that she must be on it. No—state that directly. And there will be no repercussions so long as she is. And alive.”

“Go,” said Rockman to the translator. The runner looked at his screen—the words were being translated there by a special program—then held up his thumb.

“I’m going to the White House,” Rubens told Telach. “Keep me informed.”

Traveling to the White House with his boss, Vice Admiral Devlin Brown, meant a quick helicopter ride rather than the more tiresome car caravan down to D.C. It also meant a few minutes of uninterrupted conversation, a rare occurrence in a typical workday.

“I saw the General this morning,” said Rubens as the helicopter, a specially equipped civilian version of the Sikorsky Blackhawk, lifted off.

“How is he?” asked Brown.

“Very bad,” said Rubens.

“A shame. A friend of mine’s mother had Alzheimer’s. She was very violent toward the end.”

“He’s not that, thank God. Not in his nature, I think.”

“A feisty old bird like him, not violent?” There had been several directors between Brown and Rosenberg, but many tales about him still circulated.

“I don’t know if he was so much feisty as determined,” said Rubens. “If you crossed him, I would imagine then it might seem like uncomfortable.”

“I hope you stick up for me as well when I’m packed on the top floor of a nursing home.”

“His daughter has gone ahead with her threat,” said Rubens. “I expect the suit will be filed any day. I’m to talk to the attorney about it tomorrow.”

“She really is a piece of work, isn’t she? Very greedy. How much is his cousin worth?”

“Fifteen million, in that neighborhood.” The General stood to inherit everything his slightly older cousin owned when he died. The cousin was also in a nursing home and suffering from Alzheimer’s; physically, he was in somewhat worse shape, and not given very long to live.

“If we make it clear that she can have access to the money, will she drop the suit?”

From Brown’s point of view—and the NSA’s—the proceeding wasn’t about the General at all. The General had a vast store of personal papers and other effects, presumably containing a great deal of information about the agency. It was rumored that he had been working on a memoir before he got sick. Rubens’ protests to the contrary, General Rosenberg was a feisty old bird, and it was very possible that he had recorded his thoughts on a wide range of agency projects. The agency had a series of confidentiality agreements and the resources to legally prevent anything he wrote or said from being published, and there was no question it would move to do so if necessary. However, discretion was always the better part of valor as far as the NSA was concerned, and heading off a potentially messy—and public—confrontation was infinitely better than arming the men in black with subpoenas and sending them to confiscate a moving van’s worth of uninventoried papers, notes, tapes, and computer disks.

But in this matter, Rubens was
not
acting on the agency’s behalf.

“I don’t know that there is a basis for compromise with her,” said Rubens.

“She’s that much of a witch, eh?” asked the admiral.

“Stubborn. Like her father,” he answered.

“Is his care adequate? Perhaps we could arrange for him to be moved to the facility she suggested. Mount Ina, was it?”

The facility in question was a private nursing home where care cost about ten thousand dollars a month. It was an excellent facility, and if the decision had been his, Rubens would have gladly moved the General—and footed the bill personally, if necessary. But the General had expressly forbidden it: his cousin was there, and whether the General stood to inherit his money or not, he hated him. In fact, if he were in his right mind, he probably would have denounced the inheritance somehow or given it away to a charity—preferably one his cousin couldn’t stand.

“Have you thought about moving him?” asked Brown when Rubens didn’t answer his question.

“Yes.”

“You’d pay with your own money, wouldn’t you?”

“For the General there is nothing that I would not do. He would, however, have felt betrayed if I offered it. He did not take charity. But from an objective point of view, his care now is as good as is possible. The people who watch him are decent people. They are genuinely concerned. That would appear the most important thing.”

“Do you need additional legal help?”

“I believe the lawyer I retained will be sufficient,” said Rubens. “And a lawyer from the NSA would only help Rebecca make her case.”

“Keep me informed,” said Brown, turning his attention to the papers he’d brought along.

Despite the fact that the two NSA officials were running ten minutes ahead of schedule, Secretary of State James Lincoln and his two aides had beaten them into the Oval Office. Lincoln was holding forth on the importance of rewarding France for its steps over the past year to align more closely with American Middle Eastern policies—a relevant if not uncomplicated point, given the President’s pending visit to France at the end of the week.

“Ah, there you are, Admiral. Billy, hello,” said President Jeffrey Marcke, swinging upright in his chair. “Secretary Lincoln is just reminding me that the French helped with our Revolution.”

Lincoln’s smile seemed a little pained.

“Maybe Admiral Brown will tell us about John Paul Jones,” added the President. He loved to tweak his advisers, and Lincoln was an easy mark. “Didn’t the French give him a ship?”

“The French have been interesting allies throughout history,” admitted Lincoln. “But they are coming around. They’re trying to make up for their miscues before the Second Gulf War. Better late than never.”

“Billy has a château in France, don’t you?” said the President, changing targets.

Rubens winced internally but tried to act nonplussed. “To be more precise, the château is my mother’s.”

“It overlooks the Loire near Montbazon. Heck of a view,” said Marcke. He had been there when he was still a senator, a few years before. “But if I recall, William, you don’t particularly like the French.”

“I try not to let personal opinions cloud professional judgment,” said Rubens.

Jake Namath, the head of the CIA, appeared at the doorway, followed by the deputy director of the CIA for operations, Debra Collins. George Hadash, the national security adviser, was right behind them.

“Gentlemen, Ms. Collins. Please sit down,” said the President. “The Secretary of State and I have been discussing French history. Mr. Rubens has come to talk about something slightly more recent, with unfortunate implications for the future. William, you have the floor.”

“In the late nineteen-fifties, the French shifted their nuclear weapons program into high gear,” Rubens said, launching into his brief. “They began refining plutonium and shifted to that as a basic weapons material after working with uranium. In 1960, they exploded a sixty- to seventy-kiloton weapon in Algeria near Reggane in the Sahara. Within roughly a year’s time, there were three more explosions. These were billed as tests, although at least one was a hastily arranged detonation to keep a half-finished weapon from falling into the hands of the so-called mutineering generals.”

Rubens glanced at Hadash. The revolt of the French generals was not well known outside of France and Africa, and even some of the histories that reported it confused basic information such as the dates and locations. Rubens and Hadash, however, knew it all very well: Fifteen years before, Hadash had devoted an entire week of his seminar at MIT talking about it. In his opinion, it not only represented Europe’s last attempt to hold on to African colonies; it also showed the futility of military insurrections in an industrialized democracy.

That was Hadash’s view. Rubens had written a rather long paper arguing that it did not.

He’d gotten an A-minus.

“There was at least one other warhead close to completion at the time,” continued Rubens. “This was the so-called
Chou
weapon
—chou
as in the French word for cabbage or kale. It was also apparently a reference to the small size and shape of the bomb.”

In this case,
small
was a relative term; the weapon weighed roughly several hundred pounds. At the time, American intelligence believe it was similar to the American W-9, which had been developed several years before as a warhead for artillery shells. Its yield was calculated at anywhere between forty and ninety kilotons. Little Boy, which was exploded over Hiroshima, had a calculated yield of “only” fifteen to sixteen kilotons, with some sources figuring it as low as thirteen.

At the time, American officials—not to mention the French—feared that the unfinished warhead had been confiscated by the mutineers. That turned out not to be the case—it had in fact been spirited away by a junior officer and placed in a desert storage facility. After the mutiny, the unfinished bomb was moved to a nuclear storage facility that became an underground dump for radioactive materials. The weapon wasn’t forgotten, but the program that it had been part of received a low priority for a variety of reasons and it remained in storage.

“Wasn’t its plutonium very valuable?” said Collins.

Rubens frowned but answered her question. “Of course. But in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny there was a certain amount of slippage in information and priorities, and there is some question of whether the technology the French had would have been well suited to safely reworking the warhead. In any event, there was an entirely new regime in place with different aims for their weapons. Even at the highest estimate, this would have already begun to seem like a rather small yield, certainly compared to American and Soviet programs. The captain who had moved it happened to die in a car accident before the mutiny itself was fully suppressed, and so he wasn’t around to, shall we say, advocate for the warhead.”