Shadow of Eden (47 page)

Chapter 101

V
alenti walked into Café Mocha, in Washington’s Georgetown district, and spotted her sitting at the back table. She wore a dark red suit with a white ruffled blouse that was unbuttoned enough to reveal a double strand pearl necklace. Pulling out a padded wooden chair, he sat opposite her at the small round table. Valenti couldn’t keep from grinning. It had been so long since they had last spoken. “Hello, Victoria.”

“Hello, Tony,” Victoria Hogue replied with a broad smile.

“You look great.” And indeed she had retained the slender face and high cheekbones he remembered. Valenti looked down at his robust size. “But I’ve gone to pot, I’m afraid.”

“It’s good to see you again,” Victoria said in her throaty voice thickened by too many cigarettes. “How long has it been?”

“Thirteen years.” Valenti had already counted. “I’m married now and have two wonderful kids. You?”

Victoria shook her brunette hair, cut in a short, professional look. “Still playing around. I’m married to work. You remember.”

“Only too well.” Victoria’s first love had been politics and her outlet was reporting for the Washington Post. “I read your columns regularly. It even has your picture. I could pick you out of a crowd. Oh, and congratulations on landing the White House beat.”

Victoria’s mouth curled up at his acknowledgement. “So what drags your carcass back into the cesspool?”

“Work.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Anything I can have? I want an exclusive if it’s good.”

“If it’s ever news, you’ve got it. But maybe you can help. I need some info.”

“What do you want?”

“How’s the President?” He tossed out the question with feigned nonchalance, his face expressionless.

“Why?” she asked, her voice guarded, but her face betrayed her surprise.

There
was
something going on with the President. He shrugged. “Sorry, it’s privileged.”

Her eyebrows shot up. There was no faster way to get a reporter’s attention than to withhold information. “Tell me later?” she countered. She needed something, too.

“If I can,” Valenti said.

“And I thought this was for old times.” Her hazel eyes flashed. Glancing around the coffee shop, she leaned forward and spoke in a lowered voice. “Okay, here it is. Dixon’s not right. It’s a source of rampant speculation in the corps. Rumor has it, he’s completely consumed with this China massacre thing. He’s moody, short-tempered, obstinate, and he’s got some sort of constant headache. Worse, he’s making bush league political mistakes and driving his staff crazy covering for him. This is all unconfirmed, of course, too insubstantial to run with it, but we smell something afoot. Get this,” Victoria continued, “he prayed in a public school, but his office squelched it, denied it to the rafters. Now that isn’t the Dixon we all know.”

Valenti, despite his confidence in Steve, felt a perverse sense of relief. Everything Victoria said sounded like that Eden crap. “And his backing Taiwan?”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard from him. Mind you, I like the guy, or did before all this. But something’s rotten in the state politic. He hasn’t given a press conference since the one recognizing Taiwan. I don’t expect one every day, you know, but he’s deployed the Pacific fleet to the Taiwan Straits and Congress is screaming for a better explanation, but the big guy only issues press releases and sends his minions out to joust. China’s livid and I don’t blame them. Look,” she said, her hushed voice strident, “Dixon and Taiwan have left no room for compromise. It’s balls to the walls.”

“Jesus.” Valenti couldn’t help himself. “And his twitches?”

“Everybody’s seen them. You saw them on national TV. It’s from stress, they say.”

“And you say?”

She shook her head. “I think he’s losing it. Nothing I can publish, not yet, but we’re watching him very closely. He fell asleep in the National Cathedral, no big deal, right? But he was confused or something when he woke up. We downplayed it, but the question remains, what’s going on?”

“Is he sick or something?”

Victoria locked her eyes on Valenti’s. “What do you know?”

Valenti shrugged, holding her gaze. “Nothing—right now.”

“Not fucking fair,” she complained. “I still want that exclusive.” Her expression softened. “I’ve missed you, Tony, but I never could figure you out.”

Valenti smiled. “We’re even, then.”

Chapter 102

“L
arry, I took the liberty of reviewing the Chinese sat-pics before we met,” Harold Wright said, settling in at the State situation room conference table for their eleven o’clock meeting. “I think there are a few things worth looking at that weren’t mentioned in the reports.”

“Okay, show me what you’ve found.”

Wright plugged a monitor cable into his laptop and tapped on his keyboard. Within a moment, images popped up on the wall-mounted screens. “These are from the real-time birds, the KA-48s and 52s in low orbit. Good resolution for our purposes. We’ll be seeing infrared night imaging.”

“Because they only move at night.”

“Correct.” Wright pulled his laser pointer from his shirt pocket and aimed it at the first image. “Here’s a group of eighteen trucks pulling out of Fuqua Ti Air Base. As you can see, all are covered with an opaque tarp. Probably dark military green, but of little matter for our purposes.

He turned to the second image. Here, they break up on different roads into three groups of six. Now look here.” Harry manipulated his mouse and the image zoomed in on one group of trucks. “They’re passing a street light right here. Now see that shadow?” He pointed a red laser over the back part of one tarp-covered truck.

“Yeah, but I don’t know what it means.”

“It’s the tail of a jet. The configuration matches their J-8, a fighter, and the length is compatible with the fighter’s fuselage.”

Calhoun sat up. “You’re saying that China is moving fighter jets around on trucks?”

“I looked at several other convoys from this air base and the answer is yes. What I didn’t show you is that each group of trucks is loaded in warehouses away from our sky eyes, so we can’t know for sure what’s in them. But look at the two other six-truck convoys.” He brought up two more images and pointed to another truck shadow. “It took awhile to find a light that hit each convoy at the right angle—there aren’t many street lights in rural China—but there it is right here . . .” The pointer jumped to the next image. “ . . . And here.”

Now that he knew what he was looking for, Calhoun saw it immediately.

“Now, what do you need if you have a fighter fuselage?” Wright asked.

“Wings, parts, fuel, ammo, missiles.”

“And here’s what we found. This,” he pointed to another image, “is a fuel truck. Pointing to another, he said, “This payload seems a bit wider than the rest, which is probably the wings, and the others are standard trucks that can hold anything, including parts and munitions.

“So, they’re moving planes? Where?”

“That’s what’s giving the analysts fits. Look, if the tarps are stretched over a metal frame, they will look full even if they are empty and it’s nearly impossible for us to tell which. Worse, when they arrive at a destination, they pull into covered structures so we cannot see any loading or offloading.”

“But if they’re all covered by the tarps, we can’t know which direction things are moving.”

“Can’t or don’t?” A sly smile curled the corners of Wright’s mouth.

“So, what have you got up your sleeve?” Calhoun said.

“Travel time comparison.”

Calhoun figured it out. “You time trucks going the same route, or a segment of a route, loaded or empty. Loaded trucks are slower. Since you can easily measure travel time, you can now tell when the trucks are heavy or empty.”

“Perfect.” Wright beamed, pleased with himself. “Now, it’s tedious, but it won’t take long to detect a pattern. I just haven’t had time to personally map every round-trip route, much less measure the time for representative segments, but NSA with their computers can in a hurry.”

Calhoun sat back trying to put all his bits and pieces into a picture that made sense. He imagined trucks and trains moving stuff around, full in one direction and empty on the return leg. With this pattern, China could accumulate a massive amount of military materiél somewhere without the US knowing where.

The random convoys crossing the countryside reminded Calhoun of his high school marching band. His bandleader devised a march routine in which the whole band, playing the school fight song, broke up into multiple groups of six students. Each group marched seemingly at random and looking completely disorganized until on the last refrain they all fit, suddenly and neatly together in a giant letter “P,” the initial of the school. Out of apparent chaos, order suddenly emerged—and, importantly, the audience had no clue what was planned until the final moment.

In a real sense, this was a massive Chinese marching drill, and out of the chaos a complete military formation would suddenly emerge. His pulse quickened. It had to be Taiwan; there was no other answer—but there was still a huge piece missing. Even with a massive build -up along the coast facing Taiwan, China didn’t have a large enough Navy to invade Taiwan. Exasperated, he mentally threw up his hands. What
was
the goddamn Chinese strategy?

“Harry, how long would it take you and your team to give me a quick and dirty estimation of the net flow of cargo? I want you to concentrate on the Chinese coastline closest to Taiwan.”

Harry looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “About six hours if I put everyone on it.”

“Can you do that for me?”

“On my way.” Wright folded up his laptop and hurried out.

Chapter 103

S
teve climbed out of the taxi on 23
^rd
street and looked up at the new George Washington University Hospital. Walking through the glass front entrance doors, he was fulfilling a promise he had made to himself the moment he knew he was coming to Washington. He was going to visit Captain Palmer.

He had spent the morning at the Library of Congress, and by lunchtime he had reached a good stopping place. Valenti had arranged for Heather, a research librarian, to help him and she had assisted in amassing a pile of articles about Trident enabling Steve to find key bits of information, including hire and departure dates for most of the top employees, especially the early ones. One departure in particular had stood out, a press release announcing that the founder of the company and its chief scientist, Samuel Blumenthal, MD, had just retired to his suburban Baltimore home.

Overall, the picture that emerged was what Steve had expected. At the outset, Trident, originally named Medici Biopharma, had performed their discovery and initial animal research in-house. They then floundered for lack of money, thus setting the stage for Morloch’s company-saving investment. In what looked to Steve like a
coup d’état
, Morloch renamed the company Trident, made himself Chairman and CEO, and demoted Dr. Blumenthal to Chief Scientist. Then, as Steve had predicted, Trident had begun to outsource its work. As he read, the pieces fell into place. He knew it was all circumstantial evidence at best constructing a necessary, but not sufficient chain of events pointing to Trident’s culpability. Someone would have to talk on the record to implicate Morloch and Trident.