Whirlwind (2 page)

“Charlie, please.” Sam’s patience was almost gone. Charlie wasn’t happy about the “almost” part, but he’d fix that soon enough. “We have a major crisis. The worst in all my years in government. I trust, now that I’ve paid you, you’ll spare me your sermons, and let me tell you what you have to do.”

“Oh,” Charlie chuckled. “Have to do? I think you’ve made a mistake there, Sam. The only thing you’ve bought is the privilege of speaking to me. If you want me to actually do a job, I require a down payment.”

“Almost” disappeared. “Completely” took its place. Charlie held the phone away from his ear until the swearing stopped ordinary anger, unfortunately, not the frenzied rage Charlie had been hoping for. He supposed he’d just have to try harder.

“You done, Sam?”

“Yes, I am, you treacherous Judas Iscariot sonofabitch. What the hell else do you want?”

“A small advance against any good and worthy service I might render to my nation.”

“I’ll give you my word “

“I had your word the week before you hung me out to dry. Remember your testimony, Sam? “No, Senator, the White House was totally unaware of these activities.” Yes, Senator, the whole sorry affair was undertaken by a rogue agent acting on his own initiative.” “I completely agree, Senator, the man should be disciplined in the strictest manner allowable.” Remember that, you treacherous Judas Iscariot sonofabitch?”

“Twenty million ought to cover it.” Give the man credit, Charlie thought, he truly has no conscience.

“Indeed it does. The debt is now settled. The invoice is now paid. All that remains is for you to buy an option on my future assistance.”

“In your dreams. Be so kind as to remember that I represent the president of the United States. The most powerful man in the world. Capice? And if I want to mess up your day “

“You can’t do squat. Listen up, Sambo, where my services are involved, it’s a seller’s market. The only question is: Is you a buyer or is you not?”

After a long silence, Sam answered with audible pain, “Okay, Charlie, okay. You’ll get what you want. Whatever the fuck it is.”

My, my, they really are in trouble, Charlie thought. Opportunity knocks. “Get the DCI on the phone. Conference call.”

“The director of Central Intelligence is not cleared for the subject at hand.”

Hot damn! A President’s Office Only security cover! “You don’t have to tell him what he’s paying for, all you have to do is tell him to pay.”

Sam grunted his surrender. Seconds later, the DCI’s private secretary was on the phone, seconds after that the man himself.

Sam bit the bullet and said what he had to say: “Claude, I’ve got Charlie McKenzie on the line with me.”

Claude inhaled sharply. Charlie was feeling happier with each passing moment.

Sam pressed on, “Charlie’s going to ask no, tell you to do something. I want you to do it. No questions, no delay. The president will back you every step of the way.”

What are you thinking there, Claude? Charlie asked silently. Are you thinking about how resolutely the president backed me?

“Of course,” said Claude, speaking in the tones of a man who expects he is about to be gang-raped and knows there’s nothing he can do about it. “Go ahead, Charlie, tell me what I can do for you.”

“My son-in-law. Ex-son-in-law, actually. The little skunk who married my daughter because he thought being a member of my family would advance his career. Then dumped her and their two children the moment he realized it would not.”

Claude’s voice brightened. Maybe he’d escape serial sodomy after all. “For what it’s worth, Charlie, I consider Don’s behavior reprehensible, and I for one wish “

“He’s history. Today. You call him into your office, and you fire him. On the spot.”

Salvation! Charlie could hear the relief in Claude’s tone. “With pleasure.”

“Then he gets leprosy. No one will touch him. No one in government, no one in the private sector. He doesn’t get to work as a consultant to any of the Agency’s friends. He doesn’t wind up employed by an Agency front. He’s a leper, and the best job he can get is cleaning peep-show booths in a porn house.”

“You’re a hard man, Charlie McKenzie.”

“A just one, I think.”

“True. That’s why I always liked you.” Liar! Charlie shouted, although only in his mind. “You know, I rather look forward to doing what you’ve asked. Sam, make sure the president knows that the Agency is happy to cooperate.”

Claude disconnected his side of the call. Sam, emphasizing that his problem was not the sort to be discussed on a telephone, much less commit ted to e-mail or fax, said he had a helicopter waiting on the White House lawn. He’d be arriving at Charlie’s place in about forty-five minutes.

“Forty-three minutes,” replied Charlie, who was smiling as he hadn’t smiled since getting out of prison.

lrina drove.

She did not know where she was. She did not know where she was going. She knew only that she had to drive this bleak highway, bitter desert on either side, asphalt night ahead, angry death behind.

She was not there upon that road, not in any conscious sense of the word. She was four hours earlier, although it seemed like four minutes where Dominik had become not-Dominik, transformed into a red mist, no longer a laughing colleague sharing tedious duty but only an emptiness in the air where that which once was Dominik, who was one, became myriad, and was hurled in myriad directions.

He’d not had time to scream.

She saw the deer, too. First it had been limp and motionless, entangled in the wire. But then, the second time she’d seen it, it danced.

Dead and dancing lively, a saraband in death’s embrace.

It had begun with a hollow thump like the detonation of a distant mortar shell. Pale light speared the sky beyond a ridge, flickered, then died. Dominik pulled the Jeep Cherokee off the road. He gave her the night-vision camera, taking the infrared goggles for himself.

The ridge bordered a two-lane road that Irina and Dominik cruised every week. They knew what was hidden out of sight beyond its crest: a well-patrolled electrified fence; farther still, but clearly visible to anyone who scrambled up the rocky slope, a small cluster of buildings, a helicopter pad, and no runway.

No runway, no interest. Their business was aircraft. Monitoring those other unnamed bases scattered around the American Southwest was someone else’s job.

But there had been an explosion. Dominik thought they should take a look. Maybe they’d see something that would add a little spice to their otherwise drably repetitive reports:

The attached file contains digital images taken on the nights of the 27th through 31st near New Mexico areas 57 and 12. Images 1 to 6 show modifications in the B-2 Bomber’s airframe being tested for airworthiness. Images 7 and 8 … Anything would be more interesting than that. Anything.

Dressed in shopping-mall denims, blue cotton turtlenecks, and good walking boots, she and Dominik picked their way up the rocky slope. The ground was still damp from an afternoon thunderstorm. The climb was dauntingly steep a hillside rising a hundred and twenty meters over a distance of two hundred meters.

Both of them were young and fit. It was not hard.

All they planned to do was look through the fence. Maybe shoot tele-photo pictures if something noteworthy could be seen. You never could tell. You could get lucky. Spies sometimes do.

They crested the ridge. The fence was just below where they stood.

That’s when they saw it. The first time they saw it.

The deer. The deer and the darkness. It had electrocuted itself trying to jump high voltage wire. Puke-sweet smoke still hung in the air. Irina’s stomach turned.

Dominik pointed silently. A wire had snapped. It, and the killing electricity it carried, had tumbled into a freshly washed-out gulch. Gouged by heavy rain, the gulch cut beneath the fence. It was still ankle-deep with rainwater. The broken wire had touched it, the fence had shorted out. The resulting power surge hit the small military camp’s generator like a thunderbolt.

“Flames,” he whispered.

A mile away, down near the base’s single paved road, a fire of no small fury burned. The generator shack? It had to be.

Dominik and Irina slid into the gully, duck walked beneath the fence, darted low from boulder to spiky desert shrub to plump barrel cactus.

And into secret space.

JJ

A tiny outpost: a single barracks, two dozen smaller buildings that might have been civilian quarters, a motor pool, a mess hall, utility sheds, and a windowless one-story bunker that, unlike everything else, had the appearance of something built to last.

Its roof bristled with needle-thin antennae. Its walls were poured concrete shot through with glistening metallic threads. Its single door was armored metal.

She heard the distant shouts of the soldiers, not so many of them, and all of them a hundred meters away trying to extinguish the fire. Even at that distance she could see twisted sheets of thick metal glowing red. How odd to build a generator shed of such heavy material.

Dominik flashed a grin as the door swung open. Whoever had been inside hadn’t locked up when they ran outside to see what had exploded.

Treading softly, they tiptoed in. I am a mouse, she told herself, a tiny mouse creeping softly, for the cat may he near. Her senses quivered, alert for the smallest sound, the slightest movement, the least hint that someone remained in the building.

No one had. It was empty, and, if Irina read the expression on Dominik’s face correctly, ripe for plundering.

But of what treasure?

They eased past a bank of cubicles covered with dove-grey sound-absorbing fabric. Nothing there except empty desks, black telephones, and gunmetal-colored in-and out-boxes.

To the left, five offices with Indian art prints on their walls. Management always had private offices. There might have been good pickings in them. But management, like the cubicle dwellers, had locked away all their paperwork before departing.

Irina thought that she and Dominik were fools. No one would have been working at this late hour. In a secure installation housing classified work, anything worth stealing would have been stored in impregnable safes long before dinnertime. No one worked until two in the morning. No one.

Yet, the door had been unlocked. Someone had been in this building. Who? What kind of masochist kept working through the wolf hours after midnight?

Dominik winked, “Computemiks. They never sleep.”

She nodded. Of course, it was so obvious.

To the right, a double door opened to a laboratory and rows of workbenches a disarray of tools, loose microchips, spools of soldering wire, and computers with their screens still glowing. The lab had a battery backup system, an uninterruptible power supply to ensure that those who worked there never lost their data.

Dominik had taken his degree in electrical engineering with a specialty in avionics. The gleam in his eye told her he knew what he was seeing on those screens: CAD drawings, circuit layouts. “Camera,” he whispered. She passed it to him. He focused, played with the light meter, adjusted the aperture, pressed the shutter release.

The camera made no sound. They had been issued a Peltier-cooled ten-mega pixel Hamamatsu. It could take pictures by starlight which was, after all, the dull duty to which they were assigned.

He changed settings, taking three different exposures of the screen. Then he moved down the line to the next computer, and did it again.

Irina followed. She could make no sense of what the computers displayed. She had wanted to be an economist, but Russian economic theory had fallen on hard times. She majored in mathematics instead.

A graph caught her eye. Dominik gave it a cursory glance before walking by. She stopped, studying what she saw displayed on a bright seventeen-inch monitor: a many-lobed three-dimensional shape plotted on x, y, and z axes. What formula, she wondered, could produce a graph so intriguingly complex as this? She read terse wording above the chart: “Conductivity functions are counterintuitive.”

Dominik was farther away now, prowling along the lab benches, avidly photographing computer screens. Idly, without thought, she reached out a finger and tapped the computer’s page-down key. Headline: “These functions can be approximated algorithmically.” This above a densely packed page of formula that, given time, she knew she could decipher.

Deciphering their purpose was another question entirely.

Unless…. .. unless the document on this computer was… ?

The title bar across the computer window top read, “ww_draft.ppt.”

PPT? Power Point Could it be?

She whisked a computer mouse to the menu bar. Her heart skipped a beat. What was on this particular computer was an ordinary everyday Power Point presentation.

She clicked to the title page. And was stunned breathless.

WHIRLWIND

Status Report

DefCon Enterprises

Classification: MAGMA BLACK

Unauthorized access or distribution of this document punishable by lifetime imprisonment

Magma Black was one of the American government’s highest security classifications. Whatever Whirlwind might be, one thing was absolutely certain: it numbered among the most closely guarded secrets in the United States.

Irina Kolodenkova, twenty-four years old, two months into her first FSB field assignment, had accidentally stumbled across the stuff that dreams are made of.

Another whisk of the mouse, and two clicks. The presentation’s author had made a backup copy on a disk. The disk was in the computer drive. A moment later, it was in Irina’s breast pocket.

“Here! Come here! Quickly!” Dominik shouted so loudly that she jumped. He was at the far end of the lab. Beyond where he stood, she saw a door no, not a door, the entrance to a vault, all burnished steel with a wheeled ratchet in its center, two separate combination locks on either side. Opening it was out of the question. They had only minutes; cracking such a safe would take hours.

Dominik gestured at something large and brown resting atop a trestle. Color-coded gas canisters dim ethyl ether, read the label flanked the object. Thickly clad pipes linked the canisters to a laboratory hood. Some sort of experiment is in progress, she thought as she trotted to his side.