The Armageddon Machine

by Mike Ramon

Chapter Twenty

  Seoul, South Korea

  June 7 -- 14:10 UTC/11:10 pm local time

  “Do you have any idea what this is about?” Agent Norwalk asked David as they filed into the room with Captain Rhee, Commander Choi and a host of other NIS top brass.

  It was the second time that night that he had asked that question.

  “I have no idea,” David answered truthfully, also for the second time.

  David had been whiling away another night alone at the hotel, flipping through channels on the TV and looking for anything in English, when he had received a call from Commander Choi telling him that he had to get to NIS headquarters immediately, and that a car would be there shortly to collect both Agent Norwalk and himself. They had met in the lobby, and that was when Agent Norwalk had first asked if David knew what was happening. The car had arrived less than a minute later, and two serious-looking men had driven them to headquarters.

  When they arrived at NIS HQ David quickly found Violet, but she was busy speaking with Commander Choi and he didn’t want to approach her to ask her what she knew. Then she disappeared for a few minutes. By the time he saw her again Commander Choi was asking everyone to join him in one of the conference rooms. They were herded into a large conference room where they took seats at a long table. David and Agent Norwalk sat side by side, while Violet Rhee took a seat on the other side of the table near Commander Choi.

  There was a large screen hanging on one wall, and everyone turned to watch as the screen turned from black to blue, and then the image of General Cromwell, flanked by several others in both military and civilian attire, appeared. General Cromwell listened as an aide whispered something in his ear. The aide retreated off-screen and the General cleared his throat.

  “Good evening, everyone,” General Cromwell said. “Greetings from Washington. It’s good to see you again, Commander Choi.”

  “It is good to see you as well, General,” Commander Choi reciprocated.

  “I apologize for the late hour; the time difference is a bitch. It’s just past ten in morning here.”

  “We understand, and we thank you for your concern, General,” Commander Choi said.

  “Let’s get right to it. Ten days ago this man was kidnapped from his home in Atlanta, Georgia. His disappearance first came to our attention three days later, on May 31st.”

  A photograph appeared on the screen, blocking out the General and the rest of the Washington crew. A man who looked to be in his fifties stared out from the photo; he sported a gray crewcut and a medium build.

  “This is Greg Toland,” General Cromwell’s voice informed the group gathered in Seoul. “Mr. Toland is a physicist; he was a professor at MIT up until eight years ago.”

  The photograph disappeared, and once again the General and the others in the States occupied the screen.

  “A witness placed Mr. Toland near his home between the hours of one and two o’clock on the afternoon of May 28th. The witness gave a statement that he saw Toland speaking with an unknown young woman, further stating that, to the best of his recollection, he had never seen this woman with Mr. Toland before. We deployed a team to Atlanta under FBI cover to conduct our own investigation. Our break came when we pulled footage from the surveillance systems of gas stations and convenience stores within a five mile radius of Mr. Toland’s home. We zeroed in on footage from a security camera at a Mobil station about a mile from Toland’s home. At approximately three minutes past noon on the day of the 28th a woman fitting the general description of the woman seen with Toland entered the store with a male companion. I believe you should be seeing the footage now.”

  On queue the surveillance footage appeared on the screen.

  “The male paid for gas as the woman perused a magazine rack,” General Cromwell spoke over the footage. “The video contains no sound, but as you see here the man has finished paying for the gas using cash, and now he and the female have a brief discussion. They leave the store.”

  The footage changed; it was still footage from the same camera at the same gas station, but the position of the clerk changed; suddenly he was no longer tending the counter, but stocking shelves with bags of potato chips.

  “This is footage at the same gas station approximately thirty minutes after the man and woman departed,” General Cromwell continued. “Now we see the man enter again, alone this time. He purchases a beverage and exits the store.”

  The footage jumps again, and this time they see the parking lot.

  “This is footage from an exterior camera at the same gas station. The man gets into his vehicle and sits in it for about twenty-five minutes. Then he gets a call on his cell phone.”

  The footage shows the man lifting his phone to his ear.

  “The man then backs out of his space and drives out of the parking lot. Neither he nor his female companion returned to the Mobil station after this.”

  The footage disappeared from the screen.

  “The agents who reviewed this footage had a hunch, and they followed it. They sifted through footage from exterior cameras of several businesses nearer to Toland’s home. The camera outside a bank three blocks away from his home shows the same vehicle you just saw pulling into the bank’s parking lot at 12:25.”

  David expected this surveillance footage to appear on the screen, but it didn’t.

  “The vehicle parks, the woman gets out alone and heads west on foot in the direction for Greg Toland’ home,” the General went on. “The man then drives away. Less than ten minutes later he reappears at the Mobil station. Minutes after he received the call on his cell the bank camera shows his vehicle driving past the bank, headed west. We were unable to find the man, woman or vehicle on any other surveillance cameras. Three days ago two agents paid a visit to the witness from the 28th and showed him images pulled from the gas station footage. He positively identified the female as the woman he saw speaking with Greg Toland on the day of his disappearance, though he could not recall having seen either the male or the vehicle.”

  “Excuse me, General,” David spoke up. “This is Agent Diehl speaking.”

  “Hello, David.”

  “Your guys in Atlanta work quick. You said this kidnapping appeared on you radar a week ago, and it took you, what, four days to get a positive ID on the woman?”

  “Our teams work quickly and thoroughly.”

  “What’s so special about this Toland guy, General?” Agent Norwalk spoke up.

  “As I mentioned before, Greg Toland was a physics professor at MIT until he left eight years ago. From there he came into the employ of DARPA. He worked for three years on something called Project Thunderclap. I won’t go into the details--frankly, I don’t know all of the details--but to put it simply Project Thunderclap was our own version of the Chinese program Project Dragonfire.”

  David sat up straight.

  “You mean the United States has its own Dragon’s Breath?”

  “No; what I’m saying is that we tried to develop a similar weapon, but the project was closed down before it achieved its goal. However, we now believe that the Chinese came to be in possession of the files from Thunderclap and used these to help their own project along. Since leaving DARPA Greg Toland has lived in retirement in Atlanta. ”

  “And you think that Violet Dawn has this man, General?” Commander Choi asked.

  “We do.”

  “But how can you be certain of this?”

  “After our witness ID’d the woman in the surveillance footage as the same woman he saw on the day of Toland’s disappearance, we worked to identify her and her friend. We pulled the license plate number from the gas station footage, but it turned out that the plate had been stolen from a car in Conyers, Georgia early on the morning of the kidnapping.”

  The General paused to take a drink of water before continuing:

  “We sent a few frames from the Mobil footage to our sister agencies, and an hour later we got a call from someone over at the CIA. While the Company only had alia
ses for the pair, they recognized them as contract workers who took part in the assassination of an ex-Mossad agent in Maryland last year. As fortune would have it, they had pulled off the hit with a third person, a man by the name of Harold Larkin. Larkin was captured after the Maryland deal, though the other two got away. Larkin is currently incarcerated at ADX Florence, in Colorado. We had an agent in Denver make the drive over there. It took him less than thirty minutes to get Larkin to talk.”

  “How many bones did he break?” Agent Norwalk, only half joking.

  “No broken bones,” General Cromwell said. “Our methods are much subtler than that. But he did get information. He revealed that the pair who we believe took Toland were a couple, possibly married. He didn’t know their real names, but he gave us the cover identities they were using when he worked with them. We did a search using those names on the off chance that they were still using them. That’s where they slipped up. They were still using the same cover identities of Gerald and Paulina Miller. We traced the “Millers” to an address in Manhattan, and staked out the location overnight. Again we had an FBI cover. Shortly after eleven-clock in the morning they exited the apartment building where they lived and walked to a café a few blocks away to eat lunch. In the interest of civilian safety we waited until they were walking home to move in on them.”

  “So you have them in custody?” Commander Choi asked.

  “Well, we have the woman.”

  General Cromwell looked down at some papers on the table on front of him.

  “Her true name is Vera Polk, aged twenty-five, originally from Mount Vernon, New York.”

  “What about her husband?” Commander Choi pressed.

  “It turns out that they were not married after all, but they were living together. The man’s names was Ben Chancer, aged forty-four. Just as our agents were about to start their interrogation of him Mr. Chancer swallowed a poison capsule that he had hidden on his person. His death was quick and painful. The agents who witnessed his death rushed to the room where Ms. Polk was waiting to be interrogated. They found a similar capsule hidden in the neck lining of her dress. All she would have to have done is duck her head down and bite down to free the capsule, and then swallow it. Apparently this was a security measure that she and Mr. Chancer routinely used in case they were apprehended. Evidently she didn’t have the stomach to go through with it.”

  “What did you learn from her concerning Mr. Toland’s disappearance?” Commander Choi inquired.

  “She wouldn’t talk at first. It wasn’t out of sheer stubbornness, however; she had already guessed that Mr. Chancer was deceased, and she appeared to be genuinely devastated. We leaned on her harder as the hours went by, and she eventually told us all she claims to know. Further interrogation will reveal if she is holding anything back, but I viewed the tapes of her questioning and I think she is likely being truthful. She says that she and Mr. Chancer were contracted by a man to kidnap Greg Toland and deliver him to others who were waiting for them in Houston. She said that the call came from outside the U.S., and the man identified himself only by the codename Viper.”

  “Viper,” David repeated under his breath.

  “She also claims that all the men they met in Houston were Asian,” General Cromwell finished.

  “So it appears that you are correct,” Commander Choi said. “Violet Dawn has Mr. Toland in their custody, a man who worked on an American program similar to Project Dragonfire.”

  Commander Choi shook his head, visibly displeased with this news.

  “In all likelihood Mr. Toland is already in North Korea,” General Cromwell said. “I’m sorry to have kept all of you up so late, but I thought it prudent to fill you in on all of this as soon as possible.”

  “Yes; we are grateful, General,” Commander Choi said. “Even if the news is not so good. Is there anything else?”

  “No; that is all for now, Commander.”

  Later, after the screen went dark and after a short discussion wherein those gathered around the table at NIS headquarters discussed a few of the possible ramifications of Greg Toland’s abduction by Violet Dawn, the gathering was adjourned. Again Violet Rhee appeared to be too busy for David to approach her, so he headed back to the hotel with Agent Norwalk. They were dropped off by the same government car that had picked them up earlier. They took the elevator up, and said their goodbyes when David got off on his floor. Ten minutes later he was asleep. He woke up in the pre-dawn darkness, covered in sweat. He could not remember his dreams, and he considered this a blessing.