Black Tide

by Brendan DuBois

  "Right," Felix said, taking out his keys. "There he is, in prison, with bugs and stools all around him, and if you think he was going to breathe a word that he was involved in the biggest art theft of the decade, you're nuts. He waited and kept his mouth shut and died quiet."

  After Felix pulled out into traffic, he added, "It floors me, though, that Tony Russo ends up knowing that the paintings were at the safe house in York. All he knew was that Corelli had them stolen. Would love to know how that happened."

  I leaned back in my seat, suddenly feeling tired. Though Tyler Beach was only an hour away, it seemed like weeks. "Simple intelligence work, Felix."

  "Oh? Are you going to reveal something here, Lewis, or just spin theories?"

  I didn't rise to the bait. "Just spinning theories. Corelli couldn't have known everything by himself. A couple of other guys must have known pieces of the scheme. So Tony also keeps quiet, and one year he learns from Corelli's older brother that yep, Jimmy Corelli was behind the thefts. Another year, somebody else lets him know that Corelli stole them for Cameron Briggs. More time goes by, and he finds out that Cal Maloney was in on the theft, and he delivered the paintings to a safe house in Maine, but the dumb cop gets killed in an accident."

  Felix sped up as we got on Route 1, heading north out of the city, and we passed large buildings and exit and entrance ramps and concrete-and-steel bridges.

  "Yeah, makes sense," Felix said. "Then Russo starts poking around, asking questions here and there, tries to find out who knows where the safe house is located."

  "You got it," I said. "Then your name comes up, you start getting postcards, and Tony goes to Cameron Briggs and says hey, the deal's still on, five years later. Then maybe part of Cameron is excited about finally getting the paintings, but another part panics about all of this coming out right now, and Cameron starts tidying up. Beginning with Tony Russo. And then Craig Dummer. Giving him money to pay off his debts and moving him out of his old place, and then taking care of him one bloody night."

  "Not a bad yarn, not a bad yarn at all," Felix said, and we stayed quiet as we went through the mass of cities clustered around Boston, through the strip malls and neon lights of Danvers and Saugus and Medford. Then the bright neon and concrete were left behind us. I could even make out a few stars.

  When we approached the exit for Groveland, I turned and looked at Felix, and in the dashboard lights his afternoon shadow looked blue-black and he had a thoughtful look on his face.

  "Felix?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "The swap is on for tomorrow, right?"

  "Well, in less than an hour it's going to be today. But yeah, tomorrow. Why?"

  "Just remember one thing when we're there, Felix."

  He thought for a moment, as another mile passed underneath the Lumina's wheels. "What's that?"

  "Cameron Briggs. He seems to be in the mood for tidying up. Keep that in mind."

  Felix looked over at me, with a gaze that made me glad he was not my enemy.

  "It's never left my mind, Lewis."

  I left it at that, and I think I dozed off soon after.

  At about 3 A.M. I woke up at home with a dream, another damnable flashback about where I had worked before, but it was one I had a hard time remembering. The dream had something to do with a file on my desk, and there was a voice speaking aloud in my old office at the five-sided palace. It was a familiar one, whispering to me. "Something's wrong," the voice had said, urgent yet quiet. "Something's wrong."

  I lay awake for a while, staring at the ceiling in the darkness. The sound of the ocean was there as always but it wasn't particularly comforting. There are times when I wake up from bad dreams, and the sound of the ocean and the air temperature and any imperfections in my bed's mattress conspire together to keep me awake. After about an hour or so I knew that this was one of those times. I swore softly and got up and dressed and went outside on the deck adjoining my bedroom. The stars were as bright as ever but I didn't feel like looking at them. Instead I sat down on the deck floor and remembered.

  Something's wrong. I sat there for a while and it came back to me, in dribs and drabs.

  I had been working for the Department of Defense for a few years before I got transferred --- or, depending on your definition, shunted away to --- the group that became known as the Marginal Issues Section. It took some time to get used to the working atmosphere in Marginal Issues. In other groups and sections in the DoD, even if it was all civilian, there was a tight military structure to everything, from the style of coffee cup you could keep at your desk to the number of pencils you could requisition every month. But in Marginal Issues there was a loosey-goosey atmosphere that even George Walker couldn't quite stamp out. There was no dress code and lunches were long, and there'd be afternoons off if the weather was nice. Oh, George threatened us here and there, but there were two graces that saved us: first, where it counted, the Marginal Issues Section produced, and second, the members of the section all had some sort of cognitive talent that some higher-ups wanted to keep, even to the point of screwing up time sheets every month.

  After a while in Marginal Issues, I learned that there were peaks and valleys, where you'd be working sixty to seventy-hour weeks, responding to a crisis at some flash point in the world, and other times when your desk would be clear and a two-hour lunch didn't make much of a difference. During those downtimes we were encouraged to root around and do research on stuff that interested us.

  Something's wrong. I remembered the first time I heard that phrase.

  It was during a month when I was doing my own project for the first time. It had to do with the Soviet space program, back when there really was a Soviet Union and people could call it an Evil Empire without laughing. Even with people on the ground (HUMINT) and satellites in the sky (SIGINT) and SR-71s and U-2s and surveillance vessels and listening posts in China and India and everywhere else, there was a lot we didn't know about that colossus of the East. We didn't know everything they were producing or doing, and the depth of our ignorance was shown that giddy year when all the walls came down. Before that year, there were a lot of mysteries in that dark empire, and one day, I started looking into one of them: the mystery of the second Buran.

  The Soviet Union once had an aggressive space program, another fact that is conveniently forgotten in the history and science books. Well, remember this fact: if it wasn't for a special class of booster rockets that blew up too often in the 1960s, they would have beaten us to the moon by almost a year, and Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would have been second-placers. But even with those booster failures, they had a number of successes, including the Salyut and Mir space stations, and it was well known that they were developing their own reusable space shuttle. This shuttle was called the Buran (Russian for snowflake, and I'll be damned if I know the significance of that). There were a lot of snickers in our aerospace community when it was learned what it looked like: it was almost a mirror of our own space shuttle, right down to the white paint and the black heat-shield tiles. No doubt the KGB boys had been busy stealing blueprints and such from our aerospace boys out in California.

  The first test flight of the shuttle, unmanned, took place on November 15, 1988. After a couple of orbits, the shuttle landed safely at the Baykonur Cosmodrome. While the Buran never had a manned test flight while I was at the DoD, there was something else about that Soviet shuttle program that perked up our interest. A mystery, actually, about the discrepancy between their public announcements and the private information that we were picking up: they claimed they had built and tested only one operational Buran, whereas our satellites had shown two of the winged spacecraft on the ground at the same time: one at the space complex in Baykonur and the other on top of an AN-225 aircraft at a military airfield near Alma-Alta. There were a couple of test models and one Buran under construction at the time, but these had all been accounted for when the satellite photo was taken. This was the cause of a few late meetings and some memo
barrages at the Pentagon. What was the purpose of the second operational Buran, and why were the Soviets keeping it under wraps?

  And if that wasn't enough of a mystery, none of our satellites and none of our other snooping devices ever found that second Buran again.

  It had vanished. Well, a few months after the second Buran disappeared, other crises popped up and resources got diverted, and the special task force looking into this puzzle got deactivated. Time and money were at a premium, and the Buran folder got dumped into that giant filing cabinet marked inactive --- until one rainy March day when I stumbled across it and started getting to work. I spent long hours at my desk, plugged into the DefNet system, conducting a wide-range search, also known as an Electrolux Special --- vacuuming up every piece of information that had anything and everything to do with the Soviet space program. I found some intriguing things here and there --- like a classified radio transcript of a cosmonaut stranded in Earth orbit, who, knowing he was going to die, spent his last hours cursing Lenin, the Communist Party and mission control --- and it was difficult to keep focused with such a wealth of knowledge before me.

  Then I found a few bits of information that tickled my brain. For example, a few weeks after the picture of the second Buran appeared, some Canadian scientists near the Arctic Circle had measured an unexplained burst of energy from a Salyut space station. I recorded the date and did another Electrolux Special, and something else popped up that caught my fancy: on that same date, a spectacular meteor shower was seen by an Army Special Forces team in Outer Mongolia (what an Army Special Forces team was doing in Outer Mongolia was something I didn't have the Need to Know). After some other research I found a study conducted by our cousins over at the National Security Agency (also known as None Such Agency) which determined through the monitoring of certain classified information traffic that one of the Salyuts was not a space station, but was believed to be an experimental laser battle station for the Soviets' own version of Star Wars.

  Through some cross-checking over at NASA, I found out that the Salyut with the unexpected energy emission was also the one that the NSA thought was a laser battle station. Then there were two more tiny bits of information that seemed to make it all come into focus: two days before that Salyut energy burst and the meteorite shower, there had been a launch of what was called a weather satellite from Baykonur. But later that month the Soviets announced that the weather satellite had failed in orbit. Fortunately for them, none of our satellites had caught this particular launch. Then, a week after that meteorite shower witnessed by Army troops in Outer Mongolia (and me still intrigued about what they were doing there), a radio intercept from Glavkosmos, the Soviet space agency, talked about the "successful Buran excursion." Yet there had been no official --- or unofficial --- Buran launch at the time.

  With all of this behind me, and a lot of thinking later, I came to work one weekend and wrote a detailed, informative memo that said it was apparent that (a) the Soviets had a working laser station in orbit; (b) the second Buran was in fact a large-scale target model that was destroyed in orbit by the Salyut and was designed to simulate one of our own shuttles; and (c) the Soviets had demonstrated the capability of destroying our space shuttles and satellites in orbit, and were a few years away from being the dominant space power.

  I made a recommendation: that the Buran task force be reactivated and expanded, with extensive liaisons with NASA, the Pentagon's SDI office and the aerospace industry, and that the executive and legislative branches be notified immediately. When I left work that Sunday evening, having locked my memo in my office safe, I felt tired and a little smug. But when I came back, about ten hours later, I was nervous with energy and a lack of sleep. And before submitting the memo to our section leader, I decided to engage in a little unofficial peer review, and I asked Cissy Manning to read it.

  I had been with Marginal Issues a little over a month and was immediately attracted to Cissy, but I was too busy adjusting to a new office and a new boss and co-workers to do more than just look. She was polite to me and I was polite to her, and I got the feeling, on seeing the way she worked, that in some ways she almost ran the section, leaving George Walker to his budgets and bureaucratic infighting. This day she came into my office wearing a subtle perfume that got my attention, took one of my guest chairs, stretched out her long and wonderfully slim legs and started reading. I was admiring her ivory blouse and the way I could make out the lace of her bra through the almost sheer fabric when she looked up at me, her green eyes crinkling with concern, shaking her head.

  "Something's wrong," she said.

  It felt like my office safe was now resting on my midsection. "What's wrong?"

  "This whole report," Cissy said, waving the pages in her hand as if it had a bad smell to it. "You've got some interesting things here, Lewis, but you're trying to take some scraps of driftwood and re-create the Queen Mary. You've interpreted information in a manner that only supports your theory, when in fact it could do the exact opposite. You make some real stretches, like changing a meteor shower into the reentry of space debris. And you didn't go deep enough."

  "I didn't?" I said, snappish from the work I had done all weekend, and some previous weekends before that. "Like where?"

  “Like the members of the Buran task team. You ever talk to any of them before you started writing this fantasy about a Death Star in orbit, zapping space shuttles?"

  “Uh, no,” I said.

  “Well, if you had, you would have learned that just before the panel deactivated, they decided the second Buran was just a ducky. Just an informal decision, one that wasn't put on paper, but it was one that calmed everybody down. A ducky. Nothing to worry about."

  ''A what?" Cissy sighed and put my report down on my desk and picked up two pencils. She held them up. "Listen, young one, and learn something. Some of our spy satellites are wonderful indeed, and can read license plates from orbit and even newspaper headlines. But some are just lookers. They just reproduce what they see. You can take a picture of these two pencils, and your picture wouldn't tell you which pencil was real and which one was a miniature bomb."

  The pencils clattered to my desk. "Now. Duckies. Back in World War II, we set up a fake army in southern England, commanded by General George Patton. The tanks were made out of rubber, but the Germans thought they were real, and they thought this army would invade at the Pas de Calais. I'm sure you can remember what really happened at a place called Normandy, with a real army. Closer to home, a few years back, one of our KH-11 surveillance satellites went over the Soviet Northern Fleet base at Polyarnyi, near Murmansk. The satellite took photos of three Typhoon-class submarines in the harbor. Then a bad winter storm came up, and when our satellite returned on its next pass, the three submarines were in bad shape. Two were leaking air and one was bent in the middle. They were fake. Rubber duckies. "

  As Cissy was talking, I was extracting an old cover memo from the Buran task force from my file, and saw that one C. Manning was a member of the group, and my face was warm indeed.

  "The second Buran was a fake," I said.

  "Very good," she said, and even with those words, her tone wasn't mocking. "We like to think of those old Soviets as very dour, mean and sour sons of bitches. Which they are. But sometimes they also have a sense of humor. Think how funny it is. They spend under a hundred thousand rubles to make a fake Buran, and what do they get out of it? They get everybody in this building spun up, meetings are held and memos are rocketed back and forth, and we think they're bigger and better than we are."

  "While in the process, we're wasting time, wasting resources and pulling people away from real situations," I said. "Exactly. One big practical joke." Then she eyed my report. "One that's apparently still catching people."

  I looked at her and she looked back at me with a steady gaze. I picked up the report and swiveled my chair and tossed it into one of our special wastebaskets, with a shredder on top. In a matter of seconds, about a month's worth of work wa
s shredded, and by this evening, the shredded paper would become smoke.

  "Thanks for the catch," I said. ''And thanks for saving me from a major embarrassment."

  Cissy laughed. "You're welcome, Lewis Cole, and you owe me one.”

  It only took a second. "Then why don't I take you out to lunch?"

  She kept on smiling. "That sounds like a wonderful idea."

  So we did, and that was the start of something short, sweet and delightful.

  But something was wrong.

  I looked back up at the stars. You didn't go deep enough. Not a mocking or accusatory tone. Just a statement of fact. You didn't go deep enough.

  How about that.

  Above me a meteorite seared its way through the atmosphere. This one was bright, with a long tail that looked like it had been shot out from a white-hot sparkler. A preview, maybe, of the Perseids. I kept on looking above me. The stars were as special as they always were, just shining on through, some of their light taking tens of thousands of years to reach here. Lot of distance, lot of time, and though the stars were wonderful and I never tired of seeing them, I wanted very much for the sun to rise and the day to begin. I had work to do.

  Something was wrong.

  .

  I slept fitfully the rest of the night and skipped breakfast in the morning. I made three phone calls to Felix's house before I gave up. I knew he wasn't spending too much time there, and with today being the day of the exchange, I was sure that he was keeping busy. Checking his answering machine for phone calls from me probably wasn't high on his agenda.

  One more try, then, and I called the Tyler police department. Diane Woods was not in. I tried her at home, and I got her answering machine. Lots of answering machine work going on this Friday morning. I wondered where everybody was. One thing, for sure, was that Felix and Diane weren't together. That was something I could bank on, like the sun coming up every morning.

  I sat back in my comfortable office and looked around and finally accepted that cold little ball of high-grade steel that seemed to be working its way through my digestive system. This was one that I would have to take care of myself. No depending on friends or acquaintances or contacts. Just me. I picked up the phone and made one more call, and the person on the other end said, "Boston police department."