by Andrew Mayne
“As you can see, Miss Jessica, this is the room where his holiness paid us a visit,” he says as he turns the lens on himself and smiles at the camera.
He’s got a broad, friendly grin that would seem better suited for a tour guide than a night watchman.
“Were you there?”
“Sadly, no. I have the night shift and was sleeping. I understood he wasn’t feeling well. My brother-in-law said he made a very strange speech.” He pans the phone around the room. It looks like any other hotel conference center. “Is this what you wanted to see?”
“Yes, Gustavo. I’d like to get a closer look at the walls and ceiling, if that’s possible.” I press the mute button on the laptop and turn to the other agents in the room. “In Groom’s studio we found a small antenna. Maybe there is something similar here.”
Gustavo aims his phone at the ceiling. “Is this where you want to attach the lights for motion picture?”
I couldn’t tell him I was with the FBI and Secret Service conducting an investigation. This would raise too many red flags and likely lead us through a lengthy discussion with his superiors. To make things easier, I’d told him I was with a production company doing location scouting. I’m sitting with my back to the wall. The other agents are off to the side, out of range of the camera. “Ideally, we don’t want to do anything to hurt the building. We need to see what fixtures are already in place.”
“Yes, of course.” He holds the phone up as high as he can and walks slowly from one end of the room to the other and back so we can see each section. “Is this helpful?”
“Very much so. Just keep walking like that.”
“Poor kid,” mutters Carver, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Do you think I might be able to have a role in your movie?” inquires Gustavo eagerly.
I hit the mute button for a moment as the other agents try to suppress their laughter. I don’t want to make Gustavo out to be a fool.
“We’ll see, Gustavo.” I throw the agents leaning in out of the camera range a glance. “See anything?” I can’t spot an antenna.
“No,” says Carver.
Hamed is making notes on a pad of paper.
The ceiling, except for a few small light fixtures—too small to hide an antenna like the one in Groom’s studio—appears clean. However, there’s always the possibility something was brought in with a piece of equipment and carried back out.
“Gustavo, could you show us the walls?”
“Certainly. I have nothing else to do. Do you have a boyfriend?”
The question gets me the attention of the room. Hamed glances up from her notepad, and grins. She knows what it’s like to be the one girl on the boy’s team. “No. Not at the moment.”
“Maybe when you come to Majorca I can buy you a drink?” He nervously adds, “That’s if you don’t have a boyfriend by then.”
It’s a safe bet I won’t be in Majorca anytime soon. And right now, I need to keep our one man on the ground onboard. “How about I buy you coffee?”
“Deal.” He scans his phone over the back of the room. At one side there’s a large rectangular panel painted the same color as the wall. It looks like a speaker, but it’s missing a companion on the opposite side.
This asymmetry stands out to me. “Gustavo, what’s that square thing toward the back?”
“It’s a, what’s the word in English? A speaker. We’re having it replaced.”
“Why is that?”
“It doesn’t work and some delinquents stole the other one. I chased them off myself. They were immigrants. The police arrested them.”
“That was quite brave of you.”
Carver has an interested look on his face. I mute the feed again and ask, “Can we get a look at police reports for there?”
He nods his head and pulls up the Interpol database on a laptop to my right.
“I have a crazy question, Gustavo. I have two big favors. First, could you put your phone flat against the speaker, looking out? I’d like to see the angle.”
“Do the acoustics concern you? Let me get a chair.”
A moment later the phone rises and comes to a stop facing out toward the front of the hall. I place my finger in the exact center of the screen. Underneath a restored fresco, it’s the same spot where the pope stood when he went off script. Years of working in theaters have taught me good sound design doesn’t have the speakers cross in the middle. This is odd.
“Gustavo, do you have a screwdriver?”
“I have a multi-tool on my belt. One moment.” He sets the phone down and pulls the unit down from the wall, laying it flat on a table facing up. “I’m beginning to think this is one of those hidden camera shows.”
“You said you wanted to be in a movie.”
“Yes, but television is different. Oh well.” He gives me his broad smile. “If I come in here one night and find you robbing the building, I’m going to be very upset. I won’t be able to buy you that drink.”
He moves the phone and we watch out of the corner of the screen as his arms take apart the front grill of the unit. I pray for Gustavo’s sake there’s not some kind of explosive booby trap. I start to think I should have called the Majorcan police.
“Well that is very peculiar,” he says.
The other agents lean in to our video screen. I almost shout at Gustavo to show us what he’s looking at, but after a long pause, he remembers we’re waiting and picks up the phone to give us a better view. Instead of a large speaker element inside, there’s a hexagonal arrangement of twenty small silver discs.
This is not any kind of speaker I’m familiar with. I glance across the room.
Hamed types into a computer to the side of me. “Transducer elements,” she whispers. “Sonic projection.”
“Well, monkey balls,” someone murmurs.
I’m too terrified for Gustavo’s safety to high-five myself at the moment. “Gustavo, we need you to stay there. We’re going to call someone with Interpol to arrange for that to be picked up. Don’t touch it, just leave it be.”
“I knew it,” he replies excitedly into the camera. “You’re not movie makers. You’re spies. The good kind, right? This thing, will it explode?” He is suddenly nervous.
“I’m pretty sure it won’t, but don’t touch it just to be safe. And yes, we’re the good kind.”
Carver tells someone to get on the phone with the local police and arrange for the unit to be taken from the building and inspected. Ratner stands across the table with his arms folded. I can see nods of approval from the other agents. I think I’ve earned their respect.
“So what exactly does this device do?” asks Carver.
“Let’s see if we can find a lonely night watchman in Austria, and then I’ll explain.”
58
SERGEANT SCHWEIGER HOLDS his phone aloft to give us a clear view of Caravaggio’s clear plastic-covered painting The Crowning with Thorns while Lieutenant Häupl swings his metal crowbar at the wall across from where the pope made his most recent erratic speech.
Having found the acoustic device in Majorca, we have enough cause to call in all our resources.
Painted plaster fragments go flying, bouncing off the sheets they’ve hastily arranged to protect the rest of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s exhibits.
There had been a brief debate as to whether or not they should remove the priceless art from the gallery. But waiting for curators to properly move and stow the collection would be too time-consuming. I also got the feeling that if the tactical unit was going to get blown to hell, they’d at least like something nice to look at in the afterlife.
Ratner hides his face behind his hands as the wall begins to crumble. The other agents look equally concerned. I’ve only been in their unit less than a day and I already have them ordering up the destruction of major European monuments.
>
To the Austrian authorities, the mere suggestion that there may be some illicit electronic device concealed within the walls has sent the Austrian Special Unit into overdrive.
Häupl has made a fist-sized opening. He reaches up with his thickly armored hand and peels away a sheet of plaster. Men dressed like large beetles stand around with heavy metal shields to form a barrier in the event of a blast. They all look identical in their heavy tactical gear. We can only tell them apart because Häupl appears slightly taller and thinner.
The device Gustavo uncovered in Majorca was one of the technologies I’d been researching. “If you set up series of transducers like that,” I’d explained to the Secret Service agents, pointing to the image on my laptop screen. “You can project sound. You can’t hear anything at the point of emission, but the small discs form a full sound wave at a distance. I think your tech people use something similar for embassy security to disperse protestors by blasting really annoying sounds.
“Only this can be used for more devious purposes than crowd control. Like my demo with Ratner, if you speak to someone using this it’ll sound like your voice is coming from them. No one else will hear it. It’ll drive them nuts. You can take it a step further and modulate someone’s voice as they speak. Think of auto-tune music. But instead of making a bad singer sound good, you’re using their voice to shape different words. You can then make words appear to come out of their mouth, which in some instances triggers people to try to make their speech match. It’s like a short-circuit of the speech center.”
“And someone is doing this to the pope?” asks Carver, unable to take his eyes off the destruction going on thousands of miles away.
“That’s what I think we found in Majorca. It’s what I think we’ll find here.” I hope. But feel guilty for hoping, knowing the deeper implication.
Ratner sits on the edge of a table biting his thumbnail. Our Skype scavenger hunt has quickly spiraled from something that felt like a telephone prank to what could become a major international incident if we end up embarrassing the Austrian police.
He looks at me sharply. The implication is, I better be right. The reality is that this will fall on his head. As much as he’d like to see me proven wrong here, he knows this part of the operation is ultimately under his jurisdiction. He can finger-point all he wants, but it’ll just make him look bad. Not that there won’t be serious repercussions for me. I really, really don’t want to have to explain another failure to Breyer. I’ve only been here a couple of hours and already I’ve put millions of dollars of priceless art in jeopardy halfway around the world.
Häupl tears away another piece of drywall. Bare concrete blocks are visible through the gap. He opens up the gash above and below. There’s electrical conduit, but nothing else. He steps away from the damage and takes off his gloves to wipe the sweat from under his safety goggles.
Schweiger faces the camera and speaks in accented English. “Should we have found it by now?”
The wall looks just like a ripped-up wall. There’s no hexagonal arrangement of discs. “One second.” Oh, man. I feel like there’s a piano on a thin rope over my head. “Do we have a layout of the exhibit hall?”
A tablet displaying a diagram is handed to me. Diagonal lines connect the pope’s position to the points on the wall where the transducers would need to be. It should be right in front of us, except it isn’t there.
My skin burns with the feeling of a thousand disappointed eyes watching me, even though there’s only two dozen people in the room. Well, I guess there’s the people in Austria and all the chiefs watching the live feed.
I can only imagine the reaming that’s in store for me.
“Nice going,” hisses Ratner, seeing the desperation on my face. “The FBI have the money to pay for this?”
“It was a good call, given what we found in Majorca.” Carver tries to reassure me.
“I can’t wait to see this one on Drudge Report tomorrow.” Ratner seems almost gleeful, then has a second worried thought. “I’m not taking the heat for this, Blackwood.”
“Is everything okay?” asks Häupl as he steps in front of the video. I can see his reddish hair just under his helmet.
“Yes,” I lie, staring down at the image on the tablet. Something seems a little odd. “Lieutenant Häupl, how far is it from wall to wall?”
He motions to a sergeant. The other man comes running over with a tape measure and they unwind it from wall to wall. “Twelve meters,” Häupl reads.
Embarrassment completely washes over me. I may have just botched this. It could have been portable equipment that was loaded out. I look down at the tablet again. The number matches. “Hold on,” I turn to the Hamed, who made the layout. “Is this in feet?”
“Oh shit!” she replies.
I make the adjustment on the tablet. “Lieutenant Häupl, I got the measurement wrong. Could you try a foot, I mean, um, thirty centimeters, to the left?”
This wouldn’t be the first time US-European disaster was caused by a mistake in metric versus US customary units.
He hesitates, then throws up his hands. “Plaster is cheap.” He slams the crowbar into the new coordinates, creating a new hole. The plaster falls away. Still no discs.
“How big of a hole do you want to dig yourself, Blackwood?” Ratner chortles.
This is a nightmare I don’t get to wake up from. I’m pretty sure I’d rather be giving a speech in my underwear right now.
Häupl pulls away chunks of cinder block, widening the gap. “Would this be inside the wall, perhaps?”
“Maybe,” I reply. Anything to give me a chance to think. Where are bomb threats when you need them? Damn it, that’s not funny.
“I’m about to call this,” Ratner threatens.
“I believe I’m in charge here,” Häupl responds over the video stream. “I’ll keep going until the lady is satisfied.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant Häupl.” I gratefully smile and ignore Ratner.
In Häupl’s case, it’s not that he necessarily believes me, it’s that he had better turn over every possible stone. He doesn’t have the luxury of pushing this down the line.
Ratner’s thumbs type away on his phone. No doubt already trying to cover his ass.
Häupl steps back to survey the fallen plaster. He strips off the heavy protective sleeves on his arms then walks back to the wall. He shoves his bare hands into the space behind the wall, making a face as he strains.
“Please don’t electrocute yourself,” Carver pleads quietly. Hands steepled under his nose like he’s praying, I know exactly how he feels.
“Ich habe etwas gefunden!” Häupl shouts.
“What’s that mean?” Ratner leaps from the edge of the table.
“He says he found something,” translates Schweiger, still holding his phone.
“Ein metall sechsecks . . .” Häupl calls out to his team. “A metal hexagon of some kind. Is this what you were looking for?”
“Ja, ja,” I reply.
There are smiles all around the room. Hamed claps me on the shoulder.
Häupl and his team bring out their explosive swab kits and a fiber-optic camera to get a better look at the device.
Our reaction is muted while we wait for the results. While we’re safe here, our Austrian friends could still be in peril.
Häupl looks up from a handheld monitor. “It doesn’t appear to be explosive. But we will proceed cautiously.”
“Please do. And thank you,” I reply.
“No, thank you.” He nods, then turns back to dismantling the device.
Carver sees my grim face. “What’s the matter? I’ve never seen someone proven so right.” He steals a glance at Ratner.
Ratner gives me a shrug and pockets his phone. I guess he’s decided not to finish covering his ass.
“Do you understand what this me
ans?” I ask.
Ratner replies gravely, “Yeah, I do.” He looks over at Carver. “They could have killed the pope anytime they wanted. Instead of some electronic what-not, that could have been a wall full of shape charges and metal bearings. If they just wanted to kill him, they’d have done it already. Blackwood’s right. They want to ruin him first by making him look insane or possessed before they do the big number. The real showstopper.” He points to the map of Miami on the wall. “There will be one hundred thousand people inside that stadium and another two hundred thousand right outside it. And who knows how many more millions watching around the world.” He shakes his head, staring right at me. “Christ. Jesus Christ. This is going to be bad, isn’t it?”
Ratner may be an asshole, but he’s not an idiot. Even he can see the situation we’re in.
I shake my head in return. “It started by turning a sheriff into a homicidal maniac and blowing up a church using human fat. I have no idea how this is going to end.”
59
AFTER WE’VE TAKEN this upstairs to our respective superiors, we regroup to assess how circumstances have changed.
One thing is certainly different: I’ve earned some respect around here. Nobody can deny the threat posed by somebody who was able to smuggle a large electronic warfare device into one of the most heavily protected museums in the world.
“Our adversary has nearly infinite resources,” I explain to the task force. “She’s wealthy, she has men ready to die for her and she makes it a daily habit to evade the United States government. X-20 has rapidly become one of our biggest security threats because of her. We can’t underestimate her.”
“Bin Laden tried to kill US presidents, as did Hussein,” interjects Ratner.
Seriously? I still have to plead my case to him? “Bin Laden was operating from a cave in the middle of nowhere, in constant hiding. Marta Rodriguez has a two-hundred-foot yacht and walks openly in the streets of Mexico.” Or she did, until I ID’d her. But I don’t have to point this out. “The financial resources under her control are probably in the billions. If you can imagine it, she can buy it. We’ve lost wars to countries with less resources.”
