Threat Level Black

by Jim DeFelice

  NADT had been envisioned more as a think tank than a weapons development company, and those roots showed in its headquarters buildings. The ultramodern buildings were located well back from the road behind manicured lawns and gardens. A range of security sensors, from cameras to motion detectors, maintained constant surveillance of the grounds, but to the naked eye the place seemed deserted until you passed a row of evergreens a few hundred feet off the road. At that point a pair of security guards and the small kiosk appeared a few feet ahead.

  Howe had been told that devices were planted in the roadway a bit farther along that could paralyze car engines with an electromagnetic pulse, and he had seen firsthand some of the weaponry the NADT security force had at its disposal. But for all that, the guards appeared almost nonchalant, unfailingly courteous, and friendly; indeed, they were tested and graded on these qualities, with the overall goal of presenting an image to the world—or, more specifically, visiting politicians and high-ranking military people—of absolute self-confidence and efficiency.

  Unfortunately, that image had been largely that: an image. The security staff had not exactly covered itself with glory in the Cyclops One fiasco. While the problems at NADT had been caused by Bonham and some of the investors, not the security people or the engineers and scientists and grunts who did the real work, one of his first tasks would be to determine if anyone else should be sacked because of it.

  A difficult task. Just about everyone he knew here was dedicated and hardworking, serious and proud of the job they did. A lot were ex–military people, though of course that wasn’t a carte blanche endorsement, either.

  “Colonel, good morning,” said Nancy Meile, meeting him just as the two gate men cleared him and his vehicle to proceed. Meile, about forty and a former partner in a private security firm, was the security director. “Rumor true? You’re taking the job?”

  “A few hurdles left,” he said.

  “I hope you take it.”

  “Why?”

  The question seemed to take her by surprise, and she didn’t answer right away. “I think you’ll do a good job.”

  As an officer advanced through the ranks of the military, he or she couldn’t help but become aware of the various political games that were played. For Howe, the gamesmanship was a severe negative: In his opinion it detracted not just from the mission he and his comrades had to accomplish, but from the bedrock duty and loyalty to one’s oath and the country itself. The relative lack of games in the development projects he’d gotten involved in with NADT, as a matter of fact, was one of the attractions.

  As head of NADT he’d have to devote considerable energy to playing those political games. But not with his staff.

  “I wasn’t fishing for a compliment,” he told Meile. “I want simply to understand what needs to be done.”

  His words felt a bit too stiff in his mouth, but he at least got the thought across; he could see it register on her face.

  “I’d be happy to talk with you at length when you think it’s appropriate,” she said.

  “I’ll take you up on that,” said Howe, putting the car in gear.

  He drove to the main building, a low-slung, modernist affair whose main floor served merely as a reception and processing center for the offices located in the bunkered floors below. Because of its unique relationship to the government, NADT was considered a possible target for a hostile government, and the protections against attack and, perhaps more importantly, spying were diverse. A copper sheath surrounded the different sections, rendering eavesdropping devices useless. Sixty feet of earth and concrete would keep any but the most powerful American bunker-buster bomb from damaging the heart of the complex.

  The vice president for operations was a cherubic man named Clyde Delano; he had worked for various government agencies under both Republican and Democratic administrations for close to thirty years before coming to NADT. A chemist by training, the years had magnified his academic demeanor. As he took Howe on a tour to meet some of the scientific and research staffers, he launched into a discussion of World War I, apparently because he’d been rereading Keegan’s history of the war over breakfast. He asked Howe what he thought would have happened to Europe if America had not entered the conflict but remained neutral.

  “Never really gave it much thought,” said Howe.

  “Very different world,” said Delano. “Maybe Germany wins. Maybe the stalemate goes on for a decade.”

  Howe tried changing the subject—he wanted to know what Delano thought needed to be done at NADT—but the vice president for operations simply demurred, claiming he hadn’t given it much thought. Howe found a similar reluctance to speak freely among the upper-level scientists he met, who failed to loosen up even over lunch in the company cafeteria, a facility that would rival many a D.C.-area restaurant. Meals here were free, a perk that helped compensate for the long hours and stringent security measures and discouraged people from taking off-campus breaks.

  After lunch, Howe went over to the president’s office, which had been vacant since the disgrace of General Bonham. All of Bonham’s personal belongings had been removed, leaving the shelves and desk bare; the only things that remained were a few yellow pads and an old-fashioned Rolodex phone directory. Howe idly flipped through the directory: There was his name, along with a long list of contact numbers and addresses.

  He took out the list of phone numbers Dr. Blitz had recommended he call. But instead of picking up the phone, he found himself thinking about Delano, who had functioned as Bonham’s second-in-command. Clearly they were not going to be a good match; he needed someone else to take his place, someone he could trust.

  Bringing someone else in from the Air Force would send the wrong signal, he thought; and besides, he wanted someone with better contacts with the administration and Congress, his weaknesses; someone in the service wasn’t likely to have them.

  He thought of Harold McIntyre, the former NSC assistant for technology, whom he’d worked with before. Though McIntyre could be a bit of a playboy and partyer, he had a good feel for who was who among the contractors and his standing with the administration was impeccable. He also liked Howe—not surprising, since Howe had led the mission that rescued him from India after war broke out there. McIntyre had left government following that incident, and that was a complication: Howe thought he might have had some sort of emotional collapse because of the stress he’d undergone.

  McIntyre’s name was in Bonham’s directory, with his phone number listed. Howe picked up the phone, hesitated a moment, then punched in the numbers.

  An answering machine picked up.

  “This is McIntyre. Leave a message.”

  “Mr. McIntyre. Bill Howe here. How are you? Listen, I’ve been offered a job and, uh, well, I wanted to—”

  The line clicked and a tone sounded.

  “Colonel Howe?” said a distant voice.

  “That you, Mac?”

  “Yes, sir. How are you?”

  There was a slight tremor in his voice, the sort of quality a freshly minted lieutenant might betray when he chanced to come face-to-face with the base commander. Very unlike McIntyre, Howe thought, though it was definitely him.

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Not that well, actually.” McIntyre laughed. “I, uh…well, they have me on Paxil.”

  “That a painkiller?”

  McIntyre laughed again. It was a light, self-deprecating laugh. “Antidepressant. Supposedly, I have some sort of, uh, like, uh…”

  “Delayed stress?”

  “Yeah, something like that. Combined with depression.”

  Howe tapped on the desktop. He didn’t want to subject the poor guy to more pressure.

  “I heard you were up for that job over at NADT,” said McIntyre. “Bonham’s job. Head of the whole shebang.”

  “That’s right,” Howe told him.

  “You ought to take it,” said McIntyre.

  “That’s the reason I’m calling,” said
Howe. “I’m trying to get opinions on the place.”

  “Colonel, I’ll give you a whole rundown if you want. Anything you’re looking for. I owe you.”

  “You don’t owe me, Mac.”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  McIntyre spoke as if he were a junior officer, though during McIntyre’s time in the government—which was only a few months ago, after all—he’d been the one with more authority. He would be absolutely loyal if he took the job. But Howe couldn’t offer him the post; the poor guy would feel obligated to take it, and then he’d fall apart.

  Still, Howe could pick his brain.

  “Maybe you could give me some background,” said Howe. “Informally.”

  “You bet. When? Now? This afternoon?”

  “I’m kind of tied up today. How about tomorrow—lunch, maybe?”

  “You got it, sir. You got it.”

  They made an appointment for noon at an out-of-the-way Italian restaurant near McIntyre’s condo.

  “What do you think of this Korea thing?” asked McIntyre.

  “You’re following it?” asked Howe.

  “Oh, yeah.” He laughed again. “I get a kick out of some of these commentators. CNN even called me.”

  “You went on TV?”

  McIntyre’s laughter roiled into something almost vicious. “No way.”

  “Let me ask you something,” said Howe. “Do the North Koreans have UAVs?”

  “UAVS? I don’t think so. I mean…well, in theory you can use just about anything as a UAV. Crop duster even. I forget the last assessments. You talk to Thompson over at the CIA?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “They have the last force estimate. He’d know because he would’ve worked on it. He’s the guy to ask. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Dalton would have a handle on the technology if you’re looking to get up-to-date on UAVs in general,” said McIntyre. He was referring to the head of NADT’s technical aviation section, Mark Dalton. “I’d talk to him.”

  “You sure they were robot planes?” the scientist asked when Howe described what he’d seen. “In North Korea?”

  “Pretty sure. There were no cockpits, and the fuselages were fairly narrow.”

  Howe took the small pad of Post-it notes from the top of Dalton’s computer screen and sketched out the craft. It had gull wings that extended well to the rear.

  Dalton shook his head. “You sure?”

  “Yup.”

  “Like that or like this?” He took the pen and modified the wings, making them droop more in the rear.

  “Might have been like that, yeah. That’s what attracted my attention.”

  Dalton went online and pulled up some schematics of American projects. Howe thought he saw some similarities with a Boeing project dubbed Bird of Prey that had flown in the mid-1990s. It was a manned, jet-propelled craft that tested a variety of capabilities.

  “But not an exact match,” said Dalton.

  “No.”

  “How big were they?”

  “I don’t know.” Howe didn’t feel he could tell Dalton everything—like the fact that he’d been in an airplane when he’d seen them.

  “Well, let’s think about this. You saw two abreast in a hangar. How big was the hangar?”

  “It was small, designed for a small plane, maybe an early-generation MiG. There was some space on either side and between the planes.”

  Dalton estimated that the aircraft might have a wingspan from ten to fifteen feet; by contrast a MiG-21, itself relatively small, would span about twenty-three and a half feet. Payload, range, speed, and other capabilities would depend on any number of factors, but Dalton envisioned a several-hundred-mile range with good endurance.

  “Low radar profile,” said Dalton, explaining that between the plane’s small size and angles, it would probably produce a radar cross section down toward 6- or 7/10,000 of a square inch. That was not quite as good as the best American stealthy designs, but it was extremely small, and a good deal smaller than the early F-117A, which had a cross section of approximately 8/10 of a square inch on normal radar, about that of a very small bird.

  “Pretty capable aircraft, if they have them. No match for a manned fighter,” said Dalton, “but potentially capable.”

  “What would you use it for?”

  “Reconnaissance. Stealthy attack. Hell, put a bomb in it and you have a long-range cruise missile.”

  “Thanks,” Howe told the scientist.

  Chapter

  11

  The credit card Fisher had found had been used for cash advances from several ATMs in Queens, running through the daily limit of five hundred dollars with a series of small withdrawals. With no other leads, Fisher spent nearly an entire day looking at where they were, trying to find a common link. He decided that they were all within six or seven blocks of R train stops, though what that meant if anything was difficult to say.

  On the other hand, there was a significant correlation with decent coffee places; while such a fact could not be undervalued in terms of its contributions toward solving a crime, it was not, in Fisher’s experience, of much use in the courtroom.

  “So he probably doesn’t have access to a car, but he’s being supplied with credit cards,” said Macklin after Fisher returned to the compound and they marked out the ATMs on a large map of the city. “He’s trying to disguise where he is, so he makes withdrawals from all over the place. He has the antidote for Sarin poisoning in his basement, where he’s obviously playing chemist, though we’re not sure why. He buys a lot of Clorox: That eliminates biological traces, you know. If he was playing with some sort of bacteria, that would kill it.”

  “It also cleans the toilet and whitens underwear,” said Fisher. “There’s a problem with connecting Faud to these ATM withdrawals.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They were made when he should have been at school.”

  “You don’t think he had perfect attendance, do you?”

  Fisher went to the computer where the task force’s information was fed. An investigator had spoken to his teachers and yes, Faud Daraghmeh had decent attendance. They hadn’t asked about particular dates. Fisher scrolled about halfway through the interview notes when he realized he’d missed the obvious.

  “The card and the money were delivered by the guy who made the cell calls,” Fisher told Macklin. “Look at the dates. They’re the same.”

  “So?”

  “How long would five hundred dollars last in New York?”

  Macklin shrugged. “Twenty minutes, if you spent it right.”

  Fisher pulled up Faud’s and then Mrs. DeGarmo’s phone records—they’d gone to the phone company and gotten incoming as well as outgoing—and tried to find a pattern. A number repeated every few weeks, but to the landlady’s phone.

  “We check these all out?” Fisher asked Macklin.

  “Not enough time to look at her numbers yet.”

  Fisher called the number, even though he figured it would be a relative. But the call wouldn’t go through. When they checked it, the number turned out to belong to a telephone booth near the subway station near the Washington Heights apartment.

  So the courier would call—preferably though not always from the phone booth—before going to Queens. The calls were always around four in the afternoon, after Faud got home and while Mrs. DeGarmo was watching the last of her “stories” before making dinner, at least as she had described her day to Fisher. Something had caused him to deviate from that schedule once—the time they had been able to trace originally—but this was the more usual routine.

  “You think he answered them in his apartment?” Macklin asked.

  “You’re starting to get ahold of this investigating thing,” Fisher told him. “Let’s look at some more phone numbers, okay?”

  The phone booth was in Staten Island, within walking distance of the ferry but not in the station. Four calls had been made on the same day as the calls to the As
toria apartment, though roughly three hours before those.

  “So your theory is, he calls ahead to make sure his people are there, then comes along?” said Macklin as they walked from the booth to a nearby pizza joint for dinner.

  “Probably that’s just a signal for them to meet him somewhere. If you’re just going to show up at the apartment, why call ahead?” said Fisher.

  “He’s a courier, then.”

  “Maybe, or maybe more important than that,” said Fisher. “He got off the ferry that one day the cell phone calls were made. The question is, why was he in Staten Island? But then again, that is one of the great unanswerable questions of all time.”

  After two slices of killer anchovy pizza, Fisher and Macklin took a walk, crisscrossing an area roughly eight blocks from the phone booth, looking for anything the courier or whoever had made the calls had been interested in. The area was half-commercial and half-residential, and while not the busiest in the city there were plenty of people on the streets. They didn’t see any mosques.

  While Staten Island was part of New York City, physically it was much closer to New Jersey, which loomed to the west and north and was visible over many of the buildings they passed. Three roadways connected to New Jersey; the only way to the rest of the city was either by the ferry or the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which led to Brooklyn.

  “Boat,” said Fisher.

  “Boat?”

  “It’s easier to get here by boat than by car.”

  “Okay. How does that help us?”

  “It doesn’t,” said Fisher.

  “A lot of docks and slips and stuff back that way, the other side of Front and Bay Streets.”

  “Yeah,” said Fisher, changing direction.

  “Where we going?”

  “Get some smokes. And a map of the train line.”

  “There’s a train on Staten Island?”

  The Staten Island train line ran down the eastern side of the island, from St. George to Tottenville. It ran far less often than the subways did, however. It connected to the ferry stop, and Fisher saw that it was unlikely their man had taken the train: With one exception, he made his phone calls before the train arrived at the terminal.