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 telephoto 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 rain-water. 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, duckwalked beneath the fence, darted low from boulder to spiky desert shrub to plump barrel cactus.
And into secret space.
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 be 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, “Computerniks. They never sleep.”
She nodded. Of course, it was so obvious.
To the right, a double door opened to a laboratory and rows of work-benches — 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-megapixel 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? PowerPoint? 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 PowerPoint 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 — dimethyl 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.
His smile was broad, broader than she had ever seen it. “This,” he beamed, “this means we are not turtles much longer!”
Turtles. Irina pursed her lips. Russians and Americans alike used the term. It was no compliment.
Turtles waddle slowly with their heads turned to the sky. Thus the derisive nickname given the lowest of low-level field agents, the ones who roam empty highways bordering secret bases by night, their tedious mission to take fuzzy photographs of experimental aircra
ft so secret that they are flown only after sunset.
It was an apprentice’s job — easy training for beginners, and safe in these days of detente, old enemies become wary allies in their pursuit of terrorists. Let the turtles forage for low-level intelligence; it’s cheaper than a weapons inspection treaty and requires no tendentious ratification by senate or parliament…
What, she asked herself, could Dominik have found that will elevate us from the lowly ranks of the turtles?
He had his hand on a matte-brown box almost two meters long, a meter wide, a half meter deep. His cheeks were glowing, and his eyes sparkled with triumph. He’d found something important, she knew he had.
Should she tell him about the disk? No. Later, I will tell him later. He is excited now, too full of himself for having accomplished an espionage coup of his own. “What is it?”
Anxious orders tumbled out of his mouth. “No time to talk! We’ve got to get this out of here! Come on, help me carry it. Grab that end. Be careful, it’s heavy.”
Very heavy. About thirty kilos. Irina grunted as she lifted her end.
“They’ll have their backup generator online soon. Let’s move!”
Harsh, blinding, actinic, the lights sparked on before they reached the fence. Dominik and Irina were standing targets illuminated by the fires of frozen suns.
Dominik died then. A .50 caliber machine gun mounted on a Humvee served as the machinery of his death. Its slugs shredded his body, flensed it to shining shards hurled helter-skelter across an empty landscape.
Irina lay prone, screaming surrender. Bullets tore the air above her head, aimed not at her, but elsewhere. She forced herself to look up. Directly in front of her, not five meters away, the deer hung on a fence alive again with killing electricity. From a distance, from the machine gunner’s position, the animal must have looked like a man trying to climb the wires. A river of bullets exploded into the poor dead creature’s carcass.
Although dead, it danced.
Machine-gun rounds snapped another fence link. And another. A strand of wire, alive with twenty thousand volts of death, whipped in front of Irina’s eyes. It coiled and crackled as it reached hungrily for her face. She had to run. She could not. The air above her shrieked with bullets. The wire wove back and forth, a cobra’s sway, the true and actual incarnation of mortality.
Paralysis: unable to move, unable to breathe, she could only watch. The wire darted toward her one last time, as if conscious and consciously straining to touch her. Then — as though disappointed — it recoiled, sliding into that freshly rain-washed gully beneath the fence, and into the water it contained.
Lightning split the sky. The backup generator exploded.
Irina manhandled thirty kilos of god - knows - what under the fence, over the ridge, down to the Jeep.
Bullets shattered her rear windshield. She turned the ignition, thrusting the accelerator down as hard as she could.
And she drove.
She stopped only once — the darkened parking lot of a sun-bleached motel — to abandon the Jeep, shift her overnight bag and a heavy brown box into the rear of a tourist’s Volvo station wagon, cross its ignition wires, and flee back into the night.
Irina drove.
Airborne in Marine Corps One, the president’s personal whirlybird, Sam settled his ample rear end in his boss’s even more ample seat. Very comfy. Under normal circumstances, he would be a contented man.
Not today.
Bad enough that the National Security Agency was dithering umma, umma, umma about the whereabouts of twenty million dollars. Worse, pretty soon now Sam would be discussing Whirlwind with the last man on earth who should know about it. But worst of all was a mess so colossally disastrous that only a conceited sonofabitch named McKenzie could clean it up.
Not merely the best man for the job, the evil old bastard was the only man for the job. Everyone else with his qualifications was off chasing turbaned terrorists through third world cesspits. The only available agents were desk jockeys and raw recruits — none of them qualified for a high-stakes operation like retrieving Whirlwind.
Which left Sam with a single pain-in-the-ass choice.
He was second-generation Agency, was Charlie, the son of one of Wild Bill Donovan’s handpicked buccaneers. During his long and piratical career, Charlie’s old man made only one mistake: trusting Henry Kissinger. Now, a quarter of a century after leaving Washington, that one time national security advisor traveled everywhere in the company of two muscle-boy bodyguards. Sam wondered if Henry the K was still afraid of Charlie. If he had any sense he would be.
His daddy’s boy, Sam thought, in every awful regard. Obnoxiously intelligent. Braver than lions. Righteous beyond the bounds of reason.
Righteous? Self-righteous is more like it. Charlie was the last of that galling generation who actually believed in something, the sort of loose cannon you never wanted to see in Washington — a fucking patriot.
Shit!
Sam looked out the window. The capitol dome was barely visible, haze-shrouded and disappearing in the distance. He was over the greenbelt now. Up ahead, Chesapeake Bay sparkled in the sun. Under other circumstances, he might have thought the view from five thousand feet to be pretty, maybe even beautiful. However he couldn’t enjoy it — not knowing that his worst enemy was waiting for him, and, no question about it, licking his chops.
Pretty soon now, Sam would be feathering down at Charlie’s lair, and the very idea of it made him ball his fists. McKenzie had twenty-five acres, a great old rambling estate he’d inherited from his father. But that’s all he had. Fired without a pension, he could barely pay his property tax. If everything had turned out the way Sam hoped, Charlie would have been forced to sell the house and retire to Florida.
Or maybe Arizona. Arizona would be better. It was farther away.
Only now Charlie had what he’d never bothered to acquire during his career: a nest egg. Unless the NSA got lucky (smart was not an issue; smart wasn’t even in the running when Charlie was involved), that nest egg would support him for the rest of his miserable life.
And Charlie, the man who already knew too much, would be within driving distance of the Washington press corps for the rest of his days.
Sam pursed his lips like a man who had tasted something sour.
The deal shouldn’t have gone down like this. When Charlie got caught with his pants down, he should have been covered with a blanket, put in a box, and freighted far, far away.
Farther than Arizona, actually.
Trouble was, you couldn’t do that with Charlie. He had too many Friends In High Places, and, yes, the capital letters were appropriate. Reagan — to pick the most egregious example — simply loved him. “I like,” Dutch had mused, “having someone in this town who has the guts to disagree with me.” To which he’d quickly added, “Although one is enough.”
Powerful friends — they stood by Charlie to the end. They weren’t able to keep him out of prison, but they did see to it that he got as sweet a deal as possible under the circumstances — circumstances that were, let’s face it, pretty fucking dire.
It had gone like clockwork. Charlie should have gotten away scot-free.
Oh, sure, there was the usual journalistic whining. The New York Times was aghast, The Washington Post was horrified, and the foreign press vilified America as the Wild West complete with vigilante justice, lynch law, and all that bullshit. So what else is new?
What else turned out to be a digital camera, fresh out of the box, sitting next to one Nathaniel Whinston, the driver of a car who chanced to be in the right place at the right time. Mr. Whinston, an actuary with an entrepreneurial streak, put his snapshots up for auction. NBC submitted the high bid, but Whinston sold the photos to Fox News. Fox promised him he’d personally get forty-five seconds on-screen as part of the package.
What American could resist?
Whinston’s pictures were garbage, taken at night, and from too far away. Moreover, Charlie had bee
n mostly backlit. No one could be certain it was him.
Which didn’t stop a talking-head media whore from pontificating, just outside the bounds of actionable libel, “The suspect appears to bear a slight resemblance to controversial Central Intelligence deputy operations director Charles McKenzie. Perhaps the police would be well advised to look for a man of Mr. McKenzie’s stature and build….”
The president freaked.
And Charlie, in the time-honored tradition of Washington, was well and truly a lamb for the slaughter.
Almost.
Somewhere along the line it was discovered that he was under heavy medication for an impacted wisdom tooth, and the special prosecutor couldn’t get the dentist to budge from his story. Then too, according to Charlie’s credit card records, he’d been drinking heavily that night, even though no one at McCann’s Bar on Lexington Avenue had any recollection of seeing him. Add to this the right kind of lawyerly spin, and behold: a miracle! Charlie McKenzie is alchemically transformed from a run-amock CIA agent to a pitiable victim deranged by pain, confused by drugs, befuddled by alcohol, and inflamed with a righteous passion for justice.
The Senate investigating committee bought it. So did the judge — upon whom, no doubt, Charlie’s heavyweight friends leaned heavily.
So when Charlie copped a plea, his honor wrist-slapped him with eighteen months at a minimum-security Club Fed.
Charlie thought he wouldn’t have to pull the time. Charlie thought he’d been promised presidential immunity. Charlie thought wrong.
He served out his entire sentence quietly, and didn’t say a single word, not even when his wife died. That’s when Sam started to squirm. Charlie’s silence was — no other word for it — ominous.
Now on his way to his first meeting with the man in two years, Sam ground his teeth. He’s known it, he thought, known all along that sometime, somewhere, something would go wrong — not the kind of something that you solve with an ordinary black work guy, because those punks are a dime a dozen. Rather the kind of something that nobody but evil goddamned Charlie can handle because nobody but evil goddamned Charlie can burrow into an enemy’s mind the way he does.
Whirlwind Page 2
