“This is a disgrace, Sam. I simply cannot believe the jury found that man not guilty!”
“New Yorkers. What do you expect?”
“There are plenty of countries where things like this never would have happened — where things like this never would have made it as far as a courtroom.”
“Wouldn’t have happened in Russia. Not in China either. And Israel? Hell, the prime minister calls the Shin Bet, and — bang! — case closed. Likewise the coffin.”
“Damnit, Sam, my predecessors had a lot more leeway in these situations than I do. They used…oh, what’s his name…you’ve brought him to my breakfast briefings. McKenna? McKinley? Something like that.”
“McKenzie. His name is Charlie McKenzie.”
“Right, that’s who I mean.”
So who could blame me for misconstruing the president’s wishes? Shit, it sounded like he wanted that fucking camel jockey iced. Turns out I was wrong. I admit it. Anyone can make a mistake. Everybody understands that.
Except Charlie. Charlie wasn’t a man who forgave and forgot.
Sooner or later he’s going to blow the whistle on me. So this should be an easy decision, right? Choose one from column A or one from column B. Either McKenzie goes or I do. No contest, and I should have had him taken care of two years ago.
The pilot’s voice came over the intercom: “We have begun our approach to the Albuquerque airport. Passengers please return your stewardesses to the upright position.” Sam’s eyes popped open. “That boy’s fired,” he growled to no one in particular.
He frowned out the window at Albuquerque’s shoe-leather landscape, Sandia Mountains crouched to the east, two inadequate highways crossing in the center of town, and traffic — as usual — backed up for miles.
Wheels touched the runway. The engine reversed. Sam’s jet, an Agency Falcon compliments of Claude, slowed, taxiing toward the general aviation terminal. A ground crew from Kirtland AFB was already trotting forward to service the VIP plane.
Charlie’s white and blue Citation was parked off to the left. Charlie himself was standing in the hatch. As Sam’s plane braked to a halt, the damned old dinosaur walked down the stairs and onto the tarmac. No surprise, he wasn’t limping.
Unfastening his seatbelt, Sam waved two secret service agents out of sight, then stepped through the open door. He forced himself to smile. Being from Washington, he’d had lots of practice. “Charlie, come on up. I’ll pour you a drink.”
Standing a wing’s length from Sam’s plane, Charlie shook his head. “No, Sam, I think it would be better if you came over to my plane. Less probability of bugs. No probability of armed goons hiding in the toilet.”
Sam laughed. He’d had plenty of practice at that too. “Of course I have bodyguards. They come with the territory. But I don’t have any recording equipment. And I can assure you my bar is better stocked than yours. Come on, Charlie, let’s try to be friends.”
Charlie’s eyes went into that damned mule-headed squint of his — the one that said: do it my way or else! “Sam, I don’t have time for games. Haul your pudgy butt over to my plane.”
Sam felt his blood rise. Doubtless that was what his antagonist wanted. “I don’t take orders from you, Charlie. In this country, I only take orders from one man.”
Graceful as Fred Astaire, smooth and fluid in every gesture, Charlie swept a Smith & Wesson .40 caliber automatic from behind his back, took aim at Sam’s tires, and emptied a fifteen-round clip. Rubber shredded, air percussed, the plane sagged left. Jacking out the magazine and slapping in a new one, he frowned. “I don’t want to go to your plane, Sam. Your plane is broken.”
“Jesus!” Sam was frozen with shock. “You are totally fucking insane.”
Charlie drew a bead on an underwing fuel tank. “In fact, your plane looks unsafe. It might catch fire any second now.”
Sam cursed himself. The secret to conducting a successful negotiation was to let your opponent win the first point — a token freebie to make the other party feel good. Waving off a clutch of Air Force technicians and ordering his bodyguard to stay put, Sam hustled down the stairs. All right, McKenzie, he thought. As long as you’ve got that tape, we’ll do it your way. But once I’ve got my hands on it, the terms of our contract will be subject to renegotiation.
Charlie didn’t holster his pistol until Sam was safely inside the Citation, the hatch securely latched.
Taking a seat toward the front of the plane, Sam looked daggers as Charlie toyed with his notebook computer. He seemed to be tapping into a wireless Internet connection — what did they call it? Wi-Fi or something? Who knew? Who cared? He snapped, “Can I get a drink in this rent-a-wreck?” instantly regretting the exasperation in his voice.
“The bar’s at the back. Fix me a gin and tonic while you’re at it.” Now Charlie was tweaking some sort of green computer mouse left and right.
Grudgingly, although not showing it, Sam slouched to the drinks cabinet, poured himself an amber tumbler of Laphroaig and, for Charlie, a G&T that was more T than anything else. He returned to the front of the plane, slapping Charlie’s drink in front of him. “Okay, Charlie, let’s talk.”
Charlie tapped a few computer keys, then took a seat across the aisle. “Okay, let’s.”
“You first.” Oh hell, the sonofabitch is smirking.
“Gladly. I know everything. Whirlwind, DefCon, Dr. Sangin Wing. All of it.”
“Bullshit.” Charlie started to make a comeback. Shaking his head with artful sorrow, Sam cut him off. “Charlie, do you think I’m an amateur? Come on, give me some credit. I know how your little con game works. You have a pissant collection of discombobulated factoids. You dribble them out one by one. The sucker sees a few crumbs and thinks you have the cake. So he starts spilling his guts. Every indiscreet word he drops, you pick up and throw back at him. Then, by God, the poor bastard is convinced you know even more than he does. Right, Charlie? That’s the scam you’re trying to run on me, isn’t it?”
Smiling, Charlie opened his palms wide. “Ya got me, officer! Guilty as charged.” Then he laughed. “Or I would be if I didn’t know that Whirlwind is a superconducting material that activates at, oh, probably around minus twenty or thirty degrees Celsius. That’s the temperature aircraft encounter above thirty thousand feet. By aircraft I mean fighter bombers, of course. So tell me, Sam, is this a crumb or is it a cake?”
Sam felt his stomach sink. “Keep going.”
“Big problem at the Department of Defense. A while back — at the end of the last administration if I remember correctly — the British discovered they could use modified cellular radio signals to detect Stealth aircraft. Siemens and BAe Systems are building prototypes. Call it ‘Celldar.’ Of course you guys kept the story out of the press. After all, you had the Viper coming up for appropriation, and didn’t want to jeopardize yet another overpriced weapons boondoggle. However, the truth of the matter is that any country with the infrastructure and the engineering smarts can spot Stealth planes. That’s why you need something new, something better. You need Stealth Two, the next generation, and that’s what Whirlwind is.”
Sam nodded, praying silently that all Charlie knew was what he’d just said.
The Lord wasn’t listening.
“Right now, a Stealth bomber works its magic mostly because of its geometry and because the plane is coated with a special polymer. That’s okay, but it isn’t perfect. If the enemy tunes his radar just right or uses the cell phone gimmick, he can lock an antiaircraft missile on your tailpipe. But suppose you armored your bomber with a superconductor. Ah-ha! Different story. That would work perfectly. The radar signal would zip in one end and out the other. Your plane would be totally transparent. From an electrical standpoint, shielding a plane with a superconductor is the very real world equivalent of a Klingon cloaking device, and thank you very much, Captain James Tiberius Kirk. Right, Sam? Am I right?”
“You’re right.” Sam had come to one of those extremely rare moments in his
life when truth was the only option. He didn’t like the experience. “We call it ‘S2’ — S-Squared, Super-Stealth.”
“I bet you call it super for another reason — superconductors. Interesting thing about that stuff — it’s not only invisible to radar, it’s also immune to EM warfare, to high-energy electromagnetic weapons. I think we’ve already established that the Department of Defense is hot to trot with EM. Or it would be if it weren’t for the ugly fact that there’s no way of predicting how a death ray will propagate once you zap it into the skies. Big problem there. Fire an EM microwave cannon and you’re as likely to toast your own aircraft as the enemy’s.” Charlie grinned a Cheshire cat’s grin. “How am I doing, Sam? So far so good? This is one hundred percent cake I’m feeding you, right, no crumbs at all?”
Sam wanted to grind his teeth. “Nice try, Charlie. Don’t expect me to confirm a word of this…this hypothesis of yours.”
“It’s no hypothesis, and you know it. Coat your warcraft with a superconductor, and you’ve got a squadron that is not only invisible to the enemy but that also can burn the bad guys’ planes out of the skies without risking any harm to themselves.”
Sam forced himself to keep his mouth closed. He didn’t intend to give the bastard an inch.
“So, Sambo, am I right or am I right? These are not little factoids. This is the straight scoop on a major scientific breakthrough. Just like I said, I know it all. Hell, I’m even willing to bet that the Whirlwind material — probably a stable fluoroargenate doped with quantum dot crystals — works because you’ve got buckyball nanotubes woven through it to act as waveguides.”
Stunned, Sam blurted, “How did you find that out? Damnit, that information is so highly restricted —” Realizing he’d been outmaneuvered, Sam snapped his mouth closed in midsentence.
Charlie leered. “I didn’t find out until just this very second, for which you have my undying gratitude. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Sam. I was pretty sure I’d figured it out. All you did was confirm it for me.”
“You’re just guessing.”
“Sorry, Sam, but I do not guess. What I do is Dumpster-dive in the data, then extrapolate and deduce. Want to know what I extrapolated from? I’ll tell you: Dr. Sangin Wing’s Ph.D. thesis was on superconductors. I’ve got a copy on my computer. Guess what its title is? ‘Low Temperature Properties of Buckminsterfullerines.’”
Sam felt a red moon rising. His temper was up, a rumbling in the beast’s throat, claws scraping at the bars. Unleashing that hungry predator, letting it freely feast and glut and gorge would feel good, damned good, as good as sex, and maybe better. But he didn’t dare. It was exactly what Charlie wanted: Sam ranting and raging and saying things he shouldn’t. Nonetheless hard words were irresistible, a little hors d’ouvre to feed an inner animal. “Goddamn you to hell!”
“Not likely. I’m on the side of the angels. In fact, Sam, for once in our lives we both might be. I know as well as you do that if an enemy gets his hands on your Super-Stealth material — and my bet is that the ingot Kolodenkova swiped is a trial run of a compound that’s damned difficult to manufacture — then he’d be able to leapfrog a decade’s worth of scientific research. He wouldn’t catch up with us, but he’d be a lot closer. To catch up, he’d need Kolodenkova’s computer disk.” Charlie pulled a beige square out of his pocket. “This disk.” Sam snatched at it. Charlie laughed and put it out of sight. “Uh-huh. I thought so. This has got all the good stuff on it — chemical formula, performance parameters, algorithms, all that and more.”
“Give me the disk, Charlie! Give it to me now!”
“There’s a price.”
“There always is.” Sam did his level best to look accommodating. “What did you have in mind?”
“Presidential immunity for Irina Kolodenkova.”
Sam couldn’t believe his ears. For a moment he couldn’t even speak, and that was an unprecedented experience. Finally he managed to gasp, “You’re joking.”
“I’m dead serious.”
Sam shook his head and spoke very, very softly. “Charlie, that bitch broke into a top secret installation. She stole the most important technology since the A-bomb. God only knows what she saw while she was doing it. God only knows what secrets she has locked in her head. And you want the president to let her off? You want a woman who knows what she knows going home to Russia? Are you out of your mind?”
“She won’t go home. I’m working on her. She’s got some psychological vulnerabilities. I’m pretty sure I can persuade her —”
“No! Abso-fucking-lutely no! You got that, Charlie boy? N. O. Spells ‘no!’ This is not a negotiation.” Not now it wasn’t. Things had gone beyond the point of being negotiable. “We are not bargaining. There is no give-and-take. A compromise will not be reached. Capice? I’ve paid you good money, big money, to do a job. I’ve promised you a presidential pardon. We have a deal. Now all I want is for you to deliver the goods. Numero uno, that disk. Numero duo, the Whirlwind material. Numero whatever comes next, Kolodenkova. After that, your job is done, and I’ll handle the rest.”
“The rest being,” Charlie whispered, “killing her?”
You and her both, if it can be arranged. “I didn’t say that. But we both know the answer.”
“Suppose I decide not to let you.”
If she stays on the loose, the Chinese will freak. And if they freak, I might as well kill myself. “Then I’ll move up my Friday deadline — just take my cell phone here and call Johan —”
Charlie seized Sam’s arm, wrenching it down painfully and sending the cell phone skittering across the aisle. A second later it was shards of plastic and silicon beneath his heel. “Don’t screw with me, Sam. Just do not screw with me.”
Sam tilted his head back, giving Charlie a long, appraising stare. Goddamn you, McKenzie. I need you inside the tent pissing out, not outside pissing in. At least until Schmidt burnbags your fucking video. After that, I don’t need you at all. “Okay, Charlie, calm down. Look, we both know what this is really about.” He put on his best schmoozer’s smile. “It’s your pardon, right? That’s what it all boils down to. Kolodenkova is just a bargaining chip. Okay, Charlie, okay, I understand. Honest to God, I do.”
“You don’t understand a thing.”
Sam didn’t like the undertone in Charlie’s voice. He spoke faster. “I believe we can work something out. Maybe get you a more equitable arrangement than the one we agreed to. After I returned to the White House yesterday, I began thinking about your situation. No question, you have a legitimate grievance. The truth of the matter is that justice was not done. You have every right to be upset. So what I did, Charlie, what I did was I went and had a long heart-to-heart with the boss. I did it for you. Me personally, on my own initiative. And guess what? The president wasn’t totally negative. While we were talking, a thought crossed his mind —”
“Short trip.”
“I’ll ignore that. The thought was this: if you retrieve Whirlwind, you will have done the nation a service that should be rewarded sooner than three years from now. That’s what he said. And as God is my witness, he means it. If you do the job, find Whirlwind and Kolodenkova by Friday, you’ll receive your pardon. And I mean immediately. This is good news, correct? You don’t have to wait for me to take office. The president will sign it for you the minute Kolodenkova is in a body bag. And this is an unconditional offer. No terms and no strings. All the president asks is that you make a public apology for the Kahlid Hassan affair, and —”
You could almost hear Charlie’s temper explode. All at once he was towering, dark as a thunderhead, God’s wrath incarnate, lightning crackling in every word. “Get off my airplane!” A volcano in eruption, fire from the skies. “Do it now! If you don’t, they’ll need a dustpan to scoop you up!”
The irony was not lost on Sam. Two hotheads, one trying to infuriate the other, but guess who it was who’d lost his cool? He couldn’t resist making it worse. “Oh, calm down. I’m offering you
a reasonable, no, downright generous —”
Charlie’s fists were balled tight, punches ready to be thrown. “An apology! You want an apology! I have nothing to apologize for! The only thing I did was follow — against my better judgement — some lard-assed White House bureaucrat’s orders because I thought…I thought, they came straight from the president…because I thought I had presidential immunity…because I thought I’d been told the truth…because I thought I was doing something honorable for my country! Do you think I should apologize for that? Do you, you damned buffoon?”
He grabbed Sam’s arm, yanked him from his seat, and frog-marched him to the plane’s door. “I’m owed a pardon, Sam, and I’m owed more than that. It is not my intention to apologize to get what’s due me.”
It was happening too fast. Charlie was a human hurricane. Sam couldn’t collect his thoughts, couldn’t think of a way to pacify him, and there was no resisting the almost supernatural force of his rage. He tried to say something, anything to salvage the situation. The words wouldn’t come. He wasn’t sure he wanted them to anyway. He stumbled as Charlie stormed him down the stairs and onto the tarmac. And then, finally, he found his voice, and found himself saying what he’d been wanting to say all along. Even as he spoke, he knew that his self-control was slipping, slipping, slipping away. “Fuck you, buddy! Just remember we have a deal!”
“To hell with your deal, and to hell with you!”
Two secret service agents burst through the door of Sam’s plane. Both gripped their pistols with practiced skill; both drew beads on Charlie; both slowly began to squeeze.
Sam shouted an order: “Stand down those guns.”
Charlie kicked him sprawling onto the runway. A Smith & Wesson appeared in his hand for a second time. For a second time he emptied its clip. And, for a second time, federal property exploded into ribbons. Its recently replaced wheel shot to shreds, Sam’s plane tilted sickeningly.
Sam looked up from where he lay. Charlie, blood in his eyes, towered over him. A thin wisp of blue smoke swirled from his gun barrel. “You computer-illiterate chowderhead. Remember that little green ball I plugged into my Macintosh while you were fixing the drinks? It’s a digital camera. It uploaded our entire conversation to the Internet. If any harm comes to Irina, any at all, I’ll release it to the press. Every damned word. Stealth, Super-Stealth, EM weapons, and the national security advisor engineering the murder of a twenty-four-year-old girl.”
Whirlwind Page 19
