by Dale Brown
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
“Who are you going to propose to lead this joint task force?”
“My aide, Army Command Sergeant Major Raymond Jefferson.”
“Not an officer?”
“Jefferson is the best of the best in special-operations fieldwork, Mr. President,” Chamberlain said. “He’s led both Ranger and Delta Force teams in missions all around the world for almost twenty years. He’s tough, he’s got lots of special-ops experience, and he’s itching to get out of Washington and back into the real world.”
“Who will command?”
“I picked an intelligence agent from the FBI, and I thought of using the officer that developed that manned robot contraption as a cocommander. I’ll meet with both of them this morning at the demonstration.”
“Putting the FBI and the military together like this will be like mixing gasoline and air: Do it right and it produces horsepower; do it wrong, and it…”
“Creates a big explosion. I know, sir,” Chamberlain said. “I’ll make it work.”
“Keep me advised, Robert. And thanks for the hard work.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
Just before he reached the door, the President called out, “Robert?”
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“What is it with you and Victoria?” he asked. “You know she doesn’t like being called ‘Vicki’ but you do it anyway, and it just creates tension. You two seem to be butting heads constantly, and I’m starting to feel more like a referee than the chief executive. What’s up with that?”
“I don’t like it when folks slam ideas before they’ve had a chance to study them, that’s all, sir—especially my ideas,” Chamberlain replied. “Victoria Collins is a political animal. She’s not interested in real solutions, just political expediency.”
“Maybe she’s just giving advice. That’s what she gets paid for.”
“She gets paid to run the White House staff,” Chamberlain said. “She acts as an adviser, yes, but her primary job is to get things done. When I get a directive from the President of the United States, it’s an order, not a suggestion. You directed the White House staff to lay the groundwork for you to ask for a congressional declaration of war on terrorism. It didn’t mean list all the ways it can’t or shouldn’t be done, but to do it.”
“Is that the way you did things at TransGlobal Energy, Robert?”
“Actually, sir, that’s what I learned at TGE—unfortunately, I learned it too late,” Chamberlain admitted. “I learned there are those who lead, those who follow, and those who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. I thought Harold Chester Kingman was a leader, and I was happy and proud to be his lieutenant. I found out soon enough that he is a morally bankrupt, totally corrupt, completely uncaring, and utterly emotionless bag of shit. I became his fall guy and was disgraced simply because I made the mistake of following him when I should have been voicing my opinions and standing up for what I believed to be right.”
“You’re referring to the Russian oil deal?”
“Yes, sir. Kingman had an opportunity to unite TGE with one of the world’s largest oil producers and build an alliance that would span half the globe. I believe he could have been instrumental in uniting Russia and the U.S. politically and economically too, similar to the alliance between the U.S. and Japan, for which we would have been recognized for decades. Instead, he turned the deal upside down. He fired the entire Russian board and top officers of the company, then dared to threaten the Russian government by withholding their own oil and natural gas if they didn’t cooperate with the takeover. When I stepped out of line and argued against the move, I was fired as well.”
“That was years ago. You still sound upset.”
“It was a harsh lesson, sir,” Chamberlain said stonily. “Harold Kingman just doesn’t fire someone—he destroys them, just to make sure they don’t rise up against him some time in the future. I lost millions in stock options. I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight off corruption, embezzlement, fraud, and conspiracy charges that were all frivolous and unproven, and now I’m having to pay thousands more to keep my countersuits alive against TGE’s constant delays, countersuits, and slanderous attacks in the media. In the meantime, my wife left me—amid allegations of adultery, all of which were not true and completely baseless—my kids disowned me, and I became a pariah in the eyes of every corporation in the world.”
“I know the story, Robert—but what does it have to do with Victoria Collins?”
Chamberlain paused, then averted his eyes before replying: “Maybe…maybe I see some of the ‘play it safe’ attitude that I had at TGE in her sometimes, the attitude that ruined my corporate career. Maybe I’m still angry at myself for my indecisiveness and lack of courage, and I take it out on others that I perceive as being the same.”
“You have nothing to prove here, Robert,” the President said, getting to his feet, walking around the desk, and putting a hand on his National Security Adviser’s shoulder. “You have been a tough, courageous, no-nonsense, and dedicated adviser and confidant to me and this administration since the first day you set foot in the White House. TransGlobal Energy’s and the corporate world’s loss is my gain.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. That means a lot.”
The President stepped back and seated himself at his desk again, signaling the end of the brotherly role and the resumption of the chief executive role. “You have nothing to prove, Robert—which means take the damned chip off your shoulder and start being a member of the team rather than the ideological taskmaster,” he said sternly. “You are an important man in my personal and professional life, but you are just one of many important persons around here. Start thinking of ways to build bridges instead of walls; stop torpedoing the other staff members in this office. I expect you to share your ideas with the others before you present them to me and get as much of the conflicts ironed out so we don’t waste a lot of time in bickering and confusion when you walk in here looking for a decision. Are we clear on this?”
“Yes, sir,” Chamberlain responded. The President looked down at the edited speech, signaling an end to their conversation. “Thank you, Mr. President,” Chamberlain muttered, and walked out.
I serve at the pleasure of the President, Chamberlain reminded himself as he headed back to his office to get ready for the visit to Andrews Air Force Base—and right now, the President wasn’t too pleased with him.
Facility H-18, Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
A short time later
“With all due respect to the Brazilians, I think they should get their heads out of their asses and try a little harder,” Special Agent Kelsey D. DeLaine said into her secure cell phone. She kept an eye on the partially open warehouse door for any sign of activity, but so far nothing was happening. Inside the empty building there were only a few Air Force Security Forces guards and one lone guy in camouflage battle dress uniform standing near a high-tech-looking Humvee. His hair was a little long, he was skinny and white-skinned, and he had horn-rimmed glasses strapped to his head with a black elastic band. If he was a military guy, he was definitely the geekiest-looking one she had ever seen. “There’s an attack on a TransGlobal facility in Brazil on the same day, almost the same hour, as the attack in Houston, and no one sees a connection?”
“Kel, there have been a total of nineteen attacks against TransGlobal or affiliated companies in South America in the past year,” her associate, Special Agent Ramiro “Rudy” Cortez, Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on the other end of the connection. “All of them involved small dams and power-generating plants, and all used only homemade explosives. Strictly small-time. I’m not sure there’s a connection.”
“Rudy, we can’t start to piece it together until we get more information from our ‘friends’ in the Policia Militar do Estado, but they seem to be dragging their feet on our requests,” DeLaine said impatiently. She had long brown hair, but it was put up no
w off her collar, which irritated and aggravated her to no end—she hated the feel of cold air on the back of her neck. Her black Reebok power-walking shoes were in her bureau car outside, and after standing in heels for the past twenty minutes she wished she’d brought them along. She shifted the Glock 29 pistol on her right hip for the umpteenth time, trying to find a comfortable position for the compact weapon, and wished that the bureau would reinstate the option for agents to carry their weapon in a purse in nonhostile environments.
“They’re doing the best they can, Kel,” Cortez said. “Their country is as big as ours but nowhere near as connected. We only made the request yesterday. My, we’re cranky this morning, aren’t we?”
“The eight A.M. meeting hasn’t happened yet, the place is empty, no one but some grungy-looking army gopher is here, and my feet are killing me. What do we know about this Brazilian group, GAMMA?”
“Brazilian environmental and human rights activist organization. Targets multinational petroleum and energy-producing corporations in general but appears to be going after TransGlobal Energy Corporation assets more and more in particular.”
“I want to know every detail possible about GAMMA,” Kelsey said. “If the PME won’t give the information to the FBI office in Rio de Janeiro, we should send a request to the CIA Americas desk for support. And we should start pulling data on Brazilian nuclear material and weapons research programs. Brazil could be a source for bomb-making materials, if not the actual weapons themselves.”
“As long as you’re asking for the impossible, why don’t you get me a sleepover with Jennifer Lopez?” Cortez quipped. “Kel, we’ve got every agent in our office pulling sixteen-hour days since the Houston attack. Everyone is concentrating on how a backpack nuke got into the U.S. undetected. No one is looking at Brazilian ecoterrorist groups yet—we’re looking at the more credible perps, like al Qaeda, missing Russian tactical nuclear weapons, the Chinese…”
“Then get a clerk or records officer to check—it’s all computer work,” Kelsey said. “They can pass the info to you and I’ll brief the chief and get the extra manpower if we need it. But we’re just doing surveillance—it’s not fieldwork, not yet.”
“Kelsey, you’ve already pressed every clerk, records person, secretary, janitor, and doorman into doing research for us,” her partner said. “You’ve even gotten clerks in other agencies doing work for us, which I’m sure is a breach of security. At the very least you’re going to owe a lot of lunches.”
“Ramiro…”
“Uh oh, the ethnic first name—discussion must be over,” Rudy said. “Okay, I’ll get on it. Any idea what your meeting is about, and why they scheduled it for an empty building at Andrews?”
“This is not just a ‘building,’ Rudy—the Redskins could play here if they laid down some artificial turf and put up goalposts,” Kelsey said. “I have no idea. I’m hoping they’re going to fly in a witness that’ll break the Houston bombing wide open for us, but I’m not that lucky.”
“Probably has to do with that memo you sent to the director a few months back,” Cortez surmised. “Didn’t you mention something about nuclear weapons then?”
“I talked about a memo I wrote based on reports from our London and Warsaw offices about Russian tactical battlefield nuclear warheads being converted to ‘backpack’ weapons,” Kelsey said. “It was a collection of reports from our bureaus and from European sources spanning three years and three continents, and I had no concrete conclusions—I thought my office should start an analysis and try to come up with some definite links. I thought the report got circular-filed.”
“Obviously after Houston, folks noticed.”
Just then she noticed the warehouse door opening, and several security officers taking positions inside and out. “I should find out soon—someone’s arriving. Talk to you later.”
“Break a leg.”
Kelsey closed her phone, then straightened her shoulders as three dark stretch limousines approached. The warehouse doors closed, with guards both inside and out. The limos pulled over to Kelsey…and she was at first surprised, then shocked, at the figures that stepped out of those cars: the director of the FBI, JeffreyF. Lemke, from the first; Secretary of Homeland Security, Donna Calhoun, from the second; and the President’s National Security Adviser, Robert Chamberlain, from the third.
“Kelsey, good to see you again,” Director Lemke said, holding out his hand. She shook hands. Although she worked at FBI headquarters in Washington, she’d attended just a few meetings with the director and maybe said six words to him in two and a half years. Jeffrey Lemke was a former FBI agent turned federal prosecutor and politician, first as a state attorney general and then as a two-term congressman from Oklahoma before being appointed FBI director. Kelsey liked him and thought he was an effective director, although he looked and spoke more like a politician than an FBI agent—which was probably a good thing.
Lemke turned and motioned beside him. “Secretary Calhoun, I’d like to introduce Special Agent Kelsey DeLaine, deputy director of our intelligence office in Washington and one of our best analysts. Agent DeLaine, Secretary of Homeland Security Calhoun.”
“Nice to see you again, Madam Secretary,” Kelsey said. “We met about two months ago when I briefed you and your staff on my report on backpack nuclear devices.” The pain on Donna Calhoun’s face, which Kelsey remembered seeing in a press conference on TV just last night and was obviously still with her, deepened to a look of stony agony. Kelsey meant her remark to make the secretary feel more comfortable with her, but she saw that it only made her sadder. Calhoun nodded in greeting but said nothing and stepped away to speak with Chamberlain.
“Sorry about that, sir. I wasn’t thinking. I remember she lost some family in Houston.”
“Don’t try to make polite chitchat here, DeLaine,” Lemke said pointedly. “This is not a damned cocktail party.”
“Yes, sir.” She was not accustomed to being admonished like that, even by the director, especially after recognizing her gaff and apologizing for it, but she tried not to let her indignation show. “Can you tell me what is going on?”
“We’ll all find out together,” the FBI director responded woodenly. The military officers remained apart from the civilians, talking between themselves at first and then with Chamberlain as he approached.
Kelsey found it odd that the lone guy by the Humvee had stayed by himself as all this brass arrived, so when curiosity finally overcame her, she excused herself from Lemke and stepped over to him. The guy didn’t look like a GI at all: his hair was rumpled and a bit longer than the other military guys in the hangar wore theirs; his boots looked as if they hadn’t been polished in eons; and he had a slight stubble as if he hadn’t shaved in a couple days. He was wearing crisp, new-looking military fatigues but there was no rank or insignia on them—they were obviously borrowed or just recently purchased. A very attractive dark-haired woman in a green olive drab T-shirt and black fatigue trousers was sitting behind the wheel with a headset on—she looked more military than the guy did, but she didn’t seem military. Neither of them displayed any ID. “Excuse me,” she said. “I saw you over here all by yourself and thought I’d introduce myself. I’m Kelsey…”
“Special Agent Kelsey DeLaine, deputy director of intelligence, FBI, Washington,” the officer said. “I’m Major Jason Richter, ITB, Army Research Lab, Fort Polk, Louisiana.”
“You’re in the army?” Kelsey asked, glancing up at his unkempt hair.
“We’ve had a long couple of days,” Richter said a little sheepishly. “This is Dr. Ariadna Vega, assistant director.”
“ITB?”
“Infantry Transformation BattleLab. We try to think of ways to make infantry soldiers more lethal.”
“Sounds interesting—and a little scary.” She extended a hand, and he shook it. He seemed a little nervous—his hand was cold and clammy, and there was a slight sheen of perspiration on his upper lip. His handshake matched his appearance—he see
med more like a computer nerd than an army officer. But in the intelligence field she learned that very often appearances were deceiving. He would look a lot cuter, she decided, if he weren’t wearing those geeky glasses. She shook hands with Vega as well. “Nice to meet you. How do you know who I am?”
“Because we’re monitoring all conversations taking place inside this building and all movement within a mile,” he replied.
“You are? How are you doing that?”
“Surveillance units, both inside and outside.”
Kelsey motioned to the Air Force guards. “You mean those guys?”
“No. Unmanned probes.” He pointed toward the roof. “I don’t think you can see it, but there’s a device on the roof right about there that looks like a giant cockroach, about the size of a serving tray. It can pick up, record, jam, analyze, and transmit voice, video, electromagnetic signals, and data for two square kilometers. It can crawl around walls and ceilings, and deactivates itself if it thinks it’s being scanned.”
This guy was a little too cocky and calm for her liking. He was not wearing a sidearm, but his hands were behind his back where she couldn’t see them. She fished out an ID badge that she had been given after checking in at base security. “Do you have one of these, Major, Doctor?” she asked, her voice a little sterner. “Can I see it?”
Richter smiled. “No, I don’t,” the guy said. His smile sent a warning chill up and down her spine. “I didn’t arrive via the front gate.”
“Then let me see some ID, both of you,” she ordered in a loud voice.
“Agent DeLaine…?” Director Lemke said behind her.
“I don’t have any ID to show you, Kelsey,” Richter said. “We’re here to dazzle the brass over there.”
Now she was thankful that she didn’t have her gun in her purse. Kelsey quickly drew her Glock from her holster and held it at her side where it was clearly visible but not pointed at him. “Then let me see your hands, above your head, both of you, now!” she ordered.
