Lance knew how feeble that expectation was. At Phyllis’s age, a hip fracture could be a death sentence. She certainly wouldn’t be returning to work for months, if ever.
So, he had to work with this Flaherty, who sounded like him when he wasn’t trying to hide it.
He took a deep breath, and decided not to mention Kuldeep’s nocturnal adventure. It would make them both look unprofessional, and it had nothing to do with the operation. Did it? No, it did not. Kuldeep’s food-poisoning episode? Ditto. All the Kulster needed was rest, anyway. Their journey back to the States would be arduous for him, but there was no alternative.
“Can I assume you’re up to speed on the situation?” he asked Flaherty.
“I’ve read all the materials you sent to Ms. Hoskins.”
“She may not have made a note of this, but I asked her to slap a gag order on the researchers from Arecibo.” Lance mentally apologized to Phyllis. “She said she would get that done. I wonder if she had time to put it in process?”
“A gag order? I don’t see any record of that. But as you probably know, a gag order would take time to obtain. We have to go through the proper channels to make it stick.”
“If they run to the media with this—” Lance started, boiling over.
“No, no, we can’t let that happen. I am fully in agreement with you there.”
Lance raised his eyebrows. That was something.
“I’ll get that court order, but it will take time is what I’m saying. Right now, here’s what you do.”
Lance waited. As Flaherty told him what to do, he felt a rush of fear. He sat down on the hard foot of his bed.
“You’re leaving out of there today, correct?” Flaherty said.
“Yes.”
“Then you got time to take care of that before you catch your plane. You’re gonna make one other stop on your way home,” Flaherty mentioned casually. “I’ll email you the new tickets.”
“Huh?”
“You’re going to Italy.”
Italy? What for? Lance opened his mouth to say they couldn’t go to Italy. Kuldeep needed to go home and take a week off work and lie on the sofa watching reruns and drinking chicken noodle soup. Then he closed his mouth again. It was too late. If he was going to mention Kuldeep’s condition, he should have done it earlier. “You got it,” he said flatly.
*
By the time the minibus delivered them to the one-horse airport at Mineralye Vodi, Kuldeep looked like he was about ready to check out of this world and move on to the big clambake in the sky. The toxic atmosphere on the bus couldn’t have helped. The Arecibo researchers had spent the whole ride stewing about their wiped hard drives.
It had been easy as pie. Kuldeep had already phished the scientists, on the way here, by getting them to open an email with a virus attachment. The virus enabled remote access to their computers. All Lance had to do was run the same program, hook into their C drives, and give the DELETE key a workout. Sure, a specialist could recover their files, but by the time the scientists got around to that, they would be gagged by court order. In the meantime, they couldn’t very well go to the media without a single byte of data to back up their story.
To pull it off, Lance had had to wake Kuldeep up to tell him how to run the program. Then he’d moseyed over to the laboratory while the researchers were having their final meeting with the Russians. Laptops in a box in the hall. There’d been one terrifying moment when the lead Russian astronomer, Zhigunov, came out of the room and saw Lance squatting against the wall, typing on his own laptop. But all Zhigunov had done was smirk at him. “It’s going well?”
“Not too bad,” Lance had replied. And that had been that.
Lance had a suspicion that Zhigunov knew what he’d done, more or less. And approved. The Russians understood the dark power of information.
At Moscow airport, Lance and Kuldeep parted from the Arecibo gang with barely-masked relief on both sides. The scientists went home to scan the skies, and Lance and Kuldeep flew to Naples.
By the time they got there—almost 48 hours after their departure from Zelenchukskaya—Kuldeep was running a temperature. Lance bought a thermometer at the airport. “Thirty-eight point three, what’s that in Fahrenheit?”
“I’m fine,” Kuldeep said. “I’m coming with you. What would Phyllis say if I wimped out?”
Lance had not told him about Phyllis’s accident and hospitalization. There’d be time enough for him to find out when they got home. So for the time being, Kuldeep believed Phyllis had sent them on this side trip—not the enigmatic Flaherty.
Regardless of where the idea came from, it seemed like a long shot to Lance. But he understood the need to confirm everything. Even good old Hector Quintanilla had stressed the importance of witness documentation. So with a determinedly chipper Kuldeep in tow, he headed out of their hotel to the Piazza Garibaldi.
Man, but this city stank.
Literally, a smell of toilets hung in the air.
Maybe it came from Mt. Vesuvius? The famous volcano loomed over the city, its twin peaks still lit ocher by the sunset.
But no, Lance discovered as they wandered through the back streets behind the train station. The smell came from Naples itself. Some of the alleys were cordoned off, heaped high with garbage. This city was an open-air rubbish dump. At last, they’d stumbled on someplace that made the rural South look like a model of cleanliness and order. “This is fucking disgusting,” Kuldeep said, voicing Lance’s thoughts.
Yet Lance said, “You wanted to come.”
He’d left his watch and credit cards in the safe in their hotel room, per Flaherty’s advice. His gun was in the under-arm holster, concealed by a zip-up hoodie. Pickpockets better not mess with Lance Garner.
Marking them down for tourists, ‘helpful’ locals buzzed around, offering guide services, girls, boys, drugs … “Hey, maybe you could help us out,” Lance said, producing a dazzling smile. “We’re stationed up the coast, you know? Sixth Fleet? Just wanna kick back, have a couple of beers. Where would you recommend?”
Yes, yes, I guide you, very buono, lots of bella girls.
Lance and Kuldeep weren’t servicemen, of course. But they wanted to go where the servicemen were.
Their guide led them into a chaotic nightlife quarter. Music blasted. Broken glass crunched underfoot. Lance spotted several groups of obvious American sailors. “Perfect,” he said, shoving euros into their guide’s hand to get rid of him. He inhaled the miasma of cigarette smoke that shrouded the outdoor tables and chairs, relishing a sense of multiplying possibilities. This was the part of the job he absolutely loved. The part where he got to be anonymous.
The problem was Kuldeep.
He was swaying, his eyes glassy, looking spaced out. Lance hated to even think what his temperature probably was, and he felt angry with him for not staying at the hotel.
But it was too late to worry about that now. Anyway, Kuldeep didn’t have to do much talking.
They had an established double act for the rare occasions when they got to go out in the field. They were in sales—boring! Internet sales—boring and incomprehensible!
Kuldeep’s role was to spout off authentically if their target actually showed an interest in their supposed jobs.
But Harvey, Mike, Devaughn, and Rob, twenty-year-old sailors off the USS Gravely, didn’t even ask what these two casually clad Americans, one brown, one white, were doing in Naples. Gaining their trust was as easy as buying them a pitcher and cracking some jokes about the filthiness of this city. Then Lance tossed out the line Flaherty had set him up with. “Yo, I saw what happened on the news. Y’all see that mess?”
They had seen it with their own eyes, not a mile away across the gray waters of the Mediterranean, all except Rob who had been stuck in Food Services, and was still pissed at having missed it.
“This Russian ship, yo—”
“A corvette.”
“Tarantul class.”
“They were shadowing
us, OK? Way too close. I thought they were gonna ram us at one point.”
The US Sixth Fleet and the Georgian Navy, such as it was, had recently conducted joint exercises in the Black Sea. An exercise in bear-poking, was what that was. The poked bear had duly reacted.
“They musta sent half the Black Sea Fleet just to follow us around.”
“The Black Sea Fleet ain’t shit.”
“Man, those boats hardly even stay on top of the water.”
“That carrier they got is so old, the only planes you can land on her are biplanes.”
There followed a lengthy tangent of dissing the Russian navy. Lance laughed along with them, not trying to direct the conversation. He knew they’d get back to the point soon.
“So this Tarantul class—“
“It was a Stereguchiy class.”
“Naw man, it was a Tarantul.”
“It launched a missile!”
“No fucking way!” Lance said. He was allowing himself cuss-words for the evening, to stay in character. “At you?”
“Yo man, that’s what I thought. I was all like, whoa shit!”
“We went to battle stations.”
“And then, I was up on deck and I saw this, smoke starts coming out of the Moskva!”
“The Moskva?” Lance exclaimed. “You’re kidding! They hit their own flagship?”
“Yeah, man!” The young sailors could hardly speak for laughing. “It was a misfire or some shit. That was in the news, for real?”
“Shee-yit,” Lance said. “Yeah. I saw it on the internet, but they didn’t say what happened.”
“Well, that’s what happened. Friendly fire.”
“Know what, man, it was lucky they hit their own ship. If that was one of ours, World War Three woulda started on March sixteen, two thousand and eleven.” Devaughn nodded sagely.
March 16th.
Yes, the CIA already had SIGINT recording the puzzling behavior of the Black Sea Fleet. But the testimony of the young sailors filled in the crucial blank: what had happened to make the Moskva turn tail and steam back to its home port? This had happened: a Russian corvette had fired on its own flagship.
On March 16th.
Must’ve been a Tarantul class.
Those old missile corvettes dated back to the Soviet era. Decaying electronics. Old missiles. Just waiting to be launched by a 204 GHz signal that zipped down from the sky. Like opening someone else’s garage door.
“That is some scary shit,” Lance said. “Can I buy y’all another brewski to thank you for not starting World War Three?”
Kuldeep was barely hanging in there. He hadn’t touched his beer. Lance leaned over to him while their fresh-faced companions bragged about how they would win World War Three, just give them a chance. “Why don’t you head back?”
“That’s probably a good idea,” Kuldeep said, pushing his chair back as he spoke.
“I’m gonna hang out here a while. See if these guys got anything else to say, or I might talk to some other people. Be careful you don’t get pickpocketed.”
“Roger,” Kuldeep said. He mustered a final spurt of nerdish bonhomie as he said his goodbyes.
Lance hung out with the sailors longer than he probably should’ve. He was having fun, was the truth. His anonymous persona more closely resembled the original Lance, from Calhoun County, than did the colorless CIA officer that he impersonated most of the time. A good ol’ boy with a brain two standard deviations above average. Play me some Guns ‘n’ Roses. C’mere, bellacita, looking fine. Who-ho-ho, sweet child of mine. But where do we go? Where do we go from here? Who am I really? His original self had turned into an act. He did shots and fooled around on the cramped dance floor, moshing like it was 1999, while the cold core of him checked the time impatiently, knowing that something big was happening, something that had already come within a nautical mile of starting World War III.
At midnight he tore himself away and hailed a taxi to get back to their hotel.
His phone buzzed in his pocket as the insane driver flung the taxi through the narrow streets.
The office.
“‘Sup,” he slurred.
“Lance?”
“Yeah sir.” Scrabbling for sobriety.
“This is Flaherty. I just spoke with Kuldeep on the phone.”
“He OK?”
“You sound like you’re drunk. Lance, are you drunk?”
“Not even a li’l bit, sir.”
“All right. Here is what he told me.”
Lance half-listened—it wasn’t anything he hadn’t already thought of for himself—while dealing with the guilt of knowing that Kuldeep must have found out in the most unpleasant way possible about his deception regarding Phyllis. Still pressing his phone to his ear—Flaherty wasn’t giving him a chance to talk, he was ranting—he tossed euros at the taxi driver and climbed the stairs to their room. He banged on the door and then unlocked it with his key. No Kuldeep. Well, given what Flaherty was saying, Lance had not expected to find Kuldeep tucked up in bed.
“He’s not here,” he interrupted. “I’m at our hotel. He’s not here.”
“Well, find out where he went, Lance! Find him … and kill him.”
*
He didn’t have far to go before he found Kuldeep. After all, he’d worked with him for four years. They were as close as brothers. Instinct, not tradecraft or deductive reasoning, told Lance where a sick, feverish, but determined Kuldeep would be right now.
In the nearest Internet café.
Yeah, they still had those in Naples.
A mist of cigarette smoke in the air, Albanians and Africans surfing porn sites, and Kuldeep in a corner, typing like the future of humanity depended on it.
Lance moved up behind him, his steps masked by the loud pop music blasting through the place. “Heard you talked to Flaherty,” he said.
Kuldeep jumped a mile. His hand flashed out to the mouse, but Lance was quicker. He grabbed Kuldeep’s thin brown wrist. He’d already seen what Kuldeep was doing, anyway.
Writing an email.
“Did you send anything yet?”
“Yep. To Wikileaks, the New York Times, the Times of London, the WSJ …”
Lance closed the draft—Kuldeep was using a Hotmail account registered to ‘desi1980eeeee’—and checked the sent mail. Nothing. Relieved, he opened Kuldeep’s draft again (“To Whom It May Concern”) and scanned the highly technical content. One sentence jumped out at him. Peak signal strength: 120,000,000,000 Jy.
“I wiped my laptop myself,” Kuldeep said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“Moved everything onto this remote server I have.”
“You’re so going to jail.”
“I know.”
Lance eased Kuldeep’s chair aside on its wheels. He sent Kuldeep’s draft email to himself, and then deleted the whole Hotmail account. Kuldeep made no move to stop him. His glassy, feverish gaze flickered up and down Lance’s standing body. Although the internet café was as hot as that conference room in Russia, Lance had his hoodie zipped up all the way. Maybe Kuldeep thought that was weird, or maybe he knew what it meant.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lance said. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”
“’Kay.”
Outside, Lance walked away from their hotel, keeping Kuldeep on his left. The subways were under construction. They circled decrepit, graffiti-splattered hoardings.
“Peak signal strength: one hundred and twenty million janskys,” Lance said. “No one mentioned that before. Where’d you get that?”
Kuldeep said, “The Scream was a hundred and twenty times stronger than the Russians told us.”
“Yeah. Where?”
Kuldeep shivered. “It’s cold,” he said. “Remember I thought the Russians were looking at me funny?”
“‘Member that, yeah.”
“They thought I was with the wrong group.”
“Huh?”
“That night I … went out.”
“I was gonna see if I could break into Zhigunov’s office.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“You’d’ve been all like, quit it, Kul. Coolness In Action is not career advice.” Kuldeep mimicked Lance’s accent so perfectly that it was chilling. “Anyway, I couldn’t get into the laboratory building. So I headed back to the guest-house. I was feeling like shit, anyway. But right then a bus pulled up. It was like one in the morning. They must’ve figured we would all be asleep. I hung back to see who would get out, and it was four Indians.”
“India Indians?”
“Yes, of course. They were speaking Hindi. I kind of sneaked closer and heard enough to figure out who they were. The Russians took them up to their rooms … in the other wing of the guest-house … we weren’t supposed to know they were there. I waited for the Russians to leave, and then I went and knocked on these guys’ door.”
“Who’d they turn out to be?”
Kuldeep turned his face to him. A bitter mix of emotions twisted his features. “The ISRO.”
“The Indian space agency.”
“Yup. Their Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope picked up the signal, too. They wanted to compare notes with the Russians.”
“The GMRT is way further east.”
“From which we can determine that the beam scanned slowly across the earth for eight seconds, and it was probably about half as wide as the planet.”
“Yeah, you said that in your email.”
“I also said that we know nothing about its coherency or monochromicity, only that it was powerful and had a narrow bandwidth,” Kuldeep said, always a stickler for precision.
“One hundred twenty million janskys. The Indians gave you that figure?”
“Yeah.”
“Why? How’d you get it out of them?”
“I worked my cover story,” Kuldeep said. “I am a CIA officer.”
Lance felt physically sick. Whatever Kuldeep had, maybe it was catching. “And after that, you went out to the telescope and sat there for three hours.”
“I … yeah.”
Lance stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. There were no more sidewalks, just beetling four- and five-story buildings crusted with balconies. Laundry hung out to dry in the reeking night air. They separated to pass one on either side of a parked truck. When Lance got past the truck, Kuldeep didn’t reappear.
The Signal And The Boys: A Prequel to the Earth's Last Gambit Series of First Contact Technothrillers Page 3
