Dean wanted to ask why they weren’t high-priority, but Karr had taken one of the A-2s and surreptitiously crouched behind the truck in case it was needed. A small Fiat approached from the north, slowing as it came close. Two men, both so large they seemed comical in the small car, stared at him. They were wearing suits and ties.
Dean glanced toward the ground, making sure his own rifle was nearby. For a moment he thought the Fiat would stop, but the driver downshifted and it picked up speed.
“Not good,” said Karr. “But we’re leaving anyway.”
* * *
By the time they got to the small airport where Fashona was waiting with the helicopter, it was close to 6:00 P.M. Karr and Dean had changed into military fatigues that bore no insignias, and sat in the cab of the truck. Lia had managed to wedge herself among the wreckage and curled beneath a tarp in the back. Their weapons were hidden beneath the seat of the truck, with the exception of a miniature pistol that Karr passed to Dean as they pulled up to a post guarding access to the cargo section of the airport.
Karr took some papers from the dash and spoke to the police officer in a tired voice. Dean had no idea how fluent his Russian was, but undoubtedly the stack of euros he’d passed with the papers spoke eloquently enough. Cleared through, they rounded a dusty access road past a row of military transports, then headed across weed-strewn concrete to a row of hangars that looked big enough to house a Saturn rocket. Their Hind sat in front of one, so dwarfed it appeared almost forlorn.
“Everybody’s corrupt here,” said Dean.
“Everybody’s hungry,” said Karr. His face was serious for a second, as if contemplating that fact; then it shifted back to its usual bright smile. “This used to be a big military base. They had IL-76s in the hangars, along with some weird-looking planes with their engines on top of their wings. Big mo-fos. When they decided to rent out the hangars, they took the planes and pushed them off into the field over there. We’re thinking of buying one. Apparently they’re real dogs, though. Pilots don’t want to fly them. Don’t even mention them to Fashona. He’ll bite your ear off, no shit.”
Karr backed the truck around to the helicopter, whose cargo doors were open. While Lia went to find Fashona, Karr and Dean loaded the chopper.
“College education,” said Karr as they hauled the piece in, “and I end up a schlepper anyway. My father always told me, you can’t do much with math.”
The salvaged wreckage formed a pile about five feet high and almost eight feet square. They strung a large heavy-duty net in front of it to secure it, though Dean was dubious.
Lia returned with Fashona, who in the space of a few hours had managed to grow what looked like a three-day-old beard. They’d been introduced before, but the pilot didn’t seem to remember. He stuck his hand out.
“Fashona,” he said.
“Dean.”
“Don’t call me Fashone. Or none of that shit.”
“I won’t.”
“Nice helicopter, huh?”
“Looks OK.”
“Want to sit up front?”
“Up front where?” asked Dean.
“Gunner’s compartment,” said the pilot. “No gun on this flight, though. Our weapons are packed away until we need them. We look like we’re civilians. Well, almost.”
Even without weapons strapped to its hard points and no chin gun, the helicopter hardly looked innocent, but Dean didn’t argue.
“But the front is the best seat. Great view,” added Fash-ona.
Dean shrugged but then remembered the rough landing at the field. How well could they possibly tie down the jagged metal in the back?
He walked with the pilot to the nose cabin, which looked a little like an upside-down fishbowl. A sensor boom protruded from the top of the cabin like a spear, its four winglets looking like knives.
“They took the cannon out before they sold it,” said Fashona, pointing to the underside of the nose.
“Bummer,” said Dean.
“Yeah, big-time. There’s something about a nose gun, you know what I mean? We have podded cannons we can slap on if the going gets tough, but they just don’t have the same, the same something, you know—”
“Savoir-faire?”
“Yeah. I mean, they are thirty-millimeter Gats, so don’t get me wrong, plenty of firepower. More than the Commies had. But still… suave. It’s lacking.”
“Sure.”
“I’m lobbying to get it back. Plus, some of these have shark’s teeth, you know? Right here?” He swung his hand up the front of the fuselage. “That would be intense.”
“Very,” said Dean.
“OK.” Fashona pulled open the door. Dean climbed up and then slipped in, feeling a little as if he were climbing down a sewer hole. The seat restraints were so thick, donning them felt like putting on a quilted vest.
“Headphones,” said Fashona. “They work.”
He pointed to a headset at the side, then slammed down the canopy, which failed to latch. He slammed it again — apparently the pneumatic prop was broken, since it bounded up. Dean managed to grab it from the pilot and close it gently, latching it shut. He pulled on the headphones just in time to hear Lia ask, “So what are you going to tell them when you get home, baby-sitter?”
“I don’t know that I’m going to tell them anything,” said Dean.
“Just tell the truth,” said Karr. “They’ll have you on a lie detector anyway.”
“Probably right.”
“Probably ask if the Princess put out,” said Karr. “In that case, you probably want to lie.”
The blades started to whirl. Dean felt the helicopter shaking back and forth and heard the engine whine — it seemed only slightly more distant here. Just like before, the engines revved, coughed, and died.
“Stinking fuel,” grumbled Fashona. “They piss in it, I swear.”
The rotors spun again. The blades seemed awfully close to the canopy, and Dean found himself staring down at the ground as the helicopter began to move forward, rocking up and down. There was a cough from the engines, but they kept running, the Hind moving steadily down an access ramp that led to the runway. Dean listened as Fashona exchanged barbs with the controller — in English.
“I’m a contract pilot,” he told Dean over the interphone circuit, which could not be heard by the tower. “Part of my cover. Work for Petro-UK. That’s why I talk English.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s obvious I’m an American. And the aircraft, you know, it’s traceable. So it’s not a security breach or anything.”
“Don’t be so paranoid, Fashona,” said Lia. “They’re not after your ass.”
“I’m not paranoid,” said the pilot. “I just want the guy to know what’s going on, that’s all. For his report.”
“We’ll all get raises; don’t worry,” said Karr.
Dean could see that there were no planes in front of them. Nor did it appear that they were waiting for any to land. Nonetheless, the controller kept them waiting more than fifteen minutes before finally clearing them to take off. By then the sun had set and everything was turning gray.
As the engines revved and the helo began to skip quickly along the pockmarked pavement, Dean realized that sitting in the front seat was a mistake. Whether it was because of the physical location or just the clear bubble, every move the chopper made seemed amplified up here, ten times worse than it had been in the back. The helo pitched forward sharply as it came off the ground; Dean felt as if they were going to do a somersault right into the tarmac. It turned sideways into a bank and he swore he’d fall out. A sharp rise and then another bank and Dean wondered if his internal organs had rearranged themselves.
“Quite a ride, huh?” asked Fashona.
“Oh, yeah,” said Dean. “The best.”
His stomach was still unsettled ten minutes later when he heard the pilot curse and call Karr.
“What?”
“MiG-29s, hot, on our tail,” said the pilot tersely. “RWR
says they’re scanning. Shit — we’re spiked!”
Before Karr could answer, the helo pitched hard toward the ground.
21
Nothing in the world was more depressing than a pure mathematician at middle age. Young, they were full of vim, vigor, and fresh answers to Fermat’s Last Theorem. When they hit thirty, however, they inevitably began tumbling downhill. In Rubens’ opinion, it wasn’t that they lost mental acuity. Instead they started to question things outside of math, and that threw them off. Questioning the sequence of prime numbers was one thing; questioning whether to change a haircut or have an affair was something else entirely. By the time they hit forty, the questions had done serious damage to the certainty required for top-level math.
And then, most devastatingly, they would ask the Impossible Question. This might be phrased many ways, but its most terse expression found its way to coffee cups throughout the complex: If I’m so smart, why ain’t I rich?
In a few cases, the result of asking the question was relatively benign — a bath in the stock market. Too often, however, Rubens had watched it lead to ashrams and mass marriages in baseball stadiums.
Or stadia, as a mathematician would insist they be called.
John Bibleria—“Johnny Bib” to his co-workers — was fifty-one, and a prime candidate for the stock market/stadia stage. He had joined the NSA out of Princeton. His area in the government was cryptoanalysis, but his true interests involved string theory, and during the early years of his career he had published several papers with impressive titles and even more impressive arrays of Greek letters in the text. He had also been responsible for realizing the Chinese were using a fractal code in the early 1990s.
The days of one individual “cracking a code” were long gone by the time Johnny joined the agency. “Codes”—lists of word-for-word substitutions — had been obsolete for a hundred years or more, and even the more complicated ciphers of the early Cold War seemed quaint. Modern encryption was done by translating plaintext into data streams through mathematical algorithms or formulas governed by keys. Teams of cryptoanalysts, cryptologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and programmers with overlapping abilities and responsibilities worked with cutting-edge computers to “solve” a cryptosystem.
But even with all that, Johnny Bib came as close as anyone to being a one-man show. To Rubens, his genius had little to do with his math, at least not in the way most people thought about math. What Bib at the height of his powers did as well as anyone in the world was intuit the significance of sequences. You didn’t need to know the precise words being used in a sentence if you knew that the sentence told a missile to launch. Simply knowing that allowed you to answer many questions. Did you want to know how many missiles there were? Count the sentences. Where they were? Look for the sentences. How they were aimed? Study the events before the sentence was uttered. Bib not only spotted the sentences; he also could come up with questions no one else had thought of that they would answer.
But Bib’s heyday had passed. Officially an Expert Cryptologic Mathematician, Johnny Bib was now an excellent team leader and an invaluable member of Rubens’ inner circle. But he was no longer a star’s star. Rubens, a connoisseur of genius, hated to see diminution. He looked at Johnny Bib and felt pain for the true heights the man’s mind might have reached.
Rubens had hopes, however — a few mathematicians were able to enter remission following the question stage. Whether this had to do with advancing senility or not, Rubens hadn’t yet decided.
Johnny Bib, standing over Rubens’ desk, pointed to the status sheet he’d just put down. The color of the sheet matched Johnny’s jacket.
“Now if you want my analysis,” started Bib.
“Actually, I don’t,” said Rubens. “We have plenty of analysts.”
“It’s the pattern that’s interesting,” said Johnny Bib. “Ten units, fuel purchases, obscure encryption, connection to Anderkov. Bingo.”
“Bingo,” said Rubens sarcastically.
“Russian coup,” said Johnny Bib.
“Bingo,” said Rubens.
“You can see it?”
“Not really.”
Johnny Bib blinked his owl eyes, then pushed back his longish hair, which had a habit of falling over his forehead and covering his right eye.
The E-mails that Bib’s group had selected from the vast array of intercepts harvested in the NSA’s Russia Military Project were, individually and collectively, benign — they were reports of fuel reserves in ten different Russian Army units. The fact that all of the units were east of the Urals did pique Rubens’ interest, as did the fact that they used network addresses formerly reserved for diplomatic channels. Most interesting, however — and this was Johnny Bib’s actual point — the messages used a very sophisticated but cumbersome asymmetrical or double-key encryption. Why go to so much trouble with information that was of relatively little strategic value?
“You really don’t see it?” asked Johnny Bib.
“Assume I’m playing devil’s advocate,” said Rubens.
“Ah,” said Johnny Bib, nodding knowingly.
“The CIA draft estimate doesn’t say who is organizing the coup,” said Rubens. He had obtained a copy of the draft from one of his usual sources even as Collins was leaving the Puzzle Palace; she had undoubtedly said it wasn’t prepared as a personal challenge to him.
Johnny Bib wrinkled his nose, fighting back a sneeze. He seemed to loathe the CIA people so badly he had an actual allergy to them.
“Are they holding back?” Rubens asked.
“They’re not smart enough to hold anything back.”
“Smart and devious do not go hand in glove, John. Who’s the leader of the coup? Vladimir Perovskaya, the defense minister?”
Johnny Bib stifled another sneeze by burying his nose in the crock of his arm. Rubens wondered if the agency ought to add etiquette and manners classes to its basic training regime.
“If you gave me access to the Wave Three findings,” said Johnny Bib finally, “perhaps we could pinpoint the players then.”
It was a variation of a common refrain — the intelligence expert asking for more intelligence. Wave Three, the program to take information off hard drives via aircraft, had not targeted government officials yet and, in fact, was currently on hold because of the shootdown in Siberia. But Johnny Bib wasn’t authorized to know that, which meant that the program represented a kind of Holy Grail to him — if only he had that information, he could solve the problem.
“You’re looking at me as if I don’t know about the program,” said Johnny Bib. “I was the one who invented the process for discerning significant magnetic wave patterns in real time. You’ve forgotten.”
“What wave patterns?” said Rubens. “And you’re exaggerating your role.”
The mathematician began shaking his head violently.
“Relax, Johnny. Relax.” Rubens realized he had gone a little too far. “Nothing in the data contributes to this.”
Johnny continued to shake his head. Rubens sighed.
“You are an important contributor to our operation,” Rubens told him. “Need I say more?”
Though still pouting, the mathematician stopped shaking his head.
“Do we have anything at all about our aircraft?” Rubens asked. “The PVO intercepts — that’s what we need.”
“It was a renegade unit. It’s one of the ones that sent the E-mails.”
“Now that’s interesting. What else do we know about it?”
Johnny pushed his hair back, then stuffed his arms into his pockets. A good sign — it meant he was thinking about something he hadn’t considered before.
“We have no other data at all,” said Johnny. “No intercepts from the unit.” Something had suddenly clicked in his complicated mind. “Yes. Well, yes. Yes. A subunit — if we go far enough back in the library, if we look at its creation — perhaps the person who created it: Perovskaya?”
“Don’t jump to conclu
sions,” said Rubens. He slid back in his seat. He still wasn’t sure about the coup prediction, but they were definitely making progress. A light began blinking on his phone console. “I have to answer that.”
Johnny Bib scowled but then nodded. “I’ll update you when we have something.”
“Two hours,” said Rubens. “Every two hours.”
Johnny nodded, then closed the door behind him — a good sign.
“Karr’s team is being tracked by a MiG similar to the one that took Wave Three down,” said Telach when he picked up the line to the Art Room.
“I’ll be right there.”
22
The Hind whipped downward, the momentum snaring Dean’s body in the seat restraints like a flailing shark caught in a tuna net. The helo pitched right and he flew in the opposite direction, his arms smacking the side panel so hard they went numb. The Hind leveled off, spun, then zipped through a figure eight before plummeting another thousand feet in the space of a breath. Dean remembered the warnings they gave in commercial airlines about crashes and somewhat confusedly fought to tuck his head down, though the restraints kept him upright.
Somewhere around twenty feet off the ground, the helicopter stopped its tumultuous descent. Its path, however, ran toward a rise, and just as Dean thought the worst was over, the undercarriage smacked against some trees. The top branches hit the nose so hard Dean thought they’d been whacked by a cannon. In the next moment, he felt himself thrown back in the seat, the pilot yanking on his yoke to get over the rise, then flailing left.
“We’re clear,” said Fashona, even though they continued dodging left and right across the rough terrain. “They may have seen us, but they never fired at us.”
“So what happened to the MiG?” asked Karr. His voice sounded as nonchalant as ever.
“Uh, looks like, uh, they’re tracking another aircraft, I think. Escorting.”
“Escorting what?”
“An IL-62, passenger plane. Um, you know the identifier section on the—”
“You sure they’re escorting it?”
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