Patriot Act

by James Phelan

  They came closer to Fox, walked right up to him. The silence was broken not by speech but by the sound of the sea, the surf of the ocean breaking on the headlands to the cove. The sound expanded to include that of a small town rising, that familiar milling of families and activity, which filled the morning sky.

  Truscott and Birmingham parted, walked past Fox, one on either side of him. He turned around, watching as they walked off together. They were becoming distant when they turned around to face him, and though Fox couldn’t be sure, he thought he saw them smiling.

  75

  GREENLAND

  The Delta commander watched as an RPG slammed into the dugout holding six of his troops and light machine guns and mortar. The men scrambled about, shell-shocked from the noise and debris that was still raining down. Their full-bodysuit armour undoubtedly saved their lives.

  “Damn it!” he yelled, switching on his mike. “Snipers, take out those sons of bitches with the RPG launcher!”

  Atop the windy peak of the southern radome, two Delta soldiers slid to a stop flat on their stomachs. Held in place on the slippery surface by his spotter, the sniper steadied his rifle, scanning for targets.

  He felled two before they got through the hole they had cut in the southern fence, and another as he rose to fire an RPG, the round flying wildly into the air, a trail of smoke spiralling upwards and flaring everyone’s night vision.

  While the battlefield waited for the grenade to come back to earth, everything fell silent.

  “What can you see, Emma?” Sefreid asked, as he lay next to Gibbs.

  “Gammaldi and Beasley with two others just left the station via a window to the north-east. I tracked them entering the north radome, pretty sure they’re still inside,” Gibbs said. While the GSR security team wore tape around their necks to fasten their throat-mikes, the two in civilian clothing wore the tape across their jackets. Appearing to the naked eye like regular black electrical tape, it fluoresced through the film on the scope and night-vision lenses of the team, meaning they could be identified.

  “What are they doing in there?”

  In the radome, Beasley waited by the door as Gammaldi ran around the base of the satellite dish.

  The two NSA techs were pulling apart a primitive hydro-ponics set-up, arguing all the way. Gammaldi considered interrupting them but chose to run back to the door.

  “Let’s move,” he said, and they opened the door, ran around the radome and headed north.

  The RPG crashed back down to earth into the ceiling of the station, turning the south-east corner into a pile of concrete rubble.

  The French force were firing to protect their retreat while the Delta snipers continued to pick through the ranks at every opportunity.

  “Our boys are headed our way, six hundred metres out,” Gibbs said, watching them through her big scope.

  “Geiger, change of plans, bring the Hummer in fast for evac,” Sefreid called.

  “On the way!” Geiger replied.

  “I have two armed targets coming from around the northeast corner,” Gibbs said.

  “Stall them,” Sefreid ordered.

  Gibbs squeezed off an armour-piercing round into the gas tanks along the northern wall of the station. The explosion sent the trailing Delta soldiers through the air, a small mushroom-cloud of fire and smoke erupting into the dark sky.

  76

  FORT GAUCHER

  Back in his office, Danton sat and waited on his phone for a few minutes, tapping his fingers on the desk.

  “Hello?” The voice of the French Prime Minister came on the line.

  “Prime Minister, this is General Danton of the DGSE. I am sorry to contact you at home at this hour but I have a priority request.”

  “Danton, it’s late—and I don’t have the time, something urgent has come up,” the Prime Minister said.

  Danton sat rigid in his chair, his palms sweating instantly.

  “Anything I can help with?”

  “No, nothing for you to be concerned about. Can I have someone else contact you?”

  “Sir, I have the motherlode of intel available but I will need the necessary funds to acquire it,” Danton interrupted. “I need to access the emergency-response budget.”

  “How much?” the Prime Minister said, clearly annoyed.

  “Twenty million Euros,” Danton said.

  That got his attention.

  “That’s a lot of unbudgeted money. It will have to come through via the defence funding committee, not the emergency funds.”

  “I need it within the next twelve hours,” Danton said.

  “So soon?” the Prime Minister replied, annoyed at his previous comment being ignored but intrigued by the urgency. “What for?”

  Danton expected this question and pulled out his trump card.

  “It’s to pay a long-trusted source that has the exact Afghan location of the top leadership of al Qaeda. Information is less than fifteen minutes old,” Danton said, running further with his own lie.

  “How ‘top’ is this leadership?”

  “The top. The head. The entire command structure in one location,” Danton said, enjoying his creativity. What the hell, this guy was only going to be Prime Minister for a few more days.

  “That’s, that’s…”

  “With this info we can inform the Americans of the location and they can do the dirty work,” Danton said, knowing it would press the right hot button.

  “Non. Our own Special Forces team will make the strike. We’ll turn it into a proud day for the French military. I’ll have the treasury wire the funds to your DGSE operations account straightaway.”

  77

  NSA HQ

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  Having taken the edge off with his first bourbon, Dunn sat and stared into space. He considered calling the Senate committee and explaining that a matter of national security had come up. Unfortunately, he’d already used that card, twice, and he was told on no uncertain terms to appear. Tomorrow.

  Dunn hadn’t even planned for the hearing, and for the first time he read over the letter outlining their requirements.

  He sipped at his second drink and looked at the photo of his Liberty crew on the wall. Going another round with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence over those 9/11 coals again … give me strength boys.

  78

  NEW YORK CITY

  Fox’s eyes opened slowly, and he focused on the ceiling of his houseboat’s bedroom. The view of the timber panelling was lit by the morning sun coming in from his open blinds. The houseboat creaked and moved ever so slowly in the water where it was docked. He listened to the hum and grind of one of the biggest cities in the world, all that life going about another day. The breakfast smells from the close-by DUMBO cafés tempted him up, and then he smelled something else. Sweet, like honey and citrus, a bit earthy with sweat.

  He felt next to him, where Kate had been. Cold. Empty.

  A note.

  “Thank you. Again. X”

  79

  WASHINGTON

  Kate arrived at her apartment wheeling a big empty suitcase. A pile of newspapers and mail greeted her, but she didn’t stop to look at them. She put her keys in the bowl on the kitchen bench and pressed the flashing message button on her phone. She spent five minutes speed-deleting her way through the condolences of friends and colleagues regarding John Cooper’s death. She just didn’t have the wherewithal to listen to them properly and respond. She got to the most recent message and paused, her finger over the delete button:

  “Hi babe, it’s Lachlan. Just calling to say thanks for last night, I had a great time. Sorry I missed you this morning, I actually ended up having a pretty good sleep. I guess I have you to thank for that too. Anyway, good luck in cleaning out your office in DC. Let me know if you need a hand from the airport when you come back here. Call me whenever you need to. Bye.”

  She smiled
and pressed delete, standing up from the kitchen stool and wheeling her suitcase into her bedroom. She walked over and opened the window overlooking the cobbled paving of Georgetown’s P Street. She flicked on her CD player on the dresser, filling the apartment with the sounds of Jewel.

  It wasn’t until she put her suitcase on the bed and opened her wardrobe that she got the familiar feeling associated with meeting Secher. At once thrilling and dangerous. At least, that’s what it felt like on the few occasions she’d been with him. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked in her wardrobe, the half-open, mirrored sliding door reflecting half her image back. She yawned and was reminded of the previous night she had spent with Fox, then stood and pushed the wardrobe all the way open.

  She frisked through the contents of her wardrobe, looking for the right dress to wear. She held up a couple in front of her, looking in the full-length mirror at how they clung to her figure. Secher had seen her in her two favourites, so she settled on a jade-green Elie Saab number she hadn’t worn this season.

  She held it to herself and smiled, heart racing at the thought of what she was about to do over the next twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours! She’d not thought about the details until now. What would she take? She looked over some of her favourite pieces, mostly black, conservative business attire. And then there was her shoe collection …

  “Don’t worry, we’ll buy you new things,” Secher had said the last time they were together. They had been laying in bed in his ancient stone townhouse in Bern, almost a month ago now. Had it really been a month? “We’ll shop in Milan, Rome, Florence, then sail the Mediterranean, explore the Adriatic coast…”

  Kate shifted from her thoughts to the present, seeing herself there in the mirror, holding the dress. In the reflection she saw the photos on the drawers behind her, felt her hands let go of the dress and it shimmered to the floor. She picked up a framed shot taken of her and her parents, a happy summer from freshman year. Before life became complicated.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, holding the framed photograph to her chest, and then lay back, shaking, crying. It was so close as to be real now. Was this really what she wanted? Maybe she hadn’t really thought it through. Christian had shared his dream of retiring young and sailing carefree around the world, calling the occasional seaside town home for a while before moving on when they wished, no constraints or burdens. Nothing but the drive to enjoy life. But to leave everything, to not even tell her parents …

  She would have to talk to him tonight, tell him she needed more time to think about it. Christian Secher would understand, surely, he was sensitive; especially so since what had happened to John Cooper. She sat up, took a deep breath and wiped the tears from her face.

  80

  NEW YORK CITY

  Fox had been back in his office for an hour, sipping at a third cup of coffee to keep alert to the expected news from the GSR team. His desire to be there with them itched at him more than his bandaged arm.

  He closed the open file on Kate and put it back on the pile of Advocacy Center personnel.

  He sat behind his desk in his thirty-seventh-floor office in the Seagram Building. The blinds were drawn on the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked down onto the plaza. The desk had long disappeared under papers and folders, the lamp providing the only light in his dark office. He leaned back in his Hepplewhite chair, undid his shirt another button and rolled his sleeves up.

  He picked up a file from his ‘to read’ pile.

  “The National Security Agency: Quantum Cryptography and the twenty-first century…” he said aloud. “This will be interesting…”

  81

  WASHINGTON

  “Welcome back to America, Mr Smith,” the customs woman said, stamping the visa in the English passport of Winston Smith and passing it back.

  “Thank you,” Secher said, putting it in his jacket pocket and walking into the main terminal at Dulles. He removed his black-rimmed spectacles as he walked, duffle bag in his other hand. He fished in his pocket for some quarters and placed a call at a payphone.

  “You have the helicopter booked?” Secher asked his DGSE agent in New York.

  “Yes, I have leased it without pilots, as you instructed,” the agent said. “I will fly you out to sea tomorrow night myself.”

  “Excellent,” Secher said, sensing in the tone that there was something the agent was not telling him.

  “What else is there?” Secher asked.

  “Major, Lachlan Fox is still here.”

  “What?” Secher leaned on the payphone. This could make things difficult.

  “He did not leave for Greenland, but some others did in his place.”

  “Then get rid of him,” Secher said through closed teeth.

  “Major?”

  “People get shot in America all the time,” Secher said. “Or make it look like an accident. I don’t care.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as possible. I wanted him out of the picture before and that much has not changed. I do not want him alive by the time I am in New York,” Secher said. A smile crept over his face and he held the handset up to hide it. “If you can, make it painful.”

  82

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  “There’s a procedure in place for this type of threat to intelligence installations and you know it,” McCorkell said over the phone. “Look, we’ve still got some issues to work through here this morning, but a friendly heads-up: Vanzet and Larter want blood. Your blood. And on top of your Senate hearing tomorrow, you’ll be an easy target to scapegoat all sorts of shit.”

  “I appreciate the call, Bill,” Dunn said. “I had no idea the threat could be something so big. The fucking French of all people.”

  “You had no intel come through on this?” McCorkell asked, noting the stack of daily papers that he didn’t have the time to go through this morning.

  “Nothing that’s come up, just an anonymous tip-off about Greenland,” Dunn said. “I’ve got a team on the intercepts now, going through everything in or out of France. We’re scouring for any leads on this threatened coup too.”

  “Well, it’s a damn sight more credible now,” McCorkell said. “We’ve got twelve dead French commandos on Danish soil, attempting to infiltrate a US base. The remainder surrendered to the Delta team, and the La Fayette is heading back to port with her tail between her legs. Seawolf is trailing her real close, F-15s buzzing overhead.”

  “This wasn’t just an act from their chief of navy working alone?” Dunn asked.

  “That’s yet to come through, but it’s looking damn unlikely,” McCorkell said. “Delta and the French soldiers are being picked up. Turns out there’s a DGSE agent among them but he’s staying zip. SSB agents are going to put him through the griller to see what his orders were.”

  There was silence on the other end until he heard Dunn let out a defeated sigh.

  “Look, Ira, with no Delta boys lost, this didn’t turn out too bad,” McCorkell said. “But we should all get together at the Pentagon later in the week and debrief on this one, otherwise the bad blood is going to settle in, from Larter and the DNI down.”

  Dunn shut his office door and headed downstairs. He took the walkway into the COMINT supercomputer lab. He followed the passageway past the empty workstations, through the biometrically protected vault doors to the new quantum cryptography annex, where the shift workers were calibrating the new Crays with the quantum drives.

  “How quickly can we switch over?” he asked of his head technician on the late shift.

  “Sir—how quickly? We’ve never had to speed up before.”

  “Well I’d like it sped up,” Dunn said. “Can it be brought forward?”

  “We may be able to shave a few hours off, but that’s it. We need the quantum interface to be working in sync with the Crays in order to switch over. If we force it sooner and it doesn’t interface, we can’t guarantee the security of this network o
r any other system we’re accountable for.”

  “All right. Just get it happening as fast as you can,” Dunn said, turning to leave. “And keep me posted on your progress.”

  83

  WIESBADEN, GERMANY

  The room had one purpose: torture. It was small and dark, the walls and door made of steel and totally soundproofed. One neon light in the ceiling lit up the stainless-steel interior with an eerie blue-white incandescence. The only furniture was a metal chair bolted to the floor.

  Strapped tight to the chair was the right-wing German national wanted for selling NATO arms to the Middle East. Except for his head, plastic bindings held every part of him immobile in the chair.

  “You can’t do this to me!” He spat blood from his split lip. “You have laws! I have laws!”

  The Strategic Services Branch agent was working the interrogation alone. He stood before the man, arms crossed. Watched as the German heaved breaths, the floor beneath his chair a pool of urine.

  On the floor next to him was a large metal toolbox.

  “I don’t exist,” the agent said. “So I really don’t think your laws apply to me.”

  The expression on the German’s face was blank. Gritty. Real. Cold.

  “What, you are going to keep me in this bright room for a week? Put a hood on me and take photos for your sick American friends?” The German laughed to reveal his bloodied teeth. “Do your worst.”