The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich

by Lars Emmerich

  It was the same thermal bloom problem created by Dr. Art Levitow’s Senior Quantum device, when the device was cranked up to high power settings.

  Stalwart felt excitement as he climbed in the golf cart for the trip back across the factory floor. We’re on track to change the world.

  Forty-five minutes later, after a brief discussion with Farrel in which the latter explained the legal reasons preventing him from releasing the design drawings for government inspection (clearly more stall tactics, but Stalwart let him off easy), Stalwart pulled into the valet lane at the Embassy Suites in downtown Fort Worth.

  A trip to the Flying Saucer Brewery was in order. He would rack up a few more notches on his “Beers Around the World” card while admiring the beautiful Texas belles in their tartan skirts.

  Mullah’s men had a big night ahead of them, but Stalwart’s work was done.

  Almost.

  He stopped at the front desk on the way to his room, and asked for an envelope and a slip of paper. He tucked his LM security badge into the envelope. He wrote “07-15-1971” on the piece of paper, then slid it into the envelope next to his badge. He sealed the envelope and wrote a name on the front.

  “Will you please hold this for pickup?” he asked the desk clerk. “I wrote the name on the front of the envelope, but please ask for a photo ID before you give it to him. Thanks a bunch.”

  On the way to his room, he sifted through the dozen email messages on his personal phone. It didn’t take him long to locate a message from “The Blog of the Author Tim Farley.” He received an updated email every time someone posted a new comment on a particular blog post.

  Most of the time, the blog comments held no meaning for Stalwart. Tonight’s was different: “Stewardess reports Protégé on task.”

  Beautiful. He smiled to himself.

  Archive hadn’t wanted to manipulate Protégé, but Stalwart had convinced him otherwise. Keeping tabs on the young GE executive was absolutely necessary, given what was at stake. The pretty young flight attendant had just confirmed that Archive’s trust in the rising star wasn’t misplaced.

  Stalwart let out a deep, satisfied breath. It was time for some well-deserved relaxation.

  82

  Washington, DC. Monday, 6:45 p.m. ET.

  The assassin eyed the white utility van containing his quarry, following from a distance as the van drove through a residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

  He knew his bullet had wounded the fat, balding man the Intermediary had sent him to kill, but he had no idea whether his target had actually died.

  So, on the Intermediary’s orders, he followed the van, alone and outgunned, pondering how to confirm his target’s death without causing his own.

  A fine predicament. Thanks to the Intermediary, the assassin found himself violating an important rule of tradecraft: never chase a van full of armed men by yourself.

  I’ve got to get a new career. Or at least a new boss.

  Red and blue lights flashed in his rearview mirror. Police.

  Goddamn. It’s just not my day.

  There was no point in evading the officer. Doing so would cause nothing but trouble, and would still cause him to lose track of the van.

  He had a concealed weapons permit, so there would be no problem if the officer searched his vehicle and found his sidearm.

  And all of the papers for this particular legend were in order—the driver’s license, insurance documents, and registration all said “Michael Weathersby,” his current alias.

  He would simply accept the ticket. And lose his target in the process. But there was nothing else he could do.

  The old man is going to shit himself.

  He turned on his turn signal and pulled over, watching the utility van disappear around a bend in the road.

  83

  Langley Air Force Base, Hampton, VA. Monday, 6:49 p.m. ET.

  The Langley Air Force Base gate guard looked briefly at Protégé’s identification card and the letter from Mr. Mike Charles, and waved the delivery van through without a word.

  Protégé drove past the end of the runway as an F-22 Raptor rolled out of its final turn in preparation for landing. Gorgeous machine, he thought. His company supplied a few of the jet’s parts, so he had more than a passing knowledge of the aircraft and its capabilities, but it was always awe-inspiring to see one airborne.

  He drove east past the historic brick buildings bordering the flight line, and followed a roundabout onto Dodd Boulevard.

  Langley was also home to NASA’s Langley Research Center. Giant tanks, towering wind tunnels, looming cranes, and strange-looking structures dotted the large peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the Chesapeake.

  NASA had conducted decades of research at Langley, but declining budgets had killed many of the experiments. Most of the large structures were in varying stages of decay or disassembly, and many of the remaining buildings were sealed up awaiting demolition.

  Protégé approached the Air Combat Command headquarters building. It housed the four-star general in charge of the majority of USAF’s combat forces, which consisted of thousands of airplanes and drones, together worth trillions of dollars.

  Several large multi-story buildings arrayed in a three-block radius contained the general’s staff. The command employed a dozen generals, hundreds of colonels, and thousands of clerks. Protégé had been a government contractor his entire career, and was convinced the federal government was comprised of thousands doing the work of dozens.

  Protégé turned right at the street immediately prior to the headquarters building, half a block from the large flag in front of the general’s building.

  He drove one block south, and parked the van along the side of a large building containing a gigantic, disused wind tunnel. Warning signs adorned the large garage door that had been used to transport scientific equipment in and out of the building during the wind tunnel’s time in service.

  Thirty paces further south, the pavement gave way to a marina, and boats bobbed in the early evening Chesapeake tide.

  He felt a surge of adrenaline. I can’t believe we’re going to do this right under the four-star’s nose.

  He climbed out of the van’s cab, rolled open the large delivery door in the back of the truck, and retrieved five warning cones, which he placed around the vehicle. Always best to look official.

  He walked to the personnel door on the side of the wind tunnel building, took a deep breath, and knocked hard.

  He heard footsteps, and the door opened.

  Art Levitow stood in the doorway. He wore coveralls and work boots, but still looked scholarly with his glasses creeping toward the end of his nose. He smiled warmly, shook Protégé’s hand, and pulled him in for an embrace. “Welcome to Langley!”

  “Holy shit, I wasn’t expecting to see you here!”

  “Where else would I be?” Levitow asked good-naturedly. “I thought I’d put the finishing touches on our little widget. I was in DC earlier today to update Arquist, so I just drove down afterwards. I might even have passed you on the highway.”

  Levitow motioned toward the cargo van. “Let’s get that thing inside, shall we?”

  He pushed a button just inside the personnel door, and the large roll-up door began to open.

  They pried the plywood container open to reveal the high-powered directional electromagnetic transmitter. The HDET was bolted atop a sturdy wheeled cart, which the two men rolled down the moving van’s ramp and into the open garage door. Protégé closed the garage door, once again sealing the musty building.

  Debris covered the floor, and a gargantuan metal tube—the wind tunnel itself—dominated the space above their heads.

  The tube was shaped like a giant white donut. The building was built around the western half of the wind tunnel; the eastern half of the gigantic circular shape was suspended above the parking lot on large metal stilts.

  The building was constructed to house the wind tunnel’s control room, and
to shield a half dozen huge electrical power transformers from the soggy Virginia weather.

  It took a great deal of energy to accelerate an air mass to supersonic speeds. Levitow had calculated that it would take roughly the same amount of energy to permanently disable a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, using the Senior Quantum waveform he and his team had spent the better part of a decade developing.

  Only a few directional electromagnetic transmitters in the world could handle the power output required for that purpose.

  One of them sat on the large rolling crate with the GE logo on the side, now parked in front of Protégé and Levitow.

  Levitow inspected the HDET’s specification card carefully, finally nodding in approval. “This will work nicely. The power’s still on in here, and the Senior Quantum controller is on its way,” he said. “As long as the optical tracker gets here from Texas on time, we should be in business.”

  84

  Washington, DC. Monday, 7:03 p.m. ET.

  “This won’t hurt, Senator Higgs.” Farhoud’s men had been forced to tie the pudgy senator’s hands behind his back and hold him down on the floor. He struggled against their weight, trying to break free.

  “Unless you break the needle off in your arm, jackass,” another voice growled. Higgs settled down, and Farhoud injected the syringe full of sodium amytol—truth serum—into the senator’s arm.

  Farhoud’s questioning had made it abundantly clear to Higgs that the dark-skinned man and his half-dozen henchmen were not really utility workers.

  The senator had immediately—and somewhat irrationally, given the number of armed men who surrounded him—begun struggling to free himself.

  “I’m not sure why you’re holding out, Senator,” Farhoud said. “It’s not like it’s a secret. It’s pretty safe to say that they know that you know. If we hadn’t shown up today at the safe house, you’d probably be dead by now. You might as well just answer the question.”

  “You’ll kill me as soon as you have what you want.” The drug was already taking effect, lowering Higgs’s inhibitions and loosening his tongue. His speech was groggy-sounding, and it took two of Farhoud’s men to help the senator onto the couch in the small, musty apartment.

  Higgs tried to lie down, but the men propped him in a sitting position to keep him from falling asleep.

  “What makes you think we want you dead?” Farhoud asked.

  “What makes you any different from the other two goon squads I’ve met in the past four days?”

  Farhoud raised his eyebrows. “A valid question. I’m sure we have many things in common with the people who have tried to kill you. But there is one important difference, I think. Unlike them, we don’t happen to want you dead.”

  “How do I know you’re not screwing with me? You’ve all got funny accents and you come from sketchy pissed-off third world countries. You probably hate all of us round-eyed bastards.”

  Higgs started laughing. He couldn’t stop. He was clearly intoxicated by the barbiturates.

  Farhoud addressed him in a quiet, sincere tone. “You don’t have any way of knowing whether I’m being honest with you when I say that we have no desire to kill you,” he said. “And, more importantly, that we have no need to kill you. But I am, in fact, being quite honest with you.”

  “I have another truthful statement to make, one that you should consider carefully,” Farhoud continued. “We will torture you to get that name, Senator Higgs. It will be most unpleasant for everyone involved, but we will not hesitate.”

  Higgs squirmed.

  “We will start by removing your right thumbnail with a pair of pliers,” Farhoud said. “But we will wait until after the drug wears off, so that the pain will be sharp and clear.”

  Higgs let out an exaggerated sigh, and he shook his head unsteadily from side to side. “Always with the threats. So tiresome.”

  “I will leave you to consider your options, Senator. But my two friends will keep you company as you think things through.”

  Farhoud turned on his heel and started to walk toward the door. He had taken only two steps when he heard Higgs speak.

  The terrorist stopped dead in his tracks, eyes suddenly wide in alarm and surprise.

  Had he heard Higgs correctly? Could it possibly be true?

  He turned around to face Higgs. “What did you say?”

  In as clear a voice as he could summon through the narcotics, Senator Frank Higgs repeated himself.

  Higgs spoke the name of the Facilitator.

  85

  Fort Worth, TX. Monday, 5:13 p.m. CT.

  A “Farquardt’s Industrial Moving” van approached the gate at the Langston Marlin facility. Like a military installation, LM had plenty of valuables to protect and plenty of secrets to keep under wraps, and they took security seriously.

  Mostly.

  A morbidly fat man in a guard uniform leaned out the window of his guard shack.

  The van’s driver, a dark, swarthy man of Ottoman descent, held up the badge in his left hand. On it was a picture of Stalwart, with his sandy blonde hair and fair skin, retrieved half an hour earlier from the front desk clerk at the Embassy Suites hotel in downtown Fort Worth.

  Such a ploy would never work if the gate guards ever bothered to check the bright yellow badges closely. But they never did.

  The guard waved the van through the gate, smiling as he did so.

  The team knew they would be under video surveillance, but they didn’t care. The access badge would open all the necessary doors, and LM’s after-hours security manning was sparse, overfed, and under-exercised.

  The whole operation took less than fifteen minutes.

  The van dropped one man off at the main facility door. He entered using Stalwart’s badge and personal identification number, and made his way through the labyrinthine office section and onto the factory floor.

  Once on the factory floor, the man commandeered a golf cart and raced through the mile-long assembly plant toward the anti-satellite testing setup. He parked the golf cart, then used the same badge and PIN to open a large vertical door at the rear of the facility.

  Meanwhile, the van circled around the parking lot to the back of the enormous facility. The driver maneuvered into the yawning, cavernous manufacturing center. The door closed behind the van, and a team of four technicians spilled out of the back.

  One man rolled a heavy-duty metal cart down the van’s loading ramp. The cart was fitted with a hand-operated crane.

  They used Stalwart’s badge to summon the elevator. It deposited them atop the platform just beneath the observatory aperture. The equipment was still warm from the demonstration just hours before.

  The team worked swiftly and efficiently. Stalwart and Art Levitow had provided them with all the information they needed, and everything moved like clockwork.

  The targeting system was entirely self-contained, and roughly the size of a keg of beer. The team detached it from the high-energy laser, which wasn’t powerful enough to harm communications satellites in their distant geosynchronous orbit. For that task, only the Senior Quantum waveform, powered by Protégé’s HDET, would suffice.

  The team kept the precision-machined mounting bracket, which weighed close to four hundred pounds, attached to the optical tracking device. The over-engineered bracket ensured that the aiming device and the laser beam pointed in exactly the same direction.

  Levitow planned to use the same mounting bracket to secure the high-powered directional electromagnetic transmitter to the optical tracking system, and he had been adamant that the team not jostle the calibrating arms out of alignment. “It will save hours of adjustment time,” he had said.

  The team carefully fastened the crane’s lifting chains to four load-bearing points on the optical targeting device’s exterior casing. All four men double-checked the security of the attachments. This was the only such unit in the world in operational condition. Nobody wanted to see it fall to the floor.

  They slowly hoisted the
targeting device and its heavy mounting bracket onto the cart, letting the heavy metal structure settle gently onto the cart before lashing it securely in place.

  A single electrical cable connected the device to a laptop computer. A technician placed the computer and connector in a small padded suitcase.

  The team rode the elevator down to the waiting van, and pushed the cart up the loading ramp. Three men secured the cart in the back of the van while the fourth opened the roll-up door. The warm, moist Texas air spilled into the factory.

  Less than a minute later, the driver waved to the friendly, obese gate guard as the moving van exited the Langston Marlin compound. The fat man smiled and waved back. “Y’all have a good night, now,” he said.

  They drove directly to the cargo section of the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. The driver produced a TSA badge bearing his own face and name to gain access to the aircraft parking ramp.

  He drove out onto the cargo pad, making his way to a small cargo jet parked adjacent to a towering Federal Express 767. He parked the van in front of the loading ramp.

  Forty minutes later, the aircraft leveled off at 39,000 feet, carrying the optical tracking device and the team of four technicians eastward into the growing darkness.

  86

  Washington, DC. Monday, 7:03 p.m. CT.

  Sam called her deputy for an update as she sped south on I-395, blue police light flashing atop her silver Porsche.

  The light encouraged traffic to make way for her, but drivers didn’t move out of the way quickly enough for Sam’s liking. She spat curses like an angry Tourette’s patient.

  Her interrogation of Major General Charlie Landers had started off badly, but thanks to Landers’s mistaken assumption that Sam hadn’t done her homework, and thanks to the personal dirt that Dan Gable was able to dig up on the dirty general, Sam had all the leverage she needed for a beautifully productive interview.