The three-bird formation of Arapahos was coming toward the ranch low out of the dark eastern sky. Suddenly, ahead of them, red streaks jumped up from the ground.
“Missiles, missiles!” the pilot yelled over the radio. “Break formation, dive!”
The Arapaho seemed almost to tip upside down as it banked and dove for the surface. The pilot righted the aircraft a few feet above the desert floor. Twisting his head to see through the window to the sky behind them, Jimmy saw four fireballs slowly descending. The pilot had had the presence of mind to release diversion flares as he maneuvered out of the path of the incoming Stinger-like missiles.
“Talon Two, Three, you still wi’ me?” the Arapaho pilot asked, calling on the other two helicopters.
“Roger that, Talon One, Talon Three is on your tail,” came the response. Then: “And Talon Two, who are these guys got Stingers out here?”
“Break formation. Talon Two, approach your target low from the east-northeast, heading zero eight zero. Talon Three, from the northwest at heading two eight zero. Do not break ceiling above three zero zero feet.” The lead pilot then began a long turn, giving the other aircraft time to get into position for a simultaneous assault on the site.
“I don’t see anybody down there where the Stingers came from,” Talon Two called in.
“Talon Three in position,” Foley heard over his headset. Then the other helicopter confirmed its readiness.
“All Talons, go, go, go.” The Arapaho lurched forward. “Remember, no touchdowns, drop, discharge, and pull out.”
The desert turned into dust devils as the choppers descended. The exoskeleton Marines leaping from the Arapahos reminded Foley of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, giants totally encased in their own individual ecosystems, impervious to attack. The exoskel Marines jumped into swirling sand and fanned out by bounding across the ground. Also dropping from the helicopters were several four foot long vehicles with miniature tank treads, Bombots. They carried multimode cameras and sensors designed to find booby traps and bombs. Another model carried a high-rate-of-fire electronic gun system.
Jimmy Foley and Major Zerbrowksi came up behind the squad moving in from the east. He heard a small thud up ahead and realized that the lead unit had made it to the large warehouse-like building. The thud was probably the sound of the Marines using a light explosive charge to blow the lock off the main door. Foley realized he had not yet switched his headset from the aircraft band to the ground frequency. As he switched over to the chatter of the Bravo Company ’skels, he heard, “Sending the Bombots into building one.”
Normally, the exoskeleton troops would have the visuals in their helmets of what the Bombots were seeing as they drove around inside the buildings. However, with the Netcentric connections turned off to prevent another hacker attack, only their voice radios connected the exoskels to the tactical communications system. Only Jimmy, the major, and two gunnies had the Bombot’s visuals on their portable monitors. The vehicles scanned the rooms with their electro-optical and infrared cameras, but they were also equipped with self-sensing microcantilevers that detected the smallest particles that could be explosive residue. They tested by creating faint popping noises, actually detonating particles in the air.
“Bombot reports building one secure,” he heard on the ground freq. “We’re going in.”
“Building two secure.” That meant both the warehouse and the residence had been taken and checked for booby traps.
He was getting close enough and the sand was settling, so he could make out the shape of the thirty-foot-high warehouse. “Building three secure.” That was the multibay garage building. Foley headed for the warehouse.
On the ground outside the building were what looked like two large toy aircraft, maybe the unmanned aerial vehicles that Soxster thought had been used to beam signals down directly to the exoskeleton-suited Marines? Zabrowski bent over one of the little planes. “Writing’s in English and Chinese.”
“Yeah, well, ever found a toy that’s not made in China?” Foley asked, and kept going.
Foley heard the chattering back and forth on the tactical channel. None of them had found anyone. There were lots of computers, but no people. Signs of recent occupancy, but no one home. “Got a video-monitoring studio here,” one of the Marines announced on the radionet. Foley joined him and found six flat screens, flipping among various video feeds. They had not shut the system off. But the feeds were not coming from the ranch. They seemed to be from industrial facilities, parking lots. Then the White House appeared on one screen. They had been hacking into surveillance cameras all over the country. Foley hit the computer console in front of him and a GUI appeared with a search box. On a hunch, he typed in “SCAIF.” A long list of dates came back. Jimmy typed again. “SCAIF, bombing.” It came back with three listings. He hit the third. On the center flat screen above him, a tape began to run. The image was grainy, maybe on telescopic. A cloud like a small explosion appeared in the distance, then a large truck came roaring down the road. A car crashed into the truck from the side and the screen was immediately filled with a flash. There was no sound. Then the camera panned back and to the right. There was someone on the ground. The image zoomed in. “Jesus, Susan!” Jimmy said. He reminded himself that he knew she was all right. That scene had taken place yesterday. He tapped his mike: “We got a bunch of evidence over here.”
As he reached down to the console again, he heard in his headset, “Major, we got a stiff in the warehouse. Big bullet hole in his forehead.”
Foley accompanied Major Zabrowski inside the large structure that he guessed was forty feet by a hundred. The front part was divided up into vehicle bays, some of which had dusty jeeps and trucks. The rest of the space was office cubicles, many with flat screens and headsets. Following the voice of a gunny sergeant directing them, they made their way back to a cubicle near the far side of the building. The body was still on a gurney. An IV drip stand was on its right and some sort of brain scanner on the left, with its wires still connected to pads on the skull. There was also a large, bloody hole in the middle of his forehead.
They had tried to learn what he knew through drug inducement and lie-detector brain scans, which Jimmy Foley knew from his own experience worked well, unlike the medieval hocus-pocus of polygraphs. Jimmy wondered what had happened to Naomi, the single mom, and her kid. He swallowed hard.
“You know this guy?” the major asked. “Who is he?”
“This is TTeeLer,” Jimmy said with an overwhelming sense of guilt.
“What kind of a fuckin’ name is that, Major?” the gunny asked. Zabrowski shook his head.
“It’s geek,” Foley volunteered.
“Greek? I heard of Stavos and Dimitri, no TeeTee,” the Gunny said, and laughed.
“Geek, computer talk,” Foley corrected, remembering what Soxster had told him. “TTL. It’s part of a computer packet, how long it’s good for, how long it lasts. It means Time To Live.”
“Well, in his case, I’d say it meant time to die,” the gunny said, bending down to examine the body.
Jimmy looked up and saw, on the other side of the room, the surveillance camera inside the glass globe. It was moving slowly. When it was pointed at Foley and the major standing over TTeeLer, the lens zoomed in. It could just be an intelligent video program that was directing it, Foley thought, but it had an erratic pattern that made it seem driven by hand. He turned his back on the camera, flipped his frequency to the All Mission Personnel channel, and said softly, “Do not run, but quickly withdraw from all buildings, withdraw now.”
The noise was from above, sharp and loud, THWACK, and with it came an instant rain of metal shards everywhere. They hadn’t checked the roof, Foley thought as he looked up. The ragged metal roof fragment hit his right eye and angled into and through his nose. Foley felt no pain, but through his left eye he could see his blood gushing out. Then he fell over onto the corpse.
2008 PST
Will Gaudium’s Home at the Bacch
analia Winery
“I wasn’t sure at first whether you were only pretending to agree with me,” Will Gaudium admitted as he poured the Late Harvest Laborscum, “but the expression in vino veritas hasn’t lasted two thousand years without reason.”
“Well, here is the truth: I hate dessert wines,” Susan protested, convinced that she had already had enough wine for two nights.
“At least try it,” Gaudium pleaded. “My wife loved it.” He tended to the dwindling fire, stirring the embers and adding a log.
Sipping the liqueur-like wine, Susan had to admit, “I can see why. Like honey, but not syrupy or oversweet.”
“Just like you,” Gaudium let slip. “I’m sorry, that was inappropriate, Susan.”
“No, Will, don’t be upset. It was fine. In vino veritas. I love getting compliments,” she said. “But, if you don’t mind, tell me about your wife.”
Gaudium inhaled. “Breast cancer. Three years ago. Happened fast. Tried everything, but it was aggressive and we caught it late.” He swallowed and, Susan thought, his eyes teared up. “You see I have no problem whatsoever with genetic alteration to fix mistakes in our cells. If I could have spent all my money to save her that way, I would not have hesitated. But instead of doing research into that our scientists were doing Viagra and Botox.”
“Will, I’m so sorry,” Susan offered. “And then, with her gone, you threw yourself into this work?”
“Yeah, basically. I was approached by some venture capitalists from Sand Hill Road. They were raising a new fund to invest exclusively in nanotech, human-machine interfaces, life extending pharma, all that. That’s when I really looked closely into these fields, and came away shocked that we were so close—so close to fundamentally and irrevocably altering humanity.”
For the first time, Susan saw the man sitting next to her by the fire not as a part of her investigation but as a warm, honorable, principled human being. Older than her, but still strong and fit and caring. He had built a big company on the basis of his technical brilliance, retired to be with his wife and make wine, and then lost her. Instead of any of the grief-driven things others would have done, he had put his money to use trying to educate the public and the government on a threat that only someone with his background and expertise could have seen holistically.
Susan reached out her hand and took his. She said, “I think I can help you.”
1920 EST
Cleveland Park Neighborhood
Washington, D.C.
“Drop me off opposite the fire station,” Sol Rubenstein told the cabbie. The blue and white taxi pulled in at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Porter Street. The Director of National Intelligence had not been in a taxi for several years and fumbled about trying to determine how much of a tip was appropriate to program into his RFID credit card. Wearing a Washington Nationals baseball hat and a windbreaker, he assumed that the likelihood of his being identified was small. His picture had seldom been in the media and he made no television appearances.
The light changed to stop the end-of-rush-hour traffic still moving north on Connecticut Avenue toward Maryland. In a small group of pedestrians, Rubenstein crossed the street toward the firehouse. His fellow travelers looked to be mainly twentysomethings on their way to the new laser holograph movie at the Uptown Cinema.
Rubenstein broke off from the group shortly after crossing Connecticut and moved quickly into the Yin Ching Palace restaurant. Personally, he preferred dim sum from one of the more authentic Chinese establishments in Washington’s miniature Chinatown near the convention center. The chief of the Chinese intelligence service’s Washington station had been fairly insistent that they meet at the old Woodley Park restaurant. Perhaps there were too many Taiwan sympathizers in the Cantonese establishments downtown. Maybe the Chinese intelligence service, the Guoanbu, owned the Yin Ching, though that seemed unlikely.
As requested, Rubenstein moved quickly to the last of the bright orange booths, on the right-hand side in the corner. There, pouring a Sam Adams beer, was a young Chinese professional who could have been in his late thirties or perhaps early forties, Shen Ruikai. He wore a gray polo shirt that bore the red letters MIT. On the seat next to him was a faded blue Red Sox hat. “Sol, thanks for putting up with all the cloak and dagger. Not my idea. How you been?”
“I thought you ran everything for the Guoanbu in D.C.—hell, throughout the U.S.—Shen. What’s the matter, you been demoted?” Rubenstein joked. He had known Shen Ruikai for three years. They had exchanged lunches and dinners. Both Rubenstein and Ruikai were loyal to their governments, but they also both knew the value of informal channels and officially off-the-record discussions. It was Rubenstein who had initiated the discussions, but Ruikai had warmed to them once he understood that he was not the target of a heavy-handed recruitment. Rubenstein also knew that Ruikai told the Guoanbu about the meetings, lest anyone think he had become a U.S. double agent.
“Sol, you know I don’t bullshit. I got this instruction from Director of Second Bureau in a personal message,” Ruikai explained with some chagrin.
“How is Wu Zhan?” Rubenstein asked. Wu had been the Washington station chief before Ruikai and now ran the Foreign Intelligence Division of the Ministry of State Security, the Guoanbu’s formal name. Rubenstein had gotten to know him during the interagency effort Sol had run to uncover the scope of Chinese intelligence activity on American companies. Although his team had found massive economic espionage, including widespread electronic spying through computer-network penetration and implants in products assembled in China, the American government had kept the results of the investigation quiet, plugged some of the holes, deported several Chinese graduate students, and demarched the Chinese government. Rubenstein had also put a 24×7 tail, rather overtly, on the Chinese station chief. As a result, Wu Zhan had been withdrawn back to Beijing. Rubenstein later learned that his friendly adversary had been promoted to run all of Chinese intelligence’s foreign operations.
“He misses Washington,” Ruikai joked. “Misses you.”
“Doesn’t trust his successor is doing as good a job of stealing from us?” Sol shot back, only half in jest.
Shen Ruikai hesitated and Sol sensed that his joking remark had hit home. “Apparently, he does not trust me for something, Sol. I was directed to give you this message in writing. As you will see, I am not instructed to give you a substantive message. Instead, he invites you to visit him as soon as possible.”
Rubenstein took the text, which had been translated into English. Ruikai continued, “The backstory, Sol, which I got on the secure phone, is that Taiwan shooting down our fighter aircraft has really embarrassed the big generals of the People’s Liberation Army. They want to do something. And this comes at a time when some in the Pentagon think that maybe China is responsible for the terrorist attacks in the U.S. The Guoanbu in Beijing thinks the tensions between us are too high. Dangerously high.”
“That must be because that is what Guoanbu’s Washington station is reporting to Beijing,” Sol observed. “Is that what you are telling them?”
The Peking duck arrived and both men halted the conversation until the waiter distributed the pancakes, spring onions, skin, sauce, and duck meat. Even when the waiter departed, Ruikai did not answer. He carefully stuffed a pancake and then looked up at Rubenstein. “Without revealing my sources and methods, Sol, I might have reported that many senior officials of your government have the belief that China is somehow involved in the bombings this week. They are, of course, wrong. Perhaps I have told Beijing that the Pentagon has been tasked to develop retaliation options. And that POTUS will ask the television networks for time on Monday night.”
Now it was Rubenstein who took his time carefully assembling his duck package. Then he smiled across the table. “Without commenting on the accuracy of what you might have reported, tell me why Wu thinks that in the middle of all of this, I should spend a week dragging my raggedy ass to Beijing?”
Ruikai sat back in the boot
h and took a large gulp of the Sam Adams. “Here is where I can only speculate. You know that Wu is very close personally to our President. He may or may not be speaking for him. There may be a deal, which Wu cannot put in writing yet. Our President may not want to seek approval for a plan only to have your side reject it. But, Sol, I am guessing. All I do know is that my instructions were, first, to tell you that you could leave tomorrow and be back on Sunday on the nonstop to Hong Kong. Wu will meet you there. You will be the only one in the first-class cabin on the flight out of Dulles. Second, I was to meet you here, at the Yin Ching Palace. I don’t know why this place—it’s not very trendy.”
Sol Rubenstein did not reply. Ruikai saw Sol’s eyes focus in the middle distance. Then he said slowly, “I don’t think Wu has a flair for the melodramatic, Shen, do you?” Shen Ruikai shook his head.
Rubenstein signaled for a waiter. “Menu, please.” Ruikai looked puzzled. Sol accepted the menu, turned it over, and handed it to Ruikai, his finger pointing to a box on the back cover. It read:
The Yin Ching Palace was the location of secret talks that led to the peaceful conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. A KGB officer met with ABC News television reporter John Scali and passed along a back-channel message from Soviet Chairman Khrushchev. Nuclear war between the United states and the Soviet Union was averted.
Rubenstein stood up to leave and placed his Nationals cap back on. “Tell Wu I will see him in Hong Kong on Saturday. Call my assistant with the travel details, but I must be back Sunday.”
Breakpoint Page 15
