Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  Pete sighed and shuffled to one side, letting Ray ease the heavy oak doors open just wide enough to stick his face in.

  “Ray!” The raspy voice issuing from the other side was one part septuagenarian, two parts drill instructor. “Get in here!”

  Following his boss into the gymnasium-sized conference room, Pete couldn’t help but notice how Ray hunched his thin shoulders, like a dog about to take a whipping. Pete looked up and saw why.

  There, at the far end of a mahogany table long enough to bowl on, sat Helen Artemis Gallagher of the Boston Gallaghers, former Junior Senator from the Great State of Massachusetts, and, by the grace of God and the patronage of the President, for the past seven months Energy Secretary of these United States of America.

  Pete had only ever seen her at the bimonthly DOE all-hands get-togethers. It was different being in the same room with her. Up close, her steely gaze was more than a match for the iron-gray of her close-cropped hair. Tough as nine-inch nails was the word on the street, committed to twisting Department policy into whatever shape the exigencies of Administration politics dictated.

  Ray swallowed and said, “Good afternoon, Madame Secretary.”

  “Sit down, Ray,” she replied, “You too, ah, Pete. We haven’t got all day. You know everybody, right?”

  “Uh-huh. Hi, Nate. Hi, Don.” Ray flashed a tentative smile at the two men flanking the Secretary.

  Pete just nodded. He knew them, if only by reputation. The bald, bearded guy in bifocals and shirtsleeves perched on Gallagher’s right was Nathan Hornstein, Deputy Administrator for the Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation program and Ray’s immediate superior. Across the table from him sat his boss Donald Scatizzi, Undersecretary for Nuclear Security, his substantial girth camouflaged by a tailored natural-linen suit. Mutt and Jeff, the two were called—less for their physical contrast than their complementary talents: Hornstein, the Department’s top nuclear-technology dweeb; Scatizzi, its master negotiator.

  “So,” Gallagher said, “what brings you boys in from the boonies on a Sunday afternoon? What’s this all about?” She tapped a polished fingernail on a three-ring binder lying on the table in front of her. Its cover bore the words Operation Tsunami over a DOE sigil and the requisite security notifications. “Make it good,” she went on. “Make it worth missing my grandniece’s birthday party.”

  “I’m sorry if we’ve interrupted your weekend, Madame Secretary,” Ray began. “This was the only open slot on your calendar before your Far East trip. As to the reason for the meeting, it’s all spelled out in the executive summary—”

  “I’ve read it. I don’t see the urgency. Tsunami’s a contingency plan, no more—right?”

  “Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. It’s just that we feel we, uh, may need to be in a position to action that contingency in the near future.

  “The near future,” Gallagher echoed. “When, exactly?”

  Ray’s Adam’s apple bobbed again. “Uh, this week?”

  “This week?” She turned Hornstein’s way. “Nathan?”

  Hornstein got the message: these were his people, his problem. He peered over his spectacles and fixed Ray with a gimlet stare. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Ray, but what you’re advocating here is that the United States commit an act of piracy.”

  Ray flushed all the way up to the hairline. “Um, I realize it might look that way on paper, Nate. But, uh . . .” He looked to Scatizzi for support, but the Undersecretary was busy studying the intricacies of the conference table’s grain.

  Hornstein slid a sheet of paper over to Gallagher. She picked it up and began reading from it. “Interception of a foreign-flag vessel on the high seas. Boarding, in international waters, with the option of commensurate response in the event of resistance. Inspection with a view to—” She set the paper down. “Now look, guys, I’m no admiralty lawyer, but this sounds like it’d be out of bounds on Lake Michigan.”

  “Madame Secretary?” Pete jumped in before Ray could cave altogether. “Can I say something?”

  “Somebody better.”

  “Grishin Enterprises is under suspicion of trafficking in WMD expertise, three counts. I’ve got operatives in place aboard the target vessel right now, trying to make that case stick. If they do, we’ve got to be ready to move or we could lose the evidence and my people.” And one of those people is Marianna.

  “What Pete is saying,” Scatizzi said, still not looking up, “is we have reason to believe GEI is violating international covenants on nonproliferation to the detriment of US national security. We’ll want to coordinate with our NATO partners, of course. But the only remedy available to Grishin Enterprises themselves would be to bring suit against the United States government before an international tribunal. Under the circumstances, I’m confident that tribunal would find for us.”

  “It’s the same as a raid on a terrorist base, Madame Secretary,” Ray chimed in. “Bigger than most, maybe, but no different in principle.” If he was pissed at Pete for talking out of turn, it didn’t show.

  “What about the Russians?” Gallagher asked. “A boat belonging to one of their nationals, flying their flag? They may not sit still for an interdiction, no matter how justified.”

  “I was on the phone with Vitali Rumyantsev all Friday afternoon,” Ray said. “He’s IPP coordinator for the Russian Republic—the guy on the receiving end of the Proliferation Prevention funding stream.

  He’s not in love with the search-and-seizure concept, but he’s even less thrilled by the prospect of an aid freeze. The way we left it is, as long as we can keep this from becoming a national sovereignty issue, the Kremlin will pretty much stay out of it, limit itself to proforma sound-bytes. You know: ‘We do not support, but will not oppose’—that sort of thing.”

  Pete waited, but Ray had evidently said all he was going to. Judging by Gallagher’s expression, it hadn’t been enough.

  “Madame Secretary? There’s something else.”

  “Go on.” She favored Pete with a this-better-be-good look.

  “Well, I don’t have Ray’s kind of access, understand. My contacts are more at a worker-bee level. But—” He took a deep breath. “It’s just I get the sense the Russian s wouldn’t be all that bent out of shape if we took Grishin down for them.”

  “The head of their third largest corporation?”

  “Hard to believe, I know. It’s just that last March we hosted this joint CROM-FSB workshop out in Chantilly. You know: ‘get to know our Russian partners for peace’—touchie-feelie, team-building type stuff. So, five o’clock Friday rolls around, and some of us head over to Sully Plaza for drinks. I wind up sitting around, shooting the—that is, talking to Volodya Kalugin. He’s in charge of reack ops for Greater Moscow. Seems like a good guy.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Well, we must’ve been on our third round or so when, out of the blue, he starts talking about how their head honcho’s got this wild hair up his, uh, nose. On account of he’s really got it in for this one oligarch, but it’s like the guy’s untouchable. Too connected, too well protected.”

  “Protected from the Russian government?” Scatizzi sounded incredulous.

  “I’m just telling you what the man said. But there’s more: Volodya leans over and tells me, in this real low voice, that there’s some kind of bad blood between the Prezidyent and this guy, from way back. From when they used to work for the same firm back in the old days.”

  “The KGB?” Gallagher arched an eyebrow. “And you think he was talking about Grishin?”

  “I can’t say for sure. Background checks have turned up zip for links between Grishin and the KGB, shadow or not. But think about it: the Russians know CROM’s been sniffing GEI over. How much of a stretch is it to read this whole thing as a tactical leak?”

  “You’re suggesting,” Gallagher said slowly, “that your Mr. Kalugin divulged this, this—oh, hell, it’s not even information, is it?—these hints and innuendoes deliberately, on orders from his highe
r-ups?”

  Pete shrugged. “It’s the way they’ve always done business—you know, rumors and all.”

  “So,” Gallagher steepled her fingertips, “We might, in fact, be doing them a favor. We’d have to confirm that informally, of course. But if it turns out they want it bad enough. Hmm.”

  She got to her feet. The rest of the room rose with her.

  A smile crinkled her cheeks for the first time. “Okay, boys, you’ve got my buy-in. This has still got to go to the top of the tree, you understand. But the Man’s been looking for a quid pro quo, now Moscow’s listening to reason on the Moldava situation. Crazy as it sounds, an act of piracy could be just what the doctor ordered.”

  18 | Night Moves

  MARIANNA CHECKED HER wristtop: midnight. Jon’d had long enough to engage the bridge crew in conversation. Her teeth worried her lower lip as she dialed her trompe l’oeil jumpsuit into blur mode. Then, a shadow among the shadows, she climbed the back stairs to bridge deck and slipped into the passageway leading to the chartroom.

  Now came the tricky part: knocking out Grishin’s spycam long enough to get in and get out. Phase inverters were marvelous things; any waveform was fair game for nullification. They’d even begun installing big ones under the office buildings in downtown LA to damp down earthquake tremors. Marianna had nothing so elaborate in mind for her miniature version; canceling the signal from Grishin’s surveillance camera would be quite enough, thank you.

  She couldn’t leave it at that, of course. Grishin’s watchers would get suspicious if their monitors went blank all of a sudden. No problem; by now Marianna’s laptop contained hours (and hours and hours) of filched images showing an empty chartroom, including a segment from this same time last night. On her postage-stamp display, she overlaid the real-time transmission with the sequence she’d edited out of the recordings. She began making final adjustments, trying to synch up the two image streams. Everything—the lighting, the fall of the shadows, even the animated timestamp in the lower righthand corner (with today’s date patched in, of course)—everything had to match perfectly. Not even a frame-by-frame postmortem could uncover the deception, or they’d be cooked.

  She was nearly there when she heard something, the creak of a floorboard sounded like, coming from the wheelhouse at the end of the passageway. She froze, her pulse pounding in her ears. More creaks, then a shadow flitted across the half-open wheelhouse door. In a moment, its owner would poke his face into the corridor and see her. Her suit’s camouflage might be enough to hide her from a casual glance in dim light, but not from careful scrutiny.

  Praying she’d gotten the feeds synchronized right, she hit the key that canceled out the signal from Grishin’s spycam and spliced in her own substitute. Now the watchers should be watching chartroom images twenty-four hours old, so Marianna’s present-time incursion should remain, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

  That was the theory, anyway. And she had no choice but to test it. One more glance toward the wheelhouse, then she took a deep breath and stepped across the threshold into the chartroom.

  No alarms, no scuffle of booted feet in the passageway; even the shadow-man from the bridge seemed to have lost interest and returned to his post. Phase One, complete: she’d made it as far as the chart-room.

  Next step: Grishin’s hijacked video-surveillance transmissions had recorded a protocol of sorts for gaining entry to the access shaft. At least they showed that, prior to descending out of camera view, Galina and her associate had each run a hand along the rim of the map table. Now Marianna’s gloved fingers followed suit.

  A concealed toggle snicked and the table slid back to reveal a one-meter square aperture in the parquet flooring. Marianna was now looking down three decks to a brightly-lit room. The shaft itself remained in darkness until she located a switch for a line of emergency bulbs. Their light reflected off the steel rungs running down one wall.

  Marianna braced herself and placed a foot on the first rung. She climbed down till her eyes were on a level with the shaft’s rim. Now what? The switch that moved the chart table back was out of reach, three feet above her head. A quick scan located its mate on the shaft wall. She flipped it, then ducked down into the shaft as the heavy table slid back into place.

  One more thing to check, now that she was finally out of sight and earshot. Tightening her grip on the ladder, she activated her throat mike and earphones. Her ears were suddenly filled with bridge-crew chatter, indistinct for the most part, and in Russian to boot, though Jon was coming in loud and clear.

  “Jon?” she cut in, “it’s me. I’m on my way down to the lab, but I want to test our linkup first. If you can hear me, don’t answer. Just give me three seconds on your panic button.”

  A steady beep came back at her.

  “Okay,” she said, “reading that five-by-five here. Beep again if you need me.” Marianna switched her earphones back off—too distracting—and began her descent, sight unseen, through the salon and accommodation decks.

  In the final ten feet, the rungs gave way to a free-standing ladder, then she was setting foot on tiled flooring. She looked around to see if she had company. Nobody in sight. And it wasn’t as if anyone could hide in this glare. So far so good.

  Phase Two, complete. Marianna was now standing in Rusalka’s secret heart.

  She checked the indicator lights on her toolbelt, humming “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” under her breath. All recorders were in the green, documenting her visit on their designated swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum . . . and watching for anyone who might be watching her.

  On that score, none of the lab’s EM signatures telltaled the presence of spycams like the one up above. Grishin must not want the lab’s interior imaged anywhere else on Rusalka, not even at his watchers’ posts. Good thing, too; she’d come prepared to jam such transmissions, but doing so would set an upper limit on her time here. What internal surveillance did exist was rudimentary: easily-countered motion and infrared sensors. A textbook example of what was known in the trade as “Maginot Line” security—lots of capability, all of it directed outward. A suboptimal configuration, as her incursion was even now demonstrating.

  Marianna began running a standard recon: cover all bases, observe everything, disturb nothing. Not that it was easy to avoid bumping into things in these close quarters. Hiding a third room in a floorplan built for two hadn’t left space for much more than two banks of workstations separated by a narrow walkway.

  Those workstations were impeding her intel-gathering along with her freedom of movement. They made up the bulk of the lab equipment, and, unlike a physical test stand or measuring device, there was little clue to functionality in the Cyrillic acronyms populating their displays. Her handheld included a small Russian lexicon, but it was survival vocab only. Neither it, nor her night-school Russian, were a match for the cryptic scientific shorthand in use throughout the clandestine lab.

  Jon was right, damn it! He would have been better at this than she was. Oh well, like he’d said: when in doubt, record everything. As if that weren’t just commonsense tradecraft.

  And she could go it one better. Marianna unsnapped a tool holster and extracted the NSA’s contribution to the interagency proliferation-control effort: a matte-black device maybe two inches square by an eighth of an inch thick and trailing a hair-thin antenna. Now for the secret lab’s local area network; she traced the coax out of the nearest workstation till she found a likely spot to conceal the little bug, then she clipped its retractable collar to the LAN. Nice and non-invasive, but all the signals flowing among the lab’s computers would be captured, compressed, and dumped to storage on a five-day rollover. Now she was definitely recording everything, and would continue to do so even after she left.

  What was Jon’s other piece of unsolicited advice? Oh, right—think patterns!

  One pattern, at least, was obvious. A single word repeated over and over on the displays: AHТИПОД. The handheld was no help, natura
lly. Marianna wrinkled her brow. She knew enough Russian to know that this was not a native Russian word; must be some sort of foreign cognate. Wasn’t there an English equivalent? Not “Antipod”—“Antipode.” Meaning the opposite end of the Earth from wherever you happened to be standing. What the Brits used to call Australia. She shook her head. Didn’t suggest anything. Just one more data-point, as Jon would say.

  Make that one big data-point. Fully three quarters of the lab equipment was dedicated to monitoring or controlling this “Antipode” thingee. There were readouts for what looked like nuclear reactor status (currently online, running at two-thirds of max), geophonic graphs tracking the seismic surround (nominal now, but with a blip some three hours ago), gravitometric readouts (ditto on the blip), half a dozen other telemetric technologies . . . all of them labeled AHТИПОД. Whatever the Antipode facility was, it was a nuclear-powered major piece of work.

  Marianna paused before a display with a green light slowly pulsing above it. It showed a wire-frame sphere, and something within it. Three of the cyan arcs making up the wireframe were bolder than the others—equator, Greenwich Meridian, International Dateline? Looked about right. Assuming the sphere was supposed to be the Earth, then . . . what was that?

  Beneath the turning, transparent surface of the blue wireframe globe was inscribed a rosette of red semi-ellipses, tilted at an angle, looking for all the world like the looping flower-petal designs she used to trace with a Spirograph when she was a kid. A small yellow light winked halfway down the brightest arc. Charting some sort of subsurface magma flows? She couldn’t begin to guess. The questions were accumulating far faster than the answers.

  A countdown box bearing the AHТИПОД, label occupied the upper righthand corner of the screen. It was reading ten hours and change to go till . . . something. Marianna mentally adjusted for ship’s time. Bingo! This clock was ticking down to 1145 Zulu. Whatever was slated to happen then, there would be somebody here to see it; the event was synched with the next scheduled check-in by Galina’s checker-shirted colleague.