by Jack Mars
“Hey, look at that. My assistant has me booked on CNN tonight. I’d better go prepare. I guess we’re done here, right?”
Susan stared at him.
“Are we done?” he said again.
She waved a hand at him.
His smiled broadened. “Good. Don’t worry. I’ll hint around on TV, but I won’t confirm or deny anything. We’ll do the formal announcement just like we agreed. And I’ll see you tomorrow bright and early.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
6:35 p.m.
The Tidal Basin – Washington, DC
“They used to call them squab,” the old white-haired man said.
Luke stood on the concrete path along the water’s edge.
It was a lovely evening, and many people were out—joggers, strollers, families. This area of downtown was among the most scenic that DC had to offer. From where Luke was, he could see the Lincoln Memorial far ahead and a little to the left. Sharply to his left, and across the basin, was the dome of the Jefferson Memorial, already lit up in blue for the night, shimmering like a magic city above the water.
It was a nice spot to meet. It had the added benefit of being a quarter of a mile from the Smithsonian Metro station. After this, Luke could drift over there and meet Gunner and Becca. Maybe. Or maybe he would tell Gunner he couldn’t make it, then watch them from afar. Then again, Gunner would know exactly where he was by checking the GPS. In truth, Luke had no idea what to do.
Silently, he cursed himself for letting Gunner know his whereabouts. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
The old man sat slumped on a park bench, facing down the grassy hill toward the water. His voice had stopped Luke in his tracks. He was a disheveled old man, with a three-day growth of beard and hair sticking up atop his head in mad tufts. He wore a light gray trench coat, as if the warmth of the evening couldn’t remove the winter chill from his rickety body.
“Squab, huh?” Luke said.
The man was covered in pigeons. He had a large plastic bag full of stale white bread on the bench next to him. He methodically broke off pieces of the bread and threw it, some down the hill from him, some right at his feet, some to his right and to his left. He even dropped some on the bench itself. At least fifty pigeons darted around, crazily feasting on the bread. They ran beneath the man’s long legs. They jumped on the bench. They flapped their wings, became airborne for a few seconds, then landed on his shoulders and his arms.
Their low vocalizations filled the little area around the bench with sound.
Coo… Coo… Coo… Coo…
The man nodded. “Oh my yes, for three hundred years, they were a game bird. Now people think they’re filthy, call them flying rats. Cities try to get rid of them. Why not eat them rather than exterminate them?”
He gestured with his head toward the Jefferson Memorial. “That’s what our forefathers did. Never forget that they were our betters. Extraordinary men, and they relished a squab dinner. Why shouldn’t we? Anyway, we need to do something with them. Pigeons breed too fast to ever fully eradicate.”
“Would you eat one?” Luke said.
“Sure. I used to eat them a lot in my younger days. I still do sometimes, when the mood strikes.”
Luke nearly laughed. The old man was crazy. He had always known that about him. Maybe he was getting crazier with age.
“I never see them advertised in the supermarkets. I wonder how you would get one?”
The old man shrugged. “Like this.”
He dropped the remaining bread crumbs from his hands. There were pigeons everywhere. Suddenly, his hands darted to the ground like sharks. They came back with a pigeon between them. The old man pinned the pigeon’s wings to its body with one hand, and stroked its back and head with the other. The pigeon had a short neck. It couldn’t extend it far enough to peck the old man’s hands. In any case, the bird seemed calm enough.
“That’s a neat trick,” Luke said.
“They trust me. And why not? Mostly, I feed them. Every once in a while, they return the favor.” He opened his hands and tossed the pigeon into the air. It flew, but it didn’t go far.
“What can I call you?” Luke said.
The man shrugged. “Howard will do.”
That was funny. Most recently, he had been named Raymond. Today he was Howard. When Luke was young, the name had been Henry, or Hank. He was the man without a name, the man without a country. He had been CIA, probably. But what hadn’t he been?
Luke had tried to put a finger on this man many times. He had put out feelers, and called in favors, all to no avail. Some people thought the man had been KGB, when that was a thing. Some said he was British Secret Service. Others said Mossad. Most people thought he was dead.
Luke knew he was alive, though. And someone else did, too. The man was a conduit for information from some very dark places.
“Quite an unfolding disaster you’ve got on your hands,” Howard said, switching topics without any transition. “It looks like the bad guys have managed to peek under your dress.”
“Do you know something about it?”
The old man shrugged. “I know what you know.”
“Maybe you know something more,” Luke said.
Howard leaned back. He put his hands on top of his head. He spoke in an orator’s voice, quiet, but with authority. “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”
“Very nice,” Luke said. “What is it?”
“It’s the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter twenty-four, verse twenty-seven. It prophesies the second coming of Christ. Judgment Day, the end of this world as we know it.”
“Come on,” Luke said. “The bad guys have intel on vulnerable infrastructure. Outdated technology. Glitches, loopholes. But I feel like cooler heads are going to prevail.” Luke nodded, maybe just to assure himself. “I think we’re going to avoid the Apocalypse on this one.”
“Hmmm,” the old man said. “You killed a man this morning. He appears to have been Chinese.”
“Not guilty,” Luke said. “He killed himself.”
“After you waterboarded him.”
Luke shook his head. “Rumors. It didn’t happen. I’ve never waterboarded anyone in my life.”
The old man looked directly up at Luke for the first time. There was a wild glint in his eyes. His face was lined and cracked. His eyes were deep set and piercing. He half-smiled. “If you say so.”
“I do.”
“Well, the man you didn’t kill was an interesting person. Among other things, he was a member of a church that was banned in China because the government there says it’s a cult. That isn’t exactly what they believe, but that’s what they say. They have worked pretty hard to stamp out the church over there, including executing many of its members, but it’s a seven-headed hydra, that church, and very hard to kill.”
Luke thought about that. Talking to this man was often a game of riddles. “You said the Chinese government doesn’t really believe it’s a cult. What do they believe?”
“Oh, they believe it’s a cult, all right. But they also believe that we created the cult, and that its founder is a long-time CIA asset. They further believe that the whole project is designed to undermine the authority of the Chinese state by brainwashing thousands of people into following a bizarre form of doomsday Christianity. I wonder where they got such an idea?”
Howard took a deep breath. “The scripture I quoted you is the organizing principle for the church. Its official name is the Church of Almighty God. Eastern Lightning is what a lot of people call it. Church members believe that Christ has arisen, in the form of a Chinese woman. They believe that our time here on Earth is running out. They also believe that their own actions can bring about the Apocalypse. If your people bother to look closely at the many tattoos on your man’s body, they will find the Chinese characters for Dongfang Shandian, or Eastern Lightning if you prefer, tattooed on his left shoulder.�
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Now Luke was confused. “He’s one of ours?”
The old man shrugged. “I don’t know who he belongs to. I’d say someone thought he was one of ours, once upon a time. Anyway, just because he believed in the teachings of a cult, if he ever really did, that we may or may not have created, doesn’t necessarily make him one of ours, does it? He could have joined the church because he likes God, or maybe because someone else put him up to it.”
“A double agent,” Luke said.
“Or triple, or quadruple.”
“You would know something about that,” Luke said. “Wouldn’t you?”
The man named Howard grunted. It was almost a laugh. “I’d say promiscuity can be more of a virtue than the slavish form of monogamy some people practice. It all depends on if you’re doing it right.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “And this is important because…”
The old man looked at him sharply. “You’re a bright boy. Connect the dots. Round about five or six years ago, someone in the intelligence community here thought it would be fun if Eastern Lightning started playing around with computers. Maybe some of the brighter ones could be trained for easy infrastructure takedowns inside China—remote hacking of railway switches, say, or electricity grids, or even…”
“Dams,” Luke said.
The old man paused. He seemed thoughtful. “Sure. Dams are easy enough, I guess. I can’t believe they ever meant to go through with it. It was just one of those funny ideas people get. But I also don’t think they anticipated that Eastern Lightning branches would start popping up here in America, or that…”
“We would lose control of them,” Luke said.
“Sure. Or that people with mixed loyalties might join the church, like the man you didn’t kill.”
Luke felt a familiar sensation begin to sink into his stomach. It was the feeling of dread. “Who was he?”
“I don’t know. No one seems to know. From what I hear, ten years ago, people thought he was a peasant, a lower-caste country bumpkin from northern China, who was smuggled into the United States inside a shipping container by human traffickers. Although that may be how he arrived here, the bumpkin part no longer seems to apply.”
“He spoke perfect, unaccented English,” Luke said.
“I’ve been told, by people who would prefer to remain nameless, and therefore blameless, that your unknown man was among a group of six who spent a year on a CIA compound in Taiwan, learning the rudiments of computer systems. They set him loose in China, and a short time later he disappeared. Now…”
“You’re saying the Chinese attacked us?” Luke said. He thought back to his earlier conversation with Trudy. “It doesn’t fit the suit.”
“You’re right about that,” the old man said. “It certainly doesn’t. The Chinese tend to take the long view of things. They avoid direct confrontations. They’re everybody’s favorite trading partner, and everybody’s best friend. Until they aren’t.”
“We would annihilate them,” Luke said. “Our missile capabilities are a hundred times what theirs are. We could knock their missiles out of the sky and have ten thousand left to destroy their cities.”
Luke heard how breathless he suddenly sounded. He stopped talking.
The man named Howard chuckled. “Quite a tempest you’ve cooked up in your little teapot. For a moment there, you sounded like the ten-year-old boy I once knew. A few minutes ago, you told me we were going to avoid the Apocalypse on this one. Now you’re launching it. Anyway, there’s a new leader in China, as you know. He’s young, he’s under pressure, and he wants to make a statement. But even so, I doubt this is the kind of statement he wants to make. Of course, China isn’t the only tough kid on that block.”
“What should I do?” Luke said.
“One place to start might be by shutting down the church. They’re here. Here in DC, up in New Jersey, out in Chicago, and on the west coast. Seize their assets, and any real estate they might have. Check out their computer systems. People don’t do a lot of hacking on the Dell they bought at Best Buy, if you follow me. Detain the members, and see if any of them have a background in computer science, or better yet, are former CIA assets who have wandered off the farm.”
“It would take days to get the required permissions to do that. I don’t have that kind of time. I’m not even sure I could get anyone to believe it. We created a Chinese cult, and then taught them how to attack our own infrastructure? Come on. Who’s going to buy that?”
The old man shrugged. “I’ve never known you to ask for permission.”
* * *
Luke walked back along the path.
It was almost full dark now. He was on the phone with Swann. Swann had just returned to his office at NSA. Luke didn’t know where Ed Newsam was. Ed wasn’t answering his phone at the moment.
“We need to do a takedown of a church,” Luke said. “A Chinese Christian denomination called the Church of Almighty God. It’s also known as Eastern Lightning. I need you to find and freeze their assets. Any named bank accounts, offshore accounts, investments. Freeze the personal accounts of the church leaders as well. I also need you to find any warehouses or other commercial-type facilities belonging to them, then get me those locations. Any real estate at all. We need to find their servers and examine the technology they have. Also, we should take their websites and social media accounts down, and seize their email accounts.”
Swann grunted. “Luke, do you realize what you’re asking? It’s against the law. I don’t work at the Special Response Team anymore. Here at NSA, things are done a little differently.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “Sure they are, Swann. They do everything by the book over there. That’s what I read in the newspapers, anyway.”
“I’m all by myself on this,” Swann said. “I would need an entire team to do what you’re talking about. Either that, or a solid week to work. I’ll assume you don’t have a week.”
Luke thought about that. He thought about the meeting earlier today. There was no consensus of any kind. There was no one with a path forward that others would agree to. Susan seemed frustrated at that meeting, and unable to force control. Would she give him a team to do an extra-judicial takedown of a church? He couldn’t imagine it.
“Okay, Swann, let me think on that. But you’re open to doing it, if I can get you the resources?”
“You know me, Luke,” Swann said.
“I do.”
Another call was coming through Luke’s phone. There were only two other people on the planet who had this number.
“Swann? I have to take another call.”
“Fine. Let me know what you come up with.”
Luke clicked through to the next caller.
“Stone.”
“Luke.” It was Susan, calling him directly. She almost never did that. Usually some aide made the initial call.
“Susan. Just the person I want to talk with.”
“What have you come up with?” she said.
“I have a pretty solid lead.”
Now came the hard part—asking her for the resources to help Swann take down the church. Hell, while he was at it, he might as well ask her for a SWAT team so he and Ed could raid the church headquarters.
“I hope so,” she said. “Five minutes ago, the computer system governing the entire DC Metro subway system started shutting itself down. The grid is going down sector by sector. Trains are stalled everywhere. Others are still in motion. Central control is without power. Hundreds of people are stranded in tunnels all over town. Thousands of people are piling into the stations with no trains coming to pick them up.”
Luke stopped walking.
It’s too soon. The target list said we had forty-eight hours.
For a moment, he was frozen in place. The moment went on and on, and briefly he worried that he might never take another step. All around him, it was a quiet evening along the lovely tidal basin. People were walking hand in hand. Lights glinted on the water. The Jefferson
Memorial shimmered in the distance.
He looked back to where he had talked with the old man five minutes before. He could still see the bench from here. There was no one on it.
Gunner and Becca are underground.
“Luke?”
The Smithsonian Metro station was two hundred yards ahead. Luke could see the black obelisk and the clear awning that marked the escalator down to the station from the street. He hung up the telephone and started running.
7:11 p.m.
The DC Metro Subway System – Washington, DC
Gunner nearly fell down when the train stopped.
There had been one seat left when they boarded the train, so he gave it to his mom. She sat and he stood over her, holding the metal pole with one hand while he surfed the web on his phone. At each stop, the train had gotten more and more crowded, until Gunner was surrounded by a forest of arms and legs, briefcases, and backpacks. He could barely see his mom anymore.
He didn’t mind. He knew she was there. And they had great cell and wireless internet aboard the Metro. Gunner knew that most cities didn’t have any—the Metro had done an overhaul, wiring the whole system, to offer riders the internet and texting. Other cities were way behind.
Gunner knew things like that. He was always interested in why Washington, DC, was the best city in America. It had the best subway system, and the newest one. It had the most spies per square mile of anywhere on Earth. It was the best-designed city—and unlike most cities, it really was designed ahead of time. It had the best museum system in the world, which was totally free for everybody—the Smithsonian. Also, the President lived here.
Gunner checked the GPS app to spot his dad’s location. Almost right above them. That was good. Dad was coming to meet them. It made Gunner’s chest swell with a feeling he couldn’t describe when he thought about his folks getting back together again. He couldn’t breathe. It made no sense at all that Dad wasn’t living with them. He didn’t work for the government anymore. Well, he had gone back just this once, but… did it even matter?
