BETA - Project Avatar, page 40
“Don’t trouble yourself,” she said, rising onto one elbow so she could look into his face. “Abe can keep track of developments for us. No need for you to go anywhere.”
He reached up and, placing his hand behind her head, gently drew her toward him for a long, lingering kiss.
“Hm-m. Well, perhaps you’re right about that. One way or the other, I can certainly see the advantages of being a desperate international fugitive with you for a few uninterrupted months. You know, the Côte d’Azur is supposed to be lovely this time of year. Maybe a villa in some anonymous little village with a patio looking out over the Mediterranean?”
“Not bad. And come winter, we could move farther south—say, Bali.”
“Or Argentina. Change hemispheres and have ourselves another summer.”
“New Zealand! The Milford Sound is gorgeous in December.”
John was quiet for a moment. “I do believe we’re going to make a fine pair of desperados.”
Dee’s fingers wrapped around his. “I really hope so.”
She sat up suddenly. “Oh, it’s so late! I have to call my sister! She’ll kill me.”
“We can’t have that—not after all you’ve been through.”
Thinking of her smartphone, Dee looked around for her shoulder bag and then remembered that it had been incinerated at steel-melting temperatures. At any rate, she wouldn’t be able to use a cell phone in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. “I suppose it’s impossible from here.”
“Nonsense!” John told her. He rolled to his feet. “There’s coverage out here.”
“Great! And—you said earlier that Ed regained consciousness.”
“That’s what I understand. Abe spoke with his wife. Apparently, he’s taking solid food already and seems to be coming around nicely.”
“Do you think it’s too late for me to call him, too?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a couple of hours earlier in Arizona. Let’s go find out.”
She followed him to the pilot house. Enrique was overhead on the flying bridge, smoking a stubby cigar and keeping one hand on the wheel. He was a tall, dark-skinned man wearing ragged shorts and a rather silly-looking yacht club jacket over his bare chest. He gave them a perfunctory smile and wave but otherwise discreetly ignored them.
Inside, John rummaged around in his suit jacket and pulled out a smartphone. He checked it before handing it over to her. “Yes, there’s a fairly strong signal.”
She took the phone and looked at it, then up at John, trying to form words. She felt suddenly faint and sat down, speechless.
“Are you okay? You look ill.” He sounded concerned.
She looked back down at her smartphone. There, smiling back at her, was Beta. “Hi, Dee. What can I help you with?” it said cheerfully.
“I found it in one of the rooms at the Clearinghouse and figured you must have accidentally left it in your rush to exit the building,” he said, looking thoroughly pleased with himself. “Your laptop was there too, but I didn’t have time to gather it up. In hindsight it was probably for the best,” he added.
Dee looked up at him, “But . . .”
Before she had time to finish, he interrupted. “Oh, and I asked Abe to work his magic on your comms link. He says it’s completely safe to use.” With that, he turned and headed back to the deck.
Dee made her way forward along the narrow walkway beside the pilot house and found John lounging on the deck once again. She lay down beside him.
“I heard quite a lot of laughing back there,” John said lackadaisically. “An amusing reunion with your old comrade?”
“Poor Ed, he has no idea what has happened, and can’t understand why I’m not raving about the Endyne software. I just couldn’t bring myself to break the news to him. He’s recovering well, but it’ll take some time.”
She moved a little closer and rested her body against his. He was warm and solid—a big and comforting physical presence. He put his arm around her.
In a serious voice, she said: “You’re going to get so bored, hiding out with me.”
“I can’t imagine what you mean.”
“You say that now. But we’re both going to miss our work. It’ll be, what, at least a year before I can even think about working in cryptography again. By then, you’ll be dying of boredom. In a month or two, you’ll slip off on some secret mission for MI-6.”
“Ah, you continue to forget, I am retired from MI-6. I am a software sales representative for Picomens Limited, of Clerkenwell Road, London, taking an extended leave.”
“You’re not fooling anyone.”
“Very well, if you say so. All the more reason to avoid clandestine operations. When a man can’t fool anyone, it’s best if he stay out of that game.”
“Is there even any such company as Picomens Limited?”
“Steady, now! What kind of bounder do you take me for? Of course there is just such a company. For all intents and purposes. Picomens is a company like any other, in the sense of being a . . . limited financial entity. That is, it has an office, and clients, and all that. Well, all right, not exactly clients . . . yet.”
“Does it have any employees?”
“My dear, you are simply going to have to learn to trust me. Of course it has employees. Some, anyway.”
“Other than yourself?”
“Well . . . not as such.” He gave her his most charming smile. “But I have a versatile set of skills.” He kissed her again, more ardently this time, and pulled her closer.
She shook her head and smiled. “True. And you can prevaricate with the best of them.”
“Thank you. I take that as high praise.”
Dee puckered her lips and blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Next stop, Côte d’Azur! Now, did you say we still have some champagne around here somewhere?”
Epilogue
In a large, oak-paneled room in the basement of the Old Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Lieutenant General Leonard Paulson was getting to the point where all he could think about was dinner. The meeting had been droning on for three hours now. He glanced at his watch. The people in this conference room were probably the last people in the whole building.
Unfortunately, the distinguished senator from Nebraska was still jawing away, giving his views on next year’s covert-operations budget. Paulson was inclined to agree with the senator’s hawkish opinions, but he still wished the man could express them more succinctly. For one thing, General Paulson’s chair was a few sizes too small for his considerable girth, and he longed to pry himself up from it and move to a more comfortable berth somewhere.
He wasn’t the only one in the room whose patience seemed strained. The three senior senators and the representative from the House all looked as though they’d had enough for one day, and even their eager young staffers were having trouble maintaining interested expressions.
The senator from Nebraska suddenly wrapped up his wordy speech, ending with dramatic abruptness, as was his way. The committee chair, Senator Oberlin, immediately perked up and took advantage of the opportunity to guide the day’s work toward a conclusion.
“All right, then, I’d say that pretty much covers it,” the little senator drawled in his Georgia accent. He picked up the thick topmost file from the stack in front of him—the file they had spent most of the afternoon discussing—and began tidying up the papers within it as a sort of preamble to actually closing it. “We’ve done a fine day’s work here, gentlemen. Our good friends in the GAO are always pleased to hear we’ve trimmed a little more pork off these obsolete, Cold-War-era covert programs. I’ll tell you, gents, once you earmark money for one of these shows it sure is hard to close it down.”
“That’s for sure,” said the liberal congressman from Delaware, making an unexpected contribution. General Paulson turned his head slowly and scowled at him, as he did every time the man opened his mouth. “Just to be clear,” the congressman said, holding up a finger to stop Oberlin from closing the file. “We are going to mandate complete withdrawal of funds from all of these programs, is that correct?”
“That’s correct. All of the programs in the top file.”
The congressman flipped through the pages in his copy of the file. “One of them here that we skipped right over, I don’t think I’d ever even heard of it: UMBRA?” He turned and looked at Paulson. “General, what exactly does that stand for?”
Paulson looked at the ceiling for a moment, “I’m not sure,” he said. “Doesn’t it say in the file? I believe they were stationed at Mount Hatchet. Well, whatever it stands for, they’re defunct now, Congressman. Fort Meade has already confirmed a complete reallocation of their funds. I don’t recall the details.”
The congressman nodded. “All right, as long as it’s been confirmed by Fort Meade. The other item that surprised me is Project Avatar. I don’t have the minutes from our last meeting in front of me, but I believe that this committee had already removed the funding from Project Avatar. Isn’t that so?” The congressman glanced at his aide, a smarmy young lawyer type who set Paulson’s teeth on edge. The young man gave a confident nod.
The congressmen turned to Paulson again, raising his eyebrows questioningly.
“Yes, Project Avatar was dismantled a few months ago,” Paulson said patiently, though he was feeling anything but patient at this point. “We heard a rumor about some kind of leak, so we stumped up some petty funds to look into the matter. I sent around a memo, remember? It’s all taken care of now.”
Oberlin cleared his throat. The specter of another hour of discussions seemed to be casting a shadow across his face. “General Paulson, I’m sure we all remember the reasons that we closed down Project Avatar. Some of the reports that were coming down the pipe were making folks around these parts mighty uncomfortable.”
“Sure, I remember. I assure you, it’s all in the past now.”
“You’re quite sure?” said the congressman. He leaned forward over the table, looking like a man who was not about to let up. “It turned out there wasn’t a leak? You’re absolutely sure that there are no active copies of that software unaccounted for at this point?”
The general looked hard at the skinny little congressman in his skinny little power suit. Something in Paulson always felt like clobbering this sort of guy. But his voice contained nothing but respectful eloquence as he said, “I am absolutely sure, Congressman. In fact, that software was never fully operational to begin with. Let me assure you once again that every single copy has been destroyed, except the archival version in the Pentagon data crypt.”
The congressman dropped his eyes away from the general’s unblinking glare and let the front cover of his file folder drop. He said, “Then I’m done.”
The others in the room breathed a collective sigh of relief, and with a great deal of carefully nuanced formalities and handshaking, they all struggled to their feet, gathered their things, and filed out of the room, into the hallowed underground hallway.
Ten minutes later, the general was sitting with his bulk comfortably spread out over most of the rear seat in the back of a staff limousine, heading north toward the Capital Beltway.
His senior aide, an arrogant but extraordinarily competent young West Point graduate named Merriman, was exchanging notes and flirting with a pretty intern, on the seats that faced the general.
Paulson interrupted them to say, “I’m going to check my voice messages. Make sure this jackass doesn’t miss my exit.”
Merriman accepted these instructions as he always did: wordlessly, but with a riveting gaze that showed that the order was as good as done. A dependable man. Paulson wished he had ten more like him.
The general put a Bluetooth insert into his ear, and flipped open his cell phone. Then, with his thumbs, he typed:
Leonidas
A simulacrum of his own ruddy face and fat, rounded shoulders immediately appeared on the little LCD screen.
“Hi, General,” Leonidas said into Paulson’s ear. The voice was a perfect copy of the general’s gruff baritone. “Would you like to see a menu?”
The general hit the star key to accept this offer. Then he scrolled down the menu that appeared, and selected BRIEFING.
Leonidas nodded grimly, as if agreeing that this was a good choice. Then it said, “Fifty-eight minutes ago, Fort Meade received satellite confirmation of the terrorist compound in South Yemen.”
The general’s heart jumped. He typed,
Certainty?
The voice in his ear said, “Probability of correct assessment is sixty-eight to ninety-two percent depending on the status of unknown variables.”
The general felt the blood rushing to his head—a sort of righteous and enraged excitement that had been familiar in his youth but now came only at moments like this. Moments when he was right, everyone else was wrong, and circumstances justified the use of overwhelming force. His eyes closed and rolled ecstatically up into his head for a moment. He had to struggle to avoid making involuntary noises that might alert the attention of the two young people in the seats facing him.
He typed,
MCM
This called up the military command menu. He scrolled down the menu, past its more innocuous entries, heading for the bottom of the list where the really serious options were sequestered away.
He selected,
PREEMPTIVE Air Strike
To his disappointment, Leonidas didn’t offer him a screen of menu choices from which to design the air strike he was so vividly imagining. Instead, the little animation said, “I have already ordered an air strike, General. Under your nominal authority. Twelve F/A-18 Super Hornets were launched from the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan thirty-two minutes ago. Estimated time of ordnance delivery is 0415 hours, or 2015 local time.”
Despite his stunned surprise, the general instinctively glanced at his watch. The jets would be striking in about twelve minutes. He leaned back, chewing at the inside of his lip. He wasn’t sure how to feel about all this. Something had been taken from him, no doubt about that. This might have been his very last kill operation, his last flash of glory . . . and this silly little computer animation had stolen his thunder, just like that. On the other hand, he had to admit that the job seemed to have been done well and in a timely fashion.
He flicked off his phone without further comment, put it back in his pocket, and looked out the window thoughtfully.
In the morning, the press would pass judgment on the Yemen air strike. Then, whatever the criticism or praise that reverberated around the Pentagon power structure, it was going to be his name that was attached to it. It certainly wouldn’t be the name “Leonidas.” So, when all was said and done, it was still his hit. Still the mighty hand of Lieutenant General Leonard F. Paulson, coming down from on high to smite the scorching sands of the Yemen desert.
His stomach grumbled, and he thought with some satisfaction, What a world! I just took out a whole terrorist camp, and without even delaying my dinner.
Hays, A.M.D., BETA - Project Avatar
