Cloak, page 48
“Very,” McPherson said. “I don’t suppose it also had a telescoping sailboat mast?”
“As a matter of fact, it did,” Swenson confirmed. “Not strong enough to be functional, but it apparently looked like the real thing. The whole package was obscenely expensive, of course, but it must have come in handy when he was hauling contraband and the patrol boats pulled alongside.”
“So now we’ve got drug involvement,” McPherson growled. “Terrific.”
“Actually, no,” she said. “The full history’s not clear—nothing from that part of the world is—but it looks like the patrol boats pulled alongside one time too many, and even with the quick-change superstructure the authorities got wise to the masquerade. The cat hasn’t been seen in Asian waters for six months, and informed opinion is that the owner probably sold it off.”
“To . . . ?”
“To person or persons unknown,” Swenson said. “Apparently at a fire-sale price, too, considering what it cost to build. Still, it is a money trail, and that means we should eventually be able to run it down.”
“Though probably not soon enough.”
“Probably not,” she conceded.
McPherson shook his head. “Hanna, make all of this make sense for me, will you? These people have an ocean-going cat. They have access to fuel bladders and can get them into the middle of the ocean, so they presumably can sail the cat straight across the Pacific all by itself. Right?”
“Sounds reasonable,” she agreed.
“So why bother with that Pakistani freighter?”
Swenson shrugged. “Probably so they could scatter all those red herrings,” she said. “The North Korean agent thing, the Chinese CitationJet—”
“Yes, I know the list,” McPherson interrupted. “The question is why. Was it all a massive feint to keep our attention away from the Middle East, like Whitcomb believes? Or was it to keep us in the dark about who’s behind it so that when the nuke goes off we won’t know who to pound back to the Stone Age?”
“I’d guess the latter,” Swenson said. “Though if it goes off in Jerusalem, we’ll know who to blame.”
“Will we?” McPherson countered. “How will we know if it was Rabbi Salomon or someone trying to discredit him?”
“Point,” Swenson admitted. “There are plenty of people out there afraid of his popularity.”
“Or at least afraid of his movement,” McPherson agreed. “Chop off the head and the whole movement collapses, or so says the conventional wisdom. But that’s beside the point. Fine; let’s say the nuke goes off under the Temple Mount. We’ve then got two possibilities: Salomon’s bunch or someone out to destroy Salomon’s bunch. You see where I’m going?”
“I think so,” Swenson said, gazing out at the snow. “No one would believe anymore that North Korea was involved. What reason would they have to mess with Israel?”
“Exactly,” McPherson said. “Same goes for China and India. Iran and Pakistan might still be question marks, given they probably consider Salomon an enemy of Islam. But, yes, that’s precisely my point. As soon as the nuke goes off, the suspect list instantly gets cut in half, or even smaller. So why bother with the red herrings?”
“Maybe because if we knew who was involved we’d know which targets needed protection,” Swenson suggested slowly. “Or even what dates to watch out for. If we figured out it was a local fringe group, say, we might be on special alert on the anniversaries of Waco and Oklahoma City.”
“Could be,” McPherson murmured, an odd thought suddenly striking him. “Has it occurred to you that in all this flurry of planted clues not a single one of them has pointed to any group here in the U.S.?”
“No, it hadn’t,” Swenson said thoughtfully. “Interesting. You’d think they’d want to pin the tail on at least one of our home-grown donkeys. Especially if the nuke is here.”
McPherson grimaced. “Oh, it’s here, all right,” he told her darkly. “Apparently gone to ground, too—we’ve had southwest Oregon hemmed in with checkpoints since ten o’clock this morning, with every radiation detector we could scrounge from Seattle to San Diego to Denver pressed into service. So far no one’s tried to get it through.”
“Could they be planning to use it right there?” Swenson suggested. “Some place inside the cordon?”
“I can’t see anything that would make even a halfway reasonable target,” McPherson said. “No government labs, no major military bases, no nothing.”
“Then maybe it was all just a feint after all.”
McPherson grunted. “You can believe that if you want,” he said. “Whitcomb believes it, Vaughn wants to believe it, and even Cohn goes back and forth. But I know it’s here. You can’t convince me that this morning was just a diversion.”
“What exactly did happen?” Swenson asked. “I’ve been too busy working on ship photos to get the whole story.”
“They ran circles around us, that’s what,” McPherson said sourly. “Two of them stole a Coast Guard chopper and rendezvoused with the cat a mile off the coast. When we scrambled fighters, out popped the two Harriers they stole Monday and have been hiding God only knows where. Within half an hour both Harriers had been shot down, the chopper and cat had self-destructed, and the whole bunch of them had vanished into the woodwork.”
“What about the Harrier pilots?” Swenson asked. “Did we recover the bodies?”
“There weren’t any,” McPherson told her. “Both pilots ejected, the second one into an open field with a pair of Marine pilots following him the whole way down.”
“And?”
“And he set off a couple of smoke bombs and disappeared,” McPherson said with a sigh. “Best guess is he hopped a slow-moving car while it was going through the smoke.”
“That’s somebody’s best guess?” Swenson asked scornfully. “He found a car, opened the door, hopped in, and closed the door again, all without the Marines noticing?”
“It doesn’t make sense to me, either,” McPherson agreed. “But everyone on the scene swore up and down that they’d searched every possible hiding place.”
He snorted. “They were wrong, of course. Half an hour after the Marines and police left, someone came by and maced the two cops who’d been left behind to watch the scene. Either he was hiding there, some place he couldn’t come out of without the cops spotting him, or else his own buddies didn’t know he’d gotten away. Maybe in the river with scuba gear like our friend off the Rabah Jamila—they hadn’t had a chance to drag the area yet.”
“But he didn’t just float down the river instead of coming up in the same place?”
“I’m just telling you what happened,” McPherson said. “They did get a barricade set up downstream a ways—Vaughn suggested that—so maybe he tried that direction and had to go back.”
“He could have gone upstream,” Swenson pointed out. “Maybe the police didn’t think of—”
She broke off. “What?” McPherson asked.
“Oh, no,” she murmured, her voice suddenly stricken. “An open field. The Cloaks.”
“The what?” McPherson frowned, an unpleasant sensation stirring inside him.
“The Cloaks,” she said. “High-tech fiberoptic cloaks of invisibility. You remember—that was what Talbot and I were working on when you called me back here.”
“Lyman said you were working on something important,” McPherson said, frowning at her. Cloaks of invisibility? What the hell kind of joke was this? “But we had a nuke to find and I wasn’t interested in the details.”
“Wait a minute, let me think,” she said, her voice abruptly full of rekindled dread. “There were three Cloaks. No, four: two small, one mid-sized, one large. The small one ought to cover a pilot hiding in the middle of an open field. Question: would the large one be big enough to cover two Harriers?”
The unpleasant sensation in McPherson’s gut was growing stronger. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said. “Look, I’ll buy a really good camouflage system for the Harriers. But an open field, with Marines stomping all over it?”
“I don’t know,” Swenson said. “I haven’t seen them work. All I know is that Talbot told me an assassin used one to slip through a fifty-cop trap in San Jose yesterday morning.”
“But an open field?”
“And he said the people he was up against were clever and inventive,” she went on, ignoring his objection. “That they liked finesse better than brute force. In all the explosions and dogfights this morning, did anyone die?”
“We lost one Marine during the chopper hijacking,” McPherson said darkly. “But he pulled a gun on the hijackers when he’d been warned not to. As far as I know, no one else even got a scratch. Why didn’t you say something about all this sooner?”
“It never even occurred to me that the two cases might be related,” Swenson said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” McPherson said, feeling a flicker of guilt at having jumped on her. “I should have listened when Lyman was trying to tell me what you were working on.” He got to his feet and headed for the door. “Is there any way to get hold of Talbot’s data on these things?”
“Yes, I can access his files,” Swenson said, hurrying to catch up with him. “We’d do better to talk to him directly. They recovered one of the Cloaks, so you could even see how it works.”
“Just pull up the files,” he told her. “We don’t have time to haul him out here.”
“It wouldn’t take that long,” Swenson said hesitantly. “Actually, he’s already here.”
McPherson skidded to a halt. “He’s what?”
“He’s in D.C.,” Swenson said. With her back to the windows McPherson couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded defensive. “He called me late last night and said the thieves had added some kind of password lock to the software of the recovered Cloak. The Sand/Star techs hadn’t been able to break it, and he wanted to know if I could point him to someone at the Bureau who was good at that sort of thing. Since they were also looking for a secure place for the techs to work on a countermeasure, I offered them space in the FBI Lab. They were supposed to get in early this morning.”
“And did they find a countermeasure?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t talked to him today.”
“Call and find out,” McPherson told her. “Then tell him to get his butt over here. I’m fresh out of ideas, and so is everyone else I know who’s been banging his forehead against this wall. Maybe fresh eyes will do some good.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, sounding a little uncertain. Apparently she’d been expecting a different reaction. “Uh . . . ”
“You don’t agree?”
“Yes, sir, of course,” she said. “I just thought . . . ”
“Then get on the phone,” he interrupted her verbal floundering. “I need to make some calls of my own, then I’ll clear him a pass to get in. Once he’s on his way, get back to your workstation and pull together everything we’ve got on the nuke hunt, in chronological order—we’ll want him up to speed as quickly as possible. I’ll meet you both back here.”
Swenson squared her shoulders. “Yes, sir,” she said. Slipping past him, she hurried out into the hallway.
Taking a deep breath, fatigue tugging at his eyes and lungs, McPherson followed. If the terrorists’ target was on the West Coast, and if they’d managed to slip through the cordon, the nuke could already be in position. If it was on the East Coast, they still had only two or three days at the most before it arrived.
He hoped to hell Talbot was a fast reader.
~
“Sir?”
The general opened his eyes to find a young woman standing over him. “Yes?” he asked, slipping the headphones off his ears.
“I asked if you’d like something to drink,” the flight attendant repeated.
“Ah,” he said. “No. Thank you.”
She nodded and moved on, pushing her cart past his seat down the aisle. The general glanced at his watch, already set to Eastern Time. A few minutes after one in the morning. By now the two trucks carrying the Cloaks and the weapon should have reached Idaho, with the chase vehicle running backup ten kilometers behind it.
They might even be a bit farther along. The three vehicles had gotten an early jump on his advance team, successfully passing through the military cordon via smaller back roads while the general’s group was still stuck in the long line of traffic behind the Highway 101 roadblock.
He’d been mildly surprised that the pickup, at least, hadn’t had to shoot its way through the cordon. Apparently, the soldiers on duty had decided that waving their radiation detector into the back of a clearly empty pickup truck would be a waste of valuable time.
And now the path was clear, with the last leg of the mission before them. Resettling his headphones, he leaned back in his seat and again closed his eyes. It would be several hours before they landed, and he ought to get some sleep.
But sleep refused to come. The last leg of the mission was ahead . . . and for the first time he truly had to deal with what that meant. For the first time since Nagasaki, a nuclear weapon was about to be detonated in a populated area.
And he was the man who was going to do it.
He squirmed uncomfortably against the soft cloth of the airline seat. It had been easy to talk about numbers back in that small, dark, dusty room. Easy to blithely speak about killing a thousand people, or even ten thousand, for the good of the people and the survival of the nation. Particularly easy when standing far removed from the event, both in time and in distance, with all of it neat numbers and figures on paper.
Perhaps neither of them had wanted to think about the numbers at the time. Perhaps neither of them had seriously believed the mission would ever get this far.
But it had. The road ahead was open . . . and in approximately forty-three hours, those numbers would become real people.
Is there no other way? The general had heard that question a hundred times in the past few months, the last of those times there at the end, in that small, dark, dusty room. And the general had assured him that, no, there was no other way.
At the time, he’d believed it, too. But now, with the reading light of the seat beside him forcing its way beneath his eyelids, he found himself wondering if perhaps he’d been wrong.
But no. Tactics and strategy were his business, and it was a business he knew well. This was no sudden spur-of-the-moment impulse, but something he’d carefully thought out over months, always with the hope and indeed the expectation that something better would occur to him along the way.
But nothing had, at least nothing that would eliminate the threat without making a martyr of the man’s memory. It had to be done, and there was no other way to do it.
So he would push the button, and he would send several thousand innocent people to their deaths.
For the good of the people. For the survival of the nation.
33
The calls took longer than McPherson had expected, and it was nearly an hour before he was able to get back to the lounge. Swenson was already there, seated in the same chair, her laptop on the coffee table in the center of the conversation cluster. Talbot had arrived, too, and was sitting in McPherson’s former seat on the couch, reading through the material on the laptop’s display.
And to McPherson’s annoyed surprise, he’d brought a couple of friends.
“Talbot,” he grunted as he strode across the lounge. “I assumed you’d realize this was a private party.”
“Hello, Director,” Talbot said politely, standing up and offering his hand. “It’s good to see you again, sir.”
“Private party means private,” McPherson said, ignoring the proffered hand and glaring at the two interlopers. “Bureau business. Governmental security. You understand the concepts?”
“Certainly, sir,” Talbot said, shifting his outstretched hand smoothly into a gesture toward the woman sitting quietly opposite Swenson. “May I present Mrs. Angie Chandler, widow of Dr. James Chandler, one of the Cloak’s inventors? I thought she might have some useful insights.”
“Mrs. Chandler,” McPherson said, nodding to her. An Asian, probably Chinese, with all of the stereotypical inscrutability of that people. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, Director,” she said, nodding back.
“And,” Talbot continued, “I’m sure you remember former agent Adam Ross.”
McPherson’s annoyance tightened another couple of turns. “Oh, yes,” he said softly. “I remember Mr. Ross quite well. Including the fact that he’s supposed to be in witness protection.”
Ross shrugged slightly. “I was needed.”
“Actually, you’re not,” McPherson said shortly. “I’ll have someone escort you out.”
“Sir, I respectfully request you reconsider,” Talbot said quietly. “Ross has been on the Cloak case for some time now. He’s tangled with the thieves, and at one point actually had a conversation with one of them. His insights and experience could be invaluable.”
“I just said we don’t need him,” McPherson repeated.
“With all due respect, Director,” Talbot said, putting a little steel into his unassuming tone. “We have a rogue nuclear weapon in the country and a cloak of invisibility to wrap it in. It seems to me that right now we need everyone we can get.”
McPherson took a deep breath. And you know it, Talbot might as well have added.
And he would have been right. Right now they needed everyone, even wild cards. Maybe even especially wild cards.
What had he just been thinking, he reminded himself sourly, about interagency cooperation?
“Fine,” he growled. “But you, Talbot, are responsible for him. For both of them.” He gestured at the laptop. “How up to speed are you?”
“Not very,” Talbot said, his voice all brisk business now that he’d won. “I’ve hit the high points, but there are plenty of details I still need to sort through. But I think I can at least fill in some of the blanks from this morning.” He nodded toward Swenson. “Hanna’s guess is almost certainly right, that that second Harrier pilot just stayed quietly inside his smoke screen with the Baby Bear Cloak over him. My guess is that the first Harrier pilot was supposed to pull a similar stunt after he delayed those National Guard fighters.”
