“Uh-huh. Bound to be interesting. ’Kay, I’ll grab my stuff and tell the troops something; Nellie can handle the wrap.” Truth to tell, her administrative assistant always did handle things like this, and a good thing too.
She cleared her throat at the door; they all looked up. “Everyone, I’ve been called to an emergency meeting. They won’t tell me what it’s about until I’m in the secure room, but it may be something to do with Daybreak. Nellie?”
“Ready.” Her assistant’s fingers poised above her laptop keyboard.
“Contact list from this meeting, available for all of us ASAP. See about a tentative meeting two days from now; DoF folks, Graham wants to talk to you right after this meeting. Sorry to run but I have to.”
Everyone stared at her. She didn’t blame them; she’d have been staring too. She folded her laptop, dropped it into its case, and was out the door.
Cell, pill drive, laptop, survival stuff, good till next morning if I have to be. Ready to go, just the same as the old days. There’s a dance in the old dame yet,
she thought smugly.
Hey, if
I’m
not entitled to be arrogant, who is?
She had just time enough to notice what a beautiful fall day it was, with the leaves a wild uproar of bright colors in damp golden sunlight, before the limo shot up the main drive and braked in front of her.
Man, this is
big
and someone is
worried
, for real.
The driver seemed military; as she climbed into the front seat and got a better look, she saw it was a Secret Service ERT in light-duty uniform, no external armor, but a telltale holster-buckle bump on his left shoulder. “You’ll want to buckle up.”
“Always do,” she said. As her belt clicked closed, he whipped the big car out into the mid-day traffic, letting tires squeal and horns honk as they would, and gunned it across three lanes of traffic.
“Isn’t Homeland Security in the Nebraska Complex?” Heather asked, since they were going the other way.
“Most of it still is. Secretary Ferein and some key offices have already moved to the new complex at St. Elizabeth’s.” He took another turn fast and tight. “Escort should pick us up next block, then we can go faster.”
A DC police cruiser with siren and lights going cut in front of them, and the driver gunned the engine, apparently trying to park the limo on the cop car’s bumper. They roared up an entrance ramp to the parkway, zagged across to the left lanes, and headed south at what the speedometer said was just over eighty miles an hour, the regular traffic fleeing to the right in front of them and re-merging behind them.
Heather had never realized that St. Elizabeth’s was this close; usually, she supposed, it wasn’t. The driver turned off with a wave to the cop, drove without touching the brake through four gates that opened inches in front of his grille, and followed a short driveway to a side door on a big, old mock castle of a building.
“Let me guess,” Heather said, as he pulled the car around the little circular drive. “They just said deliver Heather O’Grainne to this door, as fast as you can?”
“That’s all they told me.”
The limo halted and Heather opened her door. “Thanks for keeping it down to terrifying.”
He grinned at her in a not-quite-professional way and departed at a much more sedate pace.
A slim young woman, discreetly armed and overtly capable, led Heather to an elevator, which must have descended at least eight floors.
St. Elizabeth’s had originally been built as the first national insane asylum, before the Civil War, and over the decades had been used for many things that needed to be hidden from the public: advanced weapons, cryptology, off-the-record briefings on black ops, meetings with outlaw governments, meetings to make decisions no one wanted to own—like a toxic dump for unspeakable secrets, as if the madness and violence at its foundation had drawn every dirty, secret thing to the old fake-feudal brickpile.
The elevator door opened, and Cameron Nguyen-Peters was waiting for her. “Hey, there, buddy,” she said, grinning and throwing an arm over his shoulder, a half hug that she knew would simultaneously please him (he’d had a crush on her for fifteen years) and offend him (he’d grown steadily stuffier in his dignity with time, and he hadn’t exactly started off as an egalitarian hippie, anyway). “How the hell are you?”
“Life’s been better. We have one big mess on our hands.” He seemed to be looking at something through the wall, twenty miles away.
“Well, if
you’re
holding this meeting on the day of Game Seven, I know it’s nothing small.”
“Exactly.” He glanced around. “Gotta say the Pirates appear to be getting a very unfair level of divine intervention. Anyway, thanks again for coming right—”
“Mr. Nguyen-Peters,” a female voice said from a speaker somewhere, “the DoDDUSP”—she pronounced it daw-duss-pee—“and the liaison from Deep Black are here.”
Dude,
Heather thought.
This is
big
.
Deep Black was the satellite reconnaissance office. They didn’t show up for many meetings because the breach of security in talking to or about them was so often worse than any situation that might have come up.
But if “Deep Black” was a red flag, DoDDUSP was a shrieking siren—the painfully long abbreviation for Department of Defense Deputy Under Secretary for Policy, which could be roughly defined as the guy in charge of having at his fingertips all the plans for all the wars the United States seemed likely to get into, in case the President should say, “occupy Sudan,” or “seal the Mexican border,” or ask “How long would it take us, starting from right now, to seize Abu Dhabi?” For forty years and more, DoDDUSPs had planned Grenada, Haiti, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea, Jordan, the Second Korean War, the Taiwan defense, both Iranian wars, and the Myanmar Relief in Force—and a few more things the public had never heard about.
If DoDDUSP was here, it was because Cam thought there might need to be a war.
Cameron was nodding slightly, his lips pressed together, signaling her,
Yes, that’s right, it’s that bad.
“I have to confer with—”
The voice over the speaker said, “Mr. Nguyen-Peters, the President is just now coming in through the ultrasecure entrance.”
“We should talk some time when there is time to talk. Meanwhile I have bigwigs to prep for the ops room. I know
you
can be ready on your own. Down that way, then left, someone’ll set you up.”
“Thanks.” She hurried down the hall.
He
did
say the ops room, didn’t he?
A real working space for things that were truly bad.
At the door, she was retina-scanned by an apologetic young man. Inside, no one looked up as she came in. A map of the West Coast and the Eastern Pacific dominated the big central screen, with tables and graphs scrolling by in adjoining windows. Grim-faced people in headsets, some military, some civilian, many that radiated “cop,” a handful of geeks, a few who had the spy’s trick of giving off nothing, were all staring into screens and tapping the keys on their desks.
Lights were low so everyone could read screens easily, and to keep voices low; it felt like two minutes to midnight. A hundred feet up it was a nice fall afternoon with the trees bursting with color, and the people didn’t know this place was here. For a fleeting moment, Heather envied them, and then she strode to the station where a slim, olive-skinned young woman was beckoning her.
God, she’s young—surely they’re not using interns in here? Damn. No, I’ve just reached an age where some real live adults look young to me.
A transparent screen wrapped the far edge of Heather’s desk like an armor plate, so that she could look through the screen to see everyone else, or opaque it to concentrate.
A small shelf with indentations for cups slid out of the desk to her left. The young woman set four containers into the nearest ones. “Water, Gatorade, and coffee; the last container has squeeze bottles of half and half, vanilla extract, and honey, is that right?”
“Perfect.”
Oh, good, the end of the world will be comfortably to my taste.
“Just hit the space bar when you’re ready to read the briefing. Anything else I can do for you?”
“I’m good, I’ve been through these before.”
Too many of these,
Heather thought, fixing her coffee. She sipped, pressed the space bar and looked.
Her gaze froze onto the screen. So
that
was where Samuelson had been while the media were lathering about whether he’d been muzzled or had a breakdown. Jayapura was not exactly where you’d think to look—a place most Americans hadn’t thought about since MacArthur invaded there.
She scrolled down, and as she read more, her belly seemed to hold a ball of solid ice.
What the hell had everyone been doing for all this time?
How had they let the VP be in that isolated town halfway round the world in the first place without proper security?
Dammit! Samuelson thinks agreeing is more important than what you agree about, and they strung him along forever, then rushed him, and because he didn’t want “small details”
—like proper security!—
to be in the way, all the normal security just got peeled off like a guy trying to finish a dogsled race and throwing off his camping stuff, then his spare food, then his water, then his coat—and now the blizzard hits.
So the whole time, as they sacrificed all his security, our brave good-hearted goddam fucking naïve Samuelson kept reassuring everyone that he wasn’t afraid, and nobody said, “But, sir, it’s not just the danger to
you
, and the reason you’re not afraid is that you’re a fool.”
Radio silence; going out without the direct-to-satellite transmitters, when it turned out they didn’t have one on short notice; not flying one out
ASAP because another plane landing at Sentani might have drawn attention; who the hell’s brilliant idea had
that
been?
Three real stupid temporary solutions. Or
were
they
stupid
? Did they all come from the same place?
Shit.
All three from one Samuelson advisor, Atela Pawhan, formerly Mary Davis. Back when she was Davis, she’d been briefly married to a guy who was now identified as a sometime stringer on the edge of the il’Alb il-Jihado network. Pawhan had a cousin, Lorenzo Bell, who worked in the secured storage where they kept the encrypted direct-to-satellite boxes—
She had almost posted
round those people up, now,
before she saw the screen title:
BELL GROUP, IDENTIFIED MEMBERS AND DISPOSITIONS.
Duh.
The reason it was all there on one screen for her to find was that the FBI had already tried to arrest Pawhan and Bell about an hour ago. They found Pawhan dead in her apartment, which had been trashed in a way that fit the script for “surprised an intruder.” Bell had extensive gambling debts, and a suicide note, to go with being found hanging from his showerhead. The feebs didn’t believe either, of course, and were searching their apartments to see if they could find some clue to their controllers.
An IM glowed in the corner of her screen:
L. Plekhanov, NSA.
Lenny!
Aside from being her source for cryptology, and the only reason Arnie Yang could read Daybreak’s messages, Leonardo Plekhanov was also responsible for the last three dates she’d had—each about a month apart. She looked around for his wheelchair, and then spotted the thick, wraparound glasses surrounding Lenny’s outsized square head above his tiny shoulders; she waved, and he raised his small, twisted left arm at her, smiling.
His message said,
shitload more relevant stuff 2 read B4 strt. back 2 wrk, Beautiful. Bell Org prolly= no clues.
Okay, this is seriously weird.
how U know?
clenched fists, rubbing back of neck, uncanny analyst ability, sherlock holmes-like attn 2 detail!
He turned his wheelchair to give her the full effect of his big grin.
also i can read the files backward on yr screen cuz not opaqued.
Addressing me as Beautiful is not exactly opaque either.
She took the time to type that one all the way out.
Hunh. Assuming the whole world didn’t blow apart, wonder if he’s got anywhere to watch the Series tonight, and if he likes brats baked with sauerkraut? And the Angels, of course.
She put her mind back on the briefing; sheesh, her old tai chi coach would be all over her for the bad case of monkey mind she was developing today. Center, breathe, be in the flow . . .
Heather felt a twinge of guilt for enjoying good coffee in a comfortable chair, reading about Our Man In Jayapura trapped in that office over a bank. The supplementary data noted that he was twenty-seven years old and on his third assignment with the Foreign Service.
At least someone else somewhere had an early career experience that actually sucked worse than mine.
The report noted that he’d destroyed the confidential documents and erased all computer files, standard practice for a consul in his situation, and that his morale was assessed as “good to very good” in the circumstances.
There’s a relief,
Heather thought,
some people might think being surrounded by an angry mob in a foreign country might excuse negative thinking.
An attachment to the document said that overtime had been authorized since he couldn’t get back to his apartment.
Not only is his morale good, he’s getting
paid
; can’t do better than that!
He had been strongly advised to take all necessary measures for his personal safety.
I’m sure he wouldn’t have thought of that on his own.
Indonesian authorities in Jayapura, after much polite demurral and reassurance, had finally admitted that Sentani International Airport had been seized just at twilight, when Islamist rebels had come out of the low hills above the airport and overwhelmed the small security force. A “reinforced national police battalion”—internal security troops with a few light machine guns—had gone out from Jayapura to try to retake the airport, but they had been ambushed and thrown back on the only road around the bay. Unequipped for night fighting, the Indonesian soldiers had dug in for the night and would wait for dawn, when, “if God wills it,” a raider battalion would arrive. There were two links to raider battalion, so she clicked on them; the first explained that raiders were what Indonesia called special forces, and the second that the military attaché at the Embassy in Jakarta thought that an Indonesian raider battalion, assuming one arrived, could probably succeed in retaking the airport, unless of course there were more rebels than he had been told or “other unforeseen circumstances.”