He sighed happily as he stripped from his sneakers and jeans and pulled out slacks and wingtips. He felt it—this would work out.
Just like old times. As a mayor, John Samuelson had walked into a Crips and Bloods summit, armed with nothing but his confidence, and worn them down with round-the-clock talking and listening. As a governor, he’d hung on for five nearly sleepless days for a peaceful end to a prison hostage situation; just this June, he’d brokered a deal between UFCW and hotels to save the DNC.
Give Samuelson space to improvise, and you got a deal. This time—
Bang.
Sharp, flat, loud.
Two more bangs. Shouting. A cascade of bangs, thumps, screams—
Not bangs. Shots.
Samuelson froze, his fresh pants draped over his hand.
The door broke inward at him.
Man with a sledgehammer.
Two men beside him. Not Samuelson’s people. Not the other side’s negotiators. They pointed guns at him. For a stupefied instant, he thought of asking them to let him finish dressing.
One of them lunged, throwing something over Samuelson’s head. They pinned his arms behind him, punched him, kicked him, and grabbed his genitals and twisted. He puked.
His screams made no difference. Even with his head in a vomit-soaked coffee sack, sobbing for breath, he still understood the implications when he felt the big jet begin to move.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. JAYAPURA, INDONESIA. 6:30 P.M.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
Armand Cooper was reflecting that if people actually make their own luck, he would give himself about a B- for what he was making.
That
was something to taste with an icy rum and Coke from his personal fridge in his office; as the American consul in Jayapura, he was the highest ranking, as well as the only, State Department official stationed here. And anyway it was out of regular hours—Abang and the other Indonesian clerks were never in here.
In a smallish city in the backwoods of one of the biggest Muslim countries in the world, you really appreciate your liquor. And your ice.
He’d had the tight-beam microwave antenna up, synched in, and checked out for an hour; he liked to be ready early for everything. One of those areas where making your own luck gets you an A.
Pointing the soles of the feet toward anyone was disrespectful, even through a third-floor window, so when he dragged his office chair around to give him a view of the street, he carefully placed the hassock to hide his feet from view.
Good thing they can’t see what’s in my glass, the old hands say it wasn’t always this way, but this country has gotten pretty tight about everything.
Pluses, he thought, and savored the rum on his tongue: one of the youngest consuls in the Foreign Service. Especially hard when the younger ranks are so dominated nowadays by Asian-Americans; an African-American male rising so fast, well, hell that it’s a cliché, I sure did give Moms some bragging material.
Minuses, boondocky town in a Muslim country, near the equator.
Pluses, nothing to do except try to keep American tourists and businessmen out of trouble, or rescue them from it, and this far into the back of beyond, most of the people who get here are pretty savvy.
Minuses, social life consists of the Australian consul (nice old guy who likes to play chess), French consul (middle-aged lesbian couple), and the aging drunk that runs the Amex office downstairs.
More minuses, ever since they expanded the consular corps so much, consulates aren’t the dignified old Gothic or Victorian fortresses they used to be—
I’m in an office over a bank, and security is the bank guard downstairs.
Come to think of it, the crowd outside—streets in Jayapura were crowded except during prayer—looked kind of odd, like they were waiting for something; maybe a popular preacher or an outdoor concert in the park nearby? All right,
bigger
minus, as hard as I work at it, I never really feel like I know what’s going on.
Biggest
minus, being in charge this early in the career meant being in charge of something so small he had to be here all by himself after hours. He tasted the sourness and bite of his drink before he laughed at himself.
Armand, you are going to whine yourself to death someday, his mother had said to him, more than once, and his father had called him Mr. Glass Half Empty. And now not only was he grumbling about being in a tropical paradise with virtually no supervision, he was also on the fast track for promotion, he’d been doing well here, and the simple, easy task he had to do was part of a vital mission at the highest security level; all he had to do was not screw up and there was a great big plum of cred on his resumé.
He swirled the rum and Coke to make sure the ice was doing its job, and swallowed the rest. Maybe his next post—
His cell buzzed in his pocket. “Cooper, US Consul.”
“Cooper, it’s Seagull. Routine op in ten seconds, are you ready?”
He glanced at the computer screen, which said his antenna was aligned. “Ready . . . send the test . . .”
“Sending.”
The screen said
confirmed clear.
“Good here.”
“And good here. Sending one main message.”
The screen said
msg rec’d 48 mgb, relaying.
“Just the one this time?” Cooper asked.
“Just the one.”
Successful realay, wiping msg.
“Relayed and erased,” he said.
“That’s it for tonight. Unofficially, thanks for everything and bye.”
“Bye.”
So they were leaving. He’d thought they would be, soon; he’d been fielding more and more odd requests from the big white plane that he could just see through binoculars, across the bay at Sentani airport.
Well, time to bag it and head home.
He might give himself a few days off sometime soon, maybe hop over to Oz or Tahiti for some nightlife and just to feel like nobody was watching his ass all the time. He rinsed his glass thoroughly—wouldn’t do to have it smelling of liquor when the Indonesian help came in—and locked the fridge after making sure he had returned everything to it. He started the sequence that would do a secure memory wipe on the satellite uplink server’s disk, and did some straightening up and putting away while he waited for it to finish.
The crowd outside was shouting and chanting; his Bahasa wasn’t terribly good and rumbling AC and armored windows made it hard to hear, so he went to the window.
The first brick bounced off right in front of his face, and he ducked away and crouched as a dozen more thudded against the window.
Thought I heard “America” in that chant. And the uplink will be down for another five while it finishes—
Slams and scraping noises overhead. Ropes passing by the windows, flying up or spiraling down. Then a groaning and creaking overhead, a loud bang as bolts gave, and he saw the satellite uplink antenna plunge past the window to the ground.
Make that the uplink is
down.
Cooper crawled to the opposite wall, where the light switch was, but before he quite reached it, the power went out. He made sure his door was locked, sat up behind his heavy desk, and dialed the emergency desks at the Embassy in Jakarta, the Consular Service in Washington, and the local police department, leaving voice mail each time. Probably the person on duty at State was in the bathroom, the one in Jakarta was napping, and as for the local police, they might be out there with the mob or gone fishing for the month.
He was glad he had a prerecorded native-speaker message on the phone, and gladder still he’d made Abang stop giggling and record it perfectly straight. Minuses, he thought, I’m in a place where a prepared guy like me has LOCAL POLICE FOR VIOLENT MOB in his prerecorded speed phone list. Double minuses, voice mail all around.
He called Seagull to let them know there was trouble in the city; no voice mail picked up while he let the phone ring fifty times after he started counting. The stones and bricks had stopped after that first flurry, but so far three shots had caromed off the armored glass and screamed off into the dark.
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. 151°6’E 11°23’N: ABOUT 450 NAUTICAL MILES EAST-SOUTHEAST OF GUAM, IN THE PACIFIC. THE NEAREST LAND IS GUAM. 9:10 P.M. GUAM TIME (8:10 P.M. JAYAPURA, 6:10 A.M. EST). MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
Seagull Watchdog One, the flight of three F-35s, arrived on the dot—literally, because the rendezvous point, 151°6’E 11°23’N, was just a dot on the map of the Pacific. The nearest land was Guam, which they had left about forty-five minutes ago, taking off from Andersen AFB. As agreed, they fanned out in the Touch Hands formation, a slowly rotating equilateral triangle in which each plane was at its highest cruising altitude and just close enough to the others to put them three degrees above the horizon. In Touch Hands, they maximized their chances of detecting the white, unmarked Dreamliner that they had been told was designated Seagull; the mission itself was SCI, Sensitive Compartmented Information, a designation above Top Secret.
The F-35, after a rocky start, had been thoroughly shaken down and its bugs worked out once and for all during the Second Iranian War. Its electronics suite had been redesigned and refined by the ten years of anti-terror patrol since the suicide attack on the carrier
Franklin Roosevelt
. The same routine anti-terror, anti-drug, and border patrols had trained the Air Force pilots to execute Touch Hands flawlessly. If the Dreamliner named Seagull was coming to its rendezvous at 151°6’E 11°23’N, Seagull Watchdog One would find it; the dark was no barrier. A typhoon would have been no more than a nuisance, but the sea was calm tonight.
With their large drop tanks, Seagull Watchdog One could circle the rendezvous point in Touch Hands for more than an hour and still have plenty of fuel to complete the escort mission before turning the Dreamliner over to fresh escorts out of Hawaii.
They had been warned that the Dreamliner might be as much as twenty minutes late; unofficially, the flight leader had been told they were coming out of some bush-league Third World airport to the south and west, the kind of place where delays were routine and anything could happen. When they picked up a plane on radar, they were to hail it via secure transponder code; once they had positive ID, they would close in to fly a protective formation around the Dreamliner. Until contact, or unless there were problems, they were to minimize radio contact with the controllers back at Andersen.
At twenty minutes after arrival, the flight leader radioed in that there had been no trace, and called for a radar and satellite confirmation that they were in the right place. They were. Twenty minutes later he requested and received permission to try to raise the transponder buoy that Seagull would have released if it had gone down. There was nothing. At about 10:35 P.M., with safety margins for completing the mission running thin, they were relieved by another flight, Seagull Watchdog Two, and headed back to base.
They went in for immediate debriefing by more high-ranking officers than any of them had ever seen in the same room, but they had nothing to report except that they had flown out to the rendezvous point, waited, and encountered nothing.
“Was there anything that
could
have been a trace of Air Force Two?” a man in a civilian suit asked, and only then did they know what their mission had been and what was lost.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON, DC. 6:54 A.M. EST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
In Washington, DC, wherever great hordes of Federal workers pour in and out of big, blocky office buildings all day long, there are more small coffee shops, cafés, and grills per block than in any artists’ quarter or bohemian enclave anywhere. They are nearly as essential to government operations as the Pentagon, the White House, or the Executive Office Building.
People in private industry hold meetings to coordinate what people are doing, decide issues in which several people have a say, and gratify some boss’s ego, not necessarily in that order. Only the third purpose is the same in Washington.
Decades of sunshine laws and open-government policies guarantee that anything discussed at any official meeting is eventually going to be public, so the most important rule for any meeting is to have nothing said that might ever attract any attention. Rather than coordinating or deciding,
official
government meetings ratify pre-made decisions and avoid ever saying anything unexpected.
To achieve such perfect official meetings, there has to be a “meeting before the meeting,” where the people involved caucus about what is going to be said. Disclosure laws and media scrutiny force any bureaucrats who need to think freely to do it in a place and time that is not official in any way—and thus those coffee shops and hole-in-the-wall cafés are vital.
Heather O’Grainne knew all that as well as birds know breezes; as she rounded the corner, finishing her morning run around the Capitol area, it compressed to
time for the meeting that can’t be a meeting
. This year marked a milestone: At age thirty-nine, she had now been a desk bureaucrat for eight years, one more than she had been an active Fed cop in her younger days. It tasted sour that she knew these bureaucratic games better, now, than she knew current procedure for arresting a suspect or obtaining a warrant.
This was bound to be a big, messy, uncomfortable meeting-before-the-meeting. As Chief of Staff, Allison Sok Banh was one of the few people in the Department of the Future who could make Heather jump on command. She had “invited” Heather to an “early breakfast” to “talk things over” at the Angkor Coffee Shop, which happened to be owned by Allie’s Uncle Sam, and had a convenient back eating area that wasn’t open during the mornings. Translated from bureaucratese, Allie had summoned Heather to an urgent emergency meeting, and whatever was up, Allie
really
didn’t want it to leak.
Sam, in his seventies, stooped, face deeply lined, had to be a foot and a half shorter than Heather’s six feet. He greeted her with a bow and a grin. “You’re here to assess my cooking?”