"That's the plan, gentlemen—oh yes, one final thing. We feel the time is right to release an expurgated account of the theft to the media."
Reaching into the stack of files spilling out of his opened attaché case, he produced half a dozen single-sheet copies and handed one to Greenaway, and the rest to a DoD official, who passed the rest on. "I'm a bit short on copies, so look on with your neighbors, some of you."
They read for a full minute, many, Cundieffe noticed with a suppressed smirk, moving their lips as they digested the short statement.
Essentially, it had the Navy admitting that they'd been burglarized by a small group of disgruntled ex-sailors; that some outmoded and relatively harmless ordnance and/or intel (the Navy was free to fill in this blank with whatever it deemed least damaging to its own credibility) had been stolen, most likely for potential sale to a foreign power; and that SEALS and Operational Detachment Delta had been deployed to root out the idiots who'd done the deed in a half-maneuver, half-demonstration of military overkill to deter further pointless and petty thefts.
The base commander was the first to be heard above the rising din of complaints. "This makes us out to be complete idiots. There's no way we'll go along with it. The Admiral will shit kittens when this gets out."
"The Admiral signed off on it last night, and I think if you stop and think about it, the Navy looks far less ridiculous if it admits to having been robbed of some obsolete junk, than if napalm were stolen from them by a handful of men with magic sleep rays. It won't be long before someone tells the real story to the press, and a reporter follows the technology back to the DoD. The sooner a cover story is laid out, the easier it'll be to discredit everything that comes after as idle smoke blown by dysfunctional military peons. This can still be resolved without any real skeletons tottering out of the closet."
They calmed down as a herd under his further persuasions, and the briefing adjourned with a grim but businesslike air that emboldened Cundieffe to brace Greenaway in the hall. The commander stopped and stared at the bald spot on top of Cundieffe's head.
"There's more," Cundieffe started, "I couldn't talk about it in front of them, but you're the field commander. There's things you should know. We may have hostile elements on our side of the fence, if you take my meaning."
Greenaway made a sour face, but looked around, and led Cundieffe to an empty office. He circled around a blank desk, but didn't sit. He leaned across it and waited. Cundieffe wiped his brow and began.
"I told you that the suspected leaders of the terrorist group were involved with SDI research. I neglected to mention that there are connections to the School Of Night mass-suicide in Colma. The group's leader, a Professor Angell, was a longtime associate of Dr. Armitage— they taught together at MIT and worked on several missile guidance and directed energy projects for DARPA. In 1980, Angell had a nervous breakdown, and took a lecturer's post at Stanford."
"This is fascinating," Greenaway said. "Keep talking, I'm leaving."
"Wait, wait, it ties in." Cundieffe drank in a deep breath and began talking faster than he ever had in his life. "All of the School Of Night's computers were flash-fried at the time of their deaths, but a hard T1 line was traced to a University server which handles only large, sensitive downloads for faculty and researchers. Professor Angell's accounts for the last year consisted almost entirely of downloads from Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Lick and Palomar observatories. He put in several hundred requests for radar and photographic imagery of the orbital paths around the earth. He was looking for a satellite."
Greenaway shook his head like a bear with tinnitus. "I don't follow. What has that got to do with the napalm theft?"
"It's SDI, Lieutenant Colonel. Armitage and the rest did work on an SDI project called RADIANT, that ended in some kind of disaster, then he and several of his colleagues dropped out and, we suspect, went underground. They've come out now because there's a satellite up there that's modeled on—or is—RADIANT, about which they presumably had very strong feelings."
"So they're going to drop napalm on it. From where? The moon?"
"We don't believe RADIANT was a defensive weapon. We think it was a First Strike project, capable of effecting targets in the atmosphere— maybe even on the ground. We think they're going to try to disrupt a test of the weapon, or destroy the command/control elements, or even a research installation where a new RADIANT may be in development."
"Bullshit," Greenaway said. "So you don't even know if it exists, yet. Nothing like that could ever be built. It's too expensive, even if they had the technology, which they don't."
"And yet they're out there, aren't they? Whether or not it exists, there's some very clever people out there with napalm—and I doubt that's all they have. But the point is, they're going to strike at the military-industrial complex, and the DoD has tipped its hand. They know who we're looking for, and they've been fighting a covert war against them on our home soil."
"You're fucking crazy."
"You know about the Special Forces Sergeant who snapped and killed the Furnace Creek sheriff? The surviving deputy was in no shape to give a statement. He took a swing at an FBI agent who approached him shortly after the incident. He was restrained and drugged, and only spoke to us a day ago. He told us that a tactical squad of federal agents stormed Storch's surplus store in a squatter community in Death Valley, and removed an arsenal of weapons and chemicals. They made no arrests, and gagged the sheriff for twenty-four hours, but then Storch allegedly shot him and the other deputy. But there were no federal agents anywhere in Death Valley, and certainly no seizures like he described. Now, suppose that Storch was an agent of this terrorist group, and sitting on a stockpile of chemical weapons and explosives for them. Who raided him? They posed as federal agents, but never identified their bureau of origin, let alone produced a search or arrest warrant."
"Fuck me. Covert ops. That's how they work in-country. But I've never heard of anything like that actually being put together, and SpecWar's a small fucking world."
"It doesn't include the CIA's tactical commando unit," Cundieffe said, "or the FBI's. But the group simply turned around and stole napalm from the weapons station. Now they're waiting for the ideal time to use it."
"Maybe it's not going to happen at all, then," Greenaway said. "If their arsenal was swept up so efficiently, maybe they've been taken out."
"No, the DoD is still frightened, or they wouldn't have agreed to the leak. No, it's going to happen soon, and we're in the right area."
"What makes you so sure?"
Cundieffe allowed himself to smile as he handed Greenaway an eight by ten glossy photograph, highly pixelated from digital transmission, but crystal clear from arm's length, because it was taken with a high-speed digital camera through a starlight lens. The picture showed a bird's eye view of a late-model Taurus station wagon on a five lane highway. A tall, tense-looking man with a San Jose State Spartans baseball cap tugged down over the tops of his ears sat behind the wheel, his upturned face flattened by the light, his mouth beginning to open in shock as he locked eyes on the camera lens.
"That's Sergeant Storch, photographed just outside of Bakersfield, at the intersection of state highways 99 and 58. We don't think he's an isolated nut. After Furnace Creek, he was sighted in Colma the day of the School Of Night mass suicide. He was shot here headed south, in our direction. An aerial tail was placed on him, but called off over Tehachapi, and the ground tail he was turned over to failed to catch up to him. The station wagon was discovered parked at a truckstop in the Mojave desert two hours later, and a thorough search of the place failed to turn up any trace of him. He's gone to ground here. He's with them."
"But if he had something to do with what happened in Colma, he could very likely be a double agent."
"Exactly," Cundieffe replied. "Whether he knows it or not."
"Fucking DI," Greenaway sighed. "This shit is them all over."
"I sincerely hope so," Cundieffe said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. "You understand now why we felt you could be trusted, where they couldn't."
"I'll work with you, G-boy," Greenaway said. "They'll be taken alive, if it'll ratfuck the Pentagon. But any of my men gets hurt because of your book smarts fucking up my operations, nobody'll ever find your bones."
"I wouldn't want it any other way," Cundieffe said.
If Cundieffe hoped for an equally rosy reception from Lane Hunt, he saw pretty quickly that he would be disappointed. When Hunt hadn't shown up for the briefing, Cundieffe had assumed the team SAC was preparing to leave on the sly, and he was willing to let him get away with it. He needed no briefing from Hunt, having thoroughly digested his reports to AD Wyler, and he knew Hunt to have an almost Japanese obsession with preserving face in personal affairs. He expected that Hunt would not ride out the suspension, let alone the OPR review. Cundieffe knew Hunt's preliminary OPR review file by heart, was instrumental in collecting much of the background data himself, as per AD Wyler's request. It was a painful, shameful duty, but one he carried out with the understanding that Hunt had brought this on himself, and the timing, though fortuitous for himself, could only serve to save the Bureau from grave embarrassment, should they become a matter of public record.
As he strode into the FBI's temporary HQ in a bungalow on the same remote edge of the China Lake Weapons Station where the purloined napalm had been kept, he felt a glow of pride. The agents he'd brought worked at their new tasks with a feverish pace undiminished by the brutal heat—the Navy had pled to a shortage of air conditioners, though Cundieffe had observed condensation on the windows of many vacant office bungalows closer to the heart of the base. Another item to add to the agenda—secure his team's comfort, and their trust would follow. He greeted each of the agents by name, receiving half-smiles and absent nods as he passed. His shirt and his jacket were plastered to his slight torso, and his shorts were riding up fearsomely. He looked forward to an opportunity to change, and was about to inquire about their quarters, when he stopped in mid-stride and looked around.
His nose wrinkled and the saliva on his palate curdled as a sickening vapor reached his nose. "Do I smell…alcohol?"
Heads swiveled and shook for several uncomfortable moments, and some offered weak, mumbled excuses, but a bright young female agent named Eugenie Hanchett pointed to the cubicle in the far corner of the sweltering bungalow. "He said he was waiting for you," she whispered.
Cundieffe set down his attaché case and assigned Hanchett to watch over it, then made a beeline for the cubicle. The odor of hard alcohol was a roiling cloud spilling out the narrow doorway, which was blocked by a back-tilted office chair. Lane Hunt sat in it with his back to Cundieffe. A bottle of tequila sat on the desk beside a phone and a blotter with a bramble of notes and doodles scribbled on it. "Step into my office," Hunt said.
"Lane, I want to express my outrage at this complete breakdown of professionalism, and request that you leave forthwith to minimize the already considerable damage you've done to the morale of this investigation."
"Why now?" Hunt asked. "Why you?"
"Lane, this is not the time or the place—"
"Why now, Martin? I told the field office SAC about it two years ago, and it was no big deal. If somebody wanted to make something of it, they could have done it then, or any time since."
Cundieffe bit back a retort that would, in Hunt's condition, probably have provoked a physical confrontation. Three years ago, swinging bachelor Special Agent Lane Hunt met a young lady, Rachel Lieberman, aged twenty-four, at a Pasadena night club, took her home and, beating all the requisite odds and countermeasures, impregnated her. When Ms. Lieberman sought Hunt out with the news, he pressured her to have an abortion, and—Cundieffe's ears burned up just thinking about it—invoked his status as a federal agent to coerce her. He had friends in the IRS who could make her life interesting, not to mention what he and the Bureau could do to her and her friends and family. It'd been a bluff, conceived in a paranoid, and probably drunken, rage, but it worked. Ms. Lieberman never contacted him again, and moved to Oregon shortly thereafter. Hunt was apparently in the clear, having spilled the story to a sympathetic SAC over drinks at an official function. It'd been a dead issue, until AD Wyler had asked SA Cundieffe if there was anything the OPR should know about SA Lane Willard Hunt.
He let Hunt rant on, in the hope that he'd simmer down and recover a shred of dignity, and leave. He peeled his shirt away from his chest with a sucking sound, but made no reply until the drunk got personal. "And why you, of all the fucking guys in the division, real counterterrorist guys who break down doors and aren't afraid of guns, why you?"
"I didn't ask for this case, Lane, and I didn't hope for anything to damage your career. But you have no one to blame for your troubles but yourself. An FBI agent must hold himself to a higher standard, because one never knows when one will be tested. I was chosen to relieve you because I'm most familiar with your methods, and have done the lion's share of the research on the case. I know how to close it." He came around Hunt's chair and seized the tequila bottle, batted Hunt's hands away as he dropped it in a wastebasket. "And I resent your insinuation that I fear guns. The Director himself presided over this Bureau for forty-eight years, indeed built it out of an illegitimate and corrupt office into the finest investigative agency the world has ever known, and he never once had to resort to firing a gun in anger."
Hunt leaned in close and sneered. If his intent was to knock Cundieffe unconscious with his breath, he half succeeded. "J. Edgar Hoover was a slimy, psychopathic cocksucker who would have been just as happy working for Hitler…" His train of thought petered out, presumably because Cundieffe was supposed to have hit him by now. But Cundieffe stood fast, delicate fists clenching nails into sweaty skin, stinging, pain clearing his burning, swirling head.