Tesla Secret, The (4 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Nick dreamed.

It was hot. He was on a mission in the jungle, carrying his weapons, his gear. He was in a clearing. There was a big spider in the middle of the clearing. Selena was right behind him.

"Don't kill it, Nick. It will make too much noise."

The spider and the clearing disappeared and he was looking at an ancient ruin covered with vines and green things. Serpents and faces were carved on the weathered stones.

"That's it," Selena said behind him.

He turned and looked at her. She wore a pith helmet and a red bikini. She had combat boots and a red plastic pistol.

"Where are your weapons?" he said. "Where's your armor?"

She showed him the pistol, pulled the trigger. Water shot out. Then he was in the middle of a full blown firefight. Bullets chopped the greenery around him. Selena lay next to him, pulling the trigger on her water pistol. The stream was red.

A spot of bright red blossomed on her abdomen, red like her bikini. He watched the blood spread. He dropped his rifle, grabbed her. He tried to stop the blood, pressed his hands on her. Blood poured through his fingers.

"Nick," she said. "Nick."

Her eyes closed. Blood ran out of her mouth. She stopped breathing.

Waves of grief and rage swept through him. He raised his head and howled.

Someone was shaking him. He woke, gasping for air. His cheeks were wet. His heart was trying to pound out of his chest.

Selena gripped his arm. The clock by the bed read 3:07 A.M..

"Nick, you were shouting. You had a nightmare again."

He'd told Selena about the Afghanistan dream. He hadn't said much about the other dreams. They'd started when he was twelve. They didn't come often. He never knew until later what they meant. They were never about anything good and were always about something that hadn't happened yet. Those dreams had a strange intensity, a luminous quality.

Like the dream he'd just had.

It was a psychic ability inherited from his Irish ancestors. His Grandmother had told him it was called the "sight". She'd filled his head with dark mutterings and warnings about it. Nick assumed it came from the same place that made his ear itch and burn when everything was about to go bad.

"Christ," he said. He rubbed his face.

"Afghanistan again?"

"No." She waited.

Nick was silent. The image of his hands trying to hold in her blood stuck in his mind.

"You can't keep doing this," she said.

"Doing what?"

"Trying to get a handle on these dreams on your own. You need to see someone."

"I don't want someone poking around in my head. I'll handle it."

"You are one stubborn man." She wanted to shake him. Instead she said, "Let's go back to bed."

"We're already in bed. I don't think I can get back to sleep."

"I didn't say anything about sleeping. Don't be so damned literal."

Later, he slept.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

President James Rice stood in the wings of the Lakeside Building at Chicago's Convention Center. He listened with half an ear to his VP setting up the crowd of delegates and party faithful. Secret Service agents were stationed back stage. More circulated out front.

Rice was about to accept his party's nomination for a second term. 50,000,000 viewers would be watching. The polls showed him trailing his opponent by seven percentage points. Behind the scenes the atmosphere was tense, his campaign split into opposing factions over strategy.

Everyone wondered what Rice would say. About the endless problems in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the rising tensions with Iran and Russia and China. About jobs and an economy in trouble. The media was sharpening its knives.

It didn't matter that Rice had kept the country out of a new world war and survived a highly publicized assassination attempt a year before. The public's attitude was always "what have you done for me lately?" Kennedy's famous words about what you could do for your country had long been forgotten.

His opponent had no qualms about distorting Rice's record. Senator Richard Carino twisted facts to suit, throwing skewed numbers out like confetti in carefully rehearsed sound bites. He brayed about the enormous deficit and the wars, but posed no sensible alternatives and took no responsibility for the current state of affairs. AEON had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to oust Rice from the Presidency. His re-election bid was in trouble.

The space out front was filled to capacity. Kevin Hogan, Rice's Chief of Staff, stood at Rice's side. Hogan was the picture of a Washington political pro. He looked like what he was, a savvy, shrewd advisor with the unmistakable air that went with proximity to power. He was making an effort to keep calm. A lot was riding on the speech tonight.

"One minute, Mister President."

"How's the makeup?"

"Good, Sir. No one's going to think of Nixon."

Rice smiled. "I hope not."

Hogan gave a weak laugh. In the first Kennedy-Nixon televised debate, Richard Nixon had come across on the black and white screen as a man who needed a shave, a man who couldn't be trusted. It was a bad day for the country, the day television became a major player in shaping American politics.

Onstage, the Vice-President was finishing up. With a broad gesture he turned toward the wings.

"Fellow Americans, I give you the President of the United States."

"Showtime, Mister President." Hogan gave Rice an encouraging smile. "Give 'em hell, sir."

On cue, the sounds of "Hail to the Chief" filled the hall. Rice strode onto the stage, looking out at the crowd, waving his hand. Blinded by the lights, he stumbled on an electrical cord carelessly laid across the stage.

Rice heard the first shot and felt the wind as the bullet passed by the back of his head. Chaos erupted on the convention floor. In an instant, Rice was smothered under a swarm of Secret Service agents. He heard a second shot and felt it strike the man lying on top of him. The agent cried out. Blood sprayed out over the stage.

There was a volley of answering shots from his detail. An automatic weapon opened up somewhere overhead. For a moment, he was back in Vietnam. Bullets juddered into the living shield piled on top of him. The rounds ripped through the carpet, shattered the podium where he would have been speaking. The shooter was somewhere above in the darkness behind the lights.

He felt the shock as a bullet struck his arm, then pain. There was another fierce volley of shots from his detail. Suddenly the shooting stopped. Strong arms pulled bodies from him, lifted Rice and ran with him off stage.

Kevin Hogan lay on the floor in a spreading pool of blood. Proximity to power had its price.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Michael Healy feared no one. The closest he came to fear was nervousness. He was nervous now. He'd screwed up. The last three assignments from Foxworth had turned out badly. It didn't matter that he wasn't the one on the scene who had failed. He was responsible.

"Rice is still alive." Foxworth looked at him. "Lucky for you, the man you picked is dead. So are the people you sent after Harker's team. What have you got to say about it?"

"No excuses for Harker's people, sir. Bad luck with Rice. He tripped just as our man fired. It was certain, except for that."

"Not our man, Healy. Your man."

"Yes, sir."

"Tell me why I should not terminate your position."

He has no idea how fast I can kill him, Healy thought.

"No excuses, sir," he said again.

Foxworth swiveled, looked out the windows. He turned back.

"Don't make any more mistakes."

"Yes, sir." Healy relaxed, just a fraction.

"What is your assessment of the damage from the Brighton Beach incident?"

"It shouldn't be a problem. The men killed were low level security, former FSB provided by Ogorov. The police and papers think it's a gang war. I don't see it coming back to us. There is one possible issue."

Foxworth waited.

"A computer is missing. One of Harker's men must have taken it. It has messages on it that could lead back to Prague."

"Can they be read?"

"No. They're coded. But the point of origin can be traced."

"If Harker figures that out, she'll send someone to Prague."

"It's what I'd do."

Foxworth considered for a moment. "We have to cover it. Send a team to Prague. Watch for Harker's people to show up. If they do, eliminate them."

"Yes, sir."

"That's all."

After Healy left, Foxworth looked out his windows at the London cityscape and considered the problem of Harker. He hoped she sent someone to Prague. Sooner or later, he'd find a way to eliminate her and her group of troublemakers once and for all.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"The shooter had an M4A1 with an ACOG sight," Elizabeth said, "the latest version. The one our snipers like."

"Christ," Nick said. "How does someone get hold of that?"

"Tracked to Fort Bragg. The Army arrested a Quartermaster Sergeant who works in the armory. They're talking to him as we speak."

"I'll bet they are, " Ronnie said.

"What's an ACOG?" Selena asked.

"ACOG stands for Advanced Combat Optical Group," Nick answered. "There are a lot of variants. It's a computerized telescopic sight with built in goodies to determine range, compensate for bullet drop and wind factors, things like that. You haven't worked with it yet. It's not available on the civilian market. The M4A1 is strictly military and police use."

"Where was the shooter?" Ronnie asked.

"In the HVAC duct work over the convention floor," Harker answered. "He fired through a vent. That center is 300,000 square feet. The system runs all around the top and it's huge. Plenty of room for someone to crawl in there."

"They ID him yet?"

"A former Army Staff Sergeant named Hardin. Dishonorable discharge after an incident in Afghanistan. He was accused of rape."

"Winning hearts and minds," Nick said. "There's always a rotten apple somewhere to give the military a bad name. How come he didn't end up in Leavenworth?"

"It was political."

Nick shook his head.

Harker said, "The Bureau and the Secret Service are all over the assassination attempt. It's not our concern at the moment. We have something else. Stephanie broke the encryption on the laptop from Endgame. Steph, show us what you found."

The monitor on the wall lit. On screen was an email with directions to Nick's cabin and photos of Nick and Selena. Selena shivered. Someone had taken her picture and sent assassins to kill her.

"Son of a bitch," Nick said.

"The message was sent to a cyber café in Los Angeles," Stephanie said. "It's a dead end. I got prints from the laptop and sent them to Interpol. There were two hits, both former FSB. Russians."

"The Russians went after us?" Selena looked at Stephanie. "Why would they do that?"

"They wouldn't," Harker said. "It's not the government."

"That's an assumption," Selena said, "that it isn't the Russian government."

"You want to do the assumption thing?" Ronnie asked.

"Why not?"

"Okay." Harker looked at them. "Assumption number one is it isn't the Kremlin. What's two?"

"Those hoods were ex FSB," Nick said. "So assumption number two is that whoever is behind this has a Russian connection."

Lamont said. "Who has the contacts to hire guys like that?"

"The Russian Mafia, for one."

"Yeah, but the mob wouldn't have any interest in us. Don't forget the ones who went after us here and in California were American."

"Then assumption number three is that it's someone with widespread contacts here as well as in Russia. Who fits that profile?"

"Endgame is part of Foxworth's holdings," Selena said. "He runs AEON. He would have contacts here and in Russia."

Elizabeth said, "Ogorov is part of AEON. He could be the Russian connection. So we're back to them again."

Nick shifted in his chair, trying to ease the pain in his back.

Ronnie smoothed the front of his shirt, where hula dancers swayed under impossibly green palm trees.

"Look what's happened so far." Lamont counted out points on his fingers. "First they go after Nick and Selena. Then Ronnie and me. Nick and I go to New York, Russians try to kill us, and we find a computer with directions to Nick's place."

He'd run out of fingers. "That about it?"

"There's more," Stephanie said.

Lamont groaned. "What, more?"

"Several emails went between Brighton Beach and Prague."

Nick rubbed his forehead. He felt a headache beginning. "Prague? As in the Czech Republic?"

"Yes." Steph clicked her mouse. The screen filled with neat groups of numbers.

"These are messages in code."

Elizabeth drummed her fingers on her desk. "Can you break it?"

"I'm not promising anything. The groupings are typical of a book code. The Brighton people were Russian. Assuming this actually is a book code, then the book is probably Russian."

"How will you find out which one it is?"

"I'm running a scan of every Russian book in the world databases, combined with a decryption program. If the numbers refer to a page and a word, either the word comes first or the page. The program checks it both ways and looks for correlations. If they added an extra digit or a pre-planned substitution to get the right location of the word, we'll never crack it. If the book they used isn't in the data banks, same result. We're out of luck. "

"And if it works?"

"Then we'll know which book, which edition, which page and which word. Then we translate. The computer will do that. Then we read the message."

"Simple," Ronnie said. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"Because the government pays you a princely salary to blow up things," Stephanie said. "They don't pay you to think." They all laughed.

Harker said, "How long will it take?"

"It depends. When there's a match the computer will tell me."

"All right. Good work."

"What about Prague?" Nick asked Harker.

"I want you and Selena to check it out. Selena, you speak Czech, don't you?"

"Yes. I'm rusty, though."

"That doesn't matter." She slid a folder across her desk. "Once Steph told me what she'd found, I put this together. This has your legend and passports. You and Nick are Canadian for this trip. Married."

"Quicker than Vegas," Nick murmured.

Harker gave him one of her looks. "Nick, you're a sales rep. You're in Prague to try and drum up a little business. You brought your wife along for a real European vacation."

"Doing my bit for globalization." He said it as if it left a bad taste in his mouth.

"The address of the cafe where those emails originated is in there." She tapped the folder. "It's not much, but it's all we've got. Go there, see what you can find out. Try and identify the sender."

"How are we supposed to pick someone out? Assuming the sender is even there?"

Harker reached into a drawer and took out what looked like an ordinary digital camera. "You're a tourist. Tourists take a lot of pictures. Every picture you take with this will upload to a satellite. Steph and I will have them seconds later. Go to the cafe where the emails came from and take pictures. If the sender uses it on a regular basis and if he's in the databases, we might get lucky."

"That's a lot of ifs and not much to go on."

"Best I can do."

"I hear the beer is pretty good in Prague," Ronnie said.