The admiral nodded, giving his tacit consent to the colonel’s request, for now, and the colonel went on, “Before we begin, sir, I have to ask something. If you were in a different office when you met with Mr. Danielson before, I am assuming that it was the other office that was the interview room, not this one.”
The admiral looked blankly at the colonel for a moment, not allowing his fury at having senior military protocol discussed in front of a civilian. But clearly the colonel was unfazed. Very well.
“Colonel, Mr. Danielson, I will hear what you have to say, since you are clearly very keen to say it to me. And I will set your mind at ease by saying that my real office, which we are indeed now in, is swept daily by Naval Intelligence: you will not be heard in here.” The admiral leant back in his chair, looking pointedly at each man in turn before he delivered his final proviso.
“That said, gentlemen, I do not take kindly to being ambushed with interagency gossip. You have my attention, for now. I hope, for your sake, that what you have come to me with is important enough to warrant this highly unorthodox behavior.”
Barrett looked at Neal, who was nodding appreciatively and biting the inside of his cheek. Yes, quite, interagency gossip. Barrett was proverbially biting his tongue as well. The admiral wants to be impressed with the gravity of their purpose, they thought in unison, I think we can oblige him, and without further digression Barrett begun.
“Admiral,” said the colonel in an official tone, “the events we are here to discuss with you start just over seven months ago, when the
King’s Transom
was shot at and sunk by an attack from space, killing all aboard.”
The admiral stared wide-eyed at the man, then at Neal, who gently nodded, pensive at the memory but clearly resolute.
“Admiral,” the colonel continued, before the other officer could find the words to reply, “since that day a small but dedicated team has worked hard to identify and classify the source of that attack, and have discovered some extremely disturbing facts that we are here today to share with you.
“We have chosen you very carefully, aware of the fact that the slightest misstep by us, or anyone we share this information with, will have disastrous and far reaching consequences. But we cannot go much further with our work without informing either yourself or some other member of Strategic Command.”
He let that sink in for a moment, but when he saw the admiral about to speak he again preempted him, using a trick Ayala had taught him to control of the flow of the man’s thoughts, “Admiral, we have come to you today with proof that we have been infiltrated by agents from an extraterrestrial force. That, along with the vastly more extensive documentation we have compiled offsite, will show you, conclusively, that they have already penetrated deeply into our world’s key military institutions.”
With that, the colonel began to take a photo of Lana Wilson from a file in his lap, but Neal stopped him, “Colonel, before we get to that, why don’t we discuss in more detail the attack in India, and what has happened since. We’ll get to the agents themselves in good time.”
The admiral stared at them both. Were they mad? They clearly meant what they were saying. If this was a joke he would have them both thrown from the building, and the colonel would be dismissed from the service when the admiral had finished with him. But even as the indignant admiral thought that, he knew that they weren’t joking at all. Neal may have been capable of such a thing, but not this man Colonel Milton. He had met a thousand men like him. He did not play with admirals and generals. He knew his duty too well.
The admiral’s mind raced; had he just heard the colonel correctly? Admiral Hamilton knew that he had sensed something profound in Neal all those months ago after the attack, and had assumed the man would come to him when he was ready. But Jesus Christ. Aliens. Really? This was the purpose of this meeting?
He looked at them curiously, “Colonel Milton? Mr. Danielson? I am waiting.”
The colonel nodded at Neal, seeing the wisdom of not throwing the photo of the admiral’s son’s girlfriend in front of the man just yet. He sat back and watched as Neal took over. To a certain degree, they knew, it was now out of their hands. There was no way they could control the reaction of a senior naval admiral. Nor, realistically, could they contain him if he did not see things the way they did.
It was down to them to convince him. A part of Neal wished Ayala was there, and he assumed Barrett felt the same way, but that would have been close to impossible. It was fairly difficult, and fairly treasonous, to bring a foreign spy into the Pentagon. They would just have to give it their best shot, and then put their faith in the man they had chosen.
* * *
The three men did not travel across town together. It had come down to proof, as it always did. Neal left by his usual route and returned home. Meanwhile, the colonel and a bemused admiral drove out of the Pentagon’s secure basement garage in Barrett’s rental car. They drove in silence, stopping first at a separate apartment the team had retained across town, where they changed clothes and went the rest of the way by bus. They eventually arrived on foot at the basement entrance to the house next door to Neal’s.
Neal was already in the basement when they came in from the street. He had booted up two of the offline PCs to show some of the information they had compiled since India, as well as the probe’s findings that had cost Laurie and James their lives.
It took several hours, and the admiral had to be talked down from fury and disorientation several times. But the hardest part had come when he had turned to the wall where Neal had posted all the information they had on John’s seven counterparts around the world.
“Jesus, is that … Lana. Good God, it can’t be.” he had said as he looked at the woman who was dating his son, who he had entertained in his home … whom he had personally seen deployed to the Atlantic Fleet navy yards in Georgia.
“It’s true, Admiral,” said Neal, trying to be gentle with the man, “these are not suspects, the double Agent John Hunt has specifically identified each of these people. How do you think we got any detailed information at all on the activities of members of the Chinese and Russian military?”
“How do you know he is not just trying to undermine key people in our armed forces?” said the admiral, a sickness overcoming him. His son. It was too much to come to terms with.
“Admiral,” said the colonel, “if you were trying to spread dissent about key military personnel, would you name a fresh-faced naval lieutenant? Look at the dates, sir, look at when they each started Officer Candidate School.”
Hamilton looked at them. They were all within a couple of weeks of each other.
Neal stepped up to the admiral and stood just to his side, wary of the man’s emotions, “Admiral, just to reiterate, the meteor shower that started us all on this path was October 4
th
. Five days before the first of these individuals checked into OCS. All but one of them were in schools around the world within a month. And then three weeks after they arrived we saw the attack on Bachamir Air Base in Afghanistan that we now know initiated the last Agent into the ranks of Al Qaeda.”
The admiral looked around the board. The Agents. The probe’s findings. The superconducting material. The virus. Jesus Christ. And to think he had threatened these two men with wasting his time.
For their part, Neal and Barrett waited. They sensed that the admiral’s mood had reached critical mass. Soon he would crack. The question was: what would be left afterward? Would he be one of them, would he be broken, or, worst of all, would he be a liability?
Admiral Tim Hamilton thought. The evidence they had compiled was widespread and exhaustive. The sources were as close to infallible as you could hope to see in such situations. A senior White House advisor, an air force colonel previously in charge of the Deep Space Array, sourcing every major skyward facing asset they or any of their allies had. The meteors’ trajectories and landing sights. The markings on the remains of the
King’s Transom
’s crew. The schematics of the virus and its antigen. The plating, its utter lack of reaction to heat, cold, or, more demonstrably, to Barrett belting it with a large hammer and no small amount of malice.
As pie in the sky as it all might seem, the Pentagon had, of course, white-boarded scenarios just like this. He had been part of the briefings, at first jovial, then serious, and then jovial again. Their laughter seemed so naïve now.
Finally, face set, he looked at the photo of Lana Wilson one more time. She had come into his home. She had used his son to get ahead. He thought long and hard.
The silence was like a cloud in the room, a mist that veiled everything but the lack of response from the admiral. Eventually he spoke quietly, his eyes still locked on Lana’s picture, “How do we kill them?”
The colonel looked at Neal, who nodded, clearly still holding his breath. The colonel spoke, “Well, Admiral, first we have to break their key defenses. We have to destroy the satellites which they have orbiting above us. Once they are destroyed, we can start arming ourselves with the tools we will need to attack the Agents.”
The admiral nodded, “I hope, gentlemen, that you have not brought me here and thoroughly ruined my day without also having a plan for how to accomplish that.”
He turned to Neal, and he was an admiral once more. An air of confidence and leadership rising up, his spine regaining its steel like rigidity that all military leaders learn from long experience.
Almost consoled, this now left Neal and Barrett with the decision about how much of their plan to reveal to the admiral at this first meeting. Should they reveal the full insanity of their plan, with all its diplomatically and physically explosive parts? Neal thought a moment, holding the admiral’s stare, like a child thinking whether to ask for a kitten or a pony.
“Actually, Admiral, it is precisely because we have a plan that we approached you in the first place. Tell me, sir, how much do you know about the workings of the GBMD system?”
Yup, might as well go for the pony.
* * *
Shahim did not take notice of either the arrival or departure of the heavily disguised colonel and admiral through the basement entrance of the building next to Neal’s. The neighbors, and countless others that came and went on the street, were ancillary to his interests. He sat perfectly still in an apartment across the street, his face just visible in the second-floor window. He watched Neal’s house.
Knowing how much harder it would be to monitor the entrance to the Pentagon up close and personal, he had decided to watch Neal’s house instead, to get an idea of the man’s patterns of movement. Once he knew when his target typically went to work, he could follow him to work and then focus on studying the exact entrance the man used. After that he could plan his attack around that.
But as the days passed, Shahim watched his prey and he saw that something was not quite right. Neal Danielson would come home from the Pentagon or the White House, typically around 7pm. Then he would disappear for at least a couple of hours, sometimes longer. The day before he had not even gone to work, and yet Shahim had not seen Neal through any of the windows all day.
He knew the layout of the man’s house and he suspected that Neal was taking the stairs in the center of the house that led to the basement. But why? His floor plans told him that the basement had no windows, and Neal had a large office upstairs.
Shahim could not help but be curious what the man was doing down there.
The street in Tel Aviv was filled. The large crowd of people in the local market milled and moved like water gently washing between rocks on a calm shore, ebbing and flowing, filling every space, dotted with pockets of movement and rest like the eddies and currents of a stream. Ayala was in her old neighborhood. She had spent so many years here as a child that she could taste the place, like a long forgotten recipe, or the smell of a loved one. She had been born a Yemenite, daughter of a long line of pioneers who had settled this part of Tel Aviv long before it was Tel Aviv. Kerem HaTeimanim had always been a relatively observant neighborhood compared to the more secular districts that now surrounded it. This orthodoxy had been the cause of her mother and her being forced to leave the area when they were younger, and later the source of a teenage Ayala’s rebelliousness.
Her father had died in a car accident when Ayala was six, leaving her mother to depend on Ayala’s grandparents for support. Ayala’s mother shared her fiercely independent nature, and she had railed against this dependence, eventually spurning tradition and taking work in the Kirya, an area of government buildings just across the then burgeoning city of Tel Aviv.
Three years after Ayala’s father had died, in the summer of 1964, her mother met and fell in love with an Arab working for the Israeli government, in and of itself a great controversy, both then and now. They had kept it a secret for many months, but secrets are hard to keep in a tight-knit community like the Yemenites of Kerem HaT. When Ayala’s mother had been discovered, rage had spread throughout the neighborhood in a matter of days, shaming her family and friends.
She had been faced with a choice: stay with a family who was ashamed of her, and face curfew and moral outrage from everyone she knew, or take her now nine-year-old daughter Ayala with her and leave, going to the man she loved, surely the only way she would ever be able to see him again.
For a couple of years it had been good. Ayala was more at home in the secular world of their new neighborhood across town, and she basked in the happiness of her mother and the good man she had found. Ayala’s memories of this time had been the soil into which she would eventually plant the seed of her relationship with Barrett, the only fertile part of a life otherwise bereft of affection.
But it had not lasted. Her stepfather was an alien here, he had taken work with a construction company as a younger man, but growing tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors made it ever harder to find work. In 1967, the six-day war marked the start of renewed open aggression in the Middle East, and the outward expansion of Israeli borders as far as the Suez Canal. Though the war was officially started by Egypt and Jordan, the Israelis were prepared, and it was during this brief but lopsided conflict that they took control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hostilities would continue to flair until the last major Arab-Israeli conflict in 1973, when the armies of Egypt and Syria, backed by a host of other nations, would invade Israel once more. That war would, ironically, lead to Egypt becoming the first Arab nation to recognize Israel as a state, but by then Ayala’s life, and that of her small family, had been changed forever. Without work, or hope for support from Ayala’s family, they had left Israel and gone to her stepfather’s home nation: Saudi Arabia.