[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (25 page)

Yes, he would watch this one carefully, she had promise.

* * *

Despite the ravages of recent history’s judgment, the French military is, in fact, one of the more effective and elite fighting forces on earth. In branches such as the French Foreign Legion, for example, most members of the rest of the world’s armed forces would quail at the levels of endurance and toughness required of the young officers and privates.

That said, Agent Jean-Paul Merard had not joined the Foreign Legion, not that he wouldn’t have been able to comfortably exceed even their strict standards. But Jean-Paul, like his seven other cohorts, wanted the fastest way to his target nation’s missile command. Combat experience was the key to getting there, and the elite Rafale fighter pilot division of the French army was one of the best ways for him to get it.

During his training he had made sure he showed especially high proficiency in both hand-eye coordination and tactical target selection, placing him on top of the list of his class’s candidates, and now he was profiting from that proficiency.

Arriving at the Dassault Rafale Training Base in southeastern France, he parked the small Citroën he had bought and went to survey his new environs. Complementing his vantage point was the AI satellite’s aerial view being sent to him via the relay in his car, and he followed various paths till he came out against the tall wire fence that hemmed in the actual fighter planes. Most of his initial classes would be in a simulator, but he wanted to see the storage place for the actual machines.

The Dassault Rafale was France’s answer to the Eurofighter, as the impatient country had dropped out of the development of that plane early to work on its own machine. It had managed to complete the plane nearly ten years earlier than the European consortium and the result had been small, sleek, and lethal. They were, in the opinion of Jean-Paul’s overlaid personality, a strange combination of primitive brutality and pure, functional beauty. The now space-born warcraft of his own race had long since become so distanced from the actual battle by the range of their weaponry that the concept of seeing your enemy through glass seemed at once terrible and wonderful.

Despite his machine soul, he could not help but think this was going to be … fun.

“Can I help you, sir?” said a French sergeant on regular patrol around the central landing and hangar facility. Though these training craft carried no functional weaponry, they were still $45 million each, and access to them was closely guarded even inside the base.

“Just looking at my new job.” said the pilot trainee, smiling at the sergeant and extending his hand. “Lieutenant Jean-Paul Merard, plaisir.”

The sergeant was surprised by the officer’s casual attitude, but he instinctively took the smiling man’s hand, the ice inevitably melting between them.

“New trainee, sir?” the sergeant asked.

“New
pilot
trainee,” corrected the lieutenant, laughing a little. “Beautiful, aren’t they?”

The sergeant could not help but smile a little. He had wanted to be a pilot himself, but his eyesight had not met the strict standards required. By the time Lasik had come around he already been too old for the training program anyway. In the past he had usually begrudged the new trainees their job, but this one was so openly happy that the sergeant was momentarily caught up in it.

“Yes, sir, beautiful indeed, but quite hard to handle, I hear.”

“Ah, we’ll see if I can’t make her sing for me.” said the lieutenant, laughing. The sergeant laughed as well, and began to walk away, continuing his patrol.

Nice human, thought Jean-Paul, his eyes following the chuckling soldier. It was a pity they were all going to die, he thought offhandedly. But the thought passed and his gaze returned to the lethal fighter. He smiled.

Every time the doorbell rang at Neal’s new house in Georgetown, his heart skipped a beat. He had been sitting in the plush living room, working on the finishing touches to his rushed dissertation so that he could hand it off to Barrett Milton to push through the approval process at Neal’s own university, a place where the colonel clearly had far more influence than he. He would return to defend it to the review panel, the final step in any dissertation, once it had been tacitly accepted by the dean.

Putting his laptop aside, he climbed from the easy chair and went to the door. As he did so, he heard the colonel coming down the stairs from the room he was temporarily using in the house. It had seemed easier for him to stay with Neal while in DC, and it had meant he could contribute to the extremely high cost of renting the house while he was here, too.

Neal opened the door and was greeted by a lady in an Electric Company uniform and cap, probably in her mid-fifties, introducing herself as Madge. Her dark, Persian looks made her seem more like an Isabella or Maria, but Neal nodded and waited for her to explain herself.

“I’m with the electric company, Mr. Danielson. Need to check the meter, may I come in?”

“Oh, right, of course,” said Neal, stepping aside to let her pass. He heard the colonel coming down the stairs behind him but kept his eyes on the electrician, who was looking up at the colonel and smiling.

“Well, Barrett, you are in more trouble than your message betrayed.” she said, taking off her hat, and shaking her long, black hair free. The action made her look younger and more virile than she had appeared to be. But Neal was too disturbed by her change of attitude to notice.

She turned back to face him, smiling, “Don’t worry, I’m a friend,” then looking back up at Barrett, she went on snidely, “for now, at least.”

She nudged Neal aside, and closed the front door firmly behind herself. She locked it, and said in an aside, “You’ll need a dead bolt and a much stronger chain. Maybe a steel crossbrace. Anyway, let’s get away from the door so you can tell me what’s going on, shall we?”

“Who are you?” said Neal, almost angry at the way she was taking control. He looked at Barrett as she walked into the living room he had occupied a moment ago, “Do you know this woman?”

“Yes, Neal, you’ll have to take my word for this, she can be trusted explicitly. She is the old friend I mentioned to you a week ago.”

“And how does she come to suddenly be here, at my house?” asked Neal in an almost whisper.

At this, the woman in question returned from the living room and answered the question herself. “Neal, Barrett and I go back a very long way. A week ago he sent me a note asking me to come to DC, and saying he wanted to get back together.”

Neal digested this for a moment, and then said to the tall officer shaking his head beside him, “You invited an ex-girlfriend over to my house?”

“No,” she answered for Barrett again, before he could open his mouth, “he said he wanted to get back together. The last time I saw Barrett was five years ago, and I had joked then, however sadly, that I would never hear from him again. He had said he would contact me again when he was ready to get back together. Both of us knew that was impossible, so I had said that if he ever asked me back that I would know he was in trouble. He asked, so I knew he was in trouble.”

Barrett and the woman looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, the practiced understanding of many years of intimacy needing no words as they greeted each other and let each other know the gravity of the situation with their expressions.

She nodded, “Well then, Neal, I have been watching you for two days. You are clearly in hiding, though from what I do not know. And Barrett here is clearly concerned for your well-being, and maybe his own, but that never made him ask for my help before.” She looked around for something.

“Does this place have a basement? I’m not comfortable talking with all these windows around.” she said, waiting for Neal to respond.

“Err, yes,” he said, jolted into action, “it’s a bit of a dump, but it’s certainly not got any windows.”

“We shouldn’t have to worry about being listened to up here or down there.” put in Colonel Barrett, “I brought over one of my bug detectors from the Pentagon when Neal moved in, the place is clean.”

“Good,” said the delivery woman, following Neal and the colonel into the basement, “good.”

* * *

It had not taken long for their guest to see how worried Barrett was. But ten minutes into their dialogue about the surveillance they feared, it was painfully obvious to her that they were not telling her the whole story.

“OK, guys,” she interrupted Neal during a sentence about encrypting e-mails, “OK, I guess I need to know some things before we go any further.” They looked at one another, and it was clear to her that Neal was relying on Barrett to make a decision about how much to tell her. That, in and of itself, was very interesting.

“Firstly, you have carefully not told me who is trying to monitor you, or why. Now I have worked in many situations where that was the case … in my previous life. But always under orders from someone else who I had to leave the big decisions to. Needless to say, I am retired now, and so I make those decisions for myself.” She waited while they absorbed that, and then went on.

“So, here is what I can surmise from your … limited explanation so far. You do not just suspect, but are clearly quite certain you are being watched. You know that the organization watching you can hack your e-mails pretty reliably, if not with ease, so that makes it one of … ten or eleven countries in the world. You are also surprisingly certain that you are being monitored by satellite surveillance cameras, which brings it down to three countries in the world, including your own.”

Neal noted the use of ‘your’ own. She was not an American, apparently, though her accent was perfect. She knew that she was being evaluated by them both and noted that she had given Neal that piece of information. She decided it did not matter, as Barrett already knew it, and they were clearly very much in each other’s confidence.

“Now, gentlemen, if you are being watched closely by either the US, China, or Russia, you must be someone very important, the question is: important to whom, and why? The fact that you are also clearly afraid for your lives makes you either A) important enough that China or Russia would risk an assassination on US soil for the first time in nearly ten years; or B) dangerous enough to the US that you think they would kill a colonel in their own air force, not unheard of, but hardly standard operating procedure either.

“Unfortunately for you, the courses of action open to you are inherently different for each option, so in order to help you, I am afraid I need to know which it is. I am sorry, that is my price.”

She sat there, impassive, and watched the cogs turn over in their heads. Neal looked from her to Barrett, and back to her. Barrett, however, kept his eyes firmly on the floor, clearly very deep in thought. After about a minute of absolute silence, he looked up, and she saw immediately the conflict in his face. He wanted to protect her from whatever it was they had to say to her. She had never seen such a thing from him. She was touched, but she was also deeply disturbed by this level of emotion from a man such as he.

He broke the eye contact, clearly coming to a decision and moving forward with it immediately, before he could change his mind. “Neal, she is ready. Tell her the truth, all of it, and do not spare any details. She is easily as intelligent as we are, even you, so give it to her straight. We’ll worry about her loyalties afterward.”

Neal nodded somberly, looking at his friend and taking his cue from him, then turning, almost sadly, to the guest. “Maybe you could tell me your name first, your real name?”

She smiled. Then she decided that she was clearly about to be let into something that Colonel Barrett Milton, with all of his years in the Pentagon, considered a big secret. If Neal was willing to trust his life to her on Barrett’s word, she was willing to meet him partway.

“My name,” she said, “is Ayala Zubaideh. I am retired now, and I live in Denver, Colorado, which I have called home for five years. But I was born in Israel, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and worked for HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim, the Mossad to you, until my retirement five years ago. I met Barrett when he was stationed in the Gulf in 1991. He did not know who I worked for until I retired, when he decided he could not, in his position, stay with a member of a foreign intelligence agency, even a retired one, however close an ally Israel may be at this particular time. We got divorced and I have not seen him since.”

Neal struggled with the idea of the colonel married, and to such an exotic woman, and then with the fact that he had ended it so utterly. Finally, Neal struggled with the fact that he had just been told he was sitting in a room with a member of the feared Israeli Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations. The Mossad to its friends, and its enemies.

Not for nothing, but Holy Shit, thought Neal.

“OK, well, yes, I can see, upon reflection, that what you just said was not something you would have said at the door.” Neal went on, noting the colonel pacing behind his ex-wife.

“That said,” continued Neal in a pensive tone, “as much as I am grateful that you have …. opened up to me about who you are, I must ask that you brace yourself.” She looked at him, puzzled, her instincts pricking in mild alarm. “Because what I am about to tell you is, I am comfortable saying, far more important than anything even you have ever been told before.”

And with that, he set about thoroughly blowing her very experienced mind.

* * *

Thirty minutes later Neal stopped his monologue.

She sat, still holding the probe’s photos of the capsule he had handed to her, and she asked her ex-husband to stop pacing behind her. She was quiet and introspective, but she was also calm. The colonel paused behind her, and Neal could see the officer’s fear and sadness, the tension of the last thirty minutes had clearly taken a toll on him. The colonel had been absolutely explicit on what they must do if they recruited someone who did not immediately completely understand and agree to the enterprise’s strict secrecy.