The Leviathan Effect (21 page)

The Suburban followed her as she drove toward her office on K Street, keeping a distance, but taking all of the turns she took. Even when she deliberately went the wrong way.

As Blaine came to Pennsylvania Avenue, her phone vibrated and she saw that she wouldn’t be going to her office this morning, after all. There had been another message. She was being summoned to the White House:
YARI
.

F
OUR OF THE FIVE
members of the circle were already seated around the mahogany conference table in the Cabinet Room when Catherine Blaine entered.

Clark Easton gave her a look. Sideways, steady. Impossible to tell what it meant. Stanton, the Vice President, rose and shook her hand, as usual.

Blaine saw the now-familiar setup. Five of them gathered around one end of the conference table. Four men: husbands, fathers, grandfathers. Shirtsleeves. Secretary Easton, with his tiny scribble pad, his hard blue eyes silently managing the proceedings.

The President told her the news. Another message had been delivered.

“We gave them our assent last night,” he said. “We received their response this morning. The final one, apparently.”

The President passed copies to each of the people in the room. This one had been sent to the President’s email address.

The subject line read,
FAREWELL
.

Blaine read the message:

No one spoke for a while. Blaine read through the message several times, noting the word choices; the tone, this time, seemed slightly different from the earlier ones. She looked at Easton, then at the President, feeling claustrophobic all of a sudden. Charles Mallory had been fresher air; she wished she’d been able to open up more with him.

“Well,” Vice President Stanton said, breaking the spell. “That’s it, then. This is what we’ve been waiting to hear.”

Easton grimaced ambiguously.

“So we’re going forward with this,” DeVries said. Part statement, part question.

“I don’t see that we have much choice,” said the President.

“I just can’t help feeling there’s something nasty in the woodshed here that we’re not looking at,” said Stanton.

“There is,” the President said. “Of course, there is. But meeting with them doesn’t mean we’re capitulating to anything. It just means we finally sit down face to face and see who the hell they are. That’s been the objective of our strategy all along.”

DeVries nodded.

“I don’t like it,” the Vice President said.

“Cate?” the President said.

Blaine nodded. Showing she was on board.

“Okay.” The President sighed and collected the messages. “Now,” he said. “Second item: this storm in the Atlantic. Alexander. It’s about to become a Category Two hurricane. It’s a huge system that’s stretching across more than four hundred miles and growing. We lost a weather plane in it overnight, with eight people on board.” He paused, looking down at a summary from his morning intelligence briefing. “They were flying a fairly routine mission into the eye and the plane disappeared. That’s the first time we’ve lost a plane in a hurricane since 1955. All communications lost, no trace of her. We’re not making that announcement until we have more details, but obviously this is a matter of grave concern. We’re also fielding reports of communications lost with several ships in the Atlantic. Six ships in two or three days. Four of them freighters, two fishing vessels. I’ve been briefed by Jim Wu, who tells me that this storm is developing in ways that are very unusual.” He glanced down at his briefing paper. “Alexander is behaving more like a Pacific Ocean hurricane than an Atlantic storm.”

“That’s it, then, isn’t it?” asked the Vice President, turning and pointing toward the windows.

Blaine nodded absently, trying to make eye contact with DeVries.

“Possibly,” the President said. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Let’s just say, we’ll be watching the system very carefully.”

For a long time, though, no one said anything. They just listened to the rain on the windows.

C
ATHERINE
B
LAINE WALKED
up the steps to her townhouse, thinking about Janus’s final message. And Charles Mallory’s warning that this
wasn’t
Janus. That it wasn’t his MO.

What
was
it, then?

In the kitchen, she poured a glass of diet soda and noticed that her message light was blinking. She hit the retrieve button, hoping to hear Kevin. Instead, she heard the gruff but friendly voice of her mother, calling from North Carolina.

Blaine felt a bittersweet twinge as the message clicked off. She was disappointed—though not surprised—that her father hadn’t left a message. Increasingly, he let her mother handle communications between them, as if he were expanding his retirement to include family affairs, too. He had been a taskmaster during Blaine’s childhood; now, he often seemed a quiet, aloof stranger, only marginally interested in her career.

The storm was making her feel a little blue, she realized. She tried calling Kevin, who answered after five rings.

“Hi, Mom. Amanda’s here,” he said right away. “We’re getting ready to go out for pizza. But I can talk for a minute.”

“All right,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Of course,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be?” Then he told her he
was worried that Alexander might force them to postpone their trip to the Eastern Shore
another
week. Blaine said they’d just have to wait and see.

“Amanda’s parents have a place on the beach in, like, Dewey? So I may end up going with them.”

“Not if the storm’s coming, honey.”

He quickly changed the subject, asking if she had seen Letterman last night.

“No, honey, I normally don’t watch that,” she said.

“Well, you should have seen it last night. It was a classic.” He then told her all about it, reciting almost word for word Letterman’s exchange with Seth Rogen.

Afterward, Blaine turned on her television and switched among the cable news networks. She was surprised to see that the hurricane had already begun to impact the East Coast. She left it on CNN and watched:

The scene shifted to FEMA Director Shauna Brewster, standing behind a lectern at FEMA headquarters on C Street.

Brewster’s normally animated expression was flat and sober, Blaine noted.

Blaine surfed channels for another several minutes, and found something else that got her attention, this time on FOX News: Dr. Keri Westlake, physicist at the University of Maryland, had gone missing several days earlier.

Blaine knew Keri Westlake. Not well, but she had worked with her several times when Blaine was in Congress. A bright woman, with lots of ideas and enthusiasm. She’d advocated a federal initiative for climate research, as Blaine had done, and supported Senator Hutchison’s bill to create a weather modification bureau.

She was thinking about Keri Westlake, staring at the rain puddles in the street, when her cell phone rang.

“Cate, Rube.”

It was Dr. Sanchez.

“Oh, hello.”

“I’ve got some more information for you. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Please. Go ahead.”

“No. It’s something I’d like to show you. In the morning again?”

“Sure. All right.”

“Same Bat time, same Bat station?”

“Yes. Sure,” she said. “Works for me.”

D
MITRY
P
ETRENKO DROVE
slowly through the rolling Virginia hill country, surveying the sloping entrance and exit ramps to the underground facility, well hidden behind a wall of stone and a dense cluster of trees, on property Victor Zorn had purchased with funding from Volkov.

Petrenko had arrived two nights earlier on a private jet, with five members of his security detail, to move the mobile Command and Control Center into the facility and to make it operational. An additional four men would be arriving early tomorrow morning on two separate commercial flights. Three had already driven across country in two cargo trucks, bringing the communications equipment that could not be transported by plane.

Petrenko had been prepping this meeting for weeks, although many of the specific details had only been provided to him over the past two days. He had arranged for the hotel rooms, the decoy vehicles, the drivers. His most important task, though, would be securing Mr. Zorn. Clearly, the Americans would want to learn all that they could about him, to take advantage of the small window of vulnerability that he would be giving them. And naturally they would use everything at their command to do so: satellites, planes, digital audio and visual sensors, high-tech security cameras. Petrenko’s job was to thwart those efforts. To shield Mr. Zorn as much as possible. They had war-gamed their tactics for weeks, and he was certain that he could protect Mr. Zorn from close scrutiny. What worried him was something else.

The other part of Petrenko’s job was simply to observe. To make certain that Mr. Zorn was doing what he said he was doing—and to report the results of his observations to their boss, Vladimir Volkov.

C
LARK
E
ASTON
’
S
P
ENTAGON OFFICE
was in Room 3E-880—part of the same suite of offices that had been used by every Secretary of Defense since just after World War II. On the wall behind his desk were more than a dozen photos, most of them showing Easton with important men he’d worked with and worked for—presidents, congressmen, generals, soldiers, business leaders.

The rooms of the world’s largest office building were identified by floor, ring, corridor, and room numbers. Easton’s was on the third floor of the outermost, E-ring. His office looked out on the Potomac River and the US Capitol, through windows that had been tinted years earlier as a precaution against outside surveillance. Room 3E-880 was about a thousand feet from where American Airlines Flight 77 had ended its journey on the morning of September 11, 2001. Easton still thought about that tragedy every day. When he looked across the river, he frequently considered the fourth plane, too; a plane that might have destroyed Washington’s most potent symbol, the US Capitol, if it hadn’t been brought down in that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Secretary Easton typically worked at his Pentagon office until at least 6:30
P.M.
each night. His long working days were wellknown. The person calling his Pentagon office on the afternoon of October 5 would have known he’d probably be at his desk.

At 5:13, Easton was informed that he had a call from a representative for something called the Weathervane Group.

“Okay,” he said.

Easton pressed a button to take the call and then another to
activate the digital recorder so that he could replay the conversation to the members of the “circle.”

“This is Easton,” he said.

“Secretary Easton. This is Mr. Zorn.” A deliberate voice, gravely, confident. Metallic.

O
NE HOUR AND
thirty-nine minutes later, Catherine Blaine was sitting in the Cabinet Room, preparing to listen to the playback. Rain washed down the windows and low thunder rumbled occasionally in the distance. It bothered her a little that the President, Easton and DeVries had clearly already met to discuss details of the conversation.

“All right?” Easton said. He pressed the
PLAY
button on the digital recorder and the audio began. Vice President Stanton caught Blaine’s eye as they began to listen: