The Leviathan Effect (29 page)

“As much as we can in eighteen hours. It’s ongoing.”

“Okay,” Blaine said. “And I’ve done some checking, too, actually. Would it matter to anyone if I found some discrepancies in his biography?”

“For example,” said the President.

“I’ve found, for instance, evidence that he was not born in this country, as his official biography states. In fact, he has business ties to Russia going back perhaps a dozen years or more. That he might even be a front for a Russian business consortium that we
haven’t
vetted. And that he may have organized crime ties.”

To Blaine’s surprise, Easton leaned back and laughed, a series of short, nasally guffaws. DeVries gazed at the table. Blaine felt her face flushing.

“Have you found anything like that?” the President asked DeVries, with feigned innocence.

“No.”

“Are you pulling these allegations out of thin air, Cate? We’re not finding any of this. Or is there some evidence you have that you’d like to share with us?”

“I’d need a little time to pull it together.”

“Well,” he said. “Unfortunately, as you know, we don’t have that luxury right now.”

“That’s why I wanted to talk with you in private,” Blaine said. She felt her voice shaking. The power in the room was overwhelming her.

Easton half turned his chair, and Blaine wondered if he was going to walk out.

“Look, Cate,” the President said. “I do want to hear your piece. But I also want a united front here.” His eyes held hers, and she could see, then, that there was no chance for a different outcome.
Why?
Surely he wasn’t blind to what was at stake.
Is he?
No, for whatever reason, the President did not want her to push it anymore. He was saying that with his eyes. And with his silence. Her options were two: she could go along with him or she could resign her position.

Easton inhaled dramatically. “Even if Secretary Blaine’s concerns were legitimate,” he said, still not looking at her, “you don’t damn the whole consortium because of quibbles about a man’s birthplace.” Easton’s mouth went crooked. “Just for the record: Mr. Zorn is not why I would get behind this deal anyway. It’s Jared Clayton and Dr. Romfo and Morgan Garland, and the scientists, contractors, and researchers involved.”

“Cate,” the President said, his tone suddenly condescending. “If we have legitimate concerns about this man, if there’s a potential for embarrassment because of him, then of course we will address that accordingly, I assure you. But for now, I’ve got to go along with the intelligence. With what Harry’s giving me. We’re going to tell them yes.”

There was silence around the table. After a moment, the President’s eyes came back to her. “The immediate concern is that thing out there,” he said and pointed at the multi-colored swirl of the approaching hurricane on the television monitor. “Even if you discount the opportunity that this opens up, for jobs and for emerging science and technologies, we still have one irrefutable problem. They know how to stop this, we don’t. End of story.”

“Okay.” Blaine stood and turned away from them, her eyes misting. Knowing she had to let go. This wasn’t her battle to fight. It was his. President Hall’s. Blaine knew there was nothing she could do inside the circle anymore.

“Thank you,” the President said. “When Mr. Zorn calls, I will tell him we are ready to move forward.”

F
OURTEEN MINUTES AFTER
speaking with the President, Mr. Zorn pressed a button on his encrypted cell phone. He was feeling good, gazing out at the fast-moving Virginia countryside.

The presentation had gone even better than Zorn had expected. Within four hours, the down payment would be in their account, and Volkov could transfer it to his own account in Switzerland.

“The agreement has been accepted, as you know,” said the man in Washington.

“Yes. And the discussion went smoothly?”

“Yes. Relatively.”

Mr. Zorn heard something troubling in that word, however. A subtle inflection suggesting that something about the discussion, in fact,
hadn’t
gone smoothly. He had expected the conversation to proceed one way, to be a quick affirmation. But he could tell that his associate was concealing something. Meaning this conversation would instead have to go another direction.

“Tell me about what happened,” he said. “Tell me what was said.”

T
HE
S
ECRET
S
ERVICE
detail watched from across the street as the garage door lifted and Blaine’s Lexus 250 pulled in.

It was raining heavily, pouring through the trees. The Secret Service officers were parked directly opposite Blaine’s townhouse. Both men reflexively checked the license plate number and tried to make sure that no one seemed to be following.

Then they turned their eyes to the upstairs windows, observing a familiar pattern: the light going on in the hallway and Blaine moving across the living room, cracking open the blinds. Moments later, a cell phone rang in the car. The man in the driver’s seat, a trim, forty-three-year-old man with a buzz-cut hair style, answered. “Hi, Ralph. It’s Cate Blaine. I expect to be in for the afternoon and evening.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Stay warm.”

“I’ll try. Have a good night.”

“You too.”

Blaine was not required to call the security detail when she arrived home but she usually did. She knew it would have a psychological effect: the officers could relax a little more now. Neither of them had any idea that the person who had entered Blaine’s townhouse was not, in fact, Blaine. Or that the cell phone call had been placed from more than a mile away, not from upstairs in her townhouse.

T
HE NEXT PLACE
J
OSEPH
Chaplin had found for them was an old rural Maryland motel with a red flickering sign that read pike motel. For Charles Mallory, it had at least one advantage over a hotel—private outdoor entrances, so they could enter and leave discreetly. Mallory had Room 321. Blaine’s room was downstairs, 217.

Chaplin had left both rooms unlocked, the keys beneath the bibles in the drawers of the bedside tables. In Mallory’s room, he had also left a Beretta 9mm handgun under one of the pillows, as requested.

The rain had turned to a soft drizzle again and there was a fresh-laundry smell of ozone in the afternoon breeze, mixed with the acidic scent of the soil. Mallory carried up a mushroom and green pepper pizza, which Blaine had told him was her favorite, along with a bottle of merlot, sodas, paper plates, plastic silverware, and napkins.

In Room 321, he flipped open his computer and resumed searches on the seven names. He had begun to think about the case differently, coming at it from a new direction—considering who the perpetrator might be rather than who the victims had been.

At 5:22, one of his phones vibrated. Pat Hanratty.

“It was absolutely marvelous to see you again yesterday, dear,” she said.

“Yes, it was fun.”

“Although I think we may be in trouble now.”

“How do you mean?”
Her voice isn’t quite right
, Mallory thought.
Her words sounded slurred
.

“I called in a favor, as I said.” She laughed. “I think I might have something for you.”

“Okay.” Mallory pushed aside the computer and opened his notebook. “Go ahead.”

“I talked with my friend,” she said. “And she reminded me of a couple of things I had forgotten. And then, I looked though my files. Some of what you wanted to know, I had right here at home. Are you ready, dear?”

“Please. Fire away.”

“For starters, FAST was not a project, it was a private databank for storm information. It’s one of the things Deborah Piper was always on about. That’s what they used for these simulations. And you’re right, dear, Cloudcover did change after 9/11. In the spring of 2002, it expanded. There were two research facilities associated with the project. One in Wyoming, the other in Alaska.”

Mallory jotted notes in shorthand in his notebook.

“Buried in Project Cloudcover’s budget was something else, though,” she said. “Which actually became quite a bit larger. It had a separate name.”

“Okay.”

“It was called the Leviathan Project. Its objective was to, quote, create a storm and then take it apart. That part was classified.”

“But we’re talking computer simulations still, right?”

“No, dear, that’s the thing. Beginning in 2002, it changed. They tried to turn the computer simulations into actual working models, altering elements of existing weather patterns or storms to bring about an intended result. That was Leviathan.”

“To
literally
build a storm and take it apart?”

“Yes. That’s right. That’s what I’m told. Although, you see, it still went under the rubric of ‘research.’ The facilities in Wyoming and Alaska were both designed to manipulate storm systems in the same way the computer models predicted.”

“Are you sure about this?”

“I have memos referencing it, dear. Which I’m sending to you.”

“All right. And this was NOAA? What branch of government—?”

“A joint project, involving NOAA, the Defense Department, and the CIA. But which relied heavily on private sector contractors, from what I can see.”

“The Defense Department?”

“That’s right, dear. I found a document that Deb Piper sent me which includes the names of two of the companies involved. One of them was Raytheon. The other was called EARS, which stands for Energy and Atmospheric Research Systems.”

Another connection
. EARS was tied to two of the names on the list, Mallory recalled.

“Okay, so what happened to it?”

“Happened to what, dear?”

“This project, I mean. Leviathan. What happened to it?”

“Oh. Well.” He heard the clinking of ice in a glass. “It became inactive in 2005, I’m told. The government’s involvement in the Alaska project unofficially stopped at the end of December 2004. Although it remained funded for a number of months. The other part, in Wyoming, was phased out more gradually. Some of it was purchased and is now part of something called the Weathervane Group.”

Mallory was scribbling frantically. “Okay. So there were two parts. Do you know what each one did? Specifically?”

“In general terms? Yes. The Alaska project involved ELFs.”

“Elves?”

“Yes.”

“Like Santa’s helpers?”

“No. ELFs,” she said, the slur in her voice accentuated by her attempt to be emphatic. “Extremely low frequency radio waves. Ionospheric radio signals. The Wyoming project experimented with lasers.”

“What kinds of experiments are we talking about?”

“It’s in the memos, dear.”

“All right.” Suddenly, the list was making a new kind of sense. “That’s great, Pat. And where did these memos come from?”

“Deb.”

“Pardon?”

“Piper. She sent them to me long ago and I haven’t thought about them in years. But maybe you will find them useful. I’m in trouble, of course, if any of this gets out.”

“I am, too,” Mallory said. “Don’t worry. Any chance of sending them to me electronically?”

“I just have, dear. As PDFs. Can you open those?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m eternally grateful.”

“Eternity’s a long time, dear. I’d be willing to settle for a year.” After a pause, she laughed.

“Okay,” he said. “Deal.”

Less than two minutes later, Mallory was scrolling through the PDFs. Eleven memos. Three of them from Deborah Piper, vaguely questioning the motives behind the Wyoming Cloudcover facility. Four were from a “project administer” named Rajiv Gupta, full of technical details about satellite laser ranging, providing such insights as: “current measurements of the products of gravitational constants reveal that such measurements do not progress secularly;” and “the concurrent readings confirm an effective separation between altimeter system drift and long-term changes at the sub-cm level.”

Nine of the memos provided nothing that seemed useful to Charles Mallory. But the other two were pay dirt.

This reiterates the concerns raised today in our conversation about the objectives of the Leviathan Project. The project administrator’s report makes clear that this operation does in fact consist of two primary processes, both of which are expected to be tested on an experimental basis by the summer of 2005
.

The objective of the first process is to develop the capability to create and then take apart a hurricane-force event in the Pacific Ocean. The foundation for this is more than four years of simulations modeled and compiled through Project Cloudcover
.

The objective of the second process, as stated in the administrator’s review, has only one part. It is to create a finite event that occurs very suddenly. In other words, an event that cannot be mitigated or taken apart because it gives no warning and is over within a few minutes
.

Considering that the original objective of Leviathan was the first process and the first process alone, I would urge that we place an immediate hold on research into the second process until we have more thoroughly evaluated it and how it has been carried out
.

Further, the initial purpose of the facility in Alaska was, according to a May 23, 2002, memo from the Secretary of Defense, to “measure and better understand tectonic plate convection in the Earth’s mantle” and,
more generally, to “study Earth’s interior processes.” This original objective related to computer models showing the effects of cooler water being pumped to the ocean surface during a hurricane
.

The work going on there now has clearly strayed from this objective
.

I strongly suggest shutting down the Alaska facility and implementing an internal review and audit of Environmental Atmospheric Research Systems, the contractor that has taken the lead there
.