The Orion Protocol (14 page)

23

Los Alamos, New Mexico

As the President’s counsel took his one-man-show farther up the road, he was not strictly speaking alone. From a greater distance up the high desert hill than he would’ve liked, the intelligence officer assigned to follow Sandy Sokoff leaned across the hood of a dusty silver Crown Vic and studied the helicopter pad at Los Alamos through Zeiss binoculars.

He could not get much closer without drawing attention. Switching to a Nikon digital camera with a kick-ass custom zoom, he documented each person who came out to greet the President’s counsel and escort him inside the facility. He recognized the Chinook’s pilot and copilot as two of the six on 24/7 rotation for the President, and took shots of them, too. He also noticed how the Secret Service seemed conspicuously absent.

The officer then settled down to wait and see what he could learn from Sokoff’s departure.

24

February 2/Dunsinane, Antarctica

Emerging from the Antarctic ice, it was erect on all fours, with an astonishing look of sentience in its wet black eyes. Frozen dead standing up, with a rack of antlers cocked back at an angle, the caribou seemed afraid, as if listening to the sound of the end of the world. The National Science Foundation team now carefully releasing it from eons inside the glacier was ecstatic.

Mastodons had been found like this near the Arctic Circle, fully upright with a stomach full of freshly cropped grasses and flowers, as if mysteriously flash-frozen with the cud still in their mouths. But nothing like that had ever been found near the South Pole.

At least, not until now.

Thanks to Captain Wesley Bertrand and his crew, 99.9 percent of the radioactive ice at Dunsinane and the hot nuclear drill itself had been safely retrieved, contained, and removed. Trace contamination remained, which caused some wringing of hands, but not enough to warrant shutting down the dig.

So, with strict protocols and new biohazard protections for the science team, the Antarctic prehistoric forest was opened for study.

Running heavily insulated power lines down to an exposed section of ancient trees, the scientists in their bulky “clean suits” used handheld hair dryers to melt the last inch of ice from the upright caribou corpse.

Matted wet fur dusted with a curious layer of fine black carbon began to smell as it thawed. It would be easy to get an accurate dating,
but the NSF team already had a pool going with their bets. Most hovered around 10,500
B.C.E.
, give or take a century or two.

Antarctic ice-core samples taken in 1998 had thrown paleoclimatologists one looping big-league curveball. The samples showed that around 12,500 years ago, the Ice Age abruptly ended with extremely rapid global warming.

This dramatic climate change version of Earth history shattered the mainstream gradualist models taught in Western universities. Subsequent Greenland and North Pole core samples confirmed an overall fifty-nine-degree increase in average daily temperature during one fifty-year period; a radical change in a geological blink of the eye.

For the human population, circa 10,500
B.C.E.
, that would’ve meant a catastrophic melting of glaciers around the world, lending a whole lot of historical credibility to the Noachian myth of the Great Flood.

But what had caused the heat-up, what was the trigger? Had an immense Earth-crossing comet or bolide slammed to ground, kicking off enough volcanic eruptions to dwarf the carbon dioxide pollution pumped out by mere superindustrial man? Carbon levels in the core samples at least raised the suspicion.

In any case, the Academy of Sciences acknowledged that around the year 12,500
something big happened
and thousands of species of plants and animals were wiped out. For Homo sapiens, that most adaptable of mammals, it had been yet another near-extinction event to survive, like the Ice Age itself.

And for the twenty-first-century scientists at Dunsinane, bent over their emerging caribou buck like Moses’ lost Israelites anointing a fatted calf, the prehistoric biosphere beneath their feet was an unfolding mystery with a hundred questions for every solid answer.

25

Goddard Space Flight Lab

“Richard? Close the door, would you?”

The normally breezy and cordial NASA project manager was all business.

Eklund closed the door, surprised to see a stenographer perched with her machine next to the manager’s desk. Beside her was a wiry man in a dark suit who looked as though he spent all his spare time on a stationary bike when he wasn’t working for the federal government.

Eklund knew this couldn’t be good.

“Agent Turner, this is Dr. Eklund.” The NASA manager made the introductions. “Agent Turner and Ms. Stegman are with the FBI. The Bureau is assisting Administrator Pierce, who requested this meeting. They just want to ask you some questions.”

Agent Turner and Ms. Stegman shook hands with Eklund as if he might have a communicable disease. Turner took charge of the questioning.

“Please have a seat, Doctor. We’re required to record all interviews. Uh, ‘February second, Goddard Labs, Agent Turner interviewing Dr. Richard Eklund.’ “

Eklund noticed the tape recorder and its little omnidirectional microphone and sat down. He then responded to a wide-ranging set of prepared questions for the next fifty minutes and change.

Curiosity concerning the tenor of his remarks on the
Science Horizon
program was expressed, especially his criticisms direct and implied of
NASA and Malin Scientific, the imaging contractor for
Mars Surveyor
. Past conflicts with Goddard Space Flight management were revisited and discussed. An accounting of his hours was requested, especially non-NASA activities involving the so-called Mars Underground and the use of Goddard equipment and facilities, along with a complete description in writing of his contacts and conversations with Ms. Angela Browning and anyone else in the media with whom he had any kind of contact or correspondence.

Had the bow-tied research scientist been suspected of planning to bomb the building, the interrogation could not have been more thorough.

They also quizzed him very closely about his colleague John Fisher; what the planetary geologist had told him about his classified work at the Pentagon, whether Eklund thought Fisher was unhappy, disgruntled, having money problems, family problems, drug problems, health problems, sex problems, etc.

When it was over, Agent Turner showed him a copy of the nondisclosure agreement that Eklund had signed when he was hired by NASA and reminded him of the penalties for violating it. He was then thanked and dismissed.

Eklund stood up to go, his mind racing. He had remained polite and cooperative, and except for leaving out any mention of TOLAS and the
Mars Observer
data, he’d been absolutely truthful. But he could tell they suspected he was holding out on them. Or maybe that was just an interrogation technique.

In any case, he left for an early lunch in his aging red EV-1 feeling frightened, shaky, and drained.

What the hell was that all about?

Only paranoid-sounding answers came to mind until he remembered he needed to call John and give him a heads-up. But maybe not on a cell phone.

John is going to shit
.

Using a pay phone at a gas station where his electric car was quite a novelty, he got Fisher’s voice mail and a thin robotic-sounding recorded announcement.

“Dr. . . . John . . . Fisher . . . has been transferred to . . . NASA/AMES at Moffet Field, California . . . There is no new number at this time.”

Eklund hung up, struggling with a nauseating sense of vertigo, as if a gaping crevasse had just yawned open beneath his feet. And for the first time since he’d had root-canal work done in the ‘90’s, he decided he needed to take a personal day.

26

Corporation for Public Broadcasting/Washington, D.C.

In the twelfth-floor wood-paneled office at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting building on Pierre Street near the bridge, Arthur Maclewain tossed the TOLAS CD back across his mahogany desk like a radioactive Frisbee.

“We can take your word about what’s on there. Any response yet from this Deep Cosmos?” Leaning back in his leather desk chair, the senior attorney at CPB Legal made a steeple of his manicured fingers.

Seated opposite him and next to Angela, Miriam wasn’t sure if the lawyer’s pose was an affectation or a cliché, then decided it could be both.

“Not yet,” she said, ready to rumble in her DKNY suit.

“Just as well.” Maclewain rocked slightly back and forth. “Even a superficial reading of the law—re: the publishing or broadcasting of classified government documents—puts us in a world of hurt.”

From a dollar-green tufted leather wing back off to the side, Marvin Epstein, an associate sitting in for the Washington, D.C., affiliate, nodded in agreement. But Miriam and Angela stayed focused on Maclewain. Both looked angry.

“Who said it was classified?” Angela said, reacting first. “If you looked at it, you’d see there’s nothing on it that says it’s classified.”

“Oh, I think a federal judge would find that a bit disingenuous, don’t you?” Maclewain said with a sly smirk. Miriam knew a smirk when she saw one.

“Disingenuous? Come on, Arthur, cut the crap. Either it is or it isn’t. Either it’s classified information or it’s not. Why should we presume a photograph of Mars is classified, for God’s sake?”

“Shall we call the Department of Defense and ask them?”

“Hell no.”

“Well, if you’re afraid to ask the Pentagon if it’s classified because you think it might be classified, then you damn well better behave as if it is classified. Next?” Maclewain raised an eyebrow that reminded them that time was money and they were on their employer’s dime.

“Hold on a second.” Angela took a breath, trying to rein in her anger and frustration. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re talking preemptive self-censorship by a media journalist, which is de facto abridgment of free press and you know it.”

“I don’t see a constitutional argument.”

“Well, what’s the law here, damn it?” Miriam almost shouted it. “When does the government’s right to keep a secret supersede free speech, free press, and the people’s right to know?”

Maclewain swiveled slightly to include his young associate.

“Marvin?”

“Whenever the Supreme Court says it does,” Epstein said. “And anyone who helps broadcast state secrets or analyze classified documents for attribution like this Dr. Weintraub? He’s looking at the same ten years plus that you are.”

There it was: imprisonment and fines. It was their job to say it, but Angela thought it was also being used to try to scare them off course. She stared at Epstein.

“That doesn’t answer the question. State secrets are state secrets because somebody has decided that our national security will be harmed if they are not kept secret. So, the question is, how the hell can a NASA photograph of Mars be a state secret? What can the government possibly be trying to hide that would be a matter of national security? They can’t make a sources-and-methods argument, it’s a NASA satellite photo. I think we’re home free. They have to know that if they did come after us, they’d be begging the question! The whole world would want to know what was on Mars that the U.S. government did not want the public to see. Anyway, Weintraub declined.”

“Probably signed an open-ended nondisclosure. I don’t suppose you asked him that,” Maclewain said. Angela just stared across at him.

He just resets to smug
, Angela thought, and imagined vaulting across the barrister’s desk and ringing his condescending neck. Miriam jumped in.

“No, we didn’t ask him about the terms of any agreements, but answer me this: Why would Justice even go after Weintraub in the first place? We were only asking him to give his opinion as a satellite imaging expert.”

“For the record. In public. On-camera. On
Science Horizon
.” Maclewain shook his head and turned to Epstein, who was nodding in agreement.

“Yeah, that’s like saying he was just casing the bank for you,” Epstein said. “You’re the ones actually stealing the money.”

Before Angela could explode, leaving attorney entrails all over the wood-paneled walls, Miriam held up her hands like a traffic cop.

“All right, fine. You’ve told us all the good sound reasons why
Science Horizon
can’t
break the greatest science story ever, smash the all-time ratings record for market share on public-service television, and win every broadcast award going while we’re at it. Now tell us how we
can
.”

The two men frowned, thinking it over. Epstein shrugged.

“Big guns,” he said.

Maclewain leaned way back into his leather desk chair and made another Christ’s Church of his well-tended fingers.

“Big
honking
guns.”