The Orion Protocol (16 page)

29

February 4/Arlington Country Club

The Arlington Club golf course was not normally open in February, but unseasonably mild weather was bringing the hackers out. At 7:00
A.M.
on a weekday, however, Bob Winston, J. B. “Clay” Claiborne, a heavyset TRW lobbyist, and NASA head, Vernon Pierce still had the first tee all to themselves.

“Just wanted to give you a heads-up,” Winston said, addressing Vern Pierce and practicing his swing.

“About what?” Pierce kept it casual as he picked out a driver.

The aerospace lobbyist, Claiborne, turned out in designer golf wear that did nothing for his paunch, stood discreetly apart, swinging a Callaway club and pretending not to eavesdrop.

“PBS science journalist Ms. Angela Browning,” Winston said.

“
Science Horizon
. What about her?”

To the east, the spire of the Washington Monument could be seen poking up above a row of skeletal cherry trees, almost in perfect alignment with the flag on the far green. Winston took a practice swing, just clipping the wet grass.

“She called Commander Jake Deaver at the crack of dawn this morning, and then booked a red-eye to Colorado.”

Vern Pierce pulled on his gloves. He hated shoptalk when he was trying to enjoy himself. But Winston seemed determined to turn a little early-morning golf into exactly what Samuel Clemens had once called it: “a good walk spoiled.”

“So?” Pierce shrugged. “Maybe she’s doing a show on astronauts.”

“Maybe,” Winston said without conviction, cleaning his spikes with a Popsicle stick. Staring hard down at his Slazenger, the national security adviser then teed off, only to see the ball slice and carom off the fairway.

“Shit.”

Winston scowled at his club, as if the fault lay in the design. Pierce looked at Claiborne, TRW’s man in the capital: he’d seen it, too, but the lobbyist kept a straight face. Clay was there because he needed Winston’s support for his company’s military satellite contracts. There was no percentage in twitting the man about sportsmanship.

“Look, Bob,” Pierce said, stabbing a tee into the turf, “I wouldn’t worry about Jake Deaver for two seconds. Nobody’s strayed from the reservation in thirty-some years and I don’t know why they’d start now.”

Pierce set his feet and swung his Big Bertha. The ball was high, wide, and slicing handsomely when it disappeared like Winston’s Slazenger into the bordering trees. He shook his head.

“Crap.”

“In any case, Vern,” Winston said, lowering his voice, “we’d like you to have a little sit-down with Admiral Ingraham.”

Pierce looked bewildered.

“Ingraham?”

Claiborne, the veteran lobbyist, teed up, making a show of giving the two men their privacy by taking his practice swings with fierce concentration.

“What’s going on, Bob?”

“We’ve asked Jim to oversee the restructuring at JPL.”

“Jesus.” Pierce sounded as stunned as he was.

Admiral James T. Ingraham was a big-time spook. Former chief of Naval Intelligence. Former head of NSA. And his fait accompli posting to the top spot at the Jet Propulsion Lab, traditionally part of NASA’s turf, had occurred without consulting the NASA Administrator. Pierce felt impaled.

“When did this happen?”

Vernon Pierce didn’t have to ask why. After corrosive public hearings on Capitol Hill during which NASA was raked over the coals for its
numerous and expensive Mars mission failures, a list of congressional recommendations was put in place that included provisions for enhanced oversight. But bringing Admiral Ingraham into the mix by intel fiat was almost a slap in the face. Winston made an effort to smooth ruffled feathers.

“Vern, it’s just a preemptive shot across Phillip Lowe’s bow. We don’t want Congress to think it’s their job to fix NASA, do we?”

Clay Claiborne launched a clean, straight tee shot that would give him a look at par. Winston and Pierce broke off their sotto voce conversation and nodded in admiration.

“Beautiful.”

“Nice shot, Clay.”

“Thanks. Vern? Can we talk about this Sokoff character?” Claiborne asked.

“Sure.”

The two men grabbed their golf carts and hiked off across the fairway with their heads together. Pierce felt sick to his stomach.

Admiral James T. Ingraham. Son of a bitch.

Under pressure from Winston, he’d broken up the partnership of Eklund and Fisher over at Goddard, though he had doubted the necessity for doing so. And he’d make a few more eyewash moves that would chill out the so-called Mars Underground crowd, just to show he was “buttoning down his shop.” But bringing Ingraham on board, for Christ’s sake? Why couldn’t they just let him do his job?

Son of a bitch.
Pierce took a deep breath. Just because he knew why it was happening didn’t mean he had to like it.

Aw, hell, save your powder for a more important fight
, he told himself. There was real science to do that needed real budgets, and if he didn’t bitch and moan over something he could not change anyway, he’d have more chips to cash when approval time came. Besides, any one of a dozen potential events beyond the horizon could take the heat off and make all this paranoic pressure go away.

One good crisis in the Middle East or North Korea and Bob Winston and his hardball go-go boys will all get too damn busy to be backseat-driving the fucking space program
.

Pierce cursed under his breath and trundled his cart out toward the trees, perversely wishing for a rogue dirty bomb to go off in some place like Kashmir or Tel Aviv or the Korean Peninsula. Once off the green in search of whitey, hacking at the weeds with his three-iron, the NASA chief suspected he was not going to get that lucky.

30

Office of the Jesuit Counsel/Washington, D.C.

“Father, I understand you’ve been called upon from time to time to use your good offices with the Vatican on behalf of the government here in Washington.”

“I’ve had that privilege, Mr. Sokoff.”

The worldly, white-haired chief counsel for the Jesuit order was having the very odd presentiment that somehow God had brought Mr. Sokoff to his office. Kilgerry was not a lapsed Catholic by any means, though if faith can be tested, his certainly had been throughout much of his forty years in the capital.

But at age sixty-five, Harvard Law and Divinity School alumnus Michael Joseph Kilgerry tended to invest his faith more actively in the people through whom God worked than in prayers for intervening miracles by the Almighty himself. With this as his guiding view, Father Kilgerry was predisposed to look upon the President’s emissaries, be they atheist, agnostic, or practicing Jew, as equally viable vessels.

“How can I help our new President?”

“Father, do you recall a congressional officer acting for a House subcommittee and President Carter, sometime during the first year of his presidency, who came to you with an unusual intercession request?”

“I do, indeed. Her name was Keating, I think.”

“Carol Keating.”

“Yes. Very earnest, well organized. The White House was interested in
obtaining copies of certain Vatican documents and she asked me if I would be willing to act as liaison to the Holy See. I said yes, of course.”

“And were you able to help her, at that time?”

With his back to the view of the Jefferson Memorial that his leaded-glass windows afforded him, Monsignor Kilgerry seemed to regard Sokoff with growing affection.

“I communicated with Rome, requesting certain ‘sensitive’ material from the Vatican Archives, which, as you may imagine, are quite vast and go back many hundreds of years. But—we were denied.”

“Had that ever happened before?”

“Never.” Kilgerry leaned across the antique desk. “We had never been denied access before and certainly not when requested by a sitting President of the United States.”

Kilgerry, or Father Michael at the time, had waged quite a campaign within the order, trying to get that decision reversed, but the Holy See had not been susceptible to appeal.

Sandy Sokoff didn’t know about Kilgerry’s youthful battle on behalf of President Carter, but he had begun to feel he was in the presence of an ally.

“Why do you think that happened?”

“One must assume it was the subject matter of the documents.”

The two men looked at each other, neither one needing to pronounce the nature or category of the subject matter out loud. Sandy spoke first.

“And was that the end of it, as far as you know?”

“No, like I say, Ms. Keating apparently took her charge very seriously and I did meet with her on one other occasion, at her invitation and not in any official capacity. I suppose she trusted me.”

“She showed you some documents from the National Archives,” Sokoff said. “Things relevant to her request for material from the Vatican. Would you be willing to share with me, and possibly with the President, under the protection of executive privilege, what you saw?”

Kilgerry took a moment to gather his thoughts. He was not frightened or being coy; there was an ethical issue.

“Mr. Sokoff, Ms. Keating was under no obligation to do what she did, but she knew I would be interested and chose to trust in my discretion.
I would hate to cause her even the smallest amount of grief by violating such a confidence.”

“I’m afraid Ms. Keating passed on in 1999.”

“Ah. Then she is beyond our harm.” Kilgerry closed his eyes as if saying a small prayer, then opened them and rose to his feet. “Well . . .”

Coming around the beautifully inlaid Italianate desk, the learned Jesuit motioned Sandy toward his private library and the overstuffed chairs of that sanctum sanctorum.

“I have often wondered whether this day would come. May I offer you a glass of sherry?”

Across the street, in a navy-blue Chrysler minivan with blackout windows, DirecTV graphics, and a high-powered saucer-shaped receiver on the roof, the signal degraded rapidly as Monsignor Kilgerry and his guest moved away from the window glass that had been amplifying their conversation.

“They’re moving.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up.”

The two operatives warming their hands on thermos coffee listened closely on Koss headphones, boosted the gain until the white noise hurt, and finally logged in the time when they lost audio.

They didn’t know if anything they had on tape had any intelligence value. But they were pretty sure that what they were
not
getting was probably pretty hot.

31

February 5/Ft. Meade, Maryland

At the cortex of the National Security Agency headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, a tidal wave of intelligence data from every country in the world came crashing into the wall-sized banks of series-strung super computers every second of every day.

Gossip, rumors, misinformation, disinformation, satellite imaging, terrorist eavesdropping, all of it was part of an encrypted intel-acquisition system managed and maintained by a small army of analysts and tech wizards around the clock.

Gathering data was not the problem. The problem was determining if any of these words and sounds and pictures meant anything in terms of potential threats to America. And the ongoing urgency of this problem required the collective brainwork of human analysts and linguists the same as it always had.

The epicenter of the NSA that served that collective brain was a room that had always been called the Black Chamber, ever since the Nazi-busting cryptology heroes of the Army’s Secret Service first moved here to Ft. Meade in the ‘50’s and set up shop to fight international communism.

Flown in from touring his new JPL offices at Cal-Tech in Pasadena, Admiral James T. Ingraham, former NSA spy chief, had chosen the Black Chamber for this meeting. Not just because it was probably the most electronically secure place on the planet, but because it felt like home.

During his tenure here, he had been a hands-on leader who knew the capability of his men and women and the reach and limitations of their machines and had set a high standard for productivity.

Flanked by his aide and a much-decorated Defense Intelligence officer, the Admiral now looked around the windowless conference room, next door to his old stomping grounds at Operations.

Bob Winston had assembled execs from Rockwell, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Sandia Labs, and Los Alamos for this meeting but it was the Admiral’s show.

“We all know the future is arriving at the speed of light.” Ingraham inclined his head, acknowledging Clay Claiborne and the photon laser weapon designed by TRW. “Nevertheless, I understand concern has been expressed about the delay in the decision about Orion and also about former Senate investigator Sandy Sokoff, who is presumably acting for the White House. Well, I’m afraid Mr. Sokoff’s learning curve is rather steep. Sort of like a blind puppy groping around inside a black box. In any case, let me assure you we are one hundred percent on track. Let’s not get overanxious in the stretch drive. Believe me, if any kind of bogey seriously shows up on the radar, we will be on it. In a decisive and robust a fashion. But, again, that is not the case.”

As always, the Admiral projected a commanding presence, but Clay Claiborne shifted in his chair, not entirely mollified. Winston noticed his discomfort.

Despite the link time invested, he still had his hands full trying to finesse TRW, which had over a billion dollars at risk with Project Orion, the most of anyone at the table. There’d be a hell of a charge against their bottom line if Uncle Sam changed its mind.

“And in terms of the decision vis-à-vis deployment of Orion, we still have almost ten days remaining.” Ingraham addressed the group, making it sound like an eternity. “According to the Old Testament, the universe was created in less time than that. And let me remind you, the President’s support of discretionary funding and ongoing development is not in play. Thanks to the persuasive powers of R. Cabot Winston here, a better man than I am when it comes to diplomacy, the White
House has already signed off, and nothing Sokoff is doing or not doing is likely to reverse that.”

“Besides, he only reports to the President of the United States,” Winston added, with his razor-blade smile. “Not to the Washington Post.”

This provoked the intended chuckle and a more general sense of relief, except from Claiborne.

“Admiral, I hear what you’re saying. I just can’t help wondering: When are we going to be able to do the business of protecting the United States of America entirely in the light of day? When are we going to be able to stop having to hunker down behind closed doors like this, with our collective necks on the line, waiting to get blindsided?”

It was an impolitic if not rude question, but all the assembled aerospace reps turned to the Admiral, glad it had been asked. Ingraham had an answer.

“When the civilized world is a safe and sane place to raise our children and all of mankind can live free from threats of mass destruction.”

His face had become implacable. Hand-holding these whiny defense-industry fat cats was the worst part of having to deal with the private sector.

“In other words, for the foreseeable future, we must stay the course, whatever that requires.” Ingraham glanced meaningfully at the DIA man seated next to him who immediately stood to attention. The Admiral surveyed the table, making eye contact with each man, including the subdued if not satisfied Clay Claiborne.

“In defense of the Republic, gentlemen, the President’s hands must not be tied. Not even with his own rope.”

The Defense Intelligence officer nodded at Ingraham, tucked his hat under his arm, and quietly quit the room.

There were no further questions: this was how things got done. The Admiral knew from the quality of the silence around him that every man in the room understood something had been set in motion: an executive action directed at resolving their anxieties and concerns.

Of course, no one would have admitted to such an understanding. And none of the aerospace lobbyists who had come to press their interests had any desire to imagine, must less be actually told, exactly what action was being taken on behalf of those interests.

They just hoped it worked.