The Orion Protocol (21 page)

44

Across town, Sandy Sokoff was thinking about his impending meeting with the President and how to say some of the difficult, even disturbing things he believed he now had to say as he steered his black Ford Explorer out of the basement parking in his building and nosed into rush-hour traffic.

The contract operative falling in two cars back in a stealth-bronze Buick LeSabre didn’t know what the President’s counsel had done to attract the extreme displeasure of his employers and he wasn’t paid to guess.

He didn’t know Sandy Sokoff was counsel to the President of the United States and wouldn’t have cared to. Accelerating up a ramp behind Sokoff and merging onto the beltway, the operative had only two things on his mind: getting a positive visual ID on the target and making certain the target was alone in the vehicle. Once satisfied on both counts, he fell back a few lengths for safety before pushing a button on a tiny handheld electronic device that sent a signal to a tiny explosive device hidden in the Explorer’s left-front wheel well, blowing the tire and sending Sokoff’s truck careening in a shower of sparks until it slammed to a hard stop against the meridian.

Mission accomplished, the operative swerved past the crash and sped away. Relaxing, he loosened his tie and began looking forward to the third thing on his “to do” list: a big pancake breakfast with link sausages and bacon, hot coffee and cold orange juice.

He imagined the crash truck and the busy D.C. cops coming to the accident scene, scratching their heads at the worn-out blown left-front tire.
If they were at least half smart they would then check the right-front tire, which the op had also stealthily replaced with another discount Firestone “blem.” At which point, it would be game over. Case closed.

Seeing the exit sign for the International House of Pancakes, the contract op carefully looked over his shoulder and changed lanes.

The half-smart cops would conclude that the accident victim had made a bad bet on cheap tires that he should’ve at least rotated with the rear pair, which looked almost new. It was so simple, it was kind of a shame.

But then again
, he thought, happily steering off the beltway toward his IHOP breakfast,
that was kind of the beauty of the thing
.

Sokoff stepped shakily down out of the pranged black Explorer. There was a ringing in his ears, but he could still hear the approaching sirens. Somebody must have called it in right away. He’d been in too much shock to think of doing so.

With looky-loos slowing down to gawk on both sides of the median, he took a quick personal inventory; the air bag had saved him, but it had hurt like hell and his favorite sunglasses had left deep red indentations where they’d broken on his face.

But the shades seemed to be all that was broken. He noticed his hands were shaking and his brain seemed both frozen and way overamped.

“Jesus.” He bent at the waist, letting blood flow to his head.

By the time the ambulance pulled up, he wasn’t dizzy anymore and he’d had the presence of mind to call Mrs. Travis on his cell phone and reschedule with the President.

Then the paramedics were all over him, checking his eyes for dilation and other signs of shock or concussion and helping him over to their red-and-white van.

“Sir? We didn’t see any passengers in the vehicle; were you alone?”

“No passengers.”

Submitting to the paramedics’ tailgate physical, he learned that his right knee was banged up from smashing into the dash. It’d probably get black and blue.

“Does that hurt, sir?” The medic pressed on the bruise.

“Ow. Fuck, yes. Remind me not to press on it like that.”

His scalp also had a swell little knot from smacking into the b-pillar, making the argument for side head air-bag protection. But no nausea meant no concussion: all in all, the President’s counsel was a very lucky man.

Once his lucidity returned, Sokoff buzzed the medics with his White House ID and talked them into giving him three Tylenol and a lift to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He’d been prepared to insist that the fate of the republic was in his hands and the President of the United States was waiting to see him, but it hadn’t been necessary. Which was probably just as well.

On a gurney inside the ambulance, waiting for his drugs to kick in, Sandy had time to think about the crash and knew in his gut that it had not been an accident.

Of course, his State Farm agent and the D.C. police would investigate, and if he didn’t use his clout to make them spend money on serious lab work, et cetera, he’d be very surprised if they called it anything except “tire failure.”

But it didn’t really matter: he knew. And if
they
were smart, whoever
they
were,
they
would know he knew.

Dead or warned off
, he thought, wincing as he stretched out his stiffening leg.
Hey, it’s a win-win.

And for the first time in his life, which was surprising for a Texan, Sandy Sokoff found himself thinking about buying a gun.

45

February 7/FBI Field Office/Denver

With the word that a Naval Intelligence team was being dispatched onto their Colorado turf, Stottlemeyer and Markgrin pondered the question of what kind of bullshit politics was going on now.

“Just tell me. Has somebody got a problem?” Stottlemeyer growled into his desk phone in Denver.

All he got, though, was a bored-sounding voice emanating from the hallowed bowels of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., reminding them of their obligation to play well with others.

Markgrin watched the red rise in his partner’s already florid face as Stottlemeyer hung up. It was like following a child’s worsening fever on a thermometer.

“So, what’s up?”

Stottlemeyer put together a string of curses in which the words
gay-ass
and
motherfucker
were a recurring theme.

“Let’s roll.”

“Roll where?”

Stottlemeyer jerked on his Rockies jacket over an air-weight holster and led Markgrin out the field office door, venting as he went.

“Lunch. With some fuckin’ gay-ass gym rat NAV/INT motherfuckers. But we’re not taking any horseshit, man. You know what I’m saying?”

“And what exactly would that look like?” Markgrin followed in his wake as Stottlemeyer banged his way out into the parking lot.

“Like a bunch of gay-ass gym rats picking up the tab, for openers.”

“Oh, yeah,” Markgrin said, waving his stocky partner off the wheel side and unlocking their car. “We can put the hurt on ’em there, big guy.”

As expected, the meeting with the diffident young Navy creep-team in the bar at the Boulderado Hotel was no love fest. But the two agents gave them what they needed: the rundown on Jake Deaver’s daily routine and his teaching schedule at UC–Boulder.

“His afternoon class is from two to four,” Stottlemeyer said, making what he thought was a heroic effort not to react to the
beaucoup attitude
radiating toward them from across the table.

“At the college. That’ll work.” The twenty-nine-year-old team leader did the talking for his hard-muscled crew, who drank bottled water and smirked at the fibbies, hoping to die before they got that old. “How far is the house?”

Markgrin drew a map for them on a restaurant napkin.

“Sometimes he goes for coffee with some of the kids afterward,” he added, amused by how the NAV/INT guys kept their shades on to read the menu. It was so MTV. “Travel time from here, figure ten minutes, tops. We can stay with him, if you want. Let you know when he’s on the move.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” The team leader signaled the waitress.

Stottlemeyer fumed at the dismissive tone, then ordered the Boulderado rib eye and a bucket of steamers, since he’d decided the Navy was buying. He then leaned across the table after the menus were collected, and bumped up the peaky testosterone level just a touch.

“Do us a favor,” he said, addressing the whole crew, using a gravelly Passaic sotto voce which his straight-faced partner thought was pretty funny.

“We live here.” Stottlemeyer let the muscle in his clenched jaw jump a couple of times for emphasis. “Don’t make us have to apologize for anything.”

The G-men needn’t have worried: the all-pro Naval Intelligence creepsters executed a meticulous break-in of Jake’s cabin and a light
toss, leaving little or no trace of their passing. Hacking into the password-secure files in Deaver’s computer was a pain, but much easier to accomplish in situ than via the Internet.

In the end, every file and every disk in storage was downloaded onto a portable hard drive, and they were out clean in ninety minutes and off the Denver airport radar three hours later.

The data would then be hand-carried in a secure pouch back to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C. Once there, it would be logged in, put inside a lockbox, and taken by armed detail to the NSA for an eyes-only analysis, which would, in turn, be delivered directly to R. Cabot “Bob” Winston.

46

NASA Station/West Australia

Jonathan Quatraine was starting to feel quite at home in the back-of-beyond station, cooking meals in the rudimentary kitchen and hiking with Hudson around the outback near the dish. What he had come to like most was the thing Colonel Blake had shown him: the
Space Station Alpha
emergency channel with its privileged peek behind the scenes.

Like now, sitting in his chair, drinking a coolie from his lager cache, and watching astronaut Lieutenant Heather Charney floating weightlessly near the sleep sacks, setting out a string of raisins in the air in front of her and snapping them up like Pac-Man.

“The Goddess is in heaven and all’s right with the world, mate.”

Lieutenant Charney’s spiky haircut seemed perfectly designed to look good in microgravity and Jonathan fantasized himself into the scene, the two of them “starkers,” bouncing off the walls and making frantic flying love like a porno
Matrix
.

“Bollocks.” Jonathan banged down his beer can as the EC cycled to another camera, this one showing two Americans in jumpsuits droning their way down a checklist on a clipboard labeled
PROJECT ORION
. The Aussie student blinked.

“Orion . . .”

Jonathan didn’t remember any Project Orion. With a sinking sensation he rolled his desk chair over to recheck the e-mailed event sked: no Orion.

The screen switched again, to a camera located in the space shuttle’s
cargo bay. The cargo doors were wide open, revealing a quadrant of space that included a slice of Earth, some twinkly stars above the night terminus, and two suited-up astronauts deploying a large, shiny concave mirror.

“Shite almighty.”

Jonathan felt sick. Wasn’t he supposed to archive every station event? And deploying a satellite from
Atlantis
had to be a station event, on the sked or not.

Powering up the receiver, he smacked the nearest cassette at hand into the VCR and started recording. Setting sound levels, he could hear the astronauts’ chatter with Mission Control and a time code peeping its pulse. Something was definitely happening and he’d almost missed it completely.

“Shite,” he shouted, causing Hudson to look up from his water dish.

Jonathan quickly reset the tape counter, scanned his own instrumentation, and double-checked the record light: at least he was getting this much. Then the time-code beep became augmented by a hiss of high-end gain and an audible countdown in Russian, with a shadow count in English.

“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

Russian? Russian?
It was all happening too fast. Glued to the monitor with its beautiful view out the shuttle-bay doors, Jonathan reached for the phone and then stopped himself. What good would that do? He’d just feel like a fool calling Johnson Space Center in the middle of a count just to let them know he’d missed everything up to this point and was a complete and utter wanker.

“Project Orion. Initiate . . .”

Suddenly he saw a bright pulse of light, originating from somewhere below
Alpha
and
Atlantis
, shoot up, forming a powerful standing column of laser light that beamed out past the space station and far into space.

“What the fuck?” Jonathan held his breath. He could hear astronauts and cosmonauts chatting as the mirror SAT he had seen deployed was being remotely maneuvered into position to intercept the laser.

“Oh, God.”

Suddenly the space mirror was deflecting the huge, silent beam at an acute angle, redirecting it out past the night terminus of the Earth, where it disappeared thousands of miles downrange. Jonathan was mesmerized.

“This is awesome.”

The epic hypotenuse of lockstep photons suspended itself in this sustained manifestation of sheer power for about ninety seconds, underscored by whoops and exclamations in Russian and English on the transmit channel.

And then, as if someone had clicked off a flashlight, the laser was gone. But the Aussie grad student knew what he had witnessed.

“A weapons test. A secret bloody space weapons test.”

And the reason it wasn’t on the daily sked was that he wasn’t supposed to see it, was he?

But he had seen it. He looked down at the video machine: he even had evidence to prove it.

“Project Orion. Krilkey . . .” Jonathan’s fingers were shaky as he punched
rewind
. He noticed, for the first time, that in his haste he had not grabbed a blank cassette and had in fact recorded over a copy of the classic “Cheese Shop” sketch from the
Best of Monty Python
and part of an
Ab Fab
. But he was too busy getting paranoid to mourn the loss.

He replayed the recorded test once more: it was astounding.

“Fuck, fuck, fuckitty.”

Jonathan vaulted up out of the chair and paced the room with Hudson at his heels, picking up on his alarm.

He imagined Home Guard helicopters keening and careening overhead and security troopers rappelling down like commandos and arresting him for security violations. He saw himself dragged off and thrown incommunicado into some military/penal hellhole in Canberra and subjected to brutal interrogation.

“Shite!” he shouted, frightening the brown Lab into a barking jag. Jonathan smoothed out the raised ridge of fur on the dog’s back.

“There, there, she’ll be all right, you mug.”

It gradually occurred to him that maybe his fate was entirely in his own hands: erase the tape, destroy the evidence, and Bob’s-your-uncle.

But what if there was some way they could know that he’d seen it and archived it? A hidden camera in the station, or a monitoring device in Houston or something.

In that case, not saying anything would be the most suspicious thing he could do. And how could he prove he’d destroyed the evidence, if he destroyed the evidence?

Jonathan wanted to do the right thing, whatever it was, without getting himself shit-canned in disgrace or worse, but he was at a complete loss. Then it came to him: the one person on Earth he might be able to trust.

“Colonel Blake.”

Once he realized there might be something arguably appropriate that he could actually do, his fear subsided and he began to think more clearly.