The Orion Protocol (22 page)

47

February 8/Arlington Country Club/Washington, D.C.

The course at Arlington was a vast swath of wet and soggy turf from the night’s rain, and it appeared to be threatening, again. Yellow pin flags snapped horizontal all across the empty course. The cherry trees, fooled into budding early by a series of springlike days, were now getting double-crossed.

With an eye to the sky, Bob Winston, Admiral James T. Ingraham, and NASA Administrator Vernon Pierce elected to take buckets of balls down to the far end of the driving range.

The wind snatched at Pierce’s golf jacket, sending a chill down his neck to keep company with the cold sense of dread already lodged in his chest.

“We have a situation, Vern,” Winston said, taking practice swings amid the swampy puddles. Pierce slipped the cover off his driver. He knew they had a situation. He’d been up since 5:30
A.M.
preparing for this meeting to discuss it.

“Who is it?”

Winston glanced at the Admiral and then bent down to tee up his ball.

“Commander Jake Deaver is in felony possession of above-top-secret material which we believe he’s planning to leak or may already have leaked to the media. We’ll be consulting with the AG but we want to consider other options.”

“Good God.” Pierce gaped as Winston mechanically smacked a ball
to the one-hundred-yard sign, hardly noticing where it went. “What’s Deaver think he’s doing?”

“Apparently selling his story to PBS, God knows why. But I think you’ll agree the timing is problematic.” Winston swung again, slipping slightly in the wet and scowling down at his spikes.

“Jesus Christ,” Pierce muttered.

“It gets worse. Admiral?”

Ingraham launched a series of drives that fell in a tight cluster downrange.

“Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI say Deaver met with Angela Browning in Colorado. And two days ago, Browning and her producer walked a copy of classified material into Congressman Phillip Lowe’s office on the Hill. A NAV/INT team subsequently found it on Deaver’s computer.”

“Goddamn it.” Pierce was too upset to swing a club.

“Don’t worry, Vern.” Winston was finding his rhythm, like the Admiral, driving steadily through a half-dozen balls. “We can still get Deaver back.”

“Lowe and Browning will be handled separately,” Ingraham said, “but Commander Deaver is
our
shop.”

Our shop
. . .

Pierce winced at the fresh reminder of Ingraham’s end run appointment at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

“Your people looked over the Exposure Act?” Winston said casually.

This was it. Pierce knew what they wanted from him.

“Yes, the ET Exposure Act of 1968. It’s a power of quarantine.”

Pierce had the authority to have Jake Deaver picked up and placed in isolation. But invoking the Exposure Act to quarantine Deaver could be easily second-guessed and criticized as an abuse of power, even if it was legal.

“Indefinite detention and quarantine.” The Admiral ticked off the salient points. “At the sole discretion of the NASA administrator. No judges, no hearings, no appeals. Except to the Chief Executive.”

Winston added his two cents.

“The right tool for the right job, Vern.”

Pierce imagined how it might play in the media, if it got out: most things eventually did get out. He’d be the one expected to fall on his sword. But Pierce wasn’t quite ready to be buffaloed into the scapegoat role. He dug in his heels.

“Absent a public health hazard, we can’t arrest and detain Jake Deaver or anybody else. There’s no precedent. There’s no way in hell it’ll ever stand up.”

The Admiral watched Winston bag his driver with a disgusted shove. He then faced down Pierce and his constitutional argument with equal disdain.

“It doesn’t need to stand up. Just needs to buy us some time. You’re not going to get hung out to dry, if that’s what you’re worried about. You sign off, NSA has Deaver picked up, and it’s done. He’s their problem after that.”

Winston knew that was stretching it, but he let it stand.

“Look, Vern, I’m sure we can get Augie Blake to talk Deaver in. We probably won’t even need to use the quarantine. But we need to have it as a last resort.”

Augie Blake
. Pierce thought about that, grasping at the idea: if that’s how it was handled, that’d be fine. He looked up at the darkening sky and thought maybe he was being overanxious. Of course, if Justice did get involved, or if things went bad in any number of ways that they could go bad, all bets would be off. And he’d be out there naked and trussed up for the fall. He shuddered.

“And this is from the President?”

The Admiral faced abruptly away, as if a rude bloom of cat spray had invaded his nose. Winston zipped up his jacket against the cold.

“You haven’t had a call from Sandy Sokoff, have you?”

“Sokoff?” Pierce said, puzzled at what seemed a non sequitur. “No. Why?”

But the two men were too busy packing it in to respond. Winston hefted up his golf bag and offered a warning, disguised as a note of personal concern.

“The train is leaving the station, Vern. With or without you.”

He and Ingraham then hiked off toward the clubhouse parking lot.

Above, a kettledrum of thunder rumbled deep enough to reverberate in Vernon Pierce’s tensed-up stomach. He scowled at the gray clouds crowding together overhead.

“Christ.”

Becoming NASA administrator had been the pinnacle of his career in space science and aerospace management, but it was a presidential appointment. If he refused to exercise his authority and invoke the Exposure Act against Commander Deaver, Winston had made it plain he’d be replaced by some Bork who would.

He imagined an ignominious resignation, the look on his wife’s face, having to pull his two daughters out of private school and move back to California; damaged goods, his public career over. Maybe he could teach . . .

Big silver-dollar-sized drops of rain began to splat around him.

“Son of a bitch.”

Lightning stabbed down from the cumulonimbus coalition now amassed in earnest over the Capitol, and Pierce hustled off the range with his clubs as the first real storm of winter finally broke on top of him like Noah’s worst nightmare.

48

Office of the NASA Administrator/Washington, D.C.

Soaked to the skin, Pierce found Congressman Phillip Lowe waiting in the anteroom of his NASA suite and nursing hot Lipton’s tea in a ceramic cup. It was a souvenir cup, available on-line with a hundred other NASA souvenir items screened, stamped, or embossed with the agency logo.

“Got a minute, Vern?” Lowe was already on his feet.

“Mr. Chairman . . . of course.” Pierce peeled off his wet jacket, noticed the Congressman was holding a large plain manila envelope, and quickly guessed what might be inside. He called to his secretary.

“Stacy? Can you take this?”

“Sure.”

The NASA chief handed off his jacket and thought about what Winston had said about Lowe getting together with Angela Browning. He glanced over, looking for a clue about what the thrust of this meeting was going to be, and decided there was nothing in the Congressman’s face except the prospect of a bad day getting worse.

Pierce smiled and motioned him into his office.

“Come on in, Phil. Good to see you. Stacy? If there’s more hot tea . . . and see if you can track down Bob Winston’s whereabouts for me.”

Pierce decided he had no choice but to play ball, but he was going to need help in terms of damage control.

49

National Archives Building/Washington, D.C.

Emerging alone from the vaults of the National Archives, Representative Phillip Lowe found himself out in the high-ceilinged lobby feeling very strange: everything had changed. Nothing was physically different from the way it had been when he had walked in. The marble flooring, gilded Doric columns, and temperature-controlled, bank-hush quiet were exactly as they had been an hour ago.

The change was interior to Chairman Lowe.

Behind a mask of severity, he signed out at the security desk with its double bank of TV monitors. Nothing would have suggested to an observer that, for Phillip Lowe, the world was no longer anything like what he had thought it was sixty minutes before.

“Ordinarily, this would require above-top-secret clearance,” Bob Winston had said, escorting the Congressman and Vernon Pierce into the repository of the nation’s deepest secrets. “But that’d take time we don’t have.”

Winston stopped at the door to a guarded conference room that might have doubled as a vault for the National Reserve at Ft. Knox.

“If I can just have you sign this.” He presented a dense NSA document to each of them along with a gold-tipped pen. “It’s a standard nondisclosure.”

Pierce scrawled on his copy, but Congressman Lowe declined.

“I don’t think so.” He sounded pretty firm about it.

Winston blinked: he hadn’t imagined that Lowe might demur. Pierce jumped in to mediate.

“Um, I think the Congressman may be concerned that in his role as Chairman of the Space Committee such an agreement might represent a conflict of interest.”

Lowe did not disagree, but offered nothing more. He was fully prepared to turn and walk out: it was their dog and pony show. If they wanted to show him something intended to influence him, he had his terms.

Winston disguised his displeasure and folded away the agreements, one signed, one unsigned. Unlike his relationship with Pierce, he had little leverage with the Congressman. And it wasn’t smart to make enemies if you weren’t sure you could also make them go away.

He nodded to a Marine, who then stepped aside from the bomb-proof door.

“Then the distinguished Chairman’s word will have to suffice.”

Now, after his hour in the above-top-secret vault, Lowe waited to be buzzed out of the archives building, acutely aware of the security cameras everywhere around him and feeling almost desperately claustrophobic.

God
, he thought.
I would kill for a smoke.

It had been five years since he quit, but at the moment it seemed like five hours. The
brrraaat
of the releasing buzzer startled him, though he knew what it was. A security guard called out from behind his bank of monitors.

“Go ahead, Congressman.”

Embarrassed by the prompting, Lowe pushed on the steel-reinforced exit with unnecessary force, swinging the door wide. The electronic locks clapped loudly home behind him.

Out in the street, he was shocked at how naked he felt, how disoriented. By the time he found his three-year-old silver Saturn and was steering toward Capitol Hill on automatic pilot, all the work waiting back at his office seemed trivial.

Snatching up his car phone, he quickly put it back in its cradle. Who was he going to talk to? Who
could
he talk to?

Twenty years ago he had followed his father’s footsteps into politics, though without the seemingly requisite fire in the belly that the Carolinian Senator was famous for. Phillip Lowe was a thoughtful, decent, even idealistic man who loathed the mudslinging rhetoric and partisan rancor endemic to the House. True to his nature, he chose a low-profile path: unlike Ways and Means, Judiciary, or the Armed Services Committees, the issues related to Space seldom generated blood-feud party battles. No one could jealously imagine the Space Committee as a springboard to a damn thing.

Had the unimaginable, now, just occurred?

Lowe remembered Miriam’s question about a congressional investigation, and knowing what he now knew, he imagined televised House hearings into the violations of NASA’s charter, including the suppression of extraterrestrial artifacts discovered on the Moon and Mars. The revelations would be a scandal. The business of the nation would be paralyzed like nothing since Watergate, Clinton’s impeachment hearings, or September 11.

And Phillip Lowe, a little-known representative from a tiny district in North Carolina, would be in the white-hot glare of the national media shit storm, presiding over all of it.

Pulling into the members-only parking structure adjacent to the Hill, Lowe realized that this was exactly the kind of leadership role he had been raised and groomed to fulfill, however long he had dodged it.

It would bring unbuyable name recognition. And if he acquitted himself well, in an evenhanded statesmanlike manner, reassuring to the public, who knew? He might just be able to parlay it into a statewide run for the Senate, that more gentlemanly, prestigious, and contemplative Senate Chamber still home to his father’s legend. Something often presumed by observers of the Washington scene to be beyond the son’s grasp. A presumption he would like very much to prove wrong.

Lowe began to see the scale of the thing, the ducks he’d have to get in a row.

Then he realized who he needed to call first and why.