The Orion Protocol (26 page)

58

February 10/Washington, D.C.

The morning drive-time traffic crossing and recrossing the Potomac was every bit as stop-and-go as Angela had imagined it would be, although ten hours earlier she hadn’t expected she’d be dealing with it at all.

Before meeting Jake at Reagan National, she had booked a room for him at the Mayfair Hotel on her
Science Horizon
business Visa. And after saying good night to Dr. Winnick, they’d climbed into Angela’s Grand Cherokee and headed back to D.C., fully intending to go straight to the hotel.

Which we almost actually did
, Angela thought, deftly applying eyeliner in the truck’s rearview mirror as she crept along with the traffic.

Certain images kept coming back from the rest of their night together and she found herself grinning into the mirror uncontrollably. Searching for a word with which to characterize Commander Deaver’s generosity as a lover, she settled on
lavish
and almost swooned at the thought.

“Lavish . . .”

Especially the second time.

Science Horizon
would be billed for the room at the Mayfair, and she thought about not telling Miriam that Jake had spent the night at her apartment. She could avoid the third degree by just saying that she’d taken him to the airport that morning, and get points for saving the company taxi fare.

Angela touched the brakes, narrowly avoiding a collision with a shirtsleeved man in an E 320 Mercedes who glared back at her blissful face.

Of course, if she was going to continue grinning like a maniac, dissembling was not really going to be an option: her partner-in-crime, Miriam Kresky, was a woman of many talents. One of which was that she could read a smile like Barry Bonds reads the seams on a big-league curveball.

Well, hell
, Angela decided, adolescently rebelling at the idea of having to hide how she was feeling.
There’re only so many secrets about a man that a person can keep
.

59

The Oval Office/the White House

Shit
.

Bob Winston was unhappy, but more because of his own miscalculation than anything else: this was not a level of play with much room for error.

The national security adviser was sitting in a yellow, incongruously cheerful-looking chintz-upholstered chair in the Oval Office, paying close attention to the President of the United States now towering over him from behind the desk built for FDR.

A file containing the findings of Sandy Sokoff’s investigation lay open on the President’s blotter, including a brief on the
Mars Observer
/ TOLAS package that had been given to Congressman Lowe and Lowe’s description of his experience with Winston at the National Archives.

Too angry to sit, the Commander in Chief just stood there staring down at the file in excruciating silence and letting Winston sweat.

A few feet away, Sokoff and an uncomfortable-looking Phillip Lowe shared a couch. Sandy observed with satisfaction how Winston ignored them, as if nonacknowledgment was the same as nonexistence.

Sandy, however, felt quite at ease, in a hardball sort of way. Coming when it had, Congressman Lowe’s unexpected phone call and subsequent revelations had been providential, if not miraculous. Sandy decided he would have to ask his new friend the Jesuit monsignor what exactly was involved in the Church officially recognizing an event as a
miracle. He seemed to remember that the convening of a synod of bishops might be required, but he wasn’t sure.

For his part, the President of the United States did not believe much in miracles. He suspected Congressman Lowe’s courage in coming forward might have been driven by ambition as much as by the whispering of angels.

But he’d take whatever he could get. The President closed the file.

“Thanks to an independent investigation, conducted at my request, information regarding Unacknowledged Special Access Projects has been brought to my attention, Bob. Information of crucial importance to any sort of informed executive decision concerning Project Orion. The kind I had hoped to find in the briefing paper you provided me two weeks ago.”

“Within the constraints of time, Mr. President, I thought that brevity might serve best. I take full responsibility if that was a misreading of what you required, sir.”

Sokoff watched Winston coolly taking the heat, like the ceramic tiles on the outside of the Space Shuttle deflecting friction fire during reentry. The President appeared unimpressed.

“In any case, Bob, the issues raised by these Special Access projects will provide the talking points at a National Security Council meeting I’m calling for this afternoon. And I expect your contribution to that meeting to be an unabridged disclosure of all current USAP activities.”

“I understand.” Winston accepted the presidential reprimand even as his brain raced way out ahead, looking for wiggle room, calculating the extent of damage to his own position, and how to stop further bleeding, and which endangered species of secrets might yet be protected by a more limited disclosure than the President was calling for.

“If I may speak to the gravitas of the situation, as I see it, sir?”

“Go ahead.”

“Mr. President,” Winston continued, as if they were the only two people in the room, “it cannot be your intention to abandon the preservation of presidential deniability vis-à-vis Special Projects. As your adviser, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider.”

“Bob, that is exactly my intention.” The President responded in a
deliberate, even tone. “I will not make decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people in self-imposed ignorance. And if it puts this office and my administration in political peril down the road, so be it.”

Winston knew that this was his cue to back off, but he persevered.

“Mr. President, I still believe it is a grave mistake. And I must formally protest in the interests of national security.”

He had pushed it to the wall with all the dignity he could muster, under the deteriorating circumstances.

“Duly noted,” the President said dryly. “And please have your resignation on my desk today before the council convenes. I’ll hold my decision on it until after the meeting.”

It was the shoe Winston had been waiting to hear drop.

“Mr. President,” he said, standing in respect for the Office, if not the man. He then turned on his heel with a certain Teutonic spank and marched out of the room.

Once he was gone, the President snatched up his monogrammed letter opener like a dagger and then drummed it on the dark green blotter.

“He thinks I’m weak because I didn’t fire his ass outright.”

From the couch, Sandy Sokoff laughed and shook his head.

“No, Mr. President; he just knows he still has leverage.”

“Because we need to know what he knows and he knows it.”

Lowe shifted his weight and leaned forward, speaking for the first time since Winston had walked in.

“Mr. President, is there a scenario in which you
wouldn’t
fire his ass?”

The President gave that some thought.

“I expect our friend Bob is working on that even as we speak.”

60

Boulder, Colorado

It was not as if Deaver hadn’t been thinking about it. Off and on throughout their drive to Paula Winnick’s house and even while they were there, he had found himself fantasizing about Ms. Angela Browning: as he watched her quizzing Dr. Winnick or when their hands touched as they passed things across the coffee table.

He’d sensed that Angela had had some thoughts along those lines, too.

Still, when she had invited him up for a drink at her place, on the way into D.C., there had been mutual astonishment at how combustible they were together.

The urgency and hunger were evident in the trail of their clothing from the hallway (where they’d finally kissed each other) to the bedroom (the bed almost totally symbolic, at this point) to the puddle of clothes on Angela’s bedroom floor, where they’d fucked in such a frenzy it was more like jungle-animal sex than making love.

The second time, actually in the bed, had been even better: probing, delicious, funny, intoxicating, languorous, profound.

Pulling into his gravel drive outside Boulder, he still wondered if he had done the right thing by coming home. Jake had anguished all the way out to Reagan that morning, thinking he was insane not to be staying in D.C. for a few more days, but Angela had not suggested it and he wasn’t about to presume.

Beat from the flight and the two-hour drive from Denver, Jake dropped his carry-on bag at the door inside his A-frame cabin and surveyed the wreckage.

“Oh, no.”

Unlike the meticulous toss courtesy of Naval Intelligence, this time Deaver’s artwork and mementos, everything from his shelves and closets, was either missing, broken, or turned out in piles on the floor. The sense of violation did not take long to percolate through the initial shock.

“Son of a bitch . . .”

Angrily kicking through the ankle-deep disaster area of the living room, he righted a toppled bookcase and rescued a sketchpad still intact in the rubble of books and manuscripts. Pocketing the pad, Jake negotiated his way into the spectacularly trashed kitchen and tried the wall phone, but was greeted only by dead air. He slammed it down.

“You rat-fucks!”

A flash of lightning outside drew his attention to the open kitchen door and thunder came right behind the flash like a bang-bang play: close. He could smell the approaching weather.

Jake shoved aside a shattered spice rack and opened the fridge.

“You fuckers better’ve left me some OJ.”

His own scared-stupid bravado cracked Deaver up until he found the juice carton and chugged it, ignoring the trickle down his chin.

When the truck tires crunched into the drive out front, he didn’t stand there wondering what it was. He hit the back door and disappeared.

Jake had only one advantage over the younger, faster, and doubtlessly well-armed men who would soon be hard behind him: the home-turf advantage. He’d have to make the most of it.

61

The J. Edgar Hoover Building/Washington, D.C.

Dicks in dick suits
, Angela thought.

The two men waiting at her apartment door, after she returned from the airport, clamshelled Bureau IDs at her with a practiced snap and insisted the questions they had would be better answered at the Hoover Building.

Angela cooperated. In a gesture of good faith, she even waived her right to counsel. But three hours later she was still sequestered in a small, plain room with three chairs, a table with a tape recorder on it, and Agents Simmons and Collier.

After she had told it twice, they wanted to hear it again: everything that had transpired between Angela Browning and Commander Jake Deaver; what he said and did, what she said and did, where and when they had said and done it, and who else was in the room at the time.

She was on the cusp of telling them to go stuff it when the questions turned more specific. So he-said/she-said specific it was obvious they had to have been bugging Dr. Winnick’s house. When Angela finally asked the agents point-blank, they just shrugged and showed her the transcript.

“Ms. Browning, these are just words on a page, which can be interpreted in different ways. So, if you would please help us out here,” Agent Simmons said, with all the casual smoothness of a spider to a fly. “On page ten, about halfway down, Commander Deaver says to Dr. Winnick: ‘I told Angela everything.’ Can we hear just that portion?”

Agent Collier produced a cassette, cued up to that spot, and played it back.

“I told Angela everything, Paula.”

“What did Deaver tell you?”

Hearing Jake’s voice, Angela remembered that she hadn’t actually seen him board the plane for Denver, which made her wonder if he wasn’t right here in the building, in a room just like this himself.

“I’m sorry. What’s the question?”

“When Commander Deaver says he told you
everything
, isn’t he referring to classified government secrets? Top-secret material which he had leaked to you, in hopes that you’d use it in a PBS exposé?”

Angela saw she couldn’t last much longer without perjuring herself.

“Agent Simmons, Commander Deaver never gave me any classified documents whatsoever. And speaking of documents, since I am not a foreign national suspected of terrorist activity, I’d like to see the federal judge’s signature authorizing the electronic eavesdropping and privacy violations of which this tape and transcript are physical evidence.”

Chief Investigating Agent Simmons looked at his partner with a bleak expression, then spoke to Angela in a low, sincere voice.

“Ms. Browning, I must remind you that even as a citizen of the United States, giving false or misleading testimony to an agent of the FBI is a felony offense for which you may be sentenced to up to five years in a federal facility and fined up to ten thousand dollars.”

Angela stared back at them across the table.

“Well, if you’re waving fines and prison at me, then I think I will need to have my attorney present. And I’m sure he’ll also be very interested in seeing that bench warrant, too, if you actually have one.”

Angela knew by their reactions that they hadn’t bothered with the technical niceties. She grabbed her bag and stood up, her whole body daring them not to let her go.

“By the way, you don’t happen to have Jake and me in my bedroom rutting like crazed weasels, do you?” Angela indicated the cassette tape. “I’d sort of like a copy of that.”