The Orion Protocol (4 page)

If
this
is me
, he thought, seeing himself signing a program,
and
this
is me watching myself, then who is it that’s watching me watch myself?

It’s me
, he answered his giddy tri-located self.
Out of my fucking mind
.

Then this experience, too, was over. And he was wholly and completely back inside his body, with the winter sun warming his face and a slight tremor in his left hand that hadn’t been there before and caused the first stab of real fear.

Stroke
?

He imagined his biannual NASA physical and seemed to remember reading that signs of stroke could still be detected months after they
occurred. Being forced to retire was his worst nightmare. There was so much he still hadn’t done and needed to accomplish.

If they catch it, they’ll sit you down, son. But there’s nothin’ you can do about it. So, just let it go, let it go.

Augie willed his hand to be steady; and it seemed to work. He then found himself looking up into the eyes of a sun-bleached Space Camp mom thrusting a notepad in his direction, a pretty blonde with a trim athletic body and one got-to-be-illegal smile.

“Colonel Blake? Would y’all mind makin’ that to Bonnie Jean?”

He recognized the Texas lilt riding Western-style in her voice and thought that smile was like a “Welcome Home” banner strung across his own front door.

“Would that be Houston I hear, ma’am?”

“First-word-heard,” she said, beaming with honest pride over the historic first message transmitted from the Moon: “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”

“Yes, ma’am, it surely was. Is that Bonnie with an
i-e
?”

And in his jaunty NASA baseball cap and top-gun mirrored shades, Colonel Augie Blake was now every inch his old self, laughing and teasing, taking pleasure in the familiar cadences of a down-home flirt.

With two quick beeps a white GM sedan emblazoned with the NASA logo pulled up to collect him. He waved his good-byes, slipped into the backseat, and was spirited away.

But not to his scheduled rah-rah at Johnson Space.

“Change of plans, Colonel,” the driver in the blue blazer said, glancing back over her shoulder and making the turn marked for Putnam Air Force Base.

“McMurdo?”

“An evac crew’s going in tonight, sir. Langley’s got equipment at Putnam Field deadheading to San Pedro. They’re holding it for you.”

Augie knew about the deteriorating situation in Antarctica: he had astronaut candidates down there on Extreme Environment Training.

“Pass me that thing, would you, darlin’?” He indicated the cell phone lying on the front seat.

Dialing the area code for Washington, D.C., Augie found himself imagining all the ways that things could be going seriously south at the
Pole and felt an odd sense of release. Though concerned for his people down on the ice, if he had to choose between glad-handing journalists or jumping into a full-blown operational crisis, he’d take the crisis. It made him feel more alive.

“Where are we?” he said to whoever answered the phone, and then listened without comment. “Hell, yes. Tell them I’m filling my pockets with salt.”

Augie hung up and stared straight ahead as the NASA driver gave him a puzzled look and then put the hammer down for Putnam Field.

She didn’t know what the hell he meant about salt and wasn’t about to ask. But in the rearview mirror she noticed that Colonel Blake seemed younger than he had been only minutes before: his head held slightly higher, his eyes clear and steady with what seemed an effortless and irreducible self-confidence. An echo of the Right Stuff.

3

Once through the Oval Office door and the President’s busy anteroom, the national security adviser had headed directly for the antiquated White House cage elevator, his face as blank as a fresh plaster cast.

“Shit,” Winston said, under his breath.

Beneath the impervious self-possession, he was upset. Not so much with the decision-making style of the new Occupant of the Oval Office, irritating as it was. No, what was bothering him was the President’s subtly reproachful tone, especially when he had insisted on knowing “everything that might bear on this decision.” He punched at the elevator button three or four times.

“Everything . . .”

Of course POTUS had been implying that the NSA, CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and national security advisers like Winston might presume to keep some categories of “sensitive” information under wraps despite requests from their Commander in Chief. Which, historically, they had done and did do: it was practically part of the job description.

“Christ.” Winston gave up on the balky elevator and took the stairs down to the parking garage.

Customarily, nothing stamped
ABOVE TOP SECRET
was ever divulged, even to the President of the United States, except on the strictest need-to-know basis. This policy had evolved for many reasons, chief among them to protect the republic and the office of the President by preserving the President’s crucially important ability to credibly lie about what
was known by his government and when it was known. And if a man doesn’t know he’s lying, he’s more likely to be convincing.

Withholding information, cynical as it might seem, was also a prophylactic against the plain fact that some politicians were better public liars than others. At the highest levels of government, deniability was more than a term of art. The strategic preservation of one’s own ignorance and/or the ignorance of superiors had become a basic survival skill. But it required at least tacit cooperation.

What is the correct course of action when faithfully executing a presidential order is a certain prescription for disaster?

Clanging down the interior metal stairs to the White House parking level, Winston imagined himself retired to an emeritus professorship, lecturing about his current dilemma to government students at Yale. Fact was, there were some things about defending the republic, not to mention political survival, that you could only learn by doing.

Once through the parking-level doors, he flashed his White House pass at a young white-gloved Marine who had already recognized him and began calling for his car.

As he waited, Winston became concerned that perhaps he was being maneuvered into an untenable position on purpose: if the new President was at all naive, his staffers certainly were not.

So, what the fuck is really going on, then?

Breathing the claustrophobic monoxide-heavy air of the underground garage, he tried to step back and see the big picture.

What was the President playing at? A realignment of executive-branch power? A hidden agenda he wasn’t picking up on? Some kind of loyalty litmus? Or was this just yet another professional challenge in the finessing of conflicting vital interests in the environment of White House intrigue?

Winston wondered for a moment if this particular Occupant was simply oblivious to how conflicting interests between the intel community and the Office of the President were supposed to be handled.

No, no. It’s a test,
he decided. The partisans on the White House senior staff who had opposed Winston’s carryover appointment would be looking to seize on any arguable failure and use it against him.

He mentally addressed his imaginary students again.

The question then is: Where does your duty lie if your Commander in
Chief demands access to highly classified information, the undeniable knowledge of which might well cripple his presidency and by extension the republic you are sworn to defend? And is the answer different in time of war than in a time of peace?

At the moment, though, these were not academic questions. Whatever action he took, if Winston was perceived as withholding crucial information from the President, the knives would certainly come out. The hypocrisy was galling, of course, but politics ain’t beanbag: divulging everything about an above-top-secret project like Orion to a new Occupant who barely had his legs yet would be almost a dereliction of duty.

“Shit,” he said, in a laconic voice loud enough to echo off the underground concrete pillars.

Then his sober black Lincoln LS was being brought up, the Marine driver leaping out and holding the door open in one smooth athletic move. Winston nodded, sliding in behind the leather-wrapped steering wheel as the driver’s-side door was shut with a vaultlike thud, the sound of Ford Motors closing some ground on the Bavarians.

Using a handcuff key, he detached the hardened briefcase from his wrist and locked the doors. Weathering the political wind shear he was flying into would require pitch-perfect finesse and a Teflon vest.

With the President’s directive to tell him everything relevant to the decision about Project Orion cycling through his mind, Winston strained to detect the smallest hint of linguistic wiggle room, but without success.

“Shit, shit, and shit.”

This was a problem. He slid the brushed-aluminum gear selector into drive and headed up to the guardhouse exit and Pennsylvania Avenue.

This was a serious problem.

4

January 28/PBS Studios/Washington, D.C.

Ensconced in a video editing suite at the Public Broadcasting building just off K Street, Angela Browning and veteran producer Miriam Kresky were busy cutting promos, eleven hours into yet another deadline-driven fourteen-hour day.

Angela, at thirty-five and very much at the top of her game, didn’t think of herself as laboring on someone else’s clock. As science reporter, on-camera host, and cocreator of PBS’s Emmy Award–winning series
Science Horizon
, her work had pretty much become her life.

On a Trinitron monitor, a video sequence showing an iceberg the size of Rhode Island breaking off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica was being played back on an Avid digital editing system. Timing the assembled edits, Angela snicked a chrome mechanical stopwatch and showed it to Miriam.

“Works for me.”

“With bumpers and ten seconds for the affiliates . . .”

“Let’s cut this puppy.”

Miriam took over on the Avid keyboard. Angela stood up out of an off-black Herman Miller chair and shook out her tensed-up hands and fingers, cracking her neck vertebrae with chiropractic precision.

“Coffee?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Among the media-savvy in Washington D.C., or “Hollywood for Ugly
People,” as James Carville liked to call it, Angela Browning was a beauty, though probably only a “pretty brunette” by Left Coast standards.

BOSTON DEB WEDS WALL STREET HEIR
might have been her fate had it not been for an eclectic array of high school passions: writing, acting, filmmaking, and, curiously, astronomy and physics. Armed with stellar SATs and a vivid aversion to social clichés, Angela had eschewed Cornell and Columbia for a neobohemian Vassar education. And that road less traveled had made all the difference.

As the Krups machine in the tiny studio kitchen hissed itself awake, she shuffled over to her office, where a slumping mountain of letters and packages lay dumped on her desk.

“Oh, God.”

All the mail in the Capitol was routinely sanitized by Titan electron beam machines, and at her mother’s insistence, Angela still kept a Cipro prescription in her bag at all times. But fear of terrorist biotoxins was not the issue. She eyed the avalanche of snail mail: a critical mass had been achieved.

“Well, hell, Bullwinkle.”

Adjusting the posture of the Beanie Bullwinkle doll propped atop her computer, she separated out two things immediately: a baby shower announcement that made her wonder if she was wasting her life for about 2.5 seconds until she opened the second letter, an invitation to a party at the former vice-presidential mansion to celebrate International Space Station Alpha.

“Whoa! Big bash at the Blair House . . . ”

The minor perk of minicelebrity made her feel instantly better.

Working her way through the stacks, she came to a manila envelope with “ATT: Ms. Angela Browning” neatly typed on a white address label but no return address. The otherwise plain envelope had already been opened and inspected in the mail room.

Angela consulted her moose.

“Fan mail from some flounder?”

Inside she found one item: a CD-ROM in a clear plastic jewel case.

“Curiouser and curiouser . . .”

Held to the light, the unlabeled disk offered up nothing more than semipsychedelic rainbows refracting off its laser-etched grooves.

“
Muy mysterioso
.”

The smell of dark-roast coffee began wafting its way to her work station, promising a second wind, but Angela ignored it. Loading in the CD, she let Norton Utilities scan for virus encounters of the digital kind until a single icon appeared labeled tolas.

The TOLAS file opened to reveal a high-res satellite image of the Cydonia region on Mars and its most infamous anomaly, the leonine-humanoid “Face.”

“Oh, God.” Angela rolled her eyes, but her attention was immediately drawn to a cluster of faceted objects near the Face: several four-sided and five-sided geometric shapes rising up out of the frozen Martian plain, monumental artifacts that looked for all the world like Egyptian pyramids.

“Aha.” She grinned and shook the hair back out of her face, pretty sure where this had come from. “Those Goddard boys and their high-tech toys.”

Angela keyed the speed dial on her phone.

“Hell-o, Goddard Flight. Richard Eklund, please. Thanks.”

While on hold, she searched her e-mail for new messages about this from Goddard Space Flight Labs or from NASA researcher Richard Eklund but found nothing.

Angela had first met Eklund while prepping a
Science Horizon
show on NASA’s late-’90’s faster-smarter-cheaper robotic Mars program. Eccentric, brilliant, a confirmed workaholic, Eklund had quickly become her compass in navigating the labyrinth of Space Agency politics as well as an all-around go-to guy on all things Martian.

“Richard? Angela Browning. Are you guys smoking the drapes over there, or what?” She tried not to giggle, but not hard enough to succeed at it. “I mean the Mars CD.” Angela glanced up at the pyramids on her screen. “The one with Little Egypt on it. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink?”

On the other end, Eklund sounded puzzled, but Angela wasn’t buying.

“Come on, CGI Boy. Confession is good for the soul. I’m not saying it doesn’t look good. It’s too good! What? Nope, no note, nothing.”

She reinspected the envelope to be sure and looked around in vain to see if something had fallen out on the floor.

“No note, no return address,
nada
. Just a file labeled tolas with a high-res photo of Cydonia, including some pretty kick-ass pyramids . . . yes, T-O-L-A-S.”

She heard the NASA scientist laughing as he explained the acronym. Angela didn’t think it was as funny as all that.

“Oh, Tricks of Light and Shadow. Great . . . so it’s probably some geeksters at MIT or something, firing up a fatty and having too much fun.”

She glared at the pyramids in the beautifully rendered Marscape, no doubt the beneficiary of state-of-the-art computer graphics. Eklund invited her to bring the disk out to Goddard Labs so they could check it out.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Angela glanced at her watch. “If I’m done before midnight. Leave me a pass, anyway, okay? Thanks.”

“Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle.” Angela hung up the phone, studied the Pyramids-on-Mars for a long moment, then shut down her computer. She squeezed her Beanie moose doll and tucked the mystery CD into an overstuffed shoulder bag her chiropractor had warned her about. She then followed the coffee smell to the kitchen.

But the Mars photo still nagged at her.

So, if it’s not from Goddard Space, then who sent it?

Angela thought about people she’d worked with, those who had access to sophisticated computer graphics hardware: cameramen, other producers, political consultants, people at video production houses. Mostly they just edited news stories or created campaign ads. Nothing like this.

No, no, it’s just a sophomore prank.

“Beware of geeks bearing gifts.” In the cramped office kitchen space Angela laughed, pulling together a tray and a pair of mugs. But pouring out two black coffees, she couldn’t help feeling a little creeped out. It was not like she was being
stalked
, exactly. Or like she was in any personal danger. Still, it was weird.

TOLAS. Tricks of Light and Shadow
.

Like it or not, her curious/critical mind, the reporter part of herself, had become fully engaged. And she knew she couldn’t let it go until she had tracked down whatever she could about the who, what, where, when, and why behind this unsolicited disk. Sometimes being the relentless Angela Browning was no picnic.

Oh, God, you’re not really going to drag your tired Vassar-girl ass all the way out to Goddard tonight? You’re insane
.

Balancing her tray, Angela slipped back into the editing bay, and set the coffees on the console.

“It’s hot. You ready?”

“God bless you.” Miriam moaned, rolled back from the keyboard, and doctored her cup with pink sweetener. “You got voice-over copy?”

Angela took out her notes. Without looking at the spectacular Antarctic glacier collapsing in freeze-frame on the Avid, she palmed her stopwatch and timed herself as she read.

“ ‘The Greenhouse Paradox: Is Global Warming Triggering a New Ice Age? Sunday, on
Science Horizon
.
’ 9.5 seconds.”

“Triggering?” Miriam said, tasting her coffee.

Manufacturing? Creating? Leading to? Bringing on?

“Give me a minute.”

Angela planted herself back into her high-tech chair. Reworking the copy, she thought about the mystery disk in her bag again and was sorry she’d straightened up her damned mail pile. It was going to be an even longer night than she’d imagined.