White: A Novel (23 page)

Moments later, a tall black man in a camel-hair blazer and dark gray slacks emerged from the elevator. He nodded to his visitor without further greeting and held the door until Sirad climbed aboard. They took the car up to the fourth floor, where Sirad followed him to a two-top in a nearly empty restaurant.

“I got here as quickly as possible,” the man said. “What’s the matter?”

He looked somewhat put out by the trip.

“We have a problem.”

“You just noticed that?” he asked. “Please don’t tell me I flew up here just because we have a problem.”

A delicate waitress drifted up on three-inch heels. She hovered beside them somewhere between arrogance and grace.

“Hi, guys,” she said, failing to turn the man’s eye. “Espresso?”

Sirad nodded.

“Water,” he said. “With gas. Bring a large bottle.”

The woman smiled and turned, leaving a light scent of almond talc.

“Someone has launched an attack on the Quantis system,” Sirad said when they were alone. “It’s more a survey at this point, but a sophisticated effort nonetheless.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” he told her. The CIA program manager saw no point in elaborating on his sources or methods.

“Did Mitchell tell you we’ve identified the intruders?” she asked.

Mr. Hoch folded his fingers and rubbed his long thumbs against each other.

“Go on,” he said.

“The programmers and mathematicians who designed the Quantis encryption software added a trap-and-trace aspect. They described it to me as a sort of cyber radar that detects intrusion surveys before they become all-out attacks.”

“I don’t like suspense,” Hoch said.

“Early this morning, we tracked what was supposed to be a passive surveillance rider to a no-tell server in Delhi.”

“Wouldn’t you expect that?” Hoch nodded. “They’re trying to wash themselves.”

“We tracked the inquiry to an e-mail address in Vancouver: a Hotmail account accessed from an Internet café. Totally anonymous.”

“Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?” Hoch asked. The waitress brought his water and her espresso, then walked away.

“Hardly. You’re not going to find the horsepower necessary to accomplish a no-show surveillance like this in a coffeeshop.”

“So how did they do it?”

“They didn’t,” she answered.

“Please . . .”

“They used a decoy. Very clever . . . but that’s not the point. The point is in the subtext.”

Sirad sipped her coffee, then pulled a pen out of her pocket. She opened her hand, wrote five letters across her palm, and showed it to him.

“Impossible,” Hoch said. There was no faking the shock in his eyes. Sirad, a liar of well-documented heritage, knew this man who had seen everything truly couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Possible.” Sirad slowly licked the ink off her skin and rubbed it clean with a napkin. “Fact. Now you know why I called you. I need to talk with . . .”

“She won’t talk to you,” Hoch said. “There’s just too much downside.”

“And what about the downside if she doesn’t?”

Hoch thought for a moment. Another couple entered the dining room but sat outside the sound of his voice.

“I’ll try,” he said. “What about Mitchell? How much does he know?”

“You’re asking me?” Sirad said, perplexed. “This is the sonofabitch who tortured me for information he already had . . . who hired me for my ability to seduce and then alienated me when I used it. This is the man who brought me into Borders Atlantic as a NOC only to tell me later that the whole goddamned company was a cover!”

She was talking a little too loudly now, but Hoch did nothing to quiet her. Nobody would believe her anyway.

“Jordan Mitchell’s whole life is a black hole of secrets.” She stopped long enough to collect herself. “That’s why I called you. If you want to find out where this leads, you’re going to have to start with Mitchell.”

“YOU MUST BE
Mr. Walker,” the man said. Jeremy sensed him before he saw him.

“Colonel Ellis. It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

“No
sirs
around here, son. Not unless you’ve come to date my daughter or sell me a horse.”

“Neither.” Jeremy laughed. He liked the easy-mannered Texan immediately. “I’m here for your high-intensity tactical course. Name’s Jeremy.”

He reached out and shook the colonel’s hand.

“Buck Ellis,” the man said. “Most call me Colonel. I’ll answer to just about anything. Come on, I’ll show you around.”

Ellis looked taller than the six feet listed in his dossier. The darkly tanned legend wore sharply creased khaki pants, a sky-blue denim shirt with pearl buttons, and a Homestead ball cap. Earplugs dangled from a fluorescent-yellow tether around his neck. A stainless-steel Les Baer .45 comp gun rode high in a DeSantis speed-draw holster just behind his right hip. Jeremy noticed an oversized slide safety, custom backstrap paddle, Pachmayr grips, and tritium night sights. The hammer was cocked for combat carry. No thumb break.

“Should I get my weapon?” Jeremy asked. It seemed like an obvious enough question considering the colonel’s status.

“Up to you. We encourage students to wear their sidearms at all times while on the property,” Ellis said. “One of the first rules of gun ownership is responsibility.”

“Fair enough,” Jeremy said. “I’ll get it after I check in.”

“Where you from?” the colonel inquired without asking for further explanation. He walked away from Jeremy’s Nova, around the first building, and up a gravel path.

“Washington DC. I live out west in Virginia—what’s called the horse country.”

“Sure, know it well. I spent lots of time out there during my years at the Pentagon,” Ellis said. He walked with a bit of a limp in his right leg. Jeremy had seen his Purple Heart citations and wondered how the man could walk at all. “You like horses? Like to ride?”

“Nah, I never really had much time for it,” Jeremy admitted. “I live out there because I like the country. Quiet, you know? I gotta work in the city, but I don’t have to live there.”

“I understand,” Ellis said.

The two men climbed two steps onto a slant-roofed porch. Bare-limbed rockers lined the front wall, four to each side of a windowed door. Ellis opened it and led Jeremy into a gift shop full of T-shirts, ball caps, and coffee cups. A display case by the cash register held an impressive assortment of custom and competition handguns. Pump shotguns with extended magazines and assault rifles in fluorescent powder-coated finishes stood in racks along the back wall.

“Impressive arsenal,” Jeremy commented. He walked to a display rack full of holsters, magazine holders, and hand-tooled belts.

“Big toys for big boys.” Ellis laughed. Pictures covered available wall space around him: men in camouflage clothing and stern faces. A country artist had lettered several plaques with inspirational sayings and passages from the Bible. “Are you a long gunner?”

“I like just about anything that goes bang,” Jeremy confessed. He bent over the handgun case and eyed a magna-ported para-ordnance .45 with a double-stacked magazine. “Man, is that a beauty.”

“That’s a Homestead edition they make just for us,” Ellis said. He stepped into the back room and emerged with several sheets of paper. “It runs three thousand four hundred and ninety-five dollars plus tax, if you’re interested. I throw in a box of ammo and a tune-up at the end of the week.”

He laid the papers out on the cabinet’s glass top.

“A little rich for my blood,” Jeremy admitted. “Sure is pretty, though.”

Ellis pushed the paper between Jeremy and the gun.

“Sorry to bother with this, but you know what they say—it ain’t over ’til the paperwork’s done. Gotta get your John Hancock on these liability waivers.” Ellis held up a pen.

“Hey! Are you trying to put me out of a job, Colonel?”

The door closed behind them, and Jeremy turned toward a strikingly pretty blond woman in her late twenties. She looked fit and neatly ordered in an outfit that closely matched Ellis’s, right down to the .45 on her athletic hip.

“Ah, the boss is here!” Ellis said. “Jeremy Walker, meet my daughter, Heidi. Heidi, Mr. Walker here was just signing in.”

“First of your class to show up this morning,” she said. Jeremy tried not to look surprised at the strength of her grip or the radiance in her smile as they shook hands. “I’ve got you billeted in Cabin B. You’ll find linens and a blanket on your bunk. Chow hall is out near Range One.”

Heidi walked around the display case and stood next to her dad. They looked striking together, a hardened badger of a man and his trophy-to-proper-breeding progeny.

“I’ll just get my things, then,” Jeremy said, signing the requisite forms. “What time do we start shooting?”

“We assemble in the classroom at eleven,” the colonel told him. He pointed to Jeremy’s map. “You’ll find all the ranges, training areas, and facilities on there. I should point out that all thirty-six hundred acres of our ranch is open to students, except for the shaded area. That’s personal space. Off-limits.”

Jeremy followed the colonel’s finger to a distinctly marked section of the main compound. There was no mistaking the man’s intentions.

“Now would be a good time to look over that map and find your way around,” the colonel said. “Don’t forget to hydrate yourself and wear some sun block. That Texas sky looks friendly, but it will bite you if you let it.”

“Thanks.” Jeremy nodded. He took one last look at the .45 in the display cabinet and turned toward the door. It took all his self-control to avoid ogling the woman.

“What do you think?” she asked when Jeremy was gone. The woman watched their newest student disappear off the porch and around the corner.

“Nice enough fella,” the colonel said. He reached under a counter and pulled out a manila folder. Inside sat everything his S-2 had discovered about one Jeremy Andrew Walker of Burke, Virginia.

“Handsome rascal,” his daughter noted. “He married?”

“Not according to this,” Ellis read. “But you know the rules.”

“Rules.” She sighed. “I’m a grown woman now. You gotta stop treating me like the farmer’s daughter.”

“See to the paperwork, sweetie,” he said, kissing her sun-ripened cheek. Though he would gladly have thrown down his life for Heidi, the rules he mentioned had been put in place to protect something a whole lot more precious.

CALEB HAD ALREADY
driven more than four hours south from New Jersey when he exited I-95 just north of Washington DC, at exit 27. Though the pain in his head throbbed with the force of a rock drill, he had one stop to make before starting his long trip back to the Homestead. His father had entrusted him with the very foundation of his Megiddo project, and nothing of this world would keep him from laying its cornerstone.

Caleb merged right through heavy traffic, exited the highway, and turned left at the bottom of the ramp. He drove east a little more than a mile on Route 117 and then right onto a rural though busy two-lane access highway.

His silver-colored Ford Taurus blended in nicely with everything else on the road. Washington was a city of bureaucrats, after all, a GS-12 wasteland of midlevel managers conditioned by government employment to ignore everything but lunch and the car pool.

Thank God for indifference,
he thought to himself. Rush Limbaugh and Mike Savage and Bill O’Reilly had been brilliant in their ability to prey upon it. People in this country had lost God; they had lost their sense of family, of a country that meant anything more than a welfare handout and a blank check for foreigners. Americans had lost their sense of belonging—a belief that anything mattered enough to die for. And when you lost a cause great enough to die for, you lost the point in living.

Caleb knew by the searing pain in his forehead that he was living.
Embrace it,
he told himself.
Pain is just weakness leaving the body.

He drove until he saw the blue-and-white military reservation markers. Andrews Air Force Base was a twenty thousand-acre facility surrounded by a suburban Washington DC sprawl. No one would bother him if he pulled off at the side of the road. It was just woods out here at the far end of the tarmac, anyway. Security had concentrated their resources on the airfield itself, protecting critical infrastructure and the crown jewel of American air travel: the Presidential Airlift Group.

Air Force One. Gatekeeper. The Doomsday Plane.
The planes used to ferry the president around the world counted among the most secured airframes on earth.

Use the enemy’s weight against them,
Caleb reminded himself, trying not to let the pain distract him.
Focus on the mission.

He pulled off at the side of the busy two-lane suburban road, threw the shifter into park, and hit the hood release.

Car trouble was the perfect cover, he knew. Nobody stopped for motorists at the side of the road anymore. Not in this part of the country. They looked the other way, trying to pretend they didn’t see so they wouldn’t feel guilty. They buried themselves in the
Washington Post,
paperback novels, shortsighted administrative memos—anything that took their minds off other people’s hardship.

Caleb got out of the car, walked around front, lifted the hood, and reached in as if checking for something wrong with the engine.

How ironic that the best way to hide is to stand right out here and wave for people to look.

After a couple minutes, Caleb walked around to the back and opened the trunk. He lifted a heavy duffel out of the well and set it in the gravel bar ditch. He watched passing motorists with his good eye, trying to find a single driver who would look at his heavily bandaged head. They stared straight ahead, more intent on passing the car in front of them than on helping someone who looked like an emergency-room runaway.

When he had gathered enough strength for what lay ahead, Caleb hoisted the duffel onto his shoulder, and with no concern for passing commuters, he slipped down the bank and into the tree line.

XI

Thursday, 17 February

17:18 GMT