White: A Novel (28 page)

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Jeremy whispered back. “He said this area is off-limits.”

The new moon had risen high above them, providing enough light to see but not enough to expose their movement.

“It’s not off-limits to me.” Heidi giggled. She watched the house as they scurried from one outbuilding to another, clinging to the shadows. A single lamp burned warmly in the living room windows, but the rest of the place looked dark.

“He’s going to have my ass if he catches us,” Jeremy thought out loud. He felt like a high school kid trying to find a place to park.

“Not if I have it first,” she said. Heidi stopped to playfully kiss him again. Her nose felt cold against Jeremy’s cheek, but there was no mistaking her heat.

Jeremy allowed her to drag him, still torn about how far this could go. He had lied for his government; he had killed for it. Would they really expect him to commit adultery too?

“In here,” Heidi said. She stopped at a toolshed no more than six feet square.

“Oh, this is classy. Don’t we at least get a couple bales of hay to lie on?”

“You want to talk or get lucky?” Heidi laughed. She reached into Jeremy’s pants pocket. “’Cause I’m beginning to worry about you, Romeo.”

She fished her hand around a bit, leaning closer and biting his top lip. Jeremy tried to control himself, but . . .

“Ohhhh,” she cooed. “Is that for me?”

Heidi let her fingers roam just long enough to tease him, then pulled a Leatherman out of Jeremy’s pocket.

“They lock this just to keep the students out. It’s easy to pick.”

Jeremy looked toward the house for signs of life as Heidi jimmied the door. It took seconds.

“Come on,” she said, pulling him inside. “Watch the stairs.”

Jeremy could see nothing in the inky blackness, but he knew by the smell and the way the air felt on his face that something was wrong. This was no toolshed.

“I can’t turn the lights on until we get downstairs,” Heidi whispered. She led him down concrete steps to what felt like a hallway. She held one of his hands in hers, but he used the other to guide himself along a wall. They passed two doors on the right, then stopped.

“In here,” she said. Heidi tugged at his hand, then pushed a door closed behind them.

“Where in hell are we?” Jeremy asked.

“Not hell, sweetie,” Heidi cooed. “If I get my way, you’re gonna think you’re in heaven.”

She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him hard, hungrily, like a woman trapped in a life without affection. Heidi pulled open her jacket and guided his hand up under her shirt. She reached into his pocket again but found that things had changed.

“Don’t worry, we’re safe down here,” she said.

Jeremy tried to return the desire, but a jackhammer of doubt pounded inside his head.

Never forget who you are inside,
the UC coordinator had told him back at the Point. Many an undercover agent had failed worst when he failed himself.

What I am,
Jeremy decided,
is married.
He loved his wife, and nothing he had learned in a couple days of role-playing at some CIA facility in North Carolina was going to help him act otherwise.

“Heidi,” he said, pulling away from her. His lips felt moist with her lust. The impenetrable darkness exaggerated the sound of their breathing. “Heidi, I can’t. Please, this isn’t right.”

Jeremy felt her hand slip out of his pocket. She stepped away from him.

“I’m sorry if I misled you,” he said. “It’s just that . . .”

“It’s just that you seem to have trouble with the truth.” A new voice filled the darkness. “Maybe that’s why you have misled all of us.”

Lights flashed on, red but still blinding. As Jeremy’s eyes adjusted, he found six men standing in a semicircle around him. They wore robes that reached to the floor and hoods that covered all but their eyes. Jeremy heard the door slam shut behind him and knew that Heidi was gone.

“Now maybe you’d like to tell us your real name, Mr. Walker?” the man in the middle said.

There was no mistaking the accent, even through the mask—it belonged to the colonel.

SIRAD TURNED OFF
the Merritt Parkway at Exit 37 and drove three miles along country roads to a business park distinguished by stone walls, manicured grounds, and shaded glass. Building 1100 looked no different from the others except for the satellite dishes atop its flat roof and the fact that security patrols at this Borders Atlantic off-site carried guns. Fog hovered above the now-melting snow, lending the place a Brigadoon-like hush.

“Malneaux; Quantis project,” she told the man at the guardhouse. He checked her company ID, then found her name on a list of preapproved visitors.

“Suite twenty-two,” he said. “You can park in lot A.”

She did. A second security guard inside the front door escorted her through two cipher locks and a wave path like the one in the Rabbit Hole. Sirad found Ravi, I Can’t Dunk, and a third man already hard at work.

“Slumming?” the systems engineer asked when she arrived.

“I should have stayed in the city,” she said. “But I heard you needed some adult supervision.”

Ravi laughed but didn’t bother getting up from his terminal. He had surrounded himself with yellow legal pads, Red Bulls, and Twizzlers. I Can’t Dunk stood over his left shoulder. He jotted notes on the palm of his hand but didn’t acknowledge Sirad at all.

“Have you met our sound guy?” Ravi asked.

Sirad shook her head. The man sitting at Ravi’s right smelled of cigarette smoke and well-ripened armpit. He wore about a week’s worth of Bob Dylan scruff and a homemade T-shirt that read “E=MC Hammer.”

“N-N-N-N-Nice to m-m-meet you,” he said. Unlike I Can’t Dunk, this guy stared shamelessly at Sirad’s chest. “Fuck, Ravi, you d-d-din’t tell me she w-w-was so g-g-goddamned hot!”

“Don’t mind him, he’s harmless,” Ravi said. He pointed to a series of numbers and symbols on his monitor and turned to I Can’t Dunk. “There’s our anomaly.”

“What are we working on?” Sirad asked as she pulled off her jacket and threw it on a vacant chair. The room around her looked different from the seventeenth-floor communications center at the Albemarle Building. This so-called mind lab looked more like a college computer classroom. A half dozen terminals rested quietly atop open work spaces. White boards covered two walls. There were a few cheap-looking landscape prints and a couch upholstered in earthtone plaid.

“Digital signature,” Ravi said. “Our mole is using a pretty impressive cloaking algorithm designed to keep us from identifying him.”

“F-f-f-fucker’s smart,” the sound guy said. He craned his head to check out Sirad’s butt.

“Who are you, again?” Sirad asked. He held a Mountain Dew in one hand and a half-smoked Pall Mall in the other. Despite his hungover-frat-boy look, Sirad could sense a seething intellect.

“Wave theorist,” I Can’t Dunk spoke up. He seemed proud. “Sound waves.”

“Why do we need a sound guy on an intrusion project?”

The Indian cryptographer pointed to another series of numbers and symbols. “You’re right about those FORTRAN diversions,” he said to I Can’t Dunk; then he turned to look at Sirad as if annoyed with her ignorance.

“We need him to generate randomness. Remember the Nguyen cornerstone? We found it had specific application with regard to stochastic wave theory. Hammer Time, here, may look like roadkill, but he has found a way to uncover anomalous order coefficients. We just hired him away from a California tech firm.”

“Yeah, I’m a real world fucking g-g-g-genius,” he said.

“I thought we had already identified this mole,” Sirad said.

“We have,” I Can’t Dunk said. “But we don’t want them to know that. Hammer Time is helping us play possum until they make their move.”

“K-k-k-kinda hot in h-h-here, ain’t it?” the soundman asked. He sucked his filterless cigarette down to a stub and dropped it into the dregs of his Mountain Dew.

“You’re going to have to stop that.” Sirad scowled. “Smoke really bothers me.”

“L-l-l-lighten up, sexy,” Hammer Time said. “Those t-t-titties of yours are
killing
me, but I’m learning to c-c-cope.”

Sirad had no time for this idiot’s games. She pulled her shirt up with one hand and her bra down with the other, exposing two exquisitely formed, dark-nippled breasts.

“There,” she said as if she’d just negotiated a trade. “Now you’ve seen them. So go take a cold shower and lose the fucking cigarettes. We’ve got a long night ahead of us, and I don’t like the way you make me smell.”

THE VICE PRESIDENT
blew past two uniformed marines outside the main entrance to the Situation Room. Because of the heavy traffic now, she had ordered the doors propped open. Security had its place, but at this point, locks needlessly slowed things down.

“We’ve got everyone but the secretary of HHS,” Andrea Chase told her. James trailed behind them with NSA flash traffic in one hand and Beechum’s dry cleaning in the other. Everyone would need a change of clothes before this was over.

“They’re upstairs?” she asked.

“In the Cabinet Room,” Chase responded. “They’ll wait.”

Beechum hurried past the SITROOM’s video teleconferencing center, down a hallway, through administrative cubicles, then right twice into the main conference room. Though called the Situation Room, this state-of-the art facility was actually a suite of offices designed to keep the president informed during times of emergency. Eisenhower had ordered it built under the West Wing in the 1950s, but no one ever intended it as a bomb shelter. That was over on the other side of the mansion and was referred to as PEOC: the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. The Pentagon claimed it could withstand all but a point-blank nuclear strike.

“Let’s go. What have we got?” Beechum demanded.

“Shouldn’t we wait for the president?” the FBI director suggested.

“The president is working with his cabinet,” Beechum lied. Pulling this off would require the skill of a shell-game hustler, but with Havelock, the general, and Venable’s own chief of staff in her corner, it might work. “Don’t make me repeat myself!”

“Looks like a total loss of the Western Interconnect,” Alred said. A satellite photo popped up on a recently installed flat screen behind him: the United States at night. Virtually everything west of the Rockies was black. “California is down.”

“Details,” Beechum said. She spoke firmly, with a laserlike focus no one had seen to this point in the crisis. The attitude of the room rose to meet her.

“Ten million households,” Alred said. His back straightened, his voice grew louder. “Fourteen thousand hospitals, seventeen nuclear reactors, three of the country’s busiest ports, both national laboratories. Between them and the university system, we’re talking fifteen negative-pressure biohazard environments.”

“What about our defense posture?”

“We have fifty-seven DoD facilities in the affected areas,” Alred continued. “Those include the San Diego Naval Base—biggest in the country—NORAD, and Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, as well as Fort Huachuca in Arizona. That covers JSOC assets, intelligence-gathering capabilities, conventional forces, and our Strategic Air Command. Our war-fighting posture has been significantly challenged.”

“Do we know for sure what started it?” Beechum asked. She wrote nothing down. Her mind was enough.

“DOE says it started at a flow-monitoring center in Folsom, California. This country has three separate grids, and Cal-ISO manages the Western Interconnect—seventeen states with links to British Columbia and Mexico.”

“How?”

“Conventional explosive in a backpack. Very small in size, but it was an RDD. DOE estimates one to two ounces of a gamma-emitting isotope, most likely cesium. The facility will take weeks to decontaminate.”

“Connected to the Louisville theft?” Chase asked.

“We have to assume so,” Alred responded.

“Who?” Beechum asked.

“The same group—Ansar ins Allah—claimed responsibility. Same audiotape delivery to local media markets concurrent with the attacks . . .”

“Attacks?” Beechum asked. “There was another?”

“We had a smaller, similar detonation at a backup station in Alhambra, California. That was also an RDD; also a complicated decon. Cal-ISO estimates that it could take weeks to reestablish the complex routing network that makes the grid work. We’ll have some power restoration before then, but this has huge national security implications.”

Beechum rubbed her eyes.

“There’s something else.”

“Of course,” she said. “There’s always something else.”

“There were two survivors,” Alred told her. “Well, they survived for almost an hour.”

“Did we interview them?” Chase asked. “Did they see anything?”

“They saw the bomber. Male, white. An employee.”

“What?” Havelock asked. “White? Maybe they were delirious. We’re looking for Arabs.”

“Not anymore,” he said. Alred pointed to the same screen he had used for the satellite reconnaissance photo. The flat screen flashed with dull gray surveillance video from the Folsom Control Center.

“Does this guy look Arab to you?”

GI JANE
HAD
been taught the difference between right and wrong. Her father, a devoutly religious man, had shown her the power of a strong spirit and raised her with discipline. Parochial school had instilled a thirst for knowledge. Harvard had quenched it, offering the pristine realization that questions, not answers, provided the only true path to understanding. She had always led a life ordered by rules, savoring the symmetry of logic and the balance of an underlying truth.

Then she joined the army.

Deep breath,
she told herself, trying to calm a pounding heart.
Stay back in traffic. Use the other cars for cover. Pick a spot and then make your move.

No one could understand why an Ivy League-educated linguist would drop out of graduate school and trade academic robes for government-issued camouflage. But then, none of them had been approached the way she had. None of them had heard the calling.