“Whose politics, though?” asked Rudy. “I can’t see any American political agenda being supported by this kind of damage. It would be like setting fire to a house you wanted to rob.”
We hashed it back and forth and, sadly, came up with a very long list. America doesn’t have as many friends as we like to think it does. And there are a lot of small groups that are not full-fledged national states that have been doing bad things with technology that can be easily transported. The God Machine I saw was frighteningly portable.
Church looked at his watch and stood. “I have to meet with doctors who I’ve asked to come here. In the meantime, I would greatly appreciate it if you would come up with a list of search arguments and give them to Bug and Nikki. If you’re right about this, Captain, and I believe you are, then there has to be a pattern out there. This is too big to have happened and been planned in a vacuum, even with people who are determined to keep it off the Net. No one is that clean or efficient. Someone somewhere will have made a mistake. Be exhaustive, and check in with Doc Holliday and Junie on this. In fact, Captain, I think you should go to Brooklyn to consult with them.”
Rudy and I stood. He said, “Then you don’t believe the attack on Washington was the purpose of this conspiracy?”
“You mean I don’t believe that ‘either,’ Doctor? No. To expand on Captain Ledger’s metaphor, I think this is a larger and shinier object of distraction. And, Captain, what you said about FEMA disturbs me greatly. After that event, when Hugo Vox was still believed to be on our side, he ran a scenario at his Terror Town facility, focusing on how a natural disaster could be used to maximize the effect of an attack while minimizing the likelihood of an efficient or effective federal response. If someone has developed a way to induce earthquakes, then as bad as D.C. is, there are much more dangerous targets. Here and abroad.”
“Like?”
“Like the Long Valley Caldera in California and Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming. Like the island of Manhattan. Like any of the nuclear power plants, the largest dams. It does not have to be bigger than Washington, Captain. If this process is as portable as it seems, they can play hit-and-run and wear us down like a pack of lions attacking an elephant. Persistence, elusiveness, and intelligence are their weapons. Our own size makes it difficult for us to respond. This is why terrorism has flourished, and why it is so often effective.”
With that he left.
Rudy and I stood in the doorway and watched him move down the hall like a man pushing through walls of solid lead.
“Joe,” said Rudy softly, “you know that he should have already thought of this.”
“He was on the same page,” I said.
“No. He was a step behind you. All of this with Auntie, with the DMS being persecuted by the president, Sam… Joe, aren’t you afraid that it’s made him lose more than a step getting to first base?”
Ghost pushed between us and whined a little.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Jennifer VanOwen drove to McLean to meet her employer. It was only the third time they had ever met and VanOwen was nervous. Prying eyes were everywhere, especially in this era of cell phone cameras and social media.
Even so, it was a quiet street and the house had been continually occupied for years by a family whose members actually worked for the U.S. government. That they worked for another government as well was a deeply buried secret, one that had been protected since the early 1980s.
While she was away from D.C., carefully selected people from her employer’s organization would seed eyewitness accounts of her being here or there, and always having just left. Photos taken earlier would have their digital time stamp altered and would be sent to the news to keep the story of Hurricane VanOwen going. Those same people fed data to VanOwen so she would know where she was supposed to have been.
As she pulled into the short driveway, the garage door rolled up to let her pull inside. There was no light inside the garage, and no one visible.
She killed the engine and waited. She was not allowed to get out of the car and had never been inside the house. Several minutes passed before a piece of shadow inside the garage detached itself from the blackness and moved toward her. VanOwen opened her car door and the dome light sketched the outline of a woman dressed in a military camouflage uniform with the twin bars of a captain. The face beneath the billed cap was familiar. Pretty, stern, expectant.
“And…?” said the woman.
“I got it all,” VanOwen told her.
“Show me.”
VanOwen popped the trunk, got out, and walked around to stand beside her employer. VanOwen opened the case.
“Excellent.”
“I have to get back to D.C.,” said VanOwen. “I’ll be missed soon.”
“Yes,” said the woman, “you will.”
VanOwen heard the faint metallic click behind her but did not turn fast enough to see what it was before the knob on the end of a collapsible spring-steel fighting stick struck her at the base of the skull. The blade was angled so precisely that pieces of her shattered skull severed the brain stem and revoked all nerve conduction in a microsecond. She was dead before she knew that it was even a possibility. The next six blows were unnecessary and yet delivered with as much force and precision as the first. Her body slumped, and the other woman caught it, steadied it, and then leaned it forward so that VanOwen’s upper torso leaned into the trunk. The woman removed the metal case, set it down, and then hoisted VanOwen into the back with a grunt. VanOwen was not a large woman and she fit easily.
The woman used VanOwen’s skirt hem to wipe blood and hair from the fighting stick, then tapped the knob on the floor to reverse the telescoping weapon down to a six-inch tube. Very efficient. The weapon went back into her purse. She closed the trunk, picked up the case, and walked into the house. She made a single call on a disposable cell phone.
“Where are you?”
“Heading back to my hotel,” said Valen Oruraka.
“Wait for me there,” said Gadyuka, and hung up. Ten minutes later a woman who looked nothing at all like a Marine Corps captain drove toward Maryland in a white Camry. No one took any note of her at all.
It would be days before the smell emanating from the garage spurred a curious letter carrier to make a 9-1-1 call.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
They call it standing vigil.
Grandiose word for “waiting.” I kept hoping that it wasn’t a deathwatch, but that’s how it felt. Rudy and I had made our lists of keywords and shared them with the teams back at the Hangar. So, first there’s panic and hurry, and then there’s waiting.
Top and Bunny showed up, looking like they’d both been dragged down flights of stairs by their heels. We hugged and slapped backs — they didn’t know how bad mine was until I nearly fainted in Bunny’s embrace. Then we sat. And waited.
I still wore the same dirty, stained, and torn clothes I’d put on that morning. Bunny went out to the car and brought in our suitcases and we took turns getting cleaned up in the doctors’ lounge. More of Church’s influence.
Bunny wore a sleeveless Under Armour tank and board shorts; Top had on an ancient Atlanta Falcons sweatshirt over jeans. I came back wearing a floral-print Hawaiian shirt and an ancient but comfortable pair of Levi’s. The last sets of clean clothes we had after our trip out here were stuff more appropriate to the beaches of San Diego. Only Rudy was different, dressed in a quiet dark suit and polished shoes.