“He takes his job seriously.”
“A patriot?”
“Yes.”
“And you? Who or what are you loyal to?” Seeing the frown on Kirtley’s face, Boreas amplified his question. “Are you loyal to McFairn? The NSA? Your country? Yourself?”
“All of the above.”
“It’s not possible,” Boreas said. “There’s inherent conflict.” He scanned the black man’s face, reading it, something he had long ago learned to do. “I think you put yourself first. Deputy Director McFairn did and look where she ended up with my help. She was a glorified secretary when I first ran into her. My help got her where she is now.
“I know her well. She wouldn’t have picked you for this assignment if she didn’t think you belonged here.” He leaned forward slightly in his seat. “Would you like my help?”
Kirtley didn’t blink. “At what cost?”
“You help me when I need it. I help you when you need it.”
“And if our goals diverge?”
“They shouldn’t,” Boreas said. He smiled. “My enemies are your enemies, I can assure you of that.” Glancing out the window, Boreas could see the Humvee approaching Eichen’s helicopter. “Are you with me?”
Kirtley’s head barely moved, but there was no mistaking the assent.
“Good. Come with me.”
Boreas walked out of his office, Kirtley behind him, and entered the control room. He gave orders to his staff in a low voice. There were no questions asked-everyone here was sworn to secrecy and absolute obedience to the project and more importantly their own self-centered goals, each of which Boreas had uncovered and used as leverage. It was the way the Priory had worked for millennia. Virtually every person had a weak point where leverage could be applied, and the Priory was expert at applying that leverage.
Switches were thrown and power surged to the transmitters. The towers hummed. The dipole antennas were warming, changing the nature of the electric power, pushing it into the air, changing the sky. A red glow suffused the air over the center of the metal farm, antennas making connection with each other through the field.
“Level one,” Dr. Woods called out.
Boreas was peering through a large pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod. He could see in the bottom of the view that the general was getting out of the Humvee and into the chopper. He indicated for Kirtley to take a spare pair of glasses.
“Level two.” The red glow was now over a hundred meters in diameter, reaching up the same distance into the sky.
The helicopter lifted, banking to the east.
“Level three.” There was excitement in Woods’s voice.
“Increase,” Boreas ordered.
“Level three point five.”
The red glow now covered the entire antenna field and was racing after the helicopter, the crew and passengers of which were unaware of what was happening behind them.
“Level four.”
Boreas adjusted the focus. He could see into the cockpit as the field reached the aircraft. Both pilots jerked upright in their seats and the chopper skewed about as if on a string. There was blood flowing over the pilot’s face, pouring out of his ears.
The pilot slammed forward onto the instrument panel, twitched for a few seconds, then was still. The chopper nosed over and smashed into the ground, exploding in a ball of fire.
“Decrease power,” Boreas ordered.
The red field diminished to nothing until the power was completely off.
Boreas turned to Kirtley. “Now come to my office and I’ll brief you on what I want from you at Bright Gate.”
8
McFairn had four pieces of paper on her desk. One was the intelligence summary from Boreas regarding the activity on the virtual plane HAARP had picked up. The second was an action brief from Southern Command, detailing the disappearance of a Special Forces team assigned to Task Force Six in Colombia. The third was an interception and subsequent decryption of satellite communications between a ground element in Colombia and an unknown location.
She noted the brief introduction to the intercept, which gave information about the way the message had been encrypted-a top-notch program, but not good enough to beat the acres of computers hidden underneath NSA headquarters. The NSA was the largest employer of mathematicians in the world, almost all of them focused on making and breaking codes.
She’d read many such reports in her years, and the dryness of spoken words typed on a page had always struck her as a weak substitute for the real thing, so a DVD disk with the intercept decrypted was attached to the report as per her standing order. Before she read the report, McFairn stuck the DVD in the player built into the face of her desk and thumbed the remote.
There was a hiss of static, then a woman’s voice. “They’re surrendering.” Glancing at the report, McFairn noted that her voice analysts had deduced the accent to be Russian, specifically from the Moscow area.
The second voice startled her. Feminine, but with an echo to it. “Three of them are dead, one is wounded. There are six others. I think Valika is going to kill the surviving Americans even though they are surrendering”
McFairn hit the Pause button. The report indicated that the speech experts had no fix on the owner of the second voice. The writer of the report summarized that the voice might have been distorted by the transmitting equipment at the source. McFairn thought differently-she couldn’t tell herself why, but the edge in the voice went beyond what a machine could do. Besides, they had the machines downstairs to reverse distortion, and they obviously hadn’t been able to.
The next voice was male. “We want them alive.”
The report indicated: male, Colombian, educated. No surprise there, McFairn thought-the Ring. They even had the same voice on other intercepts: Cesar-the leader of the organization. “I said we want them alive,” the man repeated. “Put the gun down, Valika, and send the men in”
Natasha Valika-McFairn’s intelligence officers had a file on the ex-GRU agent. She’d go through that later.
“I don’t like being spied on, Señor Cesar. Where is the witch?”
The strange voice again: “Where I can see you.”
“It worked, Professor. We don’t need you any more, Souris. Turn off the Aura generator.”
McFairn sat up straight. That confirmed what they had already been almost positive of. It was indeed Professor Souris who was behind Aura.
“This is just the beginning. The world will be ours.”
Checking the report, McFairn noted that the voice analyst could not match the voice off this intercept with their file copies of Souris ’s voice. The two weren’t even close. What had happened to Souris? Why had she become a turncoat?
McFairn had read the scientist’s FBI file. There was nothing there to indicate treason. Dual Ph.D.s from MIT. The highest clearance possible granted, which meant an extensive background check that she had passed without the slightest blemish. Over a decade of work on various projects before going to the HERTF group when it was founded. From there she went to work at Bright Gate and then to HAARP. And then one day she just didn’t show up for work and was gone.
McFairn tapped the end of a pen against her lips. Souris and Professor Jenkins had been the keys to getting HAARP/Bright Gate going. Now Souris was working for the Ring and Jenkins was dead. She wished that Boreas would tell her whom he was fighting.
The other essential piece of information from the report was the fact that the location of Valika and Souris had been pinpointed in Colombia via a KH-14 spy satellite tracking their uplink. Almost exactly where the Special Forces team had been waiting in ambush. That meant that Souris had developed a portable Aura transmitter since the SF team had picked the ambush site. Cesar’s uplink had been tracked back to a commercial transmitter in Puerto Rico, which meant he was most likely using a ground line from a distant source to the uplink.