“He’s waiting for the shoe to fall. NSA is doing a study of the Internet traffic that spilled the beans about the possible threat to the base and triggered the panic. They’ll have the result in a couple of days. Someone started the rumor, and it won’t be that difficult to track down that person.”
“It could be anybody,” I suggested.
“Oh, no. That was a very tightly held secret. And hot. Smoldering. Someone found it too hot to hold. We’ll find out who. See you back at Langley.”
We shook hands, and I climbed aboard the giant eggbeater. When it lifted off, Grafton was already out of sight.
Sarah Houston was in her office when I rapped on her door. She let me in, then sat back down and stared at me.
“Did I forget your birthday?” I asked.
“I thought you were soon to be gone. Permanently gone. Now you are back. I am trying to figure out how to deal with that.”
“There’s no way you rationally can,” I admitted.
“I’m beginning to understand that.”
“Wanna go get some lunch?”
“Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after. Ask me then.”
“Sure.”
I hit the road. Closed the door behind me. Stood in the hallway feeling like dog crap for a minute or so. Perhaps this was a good thing. The truth is I was womaned out. Maybe celibacy would be good for me. At least for a while.
Grafton’s executive assistants, Anastasia Roberts and Max Hurley, were glad to see me. They were full of curiosity about what had actually happened in Norfolk, but since it was all classified to the hilt, they didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell them. We talked about holiday plans.
I stirred through the stuff on my desk, decided I didn’t want to deal with any of it and gave myself a meritorious day off.
That afternoon Willie the Wire and I made the rounds of the used car lots. At the third one we visited I fell in love with a 1974 Mercedes 450SL, a hardtop/ragtop convertible, in a pale robin’s-egg blue. Willie was appalled.
“That thing is already forty years old, Tommy. Can’t you drive somethin’ younger than you are?”
“Hey, this baby only has a hundred and forty-two thousand on it. It’s just getting broken in.”
“That odometer has probably been around the world more times than a hooker on crack,” Willie observed.
When the paperwork was finished and signed, I dropped Willie at the lock shop and took my new ride out on the road. I was feeling perky. Headed north, toward Philadelphia.
Didn’t actually get into the city. Stopped at a truck stop on the edge of town and bought a postcard of the Liberty Bell. I took it into the little diner where the truck drivers eat and sat at a booth.
Using block letters, I addressed the card to Cuthbert Gordon, Mom’s boyfriend, out there in California. I noodled my message for a while, then wrote, “FISH HAS THE CONTRACT.” It was doubtful, I thought, that Cuthbert knew of Fish’s recent disability. I signed the card “A FRIEND.” That was a stretch because ol’ Bertie probably never had any friends, but you never know.
I bought a stamp, peeled the thing off its backing using my fingernails, and affixed it to the card. Then I rubbed the front and back of the card on my jeans to smear whatever prints were on there.
After I mailed it, I hit the road back to Washington. I liked the way my new ride handled and resolved to trade cars every ten years, whether I needed to or not.
When Jake Grafton got back to Langley, he called Sal Molina. “We need to talk,” he said. “McKiernan and I want to see the president.”
“Maybe you and I ought to visit first.”
“Yeah.”
“Come over to my house this evening after dinner. We’ll have a beer.”
“Okay.”
So Jake drove to Bethesda and said hello to Mrs. Molina and followed Sal to the basement. When they each had a cold beer in hand, Jake got to it. “We’re going to have to do something that teaches the Chinese they can’t screw with us.”
“Jesus, we’re like the Mafia now?”
“The Chinese decided to try to wipe out the Atlantic Fleet’s capital ships. They saw an opportunity and leaped for it. The murders and the shootdown of Air Force One were all diversions intended to keep our eyes off the ball. And it was going their way when, for some reason, Zhang decided, or was told, to trigger the bomb with only three carriers in port. Perhaps the Internet storm panicked the people in Beijing.”
Molina nodded and sipped beer.
“The question that we can’t answer is why Zhang was returning to the radar reflector that he used to trigger the bomb.”
“Maybe he wanted to die.”
“He could have done that anywhere.”
After a bit, Molina said, “Okay. Answer the riddle.”
“I think he was probably coming back to safety the thing. I think Beijing changed their minds.”
Sal Molina rubbed his forehead and eyes. “Got anything to substantiate that think?”
“There is no other logical explanation. His superiors ordered him back. NSA has a recording of at least one Chinese-language conversation that took place on the cell network that could be the one. Zhang died two and a half hours later.”
“Which gets us where?” Molina asked.
“We must convince them that we know that they did it. We know that they intended to kill a couple million Americans and cripple our navy, even if they did change their minds at the last minute. And they had better never try something like this again. Not even think about it.”
“How do you propose that we accomplish all that?”
Jake Grafton told him.
In the days that followed the president’s press conference and the arrival of the final two Atlantic Fleet carriers in Norfolk, the world got back to normal, more or less. Most of the people in southeastern Virginia went home, Christmas came and went, the politicians flanged up another deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, and in January three of the carriers and their battle groups sailed away.
Captain Butler Spiers’ grandson arrived in the world in the usual manner, more or less on schedule.
He and his wife, Kat, talked repeatedly by telephone in the evenings. Finally he asked her, “Did you send any e-mails telling your friends to evacuate Norfolk?”
She denied it, of course, and he knew she was lying. He knew her. He didn’t press it.
The fact of the matter was that he had betrayed his trust by revealing classified information to her. He had! At the time he thought he had a good reason, and no doubt he did. And so did every other single person who was entrusted with the secret. Most of them didn’t reveal the secret, but he had.
He wondered if the NSA investigation of the e-mail trails would get back to his wife. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
Regardless, the fact that he had betrayed his trust weighed heavily upon him. Numerous people, twenty at latest count, had died in car wrecks trying to get out of the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area. He hadn’t caused the car wrecks, yet still, he wondered if in some small way he wasn’t responsible.
It could go either way, Spiers thought. Someone, his boss probably, would call him in and say NSA traced it to your wife, Kat. Or to Ellie or that dweeb Harold. We’re going to interrogate them under oath, ask Kat if she got the information from you, ask Ellie and Harold if they got it from you or Kat.
On the other hand, the word would filter down that someone else was the leak. Either way, the bald fact was that he, Captain Butler Spiers, commanding officer of Naval Base Norfolk, had leaked classified information to a person not authorized to have it. If the Chinese agent had been able to read English and had seen and heard the mass panic, he might have detonated the bomb then and there. It was a miracle he didn’t. Regardless of who got blamed, Spiers knew he had seen the ghost and failed. As a man and a naval officer.