After that, his rise in DIA had been no accident. With his bottomless energy, his genius for organizing, and his ability to command the fierce loyalty of the men around him, Bahr had forged the DIA into a rock of efficiency such as McEwen had only dreamed of. When Project Frisco arose, McEwen had dropped it in Bahr’s lap.
Something out of the ordinary had been going on. There was nothing tangible: a dozen tiny little incidents that nobody could explain, completely unrelated to each other, except that they did not fit any reasonable pattern of normal occurrence.
They had been nebulous things, at first: the theft of a commercial codebook reported from a San Francisco office; scattered unexplained radar pickups fanning across the midwest over six months time, without identification of target; the hijacking of a thermite truck on the New York-Chicago Expressway, followed a week later by six simultaneous thermite fires in a pattern over a hundred mile area, photographed by chance by a passing jet liner; the disappearance, under questionable circumstances, of several dozen men in key scientific and government posts . . . .
No pattern, no relevance to the occurrences, but something was going on. The presence of any imponderable in the delicate social and economic machinery of the country under the Vanner-Elling eco-government was not tolerable. The balance of power between the Federation Americas in the West and the Sino-Soviet bloc in the East was far too treacherous to permit unexplained incidents to remain long unexplained. That balance had teetered once, in 1965, and the world still bore the scars of that brief, bitter war. After the violent economic crash that had engulfed the world in 1995, a different sort of balance had been forged, but still the balance was there.
It was clear that whatever was behind the occurrences had to be discovered. Project Frisco, under Julian Bahr’s diligent direction, had thrown the entire striking power of the DIA into a swift, silent search for a pattern behind the occurrences. And Project Frisco, until now, had failed.
For eleven months they had run up against a blank wall. A thousand leads traced down, led nowhere. A thousand blind alleys were carefully explored. No clue to the enemy’s intentions, nor even to the enemy’s identity. Only the constantly growing conviction that somewhere in the pattern, there was an enemy . . . .
And now, Wildwood. For the first time, a chink in the armor, a possible break . . . .
And John McEwen was afraid to go on.
“Listen to me, Mac,” Bahr said. “This is the time to move in, not the time to sit on the fence and worry. We’ve got something here at last that we can get our hands on. This major . . . .”
Weakly, McEwen shook his head. “The DIA has its limits, Julian. An atomic theft . . . this is out of our hands.”
Bahr’s face hardened for just a moment. Then he swung a chair over toward the director, smiling and calm, and looked into the older man’s tired face. “Mac, let’s get this thing straightened out right now. I don’t think you’ve thought this Wildwood incident out yet.” He sensed the reaction from Carmine and the others, felt their eyes on his back. “The thing that happened last night at Wildwood changes the whole nature of Project Frisco. We can’t back out now even if we wanted to. We’ve got to hang on if it kills us.”
McEwen shook his head again. “I . . . I don’t see . . . .”
“Mac, whoever stole that U-metal made a mistake last night. A very bad mistake.”
“Mistake?” said McEwen.
“There was nothing wrong with those exit monitors. They were working fine. You couldn’t get a radium-painted watch dial past them without tripping the alarm, and they were permanently sealed so they couldn’t have been disconnected.”
McEwen looked up. “Then you think Alexander was telling the truth?”
“Not necessarily,” Bahr insisted. “But some things have checked out, and there is one simple fact that we just can’t ignore. Whoever took that U-metal out of the plant had it so effectively shielded that it didn’t trigger the exit monitors.”
McEwen blinked. “Julian, that doesn’t make sense. The very minimum shielding for that stuff would be a foot-thick slab of lead. Nobody could have carried that out past the guards. They won’t even let you carry out a mechanical pencil.”
“But a man could get a property pass,” Bahr said softly.
“For a truck-load of U-metal and shielding?”
“Oh, no. But maybe for a briefcase.”
“You’re not making sense,” McEwen said. “Those slugs . . . .”
Bahr slammed his fist down on the desk. “Mac, it happened! Can’t you begin to see this now? It happened! Of course it doesn’t make sense; there’s no earthly way anyone could cram those slugs and shielding into a small package and waltz out the gate with them, but that is exactly the thing that happened; it must have happened.” His eyes were bright on the director’s face. “All right, we have to work with it, find out how it could have happened. Nothing yet in Project Frisco has made any sense, but now a pattern is beginning to take shape. Suppose a special shield was used . . . a very special shield, say, maybe just a monomolecular layer of neutrons packed in tight like the tiles in a mosaic . . . an invisible skin built into the wall of a briefcase, completely impermeable to any radiation . . . .”
“There isn’t any such shield,” McEwen said flatly. “If the Eastern Bloc were within five years of something like that BRINT would have told us long ago. And nobody in this country is working in nuclear physics. They don’t even dare talk about things like that any more for fear DEPCO will be down their throats.”
“What you are saying,” Bahr said quietly, “is that there is nothing known to Earth science that could be used as a shield like that.”
“Of course not. Nobody—” McEwen broke off, staring at him. Across the room the teletype had stopped, leaving a sudden void of silence in the room. Early morning traffic sounds came up from the street, muffled, a world away. “What do you mean?” McEwen said hoarsely after a long moment. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that we’ve been trying so hard to pin all these occurrences down to the Eastern Bloc that we’ve ignored what was staring us in the face,” Bahr said. “Nothing has fit together in any way we could see, but these things have been purposeful, just the same. Those thermite fires: all six burned in front of searchlight reflectors and beamed straight up. The high-frequency signals we’ve been trying to pin down—not messages, not traffic or Morse characters, just signals.”
Bahr stood up, his huge body filling the room. “What have we been looking for, Mac? A Chinese guerilla unit? A Russki intelligence team? Maybe even a BRINT unit checking our reaction speed? We’ve been looking for something we could recognize and classify, something we know. And we haven’t found it. But nothing that we know could have gotten those slugs out of the Wildwood Plant.”
For a long moment there was silence. McEwen’s face was grey. “Julian, if there were a remote possibility . . . .”
“I saw that explosion last night, Mac. I saw the thing before it exploded. And I know the panic it would start off if even a hint of it ever got out. That’s why we have to sit on this so tight that nobody even hears about the Wildwood raid until we know for sure what we’re dealing with. That U-metal would be worthless to any human agent, but to an Alien intelligence team, it might be a different story. We can’t guess what they might have wanted it for. Their idea of intelligence might be as different from ours as . . . as DIA from BRINT.”