“We could follow in our own car.”
“It’s a nondescript truck. A chase car would draw attention.”
“Do you think the leak is an Aussie?”
“We shouldn’t talk about it outside of a secured facility.”
Vince exaggeratedly looked around at the hold. “Where do you think they hid the bugs?” he said in a stage whisper.
He had a point. On board an Air Force cargo jet was about as secure as they could get. The noise from the engines would make it impossible for Josephson to hear them, even if he were awake. And they wouldn’t have much time to plan once they arrived in Australia. She closed the cover on her e-reader with a sigh.
“Since the person who posted it used an anonymizer,” Morgan said, “we can’t pinpoint where it came from. So it could be anyone on the team from the US or the Australian side.”
Since they’d discovered the posting three days ago, Morgan and Vince had been working nonstop trying to trace where the message had come from. Backgrounds, relationships, and possible motives for everyone involved in the project had all been checked. On the US side, the trail was cold.
“Maybe we should look at it from a question of motive.”
Morgan nodded. “All right. There’s greed.”
“Could be. There are a dozen countries that would be willing to buy the Killswitch technology. But nobody on the team seems to have sufficient money troubles to sell out their country.”
“And none of them has any suspicious bank deposits. But we can’t rule it out because a lot of these people are smart enough to hide overseas accounts.”
“Unfortunately, we don’t know if they want to steal the Killswitch itself, steal the technology, or sabotage the test.”
“It’s doubtful they’d attempt to steal it before we get to Pine Gap,” Morgan said.
“Why?”
“Because of the xenobium stored there. It’s the only known sample in the world, and the Killswitch is useless without it.”
“Xenobium. Ever since I heard the name, I keep thinking it’s a heartburn medication. ‘Xenobium — Relief is on the way.’ What do you think it is?”
“I don’t have enough information to speculate.”
“We don’t need info to speculate.”
Morgan eyed the six-foot-long crate and shrugged. “Kessler will give us the rundown on it in Australia.”
She and Vince had received only a minimal briefing on the Killswitch, so they didn’t yet know how it worked, only that it was an unprecedented new weapon that fried electronics with an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, and that xenobium was the material used as the explosive trigger.
“The forum didn’t say anything about the xenobium,” Morgan said. “It’s possible that someone is trying to sell the plans for the Killswitch and didn’t mention the xenobium because he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too.”
Vince clucked in disapproval. “You mean, sell somebody a worthless weapon? That’s a recipe for getting yourself killed.”
“It may be enough for someone to know how it works. If they had the plans, they could build it themselves.”
“Then where do they get more of the xenobium?”
Morgan shook her head, but said nothing.
“Of course, this could all be coincidence,” Vince said, “and we’re just getting a free trip to Australia on the dime of the American taxpayer.”
“You don’t think that.”
Vince smiled. “No, I don’t. Neither do you. So what’s the plan?”
“We should get our interviews of the team underway as soon as we arrive. Maybe we’ll get one of them to crack.”
“And I’ll double check the security plan for moving the Killswitch to the test range. If someone’s planning to steal it, the likeliest scenario would be during transport, because that will be the first time the xenobium will be with the weapon outside of a secure facility.”
Vince went silent and sighed. After two more sighs, Morgan took pity on him and lent him her laptop so he could watch his DVD.
With Vince plugged in and tuned out, she went back to reading her novel. Though she tried to immerse herself again in the machinations of nineteenth-century British landed gentry, Morgan couldn’t keep her eyes from flicking to the crate holding the Killswitch.
TWELVE
Colchev sat at a metal desk in the Alice Springs warehouse office and watched the news report from Queenstown for a second time. The laptop’s streaming video cut from a view of Fay Turia’s smoldering house to the overturned jet boat lying behind a body covered in a sheet. Colchev’s lip curled in anger at the thought of his men being killed on what should have been a routine operation.
As the anchor continued her narration of the events, the video showed two men exiting the police station. The first was a huge black man dressed in the brightest orange parka Colchev had ever seen. Bald, with a neck as thick as a telephone pole, the man was identified as Grant Westfield, an electrical engineer and former professional wrestler who was known as “The Burn” before he left the sport to join the Army.
The slightly taller white man who followed Westfield was identified as Dr. Tyler Locke, another engineer with a company called Gordian Engineering. Though not as bulked-up as Westfield, Locke in his leather coat didn’t conform to the doughy awkward lab denizen that Colchev had worked with in the past. They both looked like men who could take care of themselves in a fight. Colchev had been surprised his men could be defeated by civilians until he saw Locke and Westfield.
The two men ducked into a silver Audi and left without responding to questions shouted by the journalists. Colchev found Gordian’s website and read the short bios for each of them. As he suspected, both were decorated combat veterans. Locke was a mechanical engineer skilled in forensic investigation and explosives while Westfield specialized in system failure analysis and demolition.
It wasn’t mentioned on the Gordian site, but Colchev found several news reports connecting Locke and Westfield to the discoveries of Noah’s Ark and King Midas’s tomb. Apparently, these men were gaining a reputation for finding ancient artifacts. Perhaps they were working with Fay Turia to interpret the map on the wood engraving.
That thought gave him renewed confidence that he’d been right to seek her out. She’d come to his attention through a blog from a Roswell conspiracy theorist. Colchev had standing web searches in place for any spelling variation of xenobium connected to Roswell, and her video had come back as a match. When he saw Fay talking about her experience at Roswell, he was sure she had a link to the xenobium that he needed.
His mole within the Lightfall program thought the xenobium that Australia possessed was the last remaining specimen in existence, but Colchev knew otherwise. Colchev’s research indicated that another sample of it had been hidden by the ancient Nazca civilization of Peru somewhere amongst their colossal desert drawings, but until he’d discovered Fay’s Roswell UFO convention video three days ago, he had no idea how to find it.
Zotkin knocked on the office’s open door. “We’re ready for you.”
Colchev closed the laptop and followed Zotkin to the closest trailer backed up to the warehouse’s loading platform.
Four barrels had been anchored to the trailer’s floor and filled with loose ANFO pellets. Two blocks of C-4 plastic explosive lay next to each barrel. In addition to Zotkin, four other men watched as his electrical expert, Gurevich, crimped wires together.
Colchev inspected the work. Everything seemed to be connected properly, but he had to be sure this setup would function as intended.
“Let’s test it,” he said.
While he waited for Gurevich to hook up a temporary extension to his wiring, Colchev thought it apt that yet another explosion would complete a mission that had begun at the site of the Tunguska blast in Siberia over a hundred years ago.