Countdown to Mecca (8 page)

“Thanks. You have my contact information.”

The men shook hands. Forsyth just glared at Jack.

“I will tell you one thing,” Jack said to the FBI director. “The person of interest? He's bankrolling my investigation. And I'll stack his resources against yours any day.”

 

8

Life at the safe house fell into a pattern. The next day, Ric was up early, keeping watch over their section of the building; Ana, her girls, and Sammy all slept late. Late morning, while Miwa and Ritu showered, Sammy and Ana started preparing breakfast, which they all ate together. Normally effervescent, the escorts were noticeably subdued. But even they didn't miss the thoughtful, even longing glances their boss and the party clown exchanged while sharing their domestic chores.

On Sol's instructions, Ric approached their breakfast table on the first day, after having walked Eddie and cleaned up after him in the enclosed yard of the safe house. It wouldn't do for any of them to be seen outside.

“Hey,” Ric said to the Asians while holding Eddie and scratching behind the poodle's ear, “I know you're supposed to be our guests and all, but we were wondering if you wouldn't mind talking to the residents here? The lost girls.”

Miwa and Ritu looked up at the bespectacled, burly man. He thought he noticed interest in their eyes.

“The caregivers we hired have training,” he continued eagerly, “but there's nothin' like advice from people who
live
the life, you know what I mean?”

“You assume they would try to talk them out of it?” Ana asked.

“Well—sure,” Ric said. “I mean, look what happened today. Who wants to get shot at?”

“Don't you? Isn't that
your
job?”

“Yes, but that's part of the job
description,
” he said.

“Both of these ladies are working their way through college,” Ana said. “They chose this life. Perhaps we can talk to the girls about having a greater goal than filling a crack pipe.”

“That's it, that's what I'm talking about,” Ric said.

“I could contribute something to career week,” Sammy said, feeling left out. “I could teach them how to do magic tricks and make balloon animals.”

“Actually, your brother phoned with a job for both you and Ana,” Ric said.

Miwa and Ritu agreed to Ric's plan and he teamed them with the appropriate staff members. When that was done, he motioned Sammy and Ana to a table with a pair of laptops.

“We got our tech guy setting up a digital rogues gallery of possible hit men to see if you recognize them,” Ric said. “It will help to see if they're from our talent pool or the military.”

“You people have a tech guy?” Sammy marveled.

“I'm good, he's better,” Ric said. “What do you think, we're living in the Stone Age?” Ric gestured for Sammy to take one chair. “Meanwhile, we've got a dossier of high-ranking military men who live in the area for Ana. If we can pin those boys down, that may help lead us to the gunmen.”

He gestured toward another chair and the two got to work.

 

9

Sol and Doc had left the safe house before the others woke to buy video equipment and take Jack to the police station. When he was finished there they drove to his personal “safe house,” an apartment he kept secret from everyone. During the run of his TV show he had used it when he wanted privacy or secrecy or both. Upon arriving, Sol drove around the block twice. None of them saw anyone watching from a car, from the street, or from a doorway. No one was following them. Parking in the vast three-story basement garage of the building, Jack took them to his apartment building through the elevator. They went up a flight of stairs and walked swiftly to the elevator. Punching the button, Jack stepped back to look at the street through the long, narrow glass window in the hallway, but got barely a glimpse before the elevator arrived. Inside, he slipped his key into the panel. The car started up almost immediately, taking them to the twentieth floor of the twenty-two-story building in the heart of downtown San Francisco.

Sol took a moment to admire the place, which was filled with mementoes from Jack's life, including his hobby: repairing watches. Vintage timepieces were everywhere.

Jack pointed to a large clock on top of a freestanding wardrobe. It was made of brass and shaped like a ship's wheel. “In case you're wondering, that's where I hid the surveillance camera.”

Sol appreciated the unsentimental repurposing of the antique.

The trio crowded around Jack's desk, where his editing equipment was set up. He clicked on the video he had been working on before Firebird had crashed into his life. The piece cited the case of several companies that had ended contracts with Iran. They watched a sequence showing stock footage of Der Warheit Unternehmen's varied interests before zeroing in on how the firm was continuing to help Iran. Jack had made an interesting graphic that showed just how the company's money flowed while his recorded voice chronicled the company's attempts to mitigate the publicity damage, culminating in the CEO's visit to San Francisco. That set up the final sequence, which would have been Herr Helmut running from Jack's questions.

“Boy, you really have it in for them,” Sol said.

“Yes, but that's small potatoes,” Jack said. “They're not quite like the radical Islamists who want to drag this country back two hundred years then stick a saber in its gut. No, the big story here may be the CIA. There's a possibility that Der Warheit Unternehmen is unwittingly being used by the West to sabotage the Iran program. Our tech guys have done this before, most famously with the Iranian centrifuges that suddenly went haywire.”

“You still got your contact on the inside?” Doc asked.

Jack nodded. “I knew we'd never let potentially dangerous equipment just sail into a hostile nation unless we had a reason for it being there.”

“Like bugs planted to send us information or malware to make it all go bad after billions of enemy dollars have been invested,” Sol said.

“Right,” Jack said. “So I called Kevin Dangerfield. He's a former deputy director, now retired. I explained the situation and, knowing that Kevin would never give away classified information, I asked for a simple yea or nay on whether my suspicions were solid.”

“Let me guess,” Doc drawled. “Yea.”

Jack nodded. “Only this time there's something even stranger going on,” Jack said grimly, turning back to the editing program's monitor. “I found my way to a series of stories on the Pakistan bomb program, which had also received at least some clandestine help from Western companies. There were a few video documentaries on that program, which is why we're here. We need to play out this thread to see if it links up with Firebird somewhere.”

“Where's the potential crossover?” Doc asked.

“Pulkovo,” Jack said. “The airport is pictured as a transit point in the video. That's also where that downed Russian plane took off.”

“Thin,” Doc said.

“Which is why I want to see if it fattens up,” Jack said.

“Run the video,” Sol told him, intrigued.

For the next forty-six minutes the three watched intently. Although he didn't understand the words, Jack knew that documentary making was an art, not a science; the images, their sequence, and the way they played off the narrative were as important as the journalism itself. Jack again found himself silently setting his own narrative to the images, even as he analyzed why the piece worked. One of the big reasons was the minimum of talking heads. The experts were always interviewed doing something, and the camera wandered around the environment they were in—focusing more than once on baby pictures, he noted.

When the documentary ended, Jack turned to the others. “Anything jump out?”

Sol grimaced. “The airport is a transit point, security porous as hell it seems. Also, one of the guys depicted is Schoenberg's brother Marius.”

“His job?” Doc asked.

“Useless playboy,” Sol said. “But he could be a courier. No one takes him seriously.”

Jack felt a pang as he thought about his own brother.

“Other than that the documentary's standard stuff,” Sol said. “It's all, ‘We need advanced weapons technology because the West will conquer us if we don't have it.'”

“You got that from just their expressions?” Doc asked.

“I know a few words of Arabic,” Sol replied. “You got to, in my line of work.”

“Can you press Schoenberg to open up a little more about his operation?” Jack asked.

“I can make him an offer he can't ‘refuse.'” He spoke the word so it meant “trash,” not “denial.”

Jack laughed and Sol clapped Doc on the shoulder. “The American headquarters of Schoenberg's company has got plenty of shredded refuse,” he explained. “Somebody trustworthy has to haul it.”

Doc shook his head at the tentacles Sol had in seemingly every strata of society. Then he turned to Jack. “So what do we do, hold tight?”

Jack laughed again, standing up beside his old partner in battle. “Hardly,” he said, grabbing up the carrying case with his recording equipment. “We're going to do an interview.”

“With?”

Jack replied, “Professor Peters.”

Forty minutes later the two were trudging up a hillside overlooking the shoreline of the Point Reyes National Seashore preserve.

“Professor Bernie Peters is a bona fide genius,” Jack told Doc, somewhat breathless.

“I know that name,” grumbled Doc, “I just can't place it.”

“Former childhood prodigy, finished his dissertation at eighteen, worked in the nuclear weapons industry for more than forty years.”

Peters lived in a small, rustic, log cabin tucked into a corner of the preserve, but he wasn't there when Jack and Doc arrived in the minivan. Jack acted as if it were business as usual.

“He wasn't here the last time I visited, either,” he told Doc. “That was well over a year ago, when I'd personally driven out to bring him to my show. But I had been warned by his girlfriend. He likes to wander.”

Doc shook out his legs as he took in the pastoral comfort of the house and the natural splendor of the surroundings. “Nice place.”

“Supposedly, the house is leased to him for one dollar a year by the government in recognition of his many years of service,” Jack explained as he started down the path around the side of the dwelling. “But I strongly suspect it's a padded handcuff.”

Doc followed without complaint, his boots having navigated much rougher terrain in their time. “‘The Man' wants to keep an eye on him, huh?”

Jack nodded. Doc dodged a branch that swung back when Jack lost his grip.

“Glad to see you've still got your reflexes, old man,” Jack teased.

“The day I move a little too slow is the day I end up under a pile of rocks,” Doc said. “Hey, did this fella have something to do with the B53?”

“Nice get,” Jack said. “Peters made his bones on the team that adapted the W53 Titan II warhead from the B53 air-to-ground bomb. The two-stage thermonuclear weapon tipped American ICBMs well into the 1980s, ranking it as one of the most seminal and long-lasting nuclear designs ever. Peters had worked on all the important nuclear weapons projects, known and unknown, deployed and not deployed, until the mid-1990s. At that point he was assigned to a number of teams developing speculative designs.”

“What does ‘speculative designs' mean?

“Bernie wouldn't say when I asked him,” Jack confessed, “but from a few hints I guessed they involved miniaturizing atomic weapons. And when he'd mastered that, he was assigned the task of designing wide-array explosives, bombs that could spread weaponized bacteria and viruses without frying them.”

“How the hell is that done?” Doc asked. He'd been to many of the globe's hottest hotspots over the years but that was a new one on him.

“With NEDAs,” Jack said. “Non-explosive demolition agents. Just add water to the chemical powder. The mix experiences super-rapid expansion and creates a puffball effect to disburse toxins. The atmosphere does the rest.”

“Jesus,” Doc replied. “Imagine what these minds could do if they tried to help people instead of killing them.”

“Yeah, well, no government contracts for that, is there?”

“Not unless you've got a flop of a green earth system like Solyndra had,” Doc snickered.

“Anyway, after that our boy was put to work evaluating other countries' programs, specifically those in the Middle East. He had announced that Libya's program was a bluff well before it was proven to be. Conversely, he had correctly blown the whistle on Iran before even the CIA knew what was up there. Though he's also a little loony.”

“How so?”

“Believes in UFOs. He writes long papers about mind travel. He likes to roam the wild peninsula, communing with the deer and the trees.” Jack stopped and pointed.

The subject of their conversation was sitting on a rock formation marked by a red furry algae. Doc took his first look at Professor Peters. He was tall, angular, and lithe with a hooked nose, a widow's peak of steely hair, and gray eyes that glittered like isotopes. He also wore sandals, monk's pants, and an open kimono.

“Good day, Professor,” said Jack.

“Trentepholia,” was the first thing he said as the two approached. He pointed at the rock. “Spores of this algae caused blood rain in Kerala.”

“Do you remember me? Jack Hatfield.”

“Of course,” said Peters, his tone a little annoyed. “You're Mister Truth, though you don't believe in flying saucers.” He looked Doc up and down.

Doc put out his hand. “Doc Matson, a coworker of Jack's.”

Bernie took it and gave it a solid squeeze. He regarded Jack a long moment. “So, you saved the city—twice. But they got to you, like they got to me.”