Operation Damocles (21 page)

“They’ll never believe that.”

“No, they won’t, but they will believe that I just screwed up, and that I’m trying to save face by blaming it on a computer glitch. They won’t suspect that I did it deliberately, and they won’t suspect that you had anything to do with it. Will you help me?”

Goldman smiled, “Sure, buddy, I’m with you. Tomorrow, we do the deed. Right now, I guess we had better get in there.”

“Thanks, Pete.” Phelps’ lip trembled with the emotion of his gratitude. As he turned his back, and started through the open door of the command center, Goldman hit him on the side of the neck with the edge of his hand. Phelps fell to his hands and knees, stunned. Goldman pulled a heavy instrument module from the rack near the door, and brought it down on Phelps’ head.

Captain Cogdil, had just turned away from a printer, several folds of greenbar between his hands, when he glanced up through the door and witnessed Goldman’s act. “What in God’s name—” he yelled, springing toward them.

Goldman smiled, looking down at Phelps’ bloody head, and tossed the instrument module on the floor. It hit with a heavy thud, and lay still. “Sir, I’ve just killed a lousy little traitor, that’s what.”

Cogdil drew his pistol and pointed it at Goldman. “On the floor,” he said.

Goldman said angrily, “He was going to sabotage Diana, sir. He wanted me to help him.”

“If you open your mouth again, I’m going to put a round in your knee. On the floor, mister. Now!”

Goldman complied, red-faced and silently fuming.

Cogdil stood over Goldman with his pistol pointing at the man’s back. He called to a gawking lieutenant inside the command center, “Evans, call the A.P.s. Tell them it’s an emergency. You got that?”

“Yes, sir,” yelled Evans, rushing to the desk phone.

###

In minutes, Goldman had been handcuffed and taken away. Within the hour, Cogdil was giving a preliminary statement to the provost marshall, and to Colonel Whitfield, the deputy base commander.

“I had just assumed the watch when it happened, sir,” he told Whitfield. “I saw Phelps fall out of the corner of my eye, I guess. As I looked up, I saw Goldman pull an indicator module off the calibration rack and hit Phelps in the head with it.”

“No idea what provoked the attack?” asked Whitfield.

“No, sir. I didn’t pay any attention to them when I arrived. They were standing near the door talking. I relieved Captain Robinson. I think he was talking to them when I got here. He may know something about it. After Goldman hit Phelps, he said that he had killed him because he was a traitor.”

“Do you know Phelps and Goldman?”

“Yes, sir. I haven’t had much social contact with Goldman. I share the opinion of most of the staff, that he’s an asshole. Phelps was a decent, likable, naïve kid—never slacked, always ready to help, good at his job, always friendly, trusted everybody. I can’t tell you, sir, how badly I wanted to shoot that grinning son of a bitch in the face.”

“Think there was any truth in Goldman’s accusation?”

“Sir, Phelps was a small-town boy from Iowa. He loved his mother and father; he had a pretty little thing waiting for him. He wanted to get married and start a computer sales and service shop when his hitch was over. They don’t come any more American than him. I’d stake a year’s pay on it.

“It wouldn’t make any difference if he was a spy. The kid was down, on the deck, when Goldman caved his head in. The murdering bastard smiled, can you believe that? After doing something like that, he smiled!”

XXIX

Reed spent two days in Atlanta. The afternoon and evening of the second day, he spent several hours with his friend from the computer center at the new C.I.A. headquarters.

Frederick von Braun was a dark-haired, blue-eyed young man of medium height who wore glasses and Armani suits. A yuppie, in eighties parlance. He also worshipped James Reed as the big, sophisticated, super-spy brother that he had never had.

Reed called him the evening he arrived, and asked Fred to meet him. When von Braun walked through the restaurant where they had arranged to meet, he walked right by Reed without recognizing the dark, Latin-looking gentleman in the window booth. Reed laughed, and as von Braun gazed blankly around the room, he beckoned him over. He was aghast at the change in Reed, and it took him awhile to relax and resume a semblance of his normal, gregarious spirit. He kept looking at Reed, as if trying to confirm what his eyes were telling him, intermittently shaking his head and laughing.

Townsend/Reed decided not to tell him all the particulars of his new identity or location until some indefinite time in the future. Not for lack of trust, but as a precaution. Too many people were at risk, and you learned to place your organization and the lives of your comrades over one person’s feelings. Fred understood, and believed in his hero’s promise. He did tell him briefly about Broderick’s unit and the falsified charges.

###

Fred took him to an off-site office that served as a satellite communications center for the systems research unit he worked for. Fred got Reed through the security post—got him badged and through the inner security door and into the low-security installation. They walked through brightly lit corridors that were delineated by modular furniture—a rabbit warren of cubicles, each with a computer desk and hutch, computer terminal, office chair and horizontal file cabinet.

They found Fred’s cubicle, and Townsend smiled at the personal memorabilia tacked up on the partition walls: photos of girls, old European inns and tourist sites in Switzerland and Austria, a picture of Fred with his graduating class from the academy.

Fred pulled in another chair from an unoccupied cubicle for Townsend, and turned his terminal on. Once it had booted up, he gave Townsend access into the mainframe computer system through his terminal, then went to a break room to get them some coffee from a vending machine.

By the time he returned, Townsend had inserted the 3.5-inch diskette that he had brought with him and loaded the history profile and security clearance information into the system. Fred had not seen the data.

Next, Fred keyed in the names and identity numbers that Townsend had provided. They were the employee locator numbers of Broderick and his remaining personnel. He also did a search for agency telephone traffic from the Miami area, filtered out the resident office and agents, and correlated the personnel data as a crosscheck.

Broderick had wisely moved to a location in South Carolina, just up the coast between Savannah and Charleston. There were dozens of barrier islands and miles of empty beaches, all within an hour’s drive of main, arterial Highways 95 and 16. From the volume of telephone traffic, Townsend concluded that Broderick was extremely busy with something.

Townsend surmised that he was probably using underworld contacts and petty criminals to establish a boiler room operation and computer net. It would take too much time to find and indoctrinate suitable people from other agency sources. It took a lot of arranging and legwork to organize the kind of propaganda that Broderick specialized in, and leaks could not be tolerated. Broderick could use a criminal record for leverage in exacting obedience from that type, and the proper lack of inhibitions and moral character were already in place. The media would not have supported, or even given air time, to anyone who decided to spill the beans, but it helped to use people who already had a healthy and ignoble interest in not doing so.

Broderick thought of himself as a creative genius when it came to his work. In reality, Townsend admitted, he did have a feral intelligence, but without the bias and collusion of the news media, and the use of an unaccounted-for federal budget, he would have been just another dirty little killer.

It looked to Townsend like Broderick was gearing up for something big, and he thought he knew what it was. Broderick had dropped hints of a plan to discredit the nationalists—to make their motives suspect. If the government underworld succeeded in overcoming the weapon, they would need to brand the patriot movement as the work of cultists and terrorists. The new regime was popular, and growing more so with each passing day, as greater numbers of people came to trust the promise that this was not enslavement, but a return to liberty and uniform justice. The seed of personal freedom had been planted in their minds. That trust had to be turned around.

In order to regain its former power, the government had to offer something in place of freedom. It had to offer the hope of warmth and security in a cold, insecure world, and they had to destroy that budding faith in the makers of the weapon. The only way was to make them think the nationalists were killing people without reason.

It was Broderick’s favorite scheme, but on a much grander scale. To be convincing, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of citizens would have to be sacrificed in order to simulate even a small sample of the destruction that the weapon was capable of. How were they planning to accomplish it?

The only thing that came to Townsend’s mind was a napalm and incendiary bombing of a city. That would take time, and a lot of bombs. People would see the planes and the falling bombs. The destruction would hardly be sufficient to kill and silence every inhabitant—and they couldn’t use a nuclear device because the space weapon did not leave radioactive residue.

Suddenly, it came to him. “Fred, see if you can find any unusual stockpiling of gasoline. I think I have an idea what the bastard is planning.”

“Funny you should mention gasoline. Somebody in the community has recently been buying truckloads of gasoline and having it delivered to Miramar Naval Air Station on the California coast. Almost a hundred and fifty thousand gallons. Nothing unusual for the Navy—they have lots of vehicles—but why is the community buying it? A lot of this Broderick guy’s phone traffic is going that way, too. What do you think it means?”

Townsend stared into space for a moment. “I can tell you exactly what it means. It figures that it would be a western city; they want to destroy the support for the movement that exists in the west.

“Unless I miss my guess, one of the major cities—L.A., San Diego or San Francisco—is Broderick’s target. They are planning to kill a city. L.A. is my guess. Heavy industry, cross-section of ethnic backgrounds and races, center of shipping and overseas trade—it would hurt the country the most. Stir up the most hate.”

Townsend thought a moment. “Los Angeles is ideal for another reason. The stagnant air patterns that cause much of L.A.’s smog problems are perfect for their purpose. Some night, several large tanker planes, KC-10s maybe, equipped with aerosol spray systems, will fly over the heart of the city spraying finely atomized gasoline into the air at an altitude of about three thousand feet. If they pick a night with just enough wind to stir and mix the droplets, and spread the saturated air over a wide area, they can kill millions. When the planes clear the area, they will ignite the cloud. Short of a hydrogen bomb, nothing could possibly equal the destruction.

“With so much military air traffic in the area already, no one will give the tankers a second thought. At night, no one would see the spray. Survivors won’t be able to point any fingers, or even guess where it came from. They will likely believe that the space weapon is responsible.”

“Good lord! Do you really think the community would do such a thing, Jimmy? To Americans?”

“Fred, this twisted son of a bitch is not the community. He’s a mole, but he’s a sanctioned mole, and he works for a hidden power structure. Where better to operate from, without discovery, than within an agency where no one knows anything about what anyone else is doing. The agency is busy looking outward, not auditing itself, and when the White House and others with clout get involved, even the agency heads don’t ask too many questions. It’s a perfect cover for an operation like Broderick’s.

“Someone slipped up in screening me, and I ended up in Broderick’s little cadre, much to my regret. Although, I’m almost glad now. If I didn’t know about it, I couldn’t do anything about it, and I do want to do something about it. To answer your question, yes, he would do it in a heartbeat, and never lose a minute’s sleep over it. I’ve got to stop him. We’ve got to stop him, Fred. I need your help. Will you help me?”

“Jimmy, an industrial security clearance is one thing, but this sounds an awful lot like treason we’re talking here. You know I believe in you, but you’ve got to admit, this destroying L.A. thing is pretty fuckin’ incredible. What are you asking me to do?”

“Just to find out who in the community authorized the fuel, exactly where it’s being stored, any connected business such as movement of tanker aircraft to Miramar or vicinity. Anything on tanker aircraft modifications. Anything connected with Broderick’s operation that involves the west coast. Look, Fred, if I’m wrong, nothing will happen, and your conscience is clear. You’re not being asked for state secrets or anything that would compromise normal agency business. Any problems with that?”

“No, I guess not, Jimmy, but I feel funny about all this. You know I want to help you, and I feel like I’ve let you down, man. I’m really feeling gut-sick over it. At the same time, I feel like a traitor. Please tell me something that will make me feel better.”

Townsend smiled reassuringly. “Welcome to the spy business, Fred. It’s not as glamorous in the trenches as you thought, is it?” He put a hand on his friend’s arm, and forced Fred to meet his eyes. “Fred, the Cold War is as alive now as it ever was. The only difference is that the enemy has moved onshore. He has infiltrated our government, slowly, insidiously, for years. Nationality has lost its meaning, that’s all. And we’ve all been looking the other way. It only became noticeable when the Soviet Union collapsed. Suddenly, the threat that had been the focus of our attention for the past forty years was gone. In spite of all their efforts to divert attention to the conflicts in other countries—some of which they may even be responsible for starting—Americans began to notice that a lot of crap was happening here at home.

“This administration has divided the country, singled out groups of dissenting people and with the help of the media, attached labels to them, in order to isolate and brand them bad, turn public opinion against them. Many of those groups are comprised of ordinary, patriotic people that were veterans and heroes of past wars. The National Rifle Association, and similar groups. They love this country, and they want to return it to the way it was. Now they are made out to be extremists, and right-wing radicals.

“There is a real push to unite the world under one big, incompetent government, irrespective of widely differing cultural beliefs, political systems and faiths. Almost no one in the world wants that. If the powers that be get their way, the people won’t have any choice in the matter.”

Fred’s eyes searched Townsend’s face, growing wider as he listened. Then they became furtive, began to avoid his, as if searching for a reason to suddenly be somewhere else. Townsend’s heart sank. He knew that he had made a mistake by confiding too much to the young man, and he didn’t know how to recover. He had overlooked the civil brainwashing that had molded Fred’s life, and his lack of experience against which to weigh things.

Fred had never known personal warfare, or hunger, or lean times, or a time of real internal unrest in this country. Life was a TV adventure to him, and Townsend had suddenly lifted up the curtain and shown him the seamy life behind the screen. His hero worship was turning to fear and suspicion before Townsend’s very eyes, and he was seeing Townsend in the light of his social conditioning. He was beginning to believe the agency line that Reed had turned. Townsend couldn’t do anything now but forge ahead, and try to win back the boy’s confidence.

“Think about it, Fred,” he pleaded. “Why, all of a sudden, is there so much domestic violence? And is it really as prevalent as they say? Ask yourself how crime statistics can be going down, and at the same time the media is trying to whip people into a frenzy of fear. Why are we continually moving toward martial law? Why the all-out attack on the Constitution? Why have the once-united people of this country been broken up into separate, distrustful factions that blame each other for all their misfortunes? The media are being used to incite the distrust—to destroy unity. Why, Fred?”

Townsend paused, waited while a woman carrying a printout passed Fred’s cubicle.

“Fred, Khrushchev once said that they would bury us without firing a shot. I don’t know if there is a real connection or not, but it sure seems that our country is under attack by people espousing the same political doctrine of a supreme socialist state, and an unarmed, submissive populace. You tell me what it means, Fred.

“My fall from grace came when I refused to kill an
American citizen
for saying what she believed. You explain that to me in context with your idea of patriotism, Fred.”

“I can’t. I don’t know what to think,” said the boy, looking miserable.

Suddenly, pleadingly, he grabbed Townsend’s arm. “Jimmy, let’s talk to my section supervisor, Richard Phelps. He’s a great guy. He’ll know what to do about all this. He’ll straighten it out, Jimmy. Honest. I’ll vouch for you, and he’ll get you reinstated. You’ve got to come in, man.”

“I’m sorry Fred, honestly,” said Townsend. “There comes a time in every person’s life when they have to fish or cut bait. You can’t always feel safe and righteous and above it all. Somebody has to get down in the ditch and fix the broken sewer. I guess it’s my time. It’s not yours, though. I’m letting you off the hook. All I ask is that you keep everything I’ve told you to yourself. Can I count on you to do that?”