The Ajax Protocol-7 (11 page)

"We'll see what Stephanie can make out of this," he said.

"Here's a logbook of some sort," Ronnie said. He held up a black binder notebook and flipped through the pages. "Looks like our friend on the floor was running tests. It doesn't make much sense to me."

"Something else for Steph to look at," Nick said.

"I'd better call Sam for pickup," Ronnie said.

"Right. By the time he gets here we should have found anything else worth checking out."

"What about the guy we tied up in the woods?" Selena said.

"I forgot about him." Nick ran his fingers through his hair. "We can't just leave him here. I guess we have to take him back with us. Harker will know how to handle it. Ronnie, you and Selena go get him while I look around in here."

They left the room. Five minutes later they were back.

"He's dead," Ronnie said. "Looks like he threw up and choked on the gag."

"Bad luck. I wouldn't wish that on anyone," Nick said.

"I went through his pockets. He had a wallet and civilian ID. There wasn't anything else."

"We need to check the others," Nick said. "Call your friend and tell him to come get us."

"Already did it. He should be here in a little over an hour."

CHAPTER 23

It was Thursday night in Alexandria, Virginia, not far from the Capitol. General Westlake sat at home in his favorite chair, reading the
Iliad,
the epic poem about the war between Greece and Troy. It was Homer who had inspired him with the name for the operation that was about to begin.

Westlake sighed. He had been denied the opportunity to lead vast armies. His enemies in the Pentagon had made sure of that. They would soon discover the mistake they'd made by shutting him out from important command in the field.

His secured phone signaled a call.

"Westlake."

"We have a problem." The caller was Senator Martinez. Westlake felt his good mood begin to dissolve.

"What kind of problem?"

"There was a raid on the Alaska facility. We were unable to complete the test. "

"What happened?"

"Thorpe was about to activate when some kind of special ops force showed up. We ran a satellite pass. The helicopter that brought in Thorpe and the security team was destroyed. There are bodies outside the buildings and I can't reach anyone on-site. We have to assume the equipment was taken off-line by whoever hit the site."

"CIA?"

"My sources say no. I can't find any official operation, covert or otherwise. My guess is we're dealing with Rice's group, the Project. They have the balls to pull off something like this."

Westlake could feel his blood pressure rising, an instant band tightening around his forehead. The failure of his attempt to eliminate the Project had come back to haunt him.

"Those people have more lives than a cat," he said. "It's a setback, but that's all."

On the other end of the connection, Martinez said, "We've lost Thorpe."

"We don't need him. Everything he did is documented. Hell, any college sophomore could follow his directions and program the satellite."

"If he's a prisoner, that could be a problem," Martinez said. "He knows too much."

"Send someone up there and check it out. We need to know for certain."

"All right."

Westlake said, "We'll use Colorado for the rest of the transmissions. I wanted to reserve that for the final phase, but it will give us a chance to work out any glitches in managing the operation. "

"Have you chosen the London location yet?"

"Yes. We'll place the diversion in the financial district. The amplifier will go in an entertainment complex called the O2. There's a concert scheduled a week from Saturday. Some British rock star. It's sold out. There will be 20,000 people packed together and screaming their heads off. I thought that would be a good place to put our little gift box. The device will activate fifteen minutes after the bomb, while emergency services are responding to the explosion."

"There will be real panic in a crowd like that. A lot of people are going to get killed."

"You're not getting squeamish on me, are you Senator?"

"No, but are you sure it's necessary? After all, if we put it somewhere else it will serve our purpose just as well and there will be fewer casualties."

"Provocation has to be severe. We want to encourage the strongest possible response on the part of the British government. You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs."

"Please, Louis, spare me the clichés."

"Then spare me your false humanitarian concerns. I didn't hear you commenting on the numbers of dead in Russia."

Martinez thought about it. "I see your point. You're right."

"Of course I am."

"What shall we do about the Project?"

"The damage is done," Westlake said. "They screwed up the test but things are too far along for them to do much else. They don't know what we plan. By the time they figure it out, it will be too late. They won't be able to stop it."

"Still..."

"I'll talk with Edmonds and convince him the Project is interfering with a classified military operation. I should've done it before. He'll be so happy a four-star general is taking him seriously that he'll jump on the chance to do something he thinks is presidential."

"He could be useful. You think we should leave him in office afterward? He's familiar to the public. It might lend an air of legitimacy to the new government."

"I haven't decided that yet. Let's see if he'll cooperate."

CHAPTER 24

In Virginia, Stephanie waited until Elizabeth finished talking with Nick.

"Well?" Stephanie said.

"They're on the way back. Ronnie has cracked ribs and a bruised ego but everybody else is all right. They're bringing a hard drive and a logbook for you to look at. They didn't find anything of consequence on the bodies. Nothing to tell us where they came from. Whoever sent them won't be using that site anymore."

"How did they gain access to a secret defense facility?" Stephanie asked.

"I don't know. They had to know where it was and how to get into it. Not many people would have that information."

"That should make it a little easier to narrow down," Stephanie said. "The hard drive Nick found could help."

"If you can read it, it might."

Harker picked up her pen and began tapping on her desktop.

"We've reached the limit of what we can do on our own," she said. "This is getting complicated and there are too many implications for national security. It's been compromised. We can't risk making a mistake. I'm going to bring in Langley. We can't trust the White House to help while Edmonds is running things but we can trust Hood."

"Lucas likes him. He's a pretty good judge of character."

Lucas Monroe and Stephanie had been lovers for the better part of a year. He was on the fast track to become Director of National Clandestine Services. If he made it, he'd be the first black man to ever hold down one of the four top directorates at Langley.

"See? That's a powerful endorsement, coming from him. How are you two getting along?"

Stephanie twisted the bracelets on her wrist and took a deep breath. "We're going to move in together."

"Steph, that's wonderful."

"We thought we'd try it out." The words came out in a hurry. "Living together. If it works, we'll make it permanent."

"You're the first person I've told," Stephanie said.

"That's wonderful," Elizabeth said again. "Are you keeping your apartment?"

"No, it's too small. So is his. We've begun looking for a place with more room."

Harker set her pen back down. "It's good to talk about something normal for a change."

"Isn't that why we do this?" Stephanie said.

"What do you mean?"

Stephanie gestured around the room, at the monitor on the wall, the files on Harker's desk. "So we can have normal lives. Our job is all about stopping people who think normal means doing whatever they want. People who start wars because they're rich, sociopathic assholes who want to get richer, or religious lunatics who think God is on their side."

"I never thought of it quite like that," Elizabeth said, "but that sounds about right."

"What are you going to tell Hood?" Stephanie asked.

"Everything. That we're on the track of something that relates to Novosibirsk and that I'm waiting for more information. I want you to look at that hard drive Nick recovered before I talk with him. The more I know, the better."

CHAPTER 25

Stephanie was waiting for them when they got back to Washington. Nick handed over the salvaged hard drive and logbook.

"Meeting tomorrow with Elizabeth at 0900," she said. "Ronnie, you come with me and we'll get those ribs checked out."

Nick turned to Selena. "Do you want to stay at my place tonight?"

"It's better if I go home. All I want is a hot bath and a good night's sleep."

He pushed his disappointment away.

"I'll see you in the morning," he said.

Back at his apartment, Nick poured himself a whiskey. He thought about Selena. What was it between them, anyway? Sometimes it seemed like they were on the same wavelength, as close to each other as a person could get to someone else. Other times, it was as if they lived on two different planets.

The whiskey warmed his stomach. He poured another. What did he really want from her? He realized he had never thought it through. He loved her, but did he want to marry her? What did people usually want from a marriage? He knew what he didn't want, he didn't want all the complications that went with having children. As far as he knew, that wasn't an issue for Selena. She had never given any indication that she wanted kids. So what was it?

He knew that most men would envy a situation like his. He had his own place and she had hers. They could get away from each other when they needed to. The sex was great. They worked well together. She could hold her own in the unusual and dangerous world they shared and he could rely on her when the chips were down. What more could anyone want?

Nick thought about Megan, the fiancée he'd lost years ago, the only woman he'd ever loved before Selena walked into his life. It was getting hard to remember how she'd looked. He used to dream about her but there had been a dream where she said goodbye and she hadn't appeared since.

Megan had been so different from Selena. He'd wanted different things with her and he'd been a lot younger then. With Megan, Nick had looked forward to a life pretty much like other people had. A civilian life with a couple of kids, a house somewhere, a job doing something where nobody was shooting at him.

Then all that disappeared in a fireball of burning jet fuel and twisted metal. The image of her plane arcing into the ground as he watched was seared into his memory.

The hell with it, he thought.

Nick finished his whiskey and went to bed.

CHAPTER 26

The next morning they were gathered in Elizabeth's office. Lamont had the cat in his lap. Burps was drooling onto his leg and purring, a low rumble beneath the conversation. Ronnie sat next to Lamont on the couch. He wore one of his Hawaiian shirts, this one with a gaudy picture of a volcano erupting in a bed of exotic flowers.

"It feels like we're running out of time," Elizabeth said. "It's nothing I can put my finger on, just a feeling."

Stephanie said. "I was able to recover some files from that hard drive, but most of it was corrupted."

Elizabeth sipped from a cup of coffee. "Before you get into that, Vysotsky called me. The Russians found something at Ground Zero in Novosibirsk. It's a receiver and amplifier. The weapon sends a beam from a satellite, the device picks it up, amplifies it and broadcasts it out over a wide area."

"Any way to trace where it came from?" Nick asked.

Harker shook her head. "Not much was left."

"What about the explosion before everybody went nuts? What did Vysotsky say about that? Does he think it's related?"

"Yes, he does. The explosion was caused by a bomb. Vysotsky thinks it was a diversion to add to the confusion and pull rescue services away from the center of the riot. He has his forensic people working on what's left of the device but he's not hopeful. At least he's keeping me informed of what he discovers."

There was a sudden silence in the room, broken only by the erratic purring of the cat, one of those spontaneous moments when no one knew what to say. Stephanie broke it.

"What Vysotsky told you fits with what I picked up on the hard drive," she said. "I found a program that tells the computer to broadcast a specific frequency to a satellite and have it relay back to the surface. There's nothing particularly unique about it. It's common practice."

"So there isn't anything to indicate who sent it?" Elizabeth asked.

"No. Anyone with a reasonable amount of computer knowledge and satellite communications could have done it."

"Then it's another dead end," Nick said.

"Not quite. The disc was in bad shape, but I salvaged part of it. The drive contained instructions that triggered the attack on Novosibirsk. The attack you stopped when you hit the facility was against Riyadh. There are more targets."

"How many more?" Selena said.

"I don't know, most of the data was corrupted. But I know one of them," Steph said. "It's in London. The GPS coordinates tell us where the receiver will be. Do you know the O2 in London?"

"The big arena that looks like a flying saucer with sticks coming out of it? The one that sits in the middle of the Thames?"

"That's the one," Steph said. "It's an indoor arena where they put on shows and sporting events, one of the biggest in Europe."

Everyone sat up a little bit straighter. Knowing where the next attack was scheduled meant they had a chance to stop it.

"When?" Selena asked. "When do they plan to target it?"