The Solomon Effect (27 page)

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Friday 30 October

Early that morning, General Gerald Boyd took the train up to
Boston to visit his daughter, Taylor, now in her second year at Harvard Law School. They had lunch, and a fudge sundae at Billings and Stover, then went for a walk along the Charles. They were sitting on a bench in Harvard Yard when he got a call from Colonel Lee.

“There’s a new development,” whispered Lee.

“Excuse me, honey,” Boyd told his daughter, smiling apologetically. “This’ll just take a minute.” Standing, he strolled away some fifteen feet and said to Lee, “Now what?”

“I thought you should know the Russians have sent the fingerprints of Rodriguez’s team to Division Thirteen. If they start looking into Rodriguez’s files and see—” The man’s voice cracked.

“Calm down, Colonel.” Boyd squinted up at the banks of heavy white clouds ripe with the promise of snow. Lee was rapidly becoming more of a liability than an asset. If Rodriguez would get his ass back to the States—

“We need to talk,” said Lee.

Boyd glanced over at Taylor. She was slim, like her mother, with fine light brown shoulder-length hair and a dimple that appeared in one cheek as she watched a squirrel grab an acorn and run. Whenever he thought of her, he still pictured the little kid in pigtails he used to take fishing. He had to keep reminding himself she was all grown up now. He said, “All right. I’m tied up the rest of the day, but I can meet you at the Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek Park at 0730 tomorrow morning.” If Rodriguez wasn’t back by then, Boyd would just have to take care of the Colonel himself.

“I’ll be there.”

Boyd slipped his phone away, then walked back toward Taylor, a smile on his face. “How’d you like to drive your old man to the train station?”

Kaliningrad, Russia: Friday 30 October

Jax barely managed to send Matt an urgent request to look into possible links between Kline and Paperclip, before the flight attendant’s warning voice crackled over the intercom and their plane pushed away from the gate.

“Operation Paperclip,” said October, watching him put away his phone. “Tell me about it.”

He glanced at the staid German businessman sitting in the aisle across from them, and kept his voice low. “Paperclip was the code name for a project dreamed up at the end of World War II by Allen Dulles.”

“Who was…?”

“Dulles? He was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence. Basically, the idea was to sneak Nazi scientists into the United States.”

“Why would the United States want to import Nazis?”

“Because we were already gearing up for a fight with our new rivals, the Russians.”

“Ah. I see.”

“Even before the war was over, both the Americans and the Russians had competing intel teams ready to fan out over the German countryside and grab any kind of scientific booty they could get their hands on. And the biggest prizes of all were the German scientists themselves. At first the U.S. government just took the guys they nabbed back to places like Fort Hunt in Virginia, with the idea of interrogating them and then sending them home. But the more they learned about German advances in everything from rocketry to aeronautics, the more they wanted to keep them.”

“Isn’t that, like, slave labor or something?”

“Sort of. But a lot of these guys had wives and kids in the parts of Germany taken over by the Russians. They struck a deal: they’d work for the Americans if the U.S. government would get their families out of harm’s way.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“The problem was, some of the people they wanted to keep had been real Nazis—I mean Party members. And the U.S. had laws against the immigration of former Nazis. So Dulles and his boys basically drew up fake dossiers on those guys. The really,
really
bad Nazis had to be smuggled in through the ratlines and given false identities. The program went on for years, even after presidents like Truman and Eisenhower thought it had been shut down.”

“How many scientists are we talking about?”

“The official number is sixteen hundred. But who knows? A lot of the relevant documents are still classified.”

“After sixty years? But…why?”

Jax gave a soft laugh. “The government likes to pretend it classifies stuff for ‘national security’ reasons. But the truth is, most of that shit is kept under wraps because it’s
embarrassing—either to some very important people or to the government itself.”

“But Kline wasn’t a nuclear physicist. He was just a doctor. Why would they want him?”

“Because we had a huge chemical and bioweapons program going ourselves. It wasn’t quite as crazy as what happened in Germany under Hitler, but there was some pretty ugly stuff going on.”

He expected her to say,
I don’t believe it.
Instead, she was silent for a moment, her gaze fixed on the thick white clouds on the other side of the window. When she spoke, her voice was a hushed whisper. “This is starting to sound really, really scary.”

“No shit.”

Washington, D.C.: 31 October, 6:25
A.M.
local time

Rodriguez pushed through the doors from Customs and Immigration into a nearly deserted corridor, and put in a call to Boyd.

“It’s about time you got here. Colonel Lee is becoming a problem,” said Boyd, his voice gravelly with annoyance. “He’ll be at Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek Park at 0730. Can you make it?”

Rodriguez glanced at his watch. “I can make it.”

By the time their connecting flight from Berlin touched down
at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., it was Saturday, October 31.

Halloween.

A Company car whisked them off to Langley, where Matt handed them mugs of steaming coffee and said, “I know you guys are tired. But we’re running out of time.”

Jax leaned back against Matt’s steel table and blew on the vile brew in his cup. “Have you looked at the calendar? I’d say we’re out of time.”

“And the DCI and Homeland Security still aren’t buying any of this.” Matt’s mop of curly, gray-streaked dark hair looked wilder than ever, and dark circles ringed his eyes. “I even went to the VP with the report you sent from Berlin on Tobie’s last viewing. But without something more definite…” He shrugged. “I’m afraid we’re on our own. Everything we do from here on out is off the Company clock.”

Tobie took one sip of her coffee and quietly set it aside. “What did you find out about Martin Kline?”

“Looks like the Russians were right: from what I can
figure, the U.S. government brought Dr. Kline over here in the fall of ’forty-five. But after that, he just disappears. Everything related to him is still classified. Even the DCI couldn’t access it if he wanted to. That kind of clearance needs to come from the Secretary of Defense, and he’s not playing ball.”

Tobie said, “I can’t believe they brought that guy over here. He was a war criminal!”

Matt let out his breath in a harsh huff. “Ever hear of Arthur Rudolph? He built the V-2 rocket for Hitler at the Mittelwerk factory, where something like twenty thousand prisoners they used as slave labor died. We brought him over and put him to work designing the Saturn V rocket we used in the Apollo moon landings.”

Jax rubbed his forehead. “So where did Kline go?”

“That’s anybody’s guess.” Turning away, Matt picked up a sheaf of papers. “I had better luck with this stuff.”

Jax looked up. “What’s that?”

“I ran the fingerprints your buddy Andrei sent. Do you have any idea how much shit I’m taking around here for receiving a fax from the Russian SVR?”

“Andrei is not my buddy.”

“Maybe. But you owe him on this one. Turns out we had all four sets of prints in our files. The shooter with the Special Forces tattoo was a guy from Nebraska named Ben Salinger, while his buddy was an SAS vet, Ian Kirkpatrick. Both left the service several years ago for the big bucks to be had in the private warfare sector.”

“And the Chechen?”

“He was on the CIA payroll up until about eight years ago, when he went private.” Matt reached for another file and held it out. “All three of them worked with this guy.”

Peering over Jax’s shoulder, Tobie found herself staring at a photograph of the lean, dark-haired man she’d originally
remote viewed standing in a dark garden in Kaliningrad. “He’s the one who got away. How’d the Russians get his prints?”

“Off one of the cars.”

“Major Carlos Rodriguez,” read Jax. “U.S. Army Rangers. Retired.”

“Let me guess,” said Tobie. “He’s gone private, too.”

“You got it,” said Matt. “These guys were all mercenaries.”

“So who are they working for now?”

Matt scratched the beard under his chin. “I don’t know. But this guy Rodriguez has been doing a lot of contract jobs for the U.S. government lately. His last assignment was to put together a twenty-man team to train some Ukrainian Special Forces guys.”

Tobie said, “What do you mean by ‘contract’ jobs?”

“Basically, they’re no-bid contracts executed at the specific direction of the commanding general in charge of an operation. But here’s the interesting thing: in the last two years, Rodriguez and his boys have worked on six contracts. And five of those contracts were all for the same guy: Lieutenant General Gerald T. Boyd.”

Jax swore softly under his breath.

Tobie said, “Who’s General Gerald Boyd?”

“The Deputy Commander of SOCOM—the U.S. Special Operations Command.”

She sank into one of the battered chairs beside the table. “Are you telling me we’ve stumbled into some kind of black U.S. military project?”

Matt shook his head. “Not necessarily. Most people don’t realize how little accountability there is on what these black ops people do. Once they slap a project ‘Top Secret,’ there’s no oversight. They’ve always had trouble with this kind of shit—Special Forces guys running their own secret projects without any authorization from above. Even the men
working for them didn’t know their dirty little tricks weren’t really authorized.”

Jax’s eyes narrowed. “Hang on there. Just because Boyd used Rodriguez in the past doesn’t mean he’s the one using him now.”

Matt tossed him another file. “I’ve been looking into our general. The guy’s a real loose cannon. He’s been linked to everything from coordinating the activities of unauthorized assassination squads to funding black ops that were off the books. He also has a bad habit of shooting off his mouth in public. It was mildly embarrassing when he was going around calling the ‘War on Terror’ an Apocalyptic Crusade against the forces of the Antichrist. But then he came out with a few statements that teetered on the edge of anti-Semitism, and some key people in Washington decided that enough was enough. They’re retiring him at the end of the year, which means no fourth star for our man Boyd. From what I understand, he’s pretty bitter about that. He’s been making noises about finally doing what he says should have been done a long time ago.”

Tobie said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Matt shrugged. “The guy’s not stupid. He hasn’t spelled it out.”

Jax leafed through the General’s file. “Have you asked him about Rodriguez?”

“I tried to make an appointment to get in to see him, but his aide, Phillips, basically told me to take a flying leap.”

“So how do we talk to him?” said Tobie.

“We don’t make an appointment,” said Matt. “Fortunately, he’s here in D.C. right now. He’s supposed to be a guest of honor at a charity breakfast at the Renaissance Washington being given today by Paul Ginsburg.”

Tobie glanced over at Jax. “He’s one of your mother’s ex-husbands, right?”

Matt grinned. “Number three.”

“Jesus,” said Jax. “You keep track of them?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I keep track of them. They’re great contacts. I already talked to Ginsburg. He’s arranging to get you a ticket for the breakfast. All you need to do is get cleaned up.”

“Gladly,” said Jax. Straightening, he pulled out his travel wallet and dumped Jason Aldrich’s passport, driver’s license, and credit cards in a pile on the table. “Here. Do me a favor, would you? Burn this shit.”

Matt laughed, but shook his head. “You know I can’t do that. If we don’t turn that stuff back in to ODIS, two dozen bureaucrats are gonna get their collective tits in a wringer.”

Jax scooped up the documents and turned toward the door. “Then I’ll burn them. One of these days, some lazy idiot in ODIS is going to get me killed.”

He suddenly froze.

“What?” said Tobie, watching the smile that spread slowly across his face. “What is it?”

He turned, the offending documents held up in one triumphant fist. “AODIS. That’s it.”

She shook her head. “What is AODIS?”

“The Archives for the Office of Documentation and Identity Support,” said Matt. “They’re the guys who supply field agents with their legends.”

“Their whats?”

“Their legends. You know—their cover stories. Life histories, documents, pocket litter. That stuff. They do the same thing for defectors and anyone else the Government wants to bring in on the sly. They’ve been around since the days of the OSS and TSD.”

She knew what the OSS was—the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. But…“What’s TSD?”

“Technical Services Division,” said Jax, shoving the
debris of Jason Aldrich’s legend into the pocket of his jacket. “That’s what ODIS used to be called. Their name might have changed, but that’s about it. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mudd inked our man Kline’s name into those old leather-bound ledgers himself.”

“Mud?” Tobie looked from one man to the other. “Am I missing something?”

“Herman Mudd,” said Matt. “Otherwise known as the Bowling Ball. He’s in charge of the legend archives. And Jax is right: if the Company manufactured new IDs for the really dirty guys they brought in through the ratlines, then you can bet fifty miles of red tape that some bureaucrat made a record of it.”

Tobie said, “But that information would be classified, too, right?”

Matt shook his head. “All the operational files and documents are classified. But the receipts they made Kline sign for his new birth certificate and social security number? That’s pure administrative shit.”

Tobie pushed up from her chair. “So all we need to do is go to this legends archive, and we’ll be able to track down where Martin Kline went, right?”

She watched the excited animation drain from Matt’s hairy face. “There’s a problem,” she said. “What? They’re not open on Saturday?”

Jax squinted up at the buzzing fluorescent light overhead and said nothing.

It was Matt who answered her. “Oh, they’re open. Mudd practically lives down there. The problem is, Jax had a little run-in with the Bowling Ball a couple of years ago.”

“A little run-in? What kind of a little run-in?”

“Let’s just put it this way: if anyone from Division Thirteen goes near Herman Mudd with this request, we can kiss our information good-bye.”

“So how do we get our hands on this stuff?”

She realized both men were now looking at her. “Me? Why me? I’m with Division Thirteen, too. Remember?”

“Yeah, but the Bowling Ball doesn’t know that.”

“Why do you keep calling Mudd ‘the Bowling Ball’?”

Jax smiled, and turned toward the door. “You’ll see.”