Threat Level Black (3 page)

Howe handed his entire wallet to the Secret Service agent, letting him examine his license even though his ID had been checked twice before and he already knew his name was on the list of visitors. He’d been to the West Wing of the White House only once before, and that time he had been accompanied by a high-ranking assistant to Blitz, Howard McIntyre, who’d smoothed him past all the security hoops and barriers. It was somewhat different this time around. To the men checking his ID he was just another name on the list. Howe thought he liked it that way.

The agent pointed at him and gestured to the side of the hallway. Howe stepped over to the wall, unsure of what was going on, but he wasn’t being singled out for a search and there was nothing wrong with his credentials. A moment later a phalanx of dark-suited men appeared, leading the way for President Jack D’Amici and his entourage. Dr. Blitz was at President D’Amici’s side, and the two men were engaged in a deep discussion. The secretaries of defense and state walked immediately behind, frowning deeply, while a handful of aides scurried behind, trying to keep up.

Deep furrows lined the President’s forehead. The tips of his close-cropped hair were stained gray, and though his body was trim, even on the thin side, the flesh at the corners of his chin had begun to sag. He was perhaps two decades older than Howe, young for a president, though the office weighed on him as it weighed on every man.

Howe had met him after the recovery of Cyclops One, the airborne laser plane that had been hijacked and then recovered by a team Howe had led. The pilot had come away from the meeting disappointed; spending a few minutes alone with the President had punctured the larger-than-life fantasy he’d unknowingly had of the man. But now that he saw him in the hall, absorbed in thought, Howe felt a sensation of awe take hold. This was the President of the United States, the commander in chief, and if he wasn’t larger than life—if he wasn’t a god or even a demigod—he was nonetheless a man of uncommon ability and even greater responsibility.

President D’Amici shook his head at something Blitz said. As he did he turned toward Howe, catching a glimpse of him.

“Colonel Howe, how are you?” said the President, as matter-of-factly as if he saw Howe every day. Before Howe could actually say anything in response, D’Amici added, “Good, good,” and walked on, not even breaking his stride. Blitz himself took no notice of Howe, not even pausing in his conversation.

“Hey, Colonel,” said a tall black man peeling off from the back of the formation to pump Howe’s hand.

“Tyler?”

“How the hell are you?” Major Kenal Tyler had been an Army Special Forces captain when he and Howe had met a few months before. Tyler had led a team that helped recover the Cyclops airborne laser weapon.

“You’re in D.C. now?” asked Howe.

Tyler laughed. “Everybody’s got to be somewhere. I’m on a special task force. Brain work. I’m attached to the Joint Chiefs staff, but I’ve been doing tons of work for the NSC. What are you doing these days?”

“Supposed to meet Dr. Blitz.”

“Great. You going to work for him?”

Howe shrugged.

Tyler looked at him as if he expected an explanation. When Howe didn’t offer one, the major suggested they have a drink sometime. “Where you staying?”

Howe told him the hotel. Tyler nodded—it wasn’t clear to Howe whether he was truly interested in getting together or not—then ran off down the hall to catch up with the others.

If the Secret Service agent was impressed by the fact that Howe knew the President, it didn’t show in his manner. He checked the ID again before letting Howe pass.

“Would you like some coffee, Colonel?” asked Mozelle Clarke, Blitz’s administrative assistant, when he arrived in Blitz’s office a few minutes later.

“Not really, thanks. I’m kind of coffeed out this morning.”

“Mention that to Dr. Blitz,” she said.

“Mention what?” said Blitz.

“That some people drink too much coffee.”

“I give up coffee every few months,” said Blitz, meeting him at the door. Blitz looked every bit the academic he had been before coming to work with the administration: His shirt was rumpled and his tie loose at the neck, while his glasses leaned so far off the edge of his nose it seemed impossible that they didn’t fall. Books were stacked high around the office, and the titles that were visible included tomes on biblical studies, English literature, and French philosophy as well as world politics and military analysis.

“Against my better judgment,” Blitz said, as if commenting on something he had said before.

“The coffee?” asked Howe, sitting down.

“Coffee? No. The arrangements. Keeping the contract agencies on. Privatization—between you and me—it’s bullshit. Total, complete, utter bullshit. The military ought to be in control of its own fate. I don’t buy all this outsourcing crap, even if it can be expedient.”

Howe still wasn’t sure what Blitz was talking about.

“But rearranging everything, between Congress, the budget fight—God help us if we had to raise taxes,” said Blitz.

“Yes, sir,” said Howe, falling back on the old military habit: When in doubt, salute.

“So we’re stuck with it. But if someone gives you a lemon, my stepfather always said, make lemonade. And that’s what I’d like to do.”

“Excuse me, but I’m not really following,” admitted Howe.

Blitz smiled and nodded, as if finally getting some inside joke. “National Aeronautics Development and Testing. We’ve gotten rid of Bonham—for a long time, I’d say. He’s going to plead guilty. There won’t be a trial.”

Howe nodded. A retired Air Force general, Clayton Bonham had headed the National Aeronautics Development and Testing agency. Commonly abbreviated as NADT, the private company was responsible for developing and testing cutting-edge weapons for the military. Bonham had been in the middle of the conspiracy to hijack Cyclops, using it to cheat on the tests for an augmented ABM system.

Howe realized that he should feel some relief that there would be no trial, since he would undoubtedly have been a witness in the case. But he felt as if justice had been cheated. In his opinion, no jail sentence would sufficiently punish Bonham for what he had done: betraying his trust for money.

“But the company itself—its function developing and testing new weapons systems—it has too much potential in the present political and economic climate to just walk away from,” continued Blitz. “Outsourcing and private industry sharing the risks—it’s the way we’ll be doing things for the next decade at least.”

Howe detected a note of regret in Blitz’s voice. Howe, though he had worked with NADT, agreed that outside contractors were gaining too much control over military projects. Originally conceived as a way to rein them in, NADT had helped encourage the trend. Set up as a government-sponsored company like Freddie Mac—the comparison had often been made—NADT had quickly set its own course. It now controlled or had a hand in nearly a hundred projects, including large ones like Cyclops and the Velociraptor, an improved version of the F/A-22 Raptor jet aircraft. While it wouldn’t be fair to say that the agency controlled the Pentagon, it also wouldn’t be accurate to say that the Pentagon controlled NADT. The company had far more say over individual projects than traditional contractors like Boeing ever dreamed of.

“If the structure has to remain, if outsourcing is still the order of the day,” added Blitz, “then we have to make the best of it. It does present certain opportunities—advantages in terms of expediting things, making things work. Of course, there will be reforms. That’s why it’s important to get the right people—the absolutely right people—in place.”

“Right,” said Howe absently.

“Richard Nelson is set to be elected as the new chairman, probably by the beginning of next week. But we need a new president of the company, someone to take Bonham’s place.”

“Of course.”

“Will you?”

“Will I give you recommendations?” asked Howe.

“No, I don’t want recommendations.” Blitz plucked at his goatee. It was blond, a shade lighter than the hair on the top of his head. “I want you to take the job. President of NADT. It’s going to play an important role developing weapons, not just for the Air Force, but for all the services. I want you in charge.”

“Me?”

“The President agrees. As a matter of fact, you could even say it was his idea.”

Howe leaned back in the seat.

“There will be changes. There have to be changes,” said Blitz. “You’d have the President’s confidence and free rein to get things done. A mandate to get things done.”

“I don’t know,” said Howe.

Blitz bent forward across the desk, his face intent.

“It would be an important opportunity for a man like you,” said the national security advisor. “A good career move.”

Howe started to say that he didn’t have a career: The only thing he was thinking of doing, seriously, was hooking up with a friend of his who was building spec houses up in rural New York about fifty miles from where he’d grown up. But Blitz didn’t wait for an answer.

“More than that, it will be a huge contribution to our country. Huge,” he said. “And financially it would be well worth your while.”

Howe said nothing.

“General Bonham’s base salary was roughly half a million dollars,” continued Blitz. “The entire compensation package would be somewhat complicated and would have to be negotiated.”

Half a million dollars,
thought Howe. The sum seemed incredible.

Am I worth that much?

What do they expect for that much money?

“I’m sure an equitable arrangement would be worked out. I understand you’re not the sort of man who makes decisions based on money.” Blitz got up. “Don’t answer now. Think about it. Go out there—you’ve been there. Take a long tour. A few days. Think about it.”

“Of course.”

“Go over, talk to people, talk to Jack Myron on the Defense Committee, talk to everybody. Take a week to talk to different people. I’ll arrange it—whoever you want. Mozelle will set it all up. Go over to the Pentagon, get with Admiral Christopher at the CIA. Go into it with your eyes open,” said Blitz. “As a matter of fact, I gave Congressman Myron your phone number at the hotel and your home. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, that’s fine.”

“Take some time and think,” added Blitz. “But believe me, your country needs you.”

“DIA has the intercepts and some details about how an E-bomb would work, probably from one of their Middle East sources, maybe because someone here wanted to get an understanding of it,” Fisher told Hunter in Hunter’s FBI headquarters office. “That’s the extent of it. They have Homeland Security so twisted in knots over it that they’re putting together a joint task force. Macklin and Kowalski are going to work together.”

“Where?”

“Not sure. Macklin mentioned New York, which seems to be where the terrorist cell was operating.”

“You’re sure they don’t know about our guy?”

“I’m sure.”

“How sure? Give me it on a scale of one to five.”

Fisher shrugged. “I’m not good with numbers.”

“They’re trying to muscle into our case,” said Hunter. “Those fucks. They want to take our deserter. Fuckheads.”

Fisher generally approved of cussing in a man; it implied an appreciation for the finer things in life, like spit and horses that finished just out of the running. But from Hunter’s mouth the words sounded as if they were being read from a dictionary.

“We have to bring this guy in,” said Hunter. “We have to get him out of Korea.”

“Okay,” said Fisher.

“I want you to do it.”

“Sure,” said Fisher.

“Bring him in, we debrief him, go the whole nine yards. We need our own task force,” added Hunter. “Yeah, that’s what we need: a task force. Yeah. We’ll get military people, CIA—the right CIA people. This is a big deal, Andrew. A very big deal.”

Fisher didn’t like the sound of that. Whenever Hunter used his first name—with or without expletives—trouble surely followed.

And as for working with the CIA…

“We really don’t need a task force,” he said. “Not yet. We have to make sure this guy is real. Then we can figure out how we’re going to get him. If the CIA is involved, there are going to be meetings and written estimates, budget lines….”

“You’re in the big time now, Fisher. You have to think big.
Big.”

“Can I smoke in here?”

Hunter blinked. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Just checking to see if it was you I was standing in front of.”

“You fly out to—what was the name of that town in Arizona again?”

“Applegate.”

“Yeah, right. Fly out to Applegate, meet the scientist, make contact, find out what we need. I’ll get a task force going. What we’ll do is, we’ll get everyone who’s not on the DIA–Homeland Security task force on our task force. Then we’ll nail those bastards to the wall.”

“Assuming this guy is for real,” said Fisher. “Assuming he knows something about E-bombs. Assuming there’s some sort of connection between North Korea and Middle Eastern terrorists who are so dumb even the DIA can stumble across them.”

“Right,” said Hunter. “Go for it.”

“What?”

“The whole nine yards.”

“Why not ten?” asked Fisher.

He made his escape while Hunter tried to come up with the answer.

North Korean army general Kuong Ou had not begun his life as a superstitious man, nor was he presently given to omens or fortune-telling, except for this: He played
o-koan
every morning.

The ancient arrangement of dominoes—the Korean words, taken from the Chinese, meant “five gateways,” a reference to famous battles fought by an ancient general—was a longtime habit. He had learned the skill as a babe, studying the meaning of the bone tablets.
O-koan
could be played as a game of solitaire, a mathematical puzzle to be worked out, but it was also an ancient way of predicting the future and seeing beyond the future to the world as it was, the cycle of endless rearrangement and sorrow. There were lessons in every piece and rule, most importantly this: The lowest tablets were the most powerful when combined. Even as general of an army division and the head of the North Korean Military Research Institute, Kuong Ou could not afford to forget that lesson.

Kuong held the pair—the two and four, the one and two, called
chi tsün
—in his hand, turning them over as he considered their relation to the event unfolding in the world around him. The regime was in collapse, army units openly rebelling. Even many of Kuong’s men had deserted him, including his cousin Sang. Kuong had not heard from Kim Jong Il, the Korean ruler and his half-brother, in two weeks. He had begun to believe even that he was dead.

There were many plans to assassinate the leader. There were even plans to assassinate Kuong Ou. He had already killed the conspirators he was sure of, but to eliminate every possible enemy he would have had to kill the entire division he commanded, and half the leadership of the rest of the army and air force besides. And that didn’t even include the silent traitors, those who told lies and claimed they could be counted on but who Kuong knew would vanish at the moment of need.

Kuong Ou had to publicly maintain his position and the regime. This was his duty, and to shirk it would bring dishonor much worse than death: Death was merely a stage in the cycle, whereas dishonor followed one through many cycles and could only be expunged with great exertion. On the other hand, he was not a fool: Given the choice, he preferred to live. He had made many plans to escape, holding them as contingencies against disaster.

One by one, they were disappearing. The easiest—escaping north to China or south to the so-called Republic—had been blocked long ago. The units on both borders had leaders who were his enemies, and even if he made it past them he would never be safe in either country, even for the short time he needed to get away from there.

But he would succeed. He would have revenge against the Americans who had placed his country, his leader, and himself in this predicament. The bones foretold it.

Kuong Ou scooped up the tablets and prepared to play another game.