Threat Level Black (19 page)

“You’re just a guest, Fisher,” said Kowalski. “If we want your advice, we’ll ask for it.”

“I’m just saying that the thing to do would be to wait and watch for a while, see who shows up,” said Fisher. “We don’t have any other leads.”

“We will once we’re inside,” said Kowalski.

“Maybe. Or maybe the place is rigged to blow up when someone walks in the front door.”

“See, that’s where we do things differently than the FBI,” said Kowalski. “We’re blowing a hole through the sidewall.”

“That’s
different,” said Fisher.

“We don’t screw around.”

“Kowalski’s right, Andy,” said Macklin. “We can’t afford to sit on this. We have to find out what’s inside.”

“I’m not saying sit on it.” Fisher wouldn’t have liked to admit it, but he was a bit miffed at being called a guest. He prided himself on the fact that he hadn’t been invited to anything since his best friend’s bar mitzvah twenty years ago. “If you want to go in, go through that second-story window up there. Then you can check the place out, make sure there’s no explosives, and get in through the doors.”

“Take too much time,” said Kowalski.

“You already know from the radar it’s empty,” said Fisher. The DIA people had brought in a radar unit that scanned the interior of the building. In addition, they used an infrared viewer and found nothing except for two cats. “And sneaking in would give you the option of setting up a sting.”

“We can still set up a sting,” said Kowalski. “And besides, the DIA doesn’t sneak in anywhere. Neither does Homeland Defense. Right, Macklin?”

Macklin looked at Fisher, then back at Kowalski. “I guess you’re right.”

Sneaking in would have been difficult in any event, as the task force safety officer insisted that the first team in wear full protective gear, in case they actually found something. Fisher thought he detected a certain healthy skepticism in the officer’s remarks, something he hadn’t seen much of from the rest of the task force.

The special tactics people borrowed from New York City took out the door on the loading dock by shooting out the hinges with solid lead shot. Fisher had actually never seen this done and was kind of curious about it, but the protocol called for him to stay far away until the warehouse was actually secured unless he was willing to wear a hazmat suit himself. Since that would have made it difficult to smoke, he passed on the opportunity, contenting himself with watching the team from the video feed in the van. The door seemed to pop off the building, and the men disappeared inside. Ten minutes later it was all clear. Fisher got out of the van and walked the half-block to the place, arriving as the garage-style overhead door at the front of the building was rolled upward.

“There,” said one of the men, pointing to a row of large canisters against the side wall. “That looks like it.”

The tanks were the sort used to hold seltzer water in large soda fountain setups. Fisher walked over and started to inspect one; Macklin, who was wearing a respirator, grabbed him.

“Preliminary hit says they’re filled with liquid sarin,” said Macklin. “A lot worse than that coffee you’re always drinking.”

“Not necessarily,” said Fisher, but he backed away anyway.

“This is my dream place.”

Alice opened the door and stepped through the landing. Howe followed. The living room to the left was open to the second story, with large windows covering two walls. The woodwork was stained a dark walnut that matched the inlaid pattern in the oak. He followed inside the kitchen—another granite counter—which looked into a breakfast nook and a family room. A large fireplace sat at the far end.

The wine they’d had over dinner, not to mention the conversation, had left him in a mellow mood. Howe followed her through the house: It was a house, not a condominium, and it was for sale, not rent. Her voice echoed through the empty room like faint music, luring him onward.

And her perfume. That, too, was light, almost a suggestion of a scent rather than the smell itself. A flower tickled by the wind.

God,
Howe told himself,
let’s not go overboard. She’s just showing me apartments.

And houses. One house. Her dream house.

There were four bedrooms upstairs.

“Master bedroom, kids’ room, guest room,” said Alice. “Assuming there’s kids.”

“A lot of rooms.”

Jesus, what a dumb thing to say.

“What do you think? Isn’t it great?” she said when they reached the downstairs landing.

“Yeah,” he said. He didn’t trust his tongue anymore.

“Want to know the price?”

Howe shrugged. “It’s kind of big.”

“He’ll come down, I know.”

He shrugged again.

“One point two.”

“How much?”

“A million two hundred thousand. But he’ll come down. He built it on spec.” She flicked her hair back from her shoulder. “I don’t represent him, so I can tell you this. I know he’d come down a lot.”

“A million dollars. God.”

“Payments would be about what the condo was. Less, depending on the down payment.”

“I don’t know if I have a down payment.”

Alice made a face. “Your company could always loan you the money.”

Howe didn’t answer, though he realized she was probably right.

“Oh, I know, it’s my dream not yours,” she said, waving her hand at him. “I have to get back.”

“Date?”

“Oh, God, no. I always stop by and see my dad on Wednesdays. Should we set up another appointment?”

“I’d like to.”

“Tomorrow at four?”

“Tomorrow at four. Sounds good. Your office?”

“My office.”

On the way back to the real estate parking lot where he’d left his car, Howe decided he wanted to kiss her. But somehow he couldn’t find the right chance. He smiled, waved, and got into his car to drive back to his motel.

The light on Howe’s phone blinked steadily as he came in, indicating he had a message. The motel’s voice mail system was tricky to use, and Howe finally had to call down to the desk for help. The call was from a man who said he had some questions about something Howe had told a mutual friend. The man spoke so quickly on the phone that Howe had trouble making out the phone number he left, and couldn’t entirely decipher his name; it sounded like “Woeful.”

It was past nine o’clock. Howe thought he’d try the number anyway; maybe if the caller had an answering machine or voice mail he’d get at least an idea what this was about.

“Wu,” said the voice on the other end of the line, picking up right after the first ring.

“This is Bill Howe.”

“Colonel Howe, thank you for calling me back. Where are you now?”

Howe hesitated but then told him he was in his hotel.

“There’s a diner about two miles down the highway if you take a right out of your driveway,” said Wu. “Can you meet me there in half an hour?”

“What’s this about?” said Howe.

“I’ll have to talk to you in person.”

“Does this have to do with NADT?”

“I have to talk to you in person,” repeated Wu.

Howe thought back to his tour of the NADT scientific sections earlier that day, trying to connect the man’s voice and name with a face. But there had been too many people he either didn’t know at all or had met only once or twice.

“Half hour. Sure.”

Wu hung up before Howe could ask how he would recognize him.

It turned out to be surprisingly difficult for Tyler to arrange transportation across the Korean border. Inspection teams simply weren’t afforded the priority that supplies and humanitarian aid were; what’s more, the group’s connection to the Pentagon seemed to work against it. When Tyler found four spaces on a Navy helicopter that had to stop nearby, he practically jumped up in glee, even though it would mean leaving behind half the team and all of the people they were taking for security. Tyler hustled to the airfield with Colonel Yorn, Somers, and a CIA paramilitary officer named Jake Dempsey. They just barely made the helicopter, and had to squeeze in amid extra medical supplies the corpsmen were transporting. Things were so tight that the pilot told them they were five pounds under their permitted takeoff weight.

“Good thing I didn’t have much breakfast,” said Somers.

The flight took several hours and was punctuated by a stop near the DMZ to refuel. No one spoke the whole way, and expressions grew more somber as they flew. Tyler had experienced this during combat: Even the most hardened veteran and shameless wiseass tended to focus on the job ahead as zero hour drew near. But to him, this was an easy gig; he hadn’t even considered the possibility that they might be fired at.

And yet, that was a real danger. From birth, North Koreans had been taught to hate Americans, and while their army and government had collapsed, their hatred surely percolated just under the surface. Two American soldiers with M16s and grenade launchers patrolled near the runway as the helicopter put down. Seeing them reminded Tyler that they were deep in enemy territory and heavily outnumbered.

A pair of Hummers waited to take them to the forward headquarters of the division hosting them. Tyler got into one with Somers, listening as the historian talked with the driver and escort. Both men started out taciturn but within a few minutes Somers’s easygoing style had them relaxed and, if not quite loquacious, at least speaking in sentences and paragraphs rather than single words.

“They’re curious,” said the corporal behind the wheel. “I get the feeling they think we have two heads and they’re looking to see where we’re hiding the other.”

Tyler watched Somers as he carried on similar conversations with the staff at the headquarters and then later at their billet, a villa that had apparently been vacated by a high-ranking government official during the coup. While Tyler had initially wondered whether to take the older man along, he saw now it had been a good move. In just a few hours the historian had probably done the work of a dozen toiling analysts and poll takers, eliciting candid, off-the-cuff remarks. The consensus among American service people was clear: The North Koreans would be willing to go along with things for the short term at least, so long as there were reasonable measures to both keep them safe from retribution and to feed them.

“Hungriest people I ever saw,” one of the lieutenants told them.

That seemed to be the bottom line, and Tyler made sure to repeat it several times during their conference call with Moore at the end of the day. After the call, he thought maybe that was his problem as well. A full meal, a bit of rest, and he’d be ready for whatever happened in the morning.

Howe was on his second cup of coffee when the tall man stopped in front of his booth. His round, Asian face had been marked by a double scar along the right cheek, as if he’d been scratched there by a two-fingered claw.

“Are you Howe?” asked the man.

The question took him by surprise: If Wu worked for NADT, as he’d thought, he wouldn’t need to ask. And Howe didn’t remember meeting anyone with a scar so prominent on his face.

If he suggested they go anywhere, Howe told himself, he’d resist.

Wu slid into the booth. The waitress came right over and he ordered a decaf coffee. When she left, he reached into his pocket and took out a thin wallet.

“I’m with the CIA,” said Wu, showing his credentials. “I’m sorry to make such a production out of this. I couldn’t trust your phone at the motel, and I have to have the report together in a few hours.”

“Which report?” asked Howe.

“Someone on the NSC staff mentioned that you saw UAVs on the airstrip in North Korea.”

Howe nodded. Wu took out a small notepad. He’d written a brief summary of one of the reports Howe had made earlier. They went over it quickly.

“That’s basically what I saw,” said Howe when he finished. “I didn’t get that close to them.”

“But they were definitely there?”

“Yes, sir, they were.”

Wu nodded. He waited as the waitress arrived with his coffee, then took a few sips before continuing.

“The Koreans aren’t known to have any sort of craft like this,” said Wu.

“So I’ve heard.”

“You didn’t take a picture or anything?”

Howe laughed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how much you know about what I was doing there and what happened.”

“I had to ask.”

“I’m sure of what I saw, but only of what I saw. Whether those aircraft were real airplanes, UAVs, whatever, I don’t know. I talked to someone at NADT who made some guesses about how they’d be powered and that sort of thing. I can have him get in touch with you tomorrow.”

“That’s all right. I think really I have enough.” Wu sipped his coffee. Obviously he had access to any number of experts. “One last question: Would you agree that these aircraft should be secured and examined?”

“Absolutely.”

The CIA analyst nodded, then got up and reached into his pocket for his wallet.

“I got it,” Howe told him. He stayed in the booth for a while, sipping his coffee and looking at a real estate magazine he’d grabbed on the way in. He left the waitress a nice tip and headed back to the motel.

It was Thursday, and Blitz and the CIA director always met for breakfast. The Korean crisis didn’t change that, but it did make them move up their schedule and change the location of their meeting: Blitz found himself walking up the path to the director’s home at five in the morning, accompanied by an aide and two NSC security escorts, Army Delta troopers in plainclothes on special assignment. He was met at the door by one of the director’s own security people. Inside the kitchen he found the director’s wife, Jean, presiding over a pan of home fries and another of sausage.

“Well, if I had known we would have such a good cook on duty, I would ask to meet here more often,” said Blitz.

Jean gave him a good-natured but tired smile, then asked what sort of omelet he wanted.

“I told you, load him up with cholesterol,” said Jack Anthony, entering from upstairs. He smelled as if he’d just come from the shower, though he was fully dressed and looked considerably more awake than his wife.

“Would you like blue cheese and mushrooms?” asked Jean.

“That would be fantastic,” said Blitz. He’d meant the compliment. This was shaping up as the best meal he’d had in weeks.

Blitz and Anthony had a very complicated relationship. Professionally, the men couldn’t stand each other: They were bitter rivals for power and influence, and they had come to their positions by entirely different paths. Blitz had been in and out of government and academia, and while he was acknowledged as one of the country’s foremost experts on international relations, he had been appointed largely because of his long-term relationship with the President. Anthony, on the other hand, had spent his entire adult life working for the government. Much of that experience had come at the CIA, but he had also worked for the NSA, the Pentagon, and briefly the State Department. He professed to be apolitical, though his congressional connections were strongest with members of the other party.

Personally, though, the two men got along very well. Not only were they baseball fanatics, they were both Yankee fans—a minority in Washington, D.C. Anthony had been a guest speaker for Blitz several times when Blitz was teaching, and had even informally reviewed one of Blitz’s books before it was published, giving him a dozen pages of useful notes.

“Let’s talk for a minute,” said Jack, pointing Blitz toward the nearby family room. The oldest Anthony daughter lived nearby and had recently had a baby; a playpen was set up in the corner of the room. Blitz sat on the sofa next to it, listening as Anthony quickly ran down the important points in a CIA analysis of unaccounted-for North Korean weapons. The report would be delivered as an unofficial memorandum later that morning to the NSC, which would use it to make a recommendation on further Korean operations.

“We’ve now accounted for all but one hundred of the fuel tubes from the reactor,” said the CIA head, focusing on the most important finding.

“A hundred? That’s a hell of a lot to lose.”

“We haven’t lost them, we just haven’t found them yet,” said Anthony. “That’s a big difference. We’re not even one hundred percent sure they’re gone.”

The material had been at Yonbyon, the nuclear facility roughly sixty miles north of the capital. A large number of the fuel rods had been recovered or accounted for, but even a few dozen could present a serious threat. While processing their fuel into a bomb would probably be beyond the capabilities of all but a handful of governments, the material could be used in a so-called dirty weapon, spreading radioactive waste in a high-value site.

“These weren’t used for another bomb?” Blitz asked.

“We haven’t completely ruled that out,” said Anthony. “But we have a handle on the bomb facilities and it seems unlikely.”

“Accounting for the fuel tubes has to have the highest priority,” said Blitz.

“Agreed.”

They broke for breakfast, the conversation turning to the new grandchild. Jane stayed for a few minutes, then excused herself to go take a shower. When she was gone, Anthony and Blitz resumed their discussion of what to do next in North Korea. All of the ballistic missile sites had been secured, and separate teams had already completed preliminary reports on the technology. According to Anthony, there were no surprises: American intelligence had already done a decent job of psyching out the capabilities of the weapons.

The Koreans’ small store of cruise missiles—primitive weapons based on a Russian antiship missile—were all accounted for. Several stores of chemical weapons that had not been listed on reports prior to the coup had been found. As of yet, records to check the inventories had not been located.

“What about the E-bomb?” Blitz asked.

Anthony shook his head. “Still looks like they snookered us on that. Two members of the Korean security police were arrested in Japan last night, and it’s possible one of them was Colonel Howe’s passenger.”

“I doubt that,” said Blitz. “Too low-level.” His main candidate was the head of the DPRK intelligence, who had not been heard from since twelve hours before the coup. “Colonel Howe mentioned seeing some UAVs, or possible UAVs,” added Blitz, remembering his conversation with Howe.

“One of our people checked into that. He’s recommending a check at the site.”

“As a CIA operation?”

“We don’t have the resources at the moment,” admitted Anthony.

“Perhaps we should run a military operation through the NSC,” suggested Blitz.

“Might be an idea, if you can arrange it.” Anthony took a sip of his coffee. “Is Howe going over to NADT?”

“He’s the top candidate,” said Blitz.

“I wonder if Howe is the right man for the job,” said Anthony. “He’s an outsider to Washington. And he was only a colonel.”

“He’s had a good deal of experience. He was responsible for the Velociraptors and has worked with NADT.”

Blitz wondered if Anthony saw Howe as a potential political threat. The CIA did not deal with NADT on any sort of regular basis, but whoever took over as head of the agency would be at least a potential power in Washington.

“Is there something else about Colonel Howe I should know?” Blitz asked.

Anthony shrugged. “We’re initiating an intelligence review in connection with the Korean operation.”

“How does that affect him?”

“Just that he was part of it.”

“He had nothing to do with the intelligence,” said Blitz.

“It’s odd that he was connected with that, and with a plot to steal one of America’s most advanced weapons.”

“He’s not connected at all,” said Blitz.

The matter was of more than passing importance, since it represented a potential scandal: He could just imagine what an unfriendly congressional committee would do with the information that the U.S. government had helped a Korean villain escape. Howe’s involvement could be especially problematic; Blitz wondered whether his appointment should be delayed until they had captured the man.

The doorbell rang: Anthony’s driver and aides had arrived. The conversation turned to more generic, benign matters. Blitz fretted about what to do. A review of the Korean matter could easily take months.

A way would have to be found to shortcut the process. In the meantime…

In the meantime?

One of the aides had the morning news summary with him, a compilation of important items prepared for the President and other top members of the administration. For a change, the item leading the roundup wasn’t from Korea: A joint task force headed by Homeland Security and the DIA, with help from the New York City Police Department and a long list of others, had found a cache of sarin gas in a warehouse on Staten Island.

Anthony pointed out that the discovery had been made by the group originally put together to investigate the E-bomb rumor.

“So it wasn’t a total waste after all,” he said. “Keystone Kops stumbled onto the real thing.”

Blitz made a mental note to call Jack Hunter at the FBI and congratulate him—and see whether the connection was just a coincidence as it appeared.

As the others went out to the car, Anthony held Blitz back for a second.

“About that review,” said Anthony. “We’ve suspended security clearances for everyone involved.”

“What?” said Blitz.

“It’s routine.”

“Like hell,” said Blitz.

“Don’t get mad, Professor. The review isn’t going to take that long.”

“Are you trying to torpedo Howe’s appointment?”

“Absolutely not.”

Blitz knew a lie when he heard one, but there was nothing he could do about it at the moment.