Labyrinth of Night (16 page)

LEAVE MARS TO THE MARTAINS!!

U.S. OUT NOW!!

Nash studied it only for a moment before he rebuttoned his trenchcoat and strode down the platform toward the escalator to the street.

The headquarters of Security Associates Ltd was located on Connecticut Avenue one block from Dupont Circle, in a row of commercial buildings not far from Embassy Row. There was nothing to distinguish the entrance to one of the world’s foremost private intelligence agencies from anything else on the street; on the right was a bagel shop, on the left was a gay/lesbian bookstore, and in the middle was a single frosted-glass door with the firm’s name etched on the glass, so innocuous and low-profile that it could have belonged to a detective agency that specialized in skip-tracing and divorce cases.

Nash pushed open the door, walked down the narrow corridor to the foyer and stopped in front of the two elevators to remove his trenchcoat; he made sure that his face was in plain view at all times, to allow for the eyes at the other end of the hidden TV cameras to recognize him. The elevator on the right had a panel with a recessed up-button; the elevator on the left had a keycard slot. Nash pulled his keycard out of the inside pocket of his double-breasted suitcoat and slid it into the slot.

‘Nash, August,’ he said. He thought for a second, then recited: ‘“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things.”’

This was enough for the computer’s voice-recognition system to confirm his identity. His name was important but the Lewis Carroll quote was unessential; he could have read the list of ingredients from the back of a cereal box and it would have satisfied the AI. The left elevator door opened, just as it would have had he not spoken aloud, but without voice-print identification he would have been gassed through concealed vents in the elevator’s ceiling as soon as he entered the car.

If he had been an unsolicited client or a curious pedestrian and had boarded the elevator on the right, it would have taken him to the second floor, where a polite receptionist would have given him an application form, a rather uninformative brochure, and a mild lecture to the effect that Security Associates Ltd was a very specialized agency which catered to the very particular needs of a very exclusive sort of client. He might have heard the buzz of printers and the beep of telephones behind the partition in back of her desk—both of which were taped sound-effects—but he would never have seen the TEC-9 assault pistol hidden in the half-open drawer just above her lap.

Inside the left elevator, though, there was no floor button panel. There was no need for it, since it took Nash straight to the third floor. There was a reception area here as well, but much different from the one on the floor below: no incidental furniture, potted ferns or helpful lady at a desk. In the dimly-lit foyer a taciturn young black man sitting behind a bullet-proof window silently watched Nash as he walked to the ID station next to the elevator and subjected himself to handprint and retina analysis.

The sentry glanced at the screens below the counter, then passed a plastic badge to him through a slot in the window. ‘Welcome back, Mr Nash,’ he said. His voice had the quasi-British accent of a native West African; he was seated in a wheelchair. ‘He’s waiting for you in the conference room.’

‘Thanks, Bart. It’s nice to be home.’ Nash clipped the badge to his jacket lapel—its plastic coating still warm to the touch, the enclosed photo taken from the image of himself which had been captured on the ground-floor TV monitor—and walked to the heavy oak door to the right of the security checkpoint. Bart buzzed open the lock as Nash placed his hand on the stainless-steel knob; had he not cleared Nash through, a 50,000-volt charge through the knob would have knocked Nash across the foyer.

Beyond the door was Security Associates’ inner sanctum. This was the next-most sensitive part of SA’s headquarters. Beneath the building, in an underground level accessible only by a third elevator, was the Pit, the main operations center where a dozen men and women monitored every discreet move made by the agency’s operatives as transmitted to them by satellite. The big Cray-10 computer was down there, too, as well as the armory and the firing range, but this was not where Nash was headed. At least not today; Control had called for a meeting with him on the third floor, and it would not be until much later that Nash would have anything to do with the Pit.

The corridor led Nash past a long row of soundproof doors, each guarded by its own keycard slot and numberpad. Anonymous young men and women—secretaries, data analysts, information specialists and so forth—passed him in the hallway, smiling politely but glancing down at the desert-tan carpet to avoid looking at him. Security Associates was not like other companies; there were no office parties at Christmas time or get-well cards for people who went to the hospital. Most employees’ paychecks were drawn on the bank accounts of the adjacent bagel shop or gay-lesbian bookstore, since they themselves were fronts for the agency. Casual fraternization among employees was discouraged, if not grounds for outright dismissal. As a field operative, Nash had many allies here, but no friends; besides Bart at the front desk, he hardly knew anyone at the Washington office by name.

Aside from Control, of course, and he discouraged the use of his name except in private by his senior operatives. Nash reached the conference room at the end of the corridor, knocked once on the door out of habit, and twisted the doorknob.

Before he had opened the door even an inch, he heard Control’s voice from within: ‘Good afternoon, Mr Nash. Please come in. We’ve got quite a bit to discuss, you and I…’

A dry chuckle. ‘“Of shoes and ships and sealing wax…”’

Of course he would have been monitoring his arrival; there was very little which Control missed. ‘“Of cabbages and kings,”’ Nash finished as he walked into the windowless lair—where the sea often boiled and, at times, it seemed as if pigs
could
take wing.

Control looked like an Oxford history professor who had taken an extended sabbatical and gone slumming in the States. His baggy trousers and Irish wool fisherman’s sweater were filthy with ashes from his briar pipe, and he studied Nash through his wire-rim glasses with eyes only a darker shade of grey than his longish hair and unkempt mustache. When he stood up from behind the long conference table to shake the agent’s hand, he automatically reached for the silver-headed cane propped next to the table.

The cane was more of an affectation than something necessary to relieve the weight on his damaged right knee, which he claimed was broken during a polo match at Eton during his youth. The fact of the matter was that Robert Halprin had never been to Oxford; his old college tie was from a much rougher place, somewhere in Beirut where he had been held hostage by Shiite Muslim extremists for nearly two years in the 1990s before he had managed to make his escape. It was rumored that, although he had indeed been a schoolboy at Eton, he had never seen the inside of a stable, let alone mounted a saddle for a polo match. The old knee injury was the result of a mission so sensitive that, even to this day, he was forbidden to discuss it because of the Official Secrets Act.

Halprin was a veteran of MI-6, which was hardly surprising. There were at least half a dozen alumni of His Majesty’s Secret Service on the payroll at Security Associates, along with various former members of Mossad, the Russian Central Intelligence Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, La Piscine and (like Nash himself) the US Central Intelligence Agency. As a private intelligence agency, Security Associates Limited prided itself on its ability to hire former employees of various government spy apparatus; it was better than having to hire inexperienced amateurs and then train them in spycraft. Since the British, the Israelis, the Russians, the Canadians, the French and the Americans were all fully aware of SA’s line of work, they rarely made objections to their alumni going to work for one of the ‘privates’ (although, in certain circles of the intelligence community, SA was alleged to stand for Sold-out Assholes). After all, it was far more desirable to have a retired agent lend his services to a firm in the private sector, where at least one could keep track of his whereabouts, than have him go to work for one of Them or to write another embarrassing memoir.

‘How was Jamaica?’ Halprin asked once Nash had shaken his hand. ‘Better weather than up here, I might imagine.’

Nash knew that Control was fully aware that a tropical storm had lashed Kingston for the better part of the last week. ‘Warmer, at least,’ he said briefly, folding his trenchcoat over the back of a chair and rubbing a hand across his wet blond hair. ‘A bit damp, though.’

A sly smile whispered across Halprin’s face. ‘Quite,’ he replied. He briskly waved Nash to a chair on the other side of the long table and resumed his own seat. ‘This regards your next assignment, so I hope you’re well-rested from your vacation, hmm?’

Sneaky old bastard. He would also have known that Nash had spent three days bailing rainwater out of the bilge of his schooner. There was little about his field operatives that escaped the attention of Control. ‘Yes, sir,’ Nash said as he sat down and crossed his legs. ‘Very relaxing, Jamaica is at this time of year.’ He paused, and added, ‘You should try it sometime, sir. The fishing is excellent.’

‘Yes. Right.’ Halprin shuffled through the folders on his desk. The verbal fencing was over; it was time to get down to business. ‘This indirectly reflects the Cape Canaveral assignment just over two years ago. The bit of footwork you undertook for Skycorp…’

‘Photographing the F-210 Hornets?’ Nash carefully kept his voice neutral. ‘I hope our clients aren’t still upset about my giving that technician a slap.’

‘Upset’ was an understatement. Skycorp’s chief executives had been livid when they learned that Nash had knocked out a NASA pad-rat on the launch tower at Pad 2-A. Their anger was barely mitigated by the fact that the quality of intelligence they received regarding Operation Steeple Chase had been superb.

For value earned, however, there was always value received. Ever since the infamous ‘Big Ear’ debacle of 2016, when the private space corporation had been publicly embarrassed by its affiliation with a top-secret National Security Agency operation for covert domestic SIGINT espionage—and, more recently, the labor strike at Descartes Station on the Moon in 2024 and the subsequent raid by the First Space Infantry—Skycorp had been attempting to distance itself from US intelligence and the military. It was bad for business, overall, to have the company’s interests aligned too closely with the United States government. Particularly now, when the corporation was striving to forge a multinational agreement with other space companies for the construction of the first major space colony in LaGrangian orbit.

Two years ago, Skycorp had become concerned when it learned, through the usual channels of hearsay and rumor, that a covert military payload was being sent to Mars aboard the SS
Shinseiki.
Skycorp had considerable capital investment in Mars, much of it still speculative. The planet had become very important to the company in terms of its long-range objectives; as a fuel resource for further deep-space exploration, it was invaluable. Skycorp had wanted to know what was going up there and why; like many other private companies before them, they had secretly retained the services of Security Associates.

SA had learned much, albeit not all, of the details of Operation Steeple Chase. Nash’s mission to Cape Canaveral had been to verify the nature of the military payload which was being ferried into orbit by the
Constellation.
His pictures of the two aeroshells nestled within the orbiter’s cargo bay, after study by the firm’s photo analysts, had gone far to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions. Skycorp had been very pleased with the information; when the inevitable crisis had occurred, the company had been forewarned and prepared to publicly disavow any connection with Operation Steeple Chase…a useful tactic, considering that the anti-space movement had gained momentum in response to the skirmish between US and CIS forces at Cydonia. Uchu-Hiko, the company which owned the
Shinseiki,
had not been so fortunate; Japanese Greens had picketed their Tokyo headquarters for months, and an unexploded bomb had been found near their Australian launch facility.

Even so, Skycorp had been perturbed by the fact that Nash had been obliged to protect his identity by punching out a launch-pad technician. It had never been charged, much less proven, by NASA that someone connected to Skycorp had been responsible for the still-unsolved assault; the FBI continued to believe that it had been the radical Greens which had penetrated security at the Cape in the guise of a USAF Space Command colonel, and the small handful of people who knew otherwise weren’t about to dispel that notion. Nonetheless, it had been messy. Bad for business…even if a partial refund had been refused.

‘No, no,’ Halprin said hastily. ‘The client has come to understand that by now.’

‘The client wanted me fired, as I recall,’ Nash replied.

‘Not any longer.’ Halprin glanced up from his paperwork. ‘In fact, they specifically asked for you when they contacted us. Seems they have a lingering interest in American military activities on Mars.’

Nash clasped his hands together in his lap. ‘Another payload? Sure, I can handle that…at least, so long as I don’t have to pose as a colonel again.’

It was meant as a joke, but Control apparently didn’t grasp the humor. He leaned back in his leather-backed chair and steepled his fingers together. ‘Oh, you’ll be visiting Cape Canaveral again,’ he drawled. In this posture he reminded Nash of a British professor explaining the Battle of Trafalgar to a slow-but-promising undergraduate. ‘But you’ll be going a lot further than that, I assure you…’

He paused deliberately. ‘If you accept the assignment, of course.’

Nash didn’t like the sound of that last part. Control rarely gave a field operative the option of backing out of an assignment. His salary was equivalent to his former take-home pay as a CIA agent, but hazardous-duty commission for field assignments was three times that of even a Mossad dirty-tricks operative. This was only part of the reason why the price for a Security Associates corporate contract started at one million dollars, and that was only for cheap jobs like bodyguarding corporate CEOs. It made for a comfortable living, but he was expected to earn his paycheck. Control’s extending the privilege of backing out of an assignment—especially one for which Nash’s personal involvement had been specifically requested by a client—was not the way Security Associates normally treated their highest-paid employees.