Project Reunion (13 page)

He snorted softly, with a sad smile. He brushed my hair gently with his fingertips. “I’m surely glad that you’re on my side, Dee Baker.” He rallied. “Dinner,” he confirmed. “We’re late.”

“I hope it’s a nice quiet dinner, with no politics,” I said wistfully. “A bit of wine, good food, good company...”

He nodded. “I could use a break from the roller coaster. I doubt we’re going to get it, though.”

Chapter 10

Interesting fact: Pennsylvania’s agricultural output was 15 times that of tiny Connecticut, with a population only 4 times larger. In particular, Pennsylvania grew wheat, oats, potatoes, and beans. New York wasn’t far behind Pennsylvania, producing 11 times as much as Connecticut, but with a population 7 times larger. New York grew fruit and potatoes.

The storefront windows of an upscale bistro beckoned us warmly. This didn’t quite manage to evoke a sentimental return to wealthier days and fancy restaurants. Behind us, the cold New London street was pitch black and deserted. The footing was slippery and treacherous under wet fallen leaves. A misty wind whipped at us, salted from the Sound. The restaurant’s golden candle-lit interior felt like a jack-o’-lantern grinning out of the haunted dark brick block.

Stepping in, I whispered urgently to Emmett, “Who’s the older Resco? He wasn’t at the pool last night.” I’d seen him in the auditorium the day before. I couldn’t remember whether I’d seen him today. They wore neither uniforms nor name-tags tonight, drat it.

“General Ivan Link,” Emmett murmured back. “He commands the New England borders. And the New England Rescos, sort of.”

“What, all of you? He didn’t sit with the brass,” I said, vexed.

Every time I thought I finally understood what was going on at this summit, the tables of power seemed to tilt again. Cameron’s suggestion of Emmett leaving New Haven to tame New York, not just a rescue operation, had left me uneasy. I wasn’t entirely sure what Emmett’s promotion meant. On the drive, he’d passed it off as a work in progress, but he coordinated the other Connecticut Rescos now instead of Mora. So far the summit days had been long on events and news and changes, and awfully short on explanations. I was growing wistfully eager to get home to normal. The next normal, anyway. Each new normal had a short shelf life, these days.

Emmett shrugged, out of time to explain further, as we joined the table. It was the only occupied table in the restaurant. Marine Corporal Tibbs, wearing a white steward suit this evening, handed me a small menu card, as Emmett pulled out a chair for me.

“Tibbs!” I said in astonishment.

Deeply amused that I ignored the general to focus on the waiter first, Emmett turned to let me introduce him to Corporal Tibbs. Then he steered me into my chair and introduced me to General Link. I already knew the other five – Pam and John Niedermeyer, Adam Lacey, Ash Margolis – avm89 online – from Poughkeepsie, and Pete Hoffman from South Jersey.

I smiled and smiled, and said pleasantries, and waited for a little lull, and unfolded my napkin into my lap. Emmett and I leaned our heads together as though for a little lovers’ confidence. Emmett’s jacket and my gold pashima shawl – woefully inadequate to the plummeting temperatures outside – further shielded our lover’s laps. And we both pulled out our mock-MP3 players, which buzzed silent warning like mad.

I don’t know which Amenoid put these little gizmos together, but they tracked hostile communications. They were cleverly designed. Tibbs had seen them at the security checkpoint. They’d been stashed in our laptop bags and wound around with ear buds. So Tibbs hadn’t given them a second thought. Tonight they lived in my little gold clutch purse and Emmett’s jacket pocket.

Someone at the table was transmitting. We both used our devices, a couple feet apart, to determine that it was Link.

“He was clean all day,” Emmett whispered to me, under guise of nibbling my earlobe.

I leaned over, draping us better in my pashima shawl, and nibbled his ear while he quickly checked his messages, then sent a priority text to our security gang: TRACK ASAP #1. I’m good with tech, I really am. But Emmett ran southern New Haven County from his phone. The man was a wizard at it. We were done before Pam tapped me on the shoulder.

“Get a room, Dee!”

“I’m sorry, you know how it is,” I confided to her. “Oh, I love your necklace, Pam. What a beautiful seagull.” And it was. Pam wore a dark green knit sheath dress, with a couple big wooden buttons decorating cuffs on elbow-length sleeves. A detailed palm-sized seagull, painted in true-to-life colors, hung on her breast, from a chain bearing beads of carved driftwood.

“It’s an albatross,” she said. “You’re different tonight, Dee.” Her eyes narrowed.

I had to hand it to her, she was right. I’d been feeling awkward, diffident, out of my depth, at this summit. But not any more. My attention was riveted, my sense of humor fully engaged.

“An albatross!” I said. “As in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner? John, did you hang an albatross on your wife’s neck?” The phrase meant an annoying burden, and a husband could certainly qualify.

We all laughed cocktail-party laughs, though I question whether half got the obscure literary joke. Adam stole a second glance at Pam’s bird, as though considering something. My own memory had been recently refreshed on the old poem. A firebrand on Amenac, who went by The Great Pumpkin, used a bit of the Rime as her tag line: ‘He prayeth well, who loveth well both man and bird and beast.’ The Great Pumpkin wanted us to declare the Northeast an independent nation, seceding from the U.S. She had an enthusiastic following. I would have asked Pam if she was a fan, if our conversation wasn’t being transmitted.

“To Lieutenant Colonel Emmett MacLaren!” Niedermeyer toasted. We all joined the toast. I wondered why Emmett’s new boss General Link didn’t beat Niedermeyer to it. As a supervisor myself, I mentally awarded Link a D for effort. Emmett would never have made that mistake. I’d seen that in Cameron’s eyes.

“Emmett,” said Margolis afterward, “you missed the most controversial presentation of the summit today. Bet you thought it would be yours.” Emmett laughed obligingly. Margolis continued, “So what did you do with your prisoners?”

“I got off easy on that one,” Emmett replied. “New Haven only had pre-trial prisoners. So we got some judges together, hashed out some rules. What punishments I was willing to offer. What crimes not to bother with any more. We threw out most of the cases. Got it down to a few dozen prisoners. Then we handed them over to the townships for trial by jury. Some of the damnedest trials. The townships really surprised me. But – it was up to them, not me. I insisted that whatever they decided, it had to be local. If they chose to keep a prisoner, they had to provide their own jail cell. Several towns are still holding them.”

“You didn’t kill any?” Margolis didn’t like that.

I recalled Margolis’ contributions to the land use debate. They’d screamed out ‘control freak’ to me.

“Pre-trial, Ash,” Emmett reiterated. “They hadn’t been convicted yet. A couple juries offered death by oxycontin overdose. The judges allowed it. There was this one case –”

As salads arrived and we settled down to eat, Emmett related the goofy local jury trial that kept us entertained last January, before I’d met Emmett. The jurors insisted they needed to study the house where the husband had putatively attacked his wife. This mansion was on an island, so boats were dispatched to reunite the principals to re-enact their roles of the night in question. The judge kept calling Emmett to decide whether all this silliness was allowed. Emmett kept saying, ‘You’re the judge. You decide.’ Eventually, the jury determined that the wife had falsely accused the husband, and set the whole thing up to steal his money. The jury verdict was divorce, and they offered the wife the opportunity to suicide, in exchange for everyone lying to the kids that Mommy had gone away. And she’d taken the oxycontin.

I was impressed. Emmett was hardly a chatterbox, and he managed to dominate the conversation long enough for Amenac to report back. Though I was ready to step in and prattle if his energy lagged.

“Dang it,” Emmett said, ostentatiously pulling out his phone to read it. He openly angled it for me to read:
‘Tracking complete, PA. Shut it down. SUX2NT.’
“You know, I think we should all shut these down, and go offline for the rest of dinner. Don’t you agree, Ivan?” He held out his hand across the table, with a fey grin.

“Is that your cell phone, Ivan?” I asked pointedly, as I stretched my hand out across the table, too.

He hadn’t produced the cell phone yet. I playfully put a finger to my lips to urge silence. “I’ve always wanted to look at one of those. May I?”

General Ivan Link frowned at Emmett. But he slowly drew out his phone, as everyone else plonked theirs out on the table. “No holdouts now, Ivan!” Niedermeyer pressed. His voice was cheerful. His narrowed eyes were not.

“Oh, it’s so pretty,” I prattled, as I took his golden chassis phone. Emmett seeded a general babble of how we’d all become slaves to the damned devices, as I inspected the phone’s running processes. General Link looked alarmed, and almost said something – no doubt there was classified stuff on the thing. Hoffman and Margolis, flanking him at the table, both grabbed his biceps, and pointedly insisted he join the conversation deploring the use of cell phones at meals.

I left the malware SUX2NT process running, and dropped the phone into my wine goblet. I sloshed it thoroughly and dunked it on both ends. “Oh! I am so sorry, Ivan!” I told him. “I owe you a new phone.”

“Tibbs?” Emmett called the Marine over. “Could you please store these phones in the kitchen for us?”

“Absolutely, sir,” Tibbs assured him. “I’ll clean this one up.”

“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” I suggested. “I broke it, I’ll fix it.”

“No trouble at all, Ms. Baker,” he said, blinking his eyelids slowly.

Rats. Tibbs wasn’t going to let me take the general’s phone home for an autopsy.

Emmett rose and circled the dining room, with his sniffer out. “Clear,” he reported, as he resumed his seat. He’d kept his own phone and sniffer. No one argued with him.

“No cyber warfare capability, eh, Dee?” Hoffman teased.

“Well, I think of warfare as offense,” I said, in defense of my denial earlier today.

Emmett snorted his wine beside me. “Uh-huh. Darlin’....”

“Dis-ingenuousness comes in handy sometimes, Emmett,” I offered. Adam laughed.

Emmett explained to the table. “Ivan was clean all day. We all were. I left Ivan at the Academy around 6:15, and by the time we arrived – 7:10? – his phone was transmitting our conversation to a location in Pennsylvania. SUX2NT was the malware program name. Right, Dee?” I nodded.

Tibbs was back to plonk medium-rare prime rib in front of Link. The general’s fork was still poised over the salad Tibbs relieved him of with the other hand. Tibbs’ steward style was a trifle uncouth. His security style, I rather liked.

“Time is of the essence, sir,” Tibbs told Link. “Who had access to your phone?”

“My aide was in my room while I took a shower,” Link supplied. “Possibly the driver? No one else, that I know of.” Tibbs nodded and disappeared.

Adam and I shared a skeptical look across the table. But Niedermeyer voiced the question. “So, Emmett. You’re sure that Link didn’t do this – why?”

“I did not do this,” Link asserted. He certainly looked angry and betrayed.

“No way to know for sure,” Emmett said. “But I believe him. His aide tried too hard to get into the planning room today. The Admiral threatened to throw him into the brig at one point. Did he have access to the naval plans in your room, Ivan?”

“No. The Admiral secured them,” said Link.

Emmett shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. That’s too large an operation to remain secret,” he concluded to Niedermeyer. “I think we have privacy for tonight’s conversation, at least.”

“Would you rather I leave, John?” Ivan Link offered bitterly.

John Niedermeyer looked like he was seriously considering it. “No, Ivan,” he decided. “I think you’re a Northeast patriot.” The two men held each other’s gaze without flinching. Link nodded once, emphatically.

“Ivan and I have spoken at length about this,” Niedermeyer continued. “I believe you three Rescos – and you, Dee – are some of the key power brokers in the Northeast.” He met their eyes, and mine. “Have you considered secession?”

I shrugged uneasily. Margolis and Emmett nodded neutrally. “Pennsylvania...looms large,” Margolis said.

Hoffman said, “I’m particularly curious about your opinion, Emmett. You did an exceptional job on the plans for New York. Leavenworth?”

Emmett tensed beside me briefly, then relaxed. “Command school. I finished the ILE, yes,” he agreed.

He’d mentioned that to me before, that he held a Master’s degree from Leavenworth. I thought it was funny, since I’d only ever heard of Leavenworth as an Army prison. ILE stood for Intermediate Level Education – a peculiar name for a grad school to prepare for brigade-level command. It sounded like a middle school series of graded readers.