Razing Beijing: A Thriller (82 page)

McBurney stared at him. “I told you that I could get thrown
into jail for even talking about this. Any way, to the best of my knowledge,
NORAD still hasn’t found a trace of this friggin’ satellite.
Believe
me
when I say that I wish it were otherwise. Unless they do, the government’s
position will be that it broke up soon after its insertion into orbit like
we’ve already discussed. They have not registered any spurious, unidentifiable
transmission of the type you describe. I don’t know what else I can do. On the
other hand, I’m told there is evidence—hard evidence—discovered by the FBI to
confirm the George Washington Bridge was destroyed using conventional
explosives. How do you explain that?”

Presented with two different versions of reality, Stuart leaned
back and stared through the window into the dark void that enveloped the plane.

McBurney said, “You mentioned multiple terrorist attacks.”

“Yeah, the latest being this New Jersey refinery. I assumed
you knew about it.”

“They already caught the guys.”

“Maybe. I’m told the press quotes the plant manager as
saying that a primary gang-valve assembly seems to have vanished into thin air.
Doesn’t that sound a little suspicious?”

McBurney’s eyebrows knotted. He moved to look at his watch.

“I already checked. The refinery exploded nine twenty-five
Thursday morning. That’s forty-nine hours and
very
small change after
the GWB attack. Nice round number, wouldn’t you say?”

McBurney shrugged.

“Incidentally, Congress formally yanked the funding from my
program.” Stuart described a lock-down that sounded more to McBurney like a
medical quarantine.

“Over a security problem?” McBurney asked.

“I think it was more about the budget and schedule
overruns. Frankly, we’ve had our share of stumbles, as happens with most any
R&D project. I almost hate to bring this up, but remember Deng’s warning
that my development program would be ‘obstructed,’ or something like that?”

“I remember
you
saying something like that. I’m
really not in the mood for any more of your shit.”

“Ah, but there’s more.” Stuart described what he apparently
thought to be the pinnacle of intrigue, this involving CLI’s legal counsel.

McBurney found what Stuart was suggesting bordered on the
conspiratorial absurd. He also had to struggle to keep from confusing elements
of the Thanatechnology and CLI quagmires.

Stuart was staring at him. “You know something I don’t?”

“Absolutely not. She was working to reverse the ruling by
Congress?”

“And abducted the night before the hearing.”

“So it sounds a little suspicious.” McBurney pictured in
his mind the image of another, yet to be explained Chinese connection, that of Emily
Chang’s physicist father with a gun-barrel to his head...he wondered if Stuart
had made the same observation. “Walking the cat back to Deng’s comment is a bit
of a leap.”

Stuart’s face turned instantly red. “I certainly won’t ask
you to make any great intellectual leap. While we clear up this snafu with
Congress, a few of my staff are off trying to get some work done. After this
assault on Joanne Lewis, all I’d like is for you to make a call and ask that
somebody be sent to keep an eye over things. I’d like to be sure they’re safe. You
can see to that. With a call.”

“This is about Emily Chang?”

“Among others.”

McBurney nodded. “They’re off somewhere sticking their
noses into tracking this satellite.”

Stuart hesitated. “It isn’t illegal.”

“Just what is it you’re hoping to prove?”

“Simply that they stole our property.”

McBurney narrowed his eyes while wondering how much he
could trust anything Stuart said. “This is about a nine hour flight,
door-to-door, which puts us in San Francisco around oh...I’ll think about it.”

“You’ll think
about it?”

“Yeah. I’ll think about calling up someone on the
flimsiest circumstantial evidence, and ask him to devote valuable resources to
a wild goose chase. Sure as hell I’m not going to wake people out of bed to do
that.” He paused at the sound of a groan from underneath the blanket draping Ross.
McBurney leaned forward and looked Stuart in the eye. In a harsh whisper he
said, “Right now your credibility is a little, well, a little fuckin’
worthless. Be that as it may, I’ll give it some thought. I might just decide to
have the FBI go in and seize your employees’ computers. Meanwhile, I have to
believe the odds are pretty damn favorably stacked against anything bad
happening to your staff before we reach the California coastline. Quit worrying
about it, maybe get some sleep. I’d have thought you need it. I certainly do.”

MCBURNEY OPENED HIS EYES
thirty minutes later and saw Stuart staring out his window. No sleep for
probably seventy-two hours and still the guy was wired.

McBurney reached inside his suit coat and removed the
folded pages of the CIA memorandum. Reading again slowly, he decided it was
probably just an oversight not to have mentioned the strike on the New Jersey
refinery, which had to be considered as contributing to the escalation of
tensions. It certainly looked as though the attack had occurred before the
dispatcher drafted the cable.

Elsewhere, under the heading Far Asia was a summary by
Naval Intelligence of numerous contractor equipment problems plaguing the
Seventh Fleet. Such problems were not unusual during combat preparations; some
glitches turned out to be legitimate while others were the result of sabotage. It
was among this equipment tally that something caught McBurney’s eye, something
he had earlier skimmed and ignored: Two cryptic references to ‘unexplained,
audible report followed by malfunctioning Aegis radar array’ independently
occurring aboard both an American cruiser and a Taiwanese destroyer. Initial
reports cited only that the arrays turned out to be ‘...inexplicably missing.’ It
occurred to McBurney anyone reading this would interpret it to mean, as he
originally had, that the hardware was presumably stolen through sabotage. But
was that what the dispatcher meant? How does an entire antenna array turn up ‘missing’?
There was nothing to indicate if the discoveries were made while dockside or
out on maneuvers.

McBurney circled the time and date of the events. Both, he
noted, were reported to naval command within one hour of each other. Just for
the hell of it, he turned over the page.

McBurney made three columns on the blank sheet, separately
labeling them ‘Aegis,’ ‘GWB,’ ‘NJ.’ Below each he wrote to his best
recollection the date and time of the event. Next, he examined the interval of
time elapsed between them. A crab of fear clawed the pit of his stomach…

McBurney sighed with relief. No pattern emerged that he
could see, after all. The first interval wasn’t even close to matching the
recharge cycle purported by Deng—no, he corrected himself, purported by
Stuart
.
As Stuart had pointed out, the interval between the GW Bridge and NJ refinery attacks
did match, but that was probably just a coincidence. There was nothing to
suggest a methodical campaign of attacks.

“SEE FOR YOURSELF,”
McBurney
offered from his notes beneath a recessed light in the aircraft’s ceiling. “The
time intervals don’t support this ‘fire-recharge-fire’ scenario of yours. I
even went so far as to assume...” McBurney cut himself short, realizing just
how irrational he was about to sound after having slapped Stuart around for the
last few days.

“You assumed what?”

McBurney cleared his throat. “I read a report about missing
radar arrays aboard two Aegis warships. At the time it sounded nuts—it is nuts.
But I gave you the benefit of the doubt, and I assumed it could be the work of
this satellite weapon.” McBurney rubbed his face with his hands. He was tired,
groggy, and his head was pounding to beat hell.

“So let’s take a look at the numbers,” said Stuart, eager
to play along. “Aegis radar attack, you label that time zero. GW Bridge, zero
plus seventy-four hours...that’s not even close.”

“See? Okay, now the New Jersey refinery—I used the time you
said—and sure enough that’s GWB plus forty-nine hours, Deng’s recharge
interval.” McBurney looked at Stuart. “But there’s nothing to suggest a
pattern. Granted, both intervals meet or exceed the minimum time, but they
differ. These aren’t some precision series of premeditated strikes. They’re the
work of third-world terrorists.”

Stuart studied the note, frowning deeply, rubbing his neck.
He flipped the page front-to-back a few times. Among other items, page three of
the CIA cable revealed the Aegis events—McBurney took pause but let him see it,
figuring it was old news.

“You don’t have to convince me that the Chinese have
deployed
something
in orbit,” McBurney said. “But that’s a far cry from
actually using it to attack the United States.”

Stuart didn’t seem to be listening. He shook his head
slowly, looked up at the ceiling a few times, stared at the feminine shape of Carolyn
Ross soundly asleep. McBurney saw Stuart crack a grin.
Son-of-a-bitch thinks
something’s funny, does he?

Stuart looked at him. “Ever heard of the International Date
Line? Look. Put all these times in Greenwich Mean, like the military times, fix
the date and...presto...how about that?”

Stuart patiently waited for the error to become obvious
while McBurney studied the modifications. He could see that he had forgotten to
subtract a day from the date specified on the cable while constructing his chart.
Stuart appeared to be right.

“Jesus Christ,” McBurney breathed. He glanced at his watch.
If true, it would also suggest that another attack might be imminent. Didn’t
the sticky little issue of captured terrorists invalidate Stuart’s story? On
the other hand, McBurney had been kicked around Washington enough to know that
bad information inevitably flooded the absence of fact.

He had no choice but to bring this to Director Burns’s
attention.

“Sam, I didn’t mention this earlier, but Joanne Lewis
happens to be my daughter’s godmother.”

McBurney frowned.

“That’s Lewis the abducted lawyer,” Stuart clarified. “She
helped me smuggle my daughter out of Dodge.”

“Where’d you say you sent her?”

“I didn’t.” Stuart turned his head, thinking. “I sent her
to live with family on a secluded ranch in Utah. You probably remember that was
after I received the threatening photos in my mailbox.”

“How could I forget.”

“I think the FBI shares my suspicion that Paul Devinn is
still at large. I figure the CIA would probably like to get their hands on him,
too. Whether Deng’s obscure warning has any merit or not, this thing with
Joanne Lewis fits a disturbing pattern.”

“So you think—”

“I don’t know what she might have said under duress, maybe
with a knife at her throat. I hadn’t told her or anyone specifically where my
daughter is, at least not that I’m aware of. Who’s to say what a determined
person could divine from whatever trail I might’ve left behind doing it.” Stuart
looked him in the eye. “I sure wish you’d make that call and invite the FBI
into this.”

“I seem to recall hearing that sage advice somewhere
before,” McBurney said in reference to their diner rendezvous.

Stuart glared.

Shaking his head and heaving a sigh, he glanced over
the page in his hand. “I’ll see what I can do.”

3:55 A.M. Eastern Standard Time

PAUL DEVINN WAS
COMFORTABLE
with his vigil along the rear border of the property,
enclosed within trees and backed up against a rise to a densely wooded bluff. Sitting
with his back against an old maple tree, he steadied his elbows atop his knees
and brought the Canon binoculars to his eyes. The place was new construction
with a rustic, log-style exterior—strange for an affluent neighborhood of Tudor
and stucco, Devinn thought for at least the third time since conducting his
daylight drive-by. Did the owner’s taste suggest a tilt toward the eccentric? Of
all his observations thus far—the red sentinel eye of a motion sensor staring
down from under the peak of the roof, double dead-bolted doors, an exposure to
neighboring homes only partially obstructed by trees—that the owner of this
particular home might be eccentric, and to that extent unpredictable, most
troubled Devinn. He hadn’t expected to find interior lights burning so early in
the morning; so much the better. So far he had seen no sign of movement inside
or out. Between the trees that surrounded his perch, the rear family room of
the two-story residence came into focus.

His assumption that the interior lights were
timer-controlled was proven wrong when suddenly a seated figure slid into view
on the wheels of a chair, snatched up a telephone and held it to her ear. Devinn
smiled. The figure, he saw, belonged to Emily Chang.

For quite some time he watched her pace back and forth past
the windows, talking animatedly into the phone, settling back into the chair
and then up, pacing again, flipping her hair, now pausing to stare out into the
darkness...Devinn’s pulse quickened—a flourish of anticipation tingled his
groin.

He also saw the burly figure of a man, bearded and broad-shouldered...that
would be Milton Thackeray. Devinn had been given very little time to formulate
his strategy. He had been warned that this individual had a bit of a temper. Perhaps
he could use that.
My handler will never learn
, he thought, reflecting on
the similarly rapid change of direction with regard to their Thanatechnology
operation. As the one burdened with implementing change, Devinn was wary of the
knee-jerk flavor of his current instructions. Implicit in such haste, besides
being ill conceived and reckless, was his own expendability. Lee’s suspicions
appeared to be on the money in one respect. Something was definitely playing
out here and it wasn’t a house warming party.