The Ajax Protocol-7 (7 page)

She seemed to read his mind. "I can hear you thinking, General. I'm right, aren't I?"

He sighed. "We have someone in custody. We are, ah, questioning him. What you would call a person of interest, yes?"

"Have you been watching American television again, Alexei?"

He laughed. "You have so many crime shows. America must be a very dangerous place, with all those persons of interest wandering around."

"Don't believe everything you see on television," she said. She paused.

Vysotsky waited. Now we're getting to it, he thought.

"We worked well together in the past, " she said.  "I propose that we cooperate again. You and I both want to prevent another incident."

"What do you have in mind?"

"You have full access to whatever your people discover and I do not."

"You wish to share information?"

"If we work together, we'll be more effective than if we work alone."

"What have you discovered?"

"Nothing concrete, yet. A suspicion, only. It may lead to something or not. If it proves accurate, I'll tell you."

More than a suspicion, Vysotsky thought. "Are you thinking of sending your team here?"

"I have no plans to do so, but it could be necessary in the future. That is one reason I'm calling. I don't want there to be any misunderstandings if it becomes necessary."

Vysotsky ran through the options in his mind. The riots had shaken the Kremlin. Whoever discovered the cause would be rewarded. He had nothing to lose by cooperating with her. Harker was offering an opportunity he couldn't pass up.

"I also would like to avoid misunderstandings. If you keep me informed, I think we have an agreement. Who else knows about your suspicions? Your FBI? Langley?"

"For the time being, no one else. You know we have serious security leaks."

Not long before, there had been a rash of publicity about a high profile American defector who had ended up in Russia.

Vysotsky smiled to himself. "Yes, you do. How do you want to proceed?"

"I'll pursue this on my end. If I discover something, I'll pass it on to you. I would like you to do the same." Harker paused. "Do you have any leads yet from your person of interest?"

"Not yet. But I don't think it will be very long until I do."

Thousands of miles away on the other side of the world, Elizabeth could hear a ruthless certainty in his voice. She was glad she wasn't the one Vysotsky was questioning.

CHAPTER 15

Nick had always thought counseling was an admission of weakness.
A man ought to handle things on his own
had been his dominant thought almost as long as he could remember. Even so, it had finally come home to him that he had to do something about his PTSD. It gave him nightmares and headaches. It was driving a wedge between him and Selena. It interfered when he was in the field.

He'd chosen Dave Milton from a short list recommended by other vets. Milton had made Major in Special Forces, no mean feat. He'd lost an arm in Afghanistan. Those two things gave him a lot of credibility with Nick. Now he was back in Milton's office.

The doctors he'd talked to when he'd come back from the war had told him his guilt about the child was misplaced and that it wasn't his fault. That feeling guilty just made the stress worse. That was like telling him the sky was blue. Intellectually, he already knew that. But they didn't really understand. They hadn't been there. They didn't know what it felt like, but Milton did. That was the difference. Nick trusted him.

Milton was a black man, about Nick's height but a little heavier. Today he had on a blue shirt and a tie. The left sleeve of the shirt was attached with a gold safety pin against his shoulder. Milton was the kind of man who seemed at ease with himself, a man who knew who he was.

They'd been talking for a half hour. Nick told Milton what had happened at Bethesda, in a general way. Milton's clearance was good, but it only went so far.

"You're keeping something back," Milton said.

"What do you mean?"

"You just got through telling me someone tried to kill you. Again. In a parking lot here in the US, where those kinds of things aren't supposed to happen."

"You know I can't go into all the details."

"That's not what I mean."

"Then what are you talking about?"

"You haven't said one word about how you feel. You told me what happened. You didn't tell me anything else."

"How do you think I feel? How would you feel if someone started shooting at you?" Nick could feel himself tensing up.

"If you don't want to tell me how you felt in that parking lot, why not tell me how you're doing with the dreams?"

"Better," Nick said, "but the headaches are starting again."

"You remember what you discovered the last time you were here?"

"Yeah. I can get killed like anybody else. But I already knew that. I'm not sure it has much to do with the dreams or PTSD."

"It was more than that. What was the word you used, to describe how you felt? Do you remember? It's important."

"Why?"

"Why do you think?"

"Damn it, you're doing that shrink thing."

"What shrink thing?"

"Throwing questions back at me. Answering a question with a question."

"Would it do any good if I told you what I thought?"

"That's why I'm here."

"No it isn't," Milton said. "You're here because you want to stop the nightmares and the rest of it. Me telling you what I think isn't going to help you solve anything. You have to figure it out yourself."

Every time he'd been here, Nick had wanted to get up and walk out. Now he wanted to do it again. He thought about the last time he'd been in this office. He'd been talking about Afghanistan, about the day he'd almost died. About the grenade. About the child he'd killed who was trying to kill him. The scars on his body began throbbing as he thought about it. What was the word he'd used?

Helpless.

Milton saw it register on Nick's face. "Stay with it," he said. "Stay with the feeling."

"Helpless," Nick said. "Helpless is the word."

Milton was silent.

...the grenade comes toward him, a dark, green shape tumbling through the air...everything goes white....

"How the hell do I deal with that?"

"How do you usually deal with it?"

Nick laughed. "More firepower."

Milton smiled. "Okay, but what else?"

Nick thought. "I get headaches," he said. "Nightmares."

Milton nodded. "Because...?"

"I don't know."

"When we have a nightmare over and over again, it's because our unconscious mind is trying to get our attention. It's a way to get a message through to the outer mind."

"What message?" Nick asked.

"What do you think?"

"There you go again," Nick said.

Milton waited.

"The only message I get is that I almost died."

"That's right. You almost died. How do you feel when you have the dream?"

"Damn it, you know how I feel." Nick was getting angry. "Helpless. Frightened. That good enough?"

"So why do you have the dream?"

Nick took a deep breath. He wanted to punch Milton. He wanted to leave the room. He felt like he was on the verge of something, some discovery. "All it does is remind me."

"Of what?"

"That I feel unprotected. That I could die."

"Yup. Does it work?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do the nightmares keep you safe? Protect you?"

"Of course not."

"Right. It's a failed strategy. Now you know what the issue really is."

Nick felt a surge of adrenaline. "Survival?"

Milton nodded, pleased. "At the most basic level. Life and death. Now that you know that, you don't have to get headaches and nightmares to remind you."

"It can't be that simple."

"Maybe it's a little more complicated than that but that's the foundation," Milton said. "Think about it some more and we'll do something a little different next time to defuse whatever is left."

When he walked out of the office, Nick felt that something had changed. What had Milton said? That since Nick knew what the issue really was, he didn't need the dreams to remind him. He remembered the feeling, like an electric jolt running through his body, when he realized the issue was survival. It was more than knowing it. He'd felt the rightness of it, felt the energy and truth of it ripple through his body, like touching a live wire.

It wasn't the first time he'd thought about getting killed. It wasn't the first time he'd thought about personal survival either. Hell, he had years of practice surviving in situations where others died. Where he could have died. Knowing that survival was the big issue couldn't make any difference.

It couldn't be that simple.

Could it?

CHAPTER 16

"I've pinned down the location of the signal that triggered the satellite," Stephanie said. "You're not going to like what I found."

Elizabeth had made fresh coffee. "It's nice out. Let's have coffee on the patio," she said. The coffee break had become a regular habit, something Elizabeth and Stephanie tried to do every morning about this time.

They sat down at a painted wicker table. The sun felt good on Stephanie's face.

"What did you discover?" Elizabeth asked.

Stephanie said. "The signal that triggered the satellite came from Alaska."

"Alaska? Where in Alaska?"

"The middle of nowhere. The Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge."

"Okay. You have my attention. What is a high frequency radio signal doing coming from a wildlife refuge? What's there that could do something like that?"

"SATWEP."

"The Satellite Weapons Program?"

"That's right. The Army runs it in conjunction with DARPA, the Defense Agency Research Projects Agency," Stephanie said. "The Pentagon does love their acronyms, don't they?"

"But that's the government." There was disbelief in Elizabeth's voice.

"I said you wouldn't like it," Stephanie said.

"Are you sure?"

"Positive. The signal definitely came from there. The signature is unmistakable. There's nothing like it anywhere else on the planet."

"Steph, you just said someone used a defense agency installation to attack Russia. If Moscow finds out, it's going to make a lot of trouble. It's an act of war."

"Then this probably isn't something you want to share with Vysotsky," Stephanie said.

Elizabeth snorted and choked on her coffee.

"You shouldn't make me laugh when I'm drinking."

Stephanie said, "I'm glad you think it's funny."

"It's the way you said it." Elizabeth blotted her lips with a napkin. "I don't think you realize how funny you can be sometimes."

Stephanie started to say something then changed her mind. Instead she said, "The main SATWEP facility is located near Anchorage, but there's a classified program that uses the same technology in smaller installations and research facilities. They aren't always manned. The signal came from one of those. I've got the GPS coordinates."

"Where is it?"

"It's remote. The nearest town is just a wide spot at the end of the road called Circle, around fifty miles south of the Arctic circle. They run a big dog sled race out of there every year. Beyond that, it's all wilderness. The only way in is on foot or by air. "

Elizabeth sipped her coffee.

"What do you want to do?" Stephanie asked.

"I'll send the team in. There could be something on site to give us a lead."

Stephanie said, "There's bound to be some kind of security, even if it's an unmanned station."

"We'll treat it as if it were a hostile installation," Elizabeth said.

Stephanie waited.

"Normally I would go to the White House on something like this," Elizabeth said, "but I don't trust Edmonds. I don't want to tip our hand or let anyone know what we're doing. We'll use the Gulfstream to transport the team and supplies to Alaska."

"When do you want them to go?"

"Right away. I don't think we have a lot of time to stop this. Taking Rice down is a bad sign. We need more intelligence and we need it now. We need evidence. Once we have that, I'll decide the next step. Get the team together and we'll plan the mission."

"What about the Russians? Are you going to tell them what we've discovered? "

"Let's see what Nick finds in Alaska before we talk to them," Elizabeth said.
 

CHAPTER 17

Vysotsky's investigators had uncovered the scorched remains of a device in the ruins of the Central Bank of Novosibirsk, a receiver for the signal that had driven the city mad. There was no way to know who had made it. On the other hand, it hadn't taken long to identify and arrest the person who had placed it. He was a bank teller with financial problems.

Korov had come to interrogate him. The prisoner was being held in a military prison built in the days of the Czar. It wasn't far from the old Lubyanka prison in central Moscow. Like the Lubyanka, it was not a place anyone wanted to find themselves. The massive building was made out of stone. The walls were cold and rough and sweated during the hot days of a Moscow summer. In winter, the cells were freezing.

The prison was run by the GRU, the
Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye,
Military Intelligence. SVR and GRU had a long standing relationship of mutual cooperation. No one asked any unnecessary questions. No one was very concerned with the welfare of the prisoner. You didn't come to this place because someone was looking out for your welfare.

"This way, Colonel."

Korov's escort was a brutish Senior Sergeant named Grigorev. He smelled of garlic and looked like a man who spent too much time in places with no sunlight. His skin was pale and he needed a shave. His face was dark with shadow, even though it was early in the afternoon.

To reach the cells, everyone went through a passage guarded by iron gates that had served the same purpose before the October revolution. Korov and his escort waited as each one clanked open in turn and closed behind them. They descended worn steps to the lower level. The steps opened onto a hallway lined with dozens of faceless iron doors with numbers.