The zenith angle (14 page)

Van had lost a personal fortune while working for the CCIAB, but there was no question that he was learning incredible stuff. The NSA was a mystery even to the people who worked inside it. Their secret spy feats were the stuff of distant, mist-shrouded legends.

Before their first spy satellites were ever launchable, American spies had used eavesdropping balloons. They’d sprayed toxic metal clouds into the sky that reflected Soviet radio signals from far over the horizon. Fewer and fewer government veterans still remembered any of this stuff. Huge bursts of top-secret ingenuity had just plain been forgotten. It had been nailed into wooden crates and lost inside some warehouse, like the Ark of the Covenant in
Indiana Jones.

The remote-control code that Van was now examining was a direct descendant of that mythical era. It wasn’t native computer code, it was space-machine code. His own grandfather had probably had something to do with developing this stuff, as he worked on that lost 1960s cruise missile. It was a living space-age fossil. It was code built entirely for electronic spying, electronic spacecraft, and electronic Cold Warfare. It had crept into the modern cyber-world like a digital trilobite. Still, nobody had ever broken it, because the math behind it was rock-solid. So, Van and his clients in AFOXAR now faced the serious technical challenge of repurposing this satellite control code for use in aircraft. And not normal, everyday aircraft, either. Very fast, low-flying aircraft, stolen or hijacked, skimming the hilltops to stay off Air Force radar, as they zoomed toward the White House or Capitol with a bellyfull of terrorist explosives.

The likeliest engineering solution looked like a geosynchronous aircraft-control super-satellite somehow hooked into the satellite GPS system. This was a typically bloated Pentagon-style solution that would pull down sixty billion and take a generation to design, build, and implement. Van was hoping for something much quicker and quieter that might be delivered before he died of old age. He figured the CCIAB’s best approach was to repeat a Grendel-style success. Make one working model as a proof-of-concept, and just install it somewhere in somebody’s jet. The AFOXAR guys were pressuring NASA and Boeing to get them a nice handy jet they could wreck. AFOXAR guys were a small gang of young engineers that nobody had heard of, but they didn’t brag much, they worked fast, and they were very can-do.

Van was in his tiny Vault office, deeply engrossed in this problem, when Fawn came swooning past his tangerine-colored cubicle divider. “Ohmigod, it’s him! He’s here. Elvis is here. Elvis is asking for you!”

“Who?” said Van. He was no longer even a little startled when Fawn said something apparently insane. Fawn Glickleister was not crazy. She was just so intensely bright that she cut into reality at a sharp angle.

“It’s that tall dark handsome dude with that secure briefcase strapped to his arm. He’s waiting out in the corridor, Van. He needs to consult with us!”

Van came to full alert. “That guy doesn’t look much like Elvis.”

“Well he’s Southern,” Fawn gushed. “He
feels
like Elvis. He’s just like Bill Clinton that way. Ohmigod, he is such a dreamboat, Van. He’s the hottest guy in the Vault.”

“What is it with you, Fawn? Get a grip.”

“Let’s investigate him!”

“Show him in here.” Van nodded. His code-wearied brain could use the break. Elvis shouldered his way into Van’s tight cement warren. He was wearing a black blazer and a white polo shirt and gray pants and black shoes. Elvis had changed out of his gym clothes, Van thought. This clearly implied that he could unlatch himself from that briefcase somehow. Van offered Elvis the Leap Chair and sat on the ripply edge of his plastic computer desk. The Vault cells were so small that it was like meeting a guy inside a photography booth. “I’m Dr. Vandeveer,” Van offered. “What can we do you for?”

Elvis crushed Van’s hand with a Right Stuff handshake. “I’m Michael Hickok.”

Van’s crushed hand flew straight to his beard. He stroked it thoughtfully. Hickok didn’t seem to notice his shock. After a moment, Van had steadied himself. So here he was at last then, Michael Hickok, that hustler, that ruthless mercenary, showing up at the office like a bad penny. Jeez, no wonder Hickok never took that briefcase off—he was wandering around just like that lost atomic lunatic in
Repo Man.
A cynical operator with a thirteen-billion-dollar political liability that he was trying to dump on the first available sucker. And he’d already successfully put the charm on Van’s naive young secretary. If Tony Carew hadn’t bent the rules to warn him . . .

“Nice to meet you,” Van lied.

“Doc, I’m told you’ve been cleared Executive Gamma,” said Hickok.

“That’s true. We do some satellite work here at the CCIAB. Communications software and protocols.”

“I can’t understand that sort of thing myself,” drawled Hickok. “But my employers are real, real anxious to have some experts doctor their sick bird.”

“I see.” Van was fully prepared to lower the boom on the guy. Close up and in person, though, Hickok gave off the spooky vibe of a Delta Force karate master. It looked like he could break every object in the room with his bare feet.

Why rush anything? Van thought. Surely it would be much cagier to study Hickok’s technique. Politely lure him in with a pretense of innocent cooperation. “So tell me about it.”

Hickok reached into his pocket and removed a lethal-looking folding knife with a dangling set of keys.

“I’ll have to open this secure briefcase now.”

Van glanced up. “Scram, Fawn.”

Fawn’s eager face fell. Fawn was not cleared Executive Gamma. “But . . .”

“Shut the door, and shut the outer door. Stand in the hall. If you see anybody strange, let me know right away.”

“Yes, sir,” said Fawn, who never called him “sir.” She left.

Hickok opened the briefcase with a small gray key. The case held a set of common-looking Pentagon-style folders, the sort used for weapons procurement programs. Van had seen more than his share of these Pentagon folders lately. Through fifty years of military bureaucratic ritual, the Pentagon had created its own unique paperwork style, with everything initialized through chains of superior officers, and documented in quintuplicate.

Van recognized the folders he was confronting as a classic “Pearl Harbor file.” Whenever a big-ticket project went sour, paperwork escalated as the guilty parties tried to cover their asses from the investigation that they knew was coming. The folders began to bulge, dent, and rip. There was wear and tear as the evidence got tossed from hand to hand like a hot potato.

There was no way Van was going to waste his life working his way through this huge stack of self-serving gibberish. It was time to move this farce right along. “I see we have a big opportunity-cost here.”

“That’s the truth,” said Hickok, “but my employers are willing to be more than generous with resources. That’s a ten-billion-dollar project you’re lookin’ at there.”

Van knew for a fact that the KH-13 was a thirteen-billion-dollar boondoggle that had been budgeted for eight. Van waved his hand around the junk-towering walls of his tiny office. It was densely crowded with hopeful toys of the infowar trade: solar-powered outdoor spycams, shirt-pocket-sized anthrax sniffers, biometric access gizmos that stared into eyeballs and sucked users’ thumbs. Ninety percent of them were useless, but someone responsible had to look at them and throw them away. “As you can see, we have other proj-ects here, more in line with our core tasking.” Had he really just said “core tasking”? The sense of fear and threat that poured off the sinister Hickok was really jazzing him up.

“Look, doc, I wouldn’t be coming here to y’all if there hadn’t already been investigations,” said Hickok, producing a much slimmer folder in a different shade of blue. “The bird worked fine on launch—just a few shakedown bugs. She didn’t start acting serious weird till a year ago. Believe me, we had plenty of people watching her.”

Van looked at the light blue folder without touching it. Something deep in him was hooked by this situation. His curiosity had been set to tingling.

Van sensed something peculiar here. Michael Hickok was a very scary guy, but he just didn’t feel like a smooth political operator who was out to play pin the tail on the donkey. Hickok just didn’t seem bright enough to be capable of a scheme that complicated. Maybe Tony Carew had never personally met Michael Hickok. Just possibly, there was some big, dumb, simple mistake here. Something that had gone wrong a long time ago, that Van could put right.

“So, is the bird tumbling?”

“Nope. She’s solid as a rock.”

“Noisy links? Bandwidth too tight?”

Hickok shook his handsome head. “She can talk to the ground.”

Van had to like a guy who called a satellite “she.” “You might have some antenna obscurations. Are you getting a lot of SEU’s?”

“What’s that again?”

“ ‘Single Event Upsets.’ ”

“Look, doc, I can follow most of this, but I’m just a simple country boy who is ex-Air Force Special Operations Command,” said Hickok. “You want a solid air-to-ground spotter link for a Predator drone in the back end of nowhere, then I am your man. Rocket science, that’s a little beyond me. But I can sure see it’s not beyond
you.
Let’s talk some turkey here. You look to me like the kind of man who can get this job done!”

Van was flattered. Then he sensed a trap snapping shut. Oh, yeah, this was the honeypot principle at work here: no overconfident hotshot could resist a sweet appeal to his ego. It amazed Van how good it felt to be played for a real sap.

“It’s not likely I’ll ever repair a satellite for you,” he said. “The CCIAB is a policy board.”

“But there’s money waitin’ on the table! You could hire people! And people tell me this Grendel machine of yours is twenty years ahead of our time.”

Now Van knew that he was being played for a sucker. “That may be so, but Grendel also takes a whole lot of my work time. All of it, really. I’m sorry to turn you down.”

Hickok’s face darkened. He was not the kind of man to take a rejection kindly. It was clear he’d had more than his share lately. “It’s like that, is it?”

“Like what?” Van said.

“You can’t deliver! You’re one of those R&D guys, so you’re always chasing the next hot biscuit. You’re all velocity and no vector!”

Rage flared within Van like a match on crumpled fax paper. “Look, pal, you’re coming to me, I didn’t come to you. Why should I care? Take a hike.”

“Why should you care? We’re in a war now, Jack! I got buddies of mine freezing their ass off in the

’Stan, and you’re sitting here with this faggoty dot-com stuff!” Hickok flicked a finger onto Van’s halogen desk lamp with a light aluminum clink. “That is America’s next-generation spy-sat, you egghead dork! It could save the lives of American soldiers out in the field! But not you, no, you’re too good for that!”

With a heroic, life-changing effort, Van got his searing temper back under control. He wasn’t going to punch a guest inside his own office. Besides, something deep in him told him he was confronting a very dangerous man here, somebody who could kill him easily. “Look, Mr. Hickok, if I’m not serious about this war, then what the hell am I doing in a damn secret bunker in West Virginia? You wanna tell me my job? Sit down here and start coding. See how far you get.”

“That’s what I’m asking from
you,
doc.”

“Go to hell. The KH-13 is a sorry piece of junk. It’s gonna fall out of the sky like a bank vault. You want that thing to fall on me and my people? No way. Go find some other sucker.”

“Look, you don’t know all that,” Hickok protested, with surprising mildness. He touched his pale blue folder. “You didn’t even look at the evidence here.”

“I don’t need to look at your evidence.”

Hickok’s eyes grew round and mild. “You’re a scientist and you’re saying that to me? Scientists are s’posed to look at the evidence. That’s what I always heard.”

“Well . . .” Van fell silent. He felt pinned down. No option was good in his situation suddenly. “Look, this has got nothing to do with scientific evidence. This folder here, this blue thing, this is a legal trail. I’d have to sign off on it to look at this blue folder. Then your bosses would be all over me. Right away. They’d nail me for it because I was the last guy to touch the hot potato.”

Hickok narrowed his eyes. “Damn. I never thought about it that way. So that’s your big problem, huh?

You don’t want your nose in a mousetrap.”

“You bet that’s my problem.”

“That’s right,” Hickok admitted. “They’d do that kind of thing, too.” It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even an admission. It was a realistic assessment. “But if you really fixed this bird, doc, they wouldn’t have to blame anybody.”

“I’d love to fix your bird,” Van told him. “I’m of a different generation than those guys who built the Space Age. We’ve got much better methods of computer analysis now, and I like to think that maybe I actually
could
fix the thing, if I had some time and resources. But they don’t want me to fix it. They just want me to touch it.” Van shrugged. “Look, I’m not putting my initials on any of that paper. That’s too much to ask of me.”

“I can get it about all that,” said Hickok. “Everywhere I go in this world, there’s some kind of hell that started long before I was ever born.” Hickok had gone strangely stiff. Suppressed fury, maybe. It might even be shame. “Suppose I left this little blue folder under a bench in the gym.”

Van felt his eyes widen. “That’s crazy. That’s an NKR document. You wouldn’t do that.”

“I take long showers,” Hickok snarled. “You’re a tough guy in the gym, right, Mr. Computer Geek? I’ve seen you in there. Maybe you could skip a couple of your sets on that Nautilus.”

Maybe I would, thought Van, and maybe I wouldn’t. And maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t. He jumped from the edge of his worktable. “Why not right now?”

SEVEN

PINECREST RANCH, COLORADO, JANUARY 2002

T
ony Carew spent his afternoon watching his girlfriend performing in the snow. Anjali aimed to become Bollywood’s Heroine Number One, outdoing Aishwarya Rai, Bipasha Basu, and the Kapoor sisters. If flesh and blood could do this, then Anjali had them to give.