But at age sixty-five, Harvard Law and Divinity School alumnus Michael Joseph Kilgerry tended to invest his faith more actively in the people through whom God worked than in prayers for intervening miracles by the Almighty himself. With this as his guiding view, Father Kilgerry was predisposed to look upon the President’s emissaries, be they atheist, agnostic, or practicing Jew, as equally viable vessels.
“How can I help our new President?”
“Father, do you recall a congressional officer acting for a House subcommittee and President Carter, sometime during the first year of his presidency, who came to you with an unusual intercession request?”
“I do, indeed. Her name was Keating, I think.”
“Carol Keating.”
“Yes. Very earnest, well organized. The White House was interested in obtaining copies of certain Vatican documents and she asked me if I would be willing to act as liaison to the Holy See. I said yes, of course.”
“And were you able to help her, at that time?”
With his back to the view of the Jefferson Memorial that his leaded-glass windows afforded him, Monsignor Kilgerry seemed to regard Sokoff with growing affection.
“I communicated with Rome, requesting certain ‘sensitive’ material from the Vatican Archives, which, as you may imagine, are quite vast and go back many hundreds of years. But—we were denied.”
“Had that ever happened before?”
“Never.” Kilgerry leaned across the antique desk. “We had never been denied access before and certainly not when requested by a sitting President of the United States.”
Kilgerry, or Father Michael at the time, had waged quite a campaign within the order, trying to get that decision reversed, but the Holy See had not been susceptible to appeal.
Sandy Sokoff didn’t know about Kilgerry’s youthful battle on behalf of President Carter, but he had begun to feel he was in the presence of an ally.
“Why do you think that happened?”
“One must assume it was the subject matter of the documents.”
The two men looked at each other, neither one needing to pronounce the nature or category of the subject matter out loud. Sandy spoke first.
“And was that the end of it, as far as you know?”
“No, like I say, Ms. Keating apparently took her charge very seriously and I did meet with her on one other occasion, at her invitation and not in any official capacity. I suppose she trusted me.”
“She showed you some documents from the National Archives,” Sokoff said. “Things relevant to her request for material from the Vatican. Would you be willing to share with me, and possibly with the President, under the protection of executive privilege, what you saw?”
Kilgerry took a moment to gather his thoughts. He was not frightened or being coy; there was an ethical issue.
“Mr. Sokoff, Ms. Keating was under no obligation to do what she did, but she knew I would be interested and chose to trust in my discretion. I would hate to cause her even the smallest amount of grief by violating such a confidence.”
“I’m afraid Ms. Keating passed on in 1999.”
“Ah. Then she is beyond our harm.” Kilgerry closed his eyes as if saying a small prayer, then opened them and rose to his feet. “Well . . .”
Coming around the beautifully inlaid Italianate desk, the learned Jesuit motioned Sandy toward his private library and the overstuffed chairs of that sanctum sanctorum.
“I have often wondered whether this day would come. May I offer you a glass of sherry?”
Across the street, in a navy-blue Chrysler minivan with blackout windows, DirecTV graphics, and a high-powered saucer-shaped receiver on the roof, the signal degraded rapidly as Monsignor Kilgerry and his guest moved away from the window glass that had been amplifying their conversation.
“They’re moving.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“Oh, shut the fuck up.”
The two operatives warming their hands on thermos coffee listened closely on Koss headphones, boosted the gain until the white noise hurt, and finally logged in the time when they lost audio.
They didn’t know if anything they had on tape had any intelligence value. But they were pretty sure that what they were not getting was probably pretty hot.
31
February 5/Ft. Meade, Maryland
At the cortex of the National Security Agency headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, a tidal wave of intelligence data from every country in the world came crashing into the wall-sized banks of series-strung super computers every second of every day.
Gossip, rumors, misinformation, disinformation, satellite imaging, terrorist eavesdropping, all of it was part of an encrypted intel-acquisition system managed and maintained by a small army of analysts and tech wizards around the clock.
Gathering data was not the problem. The problem was determining if any of these words and sounds and pictures meant anything in terms of potential threats to America. And the ongoing urgency of this problem required the collective brainwork of human analysts and linguists the same as it always had.
The epicenter of the NSA that served that collective brain was a room that had always been called the Black Chamber, ever since the Nazi-busting cryptology heroes of the Army’s Secret Service first moved here to Ft. Meade in the ‘50’s and set up shop to fight international communism.
Flown in from touring his new JPL offices at Cal-Tech in Pasadena, Admiral James T. Ingraham, former NSA spy chief, had chosen the Black Chamber for this meeting. Not just because it was probably the most electronically secure place on the planet, but because it felt like home.
During his tenure here, he had been a hands-on leader who knew the capability of his men and women and the reach and limitations of their machines and had set a high standard for productivity.
Flanked by his aide and a much-decorated Defense Intelligence officer, the Admiral now looked around the windowless conference room, next door to his old stomping grounds at Operations.
Bob Winston had assembled execs from Rockwell, Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Sandia Labs, and Los Alamos for this meeting but it was the Admiral’s show.
“We all know the future is arriving at the speed of light.” Ingraham inclined his head, acknowledging Clay Claiborne and the photon laser weapon designed by TRW. “Nevertheless, I understand concern has been expressed about the delay in the decision about Orion and also about former Senate investigator Sandy Sokoff, who is presumably acting for the White House. Well, I’m afraid Mr. Sokoff’s learning curve is rather steep. Sort of like a blind puppy groping around inside a black box. In any case, let me assure you we are one hundred percent on track. Let’s not get overanxious in the stretch drive. Believe me, if any kind of bogey seriously shows up on the radar, we will be on it. In a decisive and robust a fashion. But, again, that is not the case.”
As always, the Admiral projected a commanding presence, but Clay Claiborne shifted in his chair, not entirely mollified. Winston noticed his discomfort.
Despite the link time invested, he still had his hands full trying to finesse TRW, which had over a billion dollars at risk with Project Orion, the most of anyone at the table. There’d be a hell of a charge against their bottom line if Uncle Sam changed its mind.
“And in terms of the decision vis-à-vis deployment of Orion, we still have almost ten days remaining.” Ingraham addressed the group, making it sound like an eternity. “According to the Old Testament, the universe was created in less time than that. And let me remind you, the President’s support of discretionary funding and ongoing development is not in play. Thanks to the persuasive powers of R. Cabot Winston here, a better man than I am when it comes to diplomacy, the White House has already signed off, and nothing Sokoff is doing or not doing is likely to reverse that.”
“Besides, he only reports to the President of the United States,” Winston added, with his razor-blade smile. “Not to the Washington Post.”
This provoked the intended chuckle
and a more general sense of relief, except from Claiborne.
“Admiral, I hear what you’re saying. I just can’t help wondering: When are we going to be able to do the business of protecting the United States of America entirely in the light of day? When are we going to be able to stop having to hunker down behind closed doors like this, with our collective necks on the line, waiting to get blindsided?”
It was an impolitic if not rude question, but all the assembled aerospace reps turned to the Admiral, glad it had been asked. Ingraham had an answer.
“When the civilized world is a safe and sane place to raise our children and all of mankind can live free from threats of mass destruction.”
His face had become implacable. Hand-holding these whiny defense-industry fat cats was the worst part of having to deal with the private sector.
“In other words, for the foreseeable future, we must stay the course, whatever that requires.” Ingraham glanced meaningfully at the DIA man seated next to him who immediately stood to attention. The Admiral surveyed the table, making eye contact with each man, including the subdued if not satisfied Clay Claiborne.
“In defense of the Republic, gentlemen, the President’s hands must not be tied. Not even with his own rope.”
The Defense Intelligence officer nodded at Ingraham, tucked his hat under his arm, and quietly quit the room.
There were no further questions: this was how things got done. The Admiral knew from the quality of the silence around him that every man in the room understood something had been set in motion: an executive action directed at resolving their anxieties and concerns.
Of course, no one would have admitted to such an understanding. And none of the aerospace lobbyists who had come to press their interests had any desire to imagine, must less be actually told, exactly what action was being taken on behalf of those interests.
They just hoped it worked.
32
The University of Colorado at Boulder
As she entered the UC–Boulder parking lot nearest to Jake’s lecture hall, Angela was not particularly aware of the fresh-faced young man in the ten-year-old Subaru beater who had followed her Avis Cavalier from the Denver airport.
Having sat on the tarmac in D.C. for an hour and a half—God only knew why—she was late for Deaver’s class and oblivious to Subaru Boy falling casually in behind her as she hurried across the campus set down in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
Finding the right building, Angela slipped into the back of a packed amphitheater-style hall and let her eyes adjust to the low lighting. Down front, at a lectern defined by a tiny desk light, Jake was well into his talk, showing museum-quality transparencies of Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs on a theater-sized screen behind him.
“Damn.”
Angela shucked off her parka and looked around, but every spot in the five-hundred-seat auditorium seemed taken.
“So, we have a mystery, don’t we?” Jake was saying, stacking his notecards and indicating the projected hieroglyphs. “Two highly evolved cultures with remarkable similarities on two different continents, separated by thousands of years and an ocean that ostensibly would not be crossed until the Vikings.”
Behind Angela, Subaru Boy made an entrance wearing an artfully sheepish expression. He then moved off, looking for a seat, like just another undergraduate late for class. Angela stayed standing, intrigued more by Jake Deaver himself than by the images of Olmec stelae and pharaonic carvings that illustrated his lecture.
“Let’s look again at what the Mayans and Egyptians had in common: pyramid-shaped monuments oriented to the cardinal points, the solstices, et cetera. A similar and extremely sophisticated mastery of geometry, astronomy, engineering skills, art, and architecture. Shared elements of architectural style, decorative symbology, and pictographic language, not to mention similar origin myths about where all this knowledge had come from. Can we have the lights, please?”
As the students applauded, Jake looked out and recognized Science Horizon’s Ms. Angela Browning at the back of the room. She gave him a sorry-I’m-late smile and a quick wave. He smiled back, deciding she was even more attractive in person than she was on television, which made him a little nervous.
“Now, the question is,” Jake continued, “do all these cumulative little coincidences suggest contact? Some kind of a link between seventh-century Mayan civilization in the Americas and Egyptian culture in North Africa thousands of years earlier? I’m inclined to argue that they do, and what the nature of that contact or connection might be, we’ll be going into after you’ve read West, Hancock, and Bauval . . .”
Outside the auditorium the two Fibbies, Stottlemeyer and Markgrin, had already made a perfunctory sweep inside the hall, missing Subaru Boy (though he easily made them) but noticing Angela. At least Markgrin did.
“Yeah, Science Horizon. Wonder why she’s here. You watch PBS?”
“Fuck no.” Stottlemeyer pulled his collar up and sucked down smoke from the last of an unapologetic Marlboro pinched like a hot-running reefer between his thumb and index finger. Markgrin wouldn’t let him smoke in the car.
“Man, there’s this jazz series with Wynton Marsalis,” Markgrin said, leaning upwind of his partner’s smoke and checking the time on his Kenneth Cole watch. “ ‘Sax Giants of Jazz’ or something. All this early film on bop and bebop, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Wayne Shorter . . .”
“Aw, that stuff sounds like somebody squeezing a cat.”
Stottlemeyer spat a plume of smoke out of the side of his mouth and then got ready to roll as kids began pushing their way out of the lecture hall.
“Gimme Bird playing straight ahead. Hell, gimme Clarence and ‘The E Street Shuffle’ . . .”
33
Dunsinane, Antarctica
“I think I see something.” An Army engineer wearing bio-iso gear pointed at a blurry shadow in the wall of shadows that was the glacier-entombed forest.
The prehistoric caribou they had already liberated was wrapped in a space blanket and carefully tied to a sled. The Science Foundation team had then moved on to a deep translucent blue seam in the ice that proved to be a window on the rest of the ungulant herd standing poised in suspended animation, as if waiting for time to start again.
But that’s not what the engineer was looking at.
“Can we have the laser over here?”
White light thrown into the glacier just increased the whiteness that was reflected back, sort of like driving with high beams in a heavy fog. But a ruby laser light had proven very effective.
A paleoglaciologist heading the science team obliged.
“Show me where.”
He painted the area with the red laser. They could just make it out, protruding from behind a boulder: a dark, sharply pointed object about six inches in length connected to a longer shaft.
“Holy shit. Everybody, come over here.”
Tuning the laser to the warm end of the spectrum, they saw a chipped stone blade connected to the shaft of a spear. The shaft itself was etched with colored markings and disappeared behind a rock. All the way back to whoever had been out hunting caribou in this inexplicably temperate region of the Earth circa 10,000 B.C.E., now located only a short walk from the South Pole: Dunsinane Man.
34
“So, tell me,” Angela said, cradling a second glass of Pinot Grigio in the kitchen of Jake Deaver’s A-frame cabin outside Boulder. “Is it true?”
“Probably.” Jake made a mock-wary face. “Can you be more specific?”
Deaver had cleared what was left of the reheated meatless lasagna and goat-cheese salad, bused their dishes, and set coffee brewing on the kitchen counter. Beeswax candles made a flattering light, bouncing off the skylights and the warm wood walls.
Angela grinned at him, enjoying both Jake and his impromptu dinner.
“Did you really get arrested in a cow pasture doing mushrooms with a bunch of college kids?”
Her reporter’s chops were showing, but it was amu
sing what a little digging could uncover.
“We were cited by a sheriff for trespassing,” Jake confessed, drying his hands on a kitchen towel and rejoining her at the table. “But I talked the owner into dropping it. As far as the mushrooms, they couldn’t technically charge us.”
“ ’Cause you’d eaten the evidence.”
“Gate, gate, parasam gate . . . gone, gone, all gone.”
He mimed the gestures of a Tibetan tulku blessing. It was simple, well observed, and Angela laughed out loud: she was finding former Apollo Commander Jake Deaver rather charming and interesting company. He didn’t seem to be working at it too hard, though she could feel he was attracted to her.
Before she left Washington, Miriam had teased her, offering the opinion that there had to be something irresistibly sexy about any man who’d walked on the Moon. Angela had felt obliged to point out the age difference, among other things. However, sitting in his kitchen, she was conscious of something about Deaver that she’d been trying to put her finger on all evening, something besides Right Stuff glam, academic smarts, and a self-deprecating style. He had a brooding quality at moments, as if he’d been deeply wounded in a way that had yet to heal, but that was not it.
Masculine grace, she decided, sipping his Italian table wine. That’s what it is. Masculine grace.
She felt unexpectedly at ease with him and wondered why that was such a rare thing, at least judging from the men she’d been involved with. Maybe it just had to do with experience and confidence or just having nothing more to prove. The ambitious young professionals she dated, whether in journalism, science, or politics, often came to resent how she put her work and her career first in the same way they did; some were even uncomfortable with Angela’s more visible success. Jake, though, seemed beyond the pain of all that Sturm und Drang, which was refreshing.
The Orion Protocol Page 13