The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  Of course, his State Farm agent and the D.C. police would investigate, and if he didn’t use his clout to make them spend money on serious lab work, et cetera, he’d be very surprised if they called it anything except “tire failure.”

  But it didn’t really matter: he knew. And if they were smart, whoever they were, they would know he knew.

  Dead or warned off, he thought, wincing as he stretched out his stiffening leg. Hey, it’s a win-win.

  And for the first time in his life, which was surprising for a Texan, Sandy Sokoff found himself thinking about buying a gun.

  45

  February 7/FBI Field Office/Denver

  With the word that a Naval Intelligence team was being dispatched onto their Colorado turf, Stottlemeyer and Markgrin pondered the question of what kind of bullshit politics was going on now.

  “Just tell me. Has somebody got a problem?” Stottlemeyer growled into his desk phone in Denver.

  All he got, though, was a bored-sounding voice emanating from the hallowed bowels of the Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., reminding them of their obligation to play well with others.

  Markgrin watched the red rise in his partner’s already florid face as Stottlemeyer hung up. It was like following a child’s worsening fever on a thermometer.

  “So, what’s up?”

  Stottlemeyer put together a string of curses in which the words gay-ass and motherfucker were a recurring theme.

  “Let’s roll.”

  “Roll where?”

  Stottlemeyer jerked on his Rockies jacket over an air-weight holster and led Markgrin out the field office door, venting as he went.

  “Lunch. With some fuckin’ gay-ass gym rat NAV/INT motherfuckers. But we’re not taking any horseshit, man. You know what I’m saying?”

  “And what exactly would that look like?” Markgrin followed in his wake as Stottlemeyer banged his way out into the parking lot.

  “Like a bunch of gay-ass gym rats picking up the tab, for openers.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Markgrin said, waving his stocky partner off the wheel side and unlocking their car. “We can put the hurt on ’em there, big guy.”

  As expected, the meeting with the diffident young Navy creep-team in the bar at the Boulderado Hotel was no love fest. But the two agents gave them what they needed: the rundown on Jake Deaver’s daily routine and his teaching schedule at UC–Boulder.

  “His afternoon class is from two to four,” Stottlemeyer said, making what he thought was a heroic effort not to react to the beaucoup attitude radiating toward them from across the table.

  “At the college. That’ll work.” The twenty-nine-year-old team leader did the talking for his hard-muscled crew, who drank bottled water and smirked at the fibbies, hoping to die before they got that old. “How far is the house?”

  Markgrin drew a map for them on a restaurant napkin.

  “Sometimes he goes for coffee with some of the kids afterward,” he added, amused by how the NAV/INT guys kept their shades on to read the menu. It was so MTV. “Travel time from here, figure ten minutes, tops. We can stay with him, if you want. Let you know when he’s on the move.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” The team leader signaled the waitress.

  Stottlemeyer fumed at the dismissive tone, then ordered the Boulderado rib eye and a bucket of steamers, since he’d decided the Navy was buying. He then leaned across the table after the menus were collected, and bumped up the peaky testosterone level just a touch.

  “Do us a favor,” he said, addressing the whole crew, using a gravelly Passaic sotto voce which his straight-faced partner thought was pretty funny.

  “We live here.” Stottlemeyer let the muscle in his clenched jaw jump a couple of times for emphasis. “Don’t make us have to apologize for anything.”

  The G-men needn’t have worried: the all-pro Naval Intelligence creepsters executed a meticulous break-in of Jake’s cabin and a light toss, leaving little or no trace of their passing. Hacking into the password-secure files in Deaver’s computer was a pain, but much easier to accomplish in situ than via the Internet.

  In the end, every file and every disk in storage was downloaded onto a portable hard drive, and they were out clean in ninety minutes and off the Denver airport radar three hours later.

  The data would then be hand-carried in a secure pouch back to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C. Once there, it would be logged in, put inside a lockbox, and taken by armed detail to the NSA for an eyes-only analysis, which would, in turn, be delivered directly to R. Cabot “Bob” Winston.

  46

  NASA Station/West Australia

  Jonathan Quatraine was starting to feel quite at home in the back-of-beyond station, cooking meals in the rudimentary kitchen and hiking with Hudson around the outback near the dish. What he had come to like most was the thing Colonel Blake had shown him: the Space Station Alpha emergency channel with its privileged peek behind the scenes.

  Like now, sitting in his chair, drinking a coolie from his lager cache, and watching astronaut Lieutenant Heather Charney floating weightlessly near the sleep sacks, setting out a string of raisins in the air in front of her and snapping them up like Pac-Man.

  “The Goddess is in heaven and all’s right with the world, mate.”

  Lieutenant Charney’s spiky haircut seemed perfectly designed to look good in microgravity and Jonathan fantasized himself into the scene, the two of them “starkers,” bouncing off the walls and making frantic flying love like a porno Matrix.

  “Bollocks.” Jonathan banged down his beer can as the EC cycled to another camera, this one showing two Americans in jumpsuits droning their way down a checklist on a clipboard labeled PROJECT ORION. The Aussie student blinked.

  “Orion . . .”

  Jonathan didn’t remember any Project Orion. With a sinking sensation he rolled his desk chair over to recheck the e-mailed event sked: no Orion.

  The screen switched again, to a camera located in the space shuttle’s cargo bay. The cargo doors were wide open, revealing a quadrant of space that included a slice of Earth, some twinkly stars above the night terminus, and two suited-up astronauts deploying a large, shiny concave mirror.

  “Shite almighty.”

  Jonathan felt sick. Wasn’t he supposed to archive every station event? And deploying a satellite from Atlantis had to be a station event, on the sked or not.

  Powering up the receiver, he smacked the nearest cassette at hand into the VCR and started recording. Setting sound levels, he could hear the astronauts’ chatter with Mission Control and a time code peeping its pulse. Something was definitely happening and he’d almost missed it completely.

  “Shite,” he shouted, causing Hudson to look up from his water dish.

  Jonathan quickly reset the tape counter, scanned his own instrumentation, and double-checked the record light: at least he was getting this much. Then the time-code beep became augmented by a hiss of high-end gain and an audible countdown in Russian, with a shadow count in English.

  “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

  Russian? Russian? It was all happening too fast. Glued to the monitor with its beautiful view out the shuttle-bay doors, Jonathan reached for the phone and then stopped himself. What good would that do? He’d just feel like a fool calling Johnson Space Center in the middle of a count just to let them know he’d missed everything up to this point and was a complete and utter wanker.

  “Project Orion. Initiate . . .”

  Suddenly he saw a bright pulse of light, originating from somewhere below Alpha and Atlantis, shoot up, forming a powerful standing column of laser light that beamed out past the space station and far into space.

  “What the fuck?” Jonathan held his breath. He could hear astronauts and cosmonauts chatting as the mirror SAT he had seen deployed was being remotely maneuvered into position to intercept the laser.

  “Oh, God.”

  Suddenly the space mirror was deflecting the huge, sil
ent beam at an acute angle, redirecting it out past the night terminus of the Earth, where it disappeared thousands of miles downrange. Jonathan was mesmerized.

  “This is awesome.”

  The epic hypotenuse of lockstep photons suspended itself in this sustained manifestation of sheer power for about ninety seconds, underscored by whoops and exclamations in Russian and English on the transmit channel.

  And then, as if someone had clicked off a flashlight, the laser was gone. But the Aussie grad student knew what he had witnessed.

  “A weapons test. A secret bloody space weapons test.”

  And the reason it wasn’t on the daily sked was that he wasn’t supposed to see it, was he?

  But he had seen it. He looked down at the video machine: he even had evidence to prove it.

  “Project Orion. Krilkey . . .” Jonathan’s fingers were shaky as he punched rewind. He noticed, for the first time, that in his haste he had not grabbed a blank cassette and had in fact recorded over a copy of the classic “Cheese Shop” sketch from the Best of Monty Python and part of an Ab Fab. But he was too busy getting paranoid to mourn the loss.

  He replayed the recorded test once more: it was astounding.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuckitty.”

  Jonathan vaulted up out of the chair and paced the room with Hudson at his heels, picking up on his alarm.

  He imagined Home Guard helicopters keening and careening overhead and security troopers rappelling down like commandos and arresting him for security violations. He saw himself dragged off and thrown incommunicado into some military/penal hellhole in Canberra and subjected to brutal interrogation.

  “Shite!” he shouted, frightening the brown Lab into a barking jag. Jonathan smoothed out the raised ridge of fur on the dog’s back.

  “There, there, she’ll be all right, you mug.”

  It gradually occurred to him that maybe his fate was entirely in his own hands: erase the tape, destroy the evidence, and Bob’s-your-uncle.

  But what if there was some way they could know that he’d seen it and archived it? A hidden camera in the station, or a monitoring device in Houston or something.

  In that case, not saying anything would be the most suspicious thing he could do. And how could he prove he’d destroyed the evidence, if he destroyed the evidence?

  Jonathan wanted to do the right thing, whatever it was, without getting himself shit-canned in disgrace or worse, but he was at a complete loss. Then it came to him: the one person on Earth he might be able to trust.

  “Colonel Blake.”

  Once he realized there might be something arguably appropriate that he could actually do, his fear subsided and he began to think more clearly.

  47

  February 8/Arlington Country Club/Washington, D.C.

  The course at Arlington was a vast swath of wet and soggy turf from the night’s rain, and it appeared to be threatening, again. Yellow pin flags snapped horizontal all across the empty course. The cherry trees, fooled into budding early by a series of springlike days, were now getting double-crossed.

  With an eye to the sky, Bob Winston, Admiral James T. Ingraham, and NASA Administrator Vernon Pierce elected to take buckets of balls down to the far end of the driving range.

  The wind snatched at Pierce’s golf jacket, sending a chill down his neck to keep company with the cold sense of dread already lodged in his chest.

  “We have a situation, Vern,” Winston said, taking practice swings amid the swampy puddles. Pierce slipped the cover off his driver. He knew they had a situation. He’d been up since 5:30 A.M. preparing for this meeting to discuss it.

  “Who is it?”

  Winston glanced at the Admiral and then bent down to tee up his ball.

  “Commander Jake Deaver is in felony possession of above-top-secret material which we believe he’s planning to leak or may already have leaked to the media. We’ll be consulting with the AG but we want to consider other options.”

  “Good God.” Pierce gaped as Winston mechanically smacked a ball to the one-hundred-yard sign, hardly noticing where it went. “What’s Deaver think he’s doing?”

  “Apparently selling his story to PBS, God knows why. But I think you’ll agree the timing is problematic.” Winston swung again, slipping slightly in the wet and scowling down at his spikes.

  “Jesus Christ,” Pierce muttered.

  “It gets worse. Admiral?”

  Ingraham launched a series of drives that fell in a tight cluster downrange.

  “Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI say Deaver met with Angela Browning in Colorado. And two days ago, Browning and her producer walked a copy of classified material into Congressman Phillip Lowe’s office on the Hill. A NAV/INT team subsequently found it on Deaver’s computer.”

  “Goddamn it.” Pierce was too upset to swing a club.

  “Don’t worry, Vern.” Winston was finding his rhythm, like the Admiral, driving steadily through a half-dozen balls. “We can still get Deaver back.”

  “Lowe and Browning will be handled separately,” Ingraham said, “but Commander Deaver is our shop.”

  Our shop . . .

  Pierce winced at the fresh reminder of Ingraham’s end run appointment at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

  “Your people looked over the Exposure Act?” Winston said casually.

  This was it. Pierce knew what they wanted from him.

  “Yes, the ET Exposure Act of 1968. It’s a power of quarantine.”

  Pierce had the authority to have Jake Deaver picked up and placed in isolation. But invoking the Exposure Act to quarantine Deaver could be easily second-guessed and criticized as an abuse of power, even if it was legal.

  “Indefinite detention and quarantine.” The Admiral ticked off the salient points. “At the sole discretion of the NASA administrator. No judges, no hearings, no appeals. Except to the Chief Executive.”

  Winston added his two cents.

  “The right tool for the right job, Vern.”

  Pierce imagined how it might play in the media, if it got out: most things eventually did get out. He’d be the one expected to fall on his sword. But Pierce wasn’t quite ready to be buffaloed into the scapegoat role. He dug in his heels.

  “Absent a public health hazard, we can’t arrest and detain Jake Deaver or anybody else. There’s no precedent. There’s no way in hell it’ll ever stand up.”

  The Admiral watched Winston bag his driver with a disgusted shove. He then faced down Pierce and his constitutional argument with equal disdain.

  “It doesn’t need to stand up. Just needs to buy us some time. You’re not going to get hung out to dry, if that’s what you’re worried about. You sign off, NSA has Deaver picked up, and it’s done. He’s their problem after that.”

  Winston knew that was stretching it, but he let it stand.

  “Look, Vern, I’m sure we can get Augie Blake to talk Deaver in. We probably won’t even need to use the quarantine. But we need to have it as a last resort.”

  Augie Blake. Pierce thought about that, grasping at the idea: if that’s how it was handled, that’d be fine. He looked up at the darkening sky and thought maybe he was being overanxious. Of course, if Justice did get involved, or if things went bad in any number of ways that they could go bad, all bets would be off. And he’d be out there naked and trussed up for the fall. He shuddered.

  “And this is from the President?”

  The Admiral faced abruptly away, as if a rude bloom of cat spray had invaded his nose. Winston zipped up his jacket against the cold.

  “You haven’t had a call from Sandy Sokoff, have you?”

  “Sokoff?” Pierce said, puzzled at what seemed a non sequitur. “No. Why?”

  But the two men were too busy packing it in to respond. Winston hefted up his golf bag and offered a warning, disguised as a note of personal concern.

  “The train is leaving the station, Vern. With or without you.”

  He and Ingraham then hiked off toward the clubhouse parki
ng lot.

  Above, a kettledrum of thunder rumbled deep enough to reverberate in Vernon Pierce’s tensed-up stomach. He scowled at the gray clouds crowding together overhead.

  “Christ.”

  Becoming NASA administrator had been the pinnacle of his career in space science and aerospace management, but it was a presidential appointment. If he refused to exercise his authority and invoke the Exposure Act against Commander Deaver, Winston had made it plain he’d be replaced by some Bork who would.

  He imagined an ignominious resignation, the look on his wife’s face, having to pull his two daughters out of private school and move back to California; damaged goods, his public career over. Maybe he could teach . . .

  Big silver-dollar-sized drops of rain began to splat around him.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  Lightning stabbed down from the cumulonimbus coalition now amassed in earnest over the Capitol, and Pierce hustled off the range with his clubs as the first real storm of winter finally broke on top of him like Noah’s worst nightmare.

  48

  Office of the NASA Administrator/Washington, D.C.

  Soaked to the skin, Pierce found Congressman Phillip Lowe waiting in the anteroom of his NASA suite and nursing hot Lipton’s tea in a ceramic cup. It was a souvenir cup, available on-line with a hundred other NASA souvenir items screened, stamped, or embossed with the agency logo.

  “Got a minute, Vern?” Lowe was already on his feet.

  “Mr. Chairman . . . of course.” Pierce peeled off his wet jacket, noticed the Congressman was holding a large plain manila envelope, and quickly guessed what might be inside. He called to his secretary.

  “Stacy? Can you take this?”

  “Sure.”

  The NASA chief handed off his jacket and thought about what Winston had said about Lowe getting together with Angela Browning. He glanced over, looking for a clue about what the thrust of this meeting was going to be, and decided there was nothing in the Congressman’s face except the prospect of a bad day getting worse.

  Pierce smiled and motioned him into his office.