The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  “Come on in, Phil. Good to see you. Stacy? If there’s more hot tea . . . and see if you can track down Bob Winston’s whereabouts for me.”

  Pierce decided he had no choice but to play ball, but he was going to need help in terms of damage control.

  49

  National Archives Building/Washington, D.C.

  Emerging alone from the vaults of the National Archives, Representative Phillip Lowe found himself out in the high-ceilinged lobby feeling very strange: everything had changed. Nothing was physically different from the way it had been when he had walked in. The marble flooring, gilded Doric columns, and temperature-controlled, bank-hush quiet were exactly as they had been an hour ago.

  The change was interior to Chairman Lowe.

  Behind a mask of severity, he signed out at the security desk with its double bank of TV monitors. Nothing would have suggested to an observer that, for Phillip Lowe, the world was no longer anything like what he had thought it was sixty minutes before.

  “Ordinarily, this would require above-top-secret clearance,” Bob Winston had said, escorting the Congressman and Vernon Pierce into the repository of the nation’s deepest secrets. “But that’d take time we don’t have.”

  Winston stopped at the door to a guarded conference room that might have doubled as a vault for the National Reserve at Ft. Knox.

  “If I can just have you sign this.” He presented a dense NSA document to each of them along with a gold-tipped pen. “It’s a standard nondisclosure.”

  Pierce scrawled on his copy, but Congressman Lowe declined.

  “I don’t think so.” He sounded pretty firm about it.

  Winston blinked: he hadn’t imagined that Lowe might demur. Pierce jumped in to mediate.

  “Um, I think the Congressman may be concerned that in his role as Chairman of the Space Committee such an agreement might represent a conflict of interest.”

  Lowe did not disagree, but offered nothing more. He was fully prepared to turn and walk out: it was their dog and pony show. If they wanted to show him something intended to influence him, he had his terms.

  Winston disguised his displeasure and folded away the agreements, one signed, one unsigned. Unlike his relationship with Pierce, he had little leverage with the Congressman. And it wasn’t smart to make enemies if you weren’t sure you could also make them go away.

  He nodded to a Marine, who then stepped aside from the bomb-proof door.

  “Then the distinguished Chairman’s word will have to suffice.”

  Now, after his hour in the above-top-secret vault, Lowe waited to be buzzed out of the archives building, acutely aware of the security cameras everywhere around him and feeling almost desperately claustrophobic.

  God, he thought. I would kill for a smoke.

  It had been five years since he quit, but at the moment it seemed like five hours. The brrraaat of the releasing buzzer startled him, though he knew what it was. A security guard called out from behind his bank of monitors.

  “Go ahead, Congressman.”

  Embarrassed by the prompting, Lowe pushed on the steel-reinforced exit with unnecessary force, swinging the door wide. The electronic locks clapped loudly home behind him.

  Out in the street, he was shocked at how naked he felt, how disoriented. By the time he found his three-year-old silver Saturn and was steering toward Capitol Hill on automatic pilot, all the work waiting back at his office seemed trivial.

  Snatching up his car phone, he quickly put it back in its cradle. Who was he going to talk to? Who could he talk to?

  Twenty years ago he had followed his father’s footsteps into politics, though without the seemingly requisite fire in the belly that the Carolinian Senator was famous for. Phillip Lowe was a thoughtful, decent, even idealistic man who loathed the mudslinging rhetoric and partisan rancor endemic to the House. True to his nature, he chose a low-profile path: unlike Ways and Means, Judiciary, or the Armed Services Committees, the issues related to Space seldom generated blood-feud party battles. No one could jealously imagine the Space Committee as a springboard to a damn thing.

  Had the unimaginable, now, just occurred?

  Lowe remembered Miriam’s question about a congressional investigation, and knowing what he now knew, he imagined televised House hearings into the violations of NASA’s charter, including the suppression of extraterrestrial artifacts discovered on the Moon and Mars. The revelations would be a scandal. The business of the nation would be paralyzed like nothing since Watergate, Clinton’s impeachment hearings, or September 11.

  And Phillip Lowe, a little-known representative from a tiny district in North Carolina, would be in the white-hot glare of the national media shit storm, presiding over all of it.

  Pulling into the members-only parking structure adjacent to the Hill, Lowe realized that this was exactly the kind of leadership role he had been raised and groomed to fulfill, however long he had dodged it.

  It would bring unbuyable name recognition. And if he acquitted himself well, in an evenhanded statesmanlike manner, reassuring to the public, who knew? He might just be able to parlay it into a statewide run for the Senate, that more gentlemanly, prestigious, and contemplative Senate Chamber still home to his father’s legend. Something often presumed by observers of the Washington scene to be beyond the son’s grasp. A presumption he would like very much to prove wrong.

  Lowe began to see the scale of the thing, the ducks he’d have to get in a row.

  Then he realized who he needed to call first and why.

  50

  PBS Building/Science Horizon Office

  “Congressman Lowe, on line one.”

  The voice of her assistant on the intercom made Miriam raise a peremptory eyebrow at Angela, who was eating a take-out Cobb salad on the office couch. It was a look that they both knew meant: Don’t laugh or I’ll kill you. After waiting a beat, Miriam picked up the phone.

  “Getting a jump on Valentine’s Day! You are a shameless man, Phillip Lowe,” she said, causing her partner to choke on a bacon bit.

  But as Miriam listened to the Congressman, her teasing tone quickly faded.

  “Oh . . . no, no, I understand. Believe me. Don’t worry about it. You just take care, okay? Phillip? You heard me. Good.”

  Miriam hung up and swiftly closed the office door, leaning her back against it like the Dutch boy holding back the flood. Angela was all eyes.

  “Who died?”

  “I think we did.”

  “We lost the Congressman.”

  Miriam just stood there, looking oddly shaky.

  “He sounded scared, Angie. And if the Chairman of the House Committee on Space is scared, what the hell are we doing here, kiddo?”

  “Fuck him.” Angela tossed her salad in the trash. “And we are not dead.”

  “Then what’s that terrible smell?”

  51

  February 9/the White House/Residential Wing

  From the more public foyer that communicated to the West Wing, the uniformed porter opened a gold leaf and cream enamel door with white-gloved hands, bowed the President and Sandy Sokoff into the residential living room, and then closed the door, remaining discreetly available outside.

  A pine-log fire popped and hissed in the Teddy Roosevelt fireplace rebuilt by Coolidge, and Sokoff stared into it as the President crossed to a sideboard bar.

  “I’ve got a ninety-year-old single malt Tony Blair sent over from his private stock. It’s like warm peat smoke.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Sandy remained standing, but shifted some weight off his bruised right knee. Since the “accident,” he had taken a few precautions about which he had chosen not to burden his boss; chief among them was securing a concealed weapons permit and packing his wife, Juana, and the baby off to her mother’s place in Austin.

  “How d’ya want it?”

  “In a glass.”

  The President fixed their drinks underneath a whimsical portrait of the First Lady with their family
dogs, an inaugural gift from David Hockney.

  “Here.” Quitting the sideboard and handing Sokoff three fingers’ worth, he indicated the Band-Aid on Sandy’s swollen nose. “So, how is it?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Think you’re making somebody nervous out there?”

  Sandy made a wry face. The President commandeered eight feet of leather sofa.

  “All right, then. Let’s hear it,” he said, stretching out.

  “With one disclaimer.” Sokoff gave his back to the fire. “What I am about to say I would never be able to prove in front of a grand jury.”

  “Understood.”

  Sandy tasted his drink, nodded once, and began.

  “Mr. President, I believe that powers historically reserved for the executive branch and the Office of the President are being clandestinely and systematically usurped. Previous administrations either tacitly permitted it or were too distracted by more pressing issues to deal with it. But there is a cancer on the presidency and I believe it has become a constitutional crisis. You still want to hear this?”

  The President took that in, along with a half ounce of single-malt scotch. “You betcha,” he said.

  52

  Reagan National Airport/Washington, D.C.

  Jake mumbled to himself, unbuckling the business-class seat belt and wrestling his lone travel bag out of the overhead bin.

  “Face it. You’re a mess.”

  Disembarking from the American Airlines 747 at Reagan National, he said his good-byes to the flight attendants and crew who had come back to meet him during the flight and chat about the space program and the Apollo missions.

  Deaver then headed out the jetway.

  After Jake accepted the invitation to come east at Science Horizon’s expense, Angela had said she’d be picking him up at the airport and he was careful not to read anything more into the gesture than logistical convenience. On his end, though, something more had definitely been going on since that kiss in his kitchen: hell, he was talking to himself.

  “Yep. You are a definite mess.”

  He pulled at the cowlick he suspected might be sticking up on the back of his head. It had been a couple of years since he had been romantically involved with anyone outside the rather insular Buddhist community and he felt rusty. The age difference was no small item, either. But Jake didn’t really feel all that different than he ever had.

  “It’s a question of mind over matter,” he remembered Satchel Paige once said. “If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”

  Emerging at the gate, he looked around for Angela’s face, then remembered that the gate area at Reagan was still for ticketed passengers only. Even so, his posture slumped slightly in disappointment.

  “Damn.”

  He laughed at this evidence of his obvious nervous excitement and continued on out the concourse, past the state-of-the-art baggage X-ray station and a pair of armed National Guardsmen.

  And whether it was only about seeing Angela or also about what they seemed to be embarking on, professionally, Deaver was beginning to feel something like liberation. Emerging from the terminal, he saw how, even in mundane things like airport signage and the clothes people were wearing, the colors around him seemed vibrant and fresh.

  Jake looked around and realized he’d actually been whistling; something from the Broadway musical The King and I, which got him thinking about “whistling past the graveyard” and the time he had driven a car full of Tibetan monks into Boulder from the Denver airport.

  Passing the town cemetery, the young Buddhists had gazed out over the field of headstones and cheerfully called out: “Coming . . . coming!”

  And then he saw her, double-parked in a red Jeep Grand Cherokee. A rush of joy spread through his chest, and before it could be abbreviated by some attempt at being cool, he had covered the ground to Angela’s truck.

  “Hey,” he said, all too blatantly glad to see her.

  “Hey.” Angela grinned up at his surprisingly boyish face and unlocked the door. “Is that it?”

  She pointed to his solo carry-on.

  “That’s it.” Jake tossed it in back and settled into the shotgun seat.

  As Deaver buckled up, he saw how Angela’s smile made it all the way to her eyes and then some. He had been thinking a lot about those green eyes. She then deftly launched the big Jeep into an invisible break in the airport traffic and they were gone.

  Cocooned in a Cadillac limo wearing diplomatic plates, an elegantly dressed, gray-haired man fell in behind them, kept at a discreet distance by a Russian-embassy driver wearing a chauffeur’s cap.

  Up front, the race-trained driver was proud of his machine: the glossy black Caddy had been armor-plated, the weight of which necessitated an upgrade in the stock NorthstarV-8, which now put out over 450 bhp, measured at the bench. But all that giddy-up called for some serious whoa, so huge Brembo racing brakes put right-now stopping power at the corners. Finally, grippy new seventeen-inch Pirelli P-zeros and custom suspension bits made sure the bulletproof two-and-a-half-ton cruiser could perform like a Bahn-burner, either in evasion or in pursuit.

  But that performance envelope was unlikely to be pushed this evening.

  Behind the smoked privacy glass, the only performance in progress was Pavarotti making light work of II Trovatore and the gray-haired man singing along, sipping coffee decanted from a silver samovar in the limo cabinet bar. With the transparency of the Bose sound system as a reference, he could hardly understand why Bocelli’s voice spoke so to the popular culture; it was obvious he would never wrest the crown from Luciano.

  In the adjacent lane, a yellow taxi displaying an off-duty sign flashed its brights in a brief salute and passed the limo at speed, disappearing several car lengths up ahead in front of Angela’s Grand Cherokee.

  “Following from in front,” the gray-haired man thought, nodding his tradecraft approval.

  Then the dapper self-styled entrepreneur, cultural attaché, and FSB agent from Moscow relaxed deeper into the limo’s pleated leather upholstery and conducted the alert and sympathetic La Scala orchestra, deftly cuing the great Italian tenor into the chorus reprise.

  53

  Sandy Sokoff set his empty glass down on the mantel in the residential East Wing living room and summed it up.

  “So sometime during the Cold War, as far back as Truman, somebody decided that national security was too important to be left to the politicians. Including the President of the United States.”

  He took a seat in a worn leather club chair by the fire and waited for questions. The President sat up on the matching couch.

  “So, there’s a cabal. ‘Friends of Bob?’?”

  He made it sound like a political fund-raising committee. Sandy laughed.

  “Yeah. Some are probably FOB, well-placed people in the military, the intelligence services, key players in aerospace/defense. All we can know for sure is: it’s big, it’s old, it’s hugely well funded and all too ready and willing to subvert the Constitution in order to save it. Though I doubt they’d see it that way.”

  “Patriots.”

  “Yes, sir. Patriots.”

  “And at the core, it is all about black budget weapons systems.”

  “Unacknowledged Special Access Projects.”

  “Like Project Orion.”

  “Whoever they are, they decided Orion had gotten too big to hide. Which is probably the only reason we know about it.”

  “But otherwise, we’re out of the loop.” The President scowled, looking mad enough to spit. Sandy shrugged.

  “I imagine some administrations were brought into the tent and some they didn’t trust. I’d bet Nixon was in, Ford I don’t know, Carter was definitely out, Reagan was in, and Bush Senior, and Bush/Cheney. Clinton was out.”

  “So, we’re talking about a shadow government. But not a bunch of guys in bombproof bunkers waiting for the next shoe to drop on the Capitol.”

  “More like an ongoing, secret executive branch.”


  “Fuck me.” The President lurched up, returning to the heirloom sideboard below the new Hockney to freshen his drink. Sandy could see that his face was flushed more with anger than with the whiskey from the Court of St. James.

  “A secret executive branch, with command and control over the most advanced military weaponry on the planet and billions in public and private moneys, off the radar, with zero oversight.”

  “And passing itself off to each administration as business as usual.” Sokoff nodded, waving off the President’s mute offer of more scotch. But he liked seeing the man he helped get elected growing angry. He was angry, too.

  “Mr. President, the Republic is in danger.”

  “Answer me this. Am I or am I not the constitutionally elected President of the United States of America and Commander in Chief?”

  Sandy resisted the urge to scratch at the itchy edges of the Band-Aid on his nose. It was a simple enough question. Sokoff answered it.

  “Yes, sir. As long as you don’t act too much like you’re in charge.”

  The President’s brooding expression turned hard, but not at all hard to read. When he spoke, his voice was low and contained.

  “What time is it, Sandy? The exact time.”

  “Nine twenty-four P.M. Eastern Standard Time. Why?”

  “Write it down,” the Commander in Chief said, with the gravitas of direct order. “Business as usual just stopped here.”

  PART

  V

  Men praise thee in the name of Ra. Thou dost pass over and pass through untold spaces. Thou steerest thy way across the watery abyss to the place thou lovest . . . and then thou dost sink down and make an end of hours.

  —The Egyptian Book of the Dead

  54

  Three months earlier/The Giza Plateau/Egypt

  Former Commander Jake Deaver had left Boulder and flown to Egypt on seventy-two hours’ notice. His passport had needed renewing and he had to get Nile-fever and malaria shots, but he wasn’t really thinking that much about missing Christmas with his daughter and probably New Year’s as well. He was too excited about getting to go inside the Great Pyramid at Giza, which was a measure of Jake’s love affair with ancient Egypt and everything about it.