The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  “I understand.” Winston accepted the presidential reprimand even as his brain raced way out ahead, looking for wiggle room, calculating the extent of damage to his own position, and how to stop further bleeding, and which endangered species of secrets might yet be protected by a more limited disclosure than the President was calling for.

  “If I may speak to the gravitas of the situation, as I see it, sir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Mr. President,” Winston continued, as if they were the only two people in the room, “it cannot be your intention to abandon the preservation of presidential deniability vis-à-vis Special Projects. As your adviser, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider.”

  “Bob, that is exactly my intention.” The President responded in a deliberate, even tone. “I will not make decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people in self-imposed ignorance. And if it puts this office and my administration in political peril down the road, so be it.”

  Winston knew that this was his cue to back off, but he persevered.

  “Mr. President, I still believe it is a grave mistake. And I must formally protest in the interests of national security.”

  He had pushed it to the wall with all the dignity he could muster, under the deteriorating circumstances.

  “Duly noted,” the President said dryly. “And please have your resignation on my desk today before the council convenes. I’ll hold my decision on it until after the meeting.”

  It was the shoe Winston had been waiting to hear drop.

  “Mr. President,” he said, standing in respect for the Office, if not the man. He then turned on his heel with a certain Teutonic spank and marched out of the room.

  Once he was gone, the President snatched up his monogrammed letter opener like a dagger and then drummed it on the dark green blotter.

  “He thinks I’m weak because I didn’t fire his ass outright.”

  From the couch, Sandy Sokoff laughed and shook his head.

  “No, Mr. President; he just knows he still has leverage.”

  “Because we need to know what he knows and he knows it.”

  Lowe shifted his weight and leaned forward, speaking for the first time since Winston had walked in.

  “Mr. President, is there a scenario in which you wouldn’t fire his ass?”

  The President gave that some thought.

  “I expect our friend Bob is working on that even as we speak.”

  60

  Boulder, Colorado

  It was not as if Deaver hadn’t been thinking about it. Off and on throughout their drive to Paula Winnick’s house and even while they were there, he had found himself fantasizing about Ms. Angela Browning: as he watched her quizzing Dr. Winnick or when their hands touched as they passed things across the coffee table.

  He’d sensed that Angela had had some thoughts along those lines, too.

  Still, when she had invited him up for a drink at her place, on the way into D.C., there had been mutual astonishment at how combustible they were together.

  The urgency and hunger were evident in the trail of their clothing from the hallway (where they’d finally kissed each other) to the bedroom (the bed almost totally symbolic, at this point) to the puddle of clothes on Angela’s bedroom floor, where they’d fucked in such a frenzy it was more like jungle-animal sex than making love.

  The second time, actually in the bed, had been even better: probing, delicious, funny, intoxicating, languorous, profound.

  Pulling into his gravel drive outside Boulder, he still wondered if he had done the right thing by coming home. Jake had anguished all the way out to Reagan that morning, thinking he was insane not to be staying in D.C. for a few more days, but Angela had not suggested it and he wasn’t about to presume.

  Beat from the flight and the two-hour drive from Denver, Jake dropped his carry-on bag at the door inside his A-frame cabin and surveyed the wreckage.

  “Oh, no.”

  Unlike the meticulous toss courtesy of Naval Intelligence, this time Deaver’s artwork and mementos, everything from his shelves and closets, was either missing, broken, or turned out in piles on the floor. The sense of violation did not take long to percolate through the initial shock.

  “Son of a bitch . . .”

  Angrily kicking through the ankle-deep disaster area of the living room, he righted a toppled bookcase and rescued a sketchpad still intact in the rubble of books and manuscripts. Pocketing the pad, Jake negotiated his way into the spectacularly trashed kitchen and tried the wall phone, but was greeted only by dead air. He slammed it down.

  “You rat-fucks!”

  A flash of lightning outside drew his attention to the open kitchen door and thunder came right behind the flash like a bang-bang play: close. He could smell the approaching weather.

  Jake shoved aside a shattered spice rack and opened the fridge.

  “You fuckers better’ve left me some OJ.”

  His own scared-stupid bravado cracked Deaver up until he found the juice carton and chugged it, ignoring the trickle down his chin.

  When the truck tires crunched into the drive out front, he didn’t stand there wondering what it was. He hit the back door and disappeared.

  Jake had only one advantage over the younger, faster, and doubtlessly well-armed men who would soon be hard behind him: the home-turf advantage. He’d have to make the most of it.

  61

  The J. Edgar Hoover Building/Washington, D.C.

  Dicks in dick suits, Angela thought.

  The two men waiting at her apartment door, after she returned from the airport, clamshelled Bureau IDs at her with a practiced snap and insisted the questions they had would be better answered at the Hoover Building.

  Angela cooperated. In a gesture of good faith, she even waived her right to counsel. But three hours later she was still sequestered in a small, plain room with three chairs, a table with a tape recorder on it, and Agents Simmons and Collier.

  After she had told it twice, they wanted to hear it again: everything that had transpired between Angela Browning and Commander Jake Deaver; what he said and did, what she said and did, where and when they had said and done it, and who else was in the room at the time.

  She was on the cusp of telling them to go stuff it when the questions turned more specific. So he-said/she-said specific it was obvious they had to have been bugging Dr. Winnick’s house. When Angela finally asked the agents point-blank, they just shrugged and showed her the transcript.

  “Ms. Browning, these are just words on a page, which can be interpreted in different ways. So, if you would please help us out here,” Agent Simmons said, with all the casual smoothness of a spider to a fly. “On page ten, about halfway down, Commander Deaver says to Dr. Winnick: ‘I told Angela everything.’ Can we hear just that portion?”

  Agent Collier produced a cassette, cued up to that spot, and played it back.

  “I told Angela everything, Paula.”

  “What did Deaver tell you?”

  Hearing Jake’s voice, Angela remembered that she hadn’t actually seen him board the plane for Denver, which made her wonder if he wasn’t right here in the building, in a room just like this himself.

  “I’m sorry. What’s the question?”

  “When Commander Deaver says he told you everything, isn’t he referring to classified government secrets? Top-secret material which he had leaked to you, in hopes that you’d use it in a PBS exposé?”

  Angela saw she couldn’t last much longer without perjuring herself.

  “Agent Simmons, Commander Deaver never gave me any classified documents whatsoever. And speaking of documents, since I am not a foreign national suspected of terrorist activity, I’d like to see the federal judge’s signature authorizing the electronic eavesdropping and privacy violations of which this tape and transcript are physical evidence.”

  Chief Investigating Agent Simmons looked at his partner with a bleak expression, then spoke to Angela in a low, sincere v
oice.

  “Ms. Browning, I must remind you that even as a citizen of the United States, giving false or misleading testimony to an agent of the FBI is a felony offense for which you may be sentenced to up to five years in a federal facility and fined up to ten thousand dollars.”

  Angela stared back at them across the table.

  “Well, if you’re waving fines and prison at me, then I think I will need to have my attorney present. And I’m sure he’ll also be very interested in seeing that bench warrant, too, if you actually have one.”

  Angela knew by their reactions that they hadn’t bothered with the technical niceties. She grabbed her bag and stood up, her whole body daring them not to let her go.

  “By the way, you don’t happen to have Jake and me in my bedroom rutting like crazed weasels, do you?” Angela indicated the cassette tape. “I’d sort of like a copy of that.”

  62

  Boulder, Colorado

  Lightning was crackling, sending bright white fiber-optic roots to ground all around him, and Jake could feel the hair on his arms levitating. The following thunder was a basso profundo that juddered up the soles of his work boots and deep into the twisted laundry that was his stomach.

  There would be a cold squall, and soon.

  Jouncing through the brush in his ’76 Pathfinder truck, he noticed how his own fight/flight adrenaline made every physical move, every mental action, seem achingly clear and present. It was almost a spiritual experience.

  “Scared awake.” He laughed, trying to cheer himself on.

  Back at the cabin, creeping on foot through a heavy screen of pines that bordered his property, he’d watched the black, unmarked Chevy van unloading its packet of operatives. When the heavily armed team rushed the front door, Jake had made a dash for the garage and his Pathfinder and then roared out the utility road, heading uphill.

  With high clearance and four-wheel drive, he now drove as fast as he dared, thinking his best chance of losing them would be off-road. After that, he didn’t know what the hell he was going to do, but first things first.

  As he took a sharp left into some low scrub, lightning flashed again and the first spatter of rain strafed the windshield. This time of year that should have been good for snow. But whatever was playing havoc with the world’s weather systems, it was only freezing above seven thousand feet, so in the foothills of Boulder rain just meant mud.

  Good. Jake checked his rearview. Mud is good.

  Then a wind came up strong enough to buffet the cab, the clouds dropped cargo, and Jake had his wish. Zagging downhill, he slipped and thumped over the rocky terrain and got a first glimpse in the mirror of the black van muscling and banging its way behind him.

  “Shit.”

  The good news was that, so far, the wet had yet to compromise the purchase of the vintage Nissan’s all-season tires. He was going to need that grip for all it was worth.

  Making a hard off-camber turn that dumped him in a controlled fall onto a rarely used rutted track, Deaver gathered speed and distance for a quarter mile, then jumped back off-road again as the van reappeared far behind him.

  Inside the slithering black Suburban that was slamming its bump stops all the way down the hill, FBI agents Stottlemeyer and Markgrin held on to whatever they could, but this was just a courtesy ride-along.

  The Defense Intelligence crew running the show had come heavy: cammies, Kevlar vests, flash grenades, machine pistols, and laser-scoped sniper rifles.

  “Unhh. Jesus.”

  Stottlemeyer grunted after a particularly harsh impact as they followed Deaver off-road, and gave Markgrin a look: there was no way this was going to end except badly. He shouted up to the DIA team leader.

  “You don’t think this might be overkill. Just a wee bit?”

  “You were the one who said he wouldn’t run. By the way, what kind of weapons would he have in that old rice burner?”

  “Weapons?”

  “Hunting knives, rifles, shotguns? There was only one in the house.”

  A cammo’d op produced an unloaded service revolver in a Marine Corps holster. Stottlemeyer rolled his eyes.

  “Guess you missed the ceremonial sword. It goes with the dress whites.”

  “Might not be all he’s got,” the team leader said, pronouncing this wisdom with a kind of clipped righteousness meant to cut off further discussion.

  Then the pounding rain was drumming down so hard on the van’s thin roof skin that conversation became impossible anyway.

  63

  Map Room/the White House

  The Secret Service were obliged to wait outside the Map Room in the White House, where the National Security Council was in session: no one guarding the President had the clearance to hear what was being revealed.

  Behind those closed doors, Winston led the discussion, standing next to a globe of the Earth that was easily ten feet in circumference. They had already covered antigravitic propulsion technology and high-altitude microwave-beam weapons bouncing death off the upper atmosphere with scaled-down mobile applications for crowd control, and a whole lot more from the dark world of Unacknowledged Projects.

  “The next category is weaponization of weather,” Winston was saying. “We’re playing catch-up with the Russians on Battlefield Weather Modification, but we’re making progress. Mainly in forced inducement of drought and flooding, creating earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes. Ongoing testing is, of course, taking place strictly in underpopulated regions.”

  Winston indicated flagged spots in the Far East, including a few where artificially induced “natural” disasters had regrettably spread beyond isolated test areas, causing widespread destruction and human suffering.

  “Battlefield Weather Modification,” the President repeated.

  “Yes. It’s not an exact science, but we can almost put a tornado down on the ground wherever we want to, potentially incapacitating a standing army. When the Northern Alliance was champing at the bit to take Kabul, we stalled them and bought ourselves a couple of days with a sandstorm. Controlling it after it’s been generated is something else, but the technology is promising.”

  “Smart storms,” the President said, unsure which was more insane: that this could be done or that it was being done.

  Winston read his reaction.

  “If it can be done, Mr. President, how can we afford not to do it?”

  Ignoring the rhetoric, Sokoff jumped in.

  “Mr. President, you can stop it and we can probably get the Russians to stop it, but we could never go public with it. The liability issue alone . . . every hurricane in Asia would get blamed on American weapons testing. There’d be calls for reparations, business insurance would melt down—”

  “Mr. Sokoff, I won’t tell FEMA if you won’t. Can we move on?” Winston loved hearing the President’s counsel making the case for secrecy.

  “Unacknowledged R and D is a crucial element of national security, authorized by tacit EOs and funded by Aerospace and Defense monies, congressional allocations, and so-called black budget or off/book discretionary dollars for over fifty years. It’s about protecting our security future.”

  Sokoff coughed into his fist and leaned over to the President.

  “ ‘Tacit’ executive orders?”

  But the President waved him off.

  “How much money are we talking about, Bob? Altogether. Everything.”

  “Fifty billion annually, Mr. President, give or take.”

  A shocked murmur among the military men rippled around the room; mostly plain surprise, curdled with jealousy on behalf of their own service’s budget constraints.

  Winston waited while the hubbub died down. He had decided not to mention the additional billions put to work supplying weapons for every side of every armed conflict, rebellion, or civil war around the globe. Profits sometimes amplified by payment taken in heroin or cocaine and turned into cash by favored drug cartels. He didn’t want to muddy the already murky waters for the new Occupant, who seemed un
derstandably out of his depth.

  “Fifty billion dollars,” the President said. “All right, I want everyone in this room to hear this loud and clear: as Commander in Chief, I can and will impose moratoriums on any or all of these programs, if that is in the best interests of the United States. And I don’t give a shit whose bread falls butter-side down.”

  The President looked around the table, taking in the entire council, including the CIA chief, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the heads of NSA and Defense Intelligence, and others, each of whom had his or her most game face on.

  “That is a given, Mr. President,” Winston said, “but with all due respect, sir, tarring Project Orion with the same brush as weather mods or these other things would be extremely unfortunate and, I think, shortsighted, given the narrow window.”

  “We’re aware of the timetable,” the President said, locking eyes with Winston. “Let’s get back to the black budget projects.”

  64

  Everything outside Jake’s windshield kept disappearing in the lashing sideways deluge. Steering the spartan Pathfinder by Braille he hoped he was closing on an arroyo where he’d either find disaster or the break he needed.

  Squinting between swipes of smeary wiper blades, he got a glimpse of the normally dry creek bed and hit the wet brakes hard. The creek was now a swift and rising river, and he was about to find out exactly how far it had risen.

  Jake shifted gears and inched forward, sliding down the collapsing banks and fighting to keep from getting his truck sideways. Grinding through river water up to the engine mounts, he revved the Nissan four-banger furiously until he was out of the water and then gunned it like a crazy man up the other side of the arroyo.

  “Whoo-hoo!”

  From his new vantage point Jake looked back, swerving parallel with the swollen creek. The pursuing three-ton Suburban could either follow suit or fold.