“I know they ran things for over seven centuries,” Jay observed. “In fact, they’re the ones who actually brought a decent civilization to Europe. They had kept the writings from the Greek philosophers and from the Roman and Egyptian civilizations too. They had libraries and marble balconies when London was a village full of mud huts.”
“That’s the thing,” Austin said, “The Moors really had it all going. Commerce, culture, agriculture. But of course, it was too good to last. They ended up like what we see in the Middle East today with Arab groups breaking up into different factions, fighting amongst themselves. And then when the Christians finally got their act together, they were able to drive the Moors out of Spain in 1492,”
“Same year Columbus discovered America,” Hunt interjected.
“Yes, but it turned into a huge conflagration with Christians killing what was left of the Muslims and the Jews too or sending them into exile.”
“And so, to follow your point,” Jay said, “the Muslims have been furious for seven hundred years and are trying to push the borders back to their heyday. And since we always get in the way, we’re a good target.”
“Makes sense to me,” Hunt said. “Of course, that’s been our analysis of their mission ever since 9/11, or even before that. It’s just that up to now, they’ve always managed to take credit for their biggest attacks, and I don’t think we’ve had anybody own up to these things, have we?”
“No,” Jay said. “Not a one. Seems like we’re looking for a Moriarty here rather than some crazed jihadists.”
“Well, we’ve got to keep digging on that connection. But there are other possibilities we have to consider,” Austin said. He pulled another memo out of his stack. “As long as we’re focusing on the Spanish, I suppose we should check out ETA. They used to set up all kinds of explosives at airports, so it might follow their M.O. Except for the fact that they declared a permanent cease-fire back in 2006.”
“Right,” Jay said. “Then the Spanish government started a whole round of talks about the future of the Basque region. Haven’t heard much about it lately, though.”
“Maybe some of the factions held off,” Hunt said. “I don’t remember any of them actually disarming.”
“We’d better check out our sources on that group again, though it seems awfully far-fetched. Besides, I don’t see where they would get the right kind of missiles. Let me check these manifests again.” The NSC advisor perused one sheet and handed the others to Jay and Hunt.
“I don’t see Spanish types on the second plane,” Hunt said, “although there are a couple of names here we could look at again.”
“No,” the vice president said, shaking his head. “This doesn’t feel right at all. I think we’ve got a much bigger agenda on our hands here. What about the South Americans? Venezuela has imploded and signed another new pact with a couple of the other socialist regimes down there. And they’re doing absolutely nothing to stem the flow of drugs into this country. Do you see any connection with the drug cartels?”
Hunt answered. “Our guys are watching the Norte Valle Cartel. They’ve sent something like five-hundred tons of cocaine up here through Mexico in the last ten years or so. And that’s gotta be worth … what? Ten billion anyway. Then again, I don’t see the connection. We’re their best customer. Why irritate us any more than they already have?”
“Their leaders are on our ‘Most Wanted List.’ Maybe that’s enough to set them off,” Jay suggested.
“That doesn’t seem right either,” Austin said. He reached over to the telephone on a side table and buzzed his secretary. “Lucy, could you send in some coffee? We may be a while longer here. Thanks.”
“Okay. The Russians,” Hunt said. “When I was over there trying to negotiate those proliferation agreements, I heard about all sorts of missile systems that they’ve got stashed away in Georgia, the Stans. You name it, they’ve got it, and we all know their Army guys love to make a buck on the side so they’ll sell anything to anybody. And as for their latest variety, remember that contract they signed to sell a couple million dollars worth of S-300PMU1 surface-to-air missiles to Vietnam? How about that connection?”
“The Russians? I wonder,” Jay said. “The FBI has been working on that problem for years. Remember the men who tried to smuggle a Russian shoulder-fired missile into New Jersey a while back? He was an arms dealer with some sort of scheme to sell missiles from Russia to people he thought were terrorists right here in America. But they were federal agents. Talk about a sting for stingers!”
“Yes, but that was just one dealer trying to make a buck. Again, motive, gentlemen,” Austin intoned. “We have no motive. But I think we should follow-up on all of these ideas, just to be sure. Meanwhile, Hunt, since you’ve been away, you probably haven’t heard that we’re trying to fast-track a number of the technology contracts that DHS has out now.”
“The ones where they’re trying to put military defensive systems on civilian planes or around airports?”
“Yes, those and one other track.”
“What’s the other one?”
The vice president intervened. “While Austin here is focusing on the terrorist angle, the president has asked me to concentrate on those contractors but also to work with Dr. Cameron Talbot because she has a new laser technology that just might be adaptable.”
“Cammy?” Hunt said, snapping his head up at the mere mention of her name.
“Yes. I heard you had worked with her before on that India-Pakistan situation. She was pretty spectacular with that near-disaster in Delhi.”
“Hunt was there too, you know,” the NSC advisor said.
“Oh yes, that’s right. Good work on that one.”
“Thank you, sir,” Hunt said, his mind reeling. So now he was going to work with her again. But would she even speak to him after his long absence? He knew he should have figured out a way to let her know what he was doing. But it was a top secret mission. He had been instructed not to tell anyone where he was going, who he was meeting with or how long he’d be gone. Sure he should have figured out something. Some way to say that he really cared about her. Some way to ask her to wait until he got back and maybe they could take up where they’d left off. That is if he ever got back.
On the other hand, the last time he’d been through a major affair, he’d married the woman, and it had been a disaster. His wife hadn’t taken to the military life at all and ended up leaving him for some investment banker in New York who actually came home for dinner. So even though he thought the world of Cammy, he had held back, figuring that if he got home, alive, he’d wait and see how he felt and take it from there.
Now he’d have to try and sort it out at the same time he was trying to figure out who the hell was killing all of these innocent Americans.
CHAPTER NINE
EN ROUTE TO BOSTON
Cammy showed her ticket to the gate attendant in the cavernous Union Station and hurried through the doors to Track Eighteen, the early morning Acela bound for Boston. Hundreds of other travelers who were also avoiding air travel scurried by her, some pulling small carry-ons, most juggling briefcases, newspapers and tall Styrofoam cups of coffee. At least they hadn’t banned those from trains. Yet.
Cammy not only didn’t want to get on an airliner right now after the three crashes, she’d developed a terrible fear of flying ever since he father had been killed when his Air Force jet went down. She still had occasional nightmares about his plane exploding in the air, with horrible images of her father struggling to eject but having no time to escape the inferno.
Every time she had been faced with a long trip, she had tried to figure out a way to drive or take the train. The one exception had been her travel to India when she had taken her Q-3 missile defense system over seas to protect New Delhi when they feared a terrorist attack. That assignment had been on a military jet. At least she had been surrounded by her staff.
She’d always felt that a commercial flight was such a lonesome expe
rience. First, she had to relinquish any semblance of control over her life, and she hated that. Then, if anything did happen, she would be surrounded by other passengers who were strangers with no reason to care about her safety. No, it was a bad scene any way she pictured it.
She hurried on board the second car of the train and pushed her way down the aisle. She spotted a porter and asked where the “Quiet Car” was. She always tried to get a seat in that one because passengers weren’t allowed to talk on their cell phones, and you could actually get some work done on the ride. If she had to use her phone, it was easy to simply walk back to another location and place a call. By the time she found the right car though, she saw that it was already filled.
She kept on walking forward. When she got to an available one, she took a seat by the window, hung her beige blazer over the back, pulled down the tray table and lifted her laptop out of her briefcase. Just then an overweight man in a seersucker suit wedged himself into the seat next to her. She quickly jammed the arm rest down between them and hoped he wasn’t the chatty type.
The conductor made his announcement about the stops coming up at BWI, Wilmington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. He then told everybody to have their tickets out. If they didn’t have a ticket for train number twenty-two-seventy-one, they’d better get off. She pulled her ticket out, knowing that she was in the right place.
As the train pulled away from the station, she began to mentally review the routines she wanted to check with Wan Hu. After the first hour she saw that her seat-mate was dialing a number on his cell phone. It was only seven o’clock in the morning and this guy was already calling somebody?
He started talking loudly about the meeting he was going to have in New York. Just great. That meant she’d be sitting next to this bozo for the next two hours. She tried to ignore him but he kept talking as if the other party were way down the hall. The conversation went on for at least fifteen minutes and Cammy couldn’t concentrate on a single thought.
When he finally ended the call, she reached down to her briefcase and pulled out a paperback book she’d brought along. She opened it to the first chapter and began reading aloud. By the time she got through the first paragraph, the hefty one nudged her and said in an irritated tone, “Do you have to read out loud and make so much noise?”
“Not any more than you had to talk so loudly on your cell phone … sir.”
He glared at her and turned back to his copy of Sports Illustrated. She finally shut her book.
When they arrived in Boston, Cammy stood in the taxi line and gave the driver an address in Cambridge. They headed north over a bridge at the Charles River, crossed Memorial Drive, and went another quarter mile to Kendall Square. She got out and entered a grey stone building, part of the large M.I.T. complex.
It was good to be back. Cammy had graduated from Stanford at the top of her class and then studied for two years at M.I.T. She often wondered whether she should have stayed here and spent her time simply researching missile defense systems rather than going to work for Bandaq Technologies.
She had never been exposed to the business world. She had been raised on military bases since her father had been an Air Force pilot. She remembered how her father told her that several years before she was born, he had been watching television with him at home one night when President Reagan announced something called his Strategic Defense Initiative. It sounded exciting to her at the time. It was a program where he asked scientists to figure out how to knock down incoming missiles that might threaten the whole country. She had told her father she wanted to grow up to be a scientist and knock down the missiles. Of course, she was only nine at the time.
When she was a teenager, she had been completely devastated when a Sidewinder missile miss-fired causing her father’s plane to crash. She had always blamed the manufacturer of that missile, Sterling Dynamics, even though an investigation hadn’t really proved anything. So she had gladly signed up when she had a job offer from Bandaq, a company that was a direct competitor of Sterling’s.
As she looked back on it, she knew that she was not only trying to live up to her childhood dream of saving the world from errant missiles, but trying to exact some sort of revenge from Sterling for her father’s death.
She had made some major inroads when she was able to implement her first big invention, the Q-3 system which targeted cruise missiles and send them off course. That trumped anything Sterling had in their pipeline. But they were still in business. Big business. And they had snagged one of the DHS contracts to protect the airports. Maybe she could review the bidding, set up a new cross-rough, and trump whatever Sterling was touting. Perhaps this time, she’d finally win the hand.
She walked down the hall to the door with Dr. Wen Hu’s name on it, knocked and went inside. The young Chinese man jumped up from his desk and extended his hand. “Dr. Talbot, Cammy, so good to see you in person after all of our work at long distance. Here, let me take your jacket.”
He motioned to a table next to his desk. “You can put your bag over there. But first sit down and talk to me. You’ve had a long journey. We have much to discuss. I took the liberty of bringing in lunch for us both. I have it here in my refrigerator. As I recall, you prefer bacon, lettuce and tomato. I have that along with a fruit salad and some brownies. Will that be all right?”
She laughed softly. “You remember well, my friend. And yes, it’s great to be with you again too. I have some notes I made on the train, and I need your advice on the new laser feature we’ve been working on. For a while there I was having problems.” She smiled and explained, “There were times I have to admit I felt my mind was a blank slate, and I could never find the chalk.”
“I know that feeling. Sometimes it’s like the Sunday crossword in the New York Times. You think you’ve got almost all the words in the right rows, but in the end nothing works right.”
“You’ve got it. But here, let me show you my latest iteration. As I explained before, the president is totally focused on finding a new technology to protect our planes. The trouble is, nothing was ever picked up on radar at any of the crash sites. So in a way, I’m worried that we’re working on something old to defeat something new. Something we can’t even see.”
“I too know about the radar. And I have a new idea. I didn’t want to discuss it over the phone or even on email because as I told you, I am worried about my communications being compromised.”
“I know you said that. Have those agents been back?”
“Yes. Well, not in person this time, but I had a call last night warning me to start packing for a return trip to Beijing.”
“What did you say?”
“I hung up on them.”
“Have you told anybody else about the threats?”
“Who can I tell?”
Cammy thought for a moment. I have some ideas. As soon as I get back to Washington, I’m going to talk to the vice president.”
“The vice president of the United States?” he asked in an awed tone.
“Yes. I’ll be working with him on this project. I’m sure he’ll want to set up some sort of protection for you. Don’t worry. We’ll think of something. Now, back to your new ideas.”
Wen Hu went to his drawer and pulled out some papers. “Here. I have some information from a colleague in China. We keep in touch.”
“Wait a minute. If you think their agents are monitoring you, what do you use? One of the one-time anonymous accounts?” she asked.
“Sometimes we use Anonymizer.com or Findnet.com. And sometimes he just sends one of his studies to my PO Box. It’s amazing how old-fashioned mail gets by the agents. His last study was intriguing. It was about a new imaging seeker that can differentiate between certain kinds of targets. Between different kinds of airplanes for example. It uses a high-resolution camera that decides what kind of object it is, on a CCD array, a charged coupled device. It takes a picture of the plane, tracks it on a screen and follows it. So it only goes after the plane, not an
y chaff or decoys.”
“Incredible!” Cammy exclaimed. “But even if they had such a system, our radar would pick up a missile it had on board unless….” She thought for a long moment and said, “Do you think there’s any possibility that China is working on some kind of new stealth technology?”
“That I do not know. All I can do is speculate.”
“Well, think about this. What if they have some sort of a stealth missile, and they put this new camera on it to track the planes? They could conceivably program it to go after a particular kind of plane, shoot the missile which follows the right image and destroys the plane, without any radar detection at all.”
Cammy sat still, her mind racing to envelope the new concept. Yes. Yes. It was a bit far-fetched. A bit futuristic, with kind of a sci-fi element to it. But yes, they just might be on to something. She quickly ran through the basic elements of their laser experiments and thought about a new approach.
“What about dumping the idea of a single laser aimed at a target and instead, we develop a three hundred sixty degree cone by taking several lasers that fire rapidly on low power. I mean, if a missile has a camera feature, maybe we could blind it and interrupt its journey. We intercept its guidance features, and later when it opens its eyes again, so to speak, the plane has now moved out of its field of regard. So it can no longer engage. It would be too late.”
Wen Hu’s eyes grew wide with excitement. He grabbed a tablet and began making calculations. Cammy reached for another one and also began jotting down notes. They worked together for the next several hours, interrupting their exchanges only when it was time to eat their sandwiches.
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