The Ganymede Project

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  Zfar stopped washing for a moment. “I think we should get John Anderson to look at this. He’s an environmentalist with the Tellus Foundation in Washington, D.C. His people can test it.”

  “Think he’ll want to take on the U.S. Government?”

  Jafri smiled. “John’s already got Groom in his sights. He knows how to play hardball.”

  30. THE FIRST CIRCLE

  29-30 April 1994

  It wasn’t the Baltimore Orioles, but Embassy League baseball had its own avid devotees.

  There was thecrack of a bat at a small park in Fairfax, Virginia. Fans screamed as a runner dashed toward home plate. The catcher, Vladimir Fontanov, threw off his mask.

  The runner steamed in.

  Vladimir extended his mitt.

  A hard ball sizzled home.

  POW! The ball hit with high impact.

  He tagged the sliding runner.

  “Yer out!” the umpire yelled, jutting a thumb.

  The game broke up, with a mix of cheers and boos.

  Vladimir ran toward right field and wildly embraced today’s hero—Katrina. He picked her up, slinging her over a shoulder while she made two ‘victory fists.’

  Other team members converged on the two.

  “Great throw!” Vladimir said, putting her down and squeezing her biceps. “What an arm!”

  The team began a chant: “Uh! Uh! Uh!”

  Katrina and Vladimir laughed, then picked up the war cry: “Uh! Uh! Uh! Go Dingoes!”

  They allhigh-fived , then stood in line to shake hands with the losing team.

  “You look like a dirt ball,” Katrina said, pushing the bill of his cap down over his nose. Vladimir groped around, pretending to be blind. A team mate winked at Katrina and poured soda on Vladimir’s head.

  “You rats!” he screamed, in mock anger, throwing off the cap.

  They all laughed at the antics hugging each other, feeling good about the win. Their numbers swelled with spouses and children, jostling and pushing each other playfully. A little girl, the four-year-old daughter of a Singapore friend, climbed into Katrina’s arms.

  Katrina’s smile turned to a frown when she looked beyond the girl’s happy face to the throng of milling spectators, spotting an unwelcomevoyeur . The man looked at her through shaded eyes, then removed his hand. She could plainly see his face.

  “He’s watching us,” she said, pounding Vladimir’s shoulder with a fist.

  “Who?”

  “Indiana Jones.”

  “Can I see?” the little girl asked, overhearing the remark. “I want to see Indiana Jones.”

  “It’s not really him,” Katrina said.

  In the distance, Sverdlov saw Katrina looking back at him, ducked behind a dugout, then disappeared into the crowd.

  * * *

  The apartment was neat except for a littered work area where mountains of Federal environmental regulations leaned precariously against a paper stack of graphs, maps and photographs. A thick black arm reached over one of the mountains and picked up the phone after it rang twice. The face was older than the one in the picture he used to advertise his seminars.

  “Anderson,” he said, in a deep, resonant voice.

  “John, this is Zfar. Finally we connect.”

  “Hi. Good to hear from you! I see you’re becoming a famous personality—maybe even respectable now.”

  “Right—I’ve had my fifteen minutes of fame. You saw the piece, then?”

  “Yup. Some of it. Incredible timing. I briefed the Tellus Foundation yesterday on some of the environmental problems at Groom. I appreciate the way you helped me get close to the base perimeter. That preliminary data helped clinch funding.”

  He paused for a moment, then decided to share information with Jafri. “I had another surprise today. I got an invite from the Russian Embassy to discuss the project. Seems everybody’s interested.”

  “The Russians? Hmmm.”

  “It’s not like... I mean, they just called me today.”

  “Of course. You need all the help you can get.”

  “Right.”

  “By the way, I may have some more ammo for you.”

  “What?”

  “Does the Tellus Group still have a pathologist?”

  “Yeah, a good one! Rita Li. She teaches at both Johns Hopkins and Georgetown. Also heads up the Foundation. We’ve got a lot of other expertise—biochemistry, embryology, physics. You name it. What’ve you got?”

  “Not sure. A dead animal. A rat. Not native to this area. Found it at Groom. It could be nothing.”

  “Or...?”

  “Or it could be germ warfare.”

  “Jeez!”

  Anderson paced back and forth. “If that’s true, it’s political dynamite. It could derail the proposed land annexation.” His mind raced. Finally, he said, “Okay... Okay... Here’s what you do. Call my secretary tomorrow. She’ll get you an airplane ticket to DC. I need to see this. Our group needs to see this. And evaluate it. Got me?”

  “Gotcha!”

  * * *

  Zfar Jafri and Deke Dobbs had a business partnership founded on the assumption that people who believed in UFOs would be crazy enough to buy information about them. Oddly, the assumption seemed to hold.

  The nerve center of this business was a small trailer on the outskirts of Rachel. It was untidy, filled with computer equipment, file drawers, a makeshift photo lab and bunk beds. A bookshelf stuffed with paranormal literature also archived back issues ofPlayboy Magazine .

  The sign over the door read:International UFO Research Center . Underwear and Dorito crumbs littered the floor.

  “Don’t worry,” Deke said. “When you come back from D.C., everything will be just as you left it.” The short, thin, professorial 26-year-old rubbed a hand across the scarred vinyl tabletop, as though it were a priceless antique.

  “I was afraid of that,” Jafri said with a grin. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’ll call periodically and let you know the status.”

  “Looks like the Center is moving into the big time, Boss.”

  Jafri’s beard trembled at the thought. “Right. You gotta think big to be big. Remember: If Action News wants more of our help, make sure they pay in advance. We’ve got bills. Which reminds me—we need to get the newsletter out by next Friday.”

  “Aye, aye Cap’n. Hear that Gray? We got a mission.”

  A large dog of ambiguous heritage perked its ears, recognizing its name—barely. When Jafri finished packing, Deke threw his bag into the truck and drove him to the bus station.

  * * *

  John Anderson walked along 16th Street N.W. in Washington, D.C., mulling over the tradeoffs people make in their lives and careers. Each decision carries a different weight—both positive and negative. And now, a major tradeoff faced him. Access to a unique source of information could spawn an unparalleled career in environmental investigation, righting wrongs, uncovering corporate and governmental misdeeds, protecting the planet. These were all noble goals—the passions propelling John Anderson’s life. But there was a downside. A dark side. If the source of information was exposed, it could ruin him professionally. They would say he was a traitor, no matter how much good he did. They would say his research had a hidden agenda. They would say he made deals. They would be right.

  Exposure is what he feared most—an exposure that tested his metal, his principles, the core of his being. And yet, if he was not exposed, the payoff would be very high. He could follow his dreams.

  As he calculated the reward-to-risk ratio, he failed to notice the tall, broad-shouldered man with jet-black hair standing in a crowd on the opposite side of the street, stealing occasional glances in his direction—Yuri Sverdlov.

  Anderson stopped at the address—1125. There was no sign, perhaps for security reasons. An array of antennas jutted from the roof and what looked like a video camera scanned the entrance with an unblinking, unmoving eye. This seemed like the right place. He pushed a button near the gate.
Nothing happened.

  “I’m John Anderson. I’m here to see Nikolai Gallagan.”

  He made the statement not to a human, but to a metal box. It was a matter of faith that the box was linked to an actual person. The box didn’t respond in any comprehensible way. It acknowledged his existence with a burst of static.

  Magically, the iron gate opened with aclang .

  Anderson walked to the front entrance, where he met a second barrier. He entered a security trap disguised as a mud room. Both doors closed, locking him in.

  Again, he stated his name and business, hoping words and intentions would be a passport to a better place. He thought of Dante and the layered path to hell.

  When nothing happened for a minute, he yelled, “Hey!”

  A speaker in the mud room issued an unintelligible burst of static. “P**s ate **ame,” it announced.

  “Hey! Let me outta here!” he yelled.

  He pounded on the inner door. There was a muffled conversation on the other side. A woman and man argued in a foreign tongue. This was followed by the mechanical sound of a door unbolting.

  As the door swung open, he could see an attractive woman waving her arms wildly at a man behind a desk. The man was dressed in a Russian Army uniform.

  She yelled in Russian.

  He doodled with a pencil.

  Katrina suddenly remembered Anderson. “Sorry,” she said, in English. The little room lets them look at you and check you out. The guard was asking you to state your name. The technology doesn’t always work.”

  * * *

  Jack Dugan tapped a pencil back and forth between two pieces of paper on a desk in his NSA Headquarters office. One was a letter, the other, a classified voice transcript. The information was hot. Suggestive. Damning. It opened a door into hell and beckoned him down.Shall I go there? Just for a peek ? He felt alone, atop a treacherous moral cusp.

  The transcript described technology that was pirated from a technology pirate. There was some sort of double-cross. That was clear from the letter. One of the pirates was in a White House office.The White House !

  Serendipity, he thought.Chance .Maybe an omen . The voice transcript had given him a heads up. The letter added another piece to the same puzzle.

  He had simply followed up. Done his job. Traced the channels which Katrina Fontanova had intercepted. One of them turned out to be a mobile phone. The other was a government office phone. A White House phone.

  Jerry Ramos, his resident technical wizard, had tapped those same channels from the FBI Surveillance Center, using as his authority the broad, discretionary warrant provided to the Center by the Department of Justice.We had the fishing license, so why not fish ?

  A signals intercept from two days ago contained a familiar name—Weddell. He called the Leavenworth prison, but it was too late. Someone made good on the promise of violence hinted at in the intercept. Weddell was dead.

  The latest intercept suggested third parties were at risk—one of them, a traditional NSA adversary.

  “This is certainly a fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” he said aloud, blaming himself.

  I’m not a Boy Scout, he thought.I know what goes on. The problem is having two sets of rules . On the one hand, there was the world of FBI justice—right and wrong, clear cut, hard-as-rock, the law. On the other hand, the fluid world of black programs—smoke and mirrors, sociopaths, an ambiguous netherworld. And Sverdlov’s Operation Inquisition was neither land nor sea, but a swamp, somewhere in-between—a swamp that Sverdlov and Dugan had aggressively sold to multiple owners. I’m caught in the muck .

  Sverdlov demanded justice and closure.Find the leak. Plug it .Nail the Bozo . But if he pursued those goals, Jack Dugan risked his career in the black world. Or worse.

  One option was to do nothing. But if he did nothing, he would himself be a criminal—by concealing evidence of blatantly criminal acts.

  Which set of rules? It came down to personal priorities.Secrecy ?Or justice ?

  He puffed up his cheeks and expelled breath in a slow, steady stream.I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t . What the hell?

  He picked up the phone and dialed a White House number.

  * * *

  Deke pulled the sweat suit from a hook outside the trailer. This was the safest place to keep it, given the fact that it would fail any known emissions test.

  He put it on, then pranced around in a warm-up dance. Gray pranced, too, dimly aware that something BIG was about to happen.

  They took off at an easy pace.

  An unmarked van, painted Air Force blue, passed him as he rounded the first gravelly turn.

  “Groom Goons,” he said aloud. “Wonder where they’re going?”

  Unfortunately, he didn’t understand dog language. Gray’s response was a cautious “Woof!”

  * * *

  The Office of Science and Technology Policy overlooked the White House complex. It was an impressive view, evoking history, filled with symbolic artifacts, colored by the spirit of risk takers, revolutionaries and great men. Jack Dugan gazed at the Oval Office on the edge of an immaculate, green lawn, then queried the 56-year-old, bald-headed OSTP Director, Dr. Billy Stanton.

  “Do you see my problem?”

  Billy flipped through the material, attempting to act cool, throat clutching, blood pressure rising. “Is this the only intercept?”

  “Yes,” Dugan said, lying.

  Stanton beat a fist on the desk. His lips trembled. “You know it’s illegal to use intelligence assets to spy on American civilians? On your own government? I could have you thrown in jail.”

  Dugan remained calm. “With all due respect, Dr. Stanton, I don’t think so. They were nominally FBI assets. And besides, we had a warrant. A very broad, comprehensive warrant.”

  The corner of Billy’s mouth twitched. He stonewalled. “I’m sorry. Can’t help you on this one.”

  “Standard procedures require that we debrief the source of the leak. I’ve done that. Now I’ve got to report it.”

  Billy’s mind raced. “Why? If the Russians are as capable as you say they are, isn’t there a risk that your investigation could expose the very program your tryin’ to protect?”

  Dugan looked across the White House lawn again, trying to decide how much to reveal. “There are rumors, from another source, of course, that a Russian—and a member of the press—might be in danger.”

  Stanton’s face now flushed red. He could see where this play was going. It was obvious Dugan held more cards.

  Dugan recognized the danger signals—the panicked eyes of a trapped animal—and offered a way out. “I have a job to do, Dr. Stanton. You can either help me, or I’ll get my partner involved. He’s FBI. With me, it’s a matter of security. I’m good with secrets. With him, it’s a matter of justice. He’s good with prisons. Now if there are certain unknown parties planning violent acts, if you could help me stop them, then we could keep this whole damn thing under wraps.”

  Billy’s face changed to a look of regret. Everything he worked for, all the good, was unraveling. He sighed. “All right. All right.”

  “Okay. We’ve got a deal. Now if you’ll tell me about Operation Majority and Project Ganymede—”

  “Son, that project is deep black. Hear me?” Billy’s voice was now calm, soothing, reassuring, authoritative. “I’ll work with you on this, but I can’t tell you anything until you get read in.” He wrote out a note and handed it to Dugan. “This fella’ Chisholm will get you started. He’s your contact.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Mister Dugan... please destroy the paper after you make the phone call.”

  Jack nodded.

  * * *

  When the phone rang, the International UFO Research Center was empty. It rang three times before Jafri’s answering machine picked up.

  “Hello?” the machine said, in Jafri’s voice.

  “Hello, Zfar?” came the voice on the phone.

  “Hello!” the machine said, louder.


  “Zfar, can you hear me?”

  “Can’t hear you!” the machine yelled. There was a pause, then, “No wonder. I’m not here and you’re talking to a machine! At the tone, leave your message.”

  There was a BEEP.

  On the other end of the phone, Jill Sommer laughed.

  “Jeez! And I thought prophets didn’t kid around! Listen, Zfar, I need to see you today about another shoot. We might be able to prove criminal action at Groom. Could be a great story. You’re the only guy that can get me close to the base perimeter without being detected. I’ll make it worth your while. I’m at the Holiday Inn. I’ve got a few errands to run, but I should be back around 3 PM. Give me a call then. Bye.”

  She hung up.

  The answering machine dutifully recorded the message. So did another machine, about the size of a package of cigarettes, taped to the bottom of the telephone table. Telephone wires ran into and out of the device.

  * * *

  Katrina opened a door. “Through here, please, Dr. Anderson.” Her smile masked an inner tension. A part of her regretted what they were now about to do. Another part felt the triumph of a successful mission.We have some bait for you , she thought.Come nibble at the bait .

  Anderson stepped into Gallagan’s embassy office—a spacious room that reeked of pipe smoke. There was an unnatural tidiness about it. The desk was uncluttered, and every object on it aligned with grid-like precision.

  Gallagan, a heavy-set man dressed in a three-piece brown suit, spoke in flawless English. “Ah, Doctor Anderson! Katrina has told me so much about your work. Welcome to the Russian Embassy. I’m the Director of Science and Technology.”