Ground Zero

  “The report is interesting,” he said, and pushed her report to one side of his desk. “We’ll see if it’s confirmed by additional sources.”

  “But --” Lucy bit off the words she was about to say. She stood for a moment, looking at Mills, and nodded slightly. “I see. Well, then, you have my report, Mr. Mills. I’ll be getting back to my other work, then.”

  Mills looked at her suspiciously for a moment, then nodded. His grin was still there, though. Mills was having a great day. Lucy left, to find the bathroom and throw up.

  “Lieutenant Jefferson here,” a voice spoke suddenly in her ear. Lucy started, lost for a moment in her musings over the horrible scene in Mills office.

  “This is Lucy Giometti, Lieutenant Jefferson,” she said.

  “Ah yes, Lucy,” Jefferson said warmly. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to send you a small analysis I’ve done,” Lucy said calmly. This might be the end of her career at the CIA. Lucy understood the risk of going around the chain-of-command. “Do you have a computer at your desk with on-line capability?”

  “Of course,” Jefferson said warily. “This will be encrypted, of course?”

  “Of course. The key is --” here Lucy thought for a moment. “The key is the word you said your wife was when she was pregnant. Remember?”

  “I remember,” Jefferson said.

  “Are you at your desk?”

  “I’m at my desk, Miss Lucy. This sounds important.”

  “It is important,” Lucy said. “Desperately important.”

  “Then why isn’t this going through channels?” Jefferson said sharply.

  “Because channels are closed to me right now,” Lucy said grimly. “My companion at our little dinner party is not interested in furthering my reputation, shall we say?”

  “In the military world, this is a very dangerous thing to do, my dear,” Jefferson said.

  “This is my world,” Lucy said, and then winced at the arrogance of her remark. “Well, I mean --” Jefferson laughed in her ear, but it was a kindly laugh.

  “You are very young,” he said. “But I do like your style. So does my friend.”

  “Give me your e-mail address,” Lucy said, typing in ‘Peckish’ as the encryption code to her report. She typed in Jefferson’s address rapidly and punched the Send button before she could change her mind.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Jefferson said in her ear.

  “Whatever you think you should, Lieutenant,” Lucy said grimly. “Whatever you think you can.”

  University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

  Sharon was waiting when Eileen found her way into the student union. The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs sat along the slope of a bluff. The buildings were the usual college mixture of old and new. The union was new, all glass and concrete, and was empty except for a few solitary students studying at the tables. Sharon was studying as well, but she put her papers neatly together and put her books and papers in her knapsack as she saw Eileen approaching.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Eileen asked. “I was going to get a cup.”

  “Nothing, thank you,” Sharon said. She was dressed in old black jeans and a long sweater and she wore old squashy loafers on her plump feet. Sharon Johnson looked puffy and tired. A woman who was mourning. Eileen got a cup of deep black student coffee and poured half a cup of milk into the Styrofoam cup before the liquid turned a muddy brown. She sat down across from Sharon and took a cautious sip.

  “I'm sorry about Art,” Eileen said finally. Sharon blinked and nodded and looked down at her folded hands.

  “Art's in God's hands now,” she said. “I'm sorry you didn't find the murderer before but I hope you still will. Arthur was a good man.”

  “I talked to Joe Tanner about Sully,” Eileen said. “I found out about your mysterious coder, as well.”

  Sharon looked up in surprise and with the faint beginnings of a question on her lips. Eileen shook her head and Sharon nodded immediately.

  “I understand,” she said. “I don't want to know. I hoped that would help you find -- whoever it was. But it didn't, did it?”

  “No, I'm afraid not,” Eileen said. “I'm fresh out of ideas.”

  “You're not supposed to tell me that, Detective,” Sharon said wryly. “I'm one of your suspects still, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, you are,” Eileen said, and sipped her coffee. “I want to know something from you, and it's probably not going to be easy for you. So I'll start off by saying I don't think you killed Art.”

  Sharon nodded gravely, and moved the loafered feet in a slight whispery sound on the tile of the floor. That was the only sound she made, although Eileen thought she saw a slight relaxation around the tired brown eyes.

  “So you're off the hook, maybe.”

  “Thank you, Miss Reed,” she whispered.

  “Now I want to know what Terry had on you.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I think I know Terry. Perhaps better than any of you did. Better than Lowell did, even. She had to have something on everyone. I'll be talking to Lowell tomorrow; perhaps the only thing she had over him was his love for her. I'll find that out tomorrow. But every other Gamer had a reason to hate her. Tell me what she tried to do to you.”

  There was a period of silence. Eileen tried to keep her expression open and friendly and slightly pleading. She wouldn't threaten this woman.

  Sharon Johnson sighed.

  “Well I’ll tell you,” she said. “I don't know what Terry did to the other Gamers. But she hated me. She hated me and she knew just where I was the most vulnerable, the little bitch.” Sharon spoke the word with a total lack of passion that came off as somehow deadly.

  “Where was that?”

  “My children, of course,” Sharon said. She looked at Eileen with black eyes that suddenly seemed even blacker. “She was trying to get me fired. Because of my work. I told you that the first day.”

  “I remember,” Eileen said. “What did she do?”

  “She knew I couldn't afford the Colorado Springs school. Not without this job. She knew I couldn't afford this school unless the government was paying for my classes. I have three children. I have to pay for my neighbor to look after them while I'm in class, so there's that money too.”

  “Why did she think she could get you fired?”

  “Because I'm not that good, or I wasn't. I struggled a lot, that first year. Sully, I thought she hated me. I didn't know how to think my way through the whole problem. I kept missing things.”

  Sharon looked down at her fingers, twined together, then spread her hand out and looked at it.

  “I didn't know what a parameter was. It was a complete mystery. I didn't dare ask. I worked so hard but I didn't know how to write a good program. Even Terry was better than me, at first. They hired me because I talked Paul Wiessman into it. And my race helped, too,” she said, and her mouth twisted bitterly. “I wanted to prove to everyone that I could pull my own weight.”

  “What is a parameter?” Eileen asked, smiling.

  “A list of things you call a program with,” Sharon said promptly, and her grave look lifted for a moment. She smiled back at Eileen. “Like your program is going to sort fruit, so you run the program and you pass along an apple, and orange, and a banana. Those are the parameters to the program.”

  “I see,” Eileen said. “You make it sound simple.”

  “Those are Art's words,” Sharon said, and she blinked rapidly. “I finally asked, late at night. He came by and I was in tears. I don't cry easily. I knew I was beat. He sat down and flat out told me he was going to help me, and for me not to get my damn Southern back up about it.”

  Eileen could see the vision Sharon presented to her. She could see the half-darkness of the empty office space and the weeping woman in front of the blank face of the computer terminal. She could see Art's friendly expression and the simple explanation of apple, banana, orange.

  “He tuto
red me for months,” she said, and reached down to her purse. She blew her nose briskly on a tissue. “I started to get it. Before then, Terry didn't hate me. I wasn't worthy. People have to be beneath her, that's her kink. When I was the worst programmer on Gaming, she didn't notice me. Then I started understanding. Then the computer started to become a machine to me, not this living creature that hated me.”

  “Then Terry started making remarks about my work. My code. We'd run a test and she'd find some flaw with my work -- that was easy, at first -- and she'd throw up her hands and declare she couldn't do her tests unless the product was stable, unless she had good code to work with. She'd be just loud enough. Lowell had a talk with me.”

  “Lowell talked to you?”

  “He'd do anything she wanted, poor man. He loved her so. I can't imagine sleeping next to that woman. It would be like sleeping next to a nest of cottonmouth snakes. She'd talked to him about me, I imagine at home, and so he wanted to ask me about my work.”

  “What about Nelson?” Eileen asked, although she already had a pretty good idea about that.

  “I didn't talk to Nelson,” Sharon said after a moment. “He didn't concern himself much with this sort of thing.”

  Eileen nodded solemnly. Sharon had a tender heart. Nelson Atkins was a worthless manager, but he was a sweet and caring man. She wouldn't reveal Nelson's inadequacies to Detective Reed.

  “What did Lowell say?”

  “He wanted to know how I felt I was doing. Perhaps Terry thought I would be an easy pushover, that I would cry and beg to be kept on. It was so odd to see his face and voice saying words that I knew had been spoken by her.”

  “'Do you think this job is going to be too much for you?,' he asked, and I took my courage and I fixed him with my eye and I said 'I don't think it is. I'm doing well and I'm getting better every day. I've done code counts and problem counts and I could print you out a chart, if you'd like. Sully helped me with a program that shows my improvement over time.'“

  “Terry didn't know I was making friends, you see. She thought of everyone as a separate island, vulnerable. Sully put a sword in my hand. Sully knew I was supposed to go talk to Lowell. I don't know how she knew. But there she was, with her hair all sticking up every which way, and she showed me this program that she'd put together. She showed me how my code and the quality of my code was shooting up every week. She showed me her code, all flat line and basically perfect, and she winked at me and showed me Terry's code, flat line and at the bottom. Then she put my code up against Terry's and she turned and just walked away.”

  “She helped you,” Eileen said. She was choked with admiration and jealousy over a woman two years dead.

  “She knew what I was going up against. If I had shown any weakness maybe Lowell would have tried to get Nelson to set my rating back to technician instead of engineer. That would have been a big cut in pay. She wanted to punish me through my children. I would have had to pull them out of the private school. She wanted me beaten.”

  “She almost did it,” Eileen thought, and remembered the deadness of Joe’s eyes when he spoke of Sully, the tortured penance of 'Berto, and the exhaustion and guilt of Doug Procell.

  “She didn't know I'd have my friends. She took Sully away, but there was Joe, and 'Berto, and Doug. She didn't beat me. But she never gave up, either.” Sharon looked at Eileen and her eyes were implacable.

  “Whoever killed that woman did us all a favor,” Sharon said. “I'm ashamed of myself for thinking that. Then God took Art away from us. He was the best of us, Art was. Now he's gone. Perhaps that's our punishment.”

  Turtkul, Turkmenistan

  Muallah toed the body of the Russian soldier. He was a young one, perhaps no more than twenty or so. He’d gotten some sort of message out over the communications set before Rashad shot him carefully in the back. There was no sign of anyone else, although Muallah was sure that there were more people here. Women, probably, and perhaps children. The curtains at the window. The vegetable garden.

  “Ali,” he said softly. “There are more here. Find them.”

  Ali touched his lips with his right hand and ghosted out of the room, alone. Ali needed no help.

  “Ruadh,” Muallah said, and gestured at the console. Ruadh, a tall beefy man with a shadow of black beard across his sweating face, looked more like a camel driver than a SCUD missile controller. Ruadh fought well in the Iraqi acquisition of Kuwait. It was not his fault the damned American Patriot missiles kept shooting down his SCUDs. Rashad had found Ruadh morosely smoking hashish in a filthy hovel in Baghdad, victim of Hussein’s rabid attempt to lay blame down the line of command. Ruadh barely escaped a prison sentence, simply because his equipment was outgunned by the Americans and he was of a small and unprotected rank. The purge left Ruadh without a livelihood and with a deep hatred towards America, whom he considered the source of his troubles.

  “I will need time,” Ruadh said shortly, and started pulling books from the shelves of the command center. Muallah gestured towards Rashad to remove the dead soldier. There were comfortable furnishings in the helicopter, even a silver coffee service. Muallah required his small luxuries. Unfortunately there was no woman to serve the coffee. Unless...

  “Rashad,” he said softly. “Tell Ali to let one woman live. To serve us.” Rashad grinned and nodded. He dropped the dead feet of the soldier and darted from the room. Ali was very efficient in his work. If there was to be anyone left alive, Rashad had to hurry.

  Moscow, The Russian Republic

  The call from the Turkmenistani missile silo, what would be called a Mayday call in America, was picked up immediately in Moscow by the GRU, the Intelligence branch of the military. This was not a matter of luck. There were huge amounts of money pouring into the former Soviet Union, much of it American and all of it welcome. One of the more interesting strings attached to the U.S. government money was the establishment of a firm control structure over former Soviet missile silos. U.S. West, unrolling phone wire in Russia as fast as they could pitchfork the bales out of trucks, donated a staggering amount of communications equipment to the Moscow GRU. IBM delivered some gorgeously appointed computers. All of it free. The Center was almost American, it was so modern.

  Colonel Sergei Kalashnikov, a second cousin three times removed from the man who invented the rifle, was grouchy for many months about the massive and typically heavy-handed American influence in what should be a Russian problem. His superior, Major General Cherepovitch, was equally grouchy but had received The Word from on high, from the President himself. Let them help. Don’t lose control.

  For four years Kalashnikov had complied with this strategy, finally admitting that the system was, indeed, very helpful. The American advisors were almost tolerable. They were even learning how to drink vodka.

  His own home village of Salekhard in the Western Siberian lowland was now under the enormous wing of Exxon. Exxon was building roads, schools, housing, a landing field, and installing a model waste treatment plant. Exxon seemed to be intent on turning every Russian oil field site into a showplace. Of course they were making money in bundles from the new and untapped oil fields. This was not causing the Russian people, who discovered that Exxon considered them to be “private property owners” of the land and the oil fields, any pain. Kalashnikov’s uncle just sent a letter asking Sergei to resign his commission and come home to help run the family business, a grocery store. Business was booming. The lease rights from the oil fields were stunning. And every house in Salekhard had running water!

  Kalashnikov didn’t seriously consider resigning his commission. Moscow was also benefiting from the Western invasion. Kalashnikov’s wife liked the ballet, the new restaurants, the beginnings of a shopping district. Moscow suited them very well.

  When the cold and emotionless voice of Boris Pavlovsk broke through static on the emergency line, Kalashnikov’s musings over Salekhard and the grocery store ended abruptly. The systems were set up to record all incoming radio traffic, so
all Kalashnikov had to do was listen. What he heard was like a seeing a gun unexpectedly aimed at his head.

  “Oh my god,” Major Thomas Paxton said, when the transmission ended with a very brief, very final gunshot. The American Major was standing shoulder to shoulder with Kalashnikov, staring at the blinking light on the Russian map that pinpointed Turtkul, Turkmenistan. The Center was in a large room in the basement of the building that used to house the KGB. Four other soldiers sat at their consoles, looking with wide eyes at the two ranking officers. They knew, too.

  “Boris Pavlovsk will get the highest medal for this,” Kalashnikov said through numb lips. “He warned us instead of hiding with the other families.”

  “We have to believe they’re safe in the empty silo,” the Major said, clearly not believing it. “The terrorists must want the missiles.”

  “Before we contact them, we have to get a higher authority involved,” Kalashnikov said coldly.

  “I must contact my chain of command too,” Major Paxton said formally. He said it like the Americans said everything they knew you didn’t want to hear -- like a man who takes a forbidden bone from a dog’s mouth. Gently, reluctantly, but with a clear sense of mastery. Kalashnikov hated that.

  “Of course,” he said, and his tone was pure frost. “We have no idea who they intend to threaten, or what they intend to do. You must use your best judgment.”

  The Major nodded quickly and went to his phone. Kalashnikov found himself looking over at the Major after he dialed the number marked in red on the sheet taped to the phone. The Major was looking back at him, and his face was as grim as Kalashnikov felt.

  “God help those poor women and children,” he said softly to the Major, for Kalashnikov was Russian Orthodox and believed very deeply in God. “God help us all.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Turtkul, Turkmenistan