Whirlwind

by Joseph R. Garber

  A laboratory building with wires woven into its walls? That was the same principle as the Faraday cage Sledge used to safeguard Charlie’s illicit Internet connection. Shielded generator shacks? Obviously to protect them from stray electromagnetic weapons’ rays. No telephone lines and a radio that couldn’t be restored to service for four hours? Yeah, well — set phasers to stun — EM pulses will fry communications gear every time. Dimethyl ether coolant? A Ph.D. materials scientist who wrote his thesis on superconductors?

  Ha! It’s too easy! Superconductors are the holy grail of computing and telecommunications — the perfect transmitter of electricity. If you want the fastest supercomputer or an information highway of infinite bandwidth, then you need a material through which electrons pass instantaneously with no resistance at all.

  But — beam me up, Scotty — all this Star Trek technology has a little problem. Superconductors don’t work unless you cool them down to preposterously low temperatures — usually below the temperature of liquid nitrogen, but, theoretically at least, maybe the temperature of liquid ether, same as Irina saw in that lab.

  Charlie slumped in his seat, sipping his morning orange juice. At the front of his spacious cabin, a red LED panel displayed flight information.

  ALTITUDE: 34500 FEET

  GROUND SPEED: 523 KNOTS

  HEADWINDS: 15 KNOTS

  OUTSIDE TEMPERATURE: -34°C

  Bingo!

  Puzzle pieces danced together in a waltz of elegant simplicity, each dovetailing with the other, all swirling together in the one way, the only way, in which they could fit. It was pure poetry, and as full of ineluctable joy.

  An epiphany, in fact.

  There is a pattern that dictates the contour and texture of all things animate and inanimate. To be sure, much is random, and the goddess Eris (latterly known as Lady Luck) rolls her dice. But where chance is, necessity follows, for they are two sides of a single coin. Study necessity’s obligations, follow them to their logical conclusion, and there you will find, as Charlie found, that one inevitable pattern that explains so much.

  He knew what Whirlwind was. He knew because it could be nothing else.

  But there was another mystery, and it was more than a big block of a super-secret superconducting ceramic filched from a no-name New Mexico skunkworks. Browsing through the computer files he’d downloaded the night before, Charlie scented a deeper, darker riddle — perhaps the true reason why Sam had been desperate enough to bring him back from disgrace.

  The clue? Newspaper stories off the Web. Two dozen of them. They all said the same thing: CHINESE ARREST AMERICAN STUDENT AS SPY.

  Ten column inches, sometimes twelve, you’ve read it all before. It’s one of the games the Chinese play. An American citizen of Chinese derivation visits his ancestral homeland; maybe he’s an academic on a research trip; maybe he’s a businessman overseeing the construction of a factory; maybe he’s a journalist or just an ordinary tourist. It doesn’t matter. No one takes the trumped-up espionage charges seriously, least of all the Chinese government. It’s just their way of sending a message to every expatriate: if you’re of Chinese blood, we own you, boy.

  Twenty-three-year-old Michael Wing had been in diapers when his father and mother, both students at Cornell, renounced their Chinese citizenship. More than two decades later, he returned to China on a student exchange program. A week later, he was behind bars.

  As Charlie studied the digitized newspaper clippings, the hairs on the back of his neck lifted. Something was wrong. Something was missing.

  Where the hell was the president’s traditional statement of shock, outrage, and dismay? I personally lament the unwarranted charges laid against a wholly innocent individual, and wish to remind the Chinese government that the United States takes a sovereign interest in the well-being of its citizens, blah, blah, blah, and it was all on the Executive Office’s word-processing system, and they printed it out at least once a year.

  But not this time.

  Young Michael Wing got busted on February the sixth. In Washington, nobody said a word.

  Ditto on February the seventh.

  On February the eighth, another two dozen newspaper stories appeared. The Wing kid got sprung. The photos showed him in Hong Kong, smiling for the cameras with his father’s arm around him.

  Dr. Sangin Wing, who had been speaking at a scientific conference in Tokyo, met his son in Hong Kong, and you bet your ass they caught the next flight home.

  What is wrong with this picture?

  Never, under no circumstances whatsoever, do defense scientists like Sangin Wing set foot on Chinese soil, that’s what’s wrong. If they even think about it, large gentlemen in dark suits show up on their doorstep to admonish them.

  And another fishy fact: a high muckety-muck, one of the People’s Republic’s most exalted statesmen, expressed his government’s regret for the arrest of Michael Wing.

  Regret? Regret!!! The Chinese government never regrets, never apologizes, and never, never, never admits it has done something wrong.

  The Beijing spokesman went on to explain that the incident had resulted from a miscommunication among Chinese law enforcement officials, several of whom, he added, would be disciplined for “excessive zeal.”

  NFW, thought Charlie. And I don’t mean North Fort Worth.

  There should have been an exchange of strongly worded diplomatic messages. There should have been a barrage of presidential press releases. There should have been smug Chinese replies. And there most definitely should have been a show trial. Then, and only then, would the Chinese make that unctuous gesture of benevolent goodwill they’d planned all along, and release their falsely accused, falsely convicted victim.

  That was how the game was played. The moves never changed.

  Only this time they had. Instead of spending three months in a Chinese dungeon, Michael Wing spent three days.

  Somebody bought a get-out-of-jail-free card for the son of Whirlwind’s chief scientist.

  Charlie wondered what the card cost, and who paid for it. Once he knew that, he’d have a get - out - of - jail - free card of his own.

  Twenty-five minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge, Charlie pulled into DefCon Enterprises’ parking lot.

  The defense contractor occupied an anonymous, single-story building in San Rafael’s low-rent district. Cheap brick and miser’s windows, it could have housed an industrial tool maker, a software start-up, a real estate broker. There were a million buildings like it in America, and no one knew what went on inside.

  As he pushed open the front door, he checked his watch. If everything worked the way he hoped, he’d be back on the road in an hour and fifteen minutes.

  Being a California company, DefCon did not belittle the chin-tucked redhead, pretty in a desperate way, manning its front desk by assigning her so politically incorrect a job title as “receptionist.” Her nameplate informed visitors that Ms. S. M. Jacobson was “Coordinator of Visitor Access.”

  “I’m here to see your CEO, Max Henkes,” Charlie flashed his CIA identification card.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “I’m here to see him now.” He knew how you did it: leaning forward, squaring your shoulders, narrowing your eyes, whispering in a soft Clint Eastwood voice, are you feeling lucky today, punk?

  The coordinator of visitor access was very far from being equipped to deal with Dirty Harry McKenzie. “I’ll buzz him and —”

  “Tell him the man standing in front of him has even less patience than he has time.” Charlie marched six quick steps through the reception room, flung open a door, and strode into DefCon’s inner offices.

  The usual cube farm. Fluorescent light. Wear-resistant beige carpet. Pastel abstract art spaced at twelve-foot intervals on every wall. Industrial psychologists had concocted the color scheme. Any environment that soothed rats was sure to do the same for office workers.

  Charlie followed his nose. Nine times out of ten the head honcho had a corner
office — the one with the best view and the least exposure to the sun.

  Northeast corner. A small brown sign on a large oak door: Maximilian Henkes. Charlie didn’t knock.

  Henkes was the big boss, and he looked the part. His skin was evenly tanned, his blonde hair expensively styled, and his waist was as trim as five miles of daily jogging could make it. He wore a robin’s egg blue shirt with his initials monogrammed on its French cuffs. Charlie reckoned the tie was from Brioni, and guessed it cost as much as dinner for four at the best restaurant in town.

  “He just came in,” Henkes said, setting down the phone. “Yes? I’m Max Henkes. What can I do for you, Mr…. err —”

  “McKenzie,” snapped Charlie, flipping his ID card on Henkes’s quite empty desk. “Central Intelligence.”

  “Directorate of Operations,” Henkes read with a worried frown. “Deputy director, I see.” He pursed his lips, then did his level best to look at ease. Charlie’s temporarily restored rank seemed to render him a most pliable man. “Yes. Well, yes. Welcome to DefCon. Can I offer you something to drink? Tea? Mineral water?”

  “No, thanks, my time is short.” Charlie gave Henkes’s office the eye. DefCon’s CEO favored stark white — the walls, the carpet, the leather furniture — a poor choice in Charlie’s opinion. Poorer still, Henkes’s taste in art: monochrome stipple-work portraits of war pilots posed before their aircraft. “Have you been swept recently?”

  “Every Friday evening and every Monday morning.”

  Charlie nodded official, albeit feigned, approval. Same as every other defense contractor, two out of three DefCon employees frittered away their days filling out the mindless bureaucratic reports the government demanded of its suppliers. The only people employed at corporate headquarters were pencil-pushers. No spy worth his salt would bother to burgle or bug a place like this. The secrets were elsewhere.

  “Glad to hear it. All right, let’s get down to business.”

  “This is about Whirlwind, I presume?”

  “At this point everything is about Whirlwind.” Charlie let his words hang in the air, waiting for Henkes’s reaction.

  Henkes’s blinked. “I…you’re here to give me a status report, aren’t you?”

  A spy’s life is a poker game. You don’t win by studying your cards; you win by studying your opponent’s face. Solemn and slow, Charlie shook his head. “I’m here to ask questions. You’re here to answer.”

  “Uh…I, ah, I had a conversation last night with…well…and he assured me —”

  “The national security advisor.” The light in Henkes’s eyes changed. It was enough to tell Charlie that, yes, Sam had spoken to Henkes. That information was all Charlie needed to begin running his bluff. “Sam told me all about it.”

  Henkes’s head bobbed nervously. Charlie slipped his hand into his pants pocket and flipped a switch. If Max Henkes was a security nut, he’d have sensors in his office capable of detecting the minuscule magnetic field generated by a battery-powered tape recorder. However Charlie doubted he had, or could even afford, the kind of technology needed to sniff out a solid-state recorder — twelve milliamps of power that tucked digitized sound into high-density CMOS memory.

  “Did Sam tell you I signed that contract? As soon as it showed up, I signed it and faxed it straight back to that German —”

  “South African?” Charlie appended a faint question mark. If he’d guessed wrong, his inquiring tone gave him an out.

  “Whatever. Chap named Schmidt. The Specialist Consulting Group.”

  Cold reading is easily transformed into hot reading. First you tease the scantiest handful of facts from your victim. Then, you play them back to him. Not recognizing that he himself is the source of everything you know, the sucker will believe you know more than he does.

  Charlie cast his hook. “Expensive, aren’t they?”

  Henkes took the bait. “Five million dollars a day, yes, I’d say that’s expensive.”

  “You get what you pay for.” Another intentionally bland remark.

  “You mean what you pay for. This is going to show up on my next invoice.”

  Charlie milked Henkes’s indiscretion for all it was worth. “Plus the usual markup, I presume.”

  “Twelve percent on a cost-plus contract. By the way, is there any way you people can speed up processing our bills?”

  “Not my department,” said Charlie, delighted to have just recorded the sort of statement that inspired Senate investigating committees to bay at the moon. “And not germane to the reason why I’m here.”

  Henkes leaned forward. “And that would be what, Mr. McKenzie?”

  “Dr. Sangin Wing.”

  Henkes clenched his fists. “Da…da…damnit, I thought that incident was behind us.”

  Paydirt! “It’s not the sort of thing that’s ever behind you. Not really.” Charlie was trolling, dragging a line through cloudy water, and not knowing where the fish were.

  “I don’t see what this has to do with Whir…Whirlwind.”

  The ignorant confuse stuttering with stupidity. Charlie knew better. Stutterers are often smarter than the glibly eloquent. “Maybe nothing, Mr. Henkes. Maybe a great deal.”

  “Sam sa…sa…said it was the Russians.”

  “What Sam didn’t say is that the Russians desperately need hard currency. They’ll subcontract to anyone willing to pay the price.”

  Henkes’s face showed naked fear. “You mean the Chin…Chin…Chinese?”

  Thank you, Mr. Henkes. I do appreciate knowing you’re worried about the Chinese. “Their own agents don’t exactly blend into the crowd, do they? Sure, sometimes they can insert a legend — an operative under especially deep cover — into a defense project. But conventional fieldwork? They need a Westerner for that, don’t they?”

  “But Sam told me, they had prom…promised to leave Whirlwind alone.”

  A promise? From the Chinese? What the blazes is that supposed to mean?

  Charlie still knew next to nothing. He framed his next sentence carefully, choosing words that Henkes could misconstrue. “Not everyone keeps their word. People break their promises.”

  Henkes reddened. “Your pe…pe…people didn’t hold up their end of the bargain? Is that what you’re say…say…saying? That the Chinese hired some Russians to steal Whirlwind because you broke the deal?”

  A reciprocal agreement. The White House gave the Chinese something, and the Chinese gave the White House something. Charlie turned both of his palms up, the universal gesture of open candor. “Now I didn’t say that, Mr. Henkes.”

  “But you’re imp…imp…implying it.”

  “Not at all. I might be implying that Dr. Wing cut a side deal —”

  “Bullshit!” No stutter in his voice, Henkes suddenly was furious. “He’s your damned man, personally vouched for by the national security advisor!”

  Sam? What the hell? Christ, I’m out of my depth here!

  “Not that I objected. Dr. Wing is a brilliant scientist. Whirlwind wouldn’t have succeeded without him. But more to the point, he hates the Reds, hates them with every bone in his body. Yes, he made a mistake by going to the mainland to recover his son. But, no, he made no deals, promised no promises. I know that, and you know that. How the hell many lie detector tests did you give him anyway?”

  For a moment Charlie thought about explaining what an utter crock polygraphs were — a hocus-pocus technology in the same league as perpetual motion machines. Instead, baffled by Sam’s personal involvement with Sangin Wing and needing — badly needing — more information, he tried to calm Henkes down. “I apologize. I trust you understand why I had to raise the issue.”

  Henkes was in no mood for apologies. “If the Chinese are behind this, then the only question you should ask is what promise the White House has broken. I don’t know what agreement Sam negotiated. Quite frankly, I didn’t want to know and I still don’t want to know. The one thing on my mind was getting a vitally important employee out of a dangerous sit
uation.”

  Nuts! This guy is out of the loop. Whatever is going on, it’s between Sam and the goddamned Chinese. “Understood. Consider the matter closed. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a few other questions for you.”

  The world contains few sights as glorious as San Francisco seen from north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Coming out of the Waldo Tunnel, Charlie drove into light like liquid honey, the bridge luminous, a hue such as Tintoretto might have used. Beyond its breathtaking towers lay that white city whose gossip-laureate had immortally nicknamed “Baghdad by the Bay.”

  Four hours south, Charlie thought. Not that far a drive. You go down a coast that’s God’s grandest sculpture, turn onto a little back road, and there you are. There we were. Me and Mary. We’d start out here, and we’d wind up there, and maybe that’s what I should do after all. I can afford to move there now. It’ll be a fresh start for me, for Carly, and most of all for Jason and Molly. I don’t want my grandkids growing up to be Washington brats. By God, once this mess is over, I’m going to buy that seaside ranch Mary and I always talked about.

  Once this mess is over…

  Well, hell, that was the problem, wasn’t it?

  Now that he was certain what Whirlwind was — Henkes had unknowingly confirmed Charlie’s theory — he knew that Irina Kolodenkova was in a great deal more peril than he’d imagined. In and of itself Whirlwind was worth killing for. Worse yet, he still didn’t have a clue as to what else Sam was covering up. All he could say for certain was that whatever it was, it had to be even more dangerous than Whirlwind. Jesus wept, he asked himself silently, what have I gotten myself into?

  Charlie braked to a stop at the toll plaza, passing the booth attendant five dollars. As he pulled away, he flipped open one of Sam’s scrambled cell phones. No doubt every law enforcement agency in the country was on the alert for its roamer signal. Charlie didn’t want to disappoint them.