“On radar they look like a giant orbiting flock of hummingbirds. Or hummingbird feces, I guess, depending on how violent the demise. But you said this payload was intact the first hour or so?”
“So they say.”
“Okay. I’m pulling up the launch log...”
Thackeray read him the date of the launch.
“Let’s just see...Xichang Center, Launch Complex 2...they’re not always so frank about what they launch out of there. Long March-5—that’s their heavy launch vehicle. Fits with what you were saying. Assuming NORAD got one or two good shots of it, the Keplerians should still be pretty accurate.”
“Really?” This was stunningly good news—he flashed Emily a thumbs-up.
“It depends on altitude, atmospheric friction, decay rate and so forth,” Kirby expounded, “but for this recent a launch, those effects are probably small. That the Chinese report it’s broken up hasn’t changed the integrated mass center of all the bits. Our database wouldn’t be updated yet to reflect that sort of catastrophe. What is CLI’s interest in this, any way?”
Thackeray cleared his throat. “Well, you know how it goes. We spend months investigating available orbits for some customer, and then these clowns plop this friggin’ bird up there. Not only right where we were going to recommend, but shit—it goes hummingbird on us. I guess what they would like to understand is how long before this junk might start falling out of our way.”
Kirby lectured him on orbital decay due to atmospheric drag of whole versus disintegrated objects, but Thackeray was no longer listening. His attention instead was riveted by the alert flashing from the middle of his monitor.
Thackeray had taken another step in order to pinpoint the phantom satellite, a fact which he deliberately excluded from his query with Kirby. He had set up transmission intercepts from three Hughes telecommunications satellites in geo-synchronous orbit over North America—he doubted CLI’s customers would care, but telling Kirby might prompt difficult questions. He had also written a simple program to screen transmissions against known sources—ground relay stations and commercial satellites in the Internet launch log, which tracked and updated orbits for things like the dozens of Globalstars crisscrossing the globe. When a signal was transmitted up to one of the telecom satellites from an origin not corresponding to anything supposedly there, Thackeray’s program brought it to his attention. Intercepts flagged by the program had so far only revealed his inadvertent omission of some known satellite or other. He had already corrected most of these.
There had been a time when Thack enjoyed illegal computer hacking as a pastime, but with age came enlightened wisdom, wealth, and something to lose—the message on the screen made his pulse race. “Hey, uh, thanks, Jeff. Gotta run. Talk next week?”
“Any time.”
Thackeray hung up the phone.
Five minutes later, he had yet to find the source of the error. “Mind taking a look at this?”
Emily studied the monitor from over his shoulder. “Looks like video data.”
Thackeray typed a few keys for repeating the playback. He had already tried several signal-processing solutions, but the image on the screen—barely discernible as such—remained wavy and hashed.
“The encryption looks weak,” Emily said, frowning. “Is there an audio signal?”
“No. Is that maybe a time stamp there?” Thackeray shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“It’s too brief for a commercial transmission. Maybe it’s disguised to look like video.”
“Or it’s compressed.”
“I don’t think so. Try another filter.”
“I’ve tried filtering it.”
“Then try another one.”
To their mutual surprise, the hash then lessened significantly. They huddled over the screen as Thackeray replayed the sequence. It was clearly an image now.
“There it is again—that flash.” Thack pointed at the screen. “Did you see it?”
Emily said nothing. The high-speed aerial fly-over effect was obvious to both engineers.
* * *
“SHE CLAIMS IT’S A MATTER OF LIFE or death, and she insists on talking to Mr. Stuart.”
“Life or death?” McBurney repeated his secretary’s words into the satellite phone, prompting concerned stares from his fellow intelligence officers.
“I’m only telling you what she said, Sam. I don’t know how, why, or what.”
McBurney glanced at his watch; almost eleven P.M. Tokyo put it around nine in the morning at Langley. “Let me talk to her.”
McBurney heard a click as he was put on hold. His secretary’s voice came back a moment later. “Sam, she insists on talking to Stuart directly.”
McBurney cupped his hand over the phone. Counting slowly to ten, his eyes darted over crumbs, the Seven Lilies floral design on his dinner platter, and coffee-stained mugs. Stuart, he realized, was turning out to be a pain in the ass.
“Sam?”
He raised the phone back to his mouth. “All right. But she’s going to have to wait. Hold on, Philip.” McBurney cupped his palm over the phone to speak to the others. “One of Pedersen’s employees deduced how to get hold of him.”
The team all exchanged looks of bewilderment. “What the hell, Sam?” Gary Nomura asked with justifiable alarm.
“Relax, I’ll explain later. There’s some sort of an emergency. We’ll have to get an encrypted telephone to uh, to Pedersen.” As a basic precaution, they had not equipped Stuart with an encrypted telephone. A private citizen untrained in the craft was vulnerable to eavesdropping and simply too great a risk.
O’Connell said, “We could page him, send him to the embassy.”
“No. Other than you and Nomura, I don’t want any of us seen anywhere near the embassy. Damn—where else can he go?”
O’Connell thought for a moment. “How about the Tsukiji Fish Market? It’s easy. He can jump onto the subway right outside the Tokyu.”
“I’ve been there. But this late?” McBurney checked his watch. “It’s eleven.”
“Hell, the place is always open.”
McBurney concurred. “Carolyn, you know what our Mr. Pedersen looks like.”
“I can be there in an hour.”
McBurney told his secretary to arrange to have Emily Chang on hand for the call in one hour. “And tell her she makes that call from inside my office, or not at all...as close to an hour, then...I don’t care what they say, look, she’s already been...I’m not asking you to invent...just figure it out!” McBurney snapped off the phone. A personal telephone call for Stuart, smack in the middle of a covert op.
Ross and O’Connell devised a brief set of instructions. They entered the message into one of the phones and sent Stuart the page.
“Thanks, Carolyn.” McBurney smiled tightly. “I guess we were about through for the night.”
Price O’Connell looked at McBurney. “So much for Pedersen staying put in his room.”
Carolyn Ross raised her eyebrows and stood up from the table.
“Carolyn?”
“Yes, Sam?”
“Try to find out what’s going on. It had better be important.”
86
JOSEPH CICCONE OPENED HIS EYES to find himself hanging by his lap belt and staring through the shattered windshield into the waters of the Hudson River. In the instant it took the police officer to realize his patrol car was suspended vertically in the air, a stabbing ache in his head asserted itself. He was unable to blink away blurring in his left eye. His fingertips revealed a nasty lump above his eyebrow.
Loose items in the car had collected against the windshield; his police logbook; a box of crayons he’d picked up for his daughter had deposited its contents; a stuffed kitten staring back with cheerful plastic eyes made him grateful that Jennifer was home with her mother. He could remember looking straight into the sky and expecting to die, followed by his car landing hard and slamming him backward into his seat. And the road falling out from under him, screec
hing metal, tumbling, flying bits of glass.
Ciccone gradually heard the air singing with distant sirens. Smoke, thick like burning tar, swirled around his patrol car. He reached for the police-band scanner beneath the dashboard; the motion caused him to clench his teeth in pain. Nothing but static probably meant that the whip antenna had been snapped off.
He heard a metallic groan and the bridge shuddered enough that his daughter’s crayons danced back-and-forth—he held his breath. Some distance away a chorus of yelling and screaming erupted, then just as quickly trailed off. The receding cries of an infant were followed by an enormous splash from the distant surface of water.
His best guess was that upon being hurled into the air, he must have blacked out for five or ten minutes. It was impossible to know how soon help would arrive. He braced himself against the steering wheel, and reached down to unlatch his seatbelt...okay. Next, turning his head to examine his surroundings, he was stunned by the sight of a Hyundai sedan hanging not ten feet away, its hood and front bumper torn off. By some quirk a galvanized cable had become tangled with its rear wheel and bumper. Ciccone’s blood ran cold at the sight of a woman inside staring soundlessly back at him. Fifty feet beyond, a granite stone wall extended all the way down beneath the surface of the Hudson River; the officer realized this had to be the massive pedestal of the New Jersey side tower. In various degrees of destruction surrounding it, he saw twisted slabs of asphalt with white no-passing lines evident, torn and twisted girders, cables dangling in the air—that, he recognized with dread, was the essence of what had snagged his car and spared his life. He heard the distant thumping of an approaching helicopter.
Ciccone turned his attention to the other hapless survivors. “Are you hurt?” he shouted toward the woman.
Either she was panicked beyond coherence or unable to hear. Judging by the precarious state of her car it soon wouldn’t matter, unless he managed to somehow get them free. First, he had to free himself.
“Just hang on!” Bad choice of words, he thought as he tried opening the door, only to find that the handle would not budge. Glancing up over his shoulder he saw the door had shifted inside the frame; somehow the driver’s window did not appear to be cracked. There was no way to know if the passenger window was missing or not; the roof was caved in and obstructed his access to that side of the vehicle. The security screen between the front and rear passenger compartments made egress that way out of the question. Between cracks in the windshield, tiny flecks of whitecap marked the water’s distant surface. An idea to smash clear what remained of the glass evoked an image of flailing his arms as he slid over the hood. There was an allure to the idea of simply staying put which, somehow, seemed more disturbing yet.
With much grunting and groaning, his left hand gripping the mesh of the security screen over his head, Ciccone maneuvered himself so that he sat with the back of his thighs on the face of the steering wheel; he was annoyed to find the horn in working order. By bending his knees slightly he was able to place his feet against the driver’s side window. Then, gripping the wheel with his other hand to steady himself, he positioned his heels against the glass, and started to push...nothing. He took a deep breath and pushed harder. Soon the muscles in his legs started to burn; his reward was a slight cracking noise. He relaxed his legs. If only the damn roof were not caved in and cramping him, he thought. He was simply unable to expend the strength of his thighs.
Bending his knees yet more, Ciccone inched his feet away from the glass. A trickle of sweat ran from his temple and down behind his ear as he took a deep breath. With all his might, he rammed his heels against the driver’s window. There was a dull pop as the sheet of safety glass fissured and fell free of the car. His elation was short-lived. The motion caused the car to shift and slide, then snag to a stop. With a high metallic squeal it was sliding again—Ciccone froze. The car shuddered to a tentative halt.
Sprawled with the steering wheel in the small of his back, his legs suspended out through the window, Officer Ciccone didn’t so much as twitch his nose. Far below, the window splashed into the river.
STRIKING THE SURFACE of the Hudson River at eighty miles per hour killed most of the motorists. Many died as their cars bobbed on the surface and were slammed from above by others. The US Coast Guard quickly dispatched every asset they had from New York Harbor in an attempt to locate survivors. NYPD and Port Authority patrol boats, blue strobes flashing, were directed to ward off vessels attempting to pass beneath the treacherous remains of the bridge. Highway traffic had quickly backed up twenty miles in either direction; helicopter reports confirmed that vehicle pile-ups and buckled asphalt obstructed rescue efforts on all approaches to the bridge. Motorists gradually tuned their radios or used cell phones to determine the source of delay. Police choppers surveyed the carnage and began directing emergency and fire-fighting personnel arriving on the scene toward survivors trapped on isolated sections of the bridge.
Compounding rescue difficulties was an asphalt and automobile fire blazing out of control near the New Jersey tower. With a water tender miles down-river there was no immediate way of quenching the flames threatening dozens of stranded motorists, notwithstanding doubts that the boat’s pumps were powerful enough to reach them. Another complication stemmed from the bridge’s ready convenience for breaching the river with all manner of public utility needs. Tens of thousands of gallons of water and secondary effluent were dumping into the Hudson. Electrical service was disrupted to several thousand homes and businesses in the Palisades and Hackensack. The first attempts at saving life began. Three stranded motorists huddled beside a man whose legs were crushed, watching closely as a crew of firemen positioned an extension ladder across a chasm created by a missing thirty-foot section of upper-deck roadway. Ten feet below, a sixty-year old woman had wrapped her arms and legs around a distorted steel beam, shaking uncontrollably with her eyes clenched shut, too panicked to signal for help.
A Sikorsky helicopter chartered by WABC-TV was diverted from its morning rush-hour traffic report over the Tappan Zee to cover the ‘failed section of GW bridge.’
“Five-eight-kilo, please advise when in sight of the bridge.”
Rounding a crest of land, the true extent of the damage was immediately obvious. “Holy Christ,” the pilot muttered, “what bridge?” He eased back the cyclic and slowed the helicopter to a hover just upriver of what had been the George Washington Bridge. Thirty seconds later, the live news camera was fed via satellite to every major network in the world. Unlike the early minutes of the ‘9/11’ World Trade Center attack, speculation of a terrorist strike was immediate.
SPECIAL AGENT EDWARD HILDEBRANDT was behind the wheel of his rental car, contemplating the prospect of Paul Devinn’s emergence as Carl Smith in the swank Manhattan hotel, when word of the calamity arrived. His reaction had been the same as most every law enforcement officer in the vicinity; his priority was to beat the quickest path to the bridge. Blocking his way was three miles of stalled northbound interstate traffic.
Hildebrandt turned toward the field agent seated beside him. “You’re from New Jersey. How do we get the hell out of here?”
Agent Nicholas Brophy directed them south through Palisades. Ten minutes later they were cruising along the shoulder past gridlocked traffic. Even to drivers without their radios tuned-in, it was clear by the flurry of fire trucks, ambulances and police cars that something serious was taking place. Hildebrandt and Brophy made their way, but without emergency lights of their own.
87
A MOTORIZED WHINE filled the air when a forklift entered the room through a segmented rubber curtain, its white-gloved operator delivering for auction yet another pallet of some gargantuan species of fish, frozen solid and evenly stacked like firewood. Carolyn Ross strolled among the crowd of tourists and Japanese traders, casting her charge the occasional casual glance.
Stuart pressed the satellite phone to his ear and cupped his hand over the other. “Did you say Chinese characters?
”
“We’re not certain yet,” Emily admitted. “The image is weakly encrypted. It’s still going to take some work to clean up.”
“Could the image have come from a regular spy satellite? I mean, they must have them.” McBurney would certainly know, although Stuart doubted he’d reveal that he did. Emily proceeded to briefly describe the process by which Thackeray determined whether or not any known satellite should have been transmitting over the region and time in question.
“After your encryption lecture the other day, I’m a little surprised you were able to process any image at all.”
“It’s called steganography. We think they tried to disguise their data for transmission among other innocuous data streams. But isn’t it curious the transmission began immediately prior to the bridge collapse? And what about the flash?”
“What’s this weak encryption imply for the control protocols?” Stuart asked.
“According to Thack, probably nothing at all.”
Stuart thought for several moments. “I’m not sure what I can do with this. I doubt you’ll be able to reach me again.” Stuart could easily guess McBurney’s reaction to her being able to reach him at all. “In fact, I’m pretty sure that you won’t. In the meantime, you and Thack keep up the good work.”
“But what about all those people? What if this is only the beginning?”
“We can only do what we can do. What more have you heard about Congress terminating the program?”
“Only that Mr. Perry is trying to stop them in court. There’s some sort of a hearing scheduled in the next few days.”
Carolyn Ross caught his eye and flashed him a frown. Stuart turned away, angrily realizing how little faith nowadays he had in his partner’s ability to extricate CLI from such a financial mess. “You and Thack might want to think about what you’re going to do if you get booted out of there.”
“Stu?”
“Yes?”
“Please be careful.”
Stuart smiled, surprised to find he liked Emily telling him that. “I’ll try to get back to you in a day or two.”
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