“I don’t believe you.”
“You will, in about five minutes.”
“Under what possible theory of inquest is my home a legitimate target?” Hawke chuckled. “Something you concocted?”
“Here’s how it went down,” Jack said. “I didn’t mention this yesterday but I am an informant for the FBI on this matter. Seems they liked how I handled the Hand of Allah thing so much that they asked me to work with them on this Squarebeam thing.”
“How nice for you to be wanted by someone.”
Jack smiled inside. Hawke had attacked him, not what he was saying. That suggested he was listening.
“Late last night, after you dropped me off back in San Francisco, I made my report to my field office liaison,” Jack said. “He whisked me to a judge’s chambers where I was asked, under oath, to offer my conclusions as to why there is alleged criminal activity on these premises. I gave said testimony—which included research Ms. Griffith gathered using her contacts—and upon a finding of probable cause the warrant was authorized. As you can imagine, after eyewitnesses in Fairfield described the way a helicopter just plummeted from the sky, the judge did not hesitate to sign it. Field Director Forsyth also gave testimony, citing provisions of the Patriot Act that do not work in your favor. Anyway, Mr. Hawke, after explaining how your yacht was a nexus for information—but was outside U.S. jurisdiction—I suggested the next best thing would be your estate. The judge agreed and they are on the way to come and get your computers. You’ve got about four minutes now. That’s not enough time to scrub data from your hard drives but it is enough time for you to answer my questions.”
“Even if this were true, why should I care?” Hawke asked. “What do they—you—expect to find on a computer these days?”
“I know,” Jack said. “Cloud technology, end user has no access to the physical location, which isn’t here. Your secrets are safe. But what about security recordings? I see—one, two, three ... six cameras on your property, just from here. Did the Chinese ever visit you here? Is that data stored on memory chips?”
“I entertain often and widely and, unlike Richard Nixon, I don’t have my rooms bugged. Oh, and by the way—I can see you right now. You and Ms. Griffith. I’m watching you on my tablet. You didn’t take the McLaren today?”
That brought both of them up in their seats. Jack was instantly and intensely angry at himself. He had been so focused on his offensive game, on moving the ball upfield, that he had neglected defense. He wondered how far down the road the bastard’s video eyes could see. That could prove lethal.
“Good for you,” Jack said. The bluster barely concealed what he felt: exposed and vulnerable. But what he had told Dover earlier wasn’t just rhetoric. The hunter who flinched when the lion leapt was a dead man. “Speaking of video footage, I’m guessing that somewhere in your cloud files are recordings of your technology at work. That material may be saved somewhere else on your converged infrastructure but the FBI has some pretty smart tech people. I’ll bet they could find it using your own hard drives. I’m not saying everything will be accessible, but there will be enough to start sending out subpoenas—say, to HITV. Maybe hold some committee hearings on the Hill. Put an end to your absolute lack of transparency.”
“I am a one hundred percent privately held corporation, Mr. Hatfield. I am not obligated to share anything with anyone.”
“Yet. That may change once the boys and girls in Kevlar get inside. People are dying by the dozens. If you had anything to do with that, you’re going to feel like you were hit with a two-by-four.”
“To hell with you!”
“Mr. Hawke, I go wherever the trail leads me.”
The windows were rolled down. Sirens—not from the FBI, as Jack had threatened, but cars of the City of Carmel Police Department—could be heard coming along Scenic Road. They had no instructions other than to show up.
“No one covers their tracks absolutely,” Jack continued. “Not even you. I’m betting my reputation—what’s left of it—that we’re going to find something when we get inside. That’s all the Bureau needs—something. A scrap, a crumb, and down your house comes.”
“You’re stupid enough to do this, aren’t you?” Hawke asked.
“Not only that, I’m stupid enough to tell Forsyth and his team that I was mistaken, that I withdraw my testimony, if you just answer my damn questions.”
There was another silence. When Hawke returned, it was a voice Jack well remembered with a threat he had been expecting.
“I should have dealt with you here,” Hawke said. “I should do it now.”
Dover tugged Jack’s seat belt.
He followed her gaze, saw two men emerge from a side door of the mansion, behind an arbor.
Their hands were not empty.
“No. You’re too civilized for that,” Jack said hopefully.
“Am I?”
Jack felt Dover’s fingers pull on his seat belt again but he refused to back down. He couldn’t. He was wired for confrontation and that engine did not work in reverse.
“Even if you shoot us, the FBI goes in,” Jack said.
“They’re going in anyway, according to you. Besides, what do I have to lose? This surveillance will be erased. My security men shot trespassers who threatened me.”
Jack suspected these men, these “coworkers,” would take the rap for their boss. They would do a few years for shooting people who were, technically, trespassers. Hawke’s influence would probably get them incarceration at “Camp Snoopy,” any of the relatively cushy, low-security prisons. When they got out they would be set for life.
It happens in the mob world all the time, Jack thought. The world you once accused Hawke of emulating.
“It doesn’t have to go down this way,” Jack pressed. “I told you I can stop it.”
“Why would you do that?” Hawke asked. “To protect my interests?”
“Not your interests—ours. Don’t you get it? America’s under siege and this attack may only be the opening salvo.”
There was a pause in the call. The men near the mansion’s arbor stopped advancing and stood still.
“What are you talking about?”
“The helicopter in Afghanistan—and what happened this morning, inland, in Fairfield.”
“Those explosions? The reports said a car fire—”
“Mr. Hawke, we believe the Chinese were trying to hit Travis AFB but got stopped,” Jack said. “This must have been Plan B.”
The sirens were louder. The cars were just coming along a turn in the road. Jack flung off his seat belt, got out of the car, and held up his hands to stop them. To Hawke, that would play as if Jack were buying him time. In fact, he didn’t want the patrol cars rolling into view.
More silence. Jack stared at the nearest surveillance camera. He could picture Hawke in the sun, on his bizarre custom hammock, his leathery face tense as he weighed the events that were happening half a world away.
“We don’t agree on a lot, Mr. Hawke, but we’re both Americans,” Jack said. “If you’re not a part of that—and God, I don’t want to believe you are—then help me stop it.”
Hawke finally broke his silence. “If I were to agree to talk to you, this would stay between us? Your ‘journalist’s’ word of honor. Both of you?”
Only now did Jack realize he had not bothered to breathe. He drew a long, uneven breath.
“That’s fair,” Jack said. “My word.”
Dover nodded. She couldn’t speak.
Jack waited again. In his mind’s eye he saw Hawke, unhappy but resigned.
He hoped.
“I don’t like you, but I believe you,” Hawke said.
There was another pause and Jack noticed the armed men by the arbor go back inside the mansion.
“The truth is,” Hawke continued, “I’m not sure how any of this will help because I don’t know what is going on there. I sold Beijing the Squarebeam technology be
cause the DOD is killing the future.”
“What does that mean?”
“The Air Force has been using their X-37C space plane to take down Chinese satellites— ones that I build for them,” Hawke said.
“You were protecting a business relationship with American lives?”
“I said I didn’t know about that, and—this isn’t about commerce,” Hawke said. “Since Obama killed NASA’s manned space program, the Chinese are the only ones with an active, aggressive plan to build stations in earth’s orbit to colonize the moon. By picking off their satellites in the name of national security, we’re preventing that expansion.”
“You think it’s a good thing to have them spying on us?”
“They’re doing it anyway, on the ground, in cyberspace.”
“So you’re saying we should let them put up their satellites because there are potential long-term humanitarian benefits?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Hawke agreed. “The human race needs to be up there, and the Chinese are the only ones pursuing that.”
“So being a visionary trumps being a traitor?”
“Treason?” Hawke snapped. “Grounding our orbital resources is treason. Dooming zero-gravity research for new medicines is treason. Buying seats on Russian spacecraft—that’s treason! What I did was necessary to get us back on the high road!”
“So you’re saying you came up with a portable EMP device—and I’m assuming HITV did come up with it, right?”
“Yes.”
“You came up with this thing and sold it to the Chinese so they could hit our military on earth, kill our boys, because we were zapping their unmanned satellites in space? Is that the big picture?”
“No! The Chinese weren’t supposed to use it,” Hawke said. “They were just going to let the Secretary of Defense know they had it, through channels. It was supposed to be a kind of mutual assured destruction if they kept taking out satellites.”
“Genius move,” Jack said. “Just like Moscow would have taken our word for it in ‘45 if we only said we had a nuke.”
“Beijing is different.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Your elite Chinese will stab you in the back instead of in the gut. And you knew the Chinese did use it in Afghanistan. You knew.”
“I wasn’t sure,” Hawke said.
“Did you suspect? Did you tell your bloody clients to knock it off?”
“I contacted the Minister of Defense,” Hawke said. “He told me they had nothing to do with this. He was offended I’d even asked.”
“So you immediately warned our Department of Defense, right? You told them about the EMP, warned them that this threat was real?”
Hawke’s silence was his answer. Jack had already known the answer. Admitting collusion in an attack on the American military—that would have been a confession of treason.
“All right,” Jack said, “that’s secondary right now. What are the specifications of the damn thing? What’s vulnerable?”
“Anything in a direct line of sight, three-thousand-foot range, one-hundred-and-ten-foot spread,” Hawke told him. “Some macro porosity—beyond a fifteen-hundred-foot range it loses ten to twenty percent efficiency through certain kinds of soil, foliage, liquids. Metals, most kinds of natural rock will block it.”
“But you’re working on that,” Jack said.
“Of course. Think what it could do to an enemy’s nuclear power plant.”
“I’d rather not. Is there any way to locate the device, home in on the pulse?”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Hawke said. “When it’s off, it’s invisible. When it’s on, it creates a dead zone over more than half-a-mile long, making it impossible to pinpoint.”
“Beauty,“ Jack thought. If ever that was in the eye of the beholder ...
A patrol car had stopped and was idling. A beefy, impatient sergeant slid from behind the wheel. Another officer, an African-American woman, got out and remained behind the open door on the passenger’s side. A second car was parked behind it. Jack held up his hand again. The sergeant waited, arms folded.
“You really think you can stop them?” Hawke asked.
“Who? The FBI or the Chinese?” he asked.
“I regret what has happened with the Chinese,” Hawke said. “But in a way, we brought this on ourselves.”
“That was the same crap a lot of Arab nations said after 9/11,” Jack said. “‘We’ didn’t unleash this horror on Americans. You did.”
“And it is on my conscience,” Hawke said. “What about the search warrant?”
This was the moment Jack had been waiting for. Jack wasn’t a gloater but he hoped his expression reflected a little of the triumph he felt inside. “There isn’t one, Mr. Hawke.”
Hawke was silent once again. When he spoke, his tone was reserved, deflated. “Well done,” he said quietly, before hanging up.
Jack ended the call and walked toward the patrol car.
“Good morning,” Jack said. “I’m Jack Hatfield.”
“Yeah. I recognize you from the news. I got a call from the FBI field office in Frisco saying there was some kind of emergency here, that an undercover team needed backup,” he said. “Are you it?”
“We are,” Jack said. “But things are under control now.”
“I don’t often get calls like that,” the sergeant said. “In fact, that was my first one.” The man looked from Jack to Dover then back again. “You two are Feds?”
“Undercover,” Jack said. “Honorary.”
“I would never have guessed,” the sergeant said. “So we’re done here?”
“We are,” Jack said.
The sergeant returned to his car and the police drove away. Jack returned to Wilhelm and headed back down Scenic Road.
“That was a helluva job you did, Jack,” Dover said with open admiration.
“Thanks, but it didn’t really get us much.”
“What are you talking about? You aren’t going to tell Forsyth about Hawke?”
“We can tell Forsyth what he’s dealing with, let his tech team chew on it.” He handed Dover his cell phone. “You can text the details as we drive. But we gave our word to Hawke.”
“You’re serious?”
“Absolutely. Besides, prosecuting Hawke doesn’t get us anything.”
“Like hell! It puts other industrialists on notice!”
“No. Guys like Hawke will always find a reason, a loophole, a justification for what they do. The thing we have to watch out for isn’t opportunists but a philosophy, the idea that there’s no moral gulf between shooting down hardware loaded with software and shooting down hardware loaded with people.”
“So then what do we do now?”
“There’s something else that concerns me,” Jack said. “Two other things that happened over the past few days involving Chinese. Both were relatively small and local but the timing bothers me.”
“What were they?”
“A suspicious attempt to buy a grocery in Chinatown and a deadly explosion at a Chinese clinic. The San Francisco area isn’t usually a hotbed for this kind of activity. When you have these incidents on top of a Chinese terrorist flying in here and picking a local air base to attack—”
“It does seem a little more than coincidence,” Dover agreed.
“Exactly. I need to think about this,” Jack said.
Dover typed a text to Carl Forsyth as Jack got back on the Pacific Coast Highway. He was pleased his plan had worked. He had punched through Hawke’s defenses and confirmed the existence and nature of the EMP device. But he hadn’t gotten the magic bullet he had been seeking and that bothered him—especially when he considered something Johnny had said back at the grocery:
“When Chinese seek something, they never want just that one thing.“
There was another plot afoot. And it was up to Jack Hatfield to uncover it and stop it.
~ * ~
S
an Francisco, California
Liu Tang’s plastic chess pieces were arrayed on their board in the center of a wooden card table. The magnets had been removed from the pieces, exposing the drilled holes in their bases.
“Lovely,” Hu Kai remarked. He was bent over the pieces, his gloved hands on his knees, his smile wide, admiring. “You carried these, actually used them shipboard?”
“They are completely safe,” Liu said. “The aerosolized Yersinia pestis cannot penetrate these sealed vessels.”
A Time for War Page 28