The Babylonian Codex

by C. S. Graham

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he whispered.

  “What?” said October, scrambling off the bed to peer over Matt’s shoulder at the paper.

  Jax had written: The device or substance used to provoke Bill Hamilton’s heart attack.

  Chapter 41

  “But . . . I don’t understand,” said Tobie, her gaze going back to the scattered drawings. “What is it?”

  Matt reached for her sketch of the device’s inner workings. “It looks to me like some kind of a microwave weapon.” He pointed to the rectangular part of the device. “This part here is basically a lithium battery pack. It generates a current that runs along here—” He traced the drawing of the wire to the cylinder. “I’m guessing this is an RF capacitor. The electric current flows through this magnetic chamber to this output antenna, that then generates a pulse of energy.”

  “You mean, like a Taser?”

  “Sort of,” said Jax. “Except that what this does is take the frequency and modify it.”

  Tobie looked from one man to the other. “Modify it into what?”

  It was Jax who answered. “A frequency that stops the heart.”

  She said, “Is that possible?”

  Matt combed his fingers through his beard, his dark brown eyes troubled. “Theoretically. The body is like anything else that generates energy—it forms an electrical current. Hit the heart with the right frequency and it’ll freeze up.”

  She sank down on the edge of the bed. “And that would show up in an autopsy as a heart attack?”

  “Basically, yes,” said Jax. “The United States has already developed and deployed microwave weapons, but they’re huge—big enough that they need to be mounted on a Hummer. Our guys have used them in Iraq.”

  “That’s scary,” said Tobie.

  Matt tapped the paper in his hand. “Not as scary as this. This isn’t designed for crowd control. It’s designed to kill. Up close and personal, with a very narrow beam. One carefully selected victim.”

  “The perfect assassin’s weapon,” said Jax.

  “Pretty much.”

  Jax went to pull back the curtains from the window overlooking the pavement below. The red neon martini glass across the street blinked on and off, on and off, a steady rhythmic pulse. After a moment, he said, “This isn’t a military weapon. It’s designed for covert action.”

  Matt chewed the inside of his lip. “I’ve sure as hell never seen it.”

  Jax looked over his shoulder at him. “That doesn’t mean we don’t have it.”

  The two men’s gazes met and held.

  Tobie looked from one to the other. “Holy shit. What are you saying? That the bad guys have people in the CIA, too?”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Matt.

  Jax took a deep breath. “Believe it, Matt. These people have spent the last forty years burrowing deep into their so-called seven mountains. They’re the perfect subversives: they look like us and sound like us, but they sure as hell don’t think like us. Everything we hold most dear is what they want to destroy.”

  Matt stooped to gather Tobie’s sketches together with hands that were not quite steady. “Tomorrow morning I’m taking these in to our technical services guys and asking them.” He turned toward the door. “I’ll meet you at nine o’clock at the Jefferson Memorial and tell you what I’ve found.”

  “Matt? Just—” Jax broke off.

  Matt paused with a hand on the knob to look back at him. “Just—what?”

  “Just be careful.”

  Madrid, Spain: Sunday 4 February 2:05 A.M. local time

  Noah sat at the small table beneath the window of his room in a rickety old hotel near the plaza mayor. He’d been up half the night compulsively checking his Hotmail account every five minutes.

  Nothing.

  Heavy-limbed and bleary-eyed with exhaustion, he glanced at his watch, swore under his breath, and staggered to his feet, determined to go to bed. He was just about to close down when his laptop’s e-mail program went ding.

  Hastily dragging out the chair again, he hunched forward and opened his inbox.

  Linda’s message was tense. Terse. I have information I can give you if you’re willing to meet me.

  Noah rubbed the heels of his palms against his gritty eyes in disbelief. For months he’d been trying to cajole her into talking to him face-to-face. But she had steadfastly refused to meet him.

  He typed, You’re willing to meet me? Where? When? He stopped himself from adding, Why now?

  The response came back a minute later. Monday morning. Nine o’clock. Marrakech. Can you make it?

  Morocco? If he took the train to Algeciras first thing in the morning and then caught a ferry to Tangier, he could be in Marrakech by Monday morning without having to face all the risks of exposure that would come with flying. He wondered what in God’s name she had to give him that required meeting him in person—and in Morocco of all places. But he was too afraid of spooking her to ask for details or explanations.

  He typed, I can make it. Where in Marrakech?

  She answered, Dar Si Said.

  What the hell is that? he wondered. But he typed, I’ll be there. How will I recognize you?

  I’ll recognize you. There was a pause. Then: You’re not afraid to meet me?

  He stared at the screen, his heart pounding.

  He typed, Should I be?

  The answer was a long time in coming. He’d about decided to give up and go to bed when her final message of the night came through.

  The information I have to give you could get you killed.

  Chapter 42

  Langley, Virginia: Sunday 4 February 7:30 A.M. local time

  Early the next morning, Matt walked Tobie’s sketches across to the Technical Services Division of the CIA’s sprawling Langley complex. He was careful to take photocopies rather than the originals because all visitors to the TSD were heavily monitored; he could take paper in, but he couldn’t bring it out again.

  The TSD was basically the CIA version of James Bond’s Q. If an agent needed a poisoned-dart pen or a specially equipped motorcycle, these were the guys who built it. But the thing most people didn’t understand about the TSD was that the geeks who worked there puttered away in relative isolation from one another. In the intelligence community, the fewer people who knew about a dirty project, the better.

  So finding out whether or not Tobie’s nasty little weapon had come out of the TSD was not going to be easy. The geek Matt was coming to see—a hulking black guy from Atlanta named Bailey Frye—was the go-to techie for batteries and power supplies. Matt sometimes suspected Frye slept in his lab, since the guy was always there. His Aladdin’s cave was one of about a hundred such labs that opened off long corridors like the cells of a high-tech honeycomb.

  “Hey, Matt. Long time no see,” said Frye, his thick, plastic-framed glasses sliding down his nose as he buzzed Matt in through the lab’s security system. “Things’ve been pretty quiet over at Division Thirteen lately, huh?”

  “A bit.”

  Frye’s lab, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, was lined with sleek gray metal cabinets outfitted with combination locks. But the center of the room was taken up by two big wooden tables with non-conductive butcher block-type tops covered with an array of miniature saws and specialized Dremels and bits of wire scattered amid partially dismantled motors and battery packs.

  At one end of the nearest table sat what looked like a see-through miniature helicopter.

  “What the hell is that?” said Matt, hunkering down to get a better look at it.

  Frye grinned. “Something you didn’t see. It’s a remote-control helicopter made completely out of Lexan. Pretty neat, huh? The battery pack is so quiet even a bat would have a hard time hearing it, yet it’s powerful enough not only to fly the bird but to also run this little TV camera here”—he pointed to a tiny lens mounted underneath—“and a supersensitive multidirectional microphone. There’s no infrared signature, and it has the radar cro
ss-section of a Bic pen.”

  “Man, that’s something, all right,” crooned Matt.

  Frye’s grin widened.

  Matt pushed to his feet and pulled Tobie’s drawings from his pocket. “I got something I need your help with, Bailey,” he said, holding out the pages. “Have you ever seen something like this?”

  “Jesus H. Christ.” Frye’s hands clenched on the rough drawings. “Where the hell did you get these?”

  “So you have seen it before.”

  Frye used one thick finger to push his heavy glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. “Seen it? I made the battery packs. One of the guys down the hall came to me maybe eighteen months ago and said he needed a power supply that would fit into a coat pocket and deliver a specified kind of voltage at such and such a cycle. I gave him what he wanted, but he came back a week later and said it hadn’t worked. Turned out his specs were wrong. He’d underestimated the power-supply requirement.”

  “You know what this thing does?”

  “Yeah. Vince—that’s the guy who built it—was like a kid. He was practically giggling, he was that proud of it. Once I revamped the power supply, he gave me a demonstration. Took me out to a friend’s farm and killed a fricking goat with it.” He flipped through the drawings to Tobie’s schematic of the cylinder portion of the device. “One push of this button, and it shoots a pulse of energy. Bam. Stopped that poor billy goat’s ticker, just like that. Vince called it the MLFI—microwave life-form interrupter.” Frye gave a quiet laugh that shook his big frame. “Pretty sick, huh? More like life-form terminator, if you ask me.”

  “You know who he built it for?”

  “Come on, Matt; you know I couldn’t tell you that even if I knew—which I don’t. Vince said the guys who came to him were looking for a way to eliminate some activists causing problems for our pet dictators in the Middle East. Regime change in Africa. That kind of shit. A way to kill that would look completely natural.” Frye gave another one of his silent, shaking laughs. “Now every time anyone over there dies of a heart attack, I think, hmmm.”

  “How many battery packs did you make?”

  “Five.”

  “So there’s five of those suckers floating around out there?”

  “I guess.” Frye paused for a moment, the smile fading from his face, his eyes troubled.

  “What is it?” Matt asked.

  “About a week after Vince zapped that goat, he died in a one-car wreck down near Mount Vernon. Brakes failed. Maybe I been around you spooks for too long, but . . . Well, let’s just say it didn’t sit right with me.” Frye nodded to Tobie’s drawings. “Where’d you get those?”

  “You don’t want to know.” Matt went to pass them through Frye’s shredder and stood watching until the last fragment curled and fell into the receptacle. “Ever tell anyone else that you knew what Vince was working on?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good. Don’t.”

  Chapter 43

  Aboard the Algeciras-Tangier Ferry: Sunday 4 February 3:55 P.M. local time

  A thick fog hung over the heaving waters of the straits, reducing the fading daylight to an eerie glow.

  Noah stood at the rail, the collar of his coat turned up against the spray picked up from the curling bow waves. Shoving his hands deeper into his pockets, he found himself wondering how the hell he had ended up here, on a rusty ferry halfway between Spain and North Africa, on his way to a dangerous rendezvous with a shadowy, mysterious figure.

  In the beginning it had all been about the story, about a journalist’s overwhelming drive to be the first with the most sensational filing. It was still about the story, about every reporter’s endless quest to snare a career-making Pulitzer Prize. But somewhere along the line, Noah knew that his ingrained obsession with story placement and deadlines and competition had merged with the recognition of an urgent need to protect his country from a danger no one else even seemed to realize was there.

  And now?

  He breathed the cold, salty air deep into his lungs. Now, his own life was on the line. There was no turning back. He had to find a way to break this story before the shadowy figures behind it killed him.

  It was as simple as that.

  Washington, D.C.: Sunday 4 February 10:00 A.M. local time

  By ten o’clock, thick clouds were closing in on the city to cast long shadows across the classical white marble columns of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. The wind had a sharp bite to it that warned of coming snow.

  And Matt still hadn’t shown up.

  “Think something happened to him?” asked Tobie. She had her hair tucked up under a navy watch cap and had wrapped a big bulky scarf around the lower part of her face. But she was still nervous about being spotted.

  Jax smoothed his fake mustache. “Something may have come up. Or he could have been followed.” He didn’t exactly sound convinced.

  “We can’t stay here much longer. The guards will notice us.”

  “Pretend you’re reading the inscriptions.” Jax tipped back his head, his gaze following the great man’s words engraved in marble along the walls surrounding the giant bronze statue. “Did you know that Jefferson considered his authorship of the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom a more important achievement than serving two terms as president of the United States?”

  “No. But it doesn’t surprise me.” She turned to look out over the windblown mall. From here she could see across the Tidal Basin to the Washington Monument and, beyond that, the White House. Still no sign of Matt. “I imagine Jefferson must be rolling in his grave about now.”

  “Spinning like a top.”

  It was another ten minutes before Matt came running up the monument’s long steps, his bad leg dragging, his breathing heavy.

  “Thank God,” said Tobie, going to meet him.

  He bent over, his hands on his knees as he fought to draw in air. “Man, am I out of shape.” He sucked in another deep breath and straightened to gasp out, “Walk with me.”

  They turned to walk along the top of the monument’s steps, away from the thin huddle of determined tourists.

  “I talked to a guy in the Technical Services Division. He says the device Tobie saw was manufactured there eighteen months ago. It’s called the MLFI—microwave life-form interrupter. And get this: they made five of them.”

  “Any idea who for?” Jax asked.

  Matt shook his head. “The minute I start looking into that, I’m gonna draw way more attention than I want to at the moment, and I’ll never find out anyway. The important thing is, we know Hamilton was killed, we know how, and we know that the guys who did it have some pretty high-level contacts in the Agency.”

  Tobie said, “So we’ve got enough for you to go to the DCI, right?”

  Matt swiped the sleeve of his coat across his sweat-slicked forehead. “I thought about that. Then I realized it’s the stupidest thing I could do.”

  Tobie shook her head, not understanding. “But . . . why? You said the guy in TSD admitted he made the device.”

  “Yeah. But you gotta understand that what he told me was off the record. He just designed the battery pack. The only reason he knows the specs of the entire device is because Vince—the geek who built it—was too proud to keep quiet about it.” Matt paused. “And Vince died in a car wreck just a couple of days after he turned the device in. I looked at the police report. It was no accident.”

  Tobie thrust her hands deeper into her pockets and stared off across wind-whipped gray water. “I still don’t understand why we can’t take this to Chandler.”

  Jax had grown unusually solemn. He said, “It’s because you think Chandler might have links to the dominionists, too. That’s it, isn’t it? Funny, I always knew the guy was a grade-A asshole. But I never pegged him for a traitor. ”

  Matt said, “The thing is, I don’t think these guys see what they’re doing as un-American. They think they’re just following God’s plan. Watering the tree of liberty with the blood of p
atriots and all that. I’m not saying Chandler is involved, but I know he’s got ties to both the Council and the Fellowship. Randolph appointed him, remember?”

  Tobie said, “So why don’t we send what we have to the press?”

  Jax gave a soft laugh. “Because no respectable news agency would touch this.”

  Matt nodded. “Jax is right. The American public has been conditioned to laugh at conspiracy theories—or at least ones that involve their own government or white Anglo-Saxons. They’re perfectly willing to believe all kinds of crazy nonsense as long as it’s somebody like the Libyans or the Russians doing the conspiring. But this? Tin foil hat land.”

  Tobie said, “Jeez. Don’t they read history?”

  “No,” Matt and Jax answered in unison.

  “So we do nothing?”

  “No,” said Matt. “What we do is, we find more proof. I went to put Noah Bosch’s name on the Watch List like you asked, and guess what? It was already there.”

  Jax’s eyes narrowed. “Reporting to whom?”

  “Davenport. And there was a hit. He surfaced in Madrid yesterday.”

  “Madrid?” Jax and Tobie looked at each other. “What the hell is he doing in Madrid?”

  “Not a clue.” Matt reached into his pocket and came out with a folded orange Post-It note. “I got his wife’s name and address, if you want to try talking to her. She works for the Park Service at Arlington Cemetery.”

  “I thought they were divorced?” said Tobie.

  “Separated. She’s shacking up with some sports reporter.”

  Jax said, “That’s got to hurt.”

  “Could be why Bosch has dropped out of sight.”

  Jax shook his head. “I might believe that if it weren’t for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “He’s got Duane Davenport looking for him.” Jax hesitated. “If Chandler is in any way involved with these guys, you know they’re going to be watching you.”

  Matt nodded. “Somebody followed me from Langley. I lost them by taking three cabs and cutting through the Kennedy Center and then the Watergate. But I’m thinking they’re closing in on us, Jax. And every time we meet, we’re taking a big chance.”