Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  “You think Huston was the shooter?” Vasquez asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sykes said. “Maybe he was going there to talk her into coming back and someone else was the shooter.”

  “If he’s the shooter, what’s the reason?” DeLuca asked.

  “He was having an affair with Cheryl Escavedo?” MacKenzie speculated. “Or else he met Theresa Davidova when she was a prostitute and obtained her services and then felt guilty about it. Maybe he was involved with both of them. Wasn’t Jimmy Swaggart into three-ways?”

  “Or maybe he’s just pious and there’s nothing sinister underneath,” Vasquez said. “Let’s not start suspecting people just because they put up an innocent front. Some people actually are innocent.”

  “Name one,” Sykes said.

  “Hoolie has a point,” DeLuca said. “Putting Huston on the scene doesn’t make him guilty. His being a conservative doesn’t make him guilty. Everybody here knows you need more than proximity.”

  “We’ll look for it then,” MacKenzie said. “We did get some interesting intel on the helicopter downings. We ran the names through the system and one came up twice. Vitaly Sergelin. When the British communications satellite GeOx-4 went dark, shares in Global Oxford Telecom went through the floor, dropping by fifty Euros the first day and another eighty the next, until a company from Luxembourg called Eurostat came in as a white knight and stopped the slide by buying the remaining shares. You asked us to look into who profited from the lost satellites. Vitaly Sergelin owns Eurostat. And Global Oxford is trading again where it was before the slide, creating a windfall for Eurostat.”

  “What else?” DeLuca asked.

  “Two years ago, his daughter Anna is a freshman at the University of Arizona and by all accounts a major party girl,” MacKenzie said. “She picked U of A for the climate and because of its reputation as a party school. For security purposes, she’s enrolled as Anna Johnson. One night, she ditches her bodyguard and goes to a frat party where she hits it a little too hard and dies of a drug overdose. The drugs she took are traced to a junior named Miguel Cabrera. Son of Cipriano. Is that reason enough to seek revenge and blow two helicopters out of the sky? Why not? Tucson police found the body of the bodyguard who was supposed to be keeping her out of trouble in seven different pieces in a dumpster behind an El Gigante. One cop I talked to said Leon Lev and Dushko Lorkovic were the two lead suspects but they couldn’t get a single witness to talk about it so they couldn’t make the arrest.”

  “What happened to Miguel?”

  “Dropped out and disappeared,” said Vasquez. “Presumed hiding, somewhere in Sinaloa. Wes Vogel thinks Mazatlan.”

  “Can somebody please explain to me how any of this connects?” Sykes said. “I’m not trying to rock the boat, but if I can speak frankly, I think we need to know a little more about this satellite program that’s been compromised. I was fine with just looking for a person, but if you ask me there’s a little too much darkness around here. If there’s a solid reason for it, I’ll respect that and back off, but I feel like I’m driving around without an X on the map to head for. Just saying, ‘Go that way and tell me what you see’ is a little frustrating.”

  “I gotta agree,” Vasquez said. “We got Mexican drug dealers, we got Russians, and we have some sort of space program—I’m confused. And I’m a big enough man to admit it.”

  “I admitted it first,” Sykes said. “That makes me bigger than you.”

  “It does not,” Hoolie said.

  “It does too,” Sykes said.

  “Seriously,” MacKenzie said. “What are we doing here?”

  DeLuca exchanged glances with Peggy Romano, who nodded.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll try to keep it short. Let me start by saying that getting read on to this is going to increase your personal jeopardy—that’s why I was trying to avoid it. I don’t suppose anybody wants out?”

  He paused, though he knew the question was largely rhetorical. He gave them as full a briefing as he could about Darkstar, with Peggy Romano filling in some of the background details regarding the parts of the Star Wars program that she knew from her time at NSA. He concluded by presenting some of Gary Burgess’s thoughts on how whoever had seized control of Darkstar1 had run and/or financed a parallel development program, possibly in the Russian Union.

  “So you’re saying Darkstar took out Cabrera?” Vasquez said. “Like a bit of target practice?”

  “Burgess says they’ve been practicing for a long time,” DeLuca said. “Tuning the output and calibrating target acquisition software and whatever.”

  “They’re using NRO intel,” Romano said, “but they’re inside the gates. The only way to catch them at it would be to know when they’re going to need intel and then shut the whole system down to see who’s the last person on the other end of the line. And they’re not going to shut down the whole system.”

  “And Cheryl Escavedo stole information proving Koenig had seized Darkstar?”

  “Possibly,” DeLuca said. “Peggy has a theory.”

  “Stealth satellites aren’t 100 percent invisible,” she said. “They are when they’re inactive, but when they deploy to fire, according to Burgess, they give back a radar signal. The problem is that the signal reports an object that’s significantly smaller than its actual size. The reduction is maybe 90 percent, and these things are pretty small to begin with, as we understand it. So if it gives back a signal the size of a baseball, say, then that’s not technically invisible. Cheyenne Mountain and Space Command have been tracking objects the size of baseballs or larger for the last forty years. Twenty-five thousand, with about eighty-five hundred currently in orbit.”

  “Peggy thinks Darkstar is disguising itself as something currently in orbit,” DeLuca said. “Or more than one thing. If it wants to park over western Russia, it finds something already flying over western Russia, destroys it, and assumes its orbit, then moves on when it needs to go somewhere else.”

  “Wouldn’t that leave holes when it vacates?” MacKenzie said.

  “It would,” Romano said. “But these guys break up or reenter all the time, and they’re too small to leave footprints. They’re shooting stars. Who can say what’s what?”

  “And Escavedo worked in archives,” Sykes said. “She had all the records of which objects are where and when.”

  “Whoever’s controlling Darkstar needs their own dish to transmit the command and control signals,” Romano said. “If they were using ours, we’d know it. And I’m not talking about something the size of what’s on the roof of Ms. Kitty. So we’re looking for something at least thirty feet across. We’re also looking for anomalous events. For example, we got a report that a group of rebels in Chechnya attacking one of Sergelin’s oil pipelines was wiped out in the middle of nowhere, and a survivor who’d been lagging behind because he’d stopped to use an outhouse said he saw a flash of light. We’re still trying to tie down the exact time and place, but if we get enough of that sort of thing, we might be able to predict where Darkstar is going to be. Right now, the only thing that can take out a Darkstar is another Darkstar. Anything kinetic, it’s going to see coming well in advance and take out. When it reconfigures to fire, it’s exposed for only a few seconds. Nothing could get to it in time except some form of directed energy. I have to correct myself—that’s not the only way to take out Darkstar. We could disable it from the ground if we can find out who’s running it and intercept them.”

  “And you think it’s Koenig?” Vasquez said.

  “He has means and motivation. Nobody else is on the radar,” DeLuca said. “He tried to tell me Sergelin was heading up a Russian ASAT program, but I think Sergelin is his partner and he was just trying to send me on a wild goose chase. We’ll know more if we can tie Huston to Davidova. Maybe they were afraid she knew what Escavedo knew, or that she had the disks. The fact that they’re trying to erase their tracks, so to speak, makes me think they’re getting either careless or cocky or paranoid o
r all three. The good news is, that increases the likelihood of their making a mistake. The bad news is, that mistake could be killing one of us.”

  “We don’t know what their reconnaissance or biometric identification capabilities are, exactly,” Romano said. “Is it strictly NRO intel or do they have something beyond that? The whole idea was to find people like Bin Laden and take them out surgically, rather than send troops or bombers or whatever, and to get ’em before they have a chance to duck back into their spider holes. The point is that there are probably a number of ways they can target you, with or without SIGINT, so what we were thinking was that rather than try to hide indoors or wear sombreros, we’d send a false positive. I wish I could say I was as confident as I was before that all communications passing through this vehicle are secure—I still believe they are with 95 percent certainty, but 95 might not be good enough, so what I’ve done is recoded the GPS report signals on your personal phones and SATphones and mission transponders to send a phantom image, an echo, so that anybody looking down is going to think we’re all one hundred meters farther west than we actually are, meaning if Darkstar wanted to hit us, it would hit that white van at the end of the parking lot instead. Maybe we should put an orange No Parking cone there, come to think of it. Anyway, the first shot should miss. I couldn’t say how long it would take them to realize they missed, or by how much. I’d say if it happens, toss your phones as far as you can and take cover, but at least it will give you a fighting chance.”

  “Just be careful,” DeLuca said. “Dan, you’re on Major Huston. Mack, Hoolie, you’re still on Leon Lev—he set up Cabrera, so he’s onboard. He connects Koenig and Sergelin. I’ve got a stop to make and then I’m going to talk to Koenig. Alone.”

  “I don’t think…” MacKenzie began.

  “Alone,” DeLuca repeated. “Any backup that goes with me is going to be unprotected in the firing zone. It’s possible that if I tell him he’s blown, he’ll make a deal.”

  “It’s also possible he’ll melt you like the Wicked Witch of the West,” Sykes said.

  “I promise I’ll wear sunblock,” DeLuca said.

  An hour after the briefing, a green Neon pulled into the parking lot. Sami was carrying a bag of groceries in each arm as he followed Rainbow and her daughter Ruby to the motel office, where he booked them a room across the hall from his own.

  DeLuca had just finished getting dressed after a shower when Sami knocked on his door. Sami filled him in on the last twenty-four hours. They’d driven to San Antonio, where they found the house where Malcolm Percy’s sister Alexandra lived, in the King William District, south of downtown. She’d answered the doorbell with a smile on her face and invited them in when she recognized them as members of the Brethren. When Rainbow identified herself as Ruby’s mother and said she wanted to speak to her daughter, Alexandra Percy demurred and asked Rainbow if she’d gotten permission from Brother Antonionus, to which Rainbow replied that she didn’t need permission.

  “Alexandra called her brother and I guess he said it was okay,” Sami said. “The poor kid was terrified to go outside. Then when we get back, he tells Rain she’s no longer one of the Brethren and that her transport ticket has been rescinded. Look, I know it probably sounds silly to you, but it really meant something to her. She’s taking it pretty hard.”

  “How about the kid?” DeLuca asked. “How’s she holding up? She tell you what she saw?”

  “I told her I was taking her to a man who was going to explain to her what happened,” Sami said. “I told her she didn’t have to say anything until we met him.”

  “Well let’s go then,” DeLuca said. “Who’re you taking her to?”

  “You,” Sami said. “They’re in room 432.”

  The girl Ruby was sitting in a stuffed chair by the window, playing a hand-held video game, dressed in pink sweatpants and a pink zippered sweatshirt with a hood. Her mother, Rainbow, was watching a pay-per-view movie on television, The Bridges of Madison County, starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. Rainbow was wearing jeans and a black shirt, rather than the festive red DeLuca had seen her in before. It made him sad. Sami introduced DeLuca, saying, “Ruby, this is my friend David, and he wants to help you understand what you saw in the desert. Is it all right if he talks to you?”

  “I guess,” she said, not looking up from her game.

  “Can I call you Ruby?” DeLuca asked, sitting opposite her at the table.

  “My name is Susan,” she said.

  “She changed her name,” Rainbow explained. “I think all nine-year-old girls change their names. I wanted to be called Stella until I was twelve.”

  “Can you tell me what you saw in the desert, Susan?” DeLuca said. “The night you were out there with your friends?”

  “I didn’t see anything,” she said.

  “Did you see a girl?” DeLuca asked. “A Native American girl with long black hair? Kind of pretty?”

  “She was Native American?” Ruby asked.

  “Yup,” DeLuca said. “Cocopah, from near where I used to live, in Yuma, Arizona. I used to know a lot of Cocopahs. Her name was Cheryl Escavedo.”

  “What kind of Indian name is that?” Ruby/Susan asked.

  “It’s Spanish,” DeLuca said. “There was a lot of intermarriage over the years between the Cocopah and the people who lived south of the Mexican border. And she was also a soldier. Do you remember if she was dressed like a soldier? Was she wearing sort of tan pants and blouse with little spots and lines on the fabric?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It was dark. And then it wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I only saw her in the light for a little while. Like when somebody takes a picture.”

  “Like the flash on a camera?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Sort of.”

  “How far away were you?” DeLuca asked. “Like from here to the door? Here to that car? Here to that silver motor home over there?”

  “Not so far, maybe,” she said.

  “It’s great, Susan, that you can remember and tell me about what you saw, because we were hoping to find out what happened to Cheryl Escavedo.”

  “It was an ascension,” Rainbow said. “It was probably a mistake, because we were there waiting and she wasn’t even one of us.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to just hear it from Susan,” DeLuca said to Rainbow, as gently as possible. “Could you tell if she was carrying anything? Did she have anything in her hands?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ruby said.

  “Was she walking or running or standing still?”

  “She was running.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “She was caught in this light.”

  “But only for a split second?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was she lifted up? Did you see her sort of floating?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you looked away for a second?” Rainbow offered.

  “I didn’t look away,” Ruby said. “She was just there one second and then she wasn’t.”

  “What did she look like? What was the expression on her face?”

  “I didn’t see her face. She was looking down. Sort of bent over.”

  “Did you hear anything? Smell anything? Feel anything?”

  “It was hot. Like the wind was hot.”

  “Did this light come from anywhere? Like when you shine a flashlight?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruby said. “I don’t think so.”

  “And did this scare you?” DeLuca asked.

  Ruby looked at her mother, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes.

  “Were you afraid it could happen to you?” he said. “And you don’t want it to happen to you, even though you know you’re supposed to be happy about it. Because that’s what your mom and her friends have been waiting for. But it’s not what you’ve been waiting for, and you didn’t want to disappoint your mom.”

  “I just want things
to stay the way they are,” Ruby said, her voice trembling. “I don’t want to change.”

  “It’s all right,” DeLuca said, thinking. “You don’t have anything to worry about, Susan. It wasn’t an ascension. It sounds to me like Sergeant Escavedo shape-shifted. Her uncle told me her totem was a raven, so that’s probably what happened.” He turned to Sami. “Her uncle will be relieved to hear that. He was worried that she was in trouble.”

  “So she turned into a raven?” Ruby said. “Like in Brother Bear?”

  “Brother Bear?” DeLuca said.

  “The movie,” Ruby said. “This Indian named Kenai dies and his soul goes into a bear.”

  “Yeah, something like that,” DeLuca said. “Anyway, she’s okay. Thank you, Susan. Sami—can I talk to you in the hall?”

  He walked Sami toward the elevators to make sure Rainbow and her daughter wouldn’t be able to hear them through the door.

  “I don’t have time to explain but just keep them indoors and you guys should be all right. Rent all the pay-per-view movies you want and order room service but keep them inside. Romano will get you up to speed. What name did you register them under?”

  “Mary and Karen Peterson,” Sami said.

  “Good,” DeLuca said. “Who are they?”

  “That’s them,” Sami said. “That’s their real names.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Talk to Romano. And don’t talk to anybody from the Brethren. Any of you.”

  Peggy Romano had called General Koenig’s office and spoken to Lieutenant Carr, who informed her that the general was spending the weekend at his ranch in Arizona, outside the town of Ajo, between the Goldwater Testing Range and the Tohono O’Odham Indian Reservation. It was a ten-hour drive from Albuquerque. DeLuca had one stop to make before getting onto the freeway.

  He let himself in the back door to Cheryl Escavedo and Theresa Davidova’s apartment. It was probably a waste of time, but he’d been turning over in his mind where she might have hidden the disk. She would have put it somewhere where somebody could find it if something happened to her, but not somewhere obvious, like between the mattresses, and probably somewhere where she’d have access to it in case she wanted to take it with her quickly. She knew she was in danger, but she wasn’t sure how much, or she would have taken greater precautions. Something Dan had said had given him an idea.