“So she went from here to her uncle’s?” DeLuca said.
“Other way around,” Yutahay said. “She switched cars at her uncle’s, then came here, then went to Spirit Mountain. And this track at my foot is to my son’s motorcycle. It’s newer. Maybe yesterday. It traces over the others. He stopped here a moment, because there is his boot, and then he went to the intercom.”
DeLuca looked down and saw only indecipherable ruts and grooves.
“How about tracks coming out?”
“I don’t see any,” Yutahay said, staring at the dirt a moment longer, then spitting. “Maybe we’ll find him on the porch with his feet propped up.”
The road continued for another two miles, affording at one point a view, as the road climbed, of a paved airstrip below where a twin-engine jet, a Gulfstream 2, sat on the tarmac. They passed a barn and corral where a dozen saddle horses grazed without looking up at the old truck that rumbled up the road. The house was built of logs on a stone foundation, though the structure was, to a log cabin, what the White House was to a White Castle hamburger joint. Yutahay commented that the logs used to build the house were Douglas fir and had probably been shipped in from the Pacific Northwest. The roof was cedar shake, with a massive stone chimney rising from the center, and next to it, a widow’s walk where DeLuca saw that a telescope had been set up on a tripod, though it was pointing toward the horizon and not the sky, the house resting on a promontory where a table mesa dropped precipitously to the valley below. There was a large swimming pool next to the house, and beyond the pool house and patio, a large inflated white dome.
“Tennis court?” Yutahay wondered.
“That’s what it’s supposed to look like, anyway,” DeLuca said, thinking to himself that it was also not a bad place to hide the dish array Scott said Koenig would need to command Darkstar.
“How much are they paying generals these days?” Yutahay asked. “This guy is loaded.”
“His family had money,” DeLuca said. “But you’re right.”
Beyond the tennis court, he saw a helipad where a Sikorsky S-72 sat waiting, its blades slowly rotating in preparation for flight. Koenig was on the porch, having a few words with his pilot, who saluted and moved toward the helicopter as DeLuca parked the truck. Yutahay said he wanted to wait outside and perhaps have a bit of a look around. There was a five-car garage at the side of the house opposite the pool, where DeLuca saw a black Lincoln Navigator, a World War II-era vintage Willys Jeep, and a variety of ATVs and off-road dirt bikes. Yutahay promised he wouldn’t go far.
“Would your friend like to come in, Agent DeLuca?” Koenig said as DeLuca saluted.
“No thank you, sir,” DeLuca said. “Officer Yutahay isn’t military. He’s with the Tribal Police, but he’s just an old friend who wanted to take me over to the res after this.” DeLuca noticed a hand-held Mark 40 grenade launcher resting across the arms of an Adirondack chair on the porch. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything. You look like you’re expecting trouble.”
“Trouble in the form of beavers,” Koenig said. “We’re flying down to dynamite a new beaver dam. Ordinarily we’d ride in on horseback but I’m in a bit of a hurry today. My wife and family are waiting for me in Colorado. Apparently the beavers have impeded the flow of water to my neighbors to the south. They’re second only to man in their ability to alter their physical environment.”
“You’ve done a nice job of altering yours,” DeLuca said. “How long have you had this place?”
“My great-grandfather built it,” Koenig said. “My family are seafaring people, but he wanted a piece of the West. Teddy Roosevelt used to come here to hunt. We can talk inside.”
The house was decorated in a mixture of western ranch and New England antique styles, Shaker furniture, an old rocking horse, cloth dolls in a glass case, Persian rugs, nautical brass knickknacks, a massive wagon wheel light fixture in one room, a chandelier constructed of elk antlers in another. The foyer opened onto a great hall filled with the mounted heads of enough deer, antelope, elk, and mountain goats to form a small herd. The furniture was Stickney and mission style, dark wood in straight lines, leather couches, bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes, mica lampshades, Bavarian steins, Remington bronzes of cowboys on horseback and Indians hunting bison, gold-framed Russell Chatham oil landscapes mixed with portraits of ancestors on the walls, though the main feature of the room was the fireplace, which was large enough for a man to stand upright in, built of stone with a massive slate mantel above it.
“You already know Lieutenant Carr,” Koenig said, referring to the young officer who stood in the kitchen doorway with an apron around his waist, his sleeves rolled up. Carr grinned the same cocky grin DeLuca had noticed before.
“Lieutenant,” DeLuca said in acknowledgment.
“Not only is Lieutenant Carr a fine aide, but he’s also a gourmet chef,” Koenig said. “A fine butcher, too. Ninety percent of the taste of venison is how the animal is dressed. My grandfather had a Navaho who did it for him, but I think Lieutenant Carr is as good with a filleting knife as he was.”
“You flatter me, sir,” Carr said, returning to the kitchen.
DeLuca ran his hand across the mantel.
“Spectacular fireplace,” DeLuca said.
“That’s made from stone quarried on the property,” Koenig said. “We’re sitting on the crest of the Tertiary Chico-Shunie basolith. We get a lot of porphyritic quartz monzonite, hematite, feldspar, quartz diorite, cuprite, malachite, pegmatites, and fanglomerates, among other more minor lithologies. A lot of people don’t even know what’s under their feet.”
“You certainly do, sir,” DeLuca said.
“I used to do a lot of rock collecting as a boy along the fractures and footwalls. My grandfather didn’t believe in letting his grandchildren spend their time idly. There were usually tests at dinnertime. Can I get you something to drink? An iced tea?”
“That would be fine,” DeLuca said. Koenig asked Lieutenant Carr to get the drinks. Carr returned a moment later and handed DeLuca his. Koenig drank from his own glass. DeLuca decided they probably weren’t going to poison him. He sipped.
“You must get a lot of gem hunters asking you if they can collect on the premises,” DeLuca said. Koenig raised an eyebrow.
“Occasionally,” he said. “But you’re not here for a geology lesson, and I don’t have the time, so why don’t you tell me why you are here? I have a pretty good idea, but why don’t you tell me? By the way, after your first visit, I made some calls about you. It’s very impressive. Major Huston said you put away more of Saddam’s blacklist friends than anybody else. I didn’t read what happened to your friend Mohammed Al-Tariq, but regardless, you should know that I’m expecting a lot from you.”
Koenig was clearly unconcerned at DeLuca’s suddenly showing up at his door. He’d expressed very little surprise. It was almost as if he’d been expecting him. DeLuca saw a door that opened onto a study where a laptop computer glowed on the desk. He wondered what a search of the hard drive would turn up.
“The Al-Tariq file is still classified,” DeLuca said. “I’m sure you could gain access if you wanted to.”
“I’m sure I could, too. Did you find the disks?”
“I did,” DeLuca said.
“And what was on them?”
“I don’t know yet,” DeLuca said, gambling that Peggy Romano’s firewall was as strong as she said it was, and that Koenig had not been able to intercept the e-mail that Walter Ford had sent. “What I mean is, I’m not sure. It looks like financial information, bookkeeping stuff, but I haven’t really had time to study it yet. I was going to wait until I had more information before I showed it to anybody. As it stands, I haven’t told anyone I’ve found them.”
“Because?”
“Because I’m not exactly sure where I stand, actually, vis-à-vis Darkstar,” DeLuca said. “Right now, I could either stop you or help you. And frankly, I’m not sure what I want to do. I was hoping maybe
you could talk to me.”
It had been his experience that most criminals were essentially lonely. It always surprised him when, interrogating a gang member or street criminal, an offer of simple friendship led to the disclosure of information. Criminals had secrets, and keeping secrets was hard for anybody—only the most deeply psycho-emotional sociopaths could do it in a prolonged way with any sense of comfort. Most people wanted to confess. The question was always how to get them talking in a way they felt safe and supported. The approach had worked for him in Iraq. Perhaps it would work here. Koenig saw himself as a man’s man, a vigilante going it on his own, historically wronged but doing what he considered the right thing, even though nobody would ever agree with him. Part of him had to long to be understood.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Koenig said.
“I’m read on,” DeLuca said, “but I have a feeling they didn’t tell me everything. Only you would really be in a position to do that. Right now, they’re looking for a nonfunctioning piece of space crap, or they’re looking for proof that Darkstar is operational, which gives them a different set of headaches. My own team doesn’t even know how I’m adding this up, but I think I have that proof. Not just the disks. How did you and Cheryl get involved?”
“We got involved because I put my personal needs in front of the country’s and ended up compromising the only program we have that’s going to keep this country safe, and save millions of lives,” Koenig said. “When my grandfather ran the Navy during World War II, he made sure the job came before the people doing the job. People are the weak link. Always have been. Fortunately, with the new technologies, it’s going to take fewer and fewer people to get the job done. When I told Cheryl the situation had gone too far, she couldn’t handle it. If I have difficulty suffering fools, of either gender or whatever the rank, I’m not going to apologize. I saw in your service record that you have some of the same difficulties. First Gillette and then Reicken. You have a way of disposing of your superior officers, DeLuca.”
“You make it sound like I did something illegal,” DeLuca said. Gillette had been a base commander in Stuttgart who got chaptered out after DeLuca’s investigation proved he’d misappropriated funds. Colonel Stanley Reicken had been DeLuca’s immediate superior in Iraq, until he gave the order for his men to fire on Iraqis holding a white flag, and there, DeLuca had helped a BBC reporter gain access to the proof. “But you’re right, I don’t like bureaucrats. And I guess I’m not so big on rules. The Army is exactly who I’d want with me if we needed a thousand guys to cross a field, but sometimes you need to slip through a narrow door, and then you don’t want a thousand guys with you. Why Vitaly Sergelin? Was it the money or the oil?”
“Both,” Koenig said. “It always astonished me, how few people understood the nature of power in the old Soviet Union. People saw a row of unsmiling men in bad hats watching May Day parades in Red Square and thought they were in charge. Vitaly Sergelin had more to do with the democratization of the Soviet Union than Gorbachev or Yeltsin ever did. China’s gross national product tripled in the last five years and it’s going to triple again in another two—that’s a billion people who twenty years ago were riding bicycles and building houses out of bamboo. You think we’re the only country that’s going to want oil? You think a billion Chinese aren’t going to want cars? If we can’t control demand, we’d damned well better control supply. Russia has more oil reserves than all of the Middle East and Alaska combined.”
“And what Sergelin doesn’t have is the physical force to protect his assets,” DeLuca said. “So you work together. He funded your parallel programs and in return, you provide security.”
“He’s part of the decision-making process, as an ally,” Koenig said. “There are others. Maybe you haven’t noticed, Chief DeLuca, but this little world of ours is falling apart, reverting to tribalism at its most elementary components, sometimes quite literally—look at Africa. Countries that have been stabilized either by despotism or by democracy for a quarter of a century or more are splitting at seams along tribal lines. Hutus and Tutsis. Dinkas and Arabs. Kum and Fasori. You’re starting to see it in China, Pakistan, India… That narrow door you’re talking about is globalization. Those who manage to get through, fine, great, they’re our allies, but those who get shut out and can’t get inside, they’re joining the barbarians.”
“And the barbarians are armed,” DeLuca said.
“You’re goddamn right they are,” Koenig said. “And I’m not just talking about a few pissant 707s flying into office buildings. I’m not talking about having to fight two wars on two fronts today and thirty wars on thirty fronts tomorrow. I’m not even talking about dirty bombs or suitcase nukes passing through airport security checkpoints manned by overweight unwed-mother high-school dropouts who couldn’t find a bowling ball in a bread basket. We have eight thousand nuclear-armed cruise missiles and five thousand ICBMs on this planet and a hundred million laptop computers capable of launching them, and all somebody’s got to do is write the program that lets them, and once that gets on the Internet, we’re going to have eight thousand rockets launching all at the same time. And what are we going to do then? Who’s going to be left to say, ‘Gee, I wish we’d thought of that—I wish somebody had prepared for that’?”
DeLuca decided to play a hunch.
“And that’s just the terrestrial threat,” he said.
Koenig didn’t say anything. Was it possible that Koenig believed in UFOs? If so, it was probably the darkest secret he had.
“I’ll leave whether or not we need Darkstar to bigger brains than mine,” DeLuca said, shifting the focus back to things Koenig could talk about. “But if Darkstar is a fact, then the people controlling Darkstar are going to need intelligence. I don’t mean SIGINT or IMINT. I mean boots on the ground, global. I mean somebody who can walk into a village in Pakistan and ask, ‘Where’s Osama Bin Laden?’ and get a straight answer. And tell you, this is where he goes, this is when he’ll be there, come and get him. I think you’re right about tribalism. And tribes have chiefs, but how do you know who they are? Who’s going to go in and get you the information you need? And that’s what I’m good at. That’s what I’m best at. You can look it up. And that’s what I’m offering you.”
He thought a little megalomaniacal posturing was in order, delivered deferentially.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but if we’re talking about the virtually instantaneous projection of force, and I wouldn’t deny the need for it for one second, particularly after 9/11, then isn’t it imperative that that force be used wisely?” DeLuca said. “You said the problem is people, not technology. People can’t make good decisions without good intelligence. You can rely on SIGINT or IMINT all you want, but you’re still not going to build a machine that can open another man’s mind. I make my living getting people to do just that. And I guess I’m asking you to do that, too, sir. Obviously, I came here fully aware that if you turn down my offer, you could take me out the second I step out that door, and that from your point of view, the threat I pose is well-contained. But I don’t think you’d delete an asset once you appreciated the value of it. And the idea of working for somebody who could get more done in five minutes than the Army could accomplish in five years is more than a little appealing. I’ve got my résumé in the car if you want to see it.”
Koenig smiled.
“That won’t be necessary,” Koenig said. “I’m aware of your abilities. You should know that when I think somebody is looking into me, I’m going to look into them. You’re quite right about the advantages of intelligence. You know, General Taylor at Huachuca is a friend of mine. Had him out here hunting a while back, so I asked him. He said you were one of the best instructors he ever had. Wishes you were still there.”
“General Taylor’s one of the best commanders I’ve ever had,” DeLuca said. “His good opinion always meant a lot to me.”
“He referred me to the chapter you wrote on interrogation techniq
ues,” Koenig said. “Quote: ‘It is often useful to find a way to make the person you’re interviewing feel like you have his own interests at heart, whatever they may be. Taking an aggressive position is more likely to raise his defenses than to lower them. From a global perspective, when questioning an enemy combatant, the United States armed forces as “bad cop” is the default assumption. One might actually win hearts and minds with compassion, which can be either real or feigned. Real is better.’ Did you write that, DeLuca?”
“I did,” DeLuca said.
“And did you think you could play me the way you might play some third-world towelhead?” Koenig said. “Did you think you could pretend to have our interests at heart?” Apparently Koenig hadn’t read the part about the value of making an angry adversary think you’re stupid. “You have no idea what you’re dealing with, DeLuca. None. And the funny thing is, you still found out more than you were supposed to. All you had to do was find the girl and the disks and eliminate one little intangible. I asked them to get me someone who was good but not too good, and primarily, someone who could stay within the parameters of his mission. One look at your record would have suggested you weren’t going to do that. I don’t like soldiers who can’t stay within the parameters of their missions, DeLuca. Never have.”
“I didn’t come here to be liked,” DeLuca said, now that the game was up. When in doubt, declare victory.
“Then why did you come here?” Koenig said. “Not that I care, but I don’t know how you think.”
“I came here to arrest you,” DeLuca said.
“And you thought I would let you?”
“I thought you might not like it,” DeLuca conceded. “Most people don’t.”
“You don’t really have the faintest inkling of what you’re dealing with, do you?” Koenig said. He called out to the next room. Carr appeared in the door, his .45 Colt automatic in his hand. “Lieutenant Carr,” Koenig said, turning to leave. “Would you please take care of this? And when you’re finished, see to that Indian fellow wandering around outside.”
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