by James Phelan
Fox sat on the roof deck of his houseboat, drinking a beer. He watched the occasional boat and ferry chug past, and considered lighting up the barbeque while the sun was still up, but decided there was still a good hour of light left in the summer night. He felt a bit weird having Goldsmith sitting in a car overlooking his houseboat, but given what Beasley had found in his electronic sweep that morning, it was a necessary nuisance.
Kate arrived, a chilled bottle of wine in hand.
“Hey there, sailor,” she said, walking over. Her summer dress waved in the light breeze running up the East River, her hair held in a low, loose ponytail.
“Hey,” Fox replied, about to get up.
“Stay there,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “I figured I’d introduce you to a perfectly chilled Napa Valley pinot,” she added, placing the bottle on the timber table. “Been busy?”
“Just back from Washington last night. Got this for my trouble,” Fox said, holding up his bandaged forearm.
“Ouch!” she replied, holding his hand and inspecting the tightly wrapped arm. “Workplace injury?”
“Always a workplace injury,” Fox said with a grin. “Maybe Mum was right, I should have been a primary-school teacher. Make a difference in kids’ lives. Nice, quiet, safe work.”
“Sadly, there’s plenty of guns and violence in US schools,” Kate said.
“Yeah, that’s something that makes my blood boil. Beer?” Fox asked, passing one out of the cooler as Kate sat down next to him on the bench seat.
“Thanks.” She sipped the Asahi. “And thanks for inviting me over, I needed a change of scene. This is a great spot.”
“Yeah, it’s still pretty quiet, for New York. Not sure if I’m game to move right into the middle of Manhattan just yet.” Fox looked over to her. “How are you going?”
Kate stared ahead for a while then sipped her drink and turned to Fox.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’ve had two days of meetings with psychiatrists, kinda depressed me more than what happened in Russia.”
“They tend to do that,” Fox said, standing up and moving to the barbeque. “Especially if you have to fork out a couple of hundred bucks an hour to chat about your childhood abandonment.”
“Sounds like you have some experience in this,” Kate said, putting a hand on his leg as he lit the barbeque.
“A little, but I found it easier to move away from all the crap in my life and start again.” Fox blew out the match and sat back down next to her.
“Ah … so you’re a runner,” she said in humour.
“Don’t know about that…” Fox replied, picking at the label on his beer bottle.
“That’s okay, I think I am too,” Kate said. “God, how I’d love to run away from it all.”
“From what?”
“Stuff.”
There was silence between them for a moment. Just the sound of distant traffic humming under the current song playing over Fox’s iPod music system in the lounge below.
“How long are you in town for?” Fox asked.
“I’m heading back to DC early in the morning, just for the night. I have a few things to take care of before I take some leave.”
“Gonna get away for a while?” Fox asked.
“That’s the plan, not exactly sure where to yet,” Kate replied.
“You’re … you’re seeing someone?” he asked, picking more at his beer label. Fox had been thinking a lot about this and he couldn’t help but ask.
Kate looked at him as if unsure how to answer, or at least how the answer would go down. She took her hand off his leg. “Yeah.”
Silence. Fox wasn’t quite sure what to say next.
“Look, I’m sorry if I—” Fox said into the space, quickly. “About—in the train, I mean—”
“Nothing to be sorry about, I’m a big girl.” Kate sipped her beer, pulling a strained face as she looked across the river, staring into the far-off distance at something that was not physically there. She softened and smiled. “It helped, and it was nice. More than nice…”
They were both silent for a while, watching a ferry motor up the river. Fox let out a sigh, leaned over and got a fresh beer.
“Is it serious?” Fox asked.
“What? My relationship?”
He nodded.
“It’s … different to anything I’ve had,” she said. “It’s—he’s Swiss for a start.”
“Ooh, impressive…” Fox said in good humour, popping his beer.
Kate smiled. “I’ve been seeing him for a few months. That said, we’ve only seen each other in person twice. I met him at a party in DC, the type of legal thing I usually hate. He has a business that’s moderately successful, and he plans to sell it soon for a bomb.”
“And what, you two will live in the Swiss Alps, raising little watchmakers and living happily ever after?” Fox said, tossing the beer cap across the deck into a trash can.
“Don’t know about that.” Kate looked at Fox, stroked his short brown hair that was blowing in the breeze. “He’s offered to take me sailing for a while, to get away from everything for a bit. Six months, maybe a year…”
“Sounds like your dream,” Fox said.
“Mmm.”
Fox turned to look at her. She met his gaze, and she still had that haunted look in her eyes. He felt his guilt multiply but couldn’t help himself.
“So, what do we do?” he asked, putting a hand on her leg. She picked up his hand and pressed hers against it. She locked her fingers in his and leaned her head on his shoulder.
“Well, after this award-winning barbequed steak you enticed me over here with, I thought maybe I could stay the night,” she said, watching the sun move and twinkle in the glass monoliths before them.
On a warehouse rooftop to the north of Fox’s boat, the DGSE agent took photos of Fox and Kate sitting on the deck. He had a sound-finder pointed at them, and listened to their conversation through headphones, a program on his laptop computer recording every word. He waited there, took photos of Fox as he cooked, of the pair of them as they ate, and recorded their affair. When the sun went down the couple went below, and the agent, his equipment now useless, packed up and headed for the consulate.
57
THE WHITE HOUSE
Located in the reinforced-concrete basement level of the West Wing, the Situation Room had military aides hanging over laptop computer screens set up along a shallow wall-mounted bench. The long timber table in the centre of the room was vacant but for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The far wall was covered with big LCD screens and digital clocks ringed the room.
McCorkell entered the Situation Room for the third time that night, on this occasion with urgency.
“Where’s Vanzet?” he asked.
“Here,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on entering. “What’s going on?”
“France,” the Navy JCS said, pointing to the wall of LCD screens that the aides had readied. “We’ve picked up another of their navy assets where it shouldn’t be.”
“Their exercise in the South Pacific?” McCorkell asked, looking at the image of the French armada as photographed when they passed Mururoa Atoll.
“That’s them. And that,” the Navy JCS said while highlighting a smudge on another screen with a laser pointer, “is the signature of one of their nuclear boomers entering New Zealand waters.”
“How old is this image?” McCorkell asked.
“Twelve hours.”
“Why send a nuclear submarine in close like that, to test their detection capabilities?” Vanzet looked at the flagged contact point on the digital image of the map.
“There are not that many reasons, beyond an incursion force or tapping an undersea cable,” the Navy JCS said. “It went within a klick of the coast and stayed at that location for six hours.”
McCorkell’s gut turned. There was an NSA station down there somewhere. Surely they wouldn’t …
“It could have been tapping fibre-optic cable, like we had the USS Jimmy Carter do in the Persian Gulf last month,” Vanzet said, exploring all possible angles. “That there is a busy section of the New Zealand coast, a linking point between the north and south islands.”
“Or the stopover was long enough for an incursion force,” McCorkell said.
“This here,” the Navy JCS added, pointing to an aerial image of a surface warship, “is the French frigate La Fayette. Taken—”
“Just over five hours ago, sir,” a military aide answered.
“Still headed for the Greenland coast?” McCorkell asked.
Vanzet had a closer look.
“Taken with a Global Hawk returning from England,” the Navy JCS said. “Still waiting on confirm of the real-time sat coverage time.”
“Don, these two locations have one thing in common,” McCorkell said, turning to face him. “They each house NSA satellite relay stations.”
Vanzet considered this for a moment.
“If it’s French, it’s military—I wanna know where it is!” Vanzet ordered the room. “And I wanna know what we’ve got on or near Greenland. Land, sea, air, a complete inventory.”
“We’ll have real-time sat coverage over Greenland in forty minutes,” another aide called out, hanging up the line to the NRO.
“Where’s this Greenland station?” Vanzet asked.
“South-east coast, rugged as hell. Danish military is six hundred klicks north-west,” the Army JCS said.
McCorkell motioned to Vanzet to follow him over to the corner of the room.
“My source mentioned there would be possible activity at the NSA base in Greenland,” he said quietly. “Nothing military was mentioned, though, and certainly nothing on this scale.”
“Well, if your guy got this right…” Vanzet said.
“It gives a hell of a lot of credence to the likelihood of this French coup d’état,” McCorkell said. “I’ve gotten nowhere with it on the political front. Nothing has popped up in any Europol or Interpol watch lists.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’m worried about,” Vanzet said. “If they’re organised enough to keep something like this secret, then they mean business. And this shows they have some of the French military onside.”
“What was that, Lieutenant?” McCorkell said, a puzzled expression on his face as he overheard the air-force officer talking to her JCS.
“We’re tracking a US Air Force C-130 in Greenland airspace,” she repeated to the room. “Heading back to the US on return route from the NSA station.”
McCorkell looked wide-eyed at Vanzet.
“Designation?” Vanzet asked, not missing a beat.
“Black-logged with the Pope flight tower,” the aide replied, pausing to listen to the phone receiver. “SF designated flight from 43rd Air Wing. Their code word designation has an NSA classification. Flew out of Pope at ten hundred hours, sir.”
“You think the NSA had an early-warning threat they didn’t tell us about?” McCorkell asked Vanzet.
“I’ll soon find out,” Vanzet said, his neck flushed red with frustration. He turned to an aide: “Get Pope command on the phone.”
“NSA denied knowledge of a threat,” the Air Force JCS said after putting down a phone handset. “Their director said so himself.”
“The DNI is over at Meade now,” McCorkell said, referring to the Director of National Intelligence, who had overall command authority over the intelligence community. “He’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“Get this new info to him,” Vanzet said. “I want to know who ordered that damn plane and what they know. By Christ, if they got wind of a military threat to an NSA station—”
“Who’s entering an NSA station?” the President asked. He stood inside the doors to the Situation Room with the secretaries for Defence and State, and his Chief of Staff behind him. All stood to attention at his presence and he waved them back to their tasks.
“The French, Mr President,” McCorkell said.
The President looked at the seriousness of the faces before him.
“Well this beats what we were just doing,” he said, taking his seat at the head of the table. “Bill,” he said, turning to his National Security Advisor. “Tell me, what the hell is going on?”
58
NEW YORK CITY
They lay in bed naked, the linen sheet half-covering their sweaty bodies. They had talked the past hour about growing up, family memories, past loves. What Fox had planned as an evening to make sure that Kate was coping had turned into a night filled with fits of laughter.
“Bullet,” Fox said. He showed Kate his right forearm, sure he’d win this latest round of friendly competition. A neat circular scar the size of a quarter just below his elbow, an identical exit wound on the other side.
“Bicycle.” Kate pulled her leg out from under the sheet and held it straight up. A long scar ran down her shin.
“First time?” Fox asked.
“What, first sex experience?”
“Yeah,” Fox said. “With a guy or girl, take your pick.”
Kate poked him in the ribs.
“Twenty one,” she said.
“Really?” Fox laughed.
“I was a good girl,” she demurred, playfully biting him on the arm. “You?”
“Sixteen,” he said. “I grew up in a small country town, not much else to do…”
“Ah, that explains it.”
“Ha. Biggest regret?” Fox asked.
Kate was silent for a while. After two hours of making love, they’d opened another bottle of wine and started with war stories of past lovers, jobs, housemates.
“Okay, and I haven’t told anyone this before,” Kate said, sitting up and looking Fox in the eyes.
“Sounds serious…” he said.
Kate took her time.
“I was arrested in college,” she began, taking a deep breath before continuing. “We sent blackmail emails to a congressman after he had raped a friend of ours. She’d been his intern one summer, and when we came back to campus we found she was really messed up.”
“Why is that a regret?” Fox asked. “I would have done much worse if it had happened to a friend of mine. Probably would have nearly killed the bastard, or worse.”
“Well, we didn’t get anywhere with it, so then a couple of guy friends of ours offered to go around and scare him a bit.”
“Okay, that sounds better,” Fox said with a half-smile. “And?”
“And they were drunk, things got out of hand, and they beat him pretty bad.” Kate was quiet for a while, as if contemplating whether she should continue. “They never got ID’d, but the feds traced the blackmail back to me. I stayed zip, but still … any kind of criminal record in my line of work means no practising law. And that’s not to mention the sentence that could have come my way; obstruction of a criminal investigation, conspiracy to attempted murder.”
“Jesus.” Fox frowned. “If you were arrested, wouldn’t it have meant you couldn’t get on the bar?”
“They cut me a deal,” Kate said, resting her head on his chest.
“The feds cut you a deal but you stayed zip.” Fox could sense she wasn’t going to go further with this, despite his intrigue. “What happened to the congressman?”
“Didn’t run again, wife divorced him,” Kate said. “Basically got a slap on the wrist considering what he did to our friend.”
Fox lay there and stroked her hair.
“And you stayed zip…” Fox said. “I wouldn’t have picked you for the perverting-the-course-of-justice type, keeping secrets like that.”
“What, you think I’m a nun or something?” Kate had a teasing smile, then rolled on top of him and sat up.
“A nun I know you’re not,” Fox said, earning himself a playful hit on the arm. “Can you stay the night?”
She looked down and kissed his lips.
“Sure
,” she said, hands resting on his chest, her breasts squeezed between her arms. “But you’re not going to get much sleep.”
59
GREENLAND
Gammaldi approached the station with Beasley behind him. The wind was blowing at gale force and visibility was lowering as a light snow came whipping horizontally, blasting their faces.
A tall cyclone-wire fence surrounded the buildings, the last big snow dump covering every surface with a fresh coat of white. The building was low and squat, no bigger than an average-sized suburban house. Three massive radomes, looking like huge golf balls, and a forest of antennae were dispersed about the compound.
“Sniper West to base, we have two contacts approaching from the west,” a Delta sniper called over the tac-mike.
“Say again, West,” the commander replied, sipping a coffee in the mess room of the NSA station.
“Two lone figures, dressed in civilian survival gear, approaching slowly by foot from the west,” the sniper said.
“Expecting anyone from the west?” the commander said to the two base technicians before him.
“No. There’s nothing to the west,” one technician responded.
“All the more suspect,” the commander said. “Sniper West, let them approach.”
“Copy that.”
The commander made for the exit of the mess, flicking the safety off his customised M4 as he made for the building’s airlock.
“Commander?” the other technician said.
The no-nonsense Delta Force leader turned around.
The technician went silent, until nudged by his colleague.
“Do we get to have guns too?”
60
THE WHITE HOUSE
McCorkell sat in the silence of the Situation Room, waiting with the rest of the audience in suspense as the main screen was switching from blank to—