Carter didn’t move. Davis Lee couldn’t even see a gleam in his eye, although his desire for blood had to be running high. Carter wasn’t a man to accept being dismissed by anyone.
“Get out of whose way, Winslow?” he asked quietly.
“Mine.”
Carter didn’t have time to answer before an aide tapped on the door and then stuck her head into the room.
“Mr. President, it’s time to go. Mr. Thompson, Mr. Longstreet, the agents would like you to go downstairs first. The president will join you onstage in a few moments.” The aide’s smiling courtesy stopped just short of being obsequious.
“Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Mr. President,” Carter said with a brief nod, then walked out of the room with his face arranged in its familiar jovial smile.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Davis Lee repeated, shaking the man’s hand and then following his boss out of the room. He smiled at the pretty young woman as he passed her. She was blond and either smart or well connected, maybe both.
It was too damned bad the White House had gotten so tidy.
CHAPTER 7
Tuesday, July 10, 12:00 P.M., Campbelltown, Iowa
Win Benson watched in silence as his father rolled up his other sleeve. After a moment, Win brought his iPod out of his pocket and set it to his most frequently used recording, then turned it on. As the low hum of white noise filled the room, the president looked up and met his eyes.
“If he declares, he’s not going to be an easy man to beat. It will be a three-way race,” Win said.
“It’s been tried before. He’ll pull votes from the other side and make it easier for me just like Perot did for Clinton and Nader did for Bush,” his father said dismissively.
Careful not to show any sign of concern, Win smiled easily and slid his hands into his trouser pockets with a casual shrug. “He’s as wealthy as Perot but more popular, and he’s got the same core constituency as Nader with more businessmen in the mix. I think it would be a mistake to underestimate him.”
“Don’t spend too much time thinking about it, Win. He’s not going to run. For everything else he’s got going for him, Carter is a loose cannon who wouldn’t last a week on the campaign trail. His ego is out of control, as you just saw, and he can’t stand being questioned or second-guessed. And he can’t let go of things.” He paused as if he was going to continue, then shrugged. “We go way back, and things like that don’t change.”
Win froze, staring at his father’s profile. “How far back?”
“Far enough.”
Asshole. Before his annoyance at his father’s condescension could show on his face, Win turned and walked to the window. There was a hell of a crowd out there in the rain. It was a tribute that so many people would come out in this kind of weather. His father naturally thought they were here to see him up close and personal. Win, however, had spent some time walking through the crowd. The group was upbeat and energetic despite the shitty weather, and many of the conversations he’d overheard had to do with Carter or his company. He’d come away with the uncomfortable feeling that the crowd was actually here primarily for the company’s thirtieth anniversary party and only secondarily to see the president. Now, watching the stage being set up a few hundred yards from the building he was in, Win realized too late that his father might be even less of a draw in this dog-and-pony show. After all, it was a relatively young crowd, and there had a been a surprise announcement a little while ago that Bon Jovi and Hootie and the Blowfish were scheduled to play later in the day. The anti-Benson contingent was well represented among the faces swarming in the press tent; they would doubtless label his father the warm-up act.
It had to be deliberate. Even if it weren’t, the fallout would be ugly and responsibility for retribution would fall to him. He needed a weapon. Now.
Win turned to face his father. “How do you know Carter? Why do you go so far back? You were in the Senate and he was a nobody. Just some low-level bureaucrat in an agency that had no power.”
His father glanced away for a moment before answering. “He was with NOAA when it started up, and he wasn’t that low. He had some budget responsibilities. He testified before my committee back in the seventies.”
“Lots of people have testified before you. Not all of them hate you.”
The president acknowledged the statement with a wry smile. “Long story short, we canceled his program and he made such an ass of himself that no other program wanted to take him on. He was basically driven out of government work. That’s why he started his own company. He was too much of an upstart—no one would hire him.”
“What sort of budget did he have? What program was he running?”
“Climate research,” his father said after another slight pause.
The caginess was completely in keeping with the president’s personality, but the underlying discomfort with the subject was not. There was more to the story. “What did he do?”
His father’s expression now held unmistakable irritation, letting Win know he wasn’t going to get many more answers on the subject.
“It was the early seventies. Lots of people were into lots of crazy things, and Carter’s was the environment. He was angry when he heard that his program was being canceled, but he went ballistic when he heard that there were plans to build more nuclear power plants. He saw connections that weren’t there. Nuclear power was completely outside his research area, but the topic made him crazy. Still does, as you just saw. So he took it upon himself to sit there in the hearing room lecturing us on ‘deep earth’ ecology and how the Earth was an organism and not just a green and blue rock floating in space. He said that working against Nature was working against the Divine.” He gave a silent, awkward laugh. “Can you believe that? Anyway, he said that on the record, and proceeded to get so worked up that he—” The president shook his head. “He made a complete ass of himself. Sounded like some tree-hugging hippie. And he blames me for it, apparently.”
“That’s not in any hearing transcript that I’ve read.”
His father’s smile faded. “That was during a closed hearing. He didn’t do much better in the public ones, though. The point is that he might get to be governor of Iowa, but he’s no contender for the presidency.”
“Then why are you here?”
His father frowned at him. “Because he’s got money and he spreads it around. If he didn’t, believe me, he’d have been marginalized long ago.”
Another light tap at the door captured their attention. The flavor of the week stuck her head in and smiled. “Whenever you’re ready, Mr. President.”
He was going to crush Winslow Benson.
The realization took Carter by surprise. It wasn’t so much a decision as a promise to himself; it felt different from the decisions that had driven him for the last thirty years and the decisions that had driven him for all the years before that. This was cold and pure and solid, immutable, irreversible. He would make sure the president became a blot on the political landscape due to his own shortsightedness and greed. It needed to happen.
“Well, that went well, didn’t it?”
Carter continued down the carpeted corridor for several steps before glancing at his senior advisor. The fury churning in his gut was carefully contained, but he knew Davis Lee wasn’t fooled. He was one of the few people Carter could trust with the truth. Not the whole truth, but versions of it, and only because Davis Lee was so good at manipulating it.
Davis Lee Longstreet looked like a beach bum, spoke like a hillbilly, and strategized like Genghis Khan. It was a profitable but irritating combination of traits and served to automatically deflect reproach. Even the press was fooled; Davis Lee was too easygoing and quick to laugh to be considered ruthless, and yet, in ten years, he had never flinched from making the hard call and implementing the necessary plan, all the while making sure his fingerprints weren’t on the results.
“There’s no need for sarcasm,” Carter replied. “It went as
well as expected.”
“There’s always a need for sarcasm when dealing with authority,” Davis Lee replied, flashing the grin that disarmed so many. “It keeps things in perspective. What next?”
“Lunch,” Carter said, pausing to look through the wall of glass that fronted the building. Dozens of large, colorful tents covered his corporate campus, and hundreds of people swarmed beneath them. The turmoil in his gut began to ease, and for the first time in several hours the smile on his face felt nearly genuine. This was his land, in his town, in his state. Those were his employees out there, and his family and guests. The president was his guest.
Carter took a deep, satisfied breath. Even the president had known better than to turn down his invitation. Today’s party, celebrating thirty years in business, wasn’t quite a command performance for the commander in chief, but it was close enough and, despite the conversation that had just taken place, the president knew it. Winslow Benson might hold the office—for the moment—but Carter had the money, he lived in the right state, and he had accumulated enough power that the president felt some faint obligation to keep him happy. It was another sure sign that Life was unfolding as it was meant to.
On cue, Carter’s vice president of human resources introduced him. His wife, Iris, and their daughters, clustered on the stage, began to clap. The crowd followed suit, cheering wildly. Carter stepped past the Secret Service agents and pushed open the building’s heavy doors just as a few weak rays of sun broke through the clouds. A roar erupted from the audience. He jogged up the steps to the stage, shooing away with convincing humility the implication that he might have had something to do with the break in the weather.
It was quite masterful really, because he’d had everything to do with it.
CHAPTER 8
Tuesday, July 10, 3:00 P.M., McLean, Virginia
Jake Baxter clenched his right hand into a loose fist and let the phone ring a second time before picking it up. In ten years of working as a forensic meteorologist in the Directorate of Science and Technology at the Central Intelligence Agency, he’d never been on a project that fired his imagination—or his brain cells—as much as this one did. He’d been on the new task force for less than a week and it still kicked his blood pressure up a notch when he thought about it, but he was trying hard to make it seem like it was just another line item on his to do list: No. 5. Get up to speed on the God Squad Task Force.
That was how Operation DOWNPLAY had been introduced to him by Candy Freeman, the most atypical candidate the Agency had ever promoted to the level of Branch Chief. Small, loud, inappropriately named, and sarcastic as hell, Candy was also incredibly smart and had the unique talent of being able to think outside the much-touted box. Way outside. And that, he figured, was part of the reason he’d been tapped to fill the job within hours of Wayne Chellner’s death: he was an unlikely candidate for it. Wayne’s specialty had been predictive weather analysis, not forensic analysis as Jake’s was.
Wayne—poor son of a bitch—had been assigned to the interdisciplinary task force for only a month before he’d failed to completely swallow that last, fatal bite of a pulled-pork sandwich with extra Tabasco during his habitual Friday lunch at Jimmy Joe’s BBQ Shack. When Candy had not-so-casually mentioned the task force in the same conversation in which she’d announced the news about Wayne, Jake knew he wanted to be the one to pick up the ball and keep running with it.
And here he was, in over his head and working too damned hard to think about it.
He picked up the handset on the third ring. “Baxter.”
“Hi, Jake. We’re ready for you.” The West Texas twang in Candy’s voice was barely discernible. That in itself spoke volumes. She didn’t tamp that down for just anybody, so whoever was running this task force had to be way up the food chain.
“I’ll be right there.”
As he stood up and reached for his laptop, Jake admitted to himself that he hadn’t had this much adrenaline pumping through him in entirely too long. Not knowing who was in the conference room he was about to enter was only part of it. He knew little about the task force and its mission other than to know his role was to provide in-depth weather research about highly classified pinpointed locations. Some of the locations made sense to him, like Chicago and Kabul, and others, like the town of Prayer, Oklahoma, and a geographical coordinate marking an uninhabited part of Sudan, made no sense at all. It didn’t matter, though. The operation was functioning under a strict need-to-know policy, and Jake knew his role at the moment was to provide answers, not ask questions.
Except that the information he had been told to compile wasn’t just standard weather data. It had included enormous amounts of geographical and hydrological information as well as historical weather data, and in a lot of cases it went back twenty or even thirty years. It had been a surprise to Jake to realize such detailed information was available. Comprehensive weather data gathering had been in its adolescence thirty years ago, or so he’d thought. The files that had been delivered to him had borne classifications he’d never seen before.
He knocked on the door, which opened almost immediately. As he stepped inside, the first thing he noticed was that there were only two people in the room, Candy and the guy who had opened the door. He looked young enough to be an intern.
Great. I report to Junior. Jake’s adrenaline shut off as he moved into the room and set his laptop on the wood-grain Formica surface of the table.
“Hi, Jake. Come on in. This is Tom Taylor. He’s leading the task force for the DNI.”
Candy’s voice was subdued and Jake hid his surprise as he extended his hand to his new boss. If he was working for the DNI, that meant he wasn’t Agency.
That has to be thorn in a lot of executive asses. “Nice to meet you. Jake Baxter.”
“Dr. Baxter.” Tom Taylor’s grip was exactly calibrated to convey overt confidence and subtle superiority in direct defiance of a chin that looked like it might never have met a razor. After releasing Jake’s hand, he gestured for Jake to have a seat. “I’m glad you were available to step up to the plate on such short notice.”
“It’s an interesting project.”
“That’s one word for it,” Tom said after one second of deliberate hesitation, and Jake wondered if the kid expected him to look uncomfortable.
Not in this lifetime and not for this asshole. Ten seconds in the guy’s presence was enough to establish arrogance as the kid’s most memorable credential.
“I trust you’ve been given access to all of Dr. Chellner’s materials?” the asshole continued, walking to the end of the table where a short pile of manila folders was neatly stacked. Each folder was hashed with thick diagonal lines of dark blue that went from the upper right to the lower left corners. The words “TOP SECRET/SPECIAL COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION” rested in a rectangle of open space in the center of the lines.
“Yes.”
The other man nodded and motioned for Candy to be seated. Then he sat down and picked up a pen, leaning back in his chair.
They must have taught him that in business school.
Jake tried not to stare as Tom frowned slightly and stuck the pen in his mouth as if he were taking a moment to collect his thoughts.
Make that nursery school.
Jake sat down and crossed his arms, leaning on his forearms as he met Tom’s eyes. I learned this in the Marines, pretty boy; now start talking.
The flatness of his eyes told Jake bluntly that Tom was unimpressed. At least the playing field was even, which was more than it had been a minute ago.
“How much do you know about weather manipulation and control? Specifically processes that could be considered undetectable weaponry.”
“I know there’s a UN treaty forbidding it and there are a lot of crazies out there who think we’re doing it anyway,” Jake responded without a second’s hesitation.
“Not just crazies.”
Jake shrugged. “Okay, educated crazies as well as the less-educated kind.
History and a lot of junk science have given them reason to suspect it. America hasn’t always played nice in the sandbox.”
“We didn’t have to. Ever since it started to matter, it’s been our sandbox.” The shadow of a smile crossed Tom’s face, sending a chill down Jake’s back.
Jake didn’t like chills. He blinked and didn’t smile back.
Tom continued, “I realize that speaking so cavalierly about the weather can be offensive to those who have made it their life’s work. Unfortunately, the reality is that it remains the last frontier and, as such, it begs to be conquered.”
Spare me the flowery shit. Jake kept his face bland.
Tom set his pen down on the tabletop, the flat of his hand coming to rest on top of the files. “The subject of weather manipulation had its heyday in the fifties and sixties with a few successes, like when Operation POPEYE rained out the Ho Chi Minh Trail and helped to cut off the North Vietnamese supply lines, and a few disasters, like when Project STORMFURY steered a weak hurricane away from the east coast of Florida only to have it strengthen, turn on its own, and tear up southeastern Georgia.” He paused. “All of that happened in the good old days, when the Agency’s involvement was never acknowledged, but it nonetheless called the shots. Then security started to get a little too porous in Washington, what with the Pentagon Papers being leaked and Deep Throat doing his thing—you get the picture. There were obvious but false indications that the Soviets had stopped plowing money and their brightest minds into the effort and that the field was ours for the taking. All of Congress saw an agitated constituency and a lot of TV cameras. Around the same time, the Pentagon got tired of taking all the heat. So the U.S. officially dropped out of the weather game. Overt funding fell off the budget as a line item in the mid-eighties. Like you said, though, there have always been crazies spouting wild-ass theories and producing so-called ‘proof’ that the research never stopped.”
Category 7 Page 7