“As soon as you complete your assignment in Palo Alto, detour on the way home and find out. Anything you can add about this man?” Niles asked as he wrote in his notepad.
“Well, I know he may need a push because, as I said, he’s a little strange. But he can be ordered. He’s still a master chief petty officer in the navy. They haven’t found anyone with enough guts to go down and retire him yet, so he’s still building boats. Maybe you can tug on some official strings and get his cooperation,” Carl said.
“Good enough, I’ll do just that. Leave his name with Ellen outside,” Niles responded. “You’d better be off to meet our French lady friend.”
“Yes, sir,” Carl said as he nodded to those around the table and touched Jack on the shoulder.
As Carl left, Niles absentmindedly pushed the plate with his ham sandwich on it away from him as he pulled the latest satellite imagery toward him.
“Okay, Pete, what in the hell is Boris and Natasha telling us?”
“Well, the KH-11 is on the very range of its ability to see into Peru and Brazil on its current track,” Pete answered from his office in the Comp Center. “We would have to retask it to get to the areas we need to look at. But Europa has uncovered some covert stuff from NSA that was taken two weeks before Professor’s Zachary’s departure from Los Angeles, and that film has just confirmed what we already know. As you see,” he used a pointer, tapping the monitor’s screen, “the suspected area is mostly unexplored rain forest, and has tree canopies so thick that we can’t see anything. Radar imagery,” he pointed to a grouping of pictures, “picks up just what we would expect, thousands of miles of winding river, tributaries, and lagoons, not to mention hundreds of waterfalls. You could throw a dart at the images and have just as much luck as to which patch is our target site.”
Niles shook his head. He wanted to shove the hard copies of the pictures away and off the far end of the table in frustration, but caught himself. Boris and Natasha was not the answer. He stood up and stretched, and then his eyes caught the still frame of the security video on one of the large screens. He froze. His eyes roamed over the grainy image. Then he moved quickly to his console at the conference table and started tapping keys. The others watched him for a moment as the black-and-white frames started to project in reverse. Then he stopped tapping as the picture caught the twin images of two people to the far right of Helen Zachary and Kennedy. Niles tapped a few more commands and then pushed the button on the intercom. “Pete, are you getting the image on the screen on monitor one-seventeen?”
“Let’s see here, yeah, I see it, the dock security footage?”
“Yes, can you have the computer blow that frame up and enhance it? Order the shots to come in tight on those two kids by the ship’s rail to the right.”
“Yeah, Europa can probably clean up the footage,” Pete answered through the speakers around the room.
As they watched, the camera footage went dark and then cleared and the two people became larger. The quality was now much better.
“Again, Pete, tighter, concentrate on the girl, the right image,” Niles ordered as he stepped closer to the large monitor.
The picture on the screen fragmented again and then came together line by line until the smiling face of a young woman covered most of the screen.
Without turning to the others sitting at the conference table, Niles said, “You’re all excused with the exception of Major Collins.”
Questions were mumbled, but they all left their lunch and gathered their notes and walked out of the conference room. Even Alice left, though she knew the director well enough to know that Niles had spotted something that had caught him off guard and stunned him.
Jack stood up and walked to where Niles was standing.
“Major, we have a whole new priority here.”
“What is it?”
“The girl, her name wasn’t on the manifest, at least not her real name,” he said as he stepped up to the monitor for a closer look. “If that’s who I think it is, this Event has taken on a whole new, nightmarish perspective.”
10
SAN JOSE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA
Carl immediately recognized Danielle Serrate. Her red hair was up but her features, despite her having a little more makeup on, had the same model beauty as before. She saw Carl and for some reason he felt gratified that she had recognized him. He was dressed simply in slacks and a short-sleeved blue shirt. He stepped up to her and took her suitcase from her hand.
“Ms. Serrate, you’re looking…a bit cleaner.”
“You have a singular wit about you, Commander,” she said as she gave him the once-over.
“I’m like that, singular and witty,” he said as he started for the door. “If you don’t mind, ma’am, we have a busy day ahead of us.”
“May I ask our destination?” she asked, catching up with the much taller officer.
“You may ask,” he said as he flagged down marine corporal Sanchez, who would be accompanying them to Stanford. Carl lifted the trunk lid and laid her case inside, then paused. “Is there anything you would like to retrieve from your luggage?” he asked with his hand still on the trunk.
She smiled and opened the rear door of the rented Chevrolet. “No, I have everything I could possibly need,” she said significantly as she entered the car.
Carl slammed the trunk and walked to the other side of the car and climbed in. Her answer meant that she wasn’t armed. He wouldn’t push the point of the illegality of her having a weapon even if it were still hidden in her suitcase; after all, he wouldn’t like it if someone took his toys away if he visited France.
“Again, I’ll ask you our destination.” She looked at Carl over her sunglasses.
He tapped Corporal Sanchez on the back of his shoulder, signaling him to drive.
“Stanford University,” he said curtly. “And I want you to know, I was ‘volunteered’ for this assignment.”
“I look forward to spending time with you also, Commander.”
Carl could see her mocking smile in the reflection of the window.
EVENT GROUP CENTER NELLIS AFB, NEVADA
Professor Charles Hindershot Ellenshaw III was deep in thought. He had been staring at the same CT scan for the last twenty minutes. He had compared the latest shots to that of the sample of material in the electron microscope. He couldn’t figure it out. The film was cloudy around the third finger of the fossil, as if the film had a flaw in it. But it was the same on the first set of scans they had done. If he didn’t know any better, he would have thought someone was playing a joke on him.
“Heidi, would you look at this please?” he asked, handing over the film.
Heidi Rodriguez took the X-ray and reviewed it. “Looks like bad film; is this a shot of the claw’s third digit?”
“Yes, it is, but the same thing happened on the first CT scan, look,” he said as he held out the second set of film. “And if you would take a look at this also,” he said, pointing to a monitor that was connected to the electron microscope.
Heidi looked from the film to the monitor. “All I see is bone, Professor. Are you seeing something different?” she asked, looking closer.
“Right here, that spec, that isn’t bone,” he said, using a pencil to point out a black object that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.
“Dirt, or sand perhaps,” she said.
“It’s right in the area where the CT scan didn’t take. It’s as if the entire area was wiped clean.”
“Interference?” she asked.
“I don’t know, probably just coincidence. It does look like an outside contaminant, sand probably. It must have been placed there postmortem. But let’s get some more film on it. If the blur continues to be in the same area, it may indicate a malfunction in the scanner itself, either that or our ancient friend here has been playing around with a radioactive isotope.”
He glanced up but saw Heidi wasn’t smiling at his small joke. Instead she was looking at
the monitor with renewed interest.
“This is no flaw in the film or the machine,” Heidi said as she looked closer at the image. “And you’re right, Professor, the only thing that could cause this effect is …” she paused, “radioactivity.”
STANFORD, UNIVERSITY PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
An hour and a half after he picked his burden up in San Jose, Carl waited while a janitor let him and Danielle into the classroom that had been left vacant for the summer by the departure of Helen Zachary and almost a quarter of her students. The university’s security department, after examining Carl’s falsified identification, hadn’t hesitated to cooperate. Oh, the FBI ID card was real enough, but the bureau had no idea that the Event Group had been authorized to issue them to nonbureau personnel by the president of the United States.
“Nothing more eerie than a classroom with no students in it,” Danielle said as she looked around at the empty lab tables and displays.
“Especially one with a bunch of animal skeletons,” Carl said, half smiling. “Here’s the professor’s private office.” He tried the knob and found it locked.
Danielle stepped forward and eased Carl out of the way. She produced a small device; spreading its thin, wirelike probes, she easily slid it into the door’s lock and jiggled. There was a click. Danielle turned the knob and the door opened.
“Standard issue?” he asked.
“Every woman should have one,” she said as she stepped into the office and turned on the light.
Carl felt as though control of their small investigation had suddenly changed leadership.
Several filing cabinets had been left standing open. Danielle looked closely at one of the locks and called Carl over.
“What do you think of this?” she asked.
He could see small gouges in the chromed steel of the lock around the mechanism’s opening. “It’s been picked,” he said. “Someone has cleaned this place out.”
“I agree. Whatever your professor had here is now in the possession of another,” she stated as she perused the maps on the wall. “Her interests in South America are clear nonetheless,” she said as she traced a finger along the Amazon.
Carl opened his cell phone to call Niles but its indicator showed the signal strength was very low. He closed the phone, picked up the receiver of the office’s desk phone, and listened for the dial tone. On a hunch, he punched the number nine and a new tone told him he had an outside line. Then he placed a cup-size instrument over the earpiece of the phone. Danielle recognized it as a programmed descrambler.
“Can’t get a signal in here, so I have to be careful what I say. This won’t be a secure line, at least on our end.” It had taken Everett a few seconds to close his cell phone, enough time to allow a bad guy to track his usage number if the signal was bugged.
“You Americans, always so paranoid,” Danielle said as she lifted a champagne flute and looked at it curiously.
In the parking area outside of the sciences building, four men sat in a panel van. The vehicle was full of state-of-the-art monitoring equipment purchased through a dummy corporation. The fine print on the invoices could easily have been traced back to the Banco de Juarez, if anyone had been interested. Each man monitored an area of the office that had either been bugged or tapped into.
“I have an outside line open on the office phone,” one of the men said in Spanish.
“Contact Captain Rosolo,” another of the men said.
The side door slid open suddenly, illuminating the interior and shocking the communications men. They scrambled to stand in the presence of their commander.
“Keep your places. What is it you are monitoring?” the captain asked as he sat himself in front of a computer and started typing commands. “I take it you are wired into the classroom security cameras?”
The four men were unsettled that Rosolo had been that close to them, and their nervousness showed. The captain had a reputation for unforgiving ruthlessness.
“There are two people in the classroom office. One is a large man and the other a woman,” the supervisor said nervously. “We tagged the man’s cell phone, but he failed to get a signal out so he has utilized the office landline. But once he’s clear of the building, we’ll be able to track his cell’s movements and him also.”
The computer monitor connected with the camera feed to the professor’s area inside the building. Unfortunately it showed only the classroom, not the office. Rosolo typed in another command and the video rewound until the two people were clearly seen. He didn’t recognize the man, but the woman was another story.
“Patch in the gentleman’s conversation,” he ordered.
Carl was speaking with Jack and Virginia.
“The place is cleaned out,” Carl said.
Then instead of a voice on the other end, a series of clicks, beeps, and static filled the air around the speaker in the van.
“The other end of his conversation is scrambled,” Rosolo announced, as he picked up a set of headphones and listened more closely.
“Uh-huh, yeah, we can do that. Have you contacted the Department of the Navy? I’ll need some force behind me in New Orleans; as I said before, the master chief is definitely one bottle short of a six-pack,” Carl said.
More beeps and screeches.
“Have you informed the director?” Carl asked.
Scrambled response.
“He’s already left for Virginia?”
The noises once again.
Now, Rosolo could tell by a muffled sound that the man who was talking placed his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. The captain still could clearly understand what was being said to the woman in the office.
“They think they have an outside shot at recovering the map of Padilla. The director will be landing there in about three hours,” was the mumbled comment. Then Carl returned to his telephone conversation. “Yes, sir, I’ll contact you from New Orleans.”
Rosolo laid down the headphones as the connection was terminated. He looked at the frozen picture of the woman on the computer screen. Then he made a decision.
“Contact B team and have them ready the aircraft with an open flight plan ready to move at a moment’s notice,” he said without looking at his men. “Tell them we will leave within thirty minutes. We now have this man’s cell phone tapped and flagged and what he knows, we know. He is not going after the map, so he and this woman are not going to be our target at this time. We’ll wait and see what they uncover in Virginia. Inform our team at San Jose International to stand by for immediate departure when and if they discover anything worthwhile.”
The four communications men went to work as Rosolo assigned a file name to the picture of the woman on the monitor. He quickly brought up a secured e-mail address, keyboarded the picture to it as an attachment, and hit send. Then he picked up a satellite phone and punched in a number, as he slid the side door open and stepped out.
“Señor Mendez,” he said when the phone three thousand miles away was answered.
“Yes, Captain.”
“I have sent you some information that is a concern for security reasons. Check your computer when it is possible to do so. Alone.”
“Yes, I will do that,” Mendez said.
“It seems our friend’s ex-wife is on official business in Helen Zachary’s office; she is with a man who has just conversed with someone using a scrambled and encrypted phone on a secure line. Therefore, we must assume this is not to our benefit.”
“I agree; is there anything else?” Mendez asked.
“Yes, a very serious development. Whoever these people are, they may have stumbled upon a means to find the whereabouts of the Padilla map.”
“We cannot allow that map to fall into the hands of those that could harm our quest. I assume you are in the process of handling this disturbing matter?”
“The order has been given. It may take time, but if they locate the map, we’ll be there soon after.” Rosolo hung up and tossed the phone back inside
the van to one of the technicians. Then he walked to the entrance to the sciences building and waited.
It was only five minutes before he heard footsteps and talking through the double doors. He straightened his tie and opened the right side door quickly.
“Oh, excuse me,” he said as he bumped into the woman and then moved out of her way.
Danielle smiled politely and she and Carl stepped through the doorway. As they did so Rosolo, still appearing to fuss with his own garments, adeptly placed a tracer bug on the woman’s suit jacket. As he held the door open for a moment, he turned and watched Danielle and the large man leave the building. When he was sure they were out of sight, he returned to the large van.
Captain Rosolo, chief of security for clandestine operations for the Banco de Juarez International Economica, would make sure there was no interference from anyone, now that Señor Mendez was on his way to Padilla’s golden site.
The trail to that same destination would end for these two people in New Orleans, if they proved to be more resourceful there.
ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
Director Niles Compton was still shaken and Lieutenant JG Jason Ryan could barely refrain from teasing him. The director had unceremoniously lost his cookies somewhere over Kentucky on their flight into Andrews Air Force Base. The air force enlisted men acting as their ground crew wouldn’t be too happy cleaning that mess up. But Niles had wanted to get here as fast as possible, and Ryan had just fortuitously two days before finished his transition from the navy’s Super Tomcat to the air force’s F-16 B, two-seat trainer, which they had used to get to Virginia. Niles hadn’t been happy with the choice of aircraft but reluctantly borrowed one anyway from the Nellis AFB inventory. Every few minutes while they were aloft the director would glance at Ryan and try to catch him in the act of snickering. He knew he was going to have a talk with the lieutenant about the barrel roll as they descended from altitude. Their drive to Arlington was chilly at best.
Legend: An Event Group Thriller Page 16