Gridlock

by Byron L. Dorgan

  “I assume that the elevators don’t work.”

  “If they ever did. Russian contractors built the place. But the point is he probably likes it up there in his eagle’s aerie. He’ll have the stairs wired for visual, infrared, and motion so he’ll know when someone is on the way up.”

  “You’ve done your homework since we last talked,” Makarov said, which he’d expected.

  “When you come to me for information on someone you’re interested in, I find out what I can. It’s a matter of self-preservation.”

  “And in this case?”

  “From what a little bird told me just before I left to come down here, the VEVAK agent watching the kid did not make the usual contact schedule this morning.”

  “Who is this person?”

  “Dekker’s girlfriend, actually. She’s a Dane the Iranians recruited about three years ago at Aarhus Universitet in Copenhagen. She was studying to be a sociologist, and was already a communist.”

  “Has there been trouble?”

  “That I don’t know, except my source said that her handler had become nervous over the past week or so.”

  “Who is he?” Makarov asked.

  “Colonel somebody Dabir, I never knew his first name. In any event until you showed up it was none of my business.”

  “But now it is.”

  “Yes,” Sumskoy said. “Once again, I’m here, what do you want?”

  “I need your help to get to him before he can unleash your virus.”

  “Not mine—”

  “If this actually goes down there’ll be plenty of blame to go around. Something Putin, who’s having enough trouble keeping the peace at home, doesn’t want. You’re involved now which puts your name at the top of a very small list.”

  “Eb tvoiu mat.” Sumskoy swore softly. “I’ve never had personal contact with the kid. He’d have no idea who I was—except that I’d probably pose a threat to him. As would you.”

  “Not if I called him first—he’s talked to me on the phone—and told him that someone had come to kill him.”

  “Yes, you. But I don’t see how that would help.”

  “Not me, Vasili, you. I would bring you to him up the stairs, at gunpoint. In the morning, I think would be best, when he’s likely to be the least alert. Just before dawn, four or five.”

  61

  THE C37B GULFSTREAM G550 on loan to the CIA from the Navy touched down at Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport just before three in the morning, local. The pilot taxied across to the Dutch Coast Guard Station and parked in front of the Operations Building where a man in civilian clothes waited next to a Saab station wagon.

  Tim Winkler, the CIA agent who’d been assigned to fly over with Osborne but for nothing else unless something unforeseen cropped up, looked out the window. “Just as we suspected,” he said. He was an older man with a round head and thinning white hair.

  “Police?” Osborne asked. He’d managed to catch a few hours’ sleep on the way over, a trick that he and just about every GI who’d ever served in combat learned. But his mind had not shut off, and he’d replayed scenarios half dreaming, half daydreaming about just how he was going to get to Dekker. None of them had seemed workable to him. Improvise. It had been drummed into his head in FORECON.

  “Worse. He’s Major Andries DeJong. AIVD muscle. That’s the Dutch intelligence service, whose main job is internal security. Anything that’s not a military threat. Just about like our FBI and damned near as good.”

  “How’d they know I was coming?”

  “We had to tell them, otherwise it would have been Ramstein first and from there by train or car. And frankly we didn’t think there was enough time for that.”

  Jody Acers, the attendant, was busy with the front door.

  “What about him, is he going to help or is he going to tell us to turn around and get out?”

  “I don’t know. But he’ll at least listen to what we have to say,” Winkler said. “I worked on an assignment in Oslo with him about five years ago. Had to do with a couple of diplomats—one of them Dutch, the other American—who’d received death threats. He’s a tough guy, but he’ll have his orders.”

  Once the door was open and the steps were down, Acers stepped aside to let the Dutch intelligence officer aboard. The man was lightly built, with sandy blond hair, a thin mustache, about fifty. He wasn’t smiling.

  “Good to see you,” Winkler said, as he and Osborne got to their feet.

  They all shook hands and Winkler introduced Osborne.

  “Surprised to see you here, Timothy,” DeJong said.

  “We have a serious problem, some of which involves one of your citizens. But I think that you already know something about it.”

  DeJong scowled. “Have you brought me proof? My government would need that before we could take any action.” He gave Osborne a pointed look. “Or allow any action to be taken.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time, Mr. DeJong,” Osborne said. “Either you’re going to help me do what I came to do, or we’ll just turn around and get the hell out of here and let the mess spill over your fence, which it’ll surely do if this comes to a shooting war.”

  “You’re nothing more than an obscure county sheriff; what do you think you can hope to accomplish here that my service cannot do?”

  “What your service refuses to do,” Osborne shot back. It would have been better if they had landed at Ramstein and he’d anonymously crossed the border by car, because he didn’t think DeJong was even going to let them off the aircraft.

  “Do you know anything of Sheriff Osborne’s background?” Winkler asked.

  “Yes, we checked on him. And he’s an impressive man by all accounts, which is neither here nor there. The point is exactly what he’s come here to do.”

  “To find Barend Dekker and take his computer and a thumb drive which contains a computer virus—probably Russian-designed—that was delivered to him probably by a VEVAK agent or agents.”

  “Probably, probably.”

  “As you know he’s already caused serious trouble for us.”

  “Because of your intransigence with Iran’s nuclear efforts, and your attack a few months ago on some Venezuelan military targets. Why don’t you go to Tehran or Caracas?”

  Osborne didn’t know how much further he could take this and he looked to Winkler.

  “As your people probably already know, President Thompson has sent one of our aircraft carriers to stand off Caracas,” Winkler said.

  “Yes, the George H.W. Bush from Norfolk. And I suspect that you have already given Israel the green light in case you come up with definitive proof of Iran’s involvement,” DeJong said. “My question stands: What are the two of you doing here?”

  “To find Dekker and the virus before it’s too late and the damage to our electrical grid is done,” Osborne said.

  “No. The two of you.”

  “I’m here to deliver the package,” Winkler said, and it was what he’d warned Osborne would probably be the case.

  “But not to babysit. Not to participate.”

  “It would make the operation easier.”

  “For you but not for us,” DeJong said. “You will stay aboard the aircraft which will not be given clearance to take off until we know exactly what sort of damage Sheriff Osborne has caused.”

  Osborne was mad. “What the hell are you afraid of, Major?”

  “Involvement in another American adventure,” DeJong shot back angrily.

  “It was different in the forties when we and the Allies came to save your asses from the Nazis.”

  “Seventy years ago. We live in a different world now.”

  “Yes, we do. But I hope it never comes to an all-out war again, or at the very least your Turkish immigrant problem doesn’t rise up and bite you in the ass and you need help.”

  DeJong smiled faintly. “I hope that your field action is as sharp as your background suggests it is, or at least as to the point as your rhetoric is.”<
br />
  “The ball’s in your court, Andries,” Winkler said.

  “We’ll have your aircraft refueled and ready for turnaround by dawn. In the meanwhile Sheriff Osborne will come with me and I’ll point him in the right direction, but I am ordered to do nothing more than that. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Osborne said.

  They all rose and DeJong started for the door, but he stopped and turned back. “Are you armed? Have you brought weapons with you?”

  “One pistol.”

  “Leave it here.”

  “What?” Osborne asked. He’d expected anything but this. “What the hell am I supposed to defend myself with, strong language?”

  “As it has been explained to me, Barend Dekker is a computer hacker, not a trained soldier or operative. Use your strong language and he’ll probably faint.”

  It wasn’t the hacker who Osborne was concerned with, it was his girlfriend, the VEVAK agent assigned to watch him, or perhaps someone else in the neighborhood who might be interested.

  “This is my government’s condition. You will not bring a weapon onto Dutch soil.”

  Osborne unholstered his 9mm SIG-Sauer P226 and handed it to Winkler along with a spare fifteen-round magazine.

  62

  WHITNEY WAS AT her office. It was nine in the evening, and staring out her window the vague feelings of fear and even insecurity that had plagued her all day had grown stronger with the evening. She’d not been able to reach Nate, and his office said the last they’d heard he’d gone back to Minnesota to talk to the MAAP computer analyst in Hibbing. But when she called a spokesman said he was not there.

  Nor had she been able to reach Ashley’s cell phone, and she hung up after she reached the automatic voice message system.

  Her old third-floor rear office at the CDC’s headquarters in Druid Hills, a suburb of Atlanta, looked toward Emory University, the view in a colleague’s estimation “industrial shit,” with the smokestack, white trailer pods, electrical distribution yard, cars, trucks, and miscellaneous equipment parked seemingly at random. But as she’d told him, this was a working facility not a showplace, and who has time to look out their window anyway?

  She’d spent the day arranging computer time on the center’s mainframe and setting the preliminary schedules for the half-dozen postdocs she’d selected from the nearly three hundred applications that had piled up on her desk since her work on microbial quorum sensing at the Initiative had been made public. She’d suddenly become a popular scientist and a lot of kids wanted to work with her.

  Her office was organized, her lab would be up and running within a week, but the problem was she had no problem to work on. At least nothing specific beyond the broad, long-term goal of applying her research to animal subjects at first, and then to human trials.

  The idea was fairly simple in concept: produce a mix of microbes that could be directed by her quorum-sensing language system to cure a very targeted ailment. Something so important as eliminating a cancerous tumor in a lung, or in a woman’s breasts or ovaries. Or apparently simple as dissolving stones in a person’s gallbladder.

  But finding the correct mixture of microbes from a population that numbered in the hundreds of millions, and then coming up with the correct lingua franca that would cause them to work together to cure the problem instead of killing the patient was worse than finding the needle in a haystack by a factor of ten, or a hundred or a thousand.

  That didn’t matter as much as finding the starting point. Finding the correct mix of microbes and the language to make them eat coal, turn it into methane, and then reproduce more microbes to continue the process had been simple. Her failures had produced nothing but failures. No one died.

  A sudden chill made her shiver. But people at the Initiative had died because of her work, and still more might. And now she’d been unable to reach Nate or Ashley.

  Her phone rang, and it was General Forester. “Am I interrupting your work?”

  “No,” she said. “As a matter of fact I was just thinking about going home. It’s been a long day.”

  “For me, too,” Forester said. “You’ve tried to call my daughter several times today. Can you tell me why?”

  It was more than a simple question. She could hear the strain in the general’s voice. “I wanted to talk to her.”

  “About what?”

  “We’re friends, I wanted to see how she’s getting along.”

  Forester held his silence.

  “We haven’t talked much since I left Medora.”

  “You’ve also tried to reach Nate Osborne.”

  Whitney bridled. “Your people have been monitoring my telephone, and I have a hunch you’ve looked at my e-mails. This facility is supposedly every bit as secure as yours, General. I don’t like the intrusion.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. But this is a matter of national emergency. And we are talking about my daughter. I don’t know where she is, and frankly I’m very worried about her. She’s a headstrong girl who tends to go off on tangents. You tried to reach her for something more than a chat. What do you think she’s up to?”

  “Do you know where Nate is at this moment?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where she is, and frankly I’m worried about both of them, because I think that we just might be at war. Undeclared, but war just the same. For energy. And it’s been coming for a long time, and if it develops the way I’m afraid it will, we’re all going to be in a lot of trouble.”

  “I’m afraid that you’re probably right about Ashley, and everything else. It’s been an energy war ever since they hit the Initiative.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Whitney started to protest but Forester cut her off.

  “It’s not what you want to hear, Doctor, but my hands are tied and it’s going to get worse for you at least for the time being.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The gentlemen are on their way up now,” Forester said.

  “Who?”

  “The FBI. They’re taking you into protective custody.”

  Her corridor door was open and she heard the elevator arrive. She jumped up. “Bullshit! I won’t allow this to happen. I have work to do. My postdocs start showing up tomorrow.”

  “They’ll have to wait,” Forester said. “It’s for your own good.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Whitney said, her anger spiking nearly out of control. “I’m calling Charlie right now.” Charles Donovan was the director of the CDC, and his power in Washington had to be as great as Forester’s.

  “I’ve already talked to him, and he agreed that getting you out of the possible firing line was for the best. He doesn’t want to lose you. None of us do.”

  Whitney felt trapped. Someone was coming down the corridor. FBI agents. And she simply could not believe that something like this could happen to her. She was a scientist, not a soldier or secret agent or even a politician. And yet in her heart of hearts she could understand their concern for her safety. In a Scientific American editorial two months ago the writer had called her a national treasure. It’d been embarrassing to her, yet standing behind her desk she couldn’t help but think about the people at the Initiative who’d been murdered in cold blood simply because they’d been working on an alternative source of relatively clean energy. Scientists like her, some of them; others had been technicians, electrical workers, roustabouts.

  And Jim Cameron, chief of security, who’d given his life to save hers and Ashley’s and Nate’s. She had been falling in love with him, and not a day went by she didn’t see his face, his smile, his gentle good nature.

  Two men, dressed in plain business suits, came to her door. One of them held up his FBI credentials.

  “Dr. Lipton, I’m Special Agent Ian McAllister, and this is my partner Dan Herbert. I expect that you were told that we would be coming this evening and why.”

  “They’re here,” she told Foreste
r and she put down the phone before he could reply. “I’ll need to stop at my house to pick up a few things.”

  “It’s already been done, Doctor,” McAllister said.

  63

  DINNER ABOARD THE KLM flight to Amsterdam was finally winding down a few minutes past nine thirty by Ashley’s wristwatch but she had passed on the salmon and on the steak and instead drank a couple of glasses of really good cabernet. She’d been way too uptight to eat anything, and already the wine had gone to her head, but she would get some sleep. Somehow.

  Nate was going after the hacker, she knew that much, and she figured that it was a more than even chance that someone might know he was coming and would want to stop him. She was after the story, of course—the biggest in her career—but there wasn’t a chance in hell that she was going to let the man she loved go into harm’s way without her. No matter what she knew he was going to say when she showed up.

  She had her speech rehearsed: they were a partnership, and it didn’t matter what he had to say about that, because it was fact. “You and me, babe.” Sooner or later he would have to accept it, and Amsterdam was a great beginning for both of them.

  One of the male attendants from first class said something to a business-class attendant who turned and nodded toward Ashley, and he came back to her aisle seat.

  “Ms. Borden?” he said, smiling pleasantly. “Ashley Borden?”

  Ashley’s heart thumped. “Yes?”

  “Someone would like to have a word with you, if you’ll just come forward with me.”

  “Who is it?” Ashley asked. But she unbuckled her seat belt.

  “It’s actually a telephone call from Washington.”

  An older man in a business suit looked at her curiously as she got up. She gave him a smile and followed the attendant forward where he took a phone from a cradle in the flight deck bulkhead.

  “I have her here, sir,” he said, and he handed the phone to Ashley.

  She knew who it had to be. “How did you find me, Daddy?” she said.