Once Dead Page 17

  “Understood.”

  “Right now, I need to know what you bring to the table.”

  “Is this a job interview?”

  “It is if you want to work with me. Otherwise we can go our separate ways.”

  Janet studied Jack’s face. For just a second she thought she saw the distinctive red glint that she’d observed in the grainy Cartagena photograph. But maybe she just wanted to see it.

  “My full name’s Janet Alexandra Price. Both parents died when I was thirteen. After that I was raised by my grandparents on my mother’s side. I graduated high school in Gaithersburg, Maryland, before attending the University of Maryland, where I majored in Computer Science and was a two-time NCAA pentathlon champion. The CIA recruited me through an intern program during my junior and senior year of college. I surprised them by qualifying and training as a field operative as opposed to becoming the analyst they thought they were getting.”

  “Unusual for a computer scientist to want to become a field agent.”

  “Computer security fascinates me, but I’d go crazy sitting behind a desk for a career.”

  “What pentathlon events were you best at?”

  “Shooting and fencing.”

  “Fencing?”

  A wry smile creased her lips. “I’ve always been good with sharp, pointy objects.”

  Jack nodded. “So you trained under Garfield Kromly?”

  “Yes. Garfield first noticed me when I broke your CIA thousand-meter marksmanship record. After that I was part of a CIA group that was put through a special U.S. Army Ranger School class. I was the only woman to graduate.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “Why would CIA operatives need Ranger training?”

  “It was a one-time experiment Garfield engineered. I think he used it to evaluate how well select trainees could handle extended physical and mental stress.”

  “Meaning you.”

  “I was one of those he was interested in.”

  “And afterward?”

  “I worked as a special CIA field operative for two years. Then I walked away.”

  “Why?”

  Janet’s eyes lost focus as the memory of that life-changing decision filled her mind. “Admiral Riles can be a very persuasive man. He was assembling a special team of field operatives to enhance and corroborate electronically gathered information. It was a chance to operate completely off the grid.”

  “That’s stepping on the CIA’s turf. If Director Rheiner finds out, the shit’s going to hit the fan.”

  “President Harris issued a number of presidential findings that interpret governing laws in a way that expands the executive branch’s ability to deal with terrorist threats. Admiral Riles believes one of those findings gives the NSA director the authority to establish such a team. It’s why I don’t show up on official NSA employment records.”

  “And President Harris agrees?”

  “Even a president needs plausible deniability. If Riles is wrong, he’ll be the one to take the fall.”

  Jack paused, studying her eyes with new intensity, as if he was trying to crawl through them into her brain.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was your first?”

  Janet felt the memory sink its claws into the back of her neck, felt the 38 special’s recoil shock her small hands and arms as the weapon repeatedly tried to tear itself from her thirteen-year-old grip.

  “My father.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed. For several long seconds she felt the weight of his gaze bear down on her. The silence grew into a ghostly presence that sought to quench the overhead light and usher night’s shadows into the tiny kitchen.

  When he spoke again, his voice softened ever so slightly. “You’ve read my dossier?”

  “I have.”

  “If you have any questions, now’s the time.”

  Janet felt herself hesitate to ask the one thing she most wanted to understand. It might be a deal breaker. Still, she’d told Jack she never passed up an opportunity, and it was God’s truth.

  “Why did you kill that pimp in Cartagena?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “You wanted to know what I brought to the table and I laid it out for you. Now I need to know whether I can count on you to stay on target.”

  Once again she thought she saw it, that red reflection in Jack’s pupils.

  “You can’t. You’re putting your life in jeopardy just by being around me. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  As she looked deep into Jack Gregory’s strange eyes, a new understanding dawned. This man walked a tightrope through a violent and chaotic maelstrom that threatened to rise up and sweep him away at any moment. And, God help her, she was dying to step right out there with him. Hopefully that thin strand was strong enough to support them both.

  CHAPTER 55

  Jonas Aachen didn’t like making mistakes. He didn’t like having his ass chewed either, especially by the man he admired most in the world, Rolf Koenig. But he’d just been the recipient of a world-class ass-chewing, and he had to admit he deserved it.

  It wasn’t that his equations were wrong. The problem was round-off error caused by the subtraction of two nearly-equal numbers in the divisor of a single line of native C++ code, the code that controlled the payload trajectories. If Rolf Koenig hadn’t caught it, his mistake would have resulted in a three-and-a-half-meter targeting error for the third of the six packages. That error would have produced an eleven-nanosecond delay in the gamma pulse, well outside the two-nanosecond tolerance.

  As he stared at the C++ code on his screen, he made the required change, and then spent the next thirty minutes writing a test driver to validate the patch. To Rolf’s credit, he hadn’t fixed the offending software himself, allowing Jonas to atone for his error. It was one of the many reasons Rolf’s people strove so hard to be perfect at what they did. Koenig was demanding, but he always demanded more of himself than of anyone else.

  The test finished its run and, satisfied with the results, Jonas checked the change into the source code repository and started the release build that would create a new installation of the payload guidance software. Rising to his feet, Jonas walked across his office to the coffee maker. Selecting a French roast, he placed the K-cup in the brewer and pressed the blinking start button. Less than a minute later, he lifted the cup to his lips, pausing to inhale the rich aroma before taking a loud, slurping sip.

  Stepping to the window that overlooked the Kyzylorda clean room, Jonas watched his semi-transparent reflection in the glass hover over the payload that would change the world. His angular face, long platinum-blond hair, and smoke-gray eyes bore a striking resemblance to one of the ghostly twins from that Matrix movie.

  On the right side of the payload, two white-clad engineers worked to make final adjustments to one of the six Gamma Enhanced Magnetic Field Penetrators they’d nicknamed MagPipes. Each designed to look exactly like one of the nuclear-power generators on the primary power module, these devices were far more dangerous than the components they were destined to replace.

  The revolutionary design spoke to the level of Rolf Koenig’s genius. First, each device had to match the radiation signature of its counterpart on the primary power module in the assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, two hundred and fifty kilometers to the northwest of this warehouse. Each MagPipe was actually a gamma-enhanced fusion bomb the size of a welder’s acetylene bottle, which only Rolf Koenig could have pulled off.

  Each MagPipe contained an array of plutonium pellets, suspended in an explosive gel that performed two functions. It kept the pellets separated, reducing the total radiation output while preventing critical nuclear reaction. And it formed the precisely-shaped charge that would drive these pellets together into one compressed ball for the handful of femtoseconds required to achieve a fission reaction. At that instant, the light from this lit
tle A-bomb would fill the case before the explosion had a chance to tear it apart, forming the first stage of three thermo-nuclear reactions. The intensity of the light would crush the long tube that occupied the center of the cylinder for most of its two-meter length, initiating a fusion reaction within the outer tritium tube. That fusion reaction would strip neutrons from the inner tube of lithium-6, transmuting it into lithium-4 and commencing the final stage of the fusion bomb. The resulting explosion would produce the enhanced gamma flux each MagPipe was designed to generate.

  When a nuclear explosion occurs at the edge of space, gamma radiation penetrates deep into the atmosphere, ionizing the atoms and sending electrons spiraling perpendicular to the earth’s magnetic field lines as they race toward the earth’s surface. The intensity of this pulse warps the earth’s magnetic field as it achieves a saturation voltage of approximately fifty-thousand volts per meter.

  A spread of enhanced gamma nukes detonating over the U.S. east coast would burn out electrical systems over a vast area, but the first three were the key to the unimaginable destruction Rolf Koenig intended to inflict. Those three precisely timed detonations would form a tunnel through the induced electric conduction layer, laying an electromagnetic pipe that would punch through the fifty-thousand volt-per-meter saturation level all the way to the earth’s surface.

  These phased bursts would be followed by three more detonations to extend the area of peak damage from Boston to North Carolina, with reduced effects reaching all the way to Miami. While the nuclear explosions wouldn’t kill many people directly, people would die in the immediate aftermath. Airplanes would fall from the sky, motors would burn out, power plants would catch fire, transformers would explode, huge currents would be induced in electrical transmission lines, and solid-state electrical components would fry. Even facilities with Faraday cage shielding would succumb to the extended E3 pulse as the earth’s magnetic field fought to reestablish its natural state.

  The effects on the American economy would be devastating. In the Eastern corridor nothing electrical would work. There would be no fuel because there would be no working pumps. There would be no supplies because none of the trucks or trains would run. The ports would shut down because none of the heavy-lift equipment would work. There would be no running water, no food, no fuel, no heat, no cooling, no transportation for thousands of square miles. The financial system would collapse due to the shutdown of exchanges and the utter loss of banking and other financial records.

  The simulations Jonas had run to examine just such a scenario predicted that the EMP attack would plunge the U.S. into deep depression. Many other countries would suffer lesser financial damage. It would be the stroke that would break the world’s American addiction. The United States would eventually recover, but it would take at least a decade, and during that time Europe and Asia would not be waiting for them to catch up. The era of U.S. dominance was about to come to a very abrupt end.

  Jonas took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and returned to his desk. His one little mistake would have greatly reduced the total damage that they intended the coming attack to produce. Thank God Rolf had caught it in time.

  CHAPTER 56

  “So who dropped Rachel off at the clinic?”

  Jack’s question had started Janet down the thirty-six-hour trail that had carried her to the Schoelerpark Residences, a condo complex in Berlin’s upper-class Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district. She had to admit, if Petor Kline’s selection of dwellings was any indication, he was a man of refined taste. The outside of the five-story building, with its many balconies, was so covered in growing foliage it could have been the setting for a modern day Tolkien novel, had Hobbits evolved to live in apartment buildings. It was a fine spot for someone who craved comfort.

  Having again been denied access to information that was deemed too closely tied to Rolf Koenig, Janet had been forced to hack her way into a number of not-quite-public German databases to flush out her Petor Kline dossier. A surgeon who had quit public practice to join Rolf Koenig’s personal medical staff, the doctor didn’t like to get his hands dirty. And while Rolf Koenig was still his employer, a deeper check pointed to a recent working relationship with Vladimir Roskov. It should have taken her only a couple of hours to gather the information, but instead it had cost her the better part of a day.

  Thank you, Mr. President.

  From where she leaned against a tree in the park that bore the same name as the apartment complex, she watched the empty parking space that would soon hold Petor’s silver Mercedes sedan. Since it was a little after six thirty p.m., Janet expected him at any time. Instead he kept her waiting for more than two hours. He pulled into the parking lot at eight fifty-three p.m., just as the sun set in the west, and Janet walked through the parking lot to meet him, her attention seemingly focused on trying to find her keys in her handbag.

  As Petor opened his car door to step out, Janet fired a single shot, the tranquilizer dart lodging in the left side of his neck.

  “What the . . . ?”

  The last word died on his lips as his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped over in the driver’s seat. Closing the remaining distance, Janet leaned over and rolled Petor across the center console onto the passenger seat, slid into the driver’s seat, and closed the door behind her. When she pressed the START button, the powerful engine rumbled to life, accompanied by an annoying seat-belt-not-fastened beep. She ignored it and pulled out of the parking lot and onto Wilhelmsaue.

  An hour and forty-three minutes later, twelve kilometers west of Cottbus, she pulled the Mercedes into the open door of the partially collapsed barn adjacent to an abandoned farmhouse. When she switched off the engine and opened the door, Jack Gregory stepped out of the shadows to meet her, his body dimly illuminated by the interior car lights. Janet saw her H&K subcompact in his right hand, muzzle pointed down at the ground.

  “Any trouble?”

  Janet shook her head and smiled. “Kline must have worked late. Decided to take a nap on the ride down.”

  Jack opened the passenger door, leaned in, and dragged Petor Kline out of the vehicle, letting his unconscious body fall face down in the dirt. A quick pat-down revealed the presence of a nine-millimeter Glock 17 in a shoulder holster. Jack took the handgun, ejected the magazine and checked the chamber before reseating it and chambering a round. Janet accepted the H&K subcompact from his outstretched hand and watched as Jack shoved the Glock into his own shoulder holster before stooping to toss Kline’s body over his left shoulder.

  The car lights went out as Janet closed the passenger door, momentarily blinding her while her eyes sought to adjust to the sudden darkness. She switched her cell phone to flashlight mode and followed Jack out of the barn and into the dilapidated farmhouse, shutting the door behind her.

  A quick glance around showed that Jack had been busy. He’d managed to lower the living room’s metal Rouladen blinds common in German houses, completely blacking out the interior from the outside. The few pieces of broken furniture had been shoved against the far wall, with the exception of the weathered dining room table that rested in the room’s center. But now, two of its legs had been broken off so that the top tilted down to the floor at a thirty degree angle.

  Jack unceremoniously dropped Petor on the floor beside the table, switched on an LED flashlight and set it so that it pointed up to splash its light on the bare boards of the ceiling, the ambient lighting sufficient to allow Janet to switch off her cell phone. Grabbing the box of supplies they’d acquired earlier in the day, Jack set it beside the table.

  He grabbed a large roll of duct tape and, with Janet’s assistance, positioned Petor face up on the slanted table. With the sound that only duct tape makes as it rips from the roll, Jack bound Petor’s body tightly in place, his feet positioned at the high end while the back of his head extended beyond the table edge to touch the floor.

  Janet stepped back to examine their work. Petor’s feet had been bound together and secured
to the table in multiple loops of duct tape. His hands and arms were bound tightly to his sides, his chest strapped to the lower section of the table with a prodigious quantity of duct tape. Finally, Jack pulled a thick cloth sack over Petor’s head, strapping the end tightly around the slender man’s neck, before strapping his head to the table.

  That done, Jack walked across the room and lifted two of the ten-liter water bottles he had stacked near the door and set them beside the table. Janet glanced back at Petor’s body, unable to suppress the shudder that worked its way up her arms and into her shoulders. Although she’d never personally used this interrogation technique, she’d experienced it during her training. The memory wasn’t a pleasant one.

  Jack’s eyes locked with hers.

  “Time to wake him up.”

  Shaking off the feeling that had momentarily frozen her, Janet opened the small bag that held the syringe containing the stimulant that would counteract the effects of the tranquilizer dart. She knelt beside Petor and inserted the needle into a vein in his left arm, feeling her thumb depress the plunger as if it belonged to someone else’s hand.

  The thought that a dose this large would leave the man feeling wired crossed her mind, but Janet shunted it away. That unpleasant side effect was about to become the least of Petor Kline’s problems.

  CHAPTER 57

  Petor Kline opened his eyes, struggling to remember where he was. When he tried to move, he found he couldn’t. Had he been in a car accident? Even his head had been strapped in place so that he couldn’t turn it side to side. Once again the possibility that he’d been in a serious accident crossed his mind. He seemed to be bound to a back-board, although it was supported at a crazy angle, his head tilted down as if he were being treated for severe shock.