The Paris Option - Страница 62

"Otherwise, you'd be celebrating Smith's and the Chambords' survival. Yes, I see what you mean. But it's all circumstantial. Speculative."

"I deal in circumstance and speculation, sir. All intelligence services do, if they're going about their jobs properly. It's up to us to see dangers before they occur. Possibly I'm wrong, and their bodies will be found." He clasped his hands and leaned forward. "But for all three to be unaccounted for is too much to be ignored, Sam."

"What are you going to do?"

"Keep searching the ruins and testing, but"

The telephone rang, and the president snapped up the receiver. "Yes?" He grimaced, the lines on his forehead knitting. He barked, "Come up to my private office, Chuck. Yes, now." He hung up and closed his eyes a moment as if trying to wipe away the contents of the call.

Klein waited, his general unease heightened.

Castilla said in a tired voice, "Someone has just readjusted the computer processors aboard all of our military and private satellites so we can't retrieve data. All the satellites. No data. It's a catastrophic systems failure. What's even worse, no one on the ground can get them programmed back to the way they were."

"We're blind from space?" Klein bit off a curse. "It sounds like the DNA computer again, dammit. But how? That's the one thing Russell was sure of. The missile struck the villa, and the computer was inside. Smith told her he and Chambord were about to escape, all three of them, and to call in the strike. Even if Smith and Chambord hadn't destroyed it already, it should've gone up with the building."

"I agree. It should've. It's the logical conclusion. Get into the other room now, Fred. Chuck's going to be here in a moment."

Just as Klein slipped away, Charles Ouray, the president's chief of staff, hurried into the office. "They're still trying, but NASA says whoever readjusted the computers has locked us out. Completely. We can't break through! It's causing problems everywhere."

"I'd better hear what they are."

"For a while, it looked as if the North Koreans were sending off a missile strike, but we had a contact on the ground that said it was just a heavy fog that was masking the heat from a truck that was near the missile silo in question. We lost an agent in South Beirut, Jeffrey Moussad. His 3-D directional finder failed. We believe he's been killed. Also, there was a near-miss in the Pacific with one of our carriers and a submarine. Even Echelon's ears are deaf." In the Echelon program, the United States and Britain intercepted calls handled by satellites as well as tapping intercontinental undersea telephone cables.

The president forced himself to take a deep breath. "Reconvene the Joint Chiefs. They're probably not out of the building yet. If they are, get Admiral Brose and tell him to instruct the others to assume the worst an immediate attack on the United States. Anything from biological warfare to a nuclear missile. Scramble every defense, and everything we don't have, officially."

"The experimental antimissile system, sir? But our allies"

"I'll talk to them. They've got to know, so they can alert their own people. We feed a lot of them information off our satellites anyway. Hell, many buy time, too. Their systems have to be reflecting a loss of data, some of it dramatic. If I don't call them, they're going to call me. I'll put it up to some wild-haired hacker, the best we've ever seen. They'll believe it for a while. Meanwhile, we scramble everything. At least the secret experimental system should be totally secure because no one knows we have it, and it should be able to handle everything short of a massive missile attack, which terrorists won't be able to mount. No one but the Brits and Moscow can do that, and they're on our side this time, thank God. For any other kinds of strikes, we'll have to rely on our conventional military, the FBI, and the police every damn where. And Chuck, this doesn't get leaked to the press. Our allies won't want their media people to get wind of it either. This makes none of us look good. Get going, Chuck."

Ouray ran out, and the president opened the other door. Klein's face was gray with worry as he returned to the room.

"You heard?" the president asked.

"Damn right."

"Find out where the hellish thing is, Fred, and this time finish it!"

Chapter Twenty-nine

Paris, France

When Marty fell asleep again in his hospital room, Peter slipped away to contact local MI6. Randi waited ten minutes and left, too. But her journey was much shorter down to the phone booth she had spotted off the main lobby. She hovered at the top of the fire stairs, waiting as a few employees came and went, serving the rich patients who would soon emerge with new faces or new bodies or both. As soon as the lobby was clear, she padded down to it. Lilacs, peonies, and jonquils were arranged in showy springtime displays in tall cut-glass vases. The place was as fragrant as a florist's, but it was making a lot more money.

Enclosed in the glass booth, she dialed her Langley chief, Doug Kennedy, on a secure undersea fiber-optic cable line.

Doug's voice was grim. "I've got bad news. In fact, rotten news. The surveillance and communications satellites are still offline. Worse, we've lost everything in orbit, both military and civilian. NASA and the Pentagon are working like demons with every tool they have, and they're making up the rest as they go along. So far, we're zilch, kaput, aloha, and good luck. Without those satellites, we're blind, deaf, and dumb."

"I get your point. What do you think I'm working on? I told you the prototype had been destroyed, period. The only thing that makes sense is that Chambord survived, although I still can't figure out how. I also can't figure out how he could've built a new prototype so fast."

"Because he's a genius, that's how."

"Even geniuses have only two arms and ten fingers and need time and materials and a place to work. A stable place. Which brings me to my reason for calling your august self."

"Hold the sarcasm, Russell. It gets you into trouble. What do you want?"

"Check with every asset we have on the ground within a two-hundred-mile radius of the villa and find out if they noticed, heard of, or even suspect any unusual traffic on the roads and in the ports, no matter how small, all along the coast near the villa for twelve hours after the explosion. Then do the same with everything we have, sea and air, over the Mediterranean, in the same time frame."

"That's all?"

She ignored the acid tone. "For now, yes. It could tell us for sure if Chambord survived." She paused. "Or whether we're dealing with some unknown factor, which scares the hell out of me. If he did survive, we need to know that, and where he went."

"I'm convinced."

"Yesterday, okay?"

"If not sooner. What about you?"

"I've got some other leads, unofficial, you understand?" It was total bravado. The only possible leads she had were from Peter's highly developed, far-flung, idiosyncratic private assets, and Marty's brain at its most manic.

"Don't we all. Good luck, Russell." He ended the connection.

Aloft Somewhere over Europe

Gagged and blindfolded, Jon Smith sat upright in a passenger seat at the back of a helicopter, his hands bound behind him. He was anxious and worried, his wounds aching, but still he was recording in his mind as much information as possible, while twisting his wrists against the ropes. Every once in a while, he felt the bonds loosen a bit more. It gave him hope, but Abu Auda or his men could easily discover what he had been up to when they reached wherever they were going, if he had not broken free by then.

He was in a helicopter, a large one. He could feel the throb of twin, high-powered engines. From their size, the placement of the door through which he had been shoved aboard, and the interior arrangement that he had deduced by stumbling against each row of seats as he was pushed to the rear, he figured the chopper was a Sikorsky S-70 model, known by several names the Seahawk in the navy, Black Hawk in the army, Pave Hawk in the air force, and Jayhawk in the coast guard.

S-70s were troop carriers and logistical aircraft, but they often carried out other duties like medical evacuation and command-and-control. He had flown in enough while in the field and during his command days courtesy of both the army and air force, with a navy chopper or two thrown into remember the details well.

After he had decided all this, he overheard Abu Auda talking nearby with one of his men. Their conversation had confirmed that it was a Sikorsky all right, but it was the S-70A model, the export version of the multimission Black Hawk. Maybe a leftover from Desert Storm, or acquired through some fellow terrorist whose day job was in the procurement division of some Islamic country's army. In any case, it meant the chopper could easily be armed for combat, which made Jon even more uneasy. Shortly after that, Abu Auda had moved out of listening range.

Jon had been straining to hear any other talk for what he figured was nearly three hours, trying to pick up more information over the roar of the motors, but he had learned nothing useful. The chopper must be near the end of its fuel range. Then it would have to land. At the villa in Algeria, Mauritania had decided he could be useful in the future, and he must still think so, or they would have killed him. Eventually, they would get rid of him, or Abu Auda would get tired of dragging him along and kill him. Hostile witnesses made poor long-term companions.