Hellard squeezed out from behind his desk. He approached Decker, put a hand on his shoulder. “Can you do that, John? Can you? Just go home. Get some rest. Take care of your daughter.” He began to usher him toward the door. “In a few weeks, when this investigation is over, we’ll all be able to go back to our lives. Truth be told, more than a few Senators are secretly pleased that you took the fight to the Koreans, blew up their cyber facility. Don’t worry. It will all work out in the end. The people don’t like it when you go after their heroes. They prefer to do that themselves.”
Back to our lives, Decker thought. He turned toward the Associate Director, smiled his crooked smile and said, “Go fuck yourself, Hellard.”
CHAPTER 20
As soon as Decker left Hellard’s office, the Associate Director returned to his desk, sat down and picked up the telephone. He punched in a number, plus a code for the scrambler. Then he hunched forward, leaning on the tips of his elbows, and cupped the receiver close to his face. “Sir, we have a problem,” he said.
Handsome and tall, in his sixties, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, emerald green eyes and titanium-framed glasses, the man at the other end of the phone barely moved as he listened through his Bluetooth earpiece while Hellard described what had happened with Decker. He sat impassively, his back straight as a pikestaff, in the passenger seat of an All-Terrain Vehicle, wearing an orange jumpsuit emblazoned with the Allied Data Systems logo — a trio of Klieg lights pointing up at the sky.
When Hellard was finished, the man waved at his driver — a lean Hispanic with a buzz cut, also wearing an ADS jumpsuit — and the ATV growled up the incline. It was heavy going through the mesquite and creosote bushes, the Joshua trees. They entered a narrow gulch, filled with sagebrush and greasewood, and finally came upon a wall of cyclone fencing crowned with barbed wire. In fact, there were two fences, with a kill zone of twenty or so feet in between. And they ran as far as the eye could see. On the other side, across hundreds of yards of scrubland, the man could see the near wall of the one million square foot Utah Data Center, still under construction. At a cost of $2 billion, this was the “cloud” where the trillions of intercepted phone calls, emails, and data trails scooped up by the intelligence community’s vast Stellar Wind network would reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.
The man turned and looked up the Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west, dotted with junipers and pinyon trees, quaking aspen. And, higher up, conifers like lodgepole and ponderosa pine, aspen, Douglas fir and Engelmann spruce.
“What’s he know about Riptide?” said the man with the emerald green eyes. His earpiece blinked on and off, like a lighthouse.
“I don’t think he knows anything, sir,” Hellard answered. “Not yet, anyway. But Decker’s was the only workstation compromised. And he isn’t a fool. One thing might lead to another. With Senator Fuller still poking around, I think—”
“Don’t think. Just take care of it. And don’t worry about Fuller.” He tapped at his earpiece.
Another ATV approached along the fencing, kicking up dust. Inside, a beefy black four-star general leered over at him. “Looking good, RW. I like this Avatar program of yours. But you’re sure they’re been ordered to capture, not kill?”
“We’ll find out soon enough, General, won’t we?” He pointed to a small hut housing a substation for the electrical fencing about two hundred yards away. “In this scenario, the assault team cut the wire at the foot of that gulch late last night, made their way past the kill zone in the dark, trying to avoid our reconnaissance cameras, and are now holed up in the power station.”
A structure made of pre-fab concrete blocks stood on the far side of the kill zone. The substation was surrounded by the fence on one side and a vast field leading to the wall of the Data Center about three hundred yards away. Strewn with small boulders and blushes of Indian paintbrush, even when you looked real close, the movement of the Little Hound drones was almost imperceptible. They were black, after all, and slow-moving, and only a foot or so long. Shaped a little like a dog, hence the DARPA appellation, though basically headless, they crawled forward on their jointed four legs. Slowly but surely, they inched their way across the plain toward the substation.
Just then, the first of the Little Hound drones came into view of the hut’s entrance. There was a short report and the robot flipped over. Its legs flailed about in the air.
Then another Hound reached the hut. Again, it was shot by one of the unseen assailants within.
But the third Hound was luckier. It managed to get off a concussion grenade before being cut in half by a burst of machinegun fire. The roof of the hut rose up off the ground, long before the muffled explosion reached the crest of the hill. Then, the entire location was over-run by black drones, dozens of them, each picking its way through the smoldering rubble, like army ants. Moments later, they reappeared, dragging the bodies of three men from the smoking substation.
“Captured and interned, as ordered, sir.”
The General smiled. He tapped his driver on the shoulder and his ATV tore down the path.
“We have to push up our schedule,” the man with the emerald eyes said to his driver as soon as the General’s vehicle had vanished from sight. “It’s unfortunate but Decker and Fuller are getting too close.”
“I understand, sir,” the Hispanic driver replied. He issued a sly little smile. “For the good of the country.”
CHAPTER 21
It had just started to sleet as Decker drove his BMW Z8 along I-66, back from the Center, toward Georgetown and home. Traffic was sluggish. Drivers, who were hurtling past him at sixty only minutes before, were now barely crawling along. As he switched lanes again, straining to track the rear lights of the car right in front of him through the thickening snow, Decker replayed the last few days in his head. The window wipers kept pace with his heartbeat. Thump, thump. Thump, thump.
It had been a dizzying seventy-two hours. The destruction of the Shanghai Hotel had been something that not even Seiden could sweep under the rug. They had met up at the safe house off Shanshang Street after the operation was over, as planned, and Decker had been forced to wait several hours before his flight to the south and his connection back to Toronto. All hell had broken loose. At the safe house, as they sipped tea and waited, Decker explained what had happened. But even his friend from the Mossad found the narrative suspect. Some other assassin, who just happened to enter the hotel at exactly the same time. It seemed more than farfetched. Even to Decker. It seemed, well… incredible.