“Okay. I guess I believe you. The Washington Post thing is too bizarre to be made up.” He motioned them back to the chairs.
“Dr. Maverick, would you please stop waving the gun at us?” Kat asked.
He glanced at the .38 in his hand and nodded, then turned and pulled up another chair. “I’m sorry. I saw you in my house, and… didn’t know who you were.”
“Doctor,” Kat said, softening her voice. “You seem spooked. Is someone chasing you?”
He ignored the question. “Tell me why you’re in my house, please.”
“Did you know Walter Carnegie?” Kat asked, and noticed the instant reaction of fear ripple across the man’s face.
“Why?”
“Because he told us to find you.”
“Walter is dead,” Dr. Maverick said simply.
“We know,” Robert said. “He was my friend.”
Thomas Maverick sighed and shook his head.
“We need,” Kat interjected, “we need to start at the beginning. We have a lot to tell you, but I suspect you have even more to tell us.”
“We need to get out of here. We can talk for a few minutes, but then we’ve got to go. It’s not safe.”
The blue and white Air Force Gulfstream taxied clear of the runway and moved gingerly over the snow-packed surface toward the small commercial terminal, where a car waited in the dark, its exhaust curling around the rear and wafting through the gentle snowfall in the snowy scene.
Jordan James gathered his briefcase and overnight bag and wondered if he should order the crew to stay. There was an Air National Guard facility at Boise, and they were going to wait there, a plan Jordan decided was sufficient. Even if he found Kat immediately, it would be a few hours before they were ready.
When the engines were stopped and the forward stairs lowered, one of the crew raced off to verify that the driver was the one retained to take their VIP wherever he needed to go. He returned to the airplane to help the Secretary off.
“Sir, the major says to just call that cell phone number and we’ll be here within two hours. We’ll be waiting in Boise.”
“Understood. See you shortly.”
The crewman saluted smartly and raced back into the Gulfstream, raising the stairs as the pilots started the engines.
“Where to, Sir?” the driver asked.
“Hang on a second,” Jordan replied. “I have to call and find out.” He pulled out the slip of paper with the number of Kat’s satellite phone and punched it in, relieved when she answered on the first ring.
As they left the airport road, the Gulfstream roared overhead and turned to the west, its lights marking its progress as it sped away, soaring over the beacon of an inbound aircraft maneuvering for landing.
The Cessna Caravan slowed as the pilot turned on final approach and lowered the small landing wheels beneath the twin floats.
CHAPTER 45
Kat finished speaking and sat back in the kitchen chair, studying Thomas Maverick’s features. He was a bear of a man, carrying close to 300 pounds on a six-foot-three frame, his face wreathed in a full beard of reddish brown and his head almost devoid of hair. He was a physicist, he’d told them, with two decades of experience in the world of “black” projects such as the Stealth B-2 bomber and others he still wasn’t free to discuss.
Dr. Maverick was rubbing his head, his eyes carefully alternating between Kat and Robert as he considered what to say.
“Okay. First, understand that I will not go to jail for talking about my project. However, I’m not muzzled with respect to other projects for which I haven’t signed secrecy oaths. And…” He held up a finger and stared at Robert. “One ground rule, Mr. MacCabe, is that this is all deep background. You ever use my name or expose me as a source and, truly, I’ll find a way to hurt you. Understood?”
Robert MacCabe caught the steely glint of Dr. Maverick’s eyes and knew he meant every word he said. He nodded immediately. “You have my word.”
Dr. Maverick nodded. “Very well. I think someone official’s trying to find me for the same reason you were. They think I know more than I do.”
“One thing first,” Kat asked. “Assuming you’re not Walter Carnegie’s deep-throat source, do you have any idea who is?”
“No. None. He wouldn’t tell me, but whoever it is, he knew this field.”
“You mentioned black projects,” Kat began.
“I never worked on lasers or beam weapons. Do I know unofficially of a black project regarding laser weapons? Yes. Did it include vital defense research into pulse beam, particle beam, charged particle, and other electromagnetic weaponry? Absolutely. Has it made several contractors very wealthy? Yes. Has the nation benefitted? Immeasurably. But are the projects sufficiently accountable to anyone but the project managers? In most cases, yes. But exceptions can occur. That’s what I believe happened with the antipersonnel laser research.”
“What? The managers lost control?”
Dr. Maverick shook his head. “No, the project developed a life of its own beyond congressional or even Defense Department control, thanks to three men in particular at the top who are quite bright, but devoid of a moral sense of what they should be doing for their country. I’ve seen a project go out of control only once before, but this one folded into another dimension, effectively disappearing from government oversight.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Kat said, watching him get up to make coffee as he talked and periodically looked out the window.
“First, you need to understand that black projects are inherently vital to our country, and they usually work very well. To develop one, it takes billions of dollars and thousands of people. The majority of the workers are civilians, like myself, willing to work in complete secrecy on narrowly defined components of a whole we do not understand and are prohibited from speculating about, in order to build something like the F-one-seventeen stealth fighter, or the B-two bomber. In the case of antipersonnel lasers, there was an accident in testing a few years ago that I’m not supposed to know about. It destroyed the eyes of a young technician who was a nephew of the President’s chief of staff, who was, and is, a very moral and humane individual. The outraged chief of staff learned the purpose of the research and convinced the President to cancel it and prohibit any such work in the future. But in doing so, the President — who was roundly despised by the defense establishment, as you know — threatened to pull several billion dollars of revenue away from the prime contractor on the black project involved.”
“So the contractor, or the black project, defied the ban?”
Dr. Maverick turned and held up an index finger. “No. Nothing that dramatic. The Pentagon rallied around the contractor and then rewrote and redirected the project so that no money or momentum was lost, but they were simply to apply their scientific knowledge and research to other, nonprohibited military applications of laser weapons. In reality, the project managers lied even to the Secretary of Defense. I know, because a good friend of mine was highly disturbed about it and had to confess it to someone. He left the project, had a nervous breakdown, and now teaches physics at a forgettable high school somewhere for a pittance.”
“So,” Kat asked, “and please forgive the interruption — they kept on with the antipersonnel side?”
He nodded. “Oh, they did new stuff, too, but they shifted the anti-eyeball research into a black hole within a black project, with plans to outlast the President.”