Jerry and Denny were confined to the mountaintop by their own importance. They knew about the High Zap, and the High Zap couldn’t be allowed to fall into foreign hands.
Another frustrating aspect of the situation was that even though they were bored and had nothing to do and the station was now shorthanded, Jerry and his partner weren’t allowed to use any of the station’s regular equipment. Denny and Jerry weren’t authorized to use the station’s gear, any more than the station’s personnel were allowed to use the laptop that Jerry and Denny had brought with them from the States.
It left Jerry with nothing to do but watch the sunset. Or the sunrise, if the desire took him.
“Wanna play Felony Maximum?” Denny asked.
Denny was a short man of twenty-eight years. He’d been a fat kid and had grown into an obese adult, but two years previously he’d put himself on a severe diet that consisted solely of vitamins and an assortment of Progresso canned soups. Denny had lost seventy-five pounds and his body was now of svelte proportions, for all that he still had no muscle tone-he had managed to lose all the weight without any exercise at all, and even climbing a stair left him out of breath.
The odd thing about the diet was what had happened to Denny’s face. Its moon-pie proportions had shrunk, but the skin hadn’t ebbed to the same degree as his flesh, and the results were deep creases that hadn’t been there before. Jerry thought his partner now looked like a very intelligent monkey.
Despite the peculiarities of his appearance, the weight loss had nevertheless achieved its objective: it had given Denny the social confidence to court and marry a young woman named Denise, who was now pregnant and installed in a minimansion off in the Blue Ridge.
Right now Denny was sitting in the cubicle he and Jerry had been assigned, which featured a desk, two chairs, and a flat-screen monitor that hadn’t been connected to anything, because they weren’t permitted to touch any of the equipment.
“Felony Maximum,” Jerry repeated. Felony Maximum V was one of the two games Jerry had brought along with his Xbox, and the other, which involved World War II fighter combat, had already been played to death.
“Fine,” Jerry said. “Let’s play. But this time, I get to use the MAC-10.”
Jerry and Denny had managed to get the game’s convict protagonist out of Ossining and into Manhattan when they were called to supper-hearty lamb stew in the local style, fresh bread, and strawberry Jell-O for dessert.
Meals at the listening station were taken mainly in silence. If you were the sort of person who was a spy and who furthermore lived in a small near-monastic community on a mountaintop, you were also likely to be the sort of person who didn’t talk much. Jerry and Denny sat at the same table and chatted to each other about the progress of the game and how best to get revenge on the mafiosi who had sent the game’s protagonist to Sing Sing.
A phone rang in the ops room, and Mauricio, the short Dominican guy, answered. He called Chas in, and twenty seconds later Chas returned, his face set in a look of cold resolution.
“The army’s coming,” he said in his soft voice. “We need to erase or shred every piece of data in this place.”
There was a clatter of plates as the station crew pushed back their chairs and stood. Jerry stood as well, though he didn’t quite know why.
Chas looked at him.
“We need to get the two of you out of here,” he said. “Get your stuff together.”
Jerry left the remains of his dinner on the table and hustled to the little cell-like room he’d been assigned. He unplugged the Xbox and put it in its case, then began stuffing clothes into his duffel.
The laptop, with the High Zap encrypted on its hard drive, had waited in its case in the corner for the last four days. Once he’d understood that the contents of the laptop were what was confining him to the mountain, Jerry had asked permission to erase the drive, which would guarantee that it wouldn’t be captured by rogue Turkish generals or indeed anyone else-but to his surprise, his employers in Virginia had balked. He was supposed to return the program in the same condition in which he’d received it and otherwise not use the laptop except when authorized to do so. It was there in black and white-Jerry had signed a contract to that effect, a contract that included a twelve-page nondisclosure agreement.
When permission was refused to erase the hard drive, Jerry had realized that the program almost certainly contained a log on it that would inform his employers when and in what circumstances the program had been accessed. The return of that log intact would be the only way the Company would know that the High Zap hadn’t been misused or copied.
His bosses, Jerry realized, were too paranoid, or bureaucratic, for their own good.
Jerry threw the duffel on a chair and headed for the bathroom for his toilet kit. Chas appeared in his door, a set of keys in his hand.
“Take the VW,” he said. “Go warm it up now; then we’ll load it.”
Jerry took the keys and threw on his thin nylon jacket and ran out to the garage, through the ops room where the document shredder was already in operation, and past the techs bent over their keyboards, intent on zeroing every file on the hard drives. The Volkwagen’s door handle was bitterly cold to the touch. The plastic seats sucked the heat out of Jerry’s bones.
The car didn’t start the first try, the cold battery reluctantly heaving the starter over. Jerry swore, switched off, and then ground again and the engine caught. He shoved the heater lever all the way over to the right and turned up the fan as far as it would go. He put the car in neutral, set the hand brake, and stepped out into the still air of the garage.
The garage door shot up with a great boom and the high mountain wind roared into the building in a stinging swirl of ice crystals. Jerry gave a convulsive shudder as the cold hit him. Chas, looking warm as toast in a huge blue fur-lined parka, came into the garage.
“Open the trunk,” he said.
Jerry bent into the driver’s compartment again and spent a few useless seconds looking for the trunk latch. Chas reached in past his shoulder and popped the trunk lid.
“Okay!” he said. “The army’s coming up from Hakkari. You’ve got to get to the crossroads before they arrive.”
“Right,” Jerry said. The crossroads were a good ten klicks down the mountain, where the switchback road that led to the listening station met the two-lane road leading west from Hakkari. If the army got to the crossroads before Jerry did, there was no way the car could escape.
“When you get to the crossroads, turn left to?yrnak.”
“Check.”
“Here’s your stuff.”
Denny rushed into the garage, burdened with his carry-on and his suitcase. Denny was followed by Mauricio with other bags, including Jerry’s duffel. The luggage was heaved into the trunk, and the trunk slammed shut.
“When you get to?yrnak-” Chas began.
Jerry turned to Mauricio. “Do you have the laptop?” he asked.
Mauricio flashed a bright smile. “I took care of it, man.”
“Okay!”
Denny opened the passenger door and dropped into the car. Chas leaned close to Jerry’s ear. “When you get to?yrnak,” he said again, “call your contact at Langley and ask him for instructions.”
Jerry stared at Chas.
“Call him with what?” he asked. “We weren’t allowed to bring phones.”
A savage grimace crossed Chas’s face. Jerry shuddered in the cold.
“Okay,” Chas said. “In that case, get on the E90 and head west till morning. Then buy a phone with prepaid minutes and make your call.”
“Fine.”
Jerry decided that he officially no longer gave a damn about his instructions. He just wanted to get out of the freaking cold.
“I’ll open the gate and get the truck out of the way,” Chas said.
“Fine.” Jerry’s teeth were chattering. “Bye.”