The line went quiet and then the tissue paper rustled again.
'I don't think so, young man.'
'Can you check?'
'No need. I know all our members. We meet quite regularly. And I am sure I would remember a name like that.'
'French woman, kind of pretty, worked in the Valley.'
'I'm sorry.'
Sixsmith pressed the mute button, looked at Jimenez, and said, 'Shit.'
'Well, thank you, ma'am.'
'My pleasure. And remember, if you need a home for that poor creature
'I will,' said Sixsmith, thinking fast. Then added, 'Oh, one more thing. Charlotte had this beautiful picture of Michael taken in some studio somewhere. It's a real work of art. Clearly someone who understands cats. You don't know where I might go to get something like that myself, do you?'
'Now, there I can help you. If you want a portrait of a cat, there is only one man hereabouts who can do the job. Henry Lomax. You wait there one minute.'
Sixsmith pulled the phone away from his ear and sent up a little prayer. One minute later, Mrs Leonie Hicks was back with a number. Two minutes after that he was speaking to Henry Lomax, who remembered this job so well, since it happened only two weeks before. Sixsmith scribbled something down on his pad and cut the call.
He looked at Jimenez. 'Two addresses. Sunnyvale. And 2314 Ravel, that's on Potrero, he says, he delivered the pictures himself.'
Jimenez grinned. 'Hey, man, we're rolling!'
'Yeah,' said Sixsmith, and put the picture of the cat back on the shelf. It was crazy, he knew, but he didn't like the way the thing kept staring at him.
CHAPTER 17
Charley Pascal
Washington, 1913 UTC
Tim Clarke sat at the end of the table in the Pentagon bunker, dressed in an open-necked shirt and jeans, and stared at the group that had assembled around him. This was a subset of the National Security Council, with the additions he'd demanded and the live video link to La Finca. He wasn't feeling good about the team. It was an ad hoc amalgam of different agencies, different skills, no one quite meshing, no one quite understanding the prolix nature of the problem.
He'd decided against inviting the military in the form of the chiefs of staffs and the Defense Intelligence Agency. This wasn't a military threat, nor, at this point, would a military solution seem appropriate. He had the FBI to handle the internal situation, but there was no evidence that Gaia was necessarily resident in the US any more, and if they were, the Bureau had few clues about where to start looking for them. The Agency, from what he'd seen, knew more than anyone else, but that was still vague. Then there was Sundog itself. They'd patched through to the control room in La Finca, and the live video of Simon Bennett and Irwin Schulz sat on the bunker wall, alongside a digital world map showing the movement of daylight across the globe. They looked lost, academic caretakers of a half-forgotten project who had suddenly found the doors to their lab flung open to the world, and a bunch of strangers walking in, taking over the desks.
The conventional notion of security wasn't made for this world. There was something so global, so intangible, about the way the threat had emerged that it had outwitted them, and all they could do was stare at each other accusingly and wonder where next to punch the air.
His training told him you left these situations to the professionals. In his gut, Clarke knew that this would be a dreadful mistake. The zenith was now less than thirty-six hours away, and the growing presumption was that, whatever Gaia wanted to do, it was the peak of the cycle they would choose for the act. There was no time now for the infighting that would resume the moment he stepped out of the room. So instead he had to lead, directly, with no room for argument.
'Let's start this off with something we can all understand,' Clarke said slowly. 'What the hell happened in Langley this afternoon?'
Helen Wagner scanned the papers in front of her. 'Data is still coming in, Mr President, but it's already clear that the area of the CIA headquarters was subject to some intense kind of solar radiation around midday. The burst lasted, as best we can estimate, six minutes. We had massive electrical failures in the buildings, we're still missing some telecom circuits, and it may be several hours before we can hope to get back to normal. And it's not just Langley. There's telecom disruption through the DC area.'
'I'm not interested in the power supply. What about the physical effects?'
She shook her head. 'We don't know accurately what was in this burst, sir, so we're still in the dark. There was a huge increase in ultraviolet rays during the period, equivalent to standing out in the sun for the best part of a day. It's the unknown elements, the X-rays and the electromagnetic emissions, that are hard to call. The best guess of our physicians is that they are responsible for the illnesses. Mostly these are associated with a sudden rise in blood pressure — physical discomfort, headaches, nosebleeds, the triggering of cardiac incidents, and the like. If the radiation level had been on a Chernobyl level, we'd have monitored that, of course, but more importantly we would have seen other symptoms by now — vomiting, physical side effects. This thing gives you a nasty shock, and repeated doses would doubtless trigger carcinogenic occurrences, just as much as standing out under the sun all day. But it's not deadly in itself, unless you have a pre-existing condition. The real lasting damage may well be to the systems we take for granted. We have entire network backbones down and they don't seem much willing to come back up.'
'It's Sundog, Mr President,' Schulz said from the screen. 'It's all Sundog. The mix of rays is exactly what we got in the trials, and one reason why we half-mothballed the thing in the first place. It's dirty stuff and damn hard to control. But you got to remember this thing is a bunch of weapons, not just one. She's got hold of the transmission feed too and she can use that to mix data into the beam, foul up the telecom networks with all sorts of crap on top of the magnetic disruption you get anyway. Like the biggest computer virus you could think of.'
'We had to do some pretty fancy rerouting just to keep any of the network upright,' Helen added. 'But we shouldn't take that for granted. We have to assume we could lose a lot of our telecom infrastructure at any time when the satellite is in range. And we're still some way off from the zenith. What they're throwing at us on all fronts now is nothing compared to what we could get tomorrow.'
'Understood,' Clarke said. 'And on the ground?'
One of the NSC staff people Clarke didn't recognize cut in. 'The local authorities have the situation in hand outside, sir. There may be a curfew in selected DC areas tonight if this sparks unrest. Right now the TV stations are swallowing the line we're feeding them, that this is some kind of power outage. I don't know how long we can hold that, but we'll keep it as calm as we can.'
'Casualties?'
Helen said quietly, 'We have two staff reported dead of heart attacks. There are some automobile crashes on the freeway. Reports are still coming in.'
Clarke shook his head. 'This is so accurate. How'd they do that?'
Schulz's voice came out of the system. 'It's not a big deal, sir. The energy goes in a dead-straight line. Provided you can work out any refraction through the atmosphere, it's a simple calculation. The fact that they brought down two planes when clearly they were going for Air Force One maybe means they're refining it now.'
Clarke looked at the mute, immobile faces in the room. He knew the makings of despair when he saw it. 'So who are these people? What do they want? And what can they do to us if we don't give it to them or find them in time to take this little toy back out of their hands?'