Blowout (20 page)

It was as if Susan and the others were hearing a foreign, even heretical language; their faces went blank and the room fell silent.

“They failed,” Whitney said.

“What are you talking about?” Stein shouted, unable finally to contain himself. “Failed? Donna Marie is a morgue!”

“They didn't shut us down.”

“All but.”

“They'll try again,” Whitney said. And this time the silence was so profound it almost made a noise of its own. A ringing in the ears, she thought. “So you—we—all of us have to make a choice. Do you want to continue with the project, or would you rather leave now?”

“You mean get out of the damage path?” Frank Neubert, one of her postdocs who was the project's prophet of doom, asked.

And Whitney cringed. “Under the circumstances, that's exactly what I'm saying.”

Neubert looked around at the others. He was a tall, impossibly skinny man with an Ichabod Crane Adam's apple. “What about you, Doc? Are you quitting?”

“I'm the project director.”

“I'm sorry, that's not what I asked,” he said, and he sounded more angry than frightened.

She shook her head and was about to say she would
have
to stay, but suddenly changed her mind. These were her people, after all. And they needed the unvarnished truth. “Hell no,” she said. “The bastards aren't going to beat me!”

Neubert smiled, and all of a sudden everyone was talking at once, some of them shouting, laughing like little kids at a birthday party.

Whitney wanted to quiet them down in part because she wasn't sure that they really understood what they were facing, because sooner or later the Air Force and FBI would have to leave if any science were to get done, and in part because if their decision was to stay, a lot of work had to take place before they were up and running again.

In the end, however, she let them have their blowout. It was, she thought, better than champagne for them.

 

26

PRESIDENT THOMPSON WAS
working at his desk in shirtsleeves, a thick file perched on his knee, when National Security Adviser Nicholas Fenniger brought General Forester and FBI Director Edwin Rogers back to the Oval Office.

He put the file down and got to his feet. “I hoped the peace would last a bit longer,” he said, coming around the desk.

“So did I, Mr. President,” Forester said, and the two men shook hands.

“How's the cleanup proceeding?”

“We should be back up and running in a week, maybe ten days.”

“The gadget wasn't damaged?”

“No, and Dr. Lipton tells me that we caught a bit of luck. Her microbes in the coal seam haven't splintered as she thought they might. So it looks as if we won't have to start from scratch.”

Thompson turned to Rogers. “Any progress on finding who did this to us and why?”

“This is almost certainly the work of the Posse Comitatus, but they had help not only in terms of direction but of money,” the FBI director said. He'd been a first-string starting quarterback at Northwestern beginning in his freshman year, and at fifty-two he still had the combination of broad, muscular shoulders and narrow hips, as well as keen attention for detail.

“Save the details for now, I'll read your report, but how do you see the money? Who's likely behind this and why?”

“Well, it wasn't a normal Posse shoestring operation. The motor coach they used was top-shelf—well over two hundred thousand. There was another quarter of a million in sophisticated electronic equipment aboard, plus the weapons they used were expensive and the Semtex plastic explosives and detonator mechanisms were U.S. military grade, possibly from a Saudi Arabian supplier—we're still working on that aspect. Which brings up a number of interesting and delicate possibilities.”

“You're talking about motive?”

“Yes, Mr. President. Oil futures traders. Derivative players. Credit default swap folks. People with more than a vested interest in stopping or at least seriously delaying any sort of a viable approach to big-scale alternative energy sources.”

“Foreign or domestic?”

“At this point I'd guess domestic. Organizations like Venezuela's SEBIN don't have the contacts with our homegrown groups such as the Posse.”

Thompson was angry. “They're willing to sabotage our efforts simply for short-term profits?”

“Yes, sir. In the billions, maybe even trillions. These kinds of attacks are something we considered from the beginning of the Initiative. There're people out there who don't want us to succeed and they're willing to do whatever it takes to stop us.”

“Do we have names?”

“The list is short, but finding the proof won't be easy,” Rogers said. “And we have two other considerations. One of the bodies found in the abandoned motor home was that of Dr. Mohammed al-Kassem Kemal. His primary education was at the National University of Science and Technology in Rawalpindi, but he did his postdoc work in microbiology in Hungary at the University of Szeged under Laszlo Kredics.”

“The Pakastani school mostly serves the military.”

“Yes, sir, though not exclusively.”

“And the second consideration?”

“We have a leak.” Forester answered the president's question. “Probably someone on the scientific side.”

“Because of Dr. Kemal?”

“We don't have all the analysis finished, but it looks as if he created a microbial cocktail and poured it into an intake port on the wellhead that would have been released when the gadget was lowered into the seam. Dr. Lipton thinks the bacteria could have been designed to counteract our efforts, and produce a catastrophic amount of oxygen and methane.”

“An explosive mixture.”

“Worse, Mr. President. A blowout that would have rendered the entire coal seam totally unfit for production, and probably created a dangerous release of massive amounts of methane and carbon dioxide. But he would have needed the biological makeup—the blueprints if you will—of the bacteria we designed to produce the methane.”

“He couldn't have come up with the formula on his own?”

“Not according to Dr. Lipton. She tells me that there's nothing in the literature that ties everything together like she has. And that's not hubris.”

“I wouldn't think so,” the president said. “How is she holding up?”

“Better than I would have thought possible. She's a bright, dedicated woman. And right now she's transferred her fear and the fears of her staff into anger and determination.”

President Thompson sat back for just a moment. The situation in Venezuela was threatening to ramp up because of his recall of the U.S. ambassador and his expulsion of the Venezuelan ambassador over the still unpublicized beheading of Rupert Mann. The Chinese stubbornly refused to devalue their currency, pushing the balance of trade inequality to the breaking point. The Russians had started to play a dangerous game of hide-and-seek in the Atlantic with their nuclear missile submarines close aboard our Atlantic coast. Iran continued working on weaponizing its nuclear program, and both it and North Korea had nearly completed their development of three stage intercontinental ballistic missiles that could reach the U.S. mainland as far as Denver. And the European Economic Union was still on the verge of imploding.

And those were just the high points. Now this.

“We're not taking money out of anyone's pockets,” Thompson said angrily. “If the shortsighted bastards bet their money on the future they would not only make a fortune but they would possibly save the planet.”

It was the campaign rhetoric that some in the media had lambasted him for as impossibly naïve. “No one thinks that way any longer,” a talk show host had told him six months before the election, which he had won by a narrow margin.

“Maybe they should,” he'd replied, for which he'd been branded the “Boy Candidate.”

The embarrassed silence lasted only a moment or two before Thompson came back. “What's next?” he asked.

“Well, we certainly won't back down,” Forester said. “We're beefing up security, of course, but we'll continue with the project while at the same time we look for the leak.”

“And prepare for another attack?”

“Yes, Mr. President, we have to consider that possibility.”

Thompson turned to his FBI director. “Ed?”

“We're following the Posse back to the sources, including looking for who picked up the motor coach and where they acquired the electronics, the explosives, and the weapons. But our cybercrimes division is working on re-creating just how the Initiative's communications systems were taken over. And I've appointed a special action squad to figure out who would have the most to benefit from sabotaging the Initiative.”

“Don't you need to uncover the money trail first?” the president asked.

“Sorry, sir, but that's too broad. First we identify who might benefit, then look at their ledgers.”

Thompson's heart hardened. The Initiative was
his
vision and his alone, like F.D.R.'s Social Security system. “Whatever you want, you will get. No questions asked. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” a somewhat subdued Rogers replied uncertainly.

“Wiretaps, arrest without habeas corpus, whatever,” Thompson said. He took a sealed envelope from his desk and handed it to the FBI director. “In writing, Ed. My signature. No equivocation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get the bastards, no matter what it takes.”

 

27

THE ROUGH RIDERS
Hotel—the best accommodations in Medora—was a couple of blocks up from Osborne's office in the Billings County Courthouse. He'd changed into civvies because he wanted to shed his LE presence and walked up just before six because he figured he needed the exercise and might need to clear his head afterwards.

The late afternoon was cold, and the fireplace in Theodore's dining room adjacent to the bar was pulling full strength. The comfortable warm, smoky atmosphere, Christmas tree in the lobby, something he'd always equated with peace and security, permeated the adjacent cocktail lounge where Ashley Borden was sitting at the bar sipping a red wine when he walked in. Only a few other couples were seated at tables, but she was alone at the bar.

He hung up his jacket, then hesitated for just a moment, her back to him, and watched her fiddle with her glass. She was dressed in a light yellow sweater over jeans and the way she sat, the set of her head, long neck and narrow shoulders, the curve of her back and narrow waist was in his estimation very attractive. But he didn't know if he should or even could take the next step.

She turned as he walked across the dining room, and he smiled at her.

“You were snooping on me, shame on you,” she said, nodding at the mirror over the bar, her smile warm.

“Guilty as charged,” Osborne said. “I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't being stood up. You might have been waiting for a boyfriend.”

She laughed. “My dad says I'm too much of a spoiled brat to ever have a serious relationship unless I change.”

“Are you a brat?”

“Certifiable.”

The bartender came over with a Michelob Ultra tap. “How's it going, Nate?” she asked.

“Not bad, Tina. You?”

She nodded. “So, we heard there might have been some trouble down at the ELF station last night.”

“Somebody threw a wrong switch and blew something up. No big deal.”

“Anyone hurt?”

“A few bruised egos from what I was told.”

“You two having dinner?”

“Thought we might.”

The bartender nodded. “I'll put your names in,” she said and moved off.

Ashley laughed. “I wonder if there's a waiting list.” She had stayed the night, and when Osborne had called to ask her to dinner, she'd told him to get over to the hotel as soon as possible. The place was practically empty and she was getting spooked.

Osborne shrugged and took a pull of his beer. “I heard the Air Force kicked you out after the news conference.”

“Nothing much to see or do except hang around and watch the cleanup. A bunch of construction types came up by air through Ellsworth, and it's getting a little dangerous, stuff being pulled apart and hauled out to trucks. And nobody's leaning on their shovels. They're really working hard. Lipton wants the place back up and running by the end of next week. So here I sit.”

“Did she say that you'd be kept in the loop?”

“Yes, but she's not really in charge. My dad is. And for now I promised to keep my mouth shut.”

“You keep your promises?” Osborne asked, and she looked at his reflection in the bar mirror.

“When they make sense,” she said. “Anyway I'm going to go back to Bismarck tomorrow or Friday and put in an appearance at the paper before I lose my job. Christmas is Saturday but I'll be back if anything interesting turns up.”

“I thought you'd be going to Washington to be with your dad.”

She shook her head. “He's pretty busy right now.”

“No one in Bismarck?”

“No one special. How about you?”

“Divorced, she lives down in Orlando with our daughter.”

“Couldn't stand the North Dakota wilds?”

“She grew up in a big city. It's quiet out here.”

“That it is,” Ashley said. “Find anything new about the Posse connection?”

“We're still digging.”

“What about the Newell down by Amidon? Were either of the two bodies Posse guys?”

Osborne was surprised, although he knew he shouldn't be. She was a good reporter and she had some decent sources not only here in the state but as far away as Washington. After the murder suicide in the park, she'd found out that the father had lost his ad agency job in the Twin Cities, had gone bankrupt, and was in the process of losing his house. All in the few months leading up to the event. He'd been despondent; deeply troubled, she'd been told by neighbors who knew the family. And the first Osborne had known about those details was when he'd read about them in her article.