DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (7 page)

She fixed her icy stare on Odehl. All eyes, including Beloski's turned to him.

“You know we were operationally constrained,” Odehl replied.

“You mean politically,” she shot back. “Let this be a little reminder to you to listen to your friends and to not be so shy of taking hard measures against your sworn enemies.”

She stood there, glaring at Odehl for a few seconds, then went out.

“Brrrr!” Thompson said after she closed the door.

Beloski noticed Ochoa looking at him, studying him.

“She was there for the Iranian op?” Ochoa said. “With you?”

“Observing,” Beloski replied.

“And you were running it,” Ochoa said. “With her around.”

“Somehow doesn’t seem possible, does it?” Thompson said.

“What else can you tell me about her?” Ochoa asked, still looking at Beloski.

“As you experienced just now, Ochoa,” Odehl said, “I can tell you she likes young men, preferably more than a decade younger than herself. Isn’t that right, Stan?” Odehl laughed, and this time he laughed alone. “Stan was ready to file a sexual harassment charge by the time he got back from that op.”

Beloski felt the blood rushing to his cheeks and was thankful when Ochoa changed the subject by asking, “You mentioned she and the president go back?”

“I did,” Odehl said, getting serious. “He spent a summer and the following fall in Israel as an exchange student. The ambassador, an Israeli cabinet staffer back then, and Mrs. Bauman hosted the president in their home.”

Odehl sat back in his chair and added, “But if you really want to know something about Chana Bauman, start with what the Israelis say about her. ‘In Chana’s wake you will find a stream of dead bodies.’”

Ochoa took a few minutes to page through the file on his lap as if another scan of those pages would make things clearer. He looked up with a frown and said to Thompson, “It’s looking a bit more complicated than the genius in midlife crisis goes for a stroll story line.”

“This is your op and your call,” Thompson replied. “But if I were you, I'd raise this one from recovery to rendition. And make sure you keep both boggies bright lit on your radar. Mr. Julian Rogers scares me as much as Spencer. Maybe even a little more.”

Chapter 10

Beloski and Ochoa stepped out of Odehl's office to allow their bosses a few minutes of high level banter.

“I need a quick word with you,” Ochoa said.

Beloski turned to face him. “We can go into an office if you'd like.”

“Do we need to?”

Beloski could feel Ochoa scanning him. “Up to you.”

Ochoa seemed to weigh his choice for a moment before he said, “I'm flying to the West Coast tonight. I'd like you to join me if you could.”

“Sure. If you think I can be of help.”

“Good. We have two seats reserved on an ITAA Gulfstream out of Dulles, set to go between 23 and 2400.”

“Red eye,” Beloski said. “Should get in L.A. before rush hour hits.”

“Not L.A.,” Ochoa said. “San Jose.”

“San Jose?” Beloski asked.

“Spencer and L.A. are wide apart by now. San Jose is where this started, and we need to close a few loose ends there.”

Ochoa paused. Steve the analyst was running toward them.

“Is the boss still in there?” Steve asked.

Beloski knocked on Odehl's office door. “What is it?”

“Martin Spencer is online. Wants to talk to Odehl.”

Odehl walked into the war room as if carried along by a whirlwind. “Is the trace up and running?” he asked.

An analyst looked up dejected. “Still trying to figure out what to trace.”

Steve waived Odehl toward one of the computer screens. “He's on via video teleconference.”

Beloski guessed that Odehl was thinking something along the lines of, “What happened to calling on the phone?”

“It's an encrypted but open link,” Steve noted. “Keep it unclassified.”

Martin Spencer’s face appeared, cast in a greenish tint against a pitch black background. Spencer’s eyes glowed green. Someone whispered that Spencer’s computer was using a night vision camera.

Steve reached behind the monitor and flipped on the camera switch. “We're hot. Please have a seat.”

By the time Odehl faced the monitor, he'd managed to twist his tired round face into a smile. “Thanks for contacting us, Martin,” he said. “It's good to see you, son.”

“Good evening, Robert,” Martin replied. “I'm sure it's been a long and difficult 36 hours for your team. Pass along my apologies.”

“We owe you an apology as well, Martin. We took our eye off the ball, and there's been a terrible mistake. A misunderstanding, really. You should not have been released from InfoStream. We're working to rectify the situation post haste.”

“We'll, that's reassuring. I suppose that's why that Collections team is swarming all over L.A. and San Jose. To rectify things. To clear up the misunderstanding. Really.”

“Standard procedure,” Odehl said, still managing to keep up his smile. “Just following the prescribed process. You know how it is. You gave us quite a scare.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Beloski could see Thompson nodding with approval. Next to him, Ochoa was frowning.

“Let's save ourselves some time,” Martin said. “My career is done, has been done for some time, and I'm done with it.”

“You're selling yourself way short, Martin. You may not feel like it right now, and who can blame you after the way InfoStream treated you? But you have a bright future ahead of you. You're a national treasure, and everyone knows it.”

Spencer chuckled. “I got laid off, Robert. Fired. Canned. Deep-sixed. Someone doesn't think I'm a national treasure.”

“Like I said, a misunderstanding, a tragic mistake.”

“Whatever, Robert. Look, just leave me the hell alone. Let me just fade into the sunset. I don't have any ill intentions toward you or anyone in the agency or my country. I just want to enjoy my midlife crisis all on my own, without being chased or recovered or renditioned or terminated. Will you give me that? Will you just let me be?”

“We all go through seasons in life, Martin. We can let you handle your transition your way. But let's not call it the end. Let's not make it final.”

“Robert, listen. Leave. Me. Alone.”

“And if we don't? If we can't accept that?”

“Remember that discussion we had a while back about random-based decision-making? I told you then what I'll tell you now. Disregard the known for what might be, for the randomly possible, and you will get unpredictable, uncontrollable results.”

“Which means?” Odehl asked.

“The known choice is to let me be. It comes with a known, predictable result.”

“What are we talking about here, Martin?” Odehl asked. His accommodating demeanor and smile had departed.

“That's just it, Robert. We don't know and can't know. Not until it happens. You never had any idea about the tiger you were holding by the tail. No one did. Only a few with a twinkling of imagination could foresee it. One by one, you pushed us out of the way. Imagination will not be required for long. Soon we will all know.” Martin paused for a second then added, “And we when we know, you will have to untangle yourself from the mess all on your own. I’m out of it. For good.”

The screen went black.

A long discussion ensued. With a large number of prior occupants of the fishbowl pouring in, the war room was now standing room only. While Odehl stared at his hands and played with his wedding band, and while Beloski, Ochoa and Thompson watched on in silence, the analysts, profilers and experts carried on what could best be characterized as an unrestrained cackle fest. Many theories were offered, many arguments made, but in the end, consensus boiled down to two basic tenets: Martin Spencer wanted to be left alone, with the threat implied if his desire went unmet; and his state of mind had to be classed as dangerously unstable.

It was at that point that a young man knocked on the door and squeezed into the crowded room. “Bring up CNN,” he said, and he had to shout it again several times before the room quieted.

Someone typed a few commands into one of two classified computers, someone else connected its video output to the room’s projector, and an aerial view of nocturnal Los Angeles appeared. The footage, apparently shot from a helicopter at fairly high altitude, showed sections of the sprawling metropolis turning dark, then coming back on at one minute intervals, with adjacent sections going off, in what was reported as a circular pattern. According to the voice over, this phenomenon had been transpiring over the course of the past 30 minutes. Ten sections of the electrical grid were affected.

Around the room a few analysts were furiously typing commands and bringing up monitor windows in their classified terminals.

“Someone tell me that isn’t what I think it is,” Odehl said.

The analysts typed more commands and scrutinized data with focused intensity. Behind them, others gathered to make their own assessments.

Steve, one of the over-the-shoulder viewers spoke up first, “It has all the makings of a flicker event.”

“The repeating, alternating circular pattern is not coincidental,” someone else offered. “Not random, not accidental. Power outages don’t happen that way.”

On CNN, the voice over was now saying that things had returned to normal. The areal video feed showed a fully lit city. They watched on for another ten minutes, as eye witness reports came in from around the city. Then, recorded video of the prior 30 minutes replayed, this time at an accelerated frame rate to shorten the loop duration.

“It’s a message,” Ochoa said, making his way around the room.

“From Martin Spencer?” Brixten, the head of security asked.

“From whomever, it’s a message,” Ochoa said. Arriving at the front of the room, he tapped on a banner depicting the logo for project Ouroboros. “Two snakes, each eating the other’s tail. Circular,” he added, tracing with his hand the circular graphic.

“What time is your flight?” Thompson asked.

Ochoa glanced at his watch. “Right now plus however long it takes us to get to Dulles.”

“Beloski going with you?” Thompson asked.

“Yes, sir,” Ochoa replied.

“God speed,” Thompson said. “With emphasis on speed.”

On their way out of the vault, but before they exited, Beloski let Ochoa know that originally, the logo for project Ouroboros had shown a single snake eating its tail. It wasn’t until Julian’s code was incorporated that, at Martin’s suggestion, the logo had been updated to include a second snake, resulting in the circular arrangement of two snakes, each eating the other’s tail.

“Yin-yang,” Ochoa said. “Order and calculation vs. chaos and disorder, all combined into one.”

Beloski nodded and opened the door of the vault. From now on, outside the vault, they’d had to be more circumspect about what they said about the project, never mentioning it by name, and would say much less about its logo or what it represented.