Deception Point (26 page)

As soon as the train exited the tunnel and climbed onto the aboveground tracks near L’Enfant Plaza, Gabrielle dug out her cellphone and called the senator’s private cellular number. His voice mail answered. Puzzled, she phoned the senator’s office. The secretary answered.

“It’s Gabrielle. Is he in?”

The secretary sounded peeved. “Where have you been? He was looking for you.”

“I had a meeting that ran long. I need to talk to him right away.”

“You’ll have to wait till morning. He’s at Westbrooke.”

Westbrooke Place Luxury Apartments was the building where Sexton kept his D.C. residence. “He’s not picking up his private line,” Gabrielle said.

“He blocked off tonight as a P.E.,” the secretary reminded. “He left early.”

Gabrielle scowled.
Personal Event.
In all the excitement, she’d forgotten Sexton had scheduled himself a night alone at home. He was very particular about not being disturbed during his P.E. blocks.
Bang on my door only if the building is on fire,
he would say.
Other than that, it can wait until morning.
Gabrielle decided Sexton’s building was definitely on fire. “I need you to reach him for me.”

“Impossible.”

“This is serious, I really—”

“No, I mean
literally
impossible. He left his pager on my desk on his way out and told me he was not to be
disturbed all night. He was adamant.” She paused. “More so than usual.”

Shit.
“Okay, thanks.” Gabrielle hung up.

“L’Enfant Plaza,”
a recording announced in the subway car.
“Connection all stations.”

Closing her eyes, Gabrielle tried to clear her mind, but devastating images rushed in . . . the lurid photos of herself and the senator . . . the pile of documents alleging Sexton was taking bribes. Gabrielle could still hear Tench’s raspy demands.
Do the right thing. Sign the affidavit. Admit the affair.

As the train screeched into the station, Gabrielle forced herself to imagine what the senator would do if the photos hit the presses. The first thing to pop in her mind both shocked and shamed her.

Sexton would lie.

Was this truly her first instinct regarding her candidate?

Yes. He would lie . . . brilliantly.

If these photos hit the media without Gabrielle’s having admitted the affair, the senator would simply claim the photos were a cruel forgery. This was the age of digital photo editing; anyone who had ever been on-line had seen the flawlessly retouched spoof photographs of celebrities’ heads digitally melded onto other people’s bodies, often those of porn stars engaged in lewd acts. Gabrielle had already witnessed the senator’s ability to look into a television camera and lie convincingly about their affair; she had no doubt he could persuade the world these photos were a lame attempt to derail his career. Sexton would lash out with indignant outrage, perhaps even insinuate that the President himself had ordered the forgery.

No wonder the White House hasn’t gone public.
The photos, Gabrielle realized, could backfire just like the initial drudge. As vivid as the pictures seemed, they were totally inconclusive.

Gabrielle felt a sudden surge of hope.

The White House can’t prove any of this is real!

Tench’s powerplay on Gabrielle had been ruthless in its simplicity: Admit your affair or watch Sexton go to jail. Suddenly it made perfect sense. The White House
needed
Gabrielle to admit the affair, or the photos were worthless. A sudden glimmer of confidence brightened her mood.

As the train sat idling and the doors slid open, another distant door seemed to open in Gabrielle’s mind, revealing an abrupt and heartening possibility.

Maybe everything Tench told me about the bribery was a lie.

After all, what had Gabrielle really seen? Yet again, nothing conclusive—some Xeroxed bank documents, a grainy photo of Sexton in a garage. All of it potentially counterfeit. Tench cunningly could have showed Gabrielle bogus financial records in the same sitting as the genuine sex photos, hoping Gabrielle would accept the
entire
package as true. It was called “authentication by association,” and politicians used it all the time to sell dubious concepts.

Sexton is innocent,
Gabrielle told herself. The White House was desperate, and they had decided to take a wild gamble on scaring Gabrielle into going public about the affair. They needed Gabrielle to desert Sexton publicly—scandalously.
Get out while you can,
Tench had told her.
You have until eight o’clock tonight.
The ultimate pressure sales job.
All of it fits,
she thought.

Except one thing . . .

The only confusing piece of the puzzle was that Tench had been sending Gabrielle anti-NASA e-mails. This certainly suggested NASA really
did
want Sexton to solidify his anti-NASA stance so they could use it against him. Or did it? Gabrielle realized that even the e-mails had a perfectly logical explanation.

What if the e-mails were not really from Tench?

It was possible Tench caught a traitor on staff sending Gabrielle data, fired that person, and then stepped in and e-mailed the final message herself, calling Gabrielle in for a meeting.
Tench could have pretended she leaked all the NASA data on purpose—to set Gabrielle up.

The subway hydraulics hissed now in L’Enfant Plaza, the doors preparing to close.

Gabrielle stared out at the platform, her mind racing. She had no idea if her suspicions were making any sense or if they were just wishful thinking, but whatever the hell was going on, she knew she had to talk to the senator right away—P.E. night or not.

Clutching the envelope of photographs, Gabrielle hurried
off the train just as the doors hissed shut. She had a new destination.

Westbrooke Place Apartments.

F
ight or flight.

As a biologist, Tolland knew that vast physiological changes occurred when an organism sensed danger. Adrenaline flooded the cerebral cortex, jolting the heart rate and commanding the brain to make the oldest and most intuitive of all biological decisions—whether to do battle or flee.

Tolland’s instinct told him to flee, and yet reason reminded him he was still tethered to Norah Mangor. There was nowhere to flee anyway. The only cover for miles was the habisphere, and the attackers, whoever the hell they were, had positioned themselves high on the glacier and cut off that option. Behind him, the wide open sheet of ice fanned out into a two-mile-long plain that terminated in a sheer drop to a frigid sea. Flight in that direction meant death by exposure. The practical barriers to fleeing notwithstanding, Tolland knew he could not possibly leave the others. Norah and Corky were still out in the open, tethered to Rachel and Tolland.

Tolland stayed down near Rachel as the ice pellets continued to slam into the side of the toppled equipment sled. He pillaged the strewn contents, searching for a weapon, a flare gun, a radio . . . anything.

“Run!” Rachel yelled, her breathing still strained.

Then, oddly, the hailstorm of ice bullets abruptly stopped. Even in the pounding wind, the night felt suddenly calm . . . as if a storm had let up unexpectedly.

It was then, peering cautiously around the sled, that Tolland witnessed one of the most chilling sights he had ever seen.

Gliding effortlessly out of the darkened perimeter into the
light, three ghostly figures emerged, coasting silently in on skis. The figures wore full white weather suits. They carried no ski poles but rather large rifles that looked like no guns Tolland had ever seen. Their skis were bizarre as well, futuristic and short, more like elongated Rollerblades than skis.

Calmly, as if knowing they had already won this battle, the figures coasted to a stop beside their closest victim—the unconscious Norah Mangor. Tolland rose shakily to his knees and peered over the sled at the attackers. The visitors stared back at him through eerie electronic goggles. They were apparently uninterested.

At least for the moment.

•   •   •

Delta-One felt no remorse as he stared down at the woman lying unconscious on the ice before him. He had been trained to carry out orders, not to question motives.

The woman was wearing a thick, black, thermal suit and had a welt on the side of her face. Her breathing was short and labored. One of the IM ice rifles had found its mark and knocked her unconscious.

Now it was time to finish the job.

As Delta-One knelt down beside the oblivious woman, his teammates trained their rifles on the other targets—one on the small, unconscious man lying on the ice nearby, and one on the overturned sled where the two other victims were hiding. Although his men easily could have moved in to finish the job, the remaining three victims were unarmed and had nowhere to run. Rushing to finish them all off at once was careless.
Never disperse your focus unless absolutely necessary. Face one adversary at a time.
Exactly as they had been trained, the Delta Force would kill these people one at a time. The magic, however, was that they would leave no trace to suggest how they had died.

Crouched beside the unconscious woman, Delta-One removed his thermal gloves and scooped up a handful of snow. Packing the snow, he opened the woman’s mouth and began stuffing it down her throat. He filled her entire mouth, ramming the snow as deep as he could down her windpipe. She would be dead within three minutes.

This technique, invented by the Russian mafia, was called
the
byelaya smert
—white death. This victim would suffocate long before the snow in her throat melted. Once dead, however, her body would stay warm long enough to dissolve the blockage. Even if foul play were suspected, no murder weapon or evidence of violence would be apparent immediately. Eventually someone might figure it out, but it would buy them time. The ice bullets would fade into the environment, buried in the snow, and the welt on this woman’s head would look like she’d taken a nasty spill on the ice—not surprising in these gale force winds.

The other three people would be incapacitated and killed in much the same way. Then Delta-One would load all of them on the sled, drag them several hundred yards off course, reattach their belay lines, and arrange the bodies. Hours from now, the four of them would be found frozen in the snow, apparent victims of overexposure and hypothermia. Those who discovered them would be puzzled what they were doing off course, but nobody would be surprised that they were dead. After all, their flares had burned out, the weather was perilous, and getting lost on the Milne Ice Shelf could bring death in a hurry.

Delta-One had now finished packing snow down the woman’s throat. Before turning his attention to the others, Delta-One unhooked the woman’s belay harness. He could reconnect it later, but at the moment, he did not want the two people behind the sled getting ideas about pulling his victim to safety.

•   •   •

Michael Tolland had just witnessed a murderous act more bizarre than his darkest mind could imagine. Having cut Norah Mangor free, the three attackers were turning their attention to Corky.

I’ve got to do something!

Corky had come to and was moaning, trying to sit up, but one of the soldiers pushed him back down on his back, straddled him, and pinned Corky’s arms to the ice by kneeling on them. Corky let out a cry of pain that was instantly swallowed up by the raging wind.

In a kind of demented terror, Tolland tore through the scattered contents of the overturned sled.
There must be something
here! A weapon! Something!
All he saw was diagnostic ice gear, most of it smashed beyond recognition by the ice pellets. Beside him, Rachel groggily tried to sit up, using her ice ax to prop herself up. “Run . . . Mike . . .”

Tolland eyed the ax that was strapped to Rachel’s wrist. It could be a weapon. Sort of. Tolland wondered what his chances were attacking three armed men with a tiny ax.

Suicide.

As Rachel rolled and sat up, Tolland spied something behind her. A bulky vinyl bag. Praying against fate that it contained a flare gun or radio, he clambered past her and grabbed the bag. Inside he found a large, neatly folded sheet of Mylar fabric. Worthless. Tolland had something similar on his research ship. It was a small weather balloon, designed to carry payloads of observational weather gear not much heavier than a personal computer. Norah’s balloon would be no help here, particularly without a helium tank.

With the growing sounds of Corky’s struggle, Tolland felt a helpless sensation he had not felt in years. Total despair. Total loss. Like the cliché of one’s life passing before one’s eyes before death, Tolland’s mind flashed unexpectedly through long forgotten childhood images. For an instant he was sailing in San Pedro, learning the age-old sailor’s pastime of spinnaker-flying—hanging on a knotted rope, suspended over the ocean, plunging laughing into the water, rising and falling like a kid hanging on a belfry rope, his fate determined by a billowing spinnaker sail and the whim of the ocean breeze.

Tolland’s eyes instantly snapped back to the Mylar balloon in his hand, realizing that his mind had not been surrendering, but rather it had been trying to remind him of a solution!
Spinnaker flying.

Corky was still struggling against his captor as Tolland yanked open the protective bag around the balloon. Tolland had no illusions that this plan was anything other than a long shot, but he knew remaining here was certain death for all of them. He clutched the folded mass of Mylar. The payload clip warned:
CAUTION: NOT FOR USE IN WINDS OVER
10
KNOTS.

The hell with that!
Gripping it hard to keep it from unfurling,
Tolland clambered over to Rachel, who was propped on her side. He could see the confusion in her eyes as he nestled close, yelling, “Hold this!”

Tolland handed Rachel the folded pad of fabric and then used his free hands to slip the balloon’s payload clasp through one of the carabiners on his harness. Then, rolling on his side, he slipped the clasp through one of Rachel’s carabiners as well.