Jaunt (27 page)

“Those are projected targets for the neutronic devices, Agent Gilmour,” Dark Horse said, an index finger tapping one of the green dots. “The plans Agent Constantine and Agent McKean downloaded reveals the Confederation has already scheduled to line the seafloor with them.”

A red gash in the middle of the ocean with sprinkles of green was what the trench had been reduced to, a sobering thought to Gilmour. It was no longer land they fought over now, but a series of targets, illusory objects to be divvied up.

“Bastard....”

Dark Horse and de Lis narrowed their eyes. Puzzled, both said at the same time,

“What?”

Gilmour rubbed his forehead, a stubborn reminder of his jaunt, and how he had narrowly escaped the sinking Marinochka. He whispered, “I should have killed him, now see what I have created by my mercy.” He elaborated, raising his voice, “A man, masquerading as an NKVD agent, beat me to the site, by hours, maybe days.”

“Beat you to the site?” Constantine asked.

Gilmour put his hands to his hips and walked past the encircling scientists. Not turning his back, he continued, “He knew about the crash site...right where to find it.”

“You can’t blame that on yourself, Gilmour,” Waters said.

“You’re only partially correct, Stacia. Allowing him to slip away, yes, I take full responsibility for that. I should have finished him, and not allowed this to happen. But,” he faced the group again, “he knows what we are doing...then, and now. He knew I would come. Well, not me by name, but one of us. He knew.”

McKean stepped over to Gilmour. “Then there’s only one way....”

“The mole,” Roget finished, almost in afterthought, as if the group had grown accustomed to, and respected, the everpresent shadow in their midst.

“Do you have a name, an identity, Agent Gilmour?” Dark Horse asked, hoping to stem the mounting conclusions. “Anything to help characterize this imposter?”

Gilmour reflected back to the Russian man who had cleverly imprisoned—then almost killed—him before the agent broke free. “Nicolenko. That’s all I know of his identity. A Soviet captain, a man who died in my arms, gave me his name.” He shook his head. “I don’t know about its authenticity...with him impersonating an officer, it could just as easily be assumed.”

Dark Horse nodded. “That may be enough. I’ll have Quintanilla check her sources—”

“Actually, Colonel,” Gilmour interrupted, “I’d prefer if you didn’t, at least not Quintanilla. Are there other avenues?”

Dark Horse swallowed hard; what was with Gilmour’s sudden resistance to Quintanilla?

He flashed a troubled look to de Lis before saying, “I will...look into other options.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

De Lis shelved Gilmour’s perceived reticence, for now. “Agent Gilmour, I’ve instructed Doctor Anaba to perform a post-mission examination on you, the same exams Agents Constantine and McKean received when they returned. After it has been completed, please come by U5-29 for our debriefing. I’m certain your extended jaunt has left you with plenty to share with us.”

Gilmour understood de Lis’ unsaid motive for hurrying along the examination and debriefing. He was sure de Lis would be more than interested in hearing what he had to say about his opinion of Quintanilla, real or subjective.

Crossing over to the corridor, Gilmour found Anaba waiting at the doorway. He followed her out of the laboratory, certain that de Lis thought he had gone insane; walking under the fluorescent lights once again, Gilmour wished he had.

With each step, Gilmour felt the pain in his body ebbing away, owing all to the swift-action analgesic Anaba had injected. Near top shape again physically, Gilmour was ready to go one more round for the team. Mentally, though, he had to convince himself this third bout would finish the operation, or else lose all hope and concede defeat to the Confederation, who would then stand to inherit complete and utter domination over the world. It was a thought he didn't—and couldn't—relish.

The corridor leading to U5-29 seemed to be unusually active, patrolled by a higher number of MPs than when he had left for his examination hours ago. An alert had not been sounded while he was away; he would have picked up on it.

Regardless, he presented his credentials to the four Marines upon crossing over to the U5-29 doorway, who then obliged him with the standard courtesy of unlocking the entrance and shuttling him inside without so much as a look in the eye; too many other subjects to observe, Gilmour assumed.

“Agent Gilmour.”

The invitee turned from the locked door to find de Lis, Dark Horse and another man he realized on the way to the conference table was Solicitor General of the Department of Justice Sebastian Rauchambau. Raising his right hand to shake the Solicitor General’s, Gilmour understood that this wasn’t to be the standard rehashing of a mission’s success/failure ratio. Rauchambau had traveled from Washington, D.C., in the middle of a busy legislative session to Ottawa, no doubt requesting immediate answers to numerous inquiries as to the status of Temporal Retrieve. Gilmour was certain he wouldn’t disappoint.

The four took their seats at the table, and after a brief reintroduction, consulted the holobooks before them.

“Agent Gilmour,” Rauchambau started off, his Creole dialect flavoring his language,

“allow me to congratulate you on your return from the first comprehensive testing of the Casimir jaunt. Being the first to venture into any new technology is breathtaking...I look forward to hearing much more about you as your career blossoms.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Rauchambau tapped a button on his holobook. “On to our business. My presence here is of great concern to all those assigned to the Ottawa bureau. With our ongoing security compromises on these premises, I felt compelled to meet you face to face, when your schedule dictated, of course. With your absence for some weeks, that had to be delayed until now.”

Gilmour nodded. “Of course.”

“As a special agent still in the employ of the Intelligence and Investigation Agency, it is imperative that you keep your opinion of the subject to yourself, unless queried by Doctor de Lis, Colonel Dark Horse or myself. Is that clear, Agent Gilmour?”

A hoarse cough erupted from Gilmour’s throat...something rank obviously didn’t agree with him. “Sir. Yes, sir. May I inquire upon the reasoning of your command?”

“Classified.” The Solicitor General’s eyes glimpsed over his holobook before he returned them to Gilmour’s stern countenance. “Just let it be said that Justice is investigating the matter internally, and we don’t need an agent assigned to one of our most classified operations to be free with his reticence to specific personnel.”

“Understood, sir.” Gilmour wondered just how many ears picked up on his Quintanilla hunch hours ago. Or had Mason, somehow, somewhere, independently voiced both his and Gilmour’s prior suspicions of Quintanilla? It sounded unreasonable, unthinkable knowing Greg as well as he had; the man just didn’t have loose lips. Taking another tack, perhaps the Department of Justice was close to digging out HADRON, and this was just Rauchambau’s routine “don’t screw us over mode” kicking into overdrive. If that was the case, then everyone at this conference table had heard it several times already.

“Now, Agent Gilmour, I understand that during the course of your mission to the year,”

Rauchambau paused to cover a curious grin, “1940—pardon me, I still can’t quite believe this sometimes.”

“Quite all right, sir, “de Lis said, locking eyes with Gilmour. “We have difficulty accepting the plausibility of it as well.”

Gilmour hid a displeased sigh. Don’t apologize for him, de Lis. Let him finish so we can get back to our task.

Rauchambau continued, “You encountered a Soviet NKVD officer known only as Nicolenko. Correct?”

“Correct.”

The Solicitor General furrowed his eyebrows. “You suspect he was actually our contemporary? Perhaps a CIS agent, as you state in your report here?”

“Correct. He was fully aware of my activities, once he figured out that my cover was false, and demanded I hand over my Temporal Retrieve technology and the extraterrestrial samples we call jewels. He knew the location of the crash site...in fact he beat me to it, leading me to believe,” Gilmour damned the torpedoes, “that our mole—HADRON—was responsible for leaking the information.”

Rauchambau half-heartedly nodded. “In the interests of protecting our international standing as a respectable and moral nation, I have instructed the IIA to investigate the suspected identity of this Nicolenko, and to find out if he truly exists as an agent of the Confederation. Unfortunately, I am certain our intelligence experts will come to several firewalls during their international searches.”

“I have implicit trust in their capabilities. I am sure every avenue will be exhausted until no byte is left unscanned,” Gilmour said, beaming. There was more than one way to fight the bureaucratic malaise, the foremost by giving them his absolute encouragement to expend every ounce of technological capital to track the man down.

In the short amount of time de Lis had come to know Gilmour, he had to credit him for learning to joust with the politicians in their favorite arena: the verbal challenge. Checking another portion of his holobook, de Lis changed the subject and tone of the debriefing. “As for the second topic of our debriefing...Agent Gilmour, your report stated the estimated mass of the retrieved jewels at ninety to one hundred kilos.”

“Correct. I would go so far as to say the dredged jewels were double, or most probably triple, the amount we recovered in both the Nepal and Sakha combined. Right now, it’s all resting at the bottom of the trench.”

Dark Horse shifted in his chair, which now felt constraining, perhaps confining in the wake of the knowledge which had recently been revealed to this select group. “I regret to announce that it won’t last. The latest from Washington just an hour ago reports that Vladivostok has begun submarine maneuvers in the Sea of Okhotsk, simulating deep sea retrievals. The DoD estimates a week before the Pacific fleet authorizes an expedition to the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench. It would be only a matter of time before the command is given to launch with live warheads and begin mining the trench.”

“Pardon my ignorance on this matter,” Rauchambau asked, “but wouldn’t the absolute volume of the neutronic yield vaporize these jewels?”

“The latest experiments with our samples indicates that may not be the case.” De Lis brought up a schematic on his holobook, allowing it to be broadcasted to all four holobooks. A cross-section of a typical jewel was highlighted in blue, with accompanying text boxes explaining the bizarre properties and metric measurements of the specimens.

“Each jewel,” de Lis continued, “is, for all intents and purposes, infinitely dense. Even our most powerful microscopes failed to penetrate them. We have to speculate that these jewels are so tightly packed with matter, almost akin to a neutron star’s core, that they would be impossible by conventional or unconventional means to split open.”

Gilmour trimmed de Lis’ words to a layman’s level. “That is, Solicitor General, despite our and the Confederation’s best efforts, we couldn’t destroy the jewels no matter how much we try.”

A vexing frustration crossed Rauchambau’s face. “Then what do the Russians hope to succeed in doing out there? Why risk so many lives in starting a new war?”

“I don’t believe a new war is what they want,” Dark Horse said, countering the positions of many of the government’s more hawkish officers, including the lieutenant colonel’s own superior. “I believe, and this is shared by many here, that the Confederation hopes to prove its mettle on the world stage. A little nationalist pride, along with rubbing our noses in a prize we couldn’t quite control, goes a long way towards becoming an apparent equal with us.”

“We think the Confederation will attempt to atomize the surrounding matter, and sift out the jewels from there,” de Lis said. “And as Colonel Dark Horse has illustrated, sticking it to us wouldn’t hurt, either.”

Rauchambau slowly caught on. “Doing it because they can.”

De Lis nodded. “Precisely.”

The Solicitor General turned to each of them. “Then what can those of us in Justice do to prevent this,” he thought back to the curt warning he gave Gilmour, “as an olive branch?”

Gilmour leaned forward. “As a late friend of mine would say, there might just be a way to take a piss in their pool.”

A symphony of light cascaded across the pyramid-rimmed gallery, creating a menagerie of lucidity and color. The two dozen Temporal Retrieve scientists and special agents, all crammed into a semi-circle, witnessed the simulation of the most powerful weapon mankind had the temerity to create: the neutronic bomb. Watching in rapt fascination, the group beheld the holographic equivalent of a device that was designed to kill them in an instant, but constructed from the very light that struck their retinas every second...and each knew the irony.

Dark Horse stepped forward from the assembly and gestured his right hand towards the holograph flanking him. “Allow me to introduce
Strela
, the Confederation’s first practical neutronic warhead.”

About two meters in height and sixty centimeters in width, the angled device glittered in the darkness, rotating completely every thirty seconds, suspended in mid-air like some strange trapeze artist. A blue beam soon lanced out from thin air, illuminating the warhead’s nosecone.