Skinner (3 page)

THEY KNOW WHEN
they are being lied to.

Terrence reminds himself.
They are very smart. They know when they are being lied to. They’ve been trained for it.

And he begins to lie.

“I’m a little lost. You asked me here for what?”

Cross allows a sigh to escape from his nostrils. The spycraft equivalent of a spit take. But he refrains from any further comment regarding Terrence’s transparency. He’s sitting behind a mirror-finish black desk comprised of four legs of slightly more then pencil thickness and a slab top with the profile and thinness of an iPad. No drawers, a few papers, a pen set made of the same graphite carbon material as the desk; mouse, monitor, and keyboard, no visible wires, not even a power cord. A desk meant to project the same ideas about its owner that a massive chunk of oak would have communicated in decades past.

Leaning back slightly into the black webbing of an elaborately counterweighted and cantilevered task chair, Cross looks at Haven where he sits on a long, low black leather and chrome couch against the far wall.

“He wants to know why he was
asked
here.”

Haven tugs at the armpit of a jacket that Terrence recognizes as having been tailored to conceal a shoulder holster.

“Old times?”

Cross looks from Haven and back at Terrence.

“No, not for old times’ sake. Haven is trying to be funny.”

Terrence studies the sharp hairline that delineates the southern border of Haven’s crewcut. Hair freshly clipped, the back of his neck pale. Where was Haven recently that he was wearing his hair to the collar? Where has his forehead and nose burned so deeply red-brown? Where has the skin around his eyes been raccooned so white by the constant wear of huge sunglasses? His cheeks and chin left as pale as his neck by the thick beard he’d been sporting until a recent return. So many deserts he could have been in. Shaggy, bearded, Gargoyles over his eyes. Terrence has been in those deserts himself. Khakis, a blue oxford button-down, Altama desert boots, and a sweat-stained USS
Ronald Reagan
ball cap, his Ivy League version of the local paramilitary mode. Clearly articulating that he would
not
be marshaling for an extraction in Nuristan. Judging by the deep, horizonless focus in Haven’s eyes, his mind is still in the desert, while his body is here, back home, wearing a suit cut for a gun, but not wearing a gun, adapting to management, brigade tattoos hidden by navy blue wool blend.

It is unlikely that he is trying to be funny. In Terrence’s experience, Haven’s sense of humor is limited.

“So what you want is?”

Cross nods as if in agreement with a concept with which he is somewhat familiar.

“We’re interested in exploring an avenue, Terrence.”

Haven looks at the ceiling.

“An
avenue
.
”

Terrence touches the plastic sheathed visitor’s pass clipped to the breast pocket of his houndstooth check. He’d been given it in the three-story atrium where all guests are received and cleared for entry on the Kestrel Dynamics campus. That atrium had been designed both to impress and to serve as a killbox for snipers who would ring the third-floor balcony rails should hostiles ever penetrate so far along the Dulles Corridor. Be they terrorists or budget allocators threatening cuts to the dozens of Homeland Security contractors lining the strip that runs from Loudoun to Fairfax counties.

Until seven years ago Terrence hadn’t needed a visitor’s pass. He’d had an office here. This office, in fact. But times change. Witness them here, together, now. An unlikely reunion.

“An avenue toward?”

Cross looks at a chronometer display mounted above the door. Analogue, vintage, salvaged from Cheyenne Mountain Directorate during a NORAD renovation. Back when Terrence had the reserved parking spot closest to the front door, he had bought it for Cross from an online auction house specializing in cold war military memorabilia. Current times in the hot spots of the nuclear age. A birthday present for his protégé.

Cross’s eyes are on the clock on the far right, a small black plaque:
Moscow.

“How far is Russia from Ukraine? Time zones, I mean, how many time zones?”

Haven looks at one of the five narrow slits of armored glass along the wall behind Cross; the Kestrel campus outside is warped by their thickness.

“
Time zones
.”

Terrence points at the clock.

“Kiev is an hour behind Moscow. GMT plus two.”

Haven’s lips are compressed, the rest of his face impassive.

“Kiev. Tea. They drink tea in Kiev, right? Glasses of tea. Hacker tea time in Kiev.”

“Probably they drink Starbucks.”

Cross fingers a small cube of clear Lucite that is perched on his desk. Encased within, a coil of wire and a battery, the detonator from an IED that a Kestrel contractor disarmed in Anbar Province.

“If they’re state actors, they get Modafinil. B-12 injections.”

Haven relaxes his lips, amused.

“
State actors.
Ukraine state actors.”

Terrence draws a squiggle in the air with his index finger.

“An incident? Ukraine origin? Is that verifiable?”

Cross stares deep into the cube, as if willing it to blow something up.

“Alarmingly so.”

They will know if you lie.

“And you need an avenue.”

Cross rotates the cube a few degrees, setting off rainbows instead of a bomb.

“Need. Well.”

Terrence nods, touches one of the buttons of his jacket, the garment a remnant of the days when being in the CIA meant affecting the style of an Ivy League dean. Days before his own. Romanticized.

Stupid. Foolish. Romantic. Killer. Are you going to do this or not? They will know. Do they already know?

“A cyber attack. Out of Ukraine.”

Cross drops the cube, letting it bounce and tumble across his desk before settling, a gambler’s fixed die coming to rest.

“Bravo. How do you ever put together such apt analysis from unconnected scraps like time zones and Haven talking about hackers?”

Terrence takes a pen from the inside breast pocket of his jacket, a notebook. Terrence the note taker. And the burner. A joke at both the CIA and at Kestrel, Terrence’s incessant note taking and burning of his own notes. He never met a piece of paper he wouldn’t just as soon fill up with Top Secret notions and then burn. For the sake of security.

What have I forgotten? Are you doing this? They will know. They already know. They must know.

“Details?”

Haven is studying his shoes. His feet are no doubt wondering where the hell his boots are.

“It was a SCADA thing. Infrastructure attack. Kinetic. Out of Ukraine. Supposed to start a cascade of the eastern grid. We think. But all they got was blackouts in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Very small in the news cycle. But a two-hundred-megawatt generator blew.
SCADA.
The Iranian computer worm. The one the Iranians were bitching about. Went after their nuclear plant. Stuxnet worm. Looks like that. But different. Fooled a lube oil pump into shutting down. Took seconds for the turbine to grind itself out of commission. Some attributable deaths. Car accident when the traffic lights went black in Scranton. Guy fell down some stairs, broke his neck. Five dead that we know about.”

Terrence clicks the button at the end of his pen. He likes the weight of it. Heft. He bought it in Stockholm a few weeks ago. Waiting for someone in a stationery store. He clicks it three times.

“Ukraine?”

Cross lifts his hand from his desk and sets it back down.

“That is what it looks like.”

Terrence doodles the number five in the margin of his notebook page.

“Who else is working on it?”

Haven grins, scratches the back of his neck, shakes his head.

“
Who.
”

Cross presses a fingertip between his eyes.

“Terrence, really. Everyone. Everyone is working on it.”

Of course they are. Cyber attack. Every security contractor and agency, the military, commercial anti-virus software makers, everyone. They’ll all be trying to find out who launched a cyber attack on America’s power grid and caused the deaths of at least five people.

That’s the point, isn’t it?

Terrence scratches out the doodled number five.

“I was just thinking aloud. Yes, everyone. Kestrel. Hann-Aoki, Triple Canopy, XO, Symantec, NSA, CIA, DynCorp, Aegis, air force, army, Homeland.”

He looks at Cross.

“Does anyone have an inside track?”

Cross’s fingers rattle his keyboard.

“That’s what we’re all jostling for.”

A printer across the room wakes, hums, buzzes in short bursts, smoothly spilling paper into a tray.

Cross points at the printer.

“A contract.”

A last sheet of paper shushes into place, the printer goes silent.

“Freelance. Three months guaranteed, with an employer option to extend for another year.”

Terrence walks to the printer, looks down at the top sheet of the stack.

“A temp contract with the company I founded. Shall I comment on the irony?”

Cross plucks a pen from the holder on his desk.

“History, Terrence. Some lingering bile to get off your mind. Is this the time for that? Now, while our country is under attack?”

Terrence pulls the top sheet of paper from the printer, looks at some of the numbers.

“Well, it has been some time since I had your balls in my hand. No telling when I might get a chance to twist them again. If not now, when?”

Cross aims his pen at Terrence, a dart looking for a target.

“You recruited me, if I recall correctly, because you wanted someone with
a robust appetite for the jugular.
Your other misjudgments aside, you got what you wanted.”

Terrence looks around the office, nods.

“And so did you.”

Cross points at the paper in Terrence’s hand.

“Want to come out of pasture? You have the ticket right there.”

Terrence looks at the contract in his hand. The logo at the head of the page. An American kestrel, the slight sparrow hawk of the falcon family, lean and swift, adaptable, stooping to its prey. A logo he designed while still working at the CIA. An embodiment of his dream for post–cold war intelligence. And, yes, that had been a lean time at Langley, but never swift or adaptable. He’d been right enough, leaving when he did, taking his legendary eye for talent into the private sector. Cut loose from the worst of the bureaucracy, he’d been free to cultivate freelancers who never would have been tolerated inside The Company. Some tremendous successes. And also Cross. A brilliantly conscienceless Beltway climber with a clear-eyed view of national security unclouded by sentiment. The perfect man to mind the details while Terrence theorized, projected, handled esoteric ops, hunted talent, and gradually, willingly, ceded authority to the young man who would sit on the couch in his office, honing his mind against the grinding wheel of Terrence’s relentlessly merciless vision of the future.

Until the several follies of the Montmartre Incident made it possible for Cross to get up off the couch and bring in his evil mastermind desk.

They will know if you lie
.

He looks up.

“Who do you want?”

Cross tips his head, acknowledging, it seems, Terrence’s submission to the circumstances.

“I want Jae.”

Terrence looks into his notebook’s open pages.

“She won’t work for you.”

“No. But she’ll work for
you
.
Why else would you be here, Terrence, if not for that fact?”

Haven stretches his legs, crosses his ankles, folds his arms over his chest.

“
That fact.”

Terrence looks at Haven, meeting, for the first time since coming into the room, his desert-scarred eyes.

Haven blinks, deliberate closure, open.

“Late in the day, old man, for recrimination.”

Terrence does not blink.

“I didn’t say anything.”

Haven raises a hand from the couch, drops it.

“My mistake. I thought there was a general excavation going on. Dig up the old bones and chew them.”

Terrence looks back at Cross.

“Jae won’t work for you. And she won’t work with him. Pick another name.”

Cross shakes his head.

“There are no other names. Let’s not play, you don’t have anyone else in your armory. They all stayed with Kestrel. You have Jae. Which is the point, don’t you see? Terrence. Don’t you see? Must I. Spell it out?”

Terrence doesn’t move.

Cross raises and drops his shoulders.

“I must. You have Jae. She is all you have. How long would you have her if she knew you were the one who assigned Haven to Iraq?”

Terrence is remembering the first annual Conference for Securing 21st-Century Security. Year 2000. His first sight of Cross. Front row of a panel titled National Security and Climate Change, in which Terrence, overtired from an afternoon spent trolling the hospitality suites for contracts to keep Kestrel alive as it incubated, raised his voice over a modulated debate regarding the virtues of switch grass as a fossil fuel replacement:
We all know the final solution, and I’m using those words entirely conscious of what they imply—we all know that the final solution to global fucking climate change is going to be a radical reduction in global fucking population.
The hush that followed, the heads turned away, suggested that Terrence had rather embarrassingly just vomited into his own lap but that everyone would be pleased to ignore the fact if he would quietly leave and go clean himself up in the bathroom. He did, in fact, remove himself to the john, where Cross found him splashing cold water on the back of his neck and asked if he could buy him a drink. Three vodka tonics later Terrence had offered him a job, never so lucky before or since to have such a talent fall into his lap.

Haven had been there. One of the believers who had followed Terrence out of government service. His own opinion of Cross characteristically laconic.
That guy. He’s got something on his mind, old man.