The Descent From Truth (22 page)

They drove without lights until they rounded a curve. When Alex thought it safe to use the headlamps, he warned Chuck not to let the speedometer drop below eighty on the straightaway. They had to get off Variant Corporation turf before the men in the mobile home called ahead for a roadblock.

On a deserted stretch of back road near Grand Junction, Alex switched his muddy coveralls for the clothes of the man nearest his size and drove away, leaving them stranded. He drove to Denver, abandoned the Escalade in the airport parking lot, and caught a shuttle to downtown.

His father met him there in a rental car.

He’s a much better parent than I am a son, Alex thought as they headed west on Interstate 70. The interstate rose rapidly into the Rocky Mountains and afforded a panoramic view of the city, which, with day melding into evening, had become a sea of light. Relaxing on the seat by his father’s side and savoring their renewed intimacy, Alex thanked him again for his help and summarized events since their last meeting.

“I understand how disappointed you must be,” his father said. “If this guy Faust were still in the country and had Freddy’s mother with him, the ski lodge or airport would be the most logical places. What will you do now?”

“My best guess is that they’re back in Lima. That’s my next stop. I figured you’d have Freddy with you.”

“I’ve got someone watching him. And while you were being a real-life Rambo, I’ve done research. Your Maximillian Koenig has become a player in the murky world of high-stakes geopolitics.”

“Yeah? How’s that?” Alex listened intently, hoping some snippet of information would lead him to Faust.

“Several executives in his holding company, Variant Corporation, have formed an investment consortium. No way to prove it, but the State Department suspects they’re fronting for Koenig.” The colonel fell silent while he maneuvered through a tangle of trailer trucks that were using both lanes to grind their way up a steep grade. “The consortium recently made a bid for controlling interest in a mining complex in northern Peru that our government wouldn’t like it to have.”

“Rare earth—I heard about that on the news. But we’re on good terms with the Peruvian government. Can’t they nix the transaction?”

“They could, but those rebels you—” an exit sign loomed in the headlights’ glare. “Our turn-off,” the colonel said. He took the exit and concentrated on negotiating a narrow, winding, and icy road. “Shining Path, that Marxist outfit your Special Forces unit helped the Peruvian Army hunt, is a still active in the provinces where the minerals are located. Some Peruvian legislators are hedging their bets, waiting to see who wins.”

The rental car rounded a sharp turn and approached an Alpine-style condominium nestled against a mountain. The colonel parked in front and cut the ignition, and Alex studied the building. “Classy digs for a guy living on military retirement pay.”

“It belongs to a Defense Department retiree.” The colonel slid out of the car and into the cold mountain air. “The guy married well. They’re wintering in Bermuda.”

The colonel rang the doorbell, and a smiling, slender, brown-haired woman who looked to be in her early forties opened the door. Alex’s father introduced her as Lois Haynes. She showed Alex a bedroom where Frederick was sleeping. Then she led him to a kitchen-dining room and invited him to sit at a table across a narrow counter from the food preparation area, where his father was ladling coffee beans into a combination grinder and coffee maker. They made small talk until a final gurgle and a hiss signaled the machine had completed its task.

“Alex,” Lois asked as she set out cups, “do you like your coffee strong and black, the way your father drinks it?”

“Cream when I can get it. Milk’s okay if that’s what you have.”

She set a carton of half-and-half before him and served his father a cup of unadulterated coffee. Her role in the colonel’s life became clear when he grasped her hand and kissed it by way of thanks.

She seems good for him, Alex thought, watching them. I’m glad he has someone. He opened the aluminum case and turned it to face his father. “I’m not sure what I have here, but they wanted it badly.”

The colonel whistled softly when Alex mentioned the price the buyers were prepared to pay. “Memory chips.” He pulled one from the case and held it under a fluorescent light above the kitchen counter, inspecting it from every angle.

Lois rested an elbow on the counter’s tan granite surface. “It’s got something inscribed on it,” she said, pointing at the chip. “Too small to read.”

“Need better light.” The colonel disappeared into another room and returned with a high-intensity reading lamp and a letter opener with a small magnifying glass on its end. He set the lamp on the counter and plugged it in. Holding the chip under its beam, he peered through the magnifying glass. “Numbers. Parts nomenclature, probably.” He checked several more cubes, grunting each time. “Not a nomenclature. Every number’s different—sequential.”

“Serial numbers,” Alex said.

His father nodded, frowning. “That means they’re controlled. Each one has to be accounted for.”

Lois had stepped away from the counter and busied herself in the kitchen. As she walked back to the men, a microwave oven above the range emitted a low hum. “Accounted for by whom?” she asked.

“Government, most likely.” The colonel sipped his coffee. “In today’s environment, electronics are the edge in war the same as they are in business. Any petty dictator with a few oil wells can buy all the tanks and planes he wants. What makes the difference when our boys go into action is the sophistication of computerized systems.”

Alex lofted the shiny cube with which he had been toying. “You figure these are the brains for a high-tech weapon?”

“Possibly. Let’s find out.”

“How?”

“With technology of our own.” The colonel handed Lois one of the cubes. “Sweetheart, would you mind taking some photos of this? Close-ups, from various angles?” She disappeared into another room with the miniature cube. The microwave oven hummed in the background, and the aroma of cinnamon and fresh-baked bread filled the kitchen. It reminded Alex that he hadn’t eaten for a long while. The oven dinged, and the colonel pulled out cinnamon buns. He set them on the counter. “Lois makes these in a kind of space-age bread machine and freezes ’em. They’re great.”

They were.

“Lois is a professional photographer,” the colonel said as they ate. “She’ll magnify that sucker ’til you can see its molecules dancing.”

“You think the pictures will reveal something we missed?”

“Not to us. I’ve got a friend in Virginia that might be able to tell us something.”

“One of your fellow spooks?”

“Defense technology analyst. I’ll digitize the images and e-mail them with a partial list of the serial numbers. By the time we get a few hours of sleep, he ought to have something for us.”

* * *

Alex spent a mostly sleepless night. He was pleased that his father had someone to care for, but seeing them together, so comfortable and considerate with each other, made him miss Pia even more and amplified his worry about what was happening to her. He managed to drift off shortly before dawn, and it seemed only minutes later that his father shook him awake. “Sorry to disturb your beauty rest. My Pentagon contact says this won’t wait.”

In the study, his father switched the telephone to speaker mode. “Lloyd, you still holding?”

“I’m here.”

“My boy’s awake. What has he found?”

“You have your scrambler?”

“Yeah. We need to go secure?”

“It is advisable.”

It took the colonel several minutes to route the telephone jack through a small black box and re-establish contact. Lois offered coffee, and Alex sipped gratefully while his father fumbled with the electronics.

“You’re loud and clear,” his father said when the voice again materialized through the speaker. It sounded tinny, mechanical. “We’re secure on this end. What’d my boy stumble into?”

“Here’s what I can tell you without violating security. The chips are part of an order manufactured to Pentagon specs. Their disappearance has set off a worldwide intelligence alert. While you awakened your son and rigged your scrambler, your position was being triangulated. You’re going to have visitors in a matter of minutes.”

“Visitors?” Alex’s father made no attempt to mask his irritation. “Jesus H. Christ. If you can’t trust your friends, what’s the world coming to?”

“This goes way beyond friendship, Matthew. What you have there could upset the balance of power in any number of third-world hot spots.”

Alex had heard more than enough. He snapped shut the aluminum case and lifted it from the counter.

His father clicked off the speaker and put a hand over the telephone’s mouthpiece. “Alex, what are you doing?”

“I’m not in the Army anymore, Colonel. I don’t have to play by their rules.”

Colonel Bryson removed his hand from the telephone mouthpiece. “Lloyd, I’ll get back to you.” He eased the instrument onto its hook and turned to Alex. “Son, you don’t want to be part of a conspiracy to export controlled technology.”

“The government wants its chips back, Freddy wants his mama. I’ll be more than happy to work a deal.”

“Where are you going?”

“To stash these.” Alex lifted the case off the counter. “The government and I don’t have a real good working relationship. I’ll feel better if they don’t hold all the cards.”

His father tossed his car keys onto the counter.

“Appreciate your help, Colonel. When the Feds get here, tell ’em to stay put. I’ll be back shortly.”

Chapter 28

An hour after Alex left his father’s condominium with the aluminum case, he returned without it and noted two nondescript, late-model, four-door sedans with U.S. Government license plates parked out front. Inside the condo, four men—FBI agents, he assumed—sat at the dining table with his father.

Lois, unloading the dishwasher, spotted Alex as he walked in through a pantry-sized mudroom that led directly into the kitchen. She stepped into the mudroom doorway as if to shield him from the others’ view and started to say something, but she compressed her lips when his father said, “There’s my son.” She patted Alex’s arm and stepped back to the dishwasher.

Everybody stood as Alex approached. One of the agents frisked him while another read him his rights.

He cooperated until an agent brandished handcuffs. “No way,” he said, and turned so the kitchen counter protected his back. Dropping into a semi-crouch, he shifted his stance for better balance.

An explosive sound from behind the counter, then a series of secondary clatters, snapped everyone’s attention to Lois, who stood there. The agents dipped their hands under their jackets. Lois disappeared behind the counter.

“All right.” Alex’s father raised his hands as if giving a benediction. “Everybody stay cool.”

“It’s just Freddy,” Lois said from her crouching position behind the counter. Her laugh sounded nervous. Her head popped into view, then disappeared again. She stood with the youngster in her arms. “He’s found the pots and pans.”

Frederick, wearing pajamas and with his hair sleep-tousled, held a small cooking pot. He waved it furiously, as if trying to recreate the pandemonium. “Ax,” he shouted. Grinning at Alex, he rattled off a string of unintelligible words.

Alex’s father pointed toward the handcuffs the agent still held. “Before you do that, let’s get a reading from Washington.”

The other agents looked to the one who had done most of their talking. He seemed dubious.

“Nobody’s going anywhere.” The colonel’s voice oozed reassurance. “A phone call can’t hurt, can it?”

The call flowered into a conference hookup with Colonel Bryson’s Pentagon contact and an FBI official in Washington. The colonel seemed to be on a first-name basis with people at both places—a legacy of his years in Army Intelligence, Alex figured. Or maybe it was a function of what he’d been doing since retirement.

“Even if you recover the items my boy has,” the colonel said, using the speakerphone so everyone could follow the conversation, “that’s only half the missing lot. He can lead you to the rest.” When a telephone voice questioned how that might be done, the colonel raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Alex.

“The thieves are amateurs,” he said. “One of them used his own car. I can tell you where to find the vehicle. I have their driver’s licenses, their home addresses.”

The colonel’s even-tempered intercession gained them a face-to-face audience with the FBI agents’ supervisor. The meeting would be in the FBI’s Denver office the following day. Alex agreed to give a deposition explaining how he came into possession of the chips and to turn over the driver’s licenses he had taken from the sellers. His refusal to immediately surrender the chips gained him an overnight stay in a Denver lockup.

* * *

Two people awaited Alex and his father when an escort ushered them into the FBI’s Denver Office the next morning: a business-suited agent midway between their ages and an Army intelligence officer who had flown in from Washington on an Air Force jet. Alex soon realized that his father and the intelligence officer, a woman about ten years younger, were friends. Their greeting, while formally correct, exuded warmth. After everyone else had settled onto couches with a coffee table between, the FBI agent sat on a corner of his desk.

“What you’ve stumbled over, Alex,” the intelligence officer said, “is guidance circuitry. Those little bits of silicon are hard-wired programming for shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons.”

The FBI agent studied one of Lois’s photo enlargements. Lois had juxtaposed the chip with a postage stamp as a guide to relative dimensions. “That doesn’t seem possible,” the agent said. “They’re smaller than the stamp. Not that much thicker.”

“They’re the brain,” the intelligence officer said. “The muscle is a twenty-pound missile launched from a tube light enough to be carried cross-country on an infantryman’s back. A three-man team packing the tube and ammo can protect a whole infantry company from helicopter gunships.”

“They’re heat-seekers?” This came from Alex’s father.

“Basically.”

“That technology’s as old as the Sidewinder,” Alex said. “Dates from Vietnam.”

“But it’s evolved.” The intelligence officer centered her attention on Alex. “You know about the surface-to-air missiles from that era? A pilot could dodge them with violent maneuvers and could fool them with decoys.” She tapped one of the magnified photographs. “This little fellow’s too smart for that.”

“Magnesium flares,” Alex said, remembering the tactics he’d studied in the Army. “A gunship launches them as a countermeasure. The burning magnesium is hotter than the ship’s exhaust, so the heat-seeker takes out a flare instead.”

“That’s where the chip comes in.” The intelligence officer pointed to the photo. “It knows the heat-generating characteristics of every helicopter model. The operator just clicks on the craft’s nomenclature—a handbook gives the silhouettes of most makes—and the chip refuses to be lured away by anything appreciably hotter or cooler.”

“What if the grunt doesn’t have a handbook? Maybe he doesn’t have time to scope-out the attacking gunship.”

“Then it’s point-and-fire. The default setting is broad-spectrum. It hunts anything within the temperature range of all the helicopters included in its program. The program also matches heat with the metallic content of a helicopter’s engine and fuselage. Even if a decoy approximates the craft’s exhaust temperature, the missile will ignore it in favor of an alternate heat source closer to the metallic bulk.”

“Impressive.” Too antsy to remain still, Alex stood and picked up one of the photos. From his father’s briefing on their way from Denver, he was pretty sure he already knew the answer to his next question. “Why would a bunch of backcountry rebels need something like this?”

“The Peruvian Army bought a slew of Cobra gunships a few years back, and they’ve learned to use them. If Shining Path can’t find a way to counter the Cobras, they’ll be stuck with their old hit-and-run, pinprick tactics.”

“That brings us to the guidance chips?”

“Exactly. And here’s where the wicket gets sticky. Are you familiar with rare-earth minerals?”

“In a general way. Hard to find, essential for modern technology.”

The intelligence agent nodded. “China is the major source for some of them. If they cut off exports, it would make an oil embargo look like child’s play.”

“I know Peru is a promising alternative, and I understand that the minerals are in rebel-infested territory. Since Shining Path and China are buddies, we’d be in deep shit if they gain control.”

“Do you also know that a mining consortium friendly to the Chinese has made an offer for the rare earth site?”

Alex nodded and glanced at his father, thankful for yesterday’s tutorial. “But they need government approval.”

“So far, the government has said no. But their coalition has a razor-edge majority in the legislature. If Shining Path can show enough muscle to pose a major threat, even without a big victory it might be able to sway the coalition’s minority partner. That would be a game-changer.”

“What’s to keep American interests from making a counter-offer for the mineral rights, outbidding the Chinese?”

This brought a pained smile to the intelligence officer’s face. “The Chinese firm is government owned, and China’s foreign currency reserves are more than twenty times as large as ours. Their dollar reserves—essentially, money we’ve borrowed from them—are worth about twenty percent of everything America produced last year.”

A prolonged silence, broken finally by Alex’s father. “If my boy gives you the chips, what’s to keep Koenig, or Faust, or whoever, from starting over? Won’t they just cut a deal with another renegade manufacturer?”

The intelligence officer sighed. “We order background checks on all defense contractors. Not a lot more we can do.”

Alex tossed the photograph onto the coffee table. “If we can’t control the sellers, why not take out the prospective buyers?”

“Times have changed.” The intelligence officer shook her head. “We don’t do assassinations anymore.”

“You could let Shining Path do it for you.”

“You’ve got an idea?” Alex’s father asked.

Alex pointed to the photo. “I imagine making the chips is a difficult process? Close tolerances and all that?”

“That’s why they cost so much,” the intelligence officer said.

“Lots of rejects? Faulty chips that have to be melted down, or whatever they do with them?”

Understanding registered in Colonel Bryson’s eyes. “It might work,” he said. “By god, it will work!”

“What?” The FBI agent, still sitting on the edge of his desk, was clearly floundering. “What do you have in mind?”

“A switch,” Alex said. “I’ll trade you the chips for an equal number of flawed ones. They’ll need to be perfect on the outside but with bungled circuitry. I’ll offer those in exchange for Pia’s freedom. Let’s see how Shining Path reacts to receiving defective goods.”

The intelligence officer pursed her lips for several seconds. “Good idea. The rebels have got to be suspicious, given Koenig’s long association with the Peruvian government.”

“It will definitely work,” the colonel said. “They’ll assume he’s double-crossed them.”

“Probably,” the intelligence officer said. “But this exchange—what if the bad guys decide to keep both the chips and the woman?”

Silence in the room for a long moment. Then Alex shrugged. “They can do that only if they take me out first.”