The Leviathan Effect (23 page)

“Oh, God,
that
.” She squinted at him, then held up her drink and studied it. “A dreadful project. I’m amazed I survived it.”

“What was it, exactly?”

“Data,” she said. “That’s all. Data collection. Absolutely horrendous amounts of data.”

“Data about what?” He smiled unassumingly, poking at his food.

“
Every
thing. You name it.” She stirred the ice in her glass with her pinkie finger. “That’s a big part of what NOAA does, you know. They collect data and they store data. Sea levels. Sea surface temperatures. Wind currents. Air temperatures.
Chlorophyll
concentrations in sea water, for heaven’s sake. Ad infinitum.”

“Storm data?”

“All sorts of data, dear. Absolutely horrendous amounts of it.” She sipped her drink and seemed to become more thoughtful. “What happens is, NOAA’s supercomputers run climate-forecasting models twenty-four/seven. Sixty or seventy terabytes of data a day we used to process. God knows what it is now. Marvelous machines, though. And of course, the computing capacity keeps getting stronger …”

“So what was the purpose behind Cloudcover?” he said. “Why did it exist? I seem to recall you got in some sort of trouble because of it?”

“Oh, God, yes.” She laughed. “It was pure madness, really. I still don’t know what the fuss was about. Actually, I think it started because of that Chinese thing.”

“What Chinese thing?”

“Project 86. That’s what they called it, anyway. NSA supposedly intercepted signals intelligence about it and launched Cloudcover in response.”

“What was Project 86?”

“Computer simulations of weather patterns. ‘Project 86’ just referred to China’s country calling code. Not very clever, as project names go, was it? Anyway, the feeling was that maybe they had an advantage there, and so we decided we needed to catch up.”

“There was a researcher involved in Cloudcover named Deborah Piper,” he said. “Did you know her?”

“Of course, I knew her,” she said. “I mean, not well. I liked her. She
was a very bright woman. Later, of course, she became something of a thorn in their side. For a while, she used to call me late at night and ramble on about this and that. And people think
I’m
kooky. Anyway.”

Mallory made a mental note to ask her more later about Deborah Piper. For whatever reason, she wasn’t comfortable talking about her. “Tell me about Cloudcover, then,” he said. “What was it? When did it start?”

“Cloudcover? It began in, oh, I don’t know, 1999, I guess. As I say, dear, there were rumors about China that lit a small fire here in Washington. Although, frankly, I was never convinced that Project 86 was real.”

“What do you mean?”

She frowned into her vodka for a moment. “It’s not exactly a secret that sometimes they will manufacture something to help justify spending millions of dollars for a new project.”

“Is that what happened?”

“Well, I could never prove it, but, I mean, it seemed fairly obvious to me.”

“Who was driving it?”

“It was a joint Defense Department–intelligence project. But a lot of it was actually carried out by the private sector. A lot of overlap.”

“Did it ever involve the NGA—the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—or the NIMA—the National Imagery and Mapping Agency—by any chance?”

Hanratty laughed explosively. Mallory noticed three heads turn to look, almost simultaneously.

“What,” he said, ducking down slightly.

“You might as well ask me about the National Photographic Interpretation Center, too.”

“I could,” he said. “Why? Why is that funny?”

“It’s funny because they’re all the same agency.”

“Ah.”

She went to her drink, which was just ice now. “Yes, it was called the NPIC when Eisenhower started it in 1961. It was absorbed by the National Imagery and Mapping Agency sometime in the mid-nineties and was renamed NGA, I don’t know, seven or eight years ago.”

So two of the people had worked for the same agency
.

“And it’s based, where, in Bethesda?”

“It was, yes. Now in Virginia. With facilities in St. Louis, I believe.”

“Tell me what you did. What
was
Cloudcover, exactly?”

“Oh, heavens.” She waved for the waiter first. Catching his eye, she held up her glass. “We did computer simulations of weather patterns, as I said. Storms. And then with the data, we built models on these supercomputers. This was very precise data, about all aspects of the storm.”

“What did the models do?”

“They’re what are called dynamical models and dynamical-statistical models. You take all the data you have about previous storms, and factor in the physics of the atmosphere. Then you vary one element of the storm. Say you introduce a low pressure system as the storm is beginning to form, for example. Okay? Or you make a slight variation in wind speed or air pressure within the eye of a hurricane. If you adjust one factor, particularly early in the storm’s evolution, all the other variables are affected.”

“For example.”

“Okay, for example: we changed air pressure inside the eye of Hurricane Andrew and as a result it veered to sea and never made landfall in Florida.”

“These were computer simulations.”

“That’s right.”

“So Cloudcover was a computer simulation project.”

She assented by lowering her head. Mallory sensed, as he often had in the past, that Hanratty possessed remarkable knowledge in her head, although not all of it had been parsed into useful portions.

“That’s all?” he said.

“What else did you want it to be, dear?”

“I don’t know. And so what happened to it? What became of Cloudcover?”

“Well, 9/11 happened. After that, it was scaled back. People didn’t care so much about what China was doing.”

The waiter brought her a third vodka and tonic. She carefully squeezed juice from the slice of lime, then took a generous sip. “Mmm,” she said. “That’s good.”

“Could it have changed in some way after that? Mutated into something else?”

“Lots of things could have happened, dear. Lord knows, they didn’t share everything with me.”

“Because, the thing is, Dr. Piper continued to work for the government on another project. Something called FAST.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that. I mean, I could probably make a call or two and find out.”

“Could you?”

“Is it important?”

He nodded.

“Then I guess I could.”

“Good.” Mallory looked across the restaurant and made eye contact with the waiter. He held up his beer bottle, ordering a second. She still had most of her third vodka and tonic to go and he had a feeling the conversation would soon turn to her coming trip to Greece.

The assassin worked in darkness, wearing black clothing and deck shoes so that he blended with the shadows of the suburban neighborhood. The air was wet and breezy, carrying the stray scents of suppers cooking. He hopped the chain-link fence in a single scissoring motion and came at the house from the rear, darting among the shadows cast by elm and oak trees.

Entry would be a simple, five-step maneuver: pulling off the window screen, punching a hole in the lower pane of the top window, reaching in and unlatching the window, lifting up the lower window and then climbing in the residence.

The prospective victim did not imagine that this sort of an attack was even possible. He lived alone and his home had no alarms; sometimes, he left his car doors unlocked and his house windows unlatched. He was a brilliant man but not a particularly practical or prudent one. All of which made the assassin’s task easier.

This was another pre-emptive mission, the objective to eliminate a threat and also to remove potential evidence. Thinking momentarily about what had happened with the last assignment filled the assassin with dark emotions; for the first time, he had been outmaneuvered. He wanted badly to go after Jon Mallory again, to hunt him down. But he had to wait on that.

He felt his way through the darkness of a hallway and into the living room, where he clicked on a standing lamp. He let his eyes adjust. Then moved into the study and drew the blinds. Clicked on the desk lamp. It took him less than two minutes to find the flash drives in a desk drawer. He pulled out the other drawers and then dumped the files from his file cabinet. He plugged a reader into a port of the man’s computer, first copying and then erasing all of the files from his hard drive and then eliminating the recovery wall.

After that, he turned off the lights. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

C
HARLES
M
ALLORY LAY ON
the motel bed thinking, occasionally sipping from a bottle of beer, trying to construct bridges between the known and unknown. He thought of several follow-up questions he wanted to ask Patricia Hanratty but decided to wait for her to call him first.

His cell rang at 9:03. Chaplin.

“I promised I’d get back to you on Mr. Zorn,” he said.

“Yes. You did.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t much.”

“Okay.” Mallory hadn’t thought there would be.

“Victor Zorn has been making deals on behalf of what’s now called the Weathervane Group for at least a year and a half, it looks like. Many business interests before that, some of which were absorbed into the consortium. A lot of dealing, all fairly legit. He’s a slick character, apparently. A salesman of the highest degree.”

“Okay.”

“What’s unusual, though, is that everything dries up on him nine years ago. Before that, it’s just on paper. There are no confirmable records. It appears to be a carefully constructed legend.”

An invented past
.

“Also,” Chaplin said, “I found a motor vehicle record showing he was Canadian by birth, not American. That has since been covered up, apparently.”

“The old Soviet gambit?”

“Maybe.” Traditionally, it was easier to get counterfeit documentation in Canada than in the United States and easier to
move undercover there. Until 2008, anyone could cross the Canadian border simply by making an oral declaration of citizenship. “There are some sizeable gaps in the bio,” Chaplin continued. “He had ties in the early 2000s to a Russian energy firm. I can’t confirm this yet but there’s a Russian businessman named Viktor Zaystev. That may be who he really is. If so, he worked for Volkov in the late 1990s.”

“Would US intelligence not know something like that?”

“They should. But they’d have to know what to look for. He’s been careful to invent a past and keep quiet.”

“What about Volkov?”

“Harder. Everything well covered. He is listed on several boards but no real information about his activities ever seems to come up. His businesses are mostly owned by shell companies. Also, I’ve found some interesting information going back years about a connection with someone named Dmitry Petrenko.”

“Who is he?”

“He runs a security consulting firm based in Moscow. But going back I’ve found organized crime ties dating to the mid-1990s. At one point, he was accused of running a passport forgery operation. Charges didn’t stick.”

“Okay.”

“That’s all I’ve got right now. I’ll call you back when I know more.”

Mallory thanked him. He lay back on the sofa and turned up the sound on the television. Chris Matthews was on MSNBC, talking about the storm:

T
HE ASSASSIN WATCHED
the headlights sweep through the front windows, lighting up the walls of the living room, gleaming off the glass vases and picture frames. He stood in the hallway several feet from the door, waiting. Rehearsing how this had to go.

He listened as the key went in the lock and twisted, a click of metal. Heard the doorknob turn, the hinges squeak, and pictured the man’s hand going to the light switch.

As soon as the light came on and he closed the door, the assassin stepped forward. The victim made a startled gasp.

The next sound was the thud of his hand colliding with the right side of the man’s face. Then his body falling in the hallway. And the muffled sound of the .22-caliber handgun, firing an inch from the man’s ear.

The assassin crouched down and emptied the man’s pockets. Then extracted the DNA evidence from his own jacket pocket and carefully placed it on the man’s shirt and fingers. Fibers, hair and saliva samples.

He waited a moment, then, listening, and finally let himself out the back door. Walked through the drizzle in the night shadows along the edge of the yard, climbing back over the fence, crossing the yard of another house. Strode toward the sidewalk.

But then something happened that shouldn’t have happened.

“Hey!”

The assassin turned. Someone shouting at him as he came across the yard. He froze. A man standing in the grass by the sidewalk with a dog on a leash. A sudden, panicked shout. Someone seeing something wrong, not knowing what to do about it.

The assassin assessed his options. Both of them. He walked toward the man slowly, expecting that he might turn and run. But he didn’t. Instead, he stood motionless. The assassin became a soldier again. Recognizing the threat, confronting the enemy.

He scanned the street to see if anyone else was out. When he was nine feet away from his target, the assassin lifted his .22 and shot the man in the face. Then he shot the man’s dog in the head. The assassin lowered the gun and surveyed the street once more. Then he ran through the drizzle across another residential yard. Four blocks away, he tucked the gun under his seat and began the drive back to Washington.

C
ATHERINE
B
LAINE NEEDED
to unwind. She poured a bourbon over ice and sat before the computer monitor in her cluttered study. She tried to call Kevin, but his phone went to voice mail again. She left him a message. The drink felt good and she began to work, running searches on each of the people they would be meeting with the next
afternoon. There would be an intelligence briefing in the morning, but she wanted to know as much as she could before she entered the room.