Jim DeFelice - Cyclops One

“They didn’t have to fake the DNA. There was no flesh in that partial boot. The hair on the flight suit — that’s real. Probably a bunch of those spread around. Plane’s real too. But the laser’s not there, not the inside works.”

“You know that for a fact?” asked Howe.

“Not yet. There’s going to be traces, just enough to convince us. Like the hair on the flight suit. Something else is going on. I’ll bet there was another plane.”

Howe’s frustration and anger burst past the last restraints. He spun, ready to slug Fisher.

The agent stopped speaking, but only for a second. “Ever hear of Jolice Missile Systems?”

Howe looked down at his fingers, curled into a fist on the bar. His hand was bright red.

“What about Jolice?”

“I have a theory. You want to hear it before you hit me, or after?”

In outline, the theory was simple: The laser plane had to be stolen to help Jolice do well in the augmented-ABM tests. Jolice’s performance there had been nothing short of amazing, especially considering that the company had never built an antimissile system before. There were all sorts of connections between the people who ran Jolice and Cyclops, Bonham being the focal point. One of the companies in the web of connections had purchased property in Canada six months before: an old hunter’s lodge that just happened to include a lake north of the search area.

But once the FBI agent began talking about the details, things got considerably murkier. Anything close to Cyclops One would have been detected if it had been in the sky during either the ABM tests or the action over Pakistan.

“Unless,” said Fisher, “it was something like your Velociraptor.”

Howe laughed so loudly the bartender looked over. Fisher held up his glass for a refill.

Howe shook his head. “You don’t know jack about Cyclops. The laser’s as big as the plane.”

“Can’t shrink it?”

“Not much.”

“What about another stealth plane? A B-2.”

“Not going to fit in a B-2.”

“No?” Fisher took out a fresh pack of cigarettes and pounded it into his palm. “Want one?”

“No.”

“You’re telling me it won’t fit no way, no how?”

“Well, if you made about a million changes to it and the plane.”

Fisher took a long drag on the cigarette. “A million changes? What about a B-1?”

“Still too short.”

“Not by that much. In fact, Firenze says the manufacturer proposed a scaled-down version for a stealth aircraft that was only a few feet longer than a B-1.”

Fisher put up his finger to quiet him as the bartender approached.

“There’s no way,” said Howe when she was gone. “You’re telling me they stole a B-1?”

“If they could steal Cyclops One, which obviously they did, they could steal anything.” Fisher sipped at the beer. “But I don’t know. All the B-1s are accounted for.”

“There goes your theory.”

“No. There goes the easy solution, that’s all.”

“Why would Megan York be involved? She wouldn’t be after the money.”

“You sure?”

“She wouldn’t be.” Howe took a sip of his beer. It tasted stale and bitter in his mouth.

“What do you know about her uncle?” asked Fisher.

“Which uncle?”

“The guy who dropped bombs on Tokyo. The congressman’s father.”

Howe pushed back from the bar and turned toward Fisher, looking at him as if for the first time. “Let’s get some coffee,” he told him.

They found a diner not too far away. Fisher noted that it was too upscale to call itself a diner — the walls in the foyer were made of shiny vinyl and looked only moderately tacky — but was somewhat mollified by the coffee, which he said tasted as if it had been made in a garbage can four days before and boiled ever since.

In other words, perfect.

They also allowed smoking.

“Megan was involved in Cyclops and the laser program because she truly wanted to end war,” Howe said. “I know it sounds strange, but I’m positive; she could have done anything she wanted. She didn’t have to work — she was educated up the yin-yang — but she chose to do this because she believed it. Like a religion.”

“You think a laser weapon’s going to end war?”

“As part of a global defense system, sure.” Howe stared into Fisher’s face; he didn’t react. “Look what we did in India.”

Fisher still said nothing.

“I don’t know. It can change things, strategies, make some weapons obsolete. Look, I’m not a peace freak, okay? I just think it’ll change things. It already has. A lot of people owe their lives to it.”

“What about the new ABM system?” asked Fisher. “What’s the deal there?”

“Same thing. The whole system works together. You need a lot of interlocking layers. The augmented ABM system allows us to deal with things we don’t have advance warning on. We could strike cruise missiles over the sea: You see, the standard ABM system, the one Congress already approved, can’t hit cruise missiles. This is a big improvement.” He sipped the coffee. “You don’t think it will work, do you?”

“I think most of the things that happen in the world happen because of one of two things,” said Fisher, pulling on his cigarette. “Greed and lust. Plenty of greed involved here, if the project goes through.”

“Megan wasn’t like that.”

Fisher shrugged. “She didn’t have to be.” He picked up his coffee cup, debating whether to ask for another cup. When you found sewage swill like this, you really wanted to load up. But they were running a little late.

“What motivates Bonham?” he asked the pilot.

Howe shrugged. “I don’t know. He buys into it, I guess. We don’t really discuss philosophy.”

“Not money?”

“He wants to be defense secretary someday,” said Howe.

“What do you think about talking to him?”

“When? Now? It’s after eleven.”

“Yeah. If we’re lucky we can catch him in his jammies.”

Bonham turned on the TV and flipped over to ESPN as he pulled off his jacket and tie. The swirl of parties and receptions over the past forty-eight hours — the whole hail-fellow-well-met routine — was an intoxicating diversion, but it was only that. Segrest and a number of the others were determined to use the weapon for the second stage of augmented-ABM tests, set to begin in a few days. They were trying to isolate him, maneuvering behind his back.

He’d sent Megan York a long, coded E-mail telling her to carry through with the dismantling of the weapon immediately. Her one-word acknowledgment had been uncharacteristically short. There was no way, however, to safely contact her or the others on the island.

ESPN cut to a commercial; he’d have to wait for the scores.

Bonham slipped off his shoes. His paranoia was starting to get the better of him. Things had gone incredibly well, and his idea to set up the Cyclops One crash in India had worked out even better than he had hoped. The satellites had been able to definitively identify the strike on the Indian missiles as a laser discharge, and the investigators would spend months if not years trying to somehow connect the Pakistanis to the theft. In the meantime NADT was getting all the credit for Cyclops Two’s performance, and despite the tarnish of the theft Bonham’s stock was rising proportionately.

He would have preferred burying the plane in the lake by remote control as planned. But this was the next best thing. The loss of the Velociraptor and the delays in the ABM tests had complicated everything.

Segrest was being greedy. They had achieved so much — why did some people always want even more?