Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

“Flirting?” he interjected. “Margaret, I was thinking of you . I just thought it would be imprudent to be calling Marte Price from home. I’d probably feel the same if you had reason, however sound, to call an old beau, someone you had known—”

“Slept with, you mean, like you did with that tart.”

“That was before I met you — well, I mean, really got to know you after Catherine’s death. For Heaven’s sake, Margaret, get a grip. You’re blowing this way out of proportion. Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.”

“It’s the lie , Douglas. It’s not that you’re phoning your old tart.”

“I’ve asked you before. Please don’t refer to her like that.”

“It’s not that you’re phoning your old tart. It’s this pathetic 7-Eleven cover story. Linda Rushmein tells me that even amongst your enemies in the State Department, whom you’ve raked over the coals for being professional liars, you’re thought to be an honest man. But I caught you in one of your own lies.”

His blood pressure was shooting up, and his grim-jawed George C. Scott in Patton face was set in Defcon 2—the penultimate defense condition before outright war. “Linda Rushmouth should keep her mouth shut. I did not call people in the State Department professional liars. I said that they lied because most diplomats were paid to lie.”

“Oh, don’t be so tendentious. It’s the same thing.” She snatched her raincoat from the hall rack.

“All right, all right,” he began, “it was foolish of me not to tell you I’d be calling her. It’s just that I could see no good reason to tell you and get you all upset. It was wrong of me to do it. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

There was a horn bipping outside.

“That’ll be Linda,” said Margaret. “I have to go.”

“Can you leave a number where I can reach you? I always like to have a—”

She scribbled the number on the yellow Post-it pad on the hall table.

“I love you, you silly woman,” he called after her. “And tell Linda Rushmein to get a muzzle. And don’t let her drive you home if she’s had too many. Those Krauts like their suds!”

Shouldn’t have said that, oaf. He would have bawled out a subordinate for such boorishness. As he looked into the hall mirror, he rebuked himself. Now you’ve done it, Freeman. You might be the hero from way back in the Far East against the Siberian Sixth et al. but here in Monterey you’re facing a domestic court-martial for a damn fool tactical move.

He descended to the basement, opened the Rolodex file in the cabinet near his weights, and looked up Alaska — naval bases. Nothing rang a bell. Perhaps this nonstory CNN had broadcast before they’d been obviously sat upon by the heavies from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, et al. didn’t have anything to do with a naval base at all but was about an air force, army, or marine base, with an unmarked “black box” DARPA facility nearby? The Rolodex listed one DARPA facility attached to Elmendorf, the big air force base adjacent to Anchorage, Alaska, as well as other bases down Canada’s adjoining West Coast. Turning on his computer, he did a Net search for all armed forces bases. But there were no reports, not even a suggestion of a B and E, only assurances that the government was doing a good job with your tax dollars.

He called the White House, asking to speak to National Security Adviser Eleanor Prenty, the only connection he had with the administration as per his contract. He had promised he’d call only on matters of national emergency. He was put on hold. Usually the presidential staff, like those at State, didn’t take kindly to Freeman; he was likely to say what he thought, his words unadorned by the usual equivocation of career flip-floppers and yes-men.

He wouldn’t have made the call if he’d been able to get even a scrap of information about the “nonstory,” but there were no scraps. Still the very idea that terrorists might have penetrated DARPA security had set off his alarm bells. His personal interest in DARPA dated from when he’d sent a memo to the Pentagon, personally championing what otherwise would have been a small item in the press: the development of a hagfish slime-fiber weave vest. The slime’s molecular structure, he knew, was so strong that he suggested it be mixed with the latest Kevlar to make what he believed would be the toughest bulletproof vest possible, given the weight-to-load-bearing ratio of America’s fighting men and women. DARPA had run with the idea, and he was proved right. Since then, countless American and allied lives had been saved by the vests, and unfortunately the lives of American-hating terrorists who, just as Freeman had warned the Pentagon, had gotten their hands on either the chemical formula or the vests themselves so as to reverse-engineer their own. Of course it was only a matter of time before the DARPA vest went commercial anyway, but he’d hoped to give the Pentagon the heads-up to at least try to restrict the distribution of the vests. Had terrorists penetrated DARPA again? And if so, what was at risk? Or was he way off course, and Marte Price right — that it was nothing more than a badly sourced nonstory, a figment of some eager blogger’s imagination?

The White House operator told the general he’d have to leave a message or call back. Eleanor Prenty was in a meeting right now.

To calm down, he showered, opening his eyes every now and then to check that no one else was in the bathroom. As a youngster, he’d seen Hitchcock’s Psycho and after that murder in the shower scene he’d harbored a subliminal fear about showering with his eyes shut, training himself to keep his eyes open even while shampooing. It had saved his life in Iraq when a terrorist, breaching the U.S. security ring around Karbala, had come in firing his AK-47. Freeman, having glimpsed him through an eye-stinging film of soapsuds, had dived, quickly knocking the terrorist over, grabbing him in a headlock and plunging the would-be assassin headfirst into a toilet and drowning him.

Hours later, sitting in the living room La-Z-Boy waiting for Margaret to come home and tired of surfing the Net for any possible DARPA connection, Douglas Freeman was starting to have grave doubts about Aussie’s story. He had killed the TV and turned to read his favorite passages from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War , when the phone’s jangle startled him. It was Aussie Lewis.

“Hi, Aussie, what’s up?”

“We clear?”

“Clear fore and aft,” the general replied, his tone edgy after the fight with Margaret. “What’s up?”

“Uh, nothing much, General, but I’ve got a good bet.” There was a pause. “Does Mommy let you bet?”

“I’ll bet when I want,” said Freeman. It was an old Special Forces team joke that whenever you wanted to rib a guy, you just said, “Will Mommy let you do it?”

“Okay,” said Aussie. “This is straight from the trainer’s mouth, not the horse’s. Very interesting info on the eight horse in the sixth race at Churchill Downs. It’s been raining.”

The general was more alert now; this was how his SpecWar team’s military intelligence often came to him: not from neat official reports but from bits and pieces buried here and there in casual conversation which, because there was no record of it, could be “plausibly denied” by all team members should some snoopy congressman launch a fishing expedition into the financial heart of the General Accounting Office, trolling for black ops budgets.

“It’s been raining,” Aussie repeated.

“Uh-huh.” Horse racing was the team’s venue of choice for issuing an alert to the other team members, the track chosen somewhere in the world where there’d been bad weather in the last twenty-four hours.