C. Graham - The Solomon Effect

Agent Farnsworth drew up, the muscles of his clenched jaw working furiously. He was a lean, hard-muscled man with dark eyes and darkly tanned skin and a sharp-featured face that ended in a pointed goatee.

“Keep your hands where I can see them and hand me the ID,” said Jax, the car door still between them.

“What’s your fucking problem?” said Farnsworth, holding out his badge. “It’s a fucking Homeland Security ID. It’s real.”

Jax gave a soft laugh. “Yeah. I had FBI credentials myself just two weeks ago.”

He glanced through the guy’s credentials, then tossed it back. Farnsworth caught it with one hand. Jax said, “What do you want?”

Farnsworth started to put his ID away, then froze when Jax said quietly, “Don’t.”

The muscles along the man’s jaw bunched again. He said, “This is a Homeland Security operation from here on out. You’ve done your job. Now it’s time for you to back out.”

Jax stared at the idiot. “That’s what this stunt was for? So you could tell me that?”

“You’re the one who decided to play cute by taking off.”

“I’ve got people trying to kill me.”

“We’d have identified ourselves if you’d have just given us a fucking chance.”

“Give the wrong people a chance, and you end up dead.”

The guy was practically grinding his teeth. “It’s not your problem anymore. Now that we know for sure what we’re dealing with, we can take it from here.”

Jax hooked one elbow over the top of the Jetta’s open door. “You know, I hate to tell you this, but I don’t take orders from you guys. I work for a whole different outfit.”

“We’re all on the same team, remember?”

“That’s what I keep hearing. I tell you what: you go back and pull your guys out of that ditch, and just go on with whatever you were doing. When my boss tells me to quit, I’ll quit.”

Farnsworth jabbed the air between them with a pointed finger. “You’ll be hearing from him,” he said, and turned back toward the Mercedes.

Jax said, “By the way-”

Farnsworth swung around again. “What?”

“Where’d you get my phone number?”

Rather than answer, Farnsworth just turned his back and walked away, one finger raised in a backward salute.

Jax called after him, “Next time you want to talk to me, use the damned phone.”

Farnsworth kept walking.

“Well, that was all very adult and highbrow,” said Tobie, sliding back into the car and slamming her door.

Jax shut the driver’s door with a click. “Hey, I didn’t hurt the car, did I?”

She stared across the parking lot. “I don’t get it,” she said as they watched Farnsworth jerk open his door. The Mercedes’ powerful engine roared to life, tires squealing as the agents peeled out of the parking lot and raced back up the road.

Jax turned the key and eased the Jetta into gear. “It’s just a bureaucratic turf war. Homeland Security grew big and fast after 9/11, which meant they hired a lot of arrogant assholes who don’t really know what the fuck they’re doing. And thanks to the Patriot Act, they think they can do anything they want.”

“But what are those guys even doing here? I didn’t know we had Homeland Security people in Germany.”

“Are you kidding? We have Homeland Security people everywhere. Even the NYPD has ‘anti-terrorist’ guys over here. It’s supposed to make everyone feel safer.” Jax thrust the Jetta into gear and hit the gas. “Bankrupt, but confident.”

She was silent as he rolled slowly back through the quiet village. As they hit the outskirts and he began to pick up speed, she said, “Do we back off?”

“Not until Matt tells us to.”

“Do you think he will?”

Jax shifted rapidly into fourth, then fifth, the Jetta’s engine purring through the dark night. “Not a chance in hell.”

They took a room in Bremen, at a small guesthouse beside the Weser River. While October took her first shower in four days, Jax called Matt.

“I take it you passed on my information about the possible atomic nature of U-114’s cargo to Homeland Security?”

“Share and share alike; you know our new motto. But their reaction was interesting.”

“How’s that?”

“I got the feeling it wasn’t exactly a big shock to them.”

Jax was silent for a moment. “Are we the only ones who thought this whole thing was about Nazi gold?”

“Probably. You know what Washington is like. No one ever levels with anyone else.”

“Share and share alike.”

“Right.” Matt was silent a moment before blowing out a harsh breath. “This is serious shit, Jax. If these terrorists really have got their hands on an atom bomb-even an old one…”

“We’ll find them, Matt.”

“You’re running out of time.”

“I know.”

After he got off the phone with Matt, Jax sat at a small, round table overlooking the Weser. The thick bank of clouds building overhead hid the moon and turned the water sliding past into something black and cold. After a moment he got up, rummaged around in his bag, and found a sweater to pull over his head.

Halloween was just over forty-eight hours away. Somehow, knowing exactly what kind of attack they were facing made that date seem to loom even closer. And they still had no idea where the attack was going down, or who was behind it.

Twisting the top off a bottle of springwater, he went to lean against the window frame, his gaze on the river below. Somehow, it all kept coming back to the Russian connection. The Yalena. Kaliningrad. The Russian archives that had kept the German scientists’ records buried for the last sixty years. If only there were some way-some way to…

Reaching for his phone, he put in a call to Colonel McClintock. “Colonel? Jax Alexander here. I want October to do another remote viewing.”

Washington, D.C.: Wednesday 28 October

4:00 P.M. local time

Vice President T. J. Beckham stood behind his wide, well-polished desk and waited for the Director of Central Intelligence to walk up to him.

Beckham liked to think of himself as a down-home kind of guy, easy and approachable. Normally, he went out of his way to make folks feel comfortable, to keep from overawing people with the authority of his position.

Today, he wanted to reinforce it.

“You asked to see me, Mr. Vice President?” said Gordon Chandler.

“Yes, Gordon; I did.” Beckham waited while Chandler settled in the comfortable leather club chair on the far side of the desk, then he rubbed his nose with his knuckles and eased out a perturbed sigh. “I’ve just received a somewhat disturbing report, Gordon.”

Chandler’s eyebrows rose in a parody of innocent inquiry. “Sir?”

“About U-114. It seems that submarine wasn’t carrying gold, after all. Word is, it had a real live atomic bomb on it. And you knew about it.”

Chandler blinked, but kept silent.

Beckham flattened his palms on the surface of the desk and leaned into them. “Why wasn’t I told?”

Chandler cleared his throat. “Up until now, it was just a theory, and not one we tended to give much credence to.”

“A theory. Where exactly did this theory come from?”

“Some of the files we seized from Germany at the end of the war-combined with reports from certain captured scientists-suggested that Germany was actually farther along in their atomic program than is generally believed.”

Beckham studied the other man’s smooth, handsome face. “You obviously had more than that. Something that led you to focus on U-114.”

Chandler shrugged. “We knew the Nazis had secretly commissioned one of their XI-Bs. It seemed reasonable to assume they were using it for something important. And the timing was right-March of 1945.”