Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel Read online

  “And then Dulles,” Taylor said. To Quinlan’s puzzled look, Taylor added, “I’m booked to Geneva. May as well save cab fare.”

  Quinlan shrugged, added the Dulles drop-off and laughed. “Saving the world and saving cab fare,” he said, patting Taylor on the back.

  * * *

  As soon as Carlton reached his office he called the President and said, “We need to talk immediately.”

  “Ray, too?” the President asked.

  “No, sir, if you don’t mind.”

  “Okay. Come on in.”

  Carlton walked into the Oval Office a moment later. The President pointed to the cushioned wooden chair next to the President’s desk.

  “How did it go?” he asked.

  “Taylor did pretty well, Mr. President. He’s good at translating science into regular words. But he has a rather innocent view of today’s world. It’ll be damn hard to keep this a secret.”

  “We—Lebed, Zhang Xing, and I—felt we have to contain this as long as we could,” Oxley said. “We knew we had to get the scientists into the picture, and Ben Taylor looked like the ideal guy. Lebed and Zhang Xing also agreed that each of us could decide on when to tell our most trusted advisers. We also agreed—this was at the Istanbul meeting—that, when it was time, we would all three make a tripartite announcement under UN auspices.”

  “Yes, the Istanbul meeting,” Carlton said. “And the secret session went well?”

  “Yes,” the President replied. “Lebed was playing his usual imitation of a responsible statesman. As for China, it turned out they were ahead of us—just like they are with hacking. Zhang Xing has had some scientists looking at asteroids as a potential danger for some time. I guess you heard about the solar sail?”

  “Yes,” said Carlton. “And about the ‘warners’ and the ‘warnees.’ Good frame for how to handle disclosure. Any idea when?”

  “Oh, plenty of ideas, but no decision,” Oxley responded. “I’d appreciate any suggestions from you. Toughest decision I’ve ever had to make.”

  “I must tell you, Mr. President,” Carlton said, “I believe that this secret isn’t going to keep much longer.”

  “You’re right, as usual, Frank,” said the President. “I just heard that Hamilton’s lawyer—Akis Christakos—is trying to talk to him and threatening to go to Philip Dake and tell him Russia’s kidnapped an American citizen. And the administration is doing nothing about it. I’ll tell Ray to hold him off by saying we are dealing with the Hamilton issue and it’s at a sensitive stage, but I don’t know if that’ll hold Christakos for very long.” Oxley sighed and asked, “So what now?”

  “We know from the transcript, sir, that Lebed isn’t interested very much about defending the Earth,” Carlton said. “He seems to be interested in using Hamilton and his asteroid as a weapons system. He’s taking us right back to the Cold War.”

  “You may be right,” Oxley said. “So, Frank, what options do you think we have?”

  “We have to bring him back, Mr. President,” Carlton replied. “And quickly.”

  “You want me to authorize a covert rendition operation?” Oxley asked, sounding surprised.

  “No, sir,” Carlton replied. “You surely cannot authorize any such operation.”

  Carlton practically knew the National Security Act of 1947 by heart. The law says that a covert action is legal as long as the President signs a Memorandum of Notification declaring that “such an action is necessary to support identifiable foreign policy objectives of the United States and is important to the national security.…”

  The law requires the President to notify congressional intelligence committees of any covert actions that he had authorized. Carlton, well aware of how hostile Congress was to Oxley, knew there was no way that Oxley would get support for what the CIA calls “rendition” and the dictionary calls “abduction.” The action would have to be described in a written “Finding.” That Top Secret executive order, also called a Presidential Study Directive, would be issued by the President. Congressional intelligence oversight committees had to be notified as soon as possible after the Finding was approved.

  If this mission was to be on the books, President Oxley would have to lay out the reasons that he had decided to kidnap one of the nation’s wealthiest citizens. The law said that the Finding “may not authorize any action that would violate the Constitution or any statute of the United States.”

  If Hamilton was staying in Moscow voluntarily, a presidential abduction would be not only unconstitutional, but, quite likely, an impeachable offense. Both men knew this but did not mention it.

  “What if we could prove that he was being held a virtual prisoner?” Oxley pressed.

  “If the mission failed, and we lost men, it would be Jimmy Carter time for you,” Carlton said, shaking his head with disapproval. He was referring to President Carter’s failed mission in 1980 to rescue the fifty-two American hostages who had been imprisoned by the Iranians.

  “You know the national security law better than I do,” Oxley said wearily. “As for the politics and Congress, we could charge Hamilton with being an accessory to murder and demand that he be extradited. But if we tried that route, we’d have to take it into court and make the 2037 asteroid collision public. And even if a U.S. court takes our side, there’s no way that Lebed will extradite him.”

  “Agreed, sir,” Carlton said.

  “And I certainly don’t want you mixed up in this,” the President said. “That’s for sure. I need all your brain cells for what’s going on right now.”

  Before Carlton could respond, Oxley spoke again, asking, “What about Ray?”

  A thought formed in Carlton’s West Wing brain: Oxley thinks Quinlan’s expendable. “How much does he already know?” Carlton asked.

  “Not much,” Oxley replied. “We had a spat about the way he was acting like a junior president. He had even made it a firing offense if a White House staffer allowed someone to meet with me without him. Every time I thought of telling him, he would piss me off about something and I’d keep him in the dark.”

  “Why do you keep him?” Carlton asked.

  “He’s damn smart, Frank. And I guess I make him mad because when he gets mad he gets even smarter,” Oxley said with a tight smile.

  “I think Ray should be told all you know about this, sir,” Carlton said.

  “And about what is to be done with Hamilton?” Oxley asked.

  Carlton hesitated, knowing that every word of this conversation was loaded with potential trouble—very big trouble—if what was said ever left the Oval Office. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I will put him in charge of the Hamilton account.”

  Oxley stared at Carlton for a moment, knowing that Carlton was giving him deniability of what action was to take place and then said, “I think I know what you’re not saying.”

  “And I think, sir, this conversation is over,” Carlton said.

  17

  “Well, glad to see you back. Imagine! My goodness! Spending nearly a whole half a day in your office!” Molly Tobias said when Taylor knocked on her cubicle wall. She vaguely knew that he was doing something for the White House. Whatever it was, she knew that every once in a while he would, as she put it, “step out of the loop.” He would close his office door and make a lot of calls on a cell phone she did not recognize. A few days later he would come in pulling a suitcase and tell her he would be away for four or five days.

  “I … I have to pick up my bag,” Taylor said, looking at his watch. “Anything going on?”

  “What’s going on is you are going into your disappearing act again and will reappear sometime like next Monday. And what else is going on is you’ve missed a deadline for getting an okayed script back to Lou.”

  “I’ll work on it on the plane.”

  “And you’ll miss Sam’s birthday party. Darlene will be furious. Call her.”

  “She doesn’t like to be called at work.”

  “Call her.”

  Taylor nod
ded and retreated to his office. On his desk was a pile of papers a couple of inches high. He went through them and made two piles, one for now, the other for later. He checked his email, deleting dozens of messages, and sent all surviving senders, including his television producer, Lou Goodman, his standard “Away from the Office” message. Then he called Darlene, his twenty-three-year-old daughter, at the American University library.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “No. Do tell me. You’re off to somewhere again.”

  “I’m leaving very soon.”

  “And you can’t say where.”

  “That’s right, sweetie.”

  She did not respond for a moment, then icily said, “Thanks for telling me, Daddy dear.” Another pause. “And, of course that means you will be missing the surprise party for Sam.”

  Taylor winced. He liked Sam Bancroft, an Air Force officer whom Darlene had met at the library of American University, where she was a graduate student in international affairs and he was taking an accelerated summer language course in international affairs. A veteran of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, he was now stationed at the Pentagon.

  “I’m very, very sorry, sweetie,” Taylor said. “It can’t be helped. Someday you’ll understand. Please say happy birthday from me, and tell Sam I’ll call him when I get back. He’s military. He’ll understand.”

  “Oh, I see. Unlike my boyfriend, I’m a mere civilian. Well, bon voyage.”

  Taylor picked up his laptop and rolling suitcase and stood staring at his office door, bracing before opening it and facing a glare from Molly.

  “I’ll call an Uber,” she said, turning to her desk.

  “No need, Molly. I … I’ve got a ride. See you Monday.”

  * * *

  On the way to Dulles, Taylor wondered how his two associates managed the secret. If, as it appeared, neither of the two powerful men he had just briefed knew the secret, it would have been kept even better in the not very open societies of China and Russia. Still, he had to assume that intelligence services in all three nations at least knew that the three scientists were holding meetings in Geneva. Someone had arranged for their use of the UN room. And somewhere there would be records of the money being spent to cover their travel expenses.

  He had volunteered to handle the scheduling of meetings. Getting three people to the same place at the same time was not as easy as he thought it was going to be, particularly the need to book flights and hotels through the United Nations travel office. He knew that the White House had arranged his funding through the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as part of the Outer Space Treaty cover, and he assumed that his Russian and Chinese colleagues were similarly funded. He envisioned a small, secretive bureaucracy working behind the scenes to sustain the cover for a project without knowing what that project was.

  He had just made the arrangements for the next meeting of the SwissTrio, as they called themselves, when he got the summons from Quinlan. He arranged to give his briefing on the same day that he was bound for Geneva on a 5:20 flight. Getting to Dulles in a White House car was an unexpected bonus.

  * * *

  During the flight, Taylor slept more than he worked on the script of his popular PBS show, Your Universe. He was feeling ready for work when he stepped out of the Geneva terminal and into a cab that dropped him off at his hotel. He checked in, had an eggs-and-bacon breakfast that would shock Darlene, and, after a third coffee, set out for a fifteen-minute walk to his new job, saving the world.

  The massive United Nations office building spread across a hill overlooking Lake Geneva. The building dominated the 113 acres of Ariana Park, which had been bequeathed to Geneva on three conditions: that the donor be buried in the park, that it always be open to the public, and that peacocks forever roam freely on its grounds.

  A peacock strolled past Taylor as he crossed the road and mounted the broad stairs of the building, once the home of the League of Nations. The building contained thirty-four conference rooms and twenty-eight hundred offices. Once it was thought that the fate of the world would be decided in this place, then grandly called the Palace of Nations. As he headed for one of those offices, he thought, Well, fate of the world, here we go again.

  18

  As usual, Ben Taylor was the first to arrive at Room 782, a standard, windowless office for middle-rank bureaucrats. The system that operated the Palace of Nations decreed that he was chairperson of his section, small as that might be. He was given two identical keys with instructions, in the six official languages of the United Nations, that he use one and keep the other in a safe place.

  On a table near the door were three neat stacks of UN documents pertaining to the United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. On the wall above the table was Taylor’s contribution to the sterile room: a sheet of plain paper bearing these words:

  “Sooner or later human civilization must confront the asteroid/comet collision hazards or become extinct,” Carl Sagan.

  Next to the table was a wooden desk bearing a phone console, a reading lamp, and a pen and pencil desk set. In the center of the room was a larger table and three caned chairs. On the table before each chair was a white lined pad bearing the blue-and-white UN emblem and a yellow pencil freshly sharpened.

  Taylor decided to wait for the others before opening the safe. All three knew the combination, but Taylor realized that if he opened the safe in the absence of either colleague, distrust would almost certainly enter Room 782, reflecting a world in which Russia, China, and the United States were not on the best of terms.

  Taylor and his Russian and Chinese counterparts, as scientists, paid more attention to their work than they did to the political alignments of their homelands. But distrust hovered over them in this room, always threatening to strike. Without speaking about that threat, they were more cooperative than their competitive natures normally tolerated. And they shared a mission they all passionately believed in.

  They had agreed at their first meeting that they would keep their work secret until their nations’ leaders chose to reveal that an asteroid would probably smash into the Earth in twenty years. To ensure—and symbolize—the keeping of the secret, they had agreed that their sessions would be free of all electronic devices. There was a possibility, of course, that one, two, or all of them were secretly recording their discussions. They at least acted as if they trusted each other. Take away their nationalities and they were, at heart, scientists who had devoted their lives to space, which knew no boundaries.

  * * *

  Dimitri Shvernik entered next, flinging a black overcoat on the narrow table by the door. His body, clothed in a three-piece dark brown suit, was large and oblong. His hair was white and slightly wavy, neatly trimmed like his beard. He greeted Taylor with a bear hug and a loud “Good morning!”

  Dimitri Shvernik was ten years old on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, into low Earth orbit, stunning the world and spurring the laggard American space program. “I was determined on that day to go into space,” he told Taylor when they met for the first time three years ago at a conference in Berlin. “I began studying very hard in school. Won prizes. Went to university. Became a scientist. And so forth, and so forth. But I remain on Earth.”

  Taylor was surprised and pleased that Shvernik had been chosen as Russia’s representative. He was an acknowledged expert on satellite communications and had taken up the problem of the silent Asteroid USA. “I have a theory,” he had said at the last meeting. “But I want to do a little bit more calculating before I put it on the table.”

  Communication with Asteroid USA would mean that the scientists could go ahead with their defense of Earth planning without getting any help from Hamilton. Taylor assumed that Hamilton was holding back information about the SpaceMine spacecraft until the Oxley administration allowed him to return to the United
States without facing any criminal charges. But that was for the politicians of both countries to figure out. The three scientists were working independently of Hamilton and everyone else on the imperiled Earth.

  There was a faint knock on the door. Taylor and Shvernik looked at each other and smiled. Shvernik, nearer the door, opened it and admitted Liang Mei, giving her a mild hug. She always knocked, ignoring the pleas of her colleagues. “In my country,” she told them with a smile, “people always knock.”

  She wore black jeans and a pale green quilted coat, which she draped over one of the chairs, revealing a blue Duke sweatshirt. She was small and slim, with the quick, sure moves of a Qigong practitioner. During lulls in discussions, she often left the table and raised her arms in a slow sequence that began a Qi Gong session that ended with a hands-thrust martial pose.

  “Good morning,” Liang Mei said, bowing her head slightly to each man.

  “Dobroe utro,” Shvernik said, laughing and bestowing a theatrical shrug.

  “Good morning,” Taylor said, impatiently adding, “Let’s get started. When last we met, Dimitri had an idea hatching in his skull.”

  Taylor opened the safe, took out a thick black loose-leaf binder, sat down at the table, and said, “Okay, Dimitri. What’ve you got? Anything cosmic?”

  Liang Mei always looked slightly puzzled at the start of a session, as if she had to reach into her brain for the cells that handled American speech instead of what had been known as English in her secondary school. Knowledge of the English language had been a requirement of the Gaokao, China’s college entrance examination. It was at Duke’s Kunshan University in Wuhan where she first learned how to speak the American language, a skill topped off by campus life at Stanford.

  As for Shvernik, he had been formally introduced to English at Moscow State University and studied it himself, mostly from recordings, while attending the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Many papers and textbooks there were studied in their original English because translations into Russian, usually supervised by security officers, were not reliable. At MIT, he learned American English. And he picked up Americanisms over the years from chatter at scientific meetings and movie DVDs. He was a fan of American crime films.