Stream, which will carry it north while at the same time vastly diluting its strength. Shipping interests have been notified to stay clear, which will cost them money, of course, since they won’t get the boost from the Stream, but the effects shouldn’t last long. Perhaps less than a week.”
“What about damage to marine life?”
“It’s too soon to tell, but it’s my understanding from Loring that NOAA is addressing the possibility.” Ron Loring was the secretary of commerce, of which NOAA was a department.
Lord glanced at the Hutchinson Island images on the big flat-panel monitor at the other end of the room. It hadn’t been another 9/11, but it could have been. It had been meant to do the U.S. even more harm.
“Is there any reason for us to consider this as anything other than a terrorist attack?” he asked. “An incident with a national backing?”
“The CIA has no direct information of such a possibility,” Walter Page began. He was well dressed as was his custom, and looked as if he had just stepped out of a Savile Row ad in
“Kirk McGarvey,” the DOE’s Deputy Secretary Joseph Caldwell said with a smirk. “A loose cannon if ever there was one.”
“You hired him,” Page shot back. “And yes, he’s a loose cannon, but he’s done some spectacular things for this country.”
Lord knew of McGarvey, of course, everyone around this table did, and while he could see that Page had a great deal of respect for the man it was a view he didn’t share. McGarvey was of an old, dangerous cold war school; the sort of a figure who approved of places like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and renditions, even assassinations. He’d done good, even great things for the U.S., but he’d also caused a lot of serious frustration and embarrassment for previous administrations.
“What was he doing at Hutchinson Island?”
“He was in Miami training one of our new Rapid Response teams to deal with actual face-to-face encounters with a terrorist or terrorists,” Caldwell said. “But to this point he’s been more bother than benefit. It’s highly unlikely that our people would ever find themselves in such a situation.”
“This time they did,” Page said.
“Are there any current or developing threats against us or our interests that have recently come to light? Any possible connections to this attack?”
“Nothing that’s not already on the table,” Page said.
“We’ve picked up nothing recently,” the NSA’s Director General Piedermont said.
“For the time being the incident will be publicly treated as an accident,” the president said.
“We may be too late for that, Mr. President,” Newhouse disagreed. “Too many people were on site in the middle of it — several of them senior SSP&L officers. And those people definitely will not want to support any claim of an accident. It would give them a black eye.”
“Get me a list of names, and I’ll talk to each one of them personally.”
“Yes, sir,” Newhouse said, and he glanced over his shoulder at the monitor, and the president and everyone else in the room saw the CNN graphic comparing this event to 9/11.
The genie was already out of the bottle, and Lord’s anger spiked, but he contained himself. “So, we’ve passed that point already. Has anyone claimed responsibility?”
“No, sir,” the admiral said.
“In addition to the cleanup efforts, the next steps are clear. We find the bastards who did this to us, and take them out.” Lord said and he looked each of his people in the eye. “Priority one.”
“It could be helpful if we also found out why,” Page said. “This attack could be an isolated incident, but it could be the opening shot of something much larger.”
“I agree, Mr. President. Al-Quaeda and some of the other terrorist organizations have gotten a hell of lot more sophisticated since nine/eleven. We need to find out what’s going on.”
“I’ll coordinate that effort,” the president’s national security adviser Eduardo Estevez said.
“We’ll need to put someone in overall charge in the field,” Page suggested.
“Do it, but quietly,” Lord ordered. “This will not end up as another nine/eleven media circus.”
But everyone in the room, including the president himself knew that an incident of this magnitude could not be manipulated. The American public had become more savvy since 9/11 and things like this always seemed to take on a life of their own.
TWENTY-ONE
It had come to her in a dream three days ago that something awful was about to happen, and that because of it she would be in a great deal of personal danger. She’d awakened at three in the morning, drenched in sweat, alone as she had been for the past five years since her divorce, and she’d gotten up, walked to the window, and looked out over the city of Caracas, goose bumps on the back of her neck and on her arms.
But it wasn’t until late this afternoon when flash traffic from CIA Headquarters alerting all station chiefs worldwide about the attack on Hutchinson Island’s nuclear power facility, that chief of CIA Station Caracas, Lorraine Fritch, suddenly put together most of the bits and pieces of information her people had been gathering over the past four months into one big — and to her — terrifying picture.
She’d had an epiphany, and she’d convinced herself it was because of Hutchinson Island. The connections had become crystal clear in her head, but not so clear that she would be able to convince her boss, the deputy director of operations, and especially not the DCI, by e-mail, no matter how detailed, or even by encrypted phone. This she had to do in person.
She’d messaged her boss, Marty Baimbridge, that she was flying up to Washington with something even more important than flash traffic could convey. This was something, she’d told him, that would have to be face-to- face. The one word reply had been: “Come.”
It was late evening by the time she climbed into the backseat of an embassy Escalade, her driver and bodyguard in front, and they left through the front gate, and merged with steady traffic on the Avenida Miranda and headed out to the Aeropuerto Internacional de Maiquetia Simon Bolivar. Ordinarily embassy personnel, including CIA officers, were supposed to fly commercial, and coach at that. But Continental flights left first thing in the morning, and, stopping in Houston, didn’t get to Baltimore until nearly midnight, so she’d chartered a private Gulfstream that would fly directly to Miami where it would refuel and then onward to Reagan National Airport in Washington, getting there first thing in the morning.
She could sleep on the flight, if she could sleep at all, which considering her state of mind at the moment was highly doubtful. It was one of the many reasons her husband had cited for their divorce: When she was engaged in something, she was superengaged to the point of completely tuning out her family, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. Another of the reasons, of course, was the fact she couldn’t discuss her work with her husband, and she would often drop everything and fly off to somewhere in the world at a moment’s notice, again without telling him where she was going, what she would be doing when she got there, and how long it would be before she got back.
She was engaged now, and she was flying out, but the only one she’d had to inform was Ambassador Turner, who hadn’t cared to demand a detailed explanation before she spent the money for the flight. It was her station’s budget, not the embassy’s.
It had began for her four months ago when she’d accidentally overheard a chance remark during a lunch at the Tamanaco Inter-Continental Hotel with a pair of advisers to President Chavez, who knew who and what she was, and were pushing her to make a mistake. They’d met with her on orders to find out what the CIA was up to, and she to get a hint of just how much SEBIN, Venezuela’s intelligence service, knew or guessed about what was going on right under their noses.
It was a little before 12:30 P.M., and they’d just sat down and ordered drinks when a man, medium build with a mustache, his hair graying at his sideburns and temples, with lovely dark eyes, walked in with a pair of men just as expensively dressed as he was. Lorraine thought that he was extraordinarily handsome and vaguely familiar,
