“Damn it,” said Thorpe. “I knew it. We should have taken him down when we had the chance.”
“We wanted to net his handler,” said Britain.
“What happens when you get greedy,” said Thorpe.
The FBI had been aware almost from the beginning that Hirst was a plant. They knew he was no trainee. Some footwork on the part of one of the CIA’s own moles inside Israeli intelligence identified Hirst as a thirty-two- year-old Mossad agent named Yoni Shahar. He had spent eight years in the Israeli Defense Forces as a member of the elite S-13, Israel’s counterpart to America’s Delta Force. Shahar had been recruited to the Mossad and had performed a number of overseas missions. One in particular had resulted in the assassination of a high-level Iranian scientist, a nuclear physicist reputed to be working on Iran’s atomic bomb project.
“You think he knew we were onto him?” said Britain.
“Yes.”
“You think he’s got Diggs and the girl?”
“They all disappear on the same day.” Thorpe looked at him. “What do you think?” He had promised Madriani that his daughter would be safe. Now she was gone.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But he’s been hanging out at their apartment. Took her to the range. Cozied up to the dog. He wanted something. The question is, what?”
“Maybe he was lonely,” said Britain.
“Man like that doesn’t get lonely. And he doesn’t get distracted. He lives for his work.”
“It’s possible he was after the same thing we are,” said Britain.
Thorpe looked at him.
“Liquida,” said Britain. “It’s possible.”
“Why?”
“Liquida gets around. Maybe he killed a high-level Israeli. A contract on some VIP. The Israelis aren’t as forgiving as we are. They have a long history of tit for tat,” said Britain.
“It’s possible.” Thorpe thought for a moment. “Or maybe you’re right.”
“What?”
“Maybe he is after the same thing we are,” said Thorpe.
“What do you mean?”
“Project Thor.”
“What. You think…?”
“Sure. Fowler and the administration have blinded us. We don’t know what Thor is about because Fowler won’t tell us. Hirst shows up on our doorstep when-a few weeks before I get the phone call to go over to the White House. I get there, they want to play liar’s dice. What if the Israelis already knew about Thor?”
“If they already knew about it, why would they send Hirst?”
“Because they knew something we don’t. Maybe there was a piece they were missing and they thought they could get it here. Something we were supposed to know, if we were inside the loop, which we weren’t. The people who sent Hirst must have been mightily disappointed,” said Thorpe. “Because we don’t know shit.”
“If so, he picked up the threads pretty fast,” said Britain. “Hirst or Shahar or whatever the hell his name is, he’s on a better trajectory than we are. If he’s got Diggs and the girl, and Diggs knows where Madriani is. Madriani’s got a line on Liquida, and Liquida’s with Bruno. Hirst is gonna have a front-row seat to whatever is playing.”
“And we’re going to be sitting here picking our noses,” said Thorpe.
“You think he might have killed them? The girl and Diggs, I mean?” said Britain.
“No. If he extracted the information, he’d just leave them. No reason to harm them. They all left together. The girl wanted out of here anyway. She wouldn’t have been hard to convince. Madriani’s tracking Liquida. Now Hirst has his daughter. That gives him a trump card,” said Thorpe. “Madriani’s in Mexico. The question is, where? That’s where they’ll be going.”
“Let me check the airports.” Britain started to get up from his chair.
“Do it… No! On second thought, don’t.”
“Why not?” said Britain.
“Because he wouldn’t go out that way. He’s got the dog.” Thorpe looked at him. “Unless he shot him. And if he did that, he may as well shoot the girl, in which case he’ll never get anything out of Diggs. I know the man. No, if Hirst took the dog, it was because he had a way to get him out.”
“What do you mean?”
Thorpe thought about it for a moment. A boat was too slow. The only other aircraft… “Check El Al,” said Thorpe. The Israeli national airline had been known to cut corners for their government on sensitive military and political matters in the past. “Otherwise check for any MATS flights. Military air transport. Not ours, theirs,” said Thorpe. “See if there were any Israeli military flights in or out of the area around Washington since last night. If they’re still on the ground, hold them. All flights. If they’re in the air, see if the air force can pick them up on radar. If they’re over U.S. airspace, see if we can scramble fighters to bring them back.”
Britain was headed for the door.
Thorpe stood up. “And see if any of the MATS filed flight plans.” Thorpe knew it was a long shot. Hirst would never leave a flight plan behind, but maybe his pilot did. Sarah Madriani was gone. He pounded the top of his desk with a closed fist. At the moment he could have killed Fowler with his bare hands. “What in the hell is Project Thor?”
Chapter Fifty-One
Joseph-Louis Lagrange was an eighteenth-century French mathematician who determined that two large orbiting bodies in space could create gravitational pockets in which a third object, smaller than the first two, could become trapped and held in place.
According to Lagrange’s mathematical formulas, five such Lagrange points were created by the gravitational pull of the sun and the earth. Another five such points existed as a result of the competing tug of gravity caused by the earth and the moon.
All of this, of course, was mere theory until American and Russian scientists, during the early years of space exploration, verified that all five of the solar and lunar Lagrange points actually existed. Some were stable. Some were not. Those with stability have proven useful over the years as places to park geosynchronous satellites where they can be held in place with little or no maintenance.
Lunar Lagrange Point Two, or L2, was one of the less stable of these points. In order to hold an object at lunar L2, regular periodic maintenance is required. Without such maintenance the object in question will either be spun off into space or crash into the moon. For this as well as other reasons, lunar L2 is generally not deemed useful as a location for parking satellites.
However, for Larry Leffort and Project Thor, L2 offered immense advantages that far outweighed its gravitational instability. L2 is located on the back side of the moon. An object placed in an elliptical halo orbit at L2 could be maintained as if in a raceway at intense velocity. It would be visible from the earth for only short periods each day at the outer edge of its elliptical flight pattern, during which time maintenance could be performed to hold it in place. During the rest of the time, an object at lunar L2 would be completely concealed from the earth by the face of the moon. Unless someone was looking for it or knew it was there, the chances of observing it were not great, especially if it was held in this pattern for only a short time.
Leffort smiled as he settled in behind the control desk in the jungle enclave north of Coba. He looked at the array of four large computer screens in front of him to check the progress made since his departure from his office at NASA’s Caltech facility in California. In less than ten days, the scientists at Coba had done a fine job. But then the software and classified information that Leffort had given them was spot-on.
Leffort had delivered to them access and complete control over two test weapons.
These Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) had been carefully selected and harvested by NASA from among the hundreds that had been identified in the last decade as possible earth impactors and therefore potential hazards.
