chimed.
30
Six minutes earlier, E. Burton Hattemer had been sitting in a conference room in the Senate Hart Office Building while a staffer enthusiastically detailed a solar-powered, robotic surveillance device that looked, flew, and perched just like the barn swallows prevalent in the Middle East. “The prototype can be done for as little as thirty million,” she told the roomful of Senate Intelligence Committee members and advisors.
Hattemer wanted to say: Christ, that kind of cash could get us ten decent human spies and a hundred times the actionable intel.
Six years on the Hill had taught him that it would be more effective to partition the sentiment into gentle memos in the coming months when the Appropriations Subcommittee appointed a Robot-Barn-Swallow Task Force, the task force delegated a special panel, and the special panel prepared, drafted, and redrafted its recommendation to the committee.
Feeling his cell phone vibrate, he fished it from his suit pants. The LED flashed a reminder to pick up tulips for his wife at the florist in Potomac.
Hurrying out of the conference room, he said, “I beg everybody’s pardon. I’ve got to attend to a geriatric digestive issue.” Who here would want to know about that?
The florist-or SOS-message appeared when the switchboard in Stockholm activated a virtually undetectable shortwave band. “Tulips” was Drummond Clark. Three years had passed since Hattemer had communicated with his old friend other than by greeting card. That he would get in touch in this fashion, now, suggested Drummond’s life was in peril and that it was an inside job.
Executive Order 11905, signed by President Ford and bolstered by Reagan with EO 12333, banned assassinations by government organizations. Yet spies continued to die of the flu, falls from terraces, or boating accidents with far greater frequency than people in other professions, in large part because men and women at the very highest levels of government believed themselves to be above the law or turned blind eyes or deaf ears in the name of the Greater Good-a sorry euphemism, Hattemer thought, for sacrificing ideals in order to mop up inconvenient messes. And that was when there was oversight at all.
For the sake of discretion, he took the stairs down to room SH-219. The two flights hurt like hell, or about as much as he’d anticipated. He’d been forced to abandon fieldwork when his deteriorated hips were replaced with six pounds of metal alloys, making the constant air and Jeep travel impractical. Still, it took him another two years to hang up his trench coat.
Protected by armed guards around the clock, few places on Earth afforded more secure communication than SH-219. Essentially a windowless steel vault, it blocked electromagnetic eavesdropping and prohibited signals from escaping. Every morning it was swept for listening devices with an attention to minutiae unseen outside archaeological digs. Even the electrical current was filtered.
Hattemer sat at the armchair at the inner prong of the giant, horseshoe-shaped table. On the olive-green wall behind him were the seals of the various intelligence agencies. Before him was a wall of high-definition monitors, the face of a system the Senate Intelligence Committee members liked to refer to as “state-of-the-art.” In fact, state-of-the-art systems lacked many of its classified bells and whistles. A few keypunches could bring him into locked video conference with American intelligence officers operating anywhere from the United States to the United Arab Emirates. He could access all the classified computer networks. He could view satellite imagery of just about any place on the planet, either from vast archives or in real time. And if the pictures were inadequate, a program easier to use than text messaging, in his estimation, enabled him to dispatch reconnaissance drones.
He elected to use a device whose listing in the Intelligence Committee budget-“sound reproduction instrument”-always rankled him. It was, in laymen’s terms, a telephone.
Drummond opened the cell phone and raised it to his lips, but said nothing.
A brash young woman’s voice burst through the earpiece. “Jimmy, that you?”
“No,” Drummond said, “Willie.”
“This ain’t two-five-two, oh-two-seven, oh-four-four-six?”
“Sorry, ma’am, no. Good day.”
Drummond didn’t merely hang up; he disconnected the call by tearing the battery from the back of the phone.
Charlie was mystified. “What? Was the phone about to self-destruct?”
“We can’t use it again,” Drummond said. “Even when it’s off, it emits a signal.”
“Then how will we get the call from your man in Washington?”
“That was him, with more than a little voice alteration interposed between his handset and my earpiece.”
“I may have missed something.”
“‘Willies’ is a proprietary shorthand for hostiles. When I said, ‘No Willie,’ it was a recognition code that signified I wasn’t under duress. His ‘ain’t’ in turn let me know that no one was holding a gun to his head. ‘Good day’ was my sign-off that his message had been received.”
“I’m guessing you’ve left out the part about what the message was.”
“It was the number he said he’d meant to dial.” On the cover of the killers’ road atlas, Drummond wrote “2520270446.”
“So will we need to get another phone to call it?” Charlie asked.
“No, we won’t need to make any more calls. We just subtract my ‘distress code’ number from it.”
“A billion, five hundred thirteen million, four hundred seventy-nine thousand, three hundred and eleven?”
Drummond did the math on paper. “Not bad,” he said.
“You spend seven days a week handicapping…”
With a look of either mock dismay or actual dismay-Charlie wasn’t sure which-Drummond again wrote out:
2520270446 — 1016791135
This time, he tabulated it as:
1514589311
“Actually, we use what’s known as false subtraction,” he said. “In this case it means you have a series of ten separate subtractions. For instance, when you subtract six from zero four numbers in, you don’t borrow from the column to the left, you just invent the ten. Or when you subtract nine from seven-you pretend the seven is a seventeen. False subtraction adds an extra layer of security and makes the math simpler, once you get used to it. The total here is a sort of alphabetical equivalent of ‘one hick.’ The number fifteen equals the letter O, fourteen equals N, etcetera. Now, ‘one hick’ doesn’t sound very encouraging, but it’s probably the closest safe house Burt had at his disposal.” He flipped through the atlas. “Ah, there’s a Hickory Road about twenty miles north.”
The light at the end of Charlie’s tunnel burst back on at high wattage. With energy to match, he threw the Durango into a U-turn.
“So what’s the deal with this ‘Hen’ guy?” he asked.
“From the Cavalry?”
“Yeah.”
“First, I need to tell you one more thing.”
“What?”
“What I said about Grandpa Tony?”
“Yeah?”
“You won’t tell him that you know, okay?”
A shiver ran the length of Charlie. “There’s no chance whatsoever of that happening,” he said haltingly. Grandpa Tony had passed away eight years ago, and not only was there a funeral, Charlie and Drummond both were pallbearers.
“Thank you,” said Drummond.
“So who’s Hen?” Charlie asked.
