Chapter 4
So he was a hero. Now what?
Colonel Thomas Howe, in civilian clothes, sat at the end of the small bar in Alexandria, Virginia. In front of him was a beer that had been poured roughly an hour before, the glass still half full. To his left was a small bowl of stale popcorn. Every so often he’d reach into the bowl and take a single kernel — always a single kernel — examine it, then put it in his mouth and chew deliberately. There was a baseball game on the screen above the bar; Howe stared at it intently, as if he actually cared who won or even knew the score.
He’d wanted to eat dinner by himself, but in the end had been swept up by Bonham with one of the contractors on the laser project and taken to a restaurant somewhere in the Washington suburbs. The parking lot was filled with Mercedes and BMWs, the waiters wore stiff tuxedos, and there were no prices on the menu. Howe had steak. It was very, very good steak, though in truth he would have been fine with a hamburger back in his room at the hotel. He’d practically had to beg to be taken back there, rather than the parties Bonham had lined up.
He had gone inside intending to sleep, but the light was blinking on the phone when he got into the room, and he decided he was better off making himself scarce for the night. He didn’t feel like talking any more today.
So he’d found his way here, a suburban bar with green felt paper on the walls and highly polished wood and flat-screen, wide-tube TVs, and beer that cost $7.50 a glass. The bartender, a woman in her mid-twenties with an hourglass figure, smiled in his direction every fifteen minutes or so, but otherwise left him alone. The place was about three-quarters full when he came in, but people had been slowly draining away; there were less than a dozen left now, including two parties in the leather-covered booths at the other end of the room.
He picked up another piece of popcorn.
“Orioles can’t hit. They don’t understand the value of taking pitches.”
Howe turned to his left, surprised by the voice. It belonged to Andy Fisher. The FBI agent pulled out his cigarettes.
“You’re a pretty good detective to figure out where I was,” said Howe.
“Not really. You’re driving a rental that uses a satellite locator.” Fisher ordered a beer from the bartender. “Put a head on his while you’re at it.”
“No, thanks,” said Howe.
“Want my theory?”
“On what? Baseball?”
“Cyclops One.”
“Probably not.” Howe picked up his glass and took a sip.
“You’re still hooked on York?”
Howe turned to him, said nothing, then turned back.
“Well, for what it’s worth, I think she’s alive.”
Howe laughed. “How do you fake DNA?”
“Oh, you can fake anything. Look at the bartender. Those aren’t real.”
Fisher took a long drag from his cigarette, held the smoke in his mouth, then exhaled slowly.
“They didn’t have to fake the DNA. There was no flesh in that partial boot. The hair on the flight suit — that’s real. Probably a bunch of those spread around. Plane’s real too. But the laser’s not there, not the inside works.”
“You know that for a fact?” asked Howe.
“Not yet. There’s going to be traces, just enough to convince us. Like the hair on the flight suit. Something else is going on. I’ll bet there was another plane.”
Howe’s frustration and anger burst past the last restraints. He spun, ready to slug Fisher.
The agent stopped speaking, but only for a second. “Ever hear of Jolice Missile Systems?”
Howe looked down at his fingers, curled into a fist on the bar. His hand was bright red.
“What about Jolice?”
“I have a theory. You want to hear it before you hit me, or after?”
In outline, the theory was simple: The laser plane had to be stolen to help Jolice do well in the augmented- ABM tests. Jolice’s performance there had been nothing short of amazing, especially considering that the company had never built an antimissile system before. There were all sorts of connections between the people who ran Jolice and Cyclops, Bonham being the focal point. One of the companies in the web of connections had purchased property in Canada six months before: an old hunter’s lodge that just happened to include a lake north of the search area.
But once the FBI agent began talking about the details, things got considerably murkier. Anything close to Cyclops One would have been detected if it had been in the sky during either the ABM tests or the action over Pakistan.
“Unless,” said Fisher, “it was something like your Velociraptor.”
Howe laughed so loudly the bartender looked over. Fisher held up his glass for a refill.
Howe shook his head. “You don’t know jack about Cyclops. The laser’s as big as the plane.”
“Can’t shrink it?”
“Not much.”
“What about another stealth plane? A B-2.”
“Not going to fit in a B-2.”
“No?” Fisher took out a fresh pack of cigarettes and pounded it into his palm. “Want one?”
“No.”
“You’re telling me it won’t fit no way, no how?”
“Well, if you made about a million changes to it and the plane.”
Fisher took a long drag on the cigarette. “A million changes? What about a B-1?”
“Still too short.”
“Not by that much. In fact, Firenze says the manufacturer proposed a scaled-down version for a stealth aircraft that was only a few feet longer than a B-1.”
Fisher put up his finger to quiet him as the bartender approached.
“There’s no way,” said Howe when she was gone. “You’re telling me they stole a B-1?”
“If they could steal Cyclops One, which obviously they did, they could steal anything.” Fisher sipped at the beer. “But I don’t know. All the B-1s are accounted for.”
“There goes your theory.”
“No. There goes the easy solution, that’s all.”
“Why would Megan York be involved? She wouldn’t be after the money.”
“You sure?”
“She wouldn’t be.” Howe took a sip of his beer. It tasted stale and bitter in his mouth.
“What do you know about her uncle?” asked Fisher.
“Which uncle?”
“The guy who dropped bombs on Tokyo. The congressman’s father.”
Howe pushed back from the bar and turned toward Fisher, looking at him as if for the first time. “Let’s get some coffee,” he told him.
They found a diner not too far away. Fisher noted that it was too upscale to call itself a diner — the walls in the foyer were made of shiny vinyl and looked only moderately tacky — but was somewhat mollified by the coffee, which he said tasted as if it had been made in a garbage can four days before and boiled ever since.
In other words, perfect.
They also allowed smoking.
“Megan was involved in Cyclops and the laser program because she truly wanted to end war,” Howe said. “I know it sounds strange, but I’m positive; she could have done anything she wanted. She didn’t have to work — she was educated up the yin-yang — but she chose to do this because she believed it. Like a religion.”
“You think a laser weapon’s going to end war?”
