exactly what the country’s president would say in his speech that evening at nine o’clock.
The Art Room had already filled Lia in, but Fernandez was hearing this for the first time. He stared at the screen in disbelief.
“It must be a hoax,” he said. “The rebels would never be able to get a bomb. Never.”
“They have photos,” said Lia. “Didn’t you just see? And they’re working with one of the candidates.”
Fernandez stared at the TV, finally absorbed in something other than himself.
“They backed Imberbe? Impossible,” he said. “I can’t believe he would work with them. Never.”
“Will that have an impact on the election?”
Fernandez shrugged. A new set of talking heads came on, noting the gravity of the situation. A spokesman for Imberbe was interviewed saying that the candidate denounced the rebel movement; he was immediately followed by a statement by a longtime political correspondent who said Imberbe could not be believed.
Lia sipped her beer slowly as she watched the program. The show was entertaining in a bizarre way, as guest after guest speculated endlessly on something they knew almost nothing about. The medium is the same the world over, Lia decided.
Fernandez ordered another drink and then a third. Un-prompted, he began telling Lia his life story, which amounted to an epic struggle against academic demons as he went to five different schools before earning a master’s degree in international law. Fernandez seemed to feel that he had struggled mightily in his years as a student, which made him appreciate the realities of poverty and hardship even though his family regularly sent him checks from Madrid.
Lia nodded every so often, one eye on the TV. Finally, bored and tired, she got up to go. Fernandez accompanied her shakily back to the hotel; as they walked up the stairs to their rooms she wasn’t sure whether he would get sick or make a pass at her when they reached their floor.
He did neither, which was something of a relief as she eased into her room.
The door had no lock. Lia pushed the bureau in front of it; the bureau was too light to keep anyone from entering, but it would at least slow them down. Though it seemed ludicrous, she took out her PDA and scanned the room for bugs. When she saw it was clean, she checked in with the Art Room.
“Same old, same old on your end,” said Rockman, telling her nothing was new. Dean and Karr were on their way to check out the warhead; she was to proceed as planned.
Kicking off her shoes, Lia climbed under the covers still fully dressed. She’d no sooner shut her eyes than she heard a scratching sound. Jerking up in bed, Lia pulled out the pistol she had left under the covers next to her. Her first thought was that Fernandez was scraping at the door in some sort of drunken plea, but she quickly realized that the sound was coming from above her.
Lia took her gun and got out of bed. She reached into her pocket and took out her small penlight, shining it around the ceiling. There were several patches where the plaster had fallen out, exposing the lath.
As she shone her light upward, the sound turned into a scampering drumbeat, then stopped. Lia climbed up onto the bed and shone the light into one of the lath-filled holes. The light made shadows through the blackness, but it was impossible to see beyond them.
She flicked off the light for a moment. The scratching resumed. When she flicked it back on, a pair of red beads glowed down at her from above.
The ceiling space was filled with rats.
“Oh, just peachy,” Lia said to herself, shivering involuntarily as she climbed back beneath the covers.
57
When he was a corporal, Charlie Dean had learned to parachute on the advice of a top sergeant, who said the skill would help him advance. The sergeant, a short, ugly man with a large heart and a very soft voice, was the smartest noncom Dean had ever had, and so he followed the advice even though he knew he would hate every minute of it. For a man who had served as a sniper in the waning days of the Vietnam War and witnessed the evacuation of Saigon, the training could not be honestly described as difficult duty. But Dean would have gladly swapped his weeks there for a year anywhere else, including Vietnam.
His three night training jumps — all successful, all utterly routine, all scary as all get-out — came back to him as he waited for Fashona’s signal to go. The aircraft had a specially rigged door on the right side that allowed it to slide out of the way, making egress easier for parachutists. Wind kicked through the cockpit like a hurricane, and Fashona groused about how hard it was to keep the plane on its circular course over the patio-sized field they had targeted for the drop. All three men had donned oxygen masks because of the thin air.
The area they were jumping into sat in the foothills between the Andes and the thickest parts of the tropical forest. Not as wet as the jungle to the east, nor as high as the peaks to the west, it mixed qualities of both — wide rivers divided green valleys; dusty plateaus were shaded by craggy rocks. Their targeted landing zone was a grassy field a mile and a half from a river; bounded on one side by a sharp drop and on the other by a dozen or so trees, they had about two and a half acres of clear landing zone.
It might just as well have been a square foot as far as Dean was concerned, looking out at the darkness.
“Five seconds,” said Fashona.
Karr stood next to a large equipment pack that contained most of their gear as well as an inflatable boat. Rather than using a static line to open the parachute, an altimeter trigger would open the chute at nine thousand feet above sea level, which was fifteen hundred feet above the ground, if, of course, the altimeter setting they had chosen was somewhere close to the true barometric pressure. The nylon canopy was designed so that the gear would fall in as straight a line as possible; Fashona had to fly the plane along a very precise line and the gear had to be ejected at the right moment for it to hit the landing zone.
Dean couldn’t recall the name of the top sergeant who had told him to learn to jump — Jones or Jacobs — but heard his voice in his head as if he were right behind him.
What did jumping out of an airplane have to do with
“Now,” said Fashona.
Karr pushed the pack out. Dean leaned forward, hands still gripping the sides of the doorway.
“Geronimo!” yelled Karr, pulling Dean from the plane with him.
Caught off-balance, Dean’s left arm was grabbed and twisted by the wind. He focused on bringing it back, pushing his body into a flying wedge. The specially programmed goggles they were using worked with global positioning satellites as well as an altimeter reading to present visual cues as the parachutist fell. While the goggles weighed almost seven pounds, the weight was worth it — a green arrow appeared before him, telling him he was perfectly on course.
Good thing, thought Dean. At least if I splat I’ll do it in the right place.
58
Robert Gallo got up from his workstation in the Desk Three subbasement and began walking around the NSA computer lab. His eyes had started to water and blur from staring at the LCD computer screens. He’d run out of eyedrops earlier and struggled not to rub them — he knew from experience that would only make them worse. He had another bottle of the drops in the lounge, but that was a staircase and a security checkpoint away. Better to tough it out for a bit, if possible.
But not to itch! Gallo lay down in the middle of the floor and shut his eyes. The tears had just stopped streaming out when he heard someone come into the room.
“Ah,” said Johnny Bib above him. “There you are.”
“Hey,” said Gallo. “Did Angie find the source of the guerrillas’ communique?”
