Mahogany's Dream Page 22

  “And you think this gas is in the United States?”

  “We know it’s in the United States. The wave generator we found had a canister of it inside. Enough to kill everybody in a ten-block radius. The canister has an aerosol pump that’s triggered by a timer that starts ticking down as soon as the transponder receives a properly encoded signal. The generator we found is one of twelve we believe Lui brought into the country. If any one of them releases Soman into the air of a densely populated area, the death toll could be astronomical.

  My personal opinion is that the Soman is the weapon of choice here, not the generators. Any number of things would have to be in place in order for the generators to function properly. The Gerry-rigged one we found hooked up to the cable dish didn’t even have a targeting system. If all of them are like that, then any energy beam the generator might produce would be projected in whichever direction the dish was pointing, which is usually straight up in the air. I think the PRC setup that little demonstration just to let us know that they have toys just as advanced as ours. The Soman pump, on the other hand, doesn’t need a targeting system. All you do is spray it in the air and it kills everybody around.”

  “That’s terrible,” Dyson said. “But I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with Taiwan, or Dr. Tsang…or me.”

  This time the maid answered. “Five months ago, Chen Tsang had a meeting in the Spratly Islands with the man who smuggled the generators into the country and the PRC agent who was staying in the hotel room where we found the generators.”

  She spread out a sheaf of telling surveillance photos on the table.

  She pointed to one of the men in the photos. “The smuggler was a Taiwanese named Benjamin Lui, a communications engineer at the regional office of the Star Satellite System in Taipei. During the meeting, Lui provided Tsang with technical information about the company’s satellites currently in orbit, including the encoding systems used to control them. In exchange for this information, Tsang transferred three million Taiwanese dollars into a numbered account Lui owned on the Isle of Mann.

  The third man you see is a PRC agent known by the codename Koxinga. During the same meeting, Tsang transmitted a data file to him containing detailed instructions on modifying the carbon nanotubes in your PPD design to work with the vacuum cylinders in the PRC’s miniaturized wave generators. Koxinga’s real name is Yu Kwongming. He’s murdered at least three people since he’s been on U.S. soil, including Lui. We’re almost certain that Koxinga has the missing generators, or knows where they can be found.”

  The mention of murder sent Dyson back into a funk.

  An aide came into the room and whispered in Romaski’s ear. She in turn whispered in the President’s ear. The President excused herself from the meeting.

  They do a lot of whispering in Washington, Dyson thought to himself.

  “That’s not all,” Aldridge said, keeping things moving. He handed Dyson a sheet of paper. “The NSA intercepted that two weeks ago.” It was a statement from the KMV accepting responsibility for the Soman attacks.

  Dyson didn’t quite understand. “Why would the KMV attack America? We’re Taiwan’s strongest ally.”

  Aldridge answered. “The ultimate goal of the Kuomintang is to reunite Taiwan with mainland China. A terrorist attack against us is just a means to that end.”

  “How so?”

  “Even though your big brother bullies you around, he would never let anyone else hurt you.”

  “Come again?”

  “If we can’t stop the Soman attacks and they kill a lot of people, the American public will demand revenge. My head will roll and the President will be forced to retaliate against the KMV, which is just what Beijing wants.”

  “Beijing?”

  “Chinese nerve agent, Chinese spy, Chinese wave generators. You do the math, son.”

  “So you’re saying the Chinese are really behind this?”

  “I’m saying it doesn’t matter! The only thing that matters is that the PRC considers Taiwan part of China. If we retaliate against the Kuomintang on Taiwanese soil, the PRC will view it as an attack on China and come to its defense. The KMV is betting that the threat of an American military strike, for whatever reason, will make quick reunification with China look like Taiwan’s only chance to avoid becoming the next Iraq.”

  “But if the KMV kills innocent people in a terrorist act, how do they know the PRC will come to its defense?”

  Everyone in the room laughed at Dyson’s political naiveté.

  Aldridge handed him another sheet of paper. “Because they’ve already asked.”

  The sheet was a copy of a copy of a grainy fax written in simplified Chinese. It was barely legible. It said:

  The People’s Republic of China stands united with the province of Taiwan against the terrorism of the United States of America.

  “That’s a draft the Chinese Premiere is circulating amongst the Politburo,” Aldridge explained. “The final language might change, but you get the idea. The Problem for the KMV is that they’ve underestimated this administration’s resolve to fight terrorism.”

  The President’s Chief of Staff echoed that sentiment with sound bite precision. “The President has repeatedly gone on the record stating that any act of terrorism committed against the United States during her tenure will be answered with the full weight of our resources.”

  “In other words,” Covington said, “we’ll turn Taiwan into a parking lot if they go through with this. To hell with China.”

  “You’re willing to punish all of the Taiwanese people because of the acts of a few terrorists?” Dyson asked.

  “We have to make the cost of terrorism prohibitive,” Romanski said. Dyson wondered if she spoke that way all the time.

  “Ask that question to the families of the Americans who’ll be killed in the Soman attacks,” Covington snarled.

  “Now you see why it’s so important to stop that satellite transmission from releasing the Soman,” Aldridge said. “If we don’t, every possible scenario is an ugly one.”

  “Welcome to the new world order,” Covington quipped.

  Aldridge folded his arms. “We’ve been upfront with you, Mr. Conwell. Now it’s your turn. The clock is ticking. Are you with us or against us?”

  CHAPTER

  61

  Skoloff and Jill were stuck in traffic.

  Skoloff had immediately notified Wayne Thompson about the photos, but his boss wanted to see them personally before asking Aldridge to issue an Orange Alert.

  Jill had retrieved Koxinga’s ESN from his cell phone battery and had the phone company switch his mobile phone account to a new handset she’d bought at a wireless store across the street from Koxinga’s hotel. Any calls intended for Koxinga would now be directed there.

  Skoloff’s car didn’t have a siren. To get back to the CTOC as quickly as possible, he was driving aggressively, shouting obscenities at other motorists.

  The new mobile phone chirped. Skoloff and Jill looked at each other. Jill checked the caller ID, but the number was blocked. She hit the green answer button, but didn’t speak. The caller was silent too, although she could hear breathing on the other end. After a few seconds, the caller hung up. She hoped the call had lasted long enough for the phone company to triangulate the signal.

  She dialed *69, trying to catch the caller off guard with a sudden return call. But she was the one caught off guard when she heard, “You’ve reached the voicemail of Brian Hassett. Please leave a message.”

  CHAPTER

  62

  President Clinton came back into the Briefing Room holding Mahogany’s hand. “I think I’ve found someone who can help.”

  When Mahogany saw Dyson, her swollen face lit up. She ran across the room into his arms.

  “Mahogany!” Dyson exclaimed, overcome with joy at the sight of her. He bear hugged her, lifting her into the air. They embraced for several minutes, staining each other’s shoulders with tears of relief for life an
d tears of sorrow for death.

  The President and her Chief of Staff cried too, even though neither of them had ever met Janaya and didn’t know the little girl with the badly bruised face.

  “What happened?” Dyson eventually asked Mahogany.

  “The lady police officer killed Mr. Hawthorn with her gun,” she said. “And then you and Ms. Janaya fell in the water.” Mahogany looked around the room. “Did Ms. Janaya come back too?”

  “Come back from where?” Dyson asked.

  “From my dream, like you did.”

  Dyson hung his head. “Ms. Janaya is in Heaven, Mahogany. That’s where she’s going to be from now on. Your dream wasn’t real.”

  “Uh huh,” she insisted. “This one was real. It came from you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mahogany told Dyson her dream.

  While she was telling it to him, a group of Secret Service agents with guns drawn swept into the room and hurriedly whisked the President away.

  Wayne Thompson came in behind them holding a stack of photographs.

  CHAPTER

  63

  At sixty-one years old, Doris Parsons was still a force to be reckoned with. She had been working fulltime since she was fourteen, including twenty-four years as a clerk-typist in the Government Printing Office in Washington. Idle relaxation was anathema to her. That’s probably why the first year of her retirement had been something of a disaster. When she wasn’t on the phone gossiping with her former co-workers at the GPO, she spent an inordinate amount of time meddling in the personal affairs of her children and grandchildren.

  Doris devoted extra attention to Janaya, whom she tended to view as an unsuspecting butterfly resting on the open jaws of a flytrap world. When her granddaughter moved all the way up to Philadelphia without a husband, she made Janaya call her every night for the first six months.

  By the second year of her retirement, her family had all but forced their matriarch to find some new hobbies. Her son recommended that she look into becoming a volunteer at the Shaw Community Center. She did, and her volunteer work led her into some of the most rewarding experiences of her life. This was her second year directing the annual Christmas play put on by the Center’s after school program. Eighteen tiny actors in grades two through five were performing this year’s play.

  The fancy video camera that Janaya’s new boyfriend had sent her as a gift made her directorial duties infinitely less tedious. Now she could record every rehearsal and visually show her charges where they needed improvement. And the children enjoyed seeing themselves on the television screen as much as they liked breathing.

  Janaya had told her that the camera had some kind of vitamins or proteins that allowed it to hold more information than the Library of Congress. All Doris knew was that she never had to buy new tapes, which was fine with her. The only thing she didn’t like about it was the bulky antenna protruding out from the back of the device. She thought it made the camera look like a robotic unicorn. She wondered if that were the true reason why the young man had just given it away. It was obviously valuable. She could tell that by the way all the salesmen had reacted when she was searching for a tripod. Two of them had offered to buy it from her.

  “Alright, places!” she shouted. “Let’s do this one more time. And remember, anyone who can’t recite his or her lines will have to work the curtains on Christmas Eve.”

  The children drifted to their places and Doris headed for the camera.

  CHAPTER

  64

  The Americans were so predictable.

  Koxinga sat in a nondescript car, parked half a block from the J. Edgar Hoover Building in downtown Washington.

  He checked his watch. He was sure the police had found the photos and the phone battery by now. The Orange Alert could come at any time.

  He thought about Dawa, the lovely American agent who had so willingly shared her body for her country. He had considered killing her as she slept, but he never went through with it. Some of her kisses had been genuine.

  A burst of activity near the Hoover Building snapped his attention back to reality. A four-car convoy pulled up to the front entrance. That was the sign. He picked up his PDA from the empty passenger seat.

  During the first hour of an Orange Alert, the Secret Service moves the FBI Director to a secure location in West Virginia.

  Moments later, Carl Dunleavy briskly walked through the building’s main entrance, surrounded by four bodyguards in a standard diamond formation. At the precise moment Dunleavy passed under the doorframe, Koxinga deftly moved his stylus around the screen of his PDA. Dunleavy began coughing heavily and clutching his throat. The bodyguards tensed, swinging their heads from side to side, searching for visible signs of danger. One of the agents grabbed Dunleavy by the shoulders and began shoving him towards the waiting vehicle.

  “I’m fine!” Dunleavy barked. “Get off me.” Then he sat down in the backseat of the car, assuming it had just been a hairball in his throat.

  The convoy sped away.

  CHAPTER

  65

  Most of his staff was gone.

  When Aldridge discovered that the CTOC might be the target of an attack, he called a meeting and explained the situation. He gave all nonessential personnel the option of leaving. Nearly three quarters of his staff had taken him up on the offer.

  Dyson stayed. He and Mahogany sat in the rear of a huge conference room, listening to an acrimonious debate. The President was on by speakerphone from a secure location. The uplink footprint in Asia was too large to effectively jam the signal on its way up to the Satellite. A Lieutenant General from the Geospatial Intelligence Agency urged the President to disrupt the signal on the way down by using helium to generate the effect of a coronal mass ejection. An engineer from the National Security Agency pointed out the fact that such an approach was likely to disrupt all satellite communications for an indefinite period, including America’s ICBM early warning constellation. The National Security Advisor reminded the President that the signal could never reach North America unless it was relayed in space by a Chinese satellite called SinoSat-4. He advised her to simply shoot the relay satellite out of Orbit with an ASAT missile, eliminating the threat while preserving our own systems. The Deputy Secretary of State cautioned her against that option, insisting it would be the opening shot in World War Three.

  Mahogany just wanted some apple juice. All the yelling men reminded her of Blake. She squeezed Dyson’s arm for comfort.

  “Snowflakes,” Dyson said loudly.

  Everyone stopped talking and turned in his direction. Some wondered who he was, while others wanted to know what a little girl was doing in a classified meeting.

  “I think artificial snowflakes will work,” he said.

  The NSA engineer said, “We’ve already thought of that and it won’t work. All the birds in the signal relay operate in the EHF band. Airborne debris will cause almost no signal attenuation at such high frequencies.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Dyson said.

  “Who is this guy?” someone asked.

  “Hear him out,” Aldridge said.

  Dyson leaned forward in his chair. “If you release artificial snowflakes at a high altitude near the uplink signal and then douse those snowflakes with a radioactive isotope, you could detect the photons the encryption key naturally sheds as it travels. Once you’ve detected enough of these photons, you can deduct the ground location of the uplink signal and jam it with white noise.”

  “How?” the Lieutenant General asked. “The moment we detect a photon, Heisenberg Uncertainty will come into play. We’ll be detecting disturbed photons that might point us in the wrong direction.”

  “Heisenberg Uncertainty,” Dyson said, “prevents one from measuring momentum and position at the same time. Detecting one will affect the other. I’m suggesting that we don’t try to detect either property. If we’re close enough, the photons lost by the encryption key in the uplink stream will coll
ide with the snowflakes, releasing energy. Because artificial snowflakes are all the same size and dimension, they’ll function like a control group. That is, we can calculate the energy that will be released by a photon colliding with a snowflake for all possible angles. The isotopes will make the snowflakes radioactive, enabling us to record measurements from here with a lidar telescope. Then all you have to do is have one of your programmers write two simple scripts: One to map the energy released by the collisions and another to convert those readings into standard magnetic direction. If the source of the signal is in a fixed position, the readings that occur most often should point us right to it.”

  “Then we can knock it out with Cruise missiles,” Covington said.

  “Or you could just ask the Taiwanese government to shut down the electrical power grid in that area,” Dyson suggested. “To reach a satellite from the ground, the uplink signal will require a huge antenna that needs a lot of power. Shutting off the electricity should cut the link. You won’t need any missiles.”

  “And you think Taiwan—and China for that matter—won’t mind us dropping radioactive materials into their airspace?”

  “If you use a small amount high in the atmosphere, the Sun will break it down into biologically harmless elements at daybreak,” Dyson said. “That’s why it’s essential to do this at night. Backlight from the Sun will make useful photon measurements impossible.”

  The engineer checked his watch. “It’s almost two in the morning in Taiwan. That leaves us about four and half hours before sunrise.”

  “That’s not enough time,” the Deputy Secretary of State said. “Even if we sent a jet from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, we’d have to get flyover rights from a dozen countries, including China. And that won’t happen in four hours.”