Arlington, Virginia
Ghostly was the word that came to Walter as he stood on the cyber lab’s front steps and stared at the nearly-deserted parking lot. A few pole lamps glowed, but the moonless, jet-black sky easily overwhelmed them. The nighttime air was warm and muggy, but Walter shivered. He wasn’t a paranoid sort of fellow, but something felt wrong tonight. He took a deep breath to calm himself. The faint smell of slightly brackish water in the nearby Potomac River seemed to help, but his parked car was more than two hundred feet away and cloaked in inky darkness. His heart beat faster as he took the first few steps toward it.
On a whim, Walter had stopped at the cyber lab on his way home from work to run a quick computer simulation he’d been thinking about. He planned to finish up in time to be home for dinner, but he got wrapped up in his work. Now, it was nearly ten p.m. and to make matters worse, he hadn’t let his wife know about his unscheduled stop at the lab. She must be worried as hell, he thought, privately scolding himself for leaving his phone in the car.
About halfway to his vehicle, Walter thought he heard the faint sound of footsteps behind him. He silently prayed it was just his imagination, but was it? Now his heart wasn’t just beating faster, it was pounding, and the hairs on the back of his neck were standing at attention. He was afraid to look back, desperately wanting to reach his car and lock himself inside, but his bum knee slowed him down.
He hurriedly pressed the key fob’s unlock button. The double-chirp was a welcome sound, but the small degree of relief it provided was short-lived. Just as his fingers touched the door handle, two strong hands gripped his shoulders from behind. Walter resisted, but he was no match for an assailant who brutally slammed him to the pavement. He felt a rough cloth bag yanked over his head, then someone pulled its drawstrings tightly around his neck. A pair of hands grabbed his left foot; a second pair of hands grabbed his right. Walter struggled to breathe and tried to shout for help as he was dragged along the asphalt, but the only people who likely heard him were his captors.
* * *
The White House, Washington, DC
The Next Evening
President Coles eyed the antique clock on the mantle above what had earlier been a hardy blaze in the fireplace. Now the flames were little more than a glowing pile of embers. It was getting late, nearly eleven p.m. He sighed and turned to the man sharing the Oval Office with him—Secretary of Defense, Ray Tate.
“Your visitor is late, Ray,” the president said, frowning.
“Indeed,” SecDef Tate replied after a long sigh. “I’m sorry I had to ask you to meet with him this evening, but I don’t think it should wait until tomorrow. I’m sure he’ll be here soon.”
“I’ll trust you on that. It’s been a long day and I still have some papers to review. I’ll be in the library. Leah will let me know when he arrives.”
“Of course,” Ray answered. He rose from the light-brown Chippendale chair and waited for the president to leave. And then he started to pace.
Outside the White House, a dark sedan pulled over to the curb on H Street, its wipers swiping away a thin film of mist. Fog was moving in—not pea soup level yet—but thick enough to put halos around the glowing streetlights and give the White House a foreboding look.
A lone passenger got out while the driver remained behind the wheel. A police officer in a shiny yellow rain slicker unlocked and opened the entry gate for the man while a Secret Service agent waited just inside the guard shack. “Follow me,” he said as the visitor passed through. The agent turned and hurried to the hedge-lined walkway. The visitor had to pick up his pace to catch up. A moment later, a guard posted at the White House’s rear entrance opened the door and let them in.
Less than an hour ago, Leah Samuels-Price, the president’s chief of staff, had sent a driver for the visitor, saying only that her boss, President Stanley Coles, wanted to see him immediately. Leah was waiting for him just outside the Oval Office, and after a brief welcome, she led him inside. SecDef Tate was standing near the center of the room, and when the two men saw each other, they both smiled. Ray Tate was a man the visitor knew well, liked, and admired.
“Devon,” Ray said, “It’s so good to see you. Thank you for coming. Please have a seat. The president will join us momentarily.”
The visitor nodded and they both sat down. “I’m sorry you were summoned on such short notice,” Ray said, “but what you sprung on me a few hours ago was very disturbing, and I thought the president should know about it immediately.”
Before the visitor could respond, President Coles entered and moved quickly to the Resolute Desk. The visitor and Tate rose and the president hastily motioned for them to sit down.
Coles looked like he’d aged several more years than the three that had passed since Inauguration Day. His fifty-five-year-old face under a full head of curly gray hair had looked almost boyish on the day he was sworn in, but now it bore numerous worry lines and considerable bags under his eyes. Despite the stress that was no doubt the cause of his aging appearance, the visitor knew that Coles planned to run for reelection. His approval ratings weren’t in the proverbial toilet, but they weren’t stellar either. Winning the election in less than a year was anything but certain.
The president took his seat. Skipping pleasantries, he turned to the SecDef and said, “You set this meeting up, Ray, so you kick it off.”
“Yes, Mr. President. This is Dr. Devon McNeely. He’s director of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”
“Nice to meet you, Dr. McNeely,” the president said, glancing at him only briefly.
McNeely shifted in his chair and quietly said, “Thank you, sir.” Given the circumstances, he expected a rather righteous ass-chewing from President Coles.
“Let’s get right to the point, Ray,” the president said impatiently to his SecDef. “You told me a scientist is missing. Why is his absence so damned important that the three of us need to gather after eleven o’clock at night?”
Rather than answer, Ray addressed McNeely. “Devon, you’re up to bat. Please tell the president what’s going on.”
“Yes, sir,” McNeely replied. He cleared his throat, hesitated a moment, then met the president’s gaze. “Dr. Walter Boldt is no ordinary scientist. He’s the brains behind a revolutionary magnetic propulsion breakthrough that gives us an enormous space warfare advantage.”
“This is a very big deal,” the SecDef interjected. “That’s why I insisted you know about it tonight.”
“Then let’s proceed,” Coles said, his eyes boring into McNeely’s. “What do you think happened to him?”
“We don’t know for sure, but Walter didn’t come to work this morning and he didn’t call to say he wouldn’t be there. We put security on it right away, and when they contacted his wife, she told them he failed to come home last night and he never called her. She notified the police, but we at DARPA didn’t get the word.”
The president rolled his hand, signaling for McNeely to continue.
“His car wasn’t in its usual spot at DARPA headquarters, but a security officer at a remote cyber lab run by NIST—the National Institute of Standards and Technology—found it in their parking lot late this afternoon. It wasn’t locked and his iPhone was inside.”
“Anything interesting on the phone?” Ray asked.
“It was locked, and we gave it to the Bureau. They think they can break into it, but it might take as long as a week.”
“How about surveillance?” the president asked. “There were cameras, right?”
“Unfortunately, no,” McNeely answered. “And that’s only part of the problem. That particular cyber lab has a fenced-in parking lot but no guard to monitor it. There’s an open gate with a sign that reads ‘NO PUBLIC PARKING. US GOVERNMENT AND OFFICIAL VISITORS ONLY’. So, getting in and out of that lot is completely on the honor system.”
“Why the hell is security so lax at a government cyber lab?” the president asked.
“All of the work done there is unclassified, and the lab is usually open to all government personnel as well as contractors and invited foreign nationals. There’s no security to speak of inside the building, other than a single guard for each shift—days, eves, and mids—who keeps an eye on the lab equipment and tries to keep unauthorized people out.”
President Coles leaned back in his chair and slowly shook his head. “All right then,” he said. “Speculate for me. Give me your best-and worst-case scenarios as to what might have happened to Dr. Boldt.”
“Best case, Mr. President, is he intentionally met someone there last night, left his car behind, and went with whomever it was for personal reasons. Maybe he’d had a fight with his wife and needed to get away. Or perhaps he forgot to tell her he had plans with a friend. He might also be having an affair and decided to meet his lover in the parking lot and go someplace with her. If any of those are the case, he’ll most likely show up soon.”
“And the worst case?”
McNeely looked at Ray then back at President Coles. He frowned, cleared his throat again, shifted in his chair, and said, “Mr. President, I fear Walter likely defected.”
“Defected?” the president said, abruptly rising from his chair, leaning forward, and placing his hands on the desk. “Why do you think so?”
“He had to know the cyber lab’s parking lot wasn’t guarded or surveilled. It was a perfect place for him to leave his car and meet someone who could get him out of the country. Also, we checked his desk and his computer and didn’t find anything regarding his work that would allow us to continue with the project. We fear he might have taken valuable information with him. We’re concerned about him leaving his phone behind too. He might not want to be tracked by its GPS.”
“And if Dr. Boldt did defect,” the president said, “where do you think he went?”
“We don’t know, but wherever it is, the possibilities of what they could do with his magnetic propulsion knowledge are frightening. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to find him and bring him back quickly, even if it’s against his will.”
“How soon is quickly?” the president asked, taking his seat. “Do we have a day? A week? A month?”
“I can’t say for sure, Mr. President. FLINTLOCK is a very complex and compartmented program so Walter doesn’t have all the pieces, but his magnetic propulsion invention is what makes it all work. If we don’t get him back within a week, I’d say, it will likely be too late to prevent him from sharing enough details to be catastrophic for us. The significant space war advantage he’s given us will virtually evaporate.”
“A week,” the president said, rubbing his chin.
McNeely shifted in his chair again, practically squirming, and then continued. “And there’s another complication. We’ve begun to deploy FLINTLOCK, but you won’t be able to activate it without him. Everything is locked down tight, and until it’s fully tested and certified, it can only be unlocked by Walter’s biometric characteristics. The bottom line is, if you want to use the new space weapon for any reason, you won’t be able to do so without him. Everything we’ve sunk into FLINTLOCK will be for naught if we can’t bring him back.”
“FLINTLOCK,” the president said, steepling his fingers and staring at McNeely. “A word that keeps coming up. What is it, anyway? A program so damned secret no one dares tell me about it? I certainly hope not, doctor. That’s not something I’ll tolerate.”
McNeely blinked and looked at the SecDef, who said, “I’ll take it from here if that’s okay, Mr. President. Devon had nothing to do with that.”
“Alright,” the president replied, glancing at the clock again, and then at McNeely. “You’re excused. Thank you for coming. We’ll be in touch if necessary, and please do let Ray know if you learn anything about Dr. Boldt’s location.”
McNeely stood, nodded to both men, and left the Oval Office. When the door closed behind him, President Coles stared at his SecDef and said, “What the hell, Ray? If FLINTLOCK is so goddamn important, why haven’t I been briefed on it?”
“That’s on me, Stan,” Ray answered, leveraging their friendship to break protocol by referring to the president by his first name, which was common for Tate whenever he and the president were alone together. “I wanted you to have legitimate deniability about any knowledge of FLINTLOCK in case something went wrong. It’s the kind of program that will be terribly damaging to you if it’s exposed.”
“How so?” the president asked.
“It involves a revolutionary, physically-intrusive weapon that we’ve already started to deploy. If that becomes known, it will surely trigger international outrage. And you can be damn certain that asshole Speaker of the House would take great pleasure in impeaching you. The Senate would probably vote to convict you too. Throwing you under the bus would be a great way to ease international tension.”
“And that’s why you kept me out of the loop?” the president asked. “To protect me? Very noble, Ray, but I suspect it’s more along the lines that I might not have authorized whatever FLINTLOCK is, and you wanted it to proceed no matter what. Am I getting warm?”
The SecDef lowered his eyes, stared at the Oval Office’s royal blue carpet for a moment, then slowly nodded. “That’s partly true, Stan, but FLINTLOCK is a game-changer. It has the potential of preventing a war or winning one, so I gambled that I could sell it to you after it was fully tested and deployed. But the deniability reason is absolutely true too. I would have taken full responsibility, and you could have sworn under oath, and been completely honest, and said you knew nothing about FLINTLOCK. Now you can’t.” He waited a moment, then said, “If you’d like, I can give you a rundown on FLINTLOCK—what it is and what it does.”
Coles groaned and shook his head. “Not tonight. I’m certainly curious, but I’m beat. It’s been a hell of a day, and I’d like to hear about FLINTLOCK when I’m able to give it the full attention it no doubt deserves. I’ll take a raincheck. Let’s just focus on Dr. Boldt for now. He’s apparently the key to everything, so we sure as hell better find him fast.”
“Agreed,” Ray said. “And if he did defect, it’s our worst nightmare. We’ll need to bring him back when he doesn’t want to come back, and we can’t send the military or CIA because whatever country he left for will grant him protection under the International Humanitarian Law. In my opinion, Stan, we have only one option. I think we need to activate Peregrine.”
“Christ, Ray,” Coles said. “You know how risky that is. Peregrine is our last resort. We lost one of the team last time, and the program was nearly exposed. What if they get caught this time and the fact that you and I authorized it comes out? We’ll probably both end up behind bars.”
“It’ll be risky for sure, but if we’re caught sending the CIA or a Seal Team, the entire immunity-for-defectors house of cards will probably collapse. Others will use it as an excuse to do the same thing to us, and people who defect here will no longer be safe. Peregrine would at least have a chance of not being linked to the US Government—and more specifically to you and me—if the mission goes to hell.”
President Coles sighed, put his hands on the edge of the desk and rose from his chair, “Shit, Ray,” he said, frowning. “I’ll authorize Peregrine, but we’d better pray to God it isn’t exposed.”
