Darpa Alpha wi-11 Page 4

  “It’s been raining,” Aussie repeated.

  “Uh-huh.” Horse racing was the team’s venue of choice for issuing an alert to the other team members, the track chosen somewhere in the world where there’d been bad weather in the last twenty-four hours.

  The general was already Googling Churchill Downs: an inch of precipitation in the last twelve hours.

  “The eight horse,” Aussie told him, “is a good mudder. So put a packet on him if you want to make a bundle.”

  “I don’t know,” said the general, feigning disinterest should his phone be tapped by any of the myriad agencies that were now watching their own citizens more closely than ever before in the ongoing war against terror. “There must be other nags in that race who can run in the mud, Aussie.”

  “Yeah, but not like this one. Jockey told me this horse loves the mud, digs deep, no slipping and sliding. The mother of all mudders, General.”

  “I don’t know,” the general repeated. “Unlike you Aussies, I’m not the betting type. A ticket in the Power-ball now and then, maybe, but you know what they say about the lotteries.”

  “Yeah, yeah, tax on the stupid. Our mate Choir’s been singing that song to me for years. ’Course he doesn’t gamble,” continued Aussie sarcastically. “He invests. But he’s not on my case today. He’s got one hell of a hangover from last night, and has to hightail it to catch a flight back to — where’s that burg he lives in in Washington?” It wasn’t a burg, it was a small township nestled in the hills on the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains.

  “Winthrop,” the general answered, and answered jokingly, “He’s not sick already?”

  Choir Williams, one of the toughest of the tough in Special Forces, having been trained first by the British SAS, Special Air Service, at Brecon Beacons in Wales. He was notorious for getting motion sickness. Choir, they used to joke, would get sick on an early-morning dew, but, like his grandfather and so many others who’d been violently ill on that gray, ugly morning of June 6, 1944, in Normandy, once he was in action, it was the enemy’s turn to suffer.

  “He’ll be fine,” said Aussie, rubbing it in. “I’ll give ’im a coupla greasy fried eggs ’fore he leaves.”

  Choir’s terse response could be heard in the background.

  “You be sure to make the bet, General,” Aussie pressed. “The eight horse. I guarantee it.”

  “Oh,” came the general’s retort. “So you’ll give me a refund if it doesn’t win or place?”

  “Stone the crows!” said Aussie. “I’m not that stupid.”

  “I’ll think about it, Aussie. Thanks for calling.”

  When Freeman hung up, he scribbled “8, Churchill Downs” on his bedside Post-it pad and got up to spin the Rolodex file for the team’s letter-for-number code that had been disguised on one of the three-by-five-inch index cards. The cards contained everything from specs about the new weapons coming out of DARPA to the dimensions of the new Wasp-class carriers of the kind that the team had used on earlier missions and which housed helos and vertical takeoff and Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. The Rolodex also held the specifications for the object that looked like a marking pen that the general nearly always carried in his shirt pocket when out of the house.

  Consulting the Rolodex’s file for this day’s one-time pad — that is, this day’s number-for-letter code — he wrote down a seven-digit number prefixed by a three-number area code. But to make sure his end was as secure as Aussie’s had been, the general would now have to use a landline outside the house. He knew the NSA had hired hundreds of Arab-speaking translators post-9/11, but he suspected some Arab agents must have slipped through the net, using the NSA’s intercepts for their own intelligence networks. Such was the paranoia of the world after 9/11.

  He grabbed his Windbreaker and zipped it up, feeling a stiff breeze coming off the ocean, and headed down to the 7-Eleven again. He stood impatiently while a lanky, dirty-haired, earring-in-tongue youth of about twenty, who could see that the general was anxious to get on the phone, turned his back on Freeman and proceeded to loll against the wall of the phone booth, indulging himself in a long, banal conversation with his girlfriend, the communication consisting of repetition of “y’know” and “totally” and “like.” Like the general would, you know, like to pull the insolent son of a bitch right out of the phone booth and totally put him in the Marine Corps; give him a Parris Island haircut, feed him to the drill instructors, and teach the kid a few manners.

  The youth was picking his teeth with a broken fingernail as the general left, cooling down, telling himself he’d been through his own rebellious time as a young man, but assuring himself that he’d not put anything in his body that didn’t belong there. As his self-righteous mood abated, he walked off to another phone booth four blocks away to dial the number Aussie had given him.

  “Hello?” It sounded like Aussie, but there was a lot of static on the line.

  “Clear?” intoned the general.

  “Clear,” came the reply.

  The general hesitated. As his old Special Forces outfit knew, he was a stickler for details. It wasn’t only his normal disposition that made him so but the experience of having a mission in Iraq compromised because of an English-speaking insurgent having successfully imitated a U.S. Ranger, calling down mortar rounds on U.S. positions. The interloper had used only “clear” instead of the full “clear fore and aft,” but had sounded so much like an American that the SpecFor team had taken out four Rangers before realizing they’d been set up for a blue on blue. And so the general, although he was 90 percent sure it was Aussie on the other end, said, “Clear is insufficient reply. I say again, clear is insufficient reply.” The static increased. The general heard, “Clear fore and aft.”

  “What’s up?” asked the general, still on guard. Since 9/11, nothing was safe — voice mail, e-mail, snail mail, and especially text of any kind. What was it J. P. Morgan had advised? “Never write anything down.”

  “Got a phone message this afternoon. From an old girlfriend of ours.”

  “Yes?” said Freeman. The static eased up, but then surged.

  “Well, she said she couldn’t talk earlier because of the pressure of work.”

  The general still felt uneasy, the static doing nothing to abate his lingering suspicion.

  So, thought Freeman, Homeland Security or the FBI had gotten to Marte.

  “What did she say?” asked Freeman, maintaining a casual, almost bored, tone.

  “She said she wished she could have explained more but that her brother had been in the room.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Freeman. Big Brother. A CNN boss? Or a DHS official?

  “Did she like the card I sent her?” It was the team’s phrase for more information.

  “Oh yeah. She said it was a little sentimental but every word was true. She loved hearing your story about Eleanor Roosevelt, the French fries, and that kid who told her she had such big ears.”

  Freeman was so keen to jot down the message, he had at first mistakenly taken out the fake DARPA marking pen from his shirt pocket instead of the regular ballpoint before reminding himself of the “no text” rule. He’d have to commit it to memory.

  “Oh yeah,” said the general, laughing casually. “I remember that incident — cheeky damn kid. Where was that? On the campaign trail for FDR down in Louisiana?”

  “No, you’re way off.” It was said good-naturedly. “No, remember, the story was that she was flying out west for FDR and it was some VIP’s kid on the plane who insulted her.”

  “Yeah,” said Freeman in the tone of one who was just now recalling the full details of an old joke. “And she says to the cheeky kid, ‘Never mind my ears. Your nose is longer than a French fry,’ right?”

  “That was it. But I never believed that bit about her saying that to the kid. From what I remember of my history lessons, Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t like that. So, okay, she mightn’t have looked like a Hollywood film starlet, but she was a kind woman and she d
id a hell of a lot for this country. She was FDR’s right-hand woman, right?”

  “Right,” said Freeman, committing these three things to memory: Eleanor Roosevelt, the kid’s supposed comment about her “big ears,” and “French fries.” None of these words used by Aussie were likely to trigger automatic NSA, FBI, or DHS phone taps. Besides, the computer-heavy NSA, quite apart from the DHS and the FBI, simply didn’t have enough manpower. The computers were programmed so that certain giveaway phrases such as “terrorist,” “assassination,” “attack,” and “the Great Satan” would automatically trigger an NSA computer to record the conversation for later analysis. On the off chance that any terrorist infiltrator from any of the security agencies had been plugged in, neither Freeman nor Aussie had made any reference to a DARPA breaking and entering. And Eleanor Roosevelt, French fries, and big ears weren’t the kind of words that would alert NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

  “Gotta go,” said Aussie. “Someone else wants to use this phone.”

  Back at the house, the general brewed another cup of “velvet Java,” as he liked to call the smooth, black liquid that dripped from Margaret’s old but thorough filtration system. As he waited for his favorite Pyrex glass mug to fill, the one with the faded insignia of his old Third Army on it, he mused over three things. First, Aussie’s mention of “an old girlfriend of ours” clearly referred to Marte Price. Second, she had felt her message urgent and sensitive enough to call Aussie Lewis, whose number she would have from one of her interviews with the general’s team following one of their celebrated raids. And third, she wanted to get the message to Freeman quickly without phoning him directly, having eschewed e-mail, snail mail, or courier service — all of which could be, and were being, opened under the Patriot Act. If DHS and the other agencies had come down on her so hard about this “nonstory,” then they were certainly going to check any e-mail or phone calls from and to her office and home. She had done the smart thing, obviously having left the office, and chosen a landline to call Aussie. But what in hell did her message mean? He shook his head in ironic acknowledgement of the odd, ofttimes mundane, names that had been used to hide military secrets and the turning points of history: “Climb Mount Nikita,” the three words that launched the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and the names Juno, Sword, Omaha, Utah, and Gold, the designations of the four beaches used in the Allied invasion of Normandy, and, for Freeman, the moving line of Paul Verlaine’s poetry, “…blessent mon couer d’une langueur monotone”—“…wound my heart with a monotonous languor”—being the long-awaited signal that galvanized the Maquis, the French Resistance, to rise en masse against the Nazis. At least Freeman now realized that the original B and E story was true, and that Aussie’s phone message from Marte Price was trying to help him identify the base.

  All right, then, how about Eleanor Roosevelt? What did her name signify in history? Freeman remembered how Marte had once lamented to him that one of the most depressing things in her career as an investigative reporter and news anchor was discovering just how ignorant Americans are of history. Not only the history of far-off places such as Iraq but the history of our own country as well. And, she’d noted, the ignorance wasn’t confined to the United States. She’d told him how she’d had to cover the visit of one of Canada’s former prime ministers, Paul Martin, who was giving a televised speech at a military base to celebrate the D-Day landings in Normandy but who called it the “invasion of Norway.” And there was the Canadian cabinet minister who didn’t know the difference between France’s pro-Nazi Vichy government and the famous Battle of Vimy Ridge in World War I, where the Canadians had charged and broken the German line. But Marte hadn’t told him anything special, or at least anything that he could remember, about Eleanor Roosevelt. And what on earth had she to do with Aussie’s mention of French fries and big ears? Freeman, an avid history buff, had never heard such a story about FDR’s wife, and believed that a child’s supposed insult to the first lady was a red herring that Aussie had dropped into the conversation merely to get the phrase “big ears” into the message. The general had considered the possibility that a callow youth could have actually said something so rude and hurtful to the first lady; there had certainly been a lot of cruel, if unpublished, allusions to her looks during the war by many who had opposed FDR. It had been bad enough that FDR had polio, the scourge of his generation, and was in iron leg braces and a wheelchair, the press having had a gentleman’s agreement that they would never photograph the leg braces or focus in too closely on the two Secret Service men who had to stand by the president at every function, holding him by cupping his elbows. Marte and Freeman had talked about that little-known historical fact and how JFK’s severe back pain and his Addison’s disease had also been kept from the public.

  Freeman smiled affectionately at the memory of their chat about FDR, and he did recall Marte pointing out how the first lady had done so much good, not only for the wartime generation but for everyone, how the guy in the street, like his father, had loved FDR, the man in the wheelchair who had served the longest term, more than thirteen years, of any U.S. president, and who had led America out of the terrible years of the Depression. He had stood up against Hitler and helped save England, despite the pervasive mood of isolationism against him, and had vowed to stop the stomach-turning brutality that was the modus operandi of the marauding empire of Japan. And through it all, Eleanor, like so many uncomplaining wives, had borne her husband’s darkness with him and had become indispensable.

  Freeman had been Googling the Net for “Eleanor Roosevelt,” “French fries,” and “big ears” connections all afternoon. By the time the evening news came on, he was getting a headache from staring at the flickering screen. Nothing about any break-in at a military base. He remembered Watergate; that had started to unwind because a B and E had been reported. The story that was grabbing TV headlines this day was another “worm” attack on the Net. Some jerk, working for a big corporation, had left a port open on his laptop and the perpetrator had downloaded the worm into the corporation’s mainframes. Once more he went to his laptop, bringing up databases for Eleanor Roosevelt and cross-referencing keywords from them with defense-based links. What he found were “umpteen” entries, as Margaret would have described them if she were still speaking to him.

  Eleanor Roosevelt had sure traveled. He Googled “big ears” specifically on the defense contractor linkages. Nothing. There was an “Ears,” or rather “Golden Ears” provincial park in Canada not that far north of the big sub base at Bangor on Washington state’s Hood Canal, but there were no references indicating a joint U.S.-Canadian armed forces base. But when he saw that this provincial park, the equivalent of a state park in the United States, was landlocked, he thought of a possibility so obvious he was embarrassed that it hadn’t occurred to him earlier. Was it possible that there was a navy DARPA base somewhere inland in the United States? It didn’t make sense, but he ran it. There were only a few, but one of them was in Idaho. Potatoes? French fries? A possibility.

  He zoomed in. It was situated on a lake, Pend Oreille, in the Idaho panhandle, thirty-six miles northeast of Spokane. Spokane itself was east of semi-arid desert country, much of it now irrigated, but Pend Oreille was in a thickly forested valley between the eight-thousand-foot-high Bitterroot Range and the Cabinet Mountains wilderness area which, the general noted, placed the lake between northeastern Washington and northwestern Montana in an area that thousands of years ago had been deeply scoured by glaciers. Then the computer crashed. Why, he had no idea, but it forced him to curb his excitement, having to admit, with a crossword puzzle addict’s reluctance, that even if he was correct in his assumption that Idaho was a key to unlocking Marte’s message, it was still only one of three clues he’d been given, and nothing was making sense. He needed to know more before he could call National Security adviser Eleanor Prenty with his theory that someone was trying to kill a story about a B and E just as someone in the Nixon administration had tried to kill
Watergate.

  Then, just as suddenly, another connection presented itself. Eleanor Prenty and Eleanor Roosevelt. He sat back, massaging his neck muscles.

  Was there anything more that he could glean from Aussie’s conversation? The general had long been a believer, as all who had served under him knew, in Frederick the Great’s adage “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!” And it sure as hell was going to take audacity to call his wife in the middle of Linda Rushmein’s shower so soon after the verbal firefight over Marte Price. But the damned computer was down and he was impatient. Besides, the fact was that Margaret was fluent in French. He wasn’t.

  “Hello?” It was Linda Rushmein on the phone.

  “Hi. It’s Douglas Freeman here. Could I speak to Margaret?”

  “I didn’t think you two were on speaking terms,” replied Linda tartly.

  “Could I speak to my wife, please?”

  Cold as ice. He could hear women’s laughter in the background, but when Margaret came on there wasn’t a trace of humor in her voice. “Yes?” It was as if he was a telemarketer interrupting dinner.

  “Hi, sweetie,” said the general. “How’s the party going?”

  “Fine. What do you want?”

  It felt like he was standing in a force 8 gale without his thermal underwear. “Look, I’m sorry to bother you, Sweetie.” Crawl on your belly, General. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

  “What do you want, Douglas?”

  “Well, first I want to apologize. That was thoughtless of me going out earlier to call like that, but you see it was important that I use a landline other than the one in the house. I’m in a phone booth now.”

  “Is this more secret stuff?” She made it sound seedy.

  “It’s more secure on an outside landline,” he told her. “Anyway, I’m sorry I upset you. I can fully understand how you must have seen it.”