The Gulfstream V descended from the storm clouds, and Matt stared out the narrow window of the small jet, watching as the green swells of the Allegheny foothills surfaced in the mist. Here and there, the first rust tinge of fall leaves dotted the landscape. DC sweltered, but below, almost three hundred miles away in West Virginia, early autumn had taken hold.
Still, green remained the dominant color. It was the cedars, he knew. The scent seemed to reach up to Matt, but it was just a memory of what he had seen with Laura.
No, not seen with her—perceived.…
Matt had a moment of vertigo as he once again relived his appearance at Borodin’s campsite. The same stuttering avalanche of images and sensations, as disjointed as the strobe lights of the Cradle, had engulfed him after Caparelli was turned down by Lomax. All in the same moment he had smoked cigarettes, drunk Coke, dozed on the picnic table, smelled the cedars, told jokes, carried containment units, painted the van—
The van.
Out of the confusion and chaos of experiencing everything, he’d pulled out the information that Caparelli so desperately needed.
The freshly painted van with the antenna mast. With the logo for VIDEO SUPPORT PARTNERS LLC. With five containment units stacked inside.
That was when Matt knew how the general was planning to do it, and that was what Caparelli had told him to tell Ames.
* * *
The Gulfstream was courtesy of the DHS, and cut four hours from the travel time between DC and White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. It had begun its descent almost as soon as it reached altitude, and one of the fighter escorts that had accompanied it for the half-hour flight from Andrews Air Force Base to the Greenbrier Valley Airport now peeled away. The trees loomed closer, and that’s all Matt could see through the rain-streaked window. No roads, no clearings. The middle of nowhere. Then the last low-rise was cleared and replaced by the tan-and-green checkerboard of farmed fields, and the plane was down.
Humvees were spaced out on the single runway’s service road, along with two yellow fire trucks. The largest collection of vehicles, however, formed a barricade around a section of the tarmac where the instantly recognizable blue-and-white Air Force One 747 was parked. Beyond it, on another, equally protected apron of the tarmac, three distinctive green Sikorsky helicopters were at rest, each with the presidential seal.
Seeing the official aircraft and helos broke Matt out of his reverie. He was in the last hours of an operation with incalculably high stakes. Ghosts, remote viewings, his impending divorce—nothing in his life was as important as what might happen after sunset today. The world could be changed forever.
There was still, however, the chance that by now everything was over. A Department of Homeland Security Special Response Team, led by Owen Lomax, was already on-site, armed with all the information CROSSWIND could provide. Matt might be about to learn that the Russian general and his squad were already in custody, the berserkers safely contained. As if there was such a thing as luck.
Lomax and Ames were waiting for Matt and the others as they stepped down from the Gulfstream’s folded stairs. Despite a runway long enough to handle 747s, the Greenbrier Valley Airport was a small regional facility with no jetways. The DHS director and Secret Service agent looked grim, the hoods of their blue nylon jackets pulled over their ball caps giving only marginal protection from the light rain. Ames pointed to the Chevy Suburban parked off the apron, billowing exhaust twisting up into the wet wind. Matt, Caparelli, and Arlo got in. Ames drove. Lomax gave the report.
“We’ve vetted every news van and trailer on the grounds. They’re all legit. We have biometrics for each member of the media, from every country. We expanded procedures to recheck all supply vans, every trailer. We have Kates Mountain Road and Main Street blocked off for the duration. And we’ve set up checkpoints to stop and search every vehicle passing by the Greenbrier on Highway 64. And we got nothing.” Lomax turned around in the front passenger seat to look at Matt with cold eyes. “Have we missed anything?”
Matt focused, refused to open the door to panic. “Still a couple of hours before sunset.”
“Five hours, twenty-three minutes,” Ames said. “You’re certain he won’t attack till then?”
“Sun has to set,” Matt said. “But the moment it does…” He didn’t have to finish. They all knew the timetable. They all knew when hell would break loose.
Ames drove slowly past other government vehicles on the airport access road. There was a security checkpoint staffed by armed Marines at the T-intersection of the two-lane road it connected with. In one direction, the road led directly to the Lewisburg Readiness Center, a National Guard installation that was serving as a security staging area. In the other direction, a police checkpoint was set up a few hundred feet away at another T-intersection. Ames was known to the personnel he passed, but he still stopped at both places to show his ID.
“Makes sense Borodin doesn’t want to play his hand too soon,” Caparelli suggested. “He could be waiting until dark before making his approach.”
“Then it would make more sense if he’d stolen a tank. A news van doesn’t have a hope in hell of running any of the checkpoints.”
Arlo spoke hesitantly. “He does have berserkers.”
Lomax leaned back against his headrest. “Well, then, I stand corrected. The general could definitely get past the first checkpoint he encounters. But by the time he reached the second one … Gentlemen, the leaders of twenty-two world powers are in the Greenbrier tonight. We have assets with shoulder-launched missiles in the woods. We have helicopter gunships two minutes out. We have two F-35s loitering at all times. Thirty seconds after one of our checkpoints is breached, whoever did it—whatever did it—will be a smoking pile of ash. I am not worried.”
Matt understood that kind of bravado, knew the unadmitted uncertainty that prompted it. “But you still asked us here.”
Lomax gave a short laugh, but said nothing else. Matt understood that reaction, as well.
Lomax wasn’t just uncertain. He was scared.
* * *
The Greenbrier Resort spanned more than 6,500 acres of nature trails and golf courses, real estate developments, hunting grounds, a falconry range, even a casino, but the heart of it was its century-old hotel, a gleaming white jewel set within West Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
Matt recognized the classic lines of the imposing main building, a seven-story, columned, whitewashed pastiche of Washington formalism and Southern Colonialism. The design seemed fitting, considering the resort had been used in the Civil War by both the North and South. In a different life, he and Helena had come here on their first anniversary, a wild extravagance at the time, and little seemed to have changed for the fabled establishment in the decade since.
Given that the resort had existed here as a hot springs spa since 1778, maintaining the illusion of timelessness was one of its selling points. That it was an illusion in line with the deceptive modernization of the hotel was revealed by a more recent chapter in its past. From 1959 to 1992, the hotel had sat atop a continuity of government installation that had been code-named the Greek Island Project. Construction of the 112,000 square foot underground fallout bunker had taken place during an extensive remodeling and expansion of the hotel. In the event of nuclear war, the entire legislative branch of the federal government would supposedly have been relocated here and sealed in with its own air, food, water, and electrical generators. “Supposedly” because as large as the bunker was, no allowances had been made for legislators to bring their spouses and children, and even in Washington DC, there were very few who could contemplate leaving their loved ones to fend for themselves while the bombs fell.
To those families’ good fortune, though, by the late 1960s Soviet intelligence pierced the secrecy of the Greek Island Project. Had war broken out, the bunker would have been targeted with a direct hit by a four-megaton nuclear warhead it could not survive. However, US intelligence was aware of the Soviets’ discovery, and used it to their own advantage by not giving any indication that they knew that the Soviets knew.
Instead, the bunker was maintained war-ready for years. Food supplies were routinely swapped out and replaced with new shipments. Training exercises were held. Emergency communications equipment was tested and serviced by on-site personnel disguised as the resort’s own television repair team. As the Soviets tracked all this activity over the years, confident that in the event of war the survival of the US government could be measured in hours, a new, larger, deeper, and much more secret bunker complex was built in a completely different location, and it had room for families. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the charade that was the Greek Island Project lasted only a few months more. A national newspaper broke the story of the thirty-year secret history of the bunker and it was quickly decommissioned, a relic of the Cold War.
Still, the existence of the bunker was why the nearby small regional airport had a runway that could handle the presidential plane. And though the bunker doubled as a tourist attraction and a highly secure computer data backup storage facility today, the resort’s remote location and bunker-related high-security infrastructure made it a secure choice to host the Anti-terrorism Conference.
* * *
Normally, it was a ten-minute trip from the local airport to the resort, but with the newly added security checkpoints and barricades, getting there took almost forty. Even then, Matt, Arlo, and Caparelli were further delayed as they exited the Suburban and were escorted into a security tent on the main entrance’s courtyard. From there, they went through a pat-down, walked through a metal detector, stood in a chemical sniffer that blasted them with air, and only then were they given laminated photo IDs on lanyards to be worn at all times. Matt noticed his last name was now “Brown,” and that Caparelli and Arlo had also been subject to a name change.
As they left the security tent to walk through the rain to the main lobby, Matt saw that the rest of the courtyard, usually a lush expanse of green grass, was packed with other tents, most of them for news crews. Lomax had said more than three hundred media personnel were accredited, and none of them, so far, had been matched to any of the members of Borodin’s squad whose identities were known.
That was part of the problem the security detail faced. There still were no photos of General Borodin, and only two people on-site could recognize him. One was Matt. The other was waiting in what now functioned as the DHS security office: the Greenbrier’s conference services offices off the main lobby with the boldly patterned, highly colored carpet and equally striking wall prints that were unique to the hotel.
The DHS security office was a crowded warren of temporary cubicles and open areas. Whiteboards with intricate schedules and maps were everywhere, as were large video screens and unsmiling men and women, some in suits, some armed in battle-dress camouflage, even two or three in evening wear, and all with lanyards and plastic ID tags.
Lomax led the others to a corner cubicle, where a young woman with short white-blond hair, obviously new jeans, and an oversize DHS sweatshirt sat in front of a bank of video displays. Lomax introduced the woman as Sofia, didn’t add a last name. Matt was simply “Matt,” and Caparelli and Arlo were Lomax’s “colleagues.” Ames wasn’t introduced. It seemed he and the woman had already met. Sofia’s photo ID, which Matt assumed had also been altered, bore the last name “Green.”
The next thing Matt noticed about her, other than her pallid face and fatigue-shadowed eyes, was the padded bandage covering her right wrist—her hand was missing. She saw where he was looking, held up her stump, and said, “You should see other guy.”
From her accent, Sofia Green was Russian, but Lomax offered no further information. He invited Matt to take an office chair beside her, in front of eight screens, each with six video windows. Each window displayed a succession of views from the hundreds of security cameras deployed throughout the hotel and around the resort. Matt soon noted that almost every individual who appeared on-screen was accompanied by a small green marker—square in shape—that tracked above their heads. Occasionally, a red marker appeared, larger and flashing, but when the person moved or stepped into better light, the red square turned to green.
“We’re running a SPARROW subsystem,” Lomax explained. “Everyone who has authorized access to this site for the summit has had a new photo ID recorded. We’ve made a database of those biometrics, and the system indicates everyone it can positively identify with a green marker. You and Sofia will look for red markers, see if any of them are Borodin.” He showed Matt the controls he could use to freeze images, expand them, and tag individuals. Sofia had a similar control taped to the arm of her chair so she could use it with her left hand.
“Any questions?”
“Where’s Josiah Oliver?” Matt asked.
His detective’s instinct caught the blond woman’s almost imperceptible reaction. She knew the name.
“On-site.” Lomax had put on his best poker face.
“Here? Why?” Matt didn’t bother to hide his surprise.
“Because here he’s in the same protective envelope as the president.”
There was more to it than that, Matt knew. “He’s also bait.”
Caparelli put a hand on his shoulder—apparently he’d known this part of Lomax’s plan. “VEKTOR has its own perceivers, so there’s a good chance they’d locate Oliver no matter where we put him.”
“I thought Borodin was rogue,” Matt said. “Why would VEKTOR pass him information?”
“I’m still not convinced Oliver is Borodin’s target. It might just be a smokescreen.”
“What?”
“Think about it. If all Borodin wanted to do was get revenge on one ordinary man, why do it here? And why bring berserkers? Why not just go to the man’s house and shoot him? Misleading us like that, it could be part of VEKTOR’s plan all along.”
Matt couldn’t argue strategy, but he was intrigued that Caparelli had mentioned VEKTOR, perceivers, and berserkers in front of the woman. Obviously, she was deeply connected. Then he amended his conclusion: Given she was Russian, she was probably from VEKTOR herself.
Sofia caught him looking at her. She smiled, much as he imagined a wolf might before ripping out the throat of her prey. He smiled back.
“Now all is needed is popcorn,” she said, and together they watched the screens in silence.
* * *
Two hours and three false alarms later, Matt gave in to his headache. He put the controller on the table holding the displays.
“I need a break,” he said.
“No you don’t.” Sofia kept scanning the screens, methodical, almost robotic.
“My head hurts and my eyes are tired.”
“You know what berserkers can do?”
Matt hesitated, so Sofia held up her bandaged wrist. “And you complain about headache?”
Matt reassessed her. “Is that what happened to your hand?”
“What happened to my hand was worse. Is why I had doctor cut it off.”
Matt thought of what he and Laura had seen done to living bodies at the hacienda in Mexico. “You survived a berserker attack.”
“Da. This I did.”
“I’ve seen them.”
Sofia glanced at him, doing some reassessing of her own.
“Not in person,” he added.
Sofia gestured to the screens with her left hand. “Like this? Video.”
“No.” Matt paused, unsure how much more he should say.
But he didn’t have to say anything. Sofia raised her eyebrows, impressed. “You are, what would you say, a perceiver.”
Matt wondered if that were true. All the experiences he had had so far involved Laura Hart. She was the true perceiver. He was just … “Yeah, I suppose I am.”
Sofia leaned closer, conspiratorially. “You have power to change world.”
Matt hadn’t thought beyond the moment, but he realized she was right.
“Which is why,” she whispered, “I must kill you.”
Matt rocked back in his chair as if she had hit him, and she laughed. “Americans. All so serious.”
Matt sat forward again, acknowledged that she had got him.
“So how’s head now, cowboy?”
“Still hurts, but I’m not complaining.”
“Good. Hope for you yet. We keep watching. Maybe save some lives.”
Matt picked up his controller, started scanning the screens again, checking the color of the marker above each person. He even saw the president walk along a hallway for a few seconds. The square marker above his head was green.
The power to change the world, he thought. The president had it, without a doubt. Do I?
* * *
During the next hour, the SPARROW subsystem experienced a slowdown when two briefing sessions finished at the same time and the Greenbrier’s colorful hallways and lobbies filled with hundreds of people at once. Suddenly, dozens of individuals appeared with flashing red markers—not that they hadn’t been recognized, but because the local system didn’t have the resources to match them to their biometrics profile in a timely manner.
Matt and Sofia had alerted security staff to the high number of false alerts, and two technicians had arrived to reset the system. When the screens had all gone dark, Sofia stretched and said, “Now you take break.”
Since they weren’t permitted to leave without an escort, they were taken separately to washrooms, then to a table with sandwiches and coffee, then brought back, a guard remaining outside their cubicle. The screens were still dark. Matt had heard thunder rumbling from outside, but one of the technicians assured him there was no danger to the power supply. The resort had its own generators, courtesy of the bunker and its need to have uninterruptible power for its enormous data storage servers.
So they waited, eating their sandwiches. Matt saw Sofia ate as mechanically as she had watched the screens: a small bite, ten chews, swallow. Then repeat.
She caught him looking, again, didn’t seem to mind. “Are you soldier?” she asked.
“Detective.”
That seemed almost as acceptable as being a soldier. “Like CSI?”
“You get that show in Russia?”
“I’ve seen it.”
It struck Matt that she was being evasive, keeping up a conversation while adding no information about herself. Cop’s instincts kicked in. “Are you a soldier?” he asked.
“Father, brother, two uncles, yes. But me, no.”
He kept going. “What do you do?”
She gave a half smile, as if recognizing the game they had started to play. “Research.”
“For VEKTOR?”
“No, no. Could not get clearance.”
“But you know about them?”
“Of course. And perceivers and berserkers. Is what I research.”
“How do you know General Borodin?”
“Interviewed him. Once.”
“What do you know about his son?”
She sipped her coffee, seemed to be trying not to smile. “You must be good cop.”
“Misha, right?”
“Is tragedy. Father loses son. Not right what he tries to do now, but … I understand.”
“So you’re here to stop him.”
The smile again, giving away nothing. “I am here to help your people stop him.”
“No,” Matt said. It was as if he could read every word she wasn’t saying. “You tried to stop him.” He looked at her bandaged wrist. “He sent a berserker after you. You know how to fight them. Which makes you a soldier. For VEKTOR.”
Sofia laughed. “You have good, what would you call it, imagination. Very wild.”
Matt ignored her denial. “How do you fight berserkers?”
She seemed to decide the game had ended in a draw. “Hope you never find out.”
The screens came back to life, and after a moment’s delay, every person on them had a green marker.
Sofia turned back to begin watching. “Good show. Even better than CSI.”
* * *
Another hour passed, and Matt dutifully scanned the video windows in each screen, falling into the pattern of Sofia’s methodical movements. But he didn’t believe there was any point to their efforts. As good as the security envelope was, Borodin would never have undertaken his mission without knowing a way around it.
“How would you do it?” he asked Sofia. “Come after Borodin’s target through all this security?”
“I wouldn’t. If point is to kill, then like other guy said: Better to get target at home, on way to work, someplace else.”
“Then why’s the general coming after him here?”
“Because he can.” Sofia kept her eyes moving over the screens. “Is called, sending a message, yes?”
“Who’s the message for?”
“You are perceiver. You tell me.”
Before Matt could ask another question, Caparelli returned to the cubicle. His blue jacket was soaked, his hair plastered to his forehead. He wanted Matt to come with him. It was half an hour until sunset. Matt knew what that meant; so did Sofia. She wished him luck as he left, but never took her eyes from the screens.
“Nothing?” Matt asked as they made their way through the security office.
“I’m wondering if the general played us. He knew our perceivers would be tracking him, so he set up a false plan to distract us. The stolen news van is a decoy to get us looking in the wrong place.”
Matt wasn’t so sure. “But if the target is still this Josiah Oliver, that means the general still plans to hit him here.”
“Then where is he?”
They crossed the exuberantly decorated red-and-green lobby and headed up a sweeping staircase flanked by a green-toned wallpaper with extravagantly oversized tropical fronds. Matt could guess where they were going. “I think you’re about to ask me to find out.”
“Good call, Detective.” They came to one of the hotel’s guest rooms on the third floor. Caparelli used a keycard, and the door clicked open.
Arlo was waiting inside. Three black equipment cases, opened to reveal complex electronics, were jarringly out of place in the quaint room. Its bold primary colors and strong contrasting patterns made Matt think of children’s birthday decorations. “What’s that?” he asked.
Arlo looked nervous. He held up what looked to be ski goggles with blackened lenses, trailing a twisted set of wires. “Projection Mask. Not much of a substitute for a Projection Room and Cradle, but best we can manage in the field.”
Matt looked at him, then at Caparelli. He knew what they expected him to do, and the risk it meant. But now that Laura had ceased to exist, destroyed with the berserker by the EM pulse from the Cradle, he realized he no longer cared about risk. They needed his help, and he would give it. “If it works,” he said, “and I make contact with Borodin, what happens if he sends another berserker?”
Arlo looked away, and that told Matt what the stakes really were: If another berserker came after them here, without an EM pulse defense, they were helpless.
But Caparelli wasn’t ready to give up. “Don’t give Borodin the chance.” He had peeled off his jacket, was using a towel from the bathroom to dry his hair. “You see him, you let us know, we pull you out five seconds later. He won’t be able to respond in time, but you should get an impression of where he is.”
“Should?”
“At this point, you’re all we’ve got.”
“Sunset in five minutes,” Arlo said. Then he coughed, his throat dry. It was already dark outside. Between the storm clouds and the foothills, the sun was long gone from the sky. But its electromagnetic effects in the upper atmosphere would continue until it had dropped below the horizon.
There was another flash of lightning. Thunder followed a few seconds later, the storm moving closer.
Matt settled back in the brightly striped armchair Arlo had indicated. He tried to relax, but his headache had returned. “Is lightning anything I need to worry about?”
Arlo made some adjustments to the goggles. “Only if it hits you. Just a few frequencies are problematic.” He placed the goggles over Matt’s eyes, adjusted a strap to hold them in place until not a trace of light got through. Matt could feel the young man’s hands tremble. More and more he was realizing what he was about to do could quickly become a suicide mission.
“This’ll be just like the Cradle,” Arlo said. “You see the blue light?”
Like a single star rising, a point of blue radiance appeared in the darkness, and Matt understood each of his eyes was receiving a slightly different placement of the light, because he had to focus on it as if it were several feet away, the illusion very convincing.
As soon as he confirmed he could, indeed, see the light, Arlo had him say the general’s name, then repeat it just as he had before, for Norma Chu.
To either side of the blue dot, white lights began to strobe, the sequence alternating between chaotic and controlled. The general’s name became nothing but sound without meaning. The light washed out Matt’s vision and—
—Laura took his hand.