LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Come on, Steve. Find me something.” Bill McCreary was hovering nervously over Steve Goodwin’s shoulder at the computer terminal in the DTAI workroom at CIA headquarters.
Goodwin mashed furiously on the computer keyboard with his beefy fingers. “I’m working on it, boss.”
“Damn it, work faster.” McCreary quickly paced away to the other side of the room. “Ana?” he said quietly into his radio transmitter. “Mike?” For the third time in as many minutes, there was no response at all. “Crap,” he whispered. This was quickly becoming a disaster.
McCreary’s cell phone buzzed. “Yeah?” he answered sharply.
“Bill, it’s Bob Armstrong. Anything yet?”
“No, Admiral,” said McCreary in an exasperated tone. “I’ve lost all contact with them. To tell you the truth, I’m about ready to call in the big guns.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“What, you think I want to? Sure, that’s just what we need. Some big clusterfuck two blocks from the White House. You think we’ll be able to keep a lid on this stuff after that?”
“Then don’t do it. Just give them a little more time. You’ve got to trust your people to get the job done.”
McCreary exhaled loudly. “Admiral, I’m going to level with you. I don’t trust your guy Califano at all. He’s a loose cannon. He doesn’t follow protocol. Hell, I don’t think he even knows what the word ‘protocol’ means. And honestly . . . he’s just weird.”
Armstrong laughed dryly. “Bill, you worked at DARPA. Don’t tell me you haven’t worked with some weird people before.”
“Yeah, some of the folks at DARPA are quirky. Maybe you could even call them weird. But Califano . . . he’s more like criminally insane. I’m telling you, I just don’t trust him.”
“Well, I do,” said Armstrong firmly. “I’ll stake my career on it.”
“You may have to,” McCreary muttered.
“Hey, boss?” said Steve Goodwin over his shoulder.
“I gotta go,” said McCreary. He abruptly terminated the call with Admiral Armstrong and turned his attention to Goodwin. “Yeah? You got something?”
“Maybe. Take a listen.” Goodwin clicked his mouse and turned up the volume on his computer. Suddenly, sporadic voices could be heard crackling over the speakers amid a high level of static.
McCreary stepped closer so he could hear better. The voices were just barely audible over the heavy static.
“Ty na mista?” said one man’s voice.
“Tak, vse gotovo,” said another.
“What the hell language is that?” McCreary asked.
“Not sure,” said Goodwin. “Sounds like Russian or maybe Polish. It’s hard to tell.”
“Where’s it coming from?”
“The Secret Service has scanners that continuously monitor all point-to-point radio transmissions near the White House. I’m picking this up from one of their feeds at 467.6875 megahertz. It’s probably a commercial walkie-talkie, and my guess is it’s being used within about five blocks of the White House.”
“That would include the church, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Send the feed to our language folks. Let’s find out what language it is and what they’re saying.”
“Already did that. I’m just waiting—” Goodwin paused and skimmed a message that had just popped onto his screen. “Here it is. The language is Ukrainian. It’s a group of eight to ten men, and they seem to be positioning themselves for some sort of operation. One of them— Hold on. I just got another one.” Goodwin was quiet for a moment as he skimmed a new message.
“Come on, what is it?” asked McCreary impatiently.
Goodwin shook his head. “Take a look.”
McCreary leaned over Goodwin’s shoulder and read the translation that had just been provided by the CIA’s Ukrainian language specialist:
SPEAKER 1: [Garbled] What about the woman?
SPEAKER 2: Kill her if you need to. We only need [Garbled, phonetic: mal-uh-kī]. He has the [Garbled, phonetic: Thur-mond] material.
SPEAKER 1: Understood. Take him alive?
SPEAKER 2: Yes, alive. We need him to lead us to the [Garbled].
“Who the hell is Malachi?” McCreary asked.
“That must be our carjacker from Thurmond.”
“And what do they think he’s going to lead them to?”
Goodwin shrugged. “Don’t know, boss.”
McCreary shook his head slowly and wiped his brow. Christ. This was turning into a disaster. He pressed the transmit button on his microphone. “Ana and Mike, if you can hear me, the church is crawling with foreign operatives. Could be as many as ten of them. And they’re looking for someone named Malachi, who we think is our guy from Thurmond. Be careful.”
There was still no response.
Shit.