Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

“I had a lot of help.”


“Don’t sell yourself short, King. You were thrown into an impossible situation, and you held it together.”

King wondered if the men who hadn’t made it back would agree with that assessment.

Deep Blue quickly switched gears. “However, our most pressing need right now is to bring those rogue operators down. Need I add, with extreme prejudice?”

King thought about what Parker had said earlier, during the first meeting with Keasling. “I think maybe we should be more focused on the question of why this happened, and what it is the enemy wants.”

“The CIA is working that angle, but gathering intelligence will be an essential part of the mission.”

“So you don’t have a clue?” It came out with more sarcasm than he intended, but Deep Blue let it slide.

“It would be dangerous to assume anything at this early stage. It appears that this action was completely unconnected to current military operations, but whoever is behind this was able to coordinate with the insurgents that attacked you last night. We can’t dismiss the possibility that this is a bold new terror plot.”

“The CIA contractor—Therion—was the target,” King said. “They wanted her for something. She’s a code-breaker; maybe they want her to hack into the Pentagon computers? Steal nuclear launch codes?”

“Now you understand why we have to act quickly and without full knowledge of our enemy’s goal.” Deep Blue must have sensed King’s earlier concerns, and after a pause, he continued. “You probably think that I’m playing a game with your life, and the lives of your men. Perhaps in a way that’s true, but it’s a game we have to win. In chess, you can never know exactly what your opponent is thinking, but you can draw conclusions from the moves he’s made. But you must never think that you are a pawn to be sacrificed for victory. As soon as I know something, you will know it, and when it comes to operational decisions, you have the final say.”

In King’s experience, assurances like that came cheaply and were worth even less. He wished he could look the other man in the eye, read the sincerity—or lack thereof—in that promise. “All right, let’s talk about those resources. We know where Rainer is, but that’s about all we know.”

“I’ve already made contact with Shin Dae-jung—the man currently conducting reconnaissance on the target. With the GPS coordinates he gave me, I’ve tasked a KH-12 satellite to get some real-time satellite imagery. That should give you a better idea of what you’re looking at.”

For a moment, King thought he misheard. The nation’s network of ‘eyes in the sky’ was controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office, an independent and specialized agency that kept a very tight rein on its product—detailed satellite imagery—and was positively miserly about the satellites themselves. Requests for pictures of a target had to go up one chain of command and down another, a process that could take days and could be very costly in terms of political capital. Actually changing the orbit of a satellite, a procedure that required the craft to use up some of its very limited and irreplaceable fuel supply, was something that almost never happened.

Deep Blue wasn’t kidding about having unlimited resources.

Maybe this new team was going to work out after all.





TWENTY


The excitement Sasha had felt as she donned the level-four biohazard safety suit in preparation to enter the sealed room where the relic was being kept, climbed to a fever-pitch of elation as she got a chance to actually behold the object—real, tangible evidence that the Voynich code was not a unique occurrence. That was about all that it revealed.

She was able to touch and interact with the object—albeit with a barrier of latex rubber between her and it, but there was little to be gleaned from such physical contact. She laid her hands upon it, turned it this way and that and then poked experimentally at the strange protrusions that were marked with the distinctive letters of the Voynich alphabet. She could tell that the pegs extended into the larger body of the thing, and deduced that they were something like the keys on a typewriter. That would be consistent with the idea that the device had been a type of encryption machine, but somehow it didn’t feel right. She saw no evidence of gears and wheels inside the thing—the kind of things that would be necessary for a rudimentary cipher machine to work. Rather, the hollow body, broken though it was, contained only the remains of a few hollow tubes. The tubes and the wooden body of the thing reminded her of something, but what exactly that was, eluded her.