70
North of Mitú
Colombia
THERE SHE IS,” RANDI SAID, dropping her duffel on the dirt airstrip and pointing into the jungle.
The plane was a large turboprop but it was hard to tell the exact make through the modifications, rust, and camouflage paint. Smith approached a little hesitantly, looking at holes where rivets should have been and the cracked glass in at least a third of the windows. Zellerbach just stopped dead, suddenly forgetting the cloud of insects buzzing around him.
“This is it? This is the plane you told us about? What’s wrong with the one we flew here?”
His alarm was understandable but there wasn’t much they could do. Dresner had intelligence capabilities so cutting-edge that there was no way to anticipate them. While every effort had been made to ensure that the planes used by Covert-One were completely anonymous, it was impossible to guarantee in a post-Merge world. This plane, though—while maybe not entirely airworthy—could never be tracked back to Fred Klein or the president.
“It’s better than it looks,” Randi said, recruiting Smith to help pull the camo netting from the fuselage. “And my friend left a laptop with a satellite link inside. He says it’s a super-fast connection.”
“I’m not a child you can ply with candy.”
“Suit yourself. Did you bring a magazine? Maybe you could just hang out in the sun and read.”
Zellerbach looked around him at the jungle, at the old truck they’d driven there, at the mosquitoes.
“Come on, Marty,” Smith said, yanking off the last of the netting and opening the door. “It’s got air-conditioning.”
Of course that was a lie—the heat billowing out of the plane felt like a kiln—but it did prompt the sweating hacker to inch closer.
Zellerbach peeked inside and crinkled his nose as Randi made her way to the cockpit. The seats had all been ripped out but, true to her word, there was a card table with a laptop on it near the back.
“There is not air-conditioning.”
“Gotta start the engines first,” Smith promised, lacing his fingers and offering Zellerbach a boost up.
He followed and closed the door, looking back to see Zellerbach on his knees examining something on the floor.
“Is this cocaine?” the hacker said, bringing his nose within a few inches before Smith grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to the table containing the laptop.
“Just dust from the insulation, Marty. Why don’t you fire that thing up and see if you can get online.”
It was another lie. The plane belonged to a Colombian acquaintance of Randi’s who had helped her do away with a couple of Hamas guys looking to get into the drug trade. It had been a mutually beneficial operation—she got rid of two terrorists and he got rid of two potential competitors—that had gone smoothly enough to prompt them to stay loosely in touch.
Once Zellerbach was settled and had forgotten the coke in favor of the even more addictive glow of the computer screen, Smith went forward and took the copilot’s seat.
“Nice rig,” he shouted, putting on a headset as the props came up to speed. “You think it’ll actually make it over the Atlantic?”
“Diego swears it’s a cream puff.”
She eased the throttles forward and the plane bumped its way to the makeshift runway.
“And you trust him?”
“Truth be told, he has a thing for me. And he’s dying for me to go to work for him. Apparently, he has some other competitors he’d like retired.”
“Good work if you can get it.”
She grinned and twisted around to look through the tattered cockpit curtains. “Hang on, Marty!”
Despite its appearance, the plane felt solid as they lofted into the air and began to bank out over the jungle. Randi had an intense expression of concentration on her face and Smith remained silent. With her questionable skills and the unfamiliar aircraft, her focus was best left unmolested.
After a few minutes, they leveled out and she relaxed a little. The brief calm before it got dark and instrument-flying was required.
“What did Fred say?” she asked.
Smith had spoken with him on the way to South America, keeping his end of the conversation necessarily opaque due to Zellerbach.
“He talked to the president.”
Randi winced. “Shit. I knew it. It’s a bad call, Jon.”
There was no denying that it was a risk. Klein wasn’t willing to go completely off the books with this many lives at stake, though, and he’d been fairly certain he could convince the president that the risk to his family was limited.
“Yeah, but for now at least, Castilla’s solid. And with the White House behind him, Fred has free rein to look into ways to mitigate the effect of Dresner pulling the trigger. They’re using an anti-terrorism study on the vulnerabilities of the power grid to see how fast they could take it down. There’s a chance that we could put most of the major cities on the East Coast in the dark over the course of a few seconds. And at the same time, we could pull the plug on the military networks.”
“How much would that cut casualties?”
“Maybe thirty percent in the U.S.”
“But everyone else in the world gets hammered.”
“Yeah.”
“And when they figure out that we knew and didn’t warn them, how’s that going to go over?”
Of course, she was right. But there was just no way to get the word out with Dresner watching. All it would take was one insignificant slip.
“That’s not all they’re looking at, Randi. Nothing’s off the table.”
“Including taking Dresner up on his offer to make a deal?”
It was an interesting question. Klein was strongly against it, but Castilla wasn’t a spy, he was a politician.
“Probably, but there’s no point in worrying about it. If they cut a backroom deal and we get called off this, then at least the pressure’s off.”
She nodded knowingly. If their plan went south—and it probably would—more than a million people could die.
They hit a thick layer of clouds and Randi turned her attention to climbing above them. When they were back out into the sunshine, she glanced over at him. “What if Castilla does make a deal? What if five years go by and suddenly twenty million just drop dead. Would you rebuild?”
“What do you mean?”
“The military. Fire back up the carrier groups and the tanks and the infantry. Sometimes, I think it all feels like a throwback to a different time. Now it’s all about nukes and people who are willing to fight guerrilla wars for the next ten generations. But we’ve got all that stuff and we’re used to it, so we perpetuate it.”
“I don’t know what I’d do,” he said honestly. “What about you? The CIA completely missed the fall of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring, and just about everything else that’s happened in the world. Are you sure you’re worth the money we spend on you?”
“Maybe not,” she admitted. “What if the agency had never existed? Would the Soviets have invaded? Would al-Qaeda have destroyed us? I mean, I think we do a lot of good but if we had a clean slate, I’m not sure I’d set up the world the same way.”
Smith leaned his head back and managed an exhausted smile. “What would you and I do in a world full of peaceful happy people?”
“God,” she said, actually shuddering. “Can you imagine? Everyone smiling and helping each other out? I’d have to—”
“Jon!” Zellerbach shouted from the back, cutting her off. “Jon! Come quick! Hurry!”
Smith leapt from his seat and ran back to where his friend was gesticulating wildly toward his computer. “What is it, Marty? Are you okay?”
“I’m a legend!” he said. “A god! And I didn’t have to do anything!”
Smith looked down at the photo of a strategically pixilated naked man accompanying a report on CNN’s homepage. The text beneath it told the story of an unknown hacker accessing the NSA computers and putting similar pictures on all the screensavers.
Once again, Fred Klein had come through.