Chapter 10

CHAPTER 10

L ucy continues pulling in power, our airspeed easing past 155 knots, or almost 180 miles per hour, as we near the Civil War battlefields in Manassas. Vast rolling green fields are spotted with cannons and monuments surrounded by wooden palings. The trails snaking through are busy with tourists before the bad weather moves in.

“Are you expecting anyone in particular to show up at Porto Sicuro?” I study the dark clouds above the mountains, the wind gusting harder.

“Whoever abducted him was after something,” Lucy replies. “It wasn’t just to take him out or he’d probably be inside his crashed truck with a bullet in his head. Not dropped naked into the middle of a theme park after being held all night somewhere.”

“Your theory about what someone might want beyond passwords to critical facilities such as Green Bank?” I ask.

“And also the massive radio telescopes at Sugar Grove that as you well know are busy tracking what Russia and other enemies are up to,” she adds.

“Sal didn’t need to write down passwords and other sensitive information to remember it,” I reply as we fly over a school. “Anybody who knew much about him would be aware of that.”

“The passwords we’re talking about are incredibly sophisticated cryptology that changes constantly,” Lucy answers. “Even if Sal could recite the most recent ones it wouldn’t have done any good. And you’re not given the current password until you’re inside the observatory’s control room. The minute you leave, the password is changed again.”

But that doesn’t mean Sal didn’t have valuable information, she adds. In the wrong hands the security procedures would make it easier to figure out the key to hacking in. He also knew the identities of personnel involved in the intelligence community and could have blown the cover of agents in the field.

“That’s a very big incentive for our enemies,” Lucy explains.

“Is there a chance his abductor gained access to this sort of information?” I can’t imagine anything much worse for Sal and wouldn’t expect him to cooperate.

“I don’t know what might have been given up, but it appears we’re lucky so far,” Lucy says. “Green Bank, Sugar Grove and others are already taking extra security measures. Certain members of the intelligence community were forewarned the instant we realized Sal had been abducted.”

“This is the first I’ve heard that he was doing work at Sugar Grove,” I reply. “He’s talked about research projects at Green Bank but not the NSA station.”

Within fifty miles of each other, their massive radio telescopes are critical to global security, only the NSA isn’t scanning for black holes, asteroids and signs of life in the universe. Their mission is to intercept all electronic transmissions entering the eastern U.S. In other words, to spy, mainly on Russia and other enemy nations, but also on Americans.

“Sal never mentioned Sugar Grove to me,” I tell Lucy.

“He wasn’t going to discuss something like that with you or most people,” Lucy says.

We’re following I-66 now, nothing below us but farmland. I’m feeling the winds intensifying, pushing us around, and I ask about Marino. She can see him on camera in her “smart” glasses.

“Headset off, eyes shut, gripping the armrests,” she reports. “Just like last time I checked.”

“Green Bank isn’t actively engaged in spying that I’m aware of, but Sugar Grove is.” I get back to that. “And this leads me to the Russians.”

I look at Lucy, checking for any sign that she might be thinking about the enemy we tangled with not long ago and have been plagued by forever. A devil as old as evil itself. Someone I would eradicate given the chance, and I try very hard not to go into that dark space. I don’t want to give anyone that much power, but Carrie Grethen has it by the sheer dint of her existence.

An internationally wanted criminal and perhaps one of the most dangerous psychopaths I’ve ever dealt with, she managed to weave herself into the tapestry of my life. There’s scarcely any part of it she’s not touched since I was first confronted with her violence during the early days of my career. It was a relief beyond description when I heard she was captured and had died in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

For years I believed she was gone, only to discover months ago that it wasn’t true. Since then, I’ve assumed she’s in Russia, where she ended up after a prisoner swap, and I bring her up while Marino can’t hear us.

“Any chance it’s her? That she’s behind this? Maybe she has some nefarious connection with Ryder Briley?” I suggest, and the thought is appalling. “Is it possible she orchestrated the kidnapping and murder of Sal? And staged it to look like so-called aliens did it?”

“Yes and no,” Lucy says. “Carrie very well may be the mastermind of whatever is going on. But I don’t believe Sal’s death was staged to look like an attack by ETs. I don’t think it was staged at all. The UAP on radar was real. We just don’t know what it means.”

She explains that the unidentified object was picked up intermittently before vanishing near the Oz theme park. Then the UAP was picked up again on and off in the area of Waynesville. Apparently, the mysterious craft caused spikes and flashes on multiple sensors, including those at Green Bank and Sugar Grove.

“It stayed below five hundred feet, the signal difficult to distinguish from the noise floor,” Lucy is saying. “Which I believe was a deliberate evasive maneuver.”

“What’s the explanation, assuming Carrie’s involved in Sal’s death somehow?” I watch blossoming orchards flow by through the plexiglass beneath my feet. “How would that account for a UAP dropping the body overboard?”

“I don’t have an explanation yet.”

“She obviously has a score to settle,” I suggest.

“Carrie’s had a score to settle for as long as I’ve known her and doesn’t need a reason. But yes, it’s possible she’s responsible for having Sal assassinated. This is the sort of thing she would do if it serves her bigger purposes while punishing whoever she decides.”

“I just hope we’re not the reason he’s dead.” I look out my side window, the sky not as blue, more like washed-out denim. The storm continues to build above the mountains.

“That’s exactly the sort of thing Carrie would want you to start obsessing about,” Lucy says. “And if she’s to blame, she has more than one reason. Hurting us and those we care about is her dessert. It’s not the main course. What feeds her is power.”

I find it disturbing that Lucy talks about her in a familiar tone as if they still have a relationship. And maybe they do in a horrible way.

“The Oz theme park is connected to us because I used to take you there when you’d come visit,” I say to Lucy. “Does she know that?”

“I might have mentioned it during our time at Quantico. Probably when we were running the Yellow Brick Road.”

She’s talking about the FBI Academy’s obstacle course, and I still have the yellow-painted brick from when I completed it with her the first time. She often ran the Yellow Brick Road with Carrie, and it would make sense if Lucy mentioned the Oz theme park. She was a college intern at the academy when the two of them met. Carrie is twelve years older and can be irresistibly charismatic, like any successful psychopath.

An IT contractor working at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility on the academy grounds, she was tasked with supervising Lucy while developing the Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network known as CAIN. It wasn’t long before I realized that they had become more than colleagues and friends.

“If she’s formed an alliance with the likes of Ryder Briley, that would seem of great concern to all of us,” I point out.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s gotten involved with him,” Lucy says. “He funnels untold millions into elections across the country, all of the candidates having the same thing in common. They’re extremists who want to destroy our democracy.”

The old city of Front Royal is beneath us, its farmland and orchards drawing visitors from all over. I can make out the white-columned courthouse where I’ve testified in murder trials, often stopping for lunch in a former feed mill converted into a diner. I always order the fried chicken salad. Marino is partial to the cheeseburger, and I shouldn’t think about food as hungry as I am.

I catch glimpses of silos and barns, of railroad tracks and aboveground swimming pools as we near the Front Royal-Warren County Airport. Lucy makes a traffic call over the radio, alerting other pilots that we’re out here, announcing our altitude and heading. No one answers, and we cross over the center of the single paved airstrip, not an aircraft in sight, the hangar doors closed.

The Shenandoah River is bright with colorful canoes and kayaks. The elevation is climbing, and we reach the first foothills. The storm front is mounting like a tsunami behind the mountain ranges where we’re headed.

The countryside becomes more desolate as we cross I-81, cutting through the wilderness of Lost River State Park, nothing much to see but trees and rocky outcrops. As we get closer to West Virginia, Lucy describes the damage Carrie Grethen could inflict were she to take control of the radio telescopes at Green Bank and Sugar Grove. From them she could hack into others around the world and in outer space.

“We’re talking about the Naval Observatory’s atomic clocks, for example,” she’s saying. “The Department of Defense relies on them as the time standard for our GPS satellites, the time on our phones and everything else. Nothing would be safe, including NASA telescopes and probes in our solar system and beyond. Everything’s connected.”

“Imagine the computer programs that depend on the accurate time,” I reply. “It would be catastrophic.”

“And that’s just the beginning of the damage. What a coup, ensuring Carrie’s status with the Kremlin,” Lucy says, and it continues to bother me how easily she utters that name. “The havoc she could cause is unthinkable. I’m talking apocalyptically bad.”

“Where is she? Do we know? Still in Russia, far away from here, I hope, doing her maliciousness by proxy.” I watch Lucy carefully, her dark-tinted glasses monitoring a passenger jet at our eleven o’clock. “Do you have any idea of her whereabouts? Specifically, at this very moment?”

“I wouldn’t assume she’s still in Russia,” Lucy finally says.

“ Assume? That’s a word I don’t want to hear.”

“When she wants to be off the radar she will be, and we don’t know where she is right now.”

“You’re saying that our government has lost track of her,” I reply as my heart sinks.

“Yes.”

“I was hoping that wouldn’t be your response. When?”

“After Thanksgiving.”

“Any chance she’s in the U.S.?” I hope to God the answer is no.

“We don’t have a reason to think it. But that doesn’t mean much.”

“No, it doesn’t. And she could be. That’s what you’re saying, Lucy.”

“She might be close by, for all we know. Which is why I want to identify everyone who’s accessed Sal’s property in recent memory.”

We’re nearing Harrisonburg, and I recognize James Madison University’s Federal-style brick buildings, red-roofed and columned. Then we’re gaining altitude, flying over the Blue Ridge Mountains, the winds blowing harder. Lucy’s known for months that Carrie Grethen is unaccounted for. Benton would have the same information, no one telling me.

I understand why they can’t and have been kept in the dark before. I’m used to it, but that doesn’t make it less hard to take. The fact that Lucy is admitting it now also tells me she strongly suspects Carrie is a clear and present danger.

“I think we should check on Marino so he doesn’t feel we’ve forgotten him.” My impulse is to keep turning around to look, but there’s nothing to see except the partition.

“He’s still got his eyes shut,” Lucy replies. “And it’s not even all that turbulent yet. Nothing like it’s going to be.”

We’re now twenty minutes from crossing the border into West Virginia, and there’s the not-so-trivial problem of getting Sal’s truck out of the ravine.

“I’m going to have to sling-load it up to the road before the rain moves in,” Lucy explains. “The body’s protected in an enclosure, but Sal’s wrecked pickup is out in the open. We don’t want to lose any evidence. And look who’s back. Sleeping Beauty has opened his eyes at long last and put his headset on.”

She switches the intercom setting as I gaze at the Appalachian Mountains in the distance, an ocean of rolling hills under our feet thick with dark green trees.

“Marino, you still with us?” Lucy asks.

“You seeing the damn weather coming toward us like a freight train?” His voice is tense in our headsets. “And how is it okay for you to fly this thing inside the Quiet Zone?”

“Doctor Rao is one of the astronomers Sal had dinner with last night. By the time we get close she’ll have the telescope in sleep mode to protect it from our transmissions,” Lucy explains.

That also means they won’t be able to pick us up on radar or anything else, making it tricky to communicate our location and what we’re doing, she says. The only recourse is to talk over the helicopter’s satellite phone.

“Let’s give her a try,” Lucy says, and I hear the ringing through my headset.

“Welcome back,” Dr. Rao answers.

“A race against the storm,” Lucy says.

“I can’t see you yet. I’m looking out my window.” The Green Bank astronomer has an Indian accent.

“We’re ten miles to the northeast, Route Ninety-Two under us.”

“I’d like you to do the same as before, please. Turn on a one-ten heading when you’re five miles from the observatory.”

“Roger that.”

“You will want to follow Route Four around Buffalo Run again,” Dr. Rao instructs. “You’ll see the police cars and the flatbed truck.”

“The ground crew’s in place and all set?”

“They’re ready for you.”

“Thanks again for your help.” Lucy ends the call. “Marino?” she asks. “You alive?”

“Barely. How much bumpier is this going to get?” He’s very unhappy.

“We’re going silent again. Got some tricky maneuvering to do. You might want to take another pill and close your eyes like you’ve been doing.” She flips the switch on the intercom before he can respond.