Zero Option

18

At Stafford’s request, Ray Sparks agreed to go to lunch with him.

Stafford had not wanted to discuss what he had learned at Willow Grove right there in the office. They went to a local chain restaurant, where he reviewed what had happened to date. Sparks was politely skeptical.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You have no direct evidence of any crimes at the DRMO. All you’ve got is a strange occurrence at the airport involving this guy, Carson, and a teenage girl from an orphanage, whose director claims the girl is some kind of psychic. The girl can’t physically speak, and all this woman can produce is the girl’s drawing of a cylinder and her impression that the cylinder is a bad thing. Right?”

“Not your basic winning grand jury package, is it?”

“Well, there you have it, Dave. I mean, I know you’ve barely scratched the surface at the DRMO. You’ve been there — what, two business days altogether? I think you ought to forget all this extraneous stuff and see if you can find out some way the guys at the DRMO could — fix the auction process and make some damn money.”

Stafford was silent for a moment as Sparks finished his sandwich.

“Trouble is,” Stafford said, “I’m beginning to think there’s something else going on. I know, I know, all I’ve got is a gut feel. And it’s not what I’m supposed to be looking for, but something else, out there at the edges.”

“Your trademark, as I recall,” Sparks reminded him.

Stafford grinned. “Yeah, but tally it up: that weird guy coming up to me and talking about immunity, and then telling me to find Bud Lambry. Next day, Lambry’s house has been blown up. The employees down there seem to have a hate-on for the manager, and they knew from the git-go that I was a cop and not some auditor down from DLA. The incident at the airport?

Well, who knows what that means? Except I’ve got a responsible citizen telling me that it’s happened before around this girl, accompanied by evidence that she was able to visualize what someone else was thinking.”

“Evidence’?” Sparks said, looking at Stafford over the tops of his glasses. Stafford had trouble meeting Sparks’s eyes.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Sparks said. “What’s your ‘evidence’ tell you is going on?”

Stafford threw up his hands. “Beats the shit out of me. Maybe this is just a case of my trying to make this assignment into something, when we both know that it’s mostly a put-up job.”

Sparks tactfully did not reply to that, concentrating instead on stirring his sweet tea. Stafford was beginning to feel like a fool for even bringing up the psychic angle. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go back to the DRMO auction angle.”

Sparks grinned at him. “Was she good-looking? This Warren woman?”

“Up thine, as the Quakers say,” Stafford replied.

Colonel Fuller was chairing the afternoon meeting when Brigadier General Carrothers came in and sat down. The Security Working Group space had been set up as a mini command center, with secure communications, status boards, a conferencing facility, and several PCs. Fuller gave Carrothers a quick recap.

“General, it’s now fifteen-thirty. The reaction team should arrive at Fort Gillem in. about an hour and a half,” he said. “Two semis, one with the troops and their gear, the other with the sensor pack and comms suite.”

“Plain vanilla trailers, right?” Carrothers asked. “No visual markings?”

“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” one of the majors said. His name tag indicated his last name was Mason. “Anniston is treating this as an exercise of their Civil Chemical Emergency Response Team. There will be one officer on the team who knows what this is really about. Everyone else on the team will think itls a routine exercise. We arrive about seventeen hundred to minimize contact with employees.”

“Good. What’s the procedure?”

“The trucks will go in as unobtrusively as possible, park, and take initial readings while the main team itself remains in containment. If there are no immediate sensor hits, the team leaders will determine where the Tooele containers are and then proceed to secure that area for individual inspection.”

“And if they’ve already been destroyed?”

“Then they’ll check the demil facility itself, and whatever by-product assembly areas are connected to demil.”

“We expect the sensors to find nothing,” Colonel Fuller interjected.

“The cylinder is, of course, hermetically sealed. If the containers are still there, and if it’s in one of the containers, they’ll retrieve it and get out of there. If the containers have already been destroyed, they’ll have to run some tests on the demil output streams to see if there’s any residual evidence that the cylinder itself was processed.”

“If it went through demil and contaminated that facility, what do we do then?”

“That’s not likely,” Fuller said: “This is Wet Eye we’re talking about.

If that hftd happened, we would have already known about it. The whole world would have already known about it.”

Carrothers thought about that and then nodded. He was about to ask another question, then stopped short. He gave Fuller a sign that he wanted to talk to him privately, and he left the room. Fuller came out a minute later, joining Carrothers in the empty hallway outside the room.

Fuller was General Waddell s friend, but he did not really know Carrothers. He kept it formal. “Yes, sir?”

“See if I have this right: The best outcome is that the environmental containers are all still there, we find the cylinder, get it out of there without anyone knowing it was there, and declare the ‘exercise’ successful, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the worst outcome is that all the containers have been destroyed, and we find no evidence of the cylinder, chemical or otherwise?”

“Not necessarily, sir.”

“Huh? Ambiguity is not in order here, Colonel.”:

“It might be, General,” Fuller said, pausing while a staff officer walked by them. He walked Carrothers through the container demil scenario, being careful to highlight the assumptions. “Yes, we’re pretty sure we lost one. No, it did not get loose. The screw up is an internal matter, which we deal with internally.

Shoot some guilty bastards and close the records.”

“That’s the mother of all cover-ups you were talking about.”

“Yes, sir, sort of. But what purpose would be served by admitting we lost one, if no harm was done?”

“Colonel, what worries me is that there’s always the possibility someone found the cylinder and kept it.”

“To do what?”

“To sell it, of course.”

Fuller looked both ways up and down the hallway before answering. “We feel-that’s a highly unlikely possibility, General.”

” ‘We’?”

“General Waddell and I,” Fuller replied smoothly.

“Carrothers gave him a long look. He started to object, but the significance of that-“We” was beginning to penetrate. A “right answer”

was developing here.

“Okay,” he said. “Have the team leader report the moment they find something, or when he has concluded it’s not there.”