Zero Option

35

“I’ve got Mr. Sparks’s office on secure, General,” Major Mason said from the doorway.

General Carrothers picked up his handset.

“This is Brigadier General Lee Carrothers, deputy commander of the Army Chemical Corps,” he announced.

“This is Leslie Smith, General. I’m the regional DCIS office manager in Smyrna. As I just explained to the major, Mr. Sparks is not available to speak to you, sir.”

“He’s not there? When will he be available?”

“He’s not available to speak to you, General,” she repeated patiently.

“I can’t say when he will be available, sir.”

Carrothers frowned. “You telling me he won’t talk to me, Ms. Smith?”

“I’m just telling you what Mr. Sparks told me to tell you, sir.”

Carrothers held his temper. She wasn’t being disrespectful; she was merely doing what her boss had told her: that he wouldn’t take this call. -, “Okay, Ms. Smith, I understand. Do you have a secure fax number? I need to send something down there that might make Mr. Sparks change his mind.”

She gave him the secure fax number. He thanked her and hung up.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “This guy Sparks won’t take my call.”

Colonel Fuller gave the general a bemused look. “You practically arrested one of his people,” he said. “Held him for a day on a closed post, made him take a lie-detector test, and then turned him loose without so much as a by your-leave, and his boss won’t talk to you?

Unusual boss, this day and age.”

“Maybe. Although I don’t think Stafford knew who I was.”

“He knew it was Army Chemical Corps hassling him, General.”

“Yeah, well. Mason, send a copy of this spot report to this number,” he ordered, handing Mason the paper. “Addressed to Mr. Sparks. Make sure my name and secure drop are on the cover sheet.”

“Yes, sir. Right away.” Mason left the office.

“And Colonel Fuller, when he’s done, I want you and Major Mason to sit down and design a special response team that would be capable of recovering and decontaminating, if necessary, a Wet Eye exposure incident. From both the CW and the BW perspectives.”

Fuller nodded slowly but then frowned. “I can do half of that, General.

The CW side should be pretty straight forward. The chem team and their transport vehicles MOPPed up to the max. Standard decontamination procedurescurrent MOPP gear will protect the troops against the chemical agent. But as I told you, we can’t know what the bugs ‘are doing in there. Or what kind of toxins they might be generating. What granularity, for instance vis-avis the respirator filters.”

Carrothers considered that. “What’s the only absolutely, positively surefire method of eliminating biologic toxins, Colonel?”

“You just said it, General. Fire. Serious fire. As in napalm, thermite, carbon-arc fire, atomic weapons fire.”

“So if I thought a cylinder of Wet Eye was hidden in a building?”

“I’d incinerate that building. I’d bring up a flame throwing tank and burn the bastard into lampblack. Think Waco, Texas. Burn it to a smear.”

“That’s a bit extreme, Colonel.”

“So’s a Wet Eye exposure event, General.”

Colonel Fuller left the office, closing the door behind him. He looked around for Major Mason. The clerk told him the major was down the hall using the secure fax station. Fuller stood there thinking for a moment.

He asked the clerk where General Waddell was.

“He’s on the West Coast, Sir.”. “Do you have a phone number for him?”

“We can reach the general, sir,” the clerk replied warily. “General Carrothers has asked Major Mason and me to reconstitute the Security Working Group. We’ll need that secure conference room again. And I need you to get a ‘discreet message to General Waddell to call me immediately. And I mean me, not anyone else. Understand, Sergeant?” He looked meaningfully at General Carrothers’s closed door. “General Waddell and I are longtime personal friends, and I need to talk to him very privately and very soon. You can word that anyway you want to, as long as it goes out in the next five minutes or so.”.

The clerk was writing this all down. “Got it, Colonel. I’ll let you know as soon as I reach the general, sir.”

Stafford asked to use the phone in Owen’s office, where he called Ray Sparks. Ray’s secretary put him on hold for a minute and then came back on the line.

“Mr. Sparks wants to know if you have your portable with you,” she said.

“Yes. It’s out in the car.”

“He said to get it and then call back in secure. Quickly.”

Stafford hung up and went out to get his computer. The sheriff asked him what was going on. “Gotta make a secure call to the local DCIS office, Sheriff.”

“That looks like a portable.”

“It is; there’s a secure telecomm function built in.” The sheriff followed him back into Gwen’s office but withdrew when Stafford gave him an “excuse me” look. As he dialed the Smyrna secure number, he saw the sheriff and Gwen exchange a few words on the porch, and then the sheriff was picking up his hat. Gwen came over and stood in the doorway. He decided to let her stay and listen. The secure link came up with the Smyrna office. Sparks came right on, and Stafford put him on the portable’s speaker.

“Dave. There’s something you need to know about. It was faxed down here from the Pentagon by a brigadier general in the Army Chemical Corps.

It’s an intel spot report, according to which, a subject named Stafford has gone into the arms business.”

“Ducky. What is this Stafford Communist supposed to be selling?”

“A chemical weapon. He’s asking for a million bucks.

This general wanted to talk to me this morning, but I stiffed him.”

“And who originated that report?”

“Three guesses.”

Stafford thought about that for a minute. “It was a Bureau guy who fluttered me at Anniston.”

“Bingo. So we definitely have the Army and Bureau working a problem together.”

“Right. All over a weapon that isn’t missing. You feeling a little better about this, Ray? Like ‘maybe I’m not totally crazy?”

“Let’s not leap to assumptions, Dave,” Sparks said with a nervous laugh.

Stafford felt a surge of relief to have Ray back in his corner, but it was short-lived.

“Dave, you do know I’ve got to forward this to DCIS Washington, although, now that I think about it, they may already have it. And I’m going to have to tell Colonel Parsons what the hell this is all about.”

“Damn, I wish there was a way around that,” Stafford said, very much aware of Gwen in the doorway. “At least the part about the people here in Graniteville.”

“I can try. Give them the old confidential informant bit. But it’s all going to come apart anyway when the colonel closes the loop with the Green Machine, and they hunker back down and say, ‘What missing weapon?”

The thing I can’t figure out is where the hell this intel report came from. I mean, I know the FBI intel division is the source, but who’s feeding them this shit?”

“Somebody who wants to put the heat on me and take the heat off of him.”

“You mean Carson?”

“He said he had friends” in D. C., and he’s the guy who knows where this thing is.”

“You suspect.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t, Dave. You don’t know. You suspect. You know when you can present evidence. Proof. Witnesses. Documents. The little girl with the crystal ball doesn’t count.”

“For Chrissakes, Ray, she doesn’t have a goddamn crystal ball,” Stafford said, louder than he had intended. He was now painfully aware of Gwen standing in the doorway, and she was giving him a peculiar look. There was an awkward silence on the line. 1 “Who exactly sent this fax to you?” Stafford asked.

“It came from the office of a Brigadier General Lee Can-others, the Pentagon.”

“And you refused to talk to him?”

“Hell yes. This is interdepartmental. If anyone’s going to start talking to the Army headquarters, it’s got to be DCIS headquarters. As in Colonel Parsons or higher. This general undoubtedly anticipated that. He wants me to pass it up the line.”

Sparks the ever-obedient bureaucrat. “How about giving me that general’s phone number?” Stafford said.

“Negative, Dave. Let Parsons or Whittaker handle this. You’ve warned those people up there in Hicksville, or wherever you are? Then you’re done up there. Come back to Atlanta. I want you here in Smyrna when Washington starts sending cruise missiles down to Georgia. You know DCIS is going to go snake shit.”

Stafford thought fast. He had promised to go back. But he suddenly did not want to do that. “Okay. I’ll wrap it up here and get back,” he said.

“Good, you do that,” Sparks said.

Stafford hung up before Sparks could say anything more. He didn’t want to tell Ray any more lies than were absolutely necessary. Gwen looked as if she wanted to say something, but Stafford held her off by raising his hand. Then he typed in another number on the secure autodialer.

“Pentagon secure operator.”

“I need the secure drop for a Brigadier General Lee Carrothers, U.S. Army. He’s in the building. And request a patch, please, operator.”

“Stand by.” Dave motioned for Gwen to sit down. The sheriff was nowhere in sight.

“General Waddelfs office, Sergeant Clifford speaking, sir.”

“Sergeant, this is David Stafford, DCIS, calling for Brigadier Carrothers.”

“Stand by one, sir. I’ll see if the general is available.”

Stafford put his thumb over the microphone spot on the portable. “I’m going out of channels, Gwen. I’m going to try to point these people at Carson and still keep you and the girl out of it. Can’t promise—”

“This is General Carrothers.”’

Stafford thought he recognized the voice behind the mask at Anniston.

“Hello again, General.”

There was brief hesitation. “Hello again, Mr. Stafford. I was actually hoping you might call.”

“Do we have something specific to talk about yet, General? Or are we going to dance some more?”

“You tripped on two questions in your test, Mr. Stafford. You remember which ones they were?”

“Yup. And the true answers are yes, I’ve seen it, and no, I don’t have it, no matter what the Feebies are telling you. But I think I know who does have it. You need to get your hands on the manager of the DRMO, one Wendell Carsont And you probably ought to do that sooner rather than later, General.”

“Very interesting, Mr. Stafford. Will you tell me where you saw it?”

“On a PC monitor in one of your response team’s trucks, General, the first time you had them go to the DRMO. A cylinder. Three feet long or so. About three, four inches in diameter. It looked like a CAD-CAM view, revolving slowly on the screen in three-D. Or am I mistaken here? Maybe that was just a screen saver?”

The general never missed a beat. “That’s exactly what you were looking at, Mr. Stafford. A screen saver. I guess I’m disappointed. I thought you might have something substantial for me. Something real.”

“And I thought you guys were missing a chemical weapon, General.

Something substantial, something real.”

That brought a moment of silence. Then the general asked another question. “Why were you there at that DRMO, Mr. Stafford?”

“I was sent there, General. That’s usually how it works in DCIS. I was there to investigate a possible fraud case. DCIS had uricovered a pattern of evidence that someone was rigging the auctions of surplus military material. We actually picked the Atlanta DRMO at random to test the pattern theory. We don’t really have a case on any person or persons yet.”

“Well, then, Mr. Stafford, I guess we’re still dancing. I think you’re not telling me something. I need more than your say-so to go after this Mr. Carson.”

“I’m protecting a confidential informant,” Stafford said, looking over at Gwen, “who, interestingly enough, saw the same thing I saw. All I can tell you is that somebody really, really needs to go back to that DRMO and get his hands on Carson. Maybe do to him what you did to me. Before this thing that isn’t missing gets any more missing.”

“Where are you now, Mr. Stafford?”

“In Atlanta, General,” Stafford lied. “I’m calling you on a secure comms PC.”

“If I need to talk to you again, where do I call?”

“The DCIS office in Smyrna, General. Leave the message with Mr. Sparks.” He gave Carrothers the number; “Mr. Sparks wouldn’t talk to me this morning. He hurt my feelings.”

- “Mr. Sparks has a good nose for trouble, General. It’s nothing personal, you understand.”

Stafford thought he heard a small chuckle. “Goodbye, Mr. Stafford”

He secured the computer. Gwen was watching him carefully when he turned around. “Now what?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I promised Ray I’d go back to Atlanta. But I don’t really want to go back there.”

She looked momentarily relieved. “Why?” she asked. “Will something happen?”

“It shouldn’t. That fax was just an intelligence spot report — one grade better than rumor. Not even the Bureau arrests people on rumors, or they didn’t used to, anyway. Either way, that spot report’s going to stir up a fire at the DCIS headquarters as soon as the Army talks to them. There are people there willing to believe anything about me.”

“And what would they do?”

“Recall me to Washington, which might be why that spot report was generated. My guess is that Carson has the thing they’re looking for. He may be in the process of selling it to someone, and that someone has connections good enough to start this crap.”

Owen looked down at the floor. “You work in a strange world, Mr. Stafford. Are you telling me that the only way you could convince your bosses, or that general, is to have Jess corroborate your story?”

Stafford shook his head. “I actually don’t think that would do any good.

And it would definitely turn into a circus, as I think you already know.

No. I’ve made the best use of her … faculties that I can. The Army has to be desperate to find that thing. I’ve given them a new target. My guess is they’ll take a shot at it, one way or another.”

She persisted. “But didn’t you say Carson knows that you know? Does he know how you found out?”

“Initially he’s going to think it was one of his own people. But if he goes back and thinks about everything that’s happened since I entered the picture, he might guess. We were all there in the airport, Gwen.

You, Jess, Carson, and me. Carson’s a run-of-the-mill civil servant who’s probably operating way out of his depth right at the moment. But he’s not stupid. I guess it depends on what he saw or experienced when Jessamine saw what she saw.”

“In the two prior cases, they appear to remember nothing.”

“Well, then, that might work in our favor.”

“Do they know where we are? All these people — the Army, the DCIS, the FBI, or even this Carson?”

Stafford stopped to think. Sparks knew that he had come to Graniteville.

The Pentagon could probably trace back the secure phone call he had just made. The FBI probably did not know, but they also weren’t looking yet.

And Carson? Did Carson know about Graniteville? Had he mentioned Graniteville to Carson in the car that day?

“The government agencies can find out,” he said finally. “I don’t know about Carson. But if someone in Washington is helping him, someone with connections, then, yes, he might be able to find out.”

“Then we should tell John Lee about your call this morning, don’t you think?”

“Yes. But unless the Army goes after Carson, he probably won’t do anything. Unless—”

“Unless what?” Her hands were folded in her lap, but he could see the tension in her fingers.

“Unless Carson does recall what happened at the airport. Then he might consider the girl a witness. A stolen chemical weapon would be worth a ton of money in certain quarters, but not if there’s a witness.”

“So now Jess is a witness.” She sighed. “And from what you say, only the bad guy will believe her. That’s rich.” She looked across the room at him, her eyes pleading. “I really wish you could stay here. Until we know.”

He smiled. “I’m definitely thinking about it. My bosses probably won’t see it that way, of course. It’s going to depend upon what the Army does with my phone call.” He rubbed his temples. “I’m getting the mother of all headaches. I need to take a walk or something.”

“Let me make a quick check on how the afternoon’s going. Then I’ll join you.”