Zero Option

46

The office manager showed Carrothers, accompanied by Senior Special Agent Hermann Kiesling, into Sparks’s office. Sparks offered coffee, which both men accepted.

Having been up all night, Carrothers was running on a caffeine sine wave, with episodes of mental clarity following each succeeding cup of coffee, after which the only thing that kept him awake were some truly vivid stomach cramps. Agent Kiesling had been detailed to the Georgia j damage-control effort from the Atlanta FBI office at 0630 ‘ that morning by the deputy director of the FBI. He was a tall, heavily built, red-haired man with an intense, florid face. Carrothers was willing to bet they called him Hermann the German — behind his back, that is. Way behind his back.

“So what do you have for us, Mr. Sparks?” Carrothers asked wearily.

“I’ve just talked to Stafford,” Sparks said. “He just called in. I—”

“Where is he?” Kiesling. After learning about the agent going into the demil machine, Kiesling was a man with a mission.

“He’s in a small town in north Georgia called Graniteville. He called me from the sheriff’s office. He got a telecomm PC, so he could go secure, but the sheriff was in the room and Dave was on the speaker.”

“So he’s getting help from the local law?” Kiesling made it sound as if Stafford were the fugitive, not Carson.

“He actually hasn’t done anything wrong, to my knowledge,” Sparks replied, giving Kiesling a steady look. “It’s our policy to coordinate with local law.”

“And we expect cooperation from other federal law,” Kiesling “snapped.

“Like coming in when we ask them to.”

“Little problem with that, Mr. Kiesling,” Sparks said. “Seems that Mr. Stafford has resigned.”

This announcement didn’t faze the FBI man. “Okay, so tell that sheriff to arrest his ass and hold him, now that he’s just another civilian.”

“Arrest him for what, exactly?” Sparks said. “And under which warrant?”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Carrothers interrupted. “Let’s stay on point here. We’re here to find Carson. He’s the objective, remember? Does Mr. Stafford have any idea of where Carson is or might be?”

“No, sir, he does not.”

“Then why won’t he come here? Why all this arm’s length stuff?”

“Before I answer that, General, let me ask you one. You are missing a weapon, right? Some kind of chemical weapon?”

The room went very quiet. Carrothers glanced sideways at Kiesling, then looked across the desk at the DCIS supervisor. He had to decide how much to tell Sparks, and his brain simply wasn’t working that well. General Wad dell had met with the Deputy Director of the Bureau in Washington to coordinate political damage control, following which the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense had been briefed by their respective staffs. DOD and the Justice Department had agreed on an official cover story for local law-enforcement consumptidn, which was that Carson was wanted on an intelligence beef. Carson was a foreign agent who had been diverting defense material to certain Middle Eastern governments via an arms merchant conduit in Washington. The fact that an agent had been killed provided more than enough impetus for the search, which conveniently made the cover story less important. Kiesling, a protege” of the current FBI Director, was the only one on the local FBI team who knew the real reason why they were searching for Carson.

Can-others also knew that a joint task force was being convened in Washington at that very hour at the Justice Department to decide if Carson should be declared armed and dangerous, which would then authorize the use of deadly force in apprehension. General Waddell had continued to remind him that keeping the fact of the weapon’s loss secret was just about as important as getting it back. After what had happened at Fort Gillem, there were some officials at both DOD and Justice who were fervently hoping Mr. Carson would resist arrest when the time came, ajbeit for different reasons. Carrothers had made the point that first they ought to get their hands on the weapon; if they killed Carson before that, the weapon might stay lost. And get found again later. So what should he tell Sparks?

Carrothers leaned forward in his chair. “If I answer that, Mr. Sparks,” he said, “you will become one of the government officials who will have had prior knowledge of what can only be described as colossal government screw up. Do you really want to join that select group? Or would you rather cooperate with military and FBI authorities, on a strictly need-to-know basis, so that afterward you can truthfully say you had no idea of just how big a mess this was? Because I do believe there will be one or two searching questions asked about this when it’s all over.”

Carrothers watched as Sparks thought that one over. Now we’ll see just how savvy a bureaucrat this guy is, he thought, but Sparks wasn’t going to give up so easily.

“How about us chickens indulge in a some hypothetical discussions, then, General?” Sparks replied. “For instance, what are some of the possible consequences if an individual were, hypothetically now, to get loose with a chemical weapon?”

Carrothers sat back in his chair. This was a game he knew how to play.

“Hypothetically, Mr., Sparks? Well, hypothetically, it would depend on this individual’s state of mind. If he’d stolen such a weapon with the notion that he was going to make a fortune selling it on the international arms market, and something upset his big deal, then right now he might be seriously pissed off. No telling what he might do then.

He could, for instance, take such a weapon into Atlanta. Or even out here to beautiful downtown Smyrna, Georgia. He could get on one of your commuter trains, maybe open a couple of windows, and then break a seal or two on the weapon, hang it out the window, and then get off at the next stop. You know, let the train take the weapon for a little ride.

And sometime after that, you’d have a few hundred thousand screaming people stumbling out of their homes and cars and all those pretty office buildings you’ve got here with what looks like red jellyfish hanging out of their eye sockets.” He paused for a moment, watching Sparks’s face go pale as he absorbed that image.

“Their optic nerves would be eaten away back into their brains, Mr. Sparks, and when they tried to put what was left of their eyeballs back in their heads, they’d feel the tissue squirming in their hands. I say ‘feel,’ of course, because they would no longer be able to see, would they? Now some of them, the lucky ones, would just up and die from the pure shock of it. But a lot of them wouldn’t. Probably most of them wouldn’t. They’d be the ones who’d be hiring legions and legions of lawyers to come after all the government people who had known about this hypothetical problem in advance, and who wasted fucking time talking about it!”

Now that he had Sparks’s attention, Carrothers bored in. Kiesling watched with an approving look on his face. “Mr. Sparks, this man Stafford has been cropping up hi this hypothetical problem since I first got into it. Now we’ve had a major disaster down at Fort Gillem, and a federal agent has been fed into a machine that turned him into Jell-O feedstock. Now Stafford didn’t do that, but Stafford knows more about all this than is healthy for him. Or for you. So I want you to start at the beginning and tell me everything he’s told you. Don’t leave anything out. Don’t ask any more stupid fucking questions, or try to play any more stupid fucking games with me. And do it now. Right now, if you please.”