Medusa's Child

TWELVE

With the rising wind from the approaching hurricane rattling the aging windows of her tiny apartment, a senior clerk for the Office of Personnel Management sat at her kitchen table and wondered what could be important enough for her boss to bother her at home. After all, they'd closed all government offices early on account of the bad weather, and that should be that. She'd always refused to work off the clock. She wished she could quit altogether! Her section was an unhappy collection of lousy managers and brooding workers, most of whom she couldn't stand. None of them had the right to chase her down at home, least of all her stupid manager. She probably shouldn't even return his call. She could lie tomorrow and say she was visiting her mother.

But his wimpy voice had sounded even more frightened than usual on the answering machine tape. No, she decided. He could make trouble. She'd better call him back.

She punched in his office number while shaking her head. If he'd changed his mind and wanted her to come back to work for the afternoon, he could forget it. He knew the rules!

"This is Doris. You called me."

"Doris! Thank heavens. The FBI needs to talk with you immediately about a recent annuity case. Wait. I'll get the number." There was a pause and she heard the rattling of paper. He gave her the telephone number and the name without further comment, and she disconnected with a small knot of fear rising in her stomach.

What'd I do? Why do they want to talk to me?

She'd never talked to the FBI before. Even though she was sure she hadn't done anything wrong, the thought of talking to them frightened her. Maybe someone was setting her up to make a mistake.

But her boss had said immediately.

She dialed the number. A polished female voice answered and identified herself as the FBI agent whose name she had written down. She gave her name tenuously.

"We appreciate your calling, ma'am," the FBI woman said. "We need immediate help with some background information about a woman named Mrs. Vivian Henry. I realize you're at home, but do you remember this woman?" The agent explained the history of the denied annuity while Doris closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead with a pudgy finger, as if trying to massage the memory to the surface.

Vivian Henry. Probably one of those divorced women looking for a government handout, she thought. She was tired of such women, whining and pleading on the telephone for OPM to make exceptions and help them. A few might be deserving of help, but she just knew most of them had only themselves to blame for marrying bastards and hiring poor divorce lawyers who couldn't get the annuity award papers right. She didn't get any free handouts, and as far as she was concerned, all the pampered little ex-wives could damn well go out and work for a living like she'd had to all her life. Screw 'em! Screw 'em all!

The FBI agent's voice snapped her back to the present.

"Ma'am, does the name ring a bell? Your supervisor told me you handled this case personally and spoke with the woman."

Several names and faces swam before her memory, all of them involving appeals and desperate women and more urgent work to prepare the OPM's folders for the government lawyers. Whenever someone appealed an OPM decision, everyone had to work harder to make absolutely sure that it wasn't overturned. The agency would go to any lengths to win, she knew, even if they knew they were wrong.

"I don't know. I process lots of 'em," she said.

"Well, would you remember if such a woman had ever threatened you?" the FBI agent asked.

Threatened. That's different!

The face of an obviously pampered, snobbish woman holding a fur coat coalesced in her mind, a condescending, demeaning look on the woman's face as she'd stood to leave. What were the words?

"You'll regret this!" the woman had said to Doris. "I'll see to it!"

"What do you mean?" Doris had countered, feeling off-balance and defensive.

The woman had gestured contemptuously to the surroundings of Doris's tiny cubicle at OPM headquarters and tossed several of her official letters back on the desk.

"You uneducated pig! You can't even write an intelligent letter, you probably didn't finish high school, you haven't understood a single thing I've said, and you think you're going to interpret a court order that determines my financial future? This is a stupid farce! I'll tell you what you're going to do. You're going to approve this claim in full or pay the consequences."

Doris remembered getting to her feet with shaky legs, her face contorted from embarrassment and anger. She hated confrontations, and if the woman hadn't been blocking the entrance to the cubicle, she would have just walked out and left her.

"If I say your claim's no good," she had stammered, "then… then that's that, whether you think I'm smart or not Rules're rules. I'm just following the rules."

It was then that the woman had leaned very close so no one else could hear. Her voice had been a furious hiss.

"You cancel my benefits, you ignoramus, and I'll cancel you, and make a smoking hole out of this place in the process."

"You… you're threatening me!" Doris had said, trying to sound threatening herself and not succeeding.

"No. Not a threat. A promise."

The woman put on her elegant ankle-length coat and disappeared down the corridor, leaving Doris speechless.

That must be the one they're looking for!

"Ma'am?" the FBI agent's voice was in her ear again.

"Huh?"

"I asked you if you'd been threatened?"

"You mean like, 'I gonna hurt you if you don't do what I say'?"

"That's correct."

"Yes."

"Yes? In other words, you were threatened by this woman?"

"I been threatened, yes."

"But was it by Vivian Henry?" the agent asked.

Doris thought about that. Her memory for names was not good, but she did remember being belittled.

Henry. Vivian Henry. Yeah. That's the bitch. She turned the name over in her mind several times. She remembered the Henry case. The court order had a flaw in it. It had been easy to deny the annuity.

"Yeah. It was Vivian Henry."

"Tell me what happened and what she said."

The clerk smiled to herself. Invisible worker bees didn't get revenge very often.

The hurricane battering the East Coast from New Jersey to the Carolinas was scheduled to take up most of the thirty-minute evening network newscast. Live shots from the coast, along with interviews ranging from meteorologists to atmospheric scientists knowledgeable about global warming, were being lined up as ABC prepared to show the country what was happening in graphic detail.

Something new, however, was pulling away more and more members of the ABC News team. Word had come from the Washington bureau that something unrelated to the weather was presenting the White House with a new crisis.

"The usual denials, of course," the ABC correspondent in D.C. was saying to his counterpart in New York on a speaker phone as a growing number of people gathered around the main news desk, "but one of our best sources in the White House confirmed the Situation Room is in full operation, and the crisis is some sort of domestic terrorism threat."

"We have only one source for this story, then?"

"We have two, but they're only telling me that something's afoot and it might involve a nuclear threat."

"How about the other networks?"

"Nothing from the other nets, but we do have a real break. You know how cellular phones can suddenly shift frequencies and leave you listening to someone else's conversation?"

"Yeah. I've had that happen."

"A staff member for Senator Campbell called up one of his friends here fifteen minutes ago wanting to know what we knew about a nuclear emergency at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. Seems he overheard a frantic call from someone around here to a woman at Pax River, telling her to take her daughters and hit the road north. We've checked. There is an evacuation of the base going on, and a civilian cargo plane did make a touch-and-go in high winds there just a few minutes ago, but the official word from the base is the evacuation is because of the hurricane."

"Is that plausible?"

"Hardly. They've had a day's warning to evacuate and nothing happened. Now that the winds are howling, it doesn't make much sense to be moving the base."

"Do you have scanners down there that can monitor the aviation frequencies? We've got this Internet stuff about a nuke flying around Washington, and now your report of a civilian bird doing a touch-and-go at the Navy base. I'd sure like to know if it's still in that area. If it is a nuke, millions of people are at risk."

"I'm acutely aware of that, especially since I'm one of them! Yeah, we have a scanner, and we're monitoring. I'll let you know. What have you found out there in New York?"

A senior producer for World News Tonight slid quietly into a chair at the same table and motioned to the correspondent to continue.

"We've got a retired nuclear scientist who worked on the Medusa Project. He's described the whole thing and says one of his good buds was called a half hour ago by a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who said he'd been monitoring phone calls from that airplane. We're trying to track the reporter down now, but this thing is beginning to sound both credible and scary. Did you get the summary I sent you by E-mail?"

"Looking at it now. Has the fifth floor made a decision yet?"

The reference to the executive suite in ABC News headquarters caused glances around the table.

"Not yet. They're standing by. We're trying to determine the national security risks of this, too. We'll be ready for a live break-in if necessary."

Vivian Henry had closed her eyes through the worst of the gyrations over the Pax River runway, glad of the cargo strap holding her to the floor of the airplane. When the landing gear retracted and the aircraft began climbing, she realized they were changing plans once again.

She wasn't close enough to the screen on Rogers' monstrosity to read the numbers as they ticked by the remaining time, but she was sure that approximately two hours remained. They would need every minute.

Somehow the crew would have to be convinced to get the airplane on the ground so they could escape and leave her there. And she had to prevent any attempts to defuse it, since the results would be obvious.

But until someone came back to check on her, it was just her and the device. She wasn't supposed to move more than fifteen feet away, and she had no intention of trying.

Tony DiStefano looked up from the briefing sheet he'd been reading to see Donna standing impatiently in front of him again.

"Gotta hear this, Tony. Right now! The captain of ScotAir Fifty is holding for you on line four, but you've got to hear this first."

"Shoot."

She slid into an adjacent chair and began talking rapidly, her hands moving in dynamic cadence to her words. "We found a worker at OPM who dealt with the Henry case. Mrs. Vivian Henry threatened the worker."

Tony replaced the briefing paper and sat back, searching her eyes. "How long ago?"

"She came storming into their office to complain about the annuity denial over a year ago, but remember that it was just a few weeks back that her appeal was finally rejected."

"This OPM person is sure?"

"Oh, she's sure, all right. Mrs. Henry apparently gave her an earful she'll never forget."

Tony let out a deep sigh. "You really believe this woman could pull off all this, Donna? With the airplane and the device and everything?"

Donna nodded solemnly.

"Okay," Tony said, reaching for the phone. "Vivian Henry now becomes our prime target, and since she could theoretically overhear our conversation, I can't say anything to the captain."

"He may already know. She may be holding them hostage."

Tony leaned toward the phone, but Donna raised her hand to stop him from punching up the line to Scott McKay.

"What?" he asked impatiently.

"ScotAir?" She pointed to the phone. "We just heard he can't get into Pax River. He almost crashed trying. He's pretty shaken up and wants to go west somewhere."

Tony DiStefano sighed again as he shook his head and jabbed a finger at line four.

Pete Cooke had been straining to hear the latest conversation between the feds and ScotAir when the phone in front of him rang. He answered it without thinking, puzzled at the unrecognized voice on the other end.

"Pete Cooke?"

"Yeah. Who's this?"

The man identified himself as an ABC News correspondent just as the voice of a young woman came through his earpiece telling ScotAir's captain to stand by.

"ABC?"

"Yeah."

"What… why are you calling me?"

"You're apparently working the same story we are. You've got sources, we've got sources, the story's immediate and big, and we're looking for confirmation."

"What, exactly, are you talking about?" Pete asked, knowing instinctively the response would be knowledgeable.

"There's supposed to be a live nuke over Washington, D.C., that threatens computer chips and computer systems nationwide—in addition to possibly killing a few million people in an unprecedented thermonuclear blast. You just talked to a retired scientist about it and he gave you a lot of details. You may have others. Look, Pete. You're print. We're broadcast. Your deadline's tomorrow. Ours is now. We need confirmation, and you may need the same. How about sharing?"

Pete held the receiver with his left hand and began rubbing his eyes with his right. So it had leaked already. How in the world? Had one of his people talked in New York?

The word "confirmation" made its way to his consciousness. "Only if we're sure," he had cautioned Ira. Maybe this was the last tumbler in the lock. Maybe ABC could provide the corroboration he needed to be sure.

"Tell me yours first," Pete said. "If it fits, I'll share."

"Fair enough. You have a pen?"

"I do."

"Let's start with a strange report from Pax River."