The Art of War

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The president flew down to Norfolk that evening in Marine One. Standing with the Chinese ambassador to the United States, the chief of naval operations, the governor of Virginia and the mayor of Norfolk, he held a press conference with the facade of the Chambers Field ops building as background. I was curious, so I watched some of it. First, he denounced the Internet rumors and resulting panic that had poisoned the public, despite the government’s statements that the rumors were groundless. That the rumors had a hard core of fact and the government was telling lies was not mentioned.

He segued on to the bodies scattered around the southwestern Virginia area. “Terrorists have been attempting a major coup,” he said, “and we have thwarted them. I wish I could say more, but I do not wish to compromise ongoing investigations or preclude the successful prosecutions of those responsible.”

There was more, of course. The message was that it was safe to come home. The governor and mayor got a little mike time, and they confined their remarks to that point.

When it was over and the television lights were extinguished, I sat watching Grafton and Molina with their heads together, talking in low tones. Those two were a pair. If they swore it was Monday, I’d check the calendar before I believed them.

Technicians had been busy all afternoon on the nuke’s trigger. The thing was armed and ticking down, they concluded. The iPad on the Coast Guard patrol boat with Zhang Ping’s fingerprints all over it had a program that coded a radar transmission. The radar reflector had acted as an antenna and had passed the coded signal via a wire to the trigger resting under the surface of the water, near the weapon, which was essentially buried under loose stones so it couldn’t be found with sonar or a quick visual scan from the surface, if the water was actually clear enough to see through.

All in all, the weapon and setup were simple and deadly.

After the press conference, Molina climbed aboard Marine One with the president and they choppered off to Washington. Grafton came over and sat down beside me. I was working on a cup of coffee. “You ready for some dinner?” he asked.

As nutty as it sounds, he got behind the wheel of a navy sedan and away we went, through the main gate and out into the wilderness of Norfolk, all the way to the Chans’ Chinese restaurant. The place was practically empty, with only three other couples dining tonight. Sally Chan was behind the counter.

She sat down with us. She didn’t look well. It had been a long day, but she said she couldn’t stay home. The empty rooms pressed in relentlessly.

“Did you see the president’s press conference?” Grafton asked.

She nodded.

“Obviously, you can say anything you want to the press,” Grafton said, “but the fact is the government will call you a liar if you say anything that contradicts the president’s version of things.”

Sally Chan just stared at Grafton. “Our relations with China.”

Grafton nodded.

“You people aren’t just going to let them get away with all this, are you?” she demanded hotly.

“I don’t run the government,” Grafton replied, a bit evasively, I thought. “But I hope not.”

“Are you really the interim director of the CIA?”

“Yes.”

As we ate dinner, Sally talked about Choy Lee. “He thought of himself as an American, there toward the end,” she said. “After he became suspicious of Zhang, he was so conflicted.”

She chattered on, speaking directly to Jake Grafton, who looked like the father you wished you had had. Nonjudgmental. Understanding. A man you could talk to.

He looked that way, anyhow. And maybe he did understand people, with all their diverse emotions and motivations, strengths and weaknesses. Yet a harder man I have never met. I thought Choy Lee and Zhang Ping were lucky that they were already dead.

Grafton gave Sally a hug as we were leaving. She hugged him back fiercely.

Grafton stayed in Norfolk for a few more days, and I went home the following morning on one of the endless stream of helicopters that plied back and forth between Norfolk and Washington.

Before I left I saw Grafton talking to the CO of the base, Captain Butler Spiers. After a few minutes Grafton shook Spiers’ hand, then came over to wish me good-bye.

“Thanks for pulling the trigger on Zhang,” he said. “If you had waited a few more seconds, more people would have died.”

I didn’t say anything to that. If I had shot a coastie, even Grafton couldn’t have saved me. The safe course would have been to wait until the guy started squirting bullets. Maybe the truth was I no longer gave a damn about playing it safe. If that were true, I wasn’t long for this world.

“How is everything with Spiers?” I asked, because I had to say something.

“He’s waiting for the shoe to fall. NSA is doing a study of the Internet traffic that spilled the beans about the possible threat to the base and triggered the panic. They’ll have the result in a couple of days. Someone started the rumor, and it won’t be that difficult to track down that person.”

“It could be anybody,” I suggested.

“Oh, no. That was a very tightly held secret. And hot. Smoldering. Someone found it too hot to hold. We’ll find out who. See you back at Langley.”

We shook hands, and I climbed aboard the giant eggbeater. When it lifted off, Grafton was already out of sight.

Sarah Houston was in her office when I rapped on her door. She let me in, then sat back down and stared at me.

“Did I forget your birthday?” I asked.

“I thought you were soon to be gone. Permanently gone. Now you are back. I am trying to figure out how to deal with that.”

“There’s no way you rationally can,” I admitted.

“I’m beginning to understand that.”

“Wanna go get some lunch?”

“Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after. Ask me then.”

“Sure.”

I hit the road. Closed the door behind me. Stood in the hallway feeling like dog crap for a minute or so. Perhaps this was a good thing. The truth is I was womaned out. Maybe celibacy would be good for me. At least for a while.

Grafton’s executive assistants, Anastasia Roberts and Max Hurley, were glad to see me. They were full of curiosity about what had actually happened in Norfolk, but since it was all classified to the hilt, they didn’t ask. And I didn’t tell them. We talked about holiday plans.

I stirred through the stuff on my desk, decided I didn’t want to deal with any of it and gave myself a meritorious day off.

That afternoon Willie the Wire and I made the rounds of the used car lots. At the third one we visited I fell in love with a 1974 Mercedes 450SL, a hardtop/ragtop convertible, in a pale robin’s-egg blue. Willie was appalled.

“That thing is already forty years old, Tommy. Can’t you drive somethin’ younger than you are?”

“Hey, this baby only has a hundred and forty-two thousand on it. It’s just getting broken in.”

“That odometer has probably been around the world more times than a hooker on crack,” Willie observed.

When the paperwork was finished and signed, I dropped Willie at the lock shop and took my new ride out on the road. I was feeling perky. Headed north, toward Philadelphia.

Didn’t actually get into the city. Stopped at a truck stop on the edge of town and bought a postcard of the Liberty Bell. I took it into the little diner where the truck drivers eat and sat at a booth.

Using block letters, I addressed the card to Cuthbert Gordon, Mom’s boyfriend, out there in California. I noodled my message for a while, then wrote, “FISH HAS THE CONTRACT.” It was doubtful, I thought, that Cuthbert knew of Fish’s recent disability. I signed the card “A FRIEND.” That was a stretch because ol’ Bertie probably never had any friends, but you never know.

I bought a stamp, peeled the thing off its backing using my fingernails, and affixed it to the card. Then I rubbed the front and back of the card on my jeans to smear whatever prints were on there.

After I mailed it, I hit the road back to Washington. I liked the way my new ride handled and resolved to trade cars every ten years, whether I needed to or not.

When Jake Grafton got back to Langley, he called Sal Molina. “We need to talk,” he said. “McKiernan and I want to see the president.”

“Maybe you and I ought to visit first.”

“Yeah.”

“Come over to my house this evening after dinner. We’ll have a beer.”

“Okay.”

So Jake drove to Bethesda and said hello to Mrs. Molina and followed Sal to the basement. When they each had a cold beer in hand, Jake got to it. “We’re going to have to do something that teaches the Chinese they can’t screw with us.”

“Jesus, we’re like the Mafia now?”

“The Chinese decided to try to wipe out the Atlantic Fleet’s capital ships. They saw an opportunity and leaped for it. The murders and the shootdown of Air Force One were all diversions intended to keep our eyes off the ball. And it was going their way when, for some reason, Zhang decided, or was told, to trigger the bomb with only three carriers in port. Perhaps the Internet storm panicked the people in Beijing.”

Molina nodded and sipped beer.

“The question that we can’t answer is why Zhang was returning to the radar reflector that he used to trigger the bomb.”

“Maybe he wanted to die.”

“He could have done that anywhere.”

After a bit, Molina said, “Okay. Answer the riddle.”

“I think he was probably coming back to safety the thing. I think Beijing changed their minds.”

Sal Molina rubbed his forehead and eyes. “Got anything to substantiate that think?”

“There is no other logical explanation. His superiors ordered him back. NSA has a recording of at least one Chinese-language conversation that took place on the cell network that could be the one. Zhang died two and a half hours later.”

“Which gets us where?” Molina asked.

“We must convince them that we know that they did it. We know that they intended to kill a couple million Americans and cripple our navy, even if they did change their minds at the last minute. And they had better never try something like this again. Not even think about it.”

“How do you propose that we accomplish all that?”

Jake Grafton told him.

In the days that followed the president’s press conference and the arrival of the final two Atlantic Fleet carriers in Norfolk, the world got back to normal, more or less. Most of the people in southeastern Virginia went home, Christmas came and went, the politicians flanged up another deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, and in January three of the carriers and their battle groups sailed away.

Captain Butler Spiers’ grandson arrived in the world in the usual manner, more or less on schedule.

He and his wife, Kat, talked repeatedly by telephone in the evenings. Finally he asked her, “Did you send any e-mails telling your friends to evacuate Norfolk?”

She denied it, of course, and he knew she was lying. He knew her. He didn’t press it.

The fact of the matter was that he had betrayed his trust by revealing classified information to her. He had! At the time he thought he had a good reason, and no doubt he did. And so did every other single person who was entrusted with the secret. Most of them didn’t reveal the secret, but he had.

He wondered if the NSA investigation of the e-mail trails would get back to his wife. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Regardless, the fact that he had betrayed his trust weighed heavily upon him. Numerous people, twenty at latest count, had died in car wrecks trying to get out of the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area. He hadn’t caused the car wrecks, yet still, he wondered if in some small way he wasn’t responsible.

It could go either way, Spiers thought. Someone, his boss probably, would call him in and say NSA traced it to your wife, Kat. Or to Ellie or that dweeb Harold. We’re going to interrogate them under oath, ask Kat if she got the information from you, ask Ellie and Harold if they got it from you or Kat.

On the other hand, the word would filter down that someone else was the leak. Either way, the bald fact was that he, Captain Butler Spiers, commanding officer of Naval Base Norfolk, had leaked classified information to a person not authorized to have it. If the Chinese agent had been able to read English and had seen and heard the mass panic, he might have detonated the bomb then and there. It was a miracle he didn’t. Regardless of who got blamed, Spiers knew he had seen the ghost and failed. As a man and a naval officer.

One evening Butler Spiers sat at home brooding over all this. He drank a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, then went to the basement and found a good piece of rope that he’d used several years ago to tie up his small fishing boat. He stopped in the kitchen, poured one more drink, then went to the garage and got out his big stepladder.

His wife’s car was missing, of course, so there was plenty of room in there. He erected the stepladder, climbed up on it and tied the rope to the highest beam he could find. He tied a noose in the rope and let it dangle.

Butler Spiers climbed back down and finished the drink as he eyed the height of the noose. He was going to have to keep his knees up. He put the glass on a little workbench he had against one wall. He climbed the ladder, put the noose around his neck with the knot under his left ear, took a deep breath, remembered his knees and jumped.

He had figured the drop just right. The noose snapped his neck like a dry twig and he died instantly.