What he saw in one of the photographs could be related to a small article he’d noticed in today’s newspaper. The picture showed tarpaulins being rolled into a service elevator at the Hermitage. Pictures taken on successive days showed large crates of artwork being brought in as well.
That shouldn’t have aroused any suspicion. Construction was taking place throughout the museum to modernize and expand it in honor of the city’s tercentenary in 2003. Moreover, the art museum was right on the Neva River. It was possible the walls were being lined with tarpaulin to protect the artwork from moisture.
But Leon had faxed him two sheets, and according to the entirely symbolic Captain Legend comic strip on the first sheet, the superhero had flown to Hermes’ World-that is, Leon had gone to the Hermitage-a week after the photos were taken. He reported that no construction using tarpaulin was taking place on any of the three floors in any of the three buildings. As for the crates, though artwork was always being loaned to the museum, no new pieces had gone on display, nor had any new exhibits been announced: with sections closed off for the modernization, exhibit space was at a premium. Fields-Hutton would have D16 check to see if any museums or private collectors had shipped anything to the Hermitage recently, though he doubted they’d find anything.
Then there were the hours of the workers who brought the tarpaulins and crates to the elevators. According to Leon’s strip, the men-the Hera’s World slaves who brought the weapons and food to a secret base-went downstairs in the morning and didn’t come back until early in the evening. He had been watching two in particular, who came there day after day and whom he would follow if D16 thought it might help. Though they could very well be working on renovations, it was also possible they were simply using those to mask secret activity taking place underground.
All of which dovetailed with the accident reported in this morning’s newspaper, and also described in Leon’s second fax page. Yesterday, six museum employees heading home from work had skidded off the Kirovsky Prospekt into the Neva River, where all of them drowned. Leon had gone to the crash site, and his rough cover sketch for Captain Legend told him more than the two-inch article had reported. It showed the hero helping slaves from a rocket that had crash-landed in a pool of quicksand. The color notation for the smoke rising from the quicksand said “Green.” Chlorine.
Were the men gassed? Was the truck that hit them off the bridge sent to do just that to cover the fact that the men were murdered?
The accident might be a coincidence, but intelligence work couldn’t afford to overlook any possibility. The signs pointed to something unusual going on in St. Petersburg, and Fields-Hutton wanted to find out what it was.
Faxing Leon’s artwork to his office in London, Fields-Hutton included a note that ordered them to advance him twenty-seven pounds-meaning they were to look at page seven of today’s Dyen-and that he was going to St. Petersburg to meet with the artist about this cover design.
“I think we’re onto something here,” he wrote. “My feeling is, if the writer can come up with a connection between the pool of quicksand and the underground mines of Hera’s World, we’ll have ourselves a fascinating story line. I’ll let you know what Leon thinks.”
After receiving an okay from London, Fields-Hutton packed his camera, slender vanity kit, Walkman, and artwork and toys into a shoulder bag, hurried to the lobby, and took a taxicab two miles to the northeast. At the St. Petersburg Station on Krasnoprudnaya he bought his ticket for the four-hundred-mile ride, then settled in on a hard bench to await the next train leaving for the ancient city on the Gulf of Finland.
THREE
Saturday, 12:20 P.M., Washington, D.C.
During the Cold War, the nondescript, two-story building located near the Naval Reserve flight line at Andrews Air Force Base was a ready room, a staging area for crack flight crews. In the event of a nuclear attack, it would have been their job to evacuate key officials from Washington, D.C.
But the ivory-colored building was not an obsolete monument to the Cold War. The lawns were a little neater now, and there were gardens in the dirt patches where soldiers used to drill. Concrete flower pots had been erected on all sides to prevent anyone from getting too close with a car bomb. And the people who worked here didn’t arrive in jeeps and Hughes Defenders, but in station wagons, Volvos, and the occasional Saab and BMW.
The seventy-eight full-time employees who worked here now were employed by the National Crisis Management Center. They were handpicked tacticians, generals, diplomats, intelligence analysts, computer specialists, psychologists, reconnaissance experts, environmentalists, attorneys, and even media manipulators, or spin doctors. The NCMC shared another forty-two support personnel with the Department of Defense and the CIA, and commanded a twelve-person tactical strike team known as Striker, which was based at the nearby Quantico FBI Academy.
The charter of the NCMC was unlike any other in the history of the United States. Over a two year period, the group had spent more than $100 million on equipment and hi-tech modifications, turning the former ready room into an operations center designed to interface with the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, White House, State Department, Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center. But after a shakedown period of six months, in which they handled both domestic and international crises, “OpCenter,” as it was familiarly called, now had parity with those agencies and then some. Director Paul Hood reported to President Michael Lawrence himself, and what had started as an information clearinghouse with SWAT capabilities now had the singular capacity to monitor, initiate, and manage operations worldwide.
They were a unique mix of old professionals who took a methodical, hands-on, agents-in-the-field approach to intelligence, and fair-haired boys who reveled in hi-tech and bold strokes. And on top of the patchwork tapestry was Paul Hood. Though Hood was not quite a saint, his selflessness had caused his jaded coworkers to dub him “Pope” Paul. He was scrupulously honest, despite having been a hotshot banker during the Reagan terms. He was also exceedingly low-key even though he’d served as the Mayor of Los Angeles for two years. Hood was constantly schooling his team in the new art of crisis management. He saw this as an alternative to the traditional Washingtonian responses that leaned toward inactivity or all-out war. In Los Angeles he had pioneered the art of slicing problems into manageable segments and handing each to professionals who worked closely with one another. It had worked effectively in Los Angeles and it was also working here, though it went against the prevailing “I’m in charge here” mind-set of Washington. His number two man, Mike Rodgers, once told him that they’d probably find more adversaries in the nation’s capital than anywhere else in the world, since bureau chiefs, agency directors, and elected officials would view OpCenter’s management style as a threat to their fiefdoms. And many of them wouldn’t stop at trying to undermine Op-Center’s effectiveness.
“Washingtonians are like zombies,” Rodgers had said, “able to rise from the politically dead as times and moods change-look at Nixon, at Jimmy Carter. As a result, rivals don’t just try to destroy careers, they try to ruin lives. And if that’s not enough, they turn on families and friends as well. ”
But Hood didn’t care. Their charter was to look after the security of the United States, not to advance the reputation of Op-Center or its employees, and he took that mission very seriously indeed. He also believed that if they did the job they were supposed to do, their “rivals” couldn’t lay a glove on them.
At the moment, Ann Farris didn’t see the hotshot or the politician or the “Pope” sitting in the Director’s chair. Her dark rust eyes saw the awkward young boy in the man. Despite the strong jaw, wavy black hair, and steely dark hazel eyes, Hood looked like a kid who wished he could stay here in Washington and play with his friends and spy satellites and field operatives rather than go on vacation with his family. If the kids didn’t miss their old friends, and the move east hadn’t put such a strain on his marriage, Ann knew that Paul wouldn’t be going.
The forty-three-year-old Director of Op-Center was sitting in his large office at the high-security facility. Deputy Director General Mike Rodgers was seated in an armchair to the left of the desk, and Press Officer Farris was sitting on the sofa to the right. Hood’s itinerary for his trip to Southern California was on the computer.
“Sharon wrests a week off from her boss, Andy McDonnell, who says his cable show can’t live without her cooking-healthy segment,” Hood said, “and we end up at Bloopers, the antithesis of healthy eating. Anyway, that’s where we’ll be the first night. ‘Me kids saw it on MTV, and if you page me there I probably won’t hear it.”