Shortly after ten-thirty, a figure in a shiny black wet suit emerged from the water and stalked clumsily up the beach toward her. He struggled free of his oxygen tanks and stripped off his face mask. “A very good morning to you, my dear Jennifer!” David D. Castle said jauntily.
“So you made it after all. I was just about to give up.”
“Sorry, but it took some time to persuade my bodyguards that I’d be perfectly safe on my own. As it is, they’re camped on the beach a quarter of a mile from here, ready to plunge to the rescue unless I show up after a reasonable interval.”
“Then you can’t stay for lunch?”
“I wish I could. But I have time only to confirm the identity of our go-between, and then back to the loving embrace of my jailers.”
Having supervised many highly sensitive defense projects for ROR over the years, Jennifer Red Cloud was used to the government’s security concerns. All the same, David’s precautions were extraordinarily hermetic. He had insisted, for the sake of security, that even she-nominally in charge-was to be kept completely ignorant of the operation. All she had to know was that it concerned the continuing struggle between the superpowers. There was, of course, one consolation: with security so tight, at least this was one American secret operation whose details wouldn’t be spread out on Kremlin desks within a week. In their meeting five weeks before in her San Francisco office, David had outlined steps to ensure that the integrity of Operation Impromptu, as he called it, was absolute. She was to be here, alone on her private beach, at nine-forty-five on this second day of February. Shortly thereafter he would arrive by sea. That was all she had been told.
“What now?” she said. “Little green men dropping from the sky in peppermint parachutes?”
“Nothing so dramatic. One little man, anything but green, will be coming out of the bay in a wet suit just as I have done, any minute now. I know him, of course; that’s why I am here-to vet him for you. But he doesn’t have an inkling of who I am. This breaks the chain of identification, you see. He is a very competent scientist and has been cleared by the government on the basis of years of top-secret assignments. But his main function is to act as my agent, delivering my orders to the group, seeing that they carry out the assigned research, and delivering the reports to a dead drop.”
“Good Lord, David! All this undercover and subterfuge. Are you sure,” she said lightly, “you’re not working for the KGB?”
“Of course I am,” he replied. “But let’s not waste time. Dr. Oswaldo Edwards-that’s not his real name, by the way-will be here any minute, and I want to make sure we understand just how this is going to work.”
“Shoot.”
“First, how about a glass of that lemonade, or whatever it is you’re drinking? I’m dying of thirst.”
She poured him a large glass, which he drank in one draught. He handed it back and asked her to wipe it clean of fingerprints. Well, now, this was a new David D. Castle. She knew him to be a wily and resourceful politician, but never suspected a penchant for intrigue. Maybe there was more to him, after all, than the bloodless patrician grooming himself for the presidency.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” said Castle, wiping his lips. “When Edwards walks up the beach, I’ll put on my gear. With my hood and mask, he won’t recognize me, or my voice, for I’m not going to speak. But my presence here will tell him that I’m the man he reports to. When he takes off his mask, I’ll be able to confirm his identity. I’ll nod to you and be off to the briny deep. He’ll then arrange with you the administrative and financial details of our little Team B at the research facility in El Centro. Then he’ll leave the way he came. Is all this clear?”
“Quite clear, but I have a few questions I’d like-”
“Later,” said David D. Castle, pulling on his mask. “Here comes Edwards….”
9. EL CENTRO
20 FEBRUARY 2009
Livia dos Santos arrived in El Centro, California, on 17 February, bearing a load of guilt, and it got heavier every day she spent in the isolation of the barbed-wire-enclosed precincts of the former Marine air base in the arid fastness of the lower Imperial Valley. The author of her discontent was Dr. Oswaldo Edwards, but she was too much a realist to blame anybody but herself for having succumbed to the siren song of instant security.
Dr. Edwards had intercepted her on her daily four-mile walk from her office at the University of Texas to her apartment in the Austin suburbs. A pleasant square-faced man in his middle forties, he fell in by her side and introduced himself as an emissary of a government department whose identity he was not at liberty to divulge. “That old devil security, you know.” He’d laughed.
“I quite understand,” she replied, “but if it’s business, it can wait until lab hours tomorrow.”
Edwards gently disagreed. “Authorization came from Washington just four hours ago, and I chartered a plane in Chicago immediately in order to catch you today. Time is a vital factor, and I need your answer now.”
“What’s the question?” she said, resuming her three-and-a-half-mile-an-hour pace, reassured. Whatever he said, she could simply respond with a quick no and be rid of him.
“We require your services for three months-four at the maximum. That is to say, during the spring term. I am aware that you are to participate in a graduate seminar in gene engineering this, semester, and that your adviser expects you to assist four other doctoral candidates in their researches. Against that, I offer you the sum of $125,000 for the three months’ work and the chance to do something which will be vital to the national interest.”
Livia dos Santos’ pace slowed. “What do I know that could possibly be worth that much money?”
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps, several months down the road, we’ll discover that your vast erudition in plant genetics has nothing to offer Project Frontburner. On the other hand, it may, and we can afford to overlook no reasonable possibility.”
“Project Frontburner?”
“A classified project on which, as I have pointed out, this nation’s welfare depends. We hope that consideration, plus the $125,000 I am authorized to offer you- most of the other eminent young scientific minds we’ve approached for our Frontburner B-team have come aboard for an even $100,000, by the way-will persuade you to work with us.”
Livia dos Santos reflected. She needed a vacation, and maybe a few months of thinking about something else would clear her mind for fresh perspectives on ribosomal RNA and the translation of messenger RNA into protein chains when she returned. On the other hand, her laboratory cultures were almost her flesh and blood, and she hated to leave them in the inept hands of that three-thumbed idiot, Nathan Prell. Still, she had her own child to think of, and unfortunately Anthony was autistic. He would require lifetime medical care, and $125,000 would go far toward providing it. She nodded to Dr. Os-waldo Edwards. “When do I start?”
Had it not been for the feelings of guilt for having deferred her studies, Livia dos Santos would have been quite content at El Centra. The company of sixteen very bright young scientists in a wide variety of disciplines was stimulating; the catered food, brought onto the base three times daily, was excellent; the dry weather was delightful after Austin’s humidity. Furthermore, Livia dos Santos, an attractive and warm-blooded young woman of twenty-two, enjoyed the nocturnal attentions alternately of Benjamin Whitly, a brilliant agronomist from Tempe, Arizona, and physicist Raoul von Williams. And managed to keep them both separate and happy.
True, the security precautions Oswaldo Edwards imposed were onerous and thought provoking: no outgoing mail or telephone calls, all incoming mail forwarded to them through a mail drop in Akron, Ohio, and no trips off the base. They might as well have been on the far side of the moon. But when they learned what they were expected to do, they quit grousing and got down to it, for the gravity of their mission had not been exaggerated. They were indeed working on a subject of vital national interest: Soviet war plans.
“Since you have all been subjects of the most intense security clearance,” Edwards began when all seventeen were assembled for the first time in the project’s comfortable lounge, “I am going to be completely open with you about your mission and what the government hopes will be the result of your researches. You all know that much of the Soviet intelligentsia, war machine, political apparatus, and manufacturing resources was wiped out in the blink of an eye by the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, or bombs, in Moscow last year. At first glance, the military balance has swung decisively in America’s favor as a result of that catastrophe, especially since the Soviet Union demonstrated its relative impotence in an unsuccessful assault against the Republic of Texas. But in fact, if we examine the problem more closely, we’ll see that appearances may be very deceiving.