Blown Circuit Read online

  “Why aren’t you telling me about the mole?” I asked.

  Crust looked at me, exasperated, as though I had finally broken through.

  “Because we thought you were it,” he finally said.

  Chapter 13

  THERE WAS ANOTHER loud bang at the wooden door. I ignored it. Crust had broken through to the good stuff. He was talking. And I was pretty sure he would keep talking. But I wanted to make it easy for him. I wanted the words to flow right out.

  “Get up,” I said.

  Crust rose.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  “Would you like to return my well-oiled pistol?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But I need to trust you with it first.”

  “No problem, Mike,” Crust said, motioning toward the door. “But to get some, you’re going to have to give some. Follow me!”

  I still didn’t know whose side Crust was on. Not really. But I knew I needed to find out. So I picked up the yatagan and let him pull back the barrel bolt and open the door. The welders were standing around, not suspicious so much as curious. But Crust didn’t try to pick up an acetylene torch to cauterize my throat. All he did was pause in front of the dirty, half-open roll-down door and say, “You might want to put that away.”

  But I didn’t. I kept the gun exactly where it was. The arabesque trills of Turkish pop music drifted in from the street while I pulled my backpack onto both shoulders and draped the checkered towel over the Browning, yatagan in my left hand. I probably looked like a pirate, but I didn’t care. In fact, I kind of liked the idea.

  Crust ducked under the door and headed toward the rear of a Mercedes Sprinter panel van. I could see there was no one in the front of the van. I sincerely hoped the same was true of the back.

  “I’m going to reach into my pocket and take out a key,” he said.

  “And I’m going to put a bullet in your head if there’s anybody in the back of the van,” I replied.

  Crust clicked his key fob and opened the left rear door. So far, I could see nobody inside.

  “Open the other one too,” I said.

  He swung the left door open. The van was equipped as a surveillance vehicle. It was all computers and listening equipment and, of all things, a big Turkish hookah. But there were no people, at least none that I could see.

  “Now get inside, hands on your head,” I said.

  Crust did as he was asked.

  “Kneel at the back wall.”

  He knelt and I followed him in, shutting the doors behind me.

  “What’s with the water pipe?” I said.

  “The Turks call it a nargile. We’re backpackers, right? Thought it might make a nice addition to our cover at the hostel. You want to try it? I’ve got these nifty packets of apple-flavored tobacco.”

  “I’ll pass for now,” I said. “Tell me about the mole.”

  “Can I at least sit down?”

  “Jump seat on your left. No sudden moves.”

  If Crust was going to go for a hidden weapon, that would have been the time to do it. But he didn’t. He simply pulled down the jump seat and sat. I took the seat across from him, Turkish pop music still drifting in from the street.

  “We have had suggestions of a leak since the China Op,” Crust said. “They weren’t conclusive, but the pyrotechnics in the harbor were hard to ignore. Somebody knew you were going to be on that ship.”

  “Why would I leak my own operation? Do I look stupid to you?”

  “No, but you look green. We thought you might be trying to put us off the scent of the mole. Trust me, crazier things have been done. Think about it, Mike. No mole, then you join the team and information starts slipping out. It’s suggestive.”

  “What kind of information?” I said.

  “Do you want to put that thing away?”

  I thought about it. No, I didn’t want to put the gun away. I did, however, want Crust to continue talking. So I compromised. I pulled the clip and emptied the chamber. If nothing else, the Browning would still make a decent club. I braced myself for a possible attack. But it didn’t come. Instead, I heard the midday call to prayer echoing through the street.

  “Can I take my hands off my head now?” Crust asked.

  Before I could answer, Crust reached behind his head to scratch his neck. I considered that I might have removed the clip from the Browning a little too soon. Then I heard a click, like a spring-loaded catch had been released. A fraction of a second later, I was staring down the barrel of an M9 Beretta. It wasn’t what I would have called a welcoming sight.

  Crust smiled.

  “Bang,” he said, miming pulling the trigger. “That’s for doubting me.”

  He dropped the gun in his lap.

  “Happy now?” I asked, hoping that I didn’t look as relieved as I felt.

  “Not really. You should never have surrendered the advantage. Not before you knew the score.”

  “I guess I wasn’t convinced you were going to crack without a little encouragement. Where did the M9 come from?” I asked.

  “Safe-lock boxes,” Crust said. “The van is equipped with four of them. For situations just like this. Go ahead. Reach behind your head. Push the release.”

  I reached behind my head. Found an indent in the panel wall. Pushed it. A second later, I had a loaded M9 in my hand too.

  “Nifty,” I said.

  “I know. Wicked feature. It was my idea. Sometimes they listen to us field guys,” Crust said. “Shall we, then?”

  “Shall we what?” I asked.

  “Figure this the hell out,” Crust replied.

  “Why not?”

  I guess I didn’t sound convinced.

  “Look,” Crust said. “I understand that you don’t know who you can trust now, but I’m here to tell you that nothing has changed in that regard. I’m still your unit leader. So spell it out for me. Everything from the moment we parted ways at the hammam, exactly as it happened.”

  I looked Crust in the eye. I thought about lying to him. Then I made a bet. I told the truth.

  Chapter 14

  I TOLD CRUST about both the Tesla journal and exactly what had happened with Jean-Marc. Crust sighed. The interior of the van was dark, the only light provided by the eerie glow of the computer screens, but I could tell that what I was saying wasn’t entirely new to him.

  “Mike, you understand, that there is more going on here than just your father’s whereabouts, correct?”

  “I’m beginning to get that impression.”

  “The whole situation is wrapped around the Tesla technology in that journal. I’m no expert, but it sounds as though the journal you found contains research on a Tesla Device. A directed-energy weapon. We got confirmation of the Device’s existence around the same time we began to suspect a mole. That’s why you weren’t brought up to speed.”

  “Because you like to send your agents in blind?”

  “Because we didn’t know whether we could trust you.”

  “What’s changed now?”

  “You gave up your weapon, that’s what,” Crust said. “It might have been a stupid thing to do, but what’s changed is that I believe you, Mike. I believe you’re telling the truth.”

  I listened, but I was going need more than that.

  “Tell me what you know about Wardenclyffe Tower,” Crust said.

  “It was a transmission tower built by Tesla in the early 1900s—a proof-of-concept device for wireless broadcasts and the wireless transmission of electricity.”

  “And?” Crust said.

  “Are you looking for speculation here?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “And there are some schools of thought that say it was the wireless transmission of an electric charge from Wardenclyffe tower that caused the Tunguska event.”

  “Yahtzee!” Crust said. “On June 30, 1908, five hundred thousand acres of Russian tundra near the Tunguska River were flattened and burned by an event that most of the world blam
ed on an asteroid strike. As it was, Tesla was documented to be running a test atop his Wardenclyffe Tower Energy Device the same night that Tunguska was hit.”

  “So?” I said. “Tesla is working on his Device, Tunguska gets hit. Big deal. It’s possible that the two are related, but by no means guaranteed. They have a name for that fallacy in math. It’s called confusing correlation with causality. Just because A happened, doesn’t mean B caused it.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Cut to 1934.”

  “It’s not as if I was briefed on this,” I said.

  “So let me brief you. Twenty-six years later, in 1934, Nikola Tesla made claims to have invented a teleforce weapon. He called it a peace ray, a weapon to end all war. In reality, it was a directed-energy weapon capable of massive destruction. He tried to sell the Device to the United States, then to various European governments. He had no takers. No one believed it would work. Then he tried one more government. A government that had had experience with his experiments before.”

  “So we’re back to the Russians?”

  “Who else?” Crust said.

  Crust reached into his pocket and tapped the screen of his Samsung smartphone. Three large monitors built into the wall of the van immediately lit up. The middle screen displayed what looked like a faded color photo taken many years previously. There was a bleak backdrop of straggly Northern trees and patches of unmelted snow. Spring in the northern latitudes. And there was a chain-link fence guarding a galvanized steel tower. The tower was made of interlocking metal struts which rose from a wide base, growing progressively narrower and more needle-like until they reached the top. At the top of the tower was a metallic ball.

  From the scale of the shot, it looked like the ball at the top was big. It had to have had a diameter of at least ten or twelve feet. But it was hard to really see what you were looking at until you took a closer look at the picture. Because what had looked like unmelted snow on the ground was, on further inspection, something else. It looked like foam. Fire-retardant foam. And it was there because the ground at the base of the tower had been blackened and burned. When I looked closely, I could see tiny wisps of smoke rising off it. I knew what the picture represented—Wardenclyffe Tower. Like the one in the journal, but a more technologically advanced version.

  “Tunguska was a wake-up call for the Russians,” Crust said. “Thirty years later, what other governments had believed to be science fiction, the Russian government had accepted as fact. They bought the blueprints for Tesla’s Device in 1938. They then proceeded to refine it over the next sixteen years. This photo was taken in 1954. A short time after it was taken, for reasons as yet unclear to us, the prototype was disassembled and smuggled out of the Soviet Union by the Green Dragons.”

  Crust watched my eyes. He knew my interest was about to get personal. The Green Dragons were, after all, the group responsible for kidnapping my father.

  “And then?” I said.

  “Our sources say the Device never got to its destination. It went missing. From what we can tell, the Green Dragons lost it just as the cold war was heating up.”

  “Then what?” I said.

  “Now, generations later, we hear chatter from our Dragon friends. As near as we can tell, they want to use the Device to destroy a major metropolitan area.”

  “Where?”

  Crust tapped his phone and the photo of the old Tower disappeared to be replaced by a map of the globe, three panels wide. Turkey was represented by a red dot in the center of the map, concentric rings rippling out from it to hit cities around the globe. Almost the entire United States was within range, as was Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.

  “Even if we use a nominal six-thousand-mile range, like the one achieved when the Wardenclyffe Tower prototype took out Tunguska, Turkey’s central location means that this thing can hit almost anywhere on Earth, including America: New York, Washington, Chicago, nearly everywhere is vulnerable. Add another thousand or so miles, fire it across the pole, and it can hit the West Coast too.”

  Crust tapped his phone again.

  “This is what we predict will happen when the beam hits.”

  The map of the globe disappeared from the screen to be replaced by a sunny shot of the Manhattan skyline. Everything looked fine at first. Sparkling. Happy. Except then a thick bolt of what looked like lightning struck the south end of Manhattan, and I could tell that it wasn’t going to be that kind of movie. The bolt of energy didn’t just strike and disappear like a regular bolt of lightning either. Instead, it hit the ground and thousands of smaller bolts flew out of it like an electric wind.

  The bolts of energy exploded through the trees and buildings in an unstoppable wave destroying everything in their path. Skyscrapers crumbled and taxis and buses flew through the air, people reduced to ashes as the energy storm passed through the city in a raging inferno of sparks. When it was done, nothing was left standing. Buildings were twisted and melted and the ground was burned. People in the streets were vaporized. All that was left was a huge cloud of dust hanging over the charred earth.

  “The guys in tech did up the simulation,” Crust said. “They figure that given its popularity, New York is a likely target. The clip is an accurate modeling of what a directed-energy weapon attack would look like.”

  What I had just seen was no romantic comedy. It was total destruction. It looked like a nuclear bomb had hit.

  “Whoever has this thing has the power to reduce our American cities to ashes. And I’m not just talking about downtown. I’m talking about the surrounding areas as well, industrial infrastructure, ports, everything.”

  Manhattan smoldered in the simulation. Buildings had been reduced to heaps of rubble, smoke and fire everywhere. There was no way anything with a heartbeat could have survived.

  “There is one ray of sunshine, though,” Crust said.

  “It’s going to have to be good after that.”

  “The weapon that can do this, the Tesla Device, the Dragons haven’t found it yet. We think they’re close, but so far, it’s still out there.”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the journal.

  “So scan this and send it to the tech team. And give them this other stuff too. I’ve got a scarf, blood, photos.”

  I pulled the daypack out of the larger pack, handing it to Crust.

  “My dad was on that ship. I didn’t bust my ass last night, just so this stuff could gather dust.”

  “I’ll get it to Langley ASAP,” Crust said. “But we need to think about the other problem. The problem with the mole.”

  “You keep talking about a mole,” I said. “But you haven’t said where the leak was going? A mole for who?”

  ”Who else?”

  I stared at Crust in the pale light of the computer screens.

  “You’re kidding me. Are you telling me that Jean-Marc reported to the Dragons?”

  “It’s the only thing that fits. Like I said, several weeks ago, we noticed that information was being leaked. Now we’ve confirmed that leak and after your encounter with Jean-Marc, we know that the mole is dead. The thing that’s working in our favor is that we’re fairly certain that the Dragons haven’t met their mole. All our intel suggests it’s been a data leak all along. They’ve got no ID on their asset other than a codename—Raptor.”

  “You’re fairly certain?”

  “Better than fairly certain. Very certain. They don’t know that we’re on to them, and they have no idea what their asset looks like. That puts us two steps ahead. You know what two steps ahead means in the spy game?”

  “Ahh, shit,” I said. I knew what it meant.

  “Welcome to the world of the double agent, Mike. From this moment on you report to the Dragons.”

  Chapter 15

  OF COURSE, BECOMING the new mole was easier said than done. The mole had been communicating with the Dragons via a secure message board. The CIA knew because they’d found the message board. What they hadn’t found were the messages, except a single
post which the mole had failed to delete. Nor did they know what kind of communication protocols may have been set up in case he was compromised. As a result of the undeleted message, though, they did know his next point of contact—a woman, working for the Turkish Secret Police. What business Jean-Marc had had with her and what business she might have, if any, with the Dragons, was unclear, but on the balance of probabilities, it looked as though it was a blind first meeting. Which was why Crust had asked me to take Jean-Marc’s place.

  I knew there were a million things that could go wrong. For one, the undeleted post could be a setup by the Dragons. Bait in case Jean-Marc was compromised. For another, we had no idea of the communications’ protocols that had been used to date. Anything that varied from a predetermined pattern could alert the other party. Finally, and most obviously, after the China Op, the Dragons were now aware of who I was. If the contact was connected to them in anything but a tertiary manner, my going in could raise a significant flag.

  The other side of the equation was that the CIA needed to place an agent and they needed to do so quickly. Short of Crust going in himself, I was the only alternative. There was time to familiarize myself with the Tesla Device and the threats of its use to date, but not much else. After scanning the journal and uploading it to an anonymous CIA drop box, I cleaned myself up and went out to meet my contact.

  The meet was set for a location in Taxsim Square, the heart of contemporary Istanbul. A crowded shared-ride van disgorged me onto the darkening street and I followed the Saturday-night crush of people past a long row of burger shops and down a wide thoroughfare. The vehicular traffic was blocked off, except for some kind of party tram, which was a good thing, because there wasn’t enough room to handle the pedestrian traffic as it was.

  I continued along the boulevard, bright lights shining down from boutiques of all descriptions, some international names, some I’d never heard of before. Everybody was dressed to the nines, so much so, that I stood out a little more than I was comfortable with in my khaki shorts and polo shirt. I resisted the notion to change, after all, I was a backpacker. No need to gild the lily.