The Gatekeeper, page 19
She does, of course. “A constitution, governance, infrastructure, an economic plan, trade deals, law enforcement, a military, and funds.”
“An’ allies,” Dez says.
“Dmytro Rudko has a megayacht. With a helipad. I’ve been on it myself.”
“Seen it with me own eyes. It’s here.”
“Dez, if the conspirators declare independence and threaten the meltdown of a nuclear power plant, that would stop the military from a quick response. But not from a response. But if a foreign power acknowledged them … set up a delegation, assigned an ambassador…”
“Then Congress would screech to a feckin’ halt.” Dez covers his mobile with his palm and winces at Renata Esquivel. “Sorry.” He returns to the call. “Congress would hesitate. An’ my all-time-favorite time-wasting organization, the United Nations, would get involved.”
“Being acknowledged by a permanent member of the UN Security Council would be a game changer.”
“They wouldn’t be a bunch of upstarts waiting to get smacked about the ears,” Dez says.
“No,” she agrees. “They’d be a nation.”
CHAPTER 57
Triton Expediters Headquarters, Hawthorne, California
“… They’d be a nation. Damn it. Dez, I have to go. We’re very, very short on time.”
Petra disconnects. She stands in the corridor a moment, forehead against the wall, eyes squeezed shut.
This. Is. Not. Happening.
This whole scheme has been more than two years in the making. And the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, the goddamned GRU, has been secretly backing it. Why not? They successfully jinxed America’s 2016 election. They sowed the seeds of doubt about the election processes in 2018 and 2020. Each time, they harnessed right-wing media to make it happen. If Russian intelligence discovered a nascent proposal by white supremacists to split off from the union, of course they’d intercede. Why in the world wouldn’t they?
And Petra Alexandris, whose claim to fame is that she plays three-dimensional chess on the international stage, got caught flat-footed.
It’s a Sunday morning at the world headquarters of Triton Expediters and she’s in her usual weekend power uniform—that’s an oxymoron only if you’re not in the international finance world—of fitted jeans, boots with blocky heels, and a man’s dress shirt.
She returns to Constantine’s office, tucking her phone in the back pocket of her jeans.
“Trouble,” she says.
All four of them have been poring over the evidence of the $1.3 billion theft for the entire weekend, using the conference table in Constantine’s spacious office. They’re on day two of it. Petra is taking them step-by-step through the months of research she did into the theft. And as she does, she narrows the cover for the conspirator in their midst.
The one person here who could hack the Pentagon.
The pompous Colin Frye is looking ragged. Colin hasn’t done a decent day’s work for decades. He’s the chief financial officer of the company but it’s been clear for years that his staff does all the real work. His job is to go out and glad-hand worldwide clients. He sees and gets seen with sultans and senators, with oligarchs and petrogarchs, with Indian and Chinese billionaires. They are almost a team, Colin Frye and Petra. He sets up the relationships; she’s the closer.
Today he looks fatigued, his bottled tan a little jaundiced, his jawline sagging. No one in his department could have been the coconspirator without alerting Colin. But that’s not the same as saying he’s used to putting in arduous hours anywhere but the golf course.
Sitting opposite him with her usual Vulcan cool is Brittany Kinney, chief technical officer, in a plain white tank, black yoga pants, and black sneakers. The same uniform she’s worn every day since taking the job at Triton. Petra herself stole Brittany away from Boeing, who stole her away from NASA. Petra doubts the woman could put together the financing for a Philly cheesesteak and a bag of chips, but she knows how to route money everywhere, at all times, with such a steely web of spaghetti logic that Triton has leapfrogged ahead of the world’s competition, year after year. Brittany is the secret sauce. She’s the computer who controls all the other computers.
Petra plays a mean hand of poker. But she has never sat across a card table from Brittany Kinney. Now, that would be a challenge, she suspects. And it saddens her to think that the evidence Dez has uncovered points directly to her.
There is no smoking in the Triton Expediters headquarters. There is no smoking in any public building in California. Constantine Alexandris regularly smokes in his office. He pays a fortune to import a bespoke blend of Papastratos Athens Hellas. They are foul and hideous, but Petra has never known a time in her life when her father didn’t smoke the Greek cigarettes. He filled his ashtray to brimming on Saturday and it’s already halfway there today. He’s poured himself an espresso while she was out, and he sips it at the head of the table.
Petra snatches a bottled water, cracks it open, drains nearly a quarter of it, standing. The others watch her.
She works to regain her cool. She does not speak until she has to.
“That was Desmond Limerick. He’s calling from a nuclear power station in Central California. He’s made some discoveries. He—”
“Petra,” her father cuts in. He had been looking tired the past few hours, but now he looks … impatient?
“What?”
Colin and Brittany exchange quick glances.
Constantine inhales deeply, snuffs out the cigarette, reaches for the next. “Enough. Dmytro Rudko told us you already have your suspicions about Sloatville. We know that idiot Englishman is up there. Rudko claims I’ve always underestimated you. I believe he’s right. But enough. Enough.”
Petra studies the old man as he taps a cigarette against the heel of his hand to tamp down the tobacco. He puts it to his lips, uses the tarnished, hard-knocked, brushed steel lighter he’s had since he was twenty, inhales again.
“Father?”
Colin Frye stands and moves to the wet bar. “I for one could use a Bloody Mary.”
Brittany Kinney keeps her head down and thumb-scrolls on her phone, as she has all weekend.
Constantine sucks down that cigarette and stubs it out. He stands and moves to the window, to the view of all of Los Angeles and the ocean.
Petra feels gravity shift under her heels.
“Who are the Founding Fathers of America?” Constantine asks. “Washington? Jefferson? Madison? No. The Founding Fathers were Cooke in finance. Crocker in railroads. Carnegie in steel.” He ticks them off with his fingers.
“Father. What the hell are—”
“And after them came John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon and all the others. Those are the Founding Fathers of the real America. Those were the men with the foresight to see an isolated, rudderless new nation, afloat in a world of international giants like England and France and Germany, and to turn it into the dominant power on the planet.”
The room seems to shimmer and it takes Petra a moment to realize the illusion is caused by tears welling. “Dad?”
He stares out at his view. He nods to his own reflection.
What was it Dez had said, standing in the exact same spot, about Alexander the Great?
Constantine makes a dismissive gesture around the room. “We’ve been buying time, Petra. We’ve been keeping you sidelined because, at long last, you truly were the only one smart enough to wreck everything.”
“I’m not sure she hasn’t,” Brittany Kinney says, eyes locked on her phone, thumbs flashing across the keyboard.
“No,” Constantine says. “We’re close enough now. Everything’s in place.”
Brittany says, “If everything was in place, I’d still be connected to the Pentagon. Which I’m not. And to General Tancredi at Joint Base McKinzie-Clark. Which I’m not.”
“Why not?” Colin Frye speaks from the wet bar, where he’s mixing a drink.
Brittany shrugs.
Constantine says, “Get our connection back. The general makes his move tonight.”
He makes eye contact with his daughter. He nods once. Reassuringly.
“This is a good thing, Petra. We stand next to Carnegie and Rockefeller and Morgan. Right now. We have played the role of giants. We are Founding Fathers.”
Petra is still holding the water bottle but has forgotten about it. She has towered over her father since the age of fourteen, but there’s an optical illusion in the room that he’s towering over her now. She hears her own voice crack.
“Daddy?”
CHAPTER 58
Unlike most people, Dez has actually been on the campus of nuclear power plants before. So he can say, for a fact, that the Boca Serpiente Valley Nuclear Power Station is the saddest excuse for one he’s ever seen.
The place has reached the end of its useful life span. In fact, a quick internet check confirmed that the Boca Serpiente Valley plant surpassed its useful life span five years previously, but a combination of the U.S. Department of Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the governors of the western states, with their blended power grids, prevailed upon regulators to keep it open an extra decade.
The overriding logic seemed to be: Well, it hasn’t melted down yet. Here’s hoping.
The place feels as old and tattered as did the soon-to-be-closed joint military base. It’s been built for a staff of about two thousand but modern advancements mean a staff of fewer than two hundred and fifty can run the day-to-day operations. The cooling tower has been shedding paint for decades. Tumbleweeds bop about, bumping up against diesel storage tanks and transformers and the odd rusty Quonset hut.
The young driver gets the laundry van into the facility and parks in front of the administrative building, which, helpfully, has a largish sign out front reading ADMINISTRATIVE BUILDING. Dez, Mike Whitney, and Renata Esquivel head into Mike’s office, which features faux wood paneling, a mounted bigmouth bass on a cedar plaque, and pictures of Mike shaking hands with two vice presidents and one movie star. In one corner is an American flag on a pole, in a stand, the one Mike likely loads into his personal SUV to haul to weekly Kiwanis or Rotary meetings. He’s got a trophy on the cabinet with the inscription WORLD’S GREATEST DAD and a coffee cup that reads HAPPY WIFE, HAPPY LIFE. He’s got a photo of a woman his age and five youths, midteens to early twenties, plus nearly a dozen other photos of them individually, many in softball and baseball kit. When Mike sees Dez looking at the photos, he beams.
Mike picks up the receiver on a phone so old it still has five clear cubes at the bottom that turn red when one of the lines is engaged. “I’ll get the dayshift foremen here. We have six teams.”
Dez interrupts him. “Can they meet us at the master control room? Would love to see that. Plus, could be good information for the councilor an’ me to have.”
Mike shrugs. He makes the call.
“They’re on their way. It’s a pretty big facility. It’ll take a while for them to get there. C’mon.”
They exit the office and the building and head to the largest building on the campus. It’s two stories tall and made of cinder block. No real effort was made to make it look like anything other than a barricade between the real world and fissionable material.
The master control room looks a bit like you’d expect. A curved bank of fifteen work stations with built-in computers, circa 2000 maybe, all facing a full wall of flat-screen monitors that gauge every conceivable metric. Nine of the fifteen workstations are in use; people hunched over them, looking bored; looking a bit more attentive since Mike Whitney walked in. Not a necktie to be seen. At some of the workstations, people have clipped-out comics of Homer Simpson fumbling his famous glowing ingot of uranium, or Mr. Burns gloating over a disaster. The classics.
Six people show up; four men, two women. Some wear jeans and polo shirts. Some wear one-piece coveralls that, when Dez was growing up, were called boilersuits. He’s not sure what Americans call them.
Mike Whitney has everyone meet in the single saddest conference room Dez has ever been in. He can see from the mismatched, sun-faded floor that the room used to include vending machines for drinks or maybe snacks. Austere times; the machines are long gone. One wall of windows facing the backs of the crew staffing the master control room.
Mike Whitney is about to address the lot but Renata Esquivel says, “Do you mind?”
Mike gestures to give her the floor.
“Thank you. Some of you know me. I’m on the city council in Sloatville. Before we get started, I should tell you that I am of the opinion that the city has been taken over by a criminal, anarchistic gang of white supremacists. If you think I’m wrong, then you won’t be receptive to what this man here, Desmond Limerick, has to tell you. It would be good to establish this up front. Who here stands with Patriot Media and the people who’ve descended on our town?”
The six staff leaders stay very, very quiet. One guy in coveralls raises his hand, as if he’s in a high school classroom. “I guess, some of what they say, you have to admit is true. The invasion by illegals. Drugs and crime and everything…” He shrugs.
“Some of what they say is true,” Renata agrees. “America has problems. America has always had problems. By and large, Americans have risen to the task of solving these problems. Not overnight. Not without setbacks. Not without errors. But America is the land of accomplishing great things, and America is the land of immigrants, and those twin truths we hold self-evident.”
Not bad, Dez thinks. She rounded that little speech out nicely. Kept it short. Didn’t start by arguing the fella down. Mike Whitney looks a little impressed, too.
The coveralls guy is quick to get on the same page with Renata. “Oh, yeah. For sure. I’ve got, like, German and Polish and Scottish blood in me. Cherokee, too, my mom says.”
The woman next to him says, “My grandfather is Japanese. I’m one-quarter Japanese. We’re hearing you, Ms. Esquivel. You won’t remember, but you came to my high school for career day, like, eight years ago.”
Renata smiles. “I don’t remember, no. Was I pompous?”
The woman smiles shyly and waggles her hand in midair. She’s relieved when Renata laughs a genuine laugh.
A third guy with tortoiseshell glasses frames and a messy blond thatch of hair smiles and gives Renata the thumbs-up.
A fourth guy with a smoker’s voice clears his throat. He looks like public speaking is second only to a colonoscopy on his fun list. “I, uh, didn’t vote for you, ma’am. Truth is, I don’t vote. I’ve listened to Patriot Media in the car. They’re like everyone else; what my old man used to call three-fourths foolish and a quarter flash. Better than listening to easy rock on the commute. We haven’t left our jobs or the town, ma’am. We’re here for the long haul.”
Renata nods. “My father used to say that, too. All right. Thank you. Everyone. Mr. Limerick was sent here to investigate what’s going on. He’s laid out his case and, to me, it makes a horrible kind of sense. I think we need to listen to him with an open mind. You’ll take questions, Mr. Limerick?”
“Course.”
“All right,” she says. “Just listen. Take it all in. Ask us anything. Mr. Limerick? The floor’s yours.”
Dez claps his hands together, rubs his palms. “Good. Thank you. Great.” He turns to Mike Whitney and the six forepersons. “Folks? Operation Swift Sword is fecked.”
Six of the seven blink at him a bit.
The guy in the tortoiseshell frames and curly hair says, “Shit!” and reaches around to draw a .22 from a belt holster.
Dez hits him in the breadbasket and the man folds like paper money.
The guy’s lying in the fetal position as Dez claps his palms crosswise, as if smacking off chalk dust. He smiles around.
“Right then. Questions?”
CHAPTER 59
The people in the conference room take a second or two to react. Some step back in fear. One woman kneels next to the guy holding his gut and groaning. The smoker makes a fist, looks at Dez’s hands, uncurls his fist.
Dez nods to Renata and Mike. “Ma’am. Mike. Apologies. The bastards behind this have been keen to use inside people. Did it at Triton Expediters. Did it at the joint military base. Stood t’reason they’d do it here. The general in charge of this clusterf—this event told me it had a code name. Operation Swift Sword. Which, say that three times fast, yeah?”
He smiles at them. They don’t smile back.
“Point being, the conspiracy had someone on the inside. Had to be. Someone with command authority. Needed sorting out, that.” He gestures to the guy still curled like a snail. “Sorted.”
The kneeling woman looks up. “Rolly definitely has some way far, right-wing opinions. He used to talk about them all the time.”
Renata says, knowingly, “Used to.”
The woman stands. Nods. “Yeah. He stopped talking about politics. I mean, stopped all together. Honest, I was so glad, I didn’t think about it twice.”
“Again, apologies,” Dez addresses the room. “Needed to be done. Joint Base McKinzie-Clark is no longer under the control of the U.S. military. I was there. I’ve met up with an undercover DEA agent and two Los Angeles Police detectives, and we can prove it.”
A lot of that is horseshit. He’s met all those people, sure, but they can’t prove squat. Also, Dez still doesn’t know what DEA stands for but the people around the room seem to.
“Patriot Media is off the air, an’ that’s my doing. The bastards behind all this have a plan. Take over the town. Take over the military base. Take over this power plant.”
The smoker says, “Bullshit.”
“I shit you not.” He turns to Renata. “Sorry, ma’am.” He turns back. “What they got planned requires slowing down the official response from the military and the police. The bastards’ll be hiding among civilians in Sloatville. They’ve got the small-arms supply of the joint military base already. If they can take this power plant, and if they can threaten to melt it down, they’ll keep the whole shebang off their asses long enough for the final phase.”
