Death Wave Read Online Free PDF Page B

picked out the serial number on the Hip’s tail-rotor boom: 10450.
The analysts, he knew, would have much better resolution on the big screen down in the Art Room, but the detail on his office monitor was still superb. Less than two hours old …
“How far are these coordinates from Ayni Airfield?” he asked Marie.
“Seventy-five miles in a straight line,” Marie replied. “Closer to eighty or ninety by road.”
“This was from Deep One?”
“Yes, sir.”
Deep One was Terry Barnes, a friend of Rubens’ and a department head at the NRO headquarters in Chantilly, Virginia. He and Rubens had a backroom understanding that let Desk Three bypass some of the mountain of red tape that routinely clogged the communications lines between Chantilly and Fort Meade. Specifically, when Barnes saw something come through that he thought would be of interest to Desk Three, he would pass it along without the usual formal protocols.
“Just what was USA-202 working on when it caught an A2TI?” Rubens asked.
“NRO restricted, sir, but the encrypted ID says it’s Agency.”
Agency . Not the National Security Agency but the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. Each of the NRO’s government clients had its own encryption on data transmitted from the NRO; the NSA routinely broke those codes, for practice and to show that they could do it, as much as anything else—they were America’s premier code-breakers and SIGINT specialists, after all.
Rubens scowled briefly. Although the CIA had brought the NSA and Desk Three in on this op in the first place, they were still playing their little games, competing with the NSA for precious time on the available reconnaissance satellites. The bureaucracy grinds on …
The National Reconnaissance Office, which ran the technical end of spy satellite surveillance, provided imaging data to both the CIA and the NSA, among others. This morning, it seemed, while the NSA was trying to get observing time on any of the available satellites—Intruder or Crystal Fire—the CIA obviously was running a sweep over the same area and keeping the results to themselves. Presumably, that sweep was part of the same mission, Operation Haystack, searching for the missing suitcase nukes. Rubens wasn’t aware of any other situation of particular interest to U.S. intelligence in Tajikistan at the moment.
He decided he would need to talk to Collins about this.
“Mr. Rubens?” Marie’s voice said from behind the image of the Russian helicopter.
“Yes, Marie.”
“You wanted me to remind you when Ms. DeFrancesca reached her AO.”
Automatically, he glanced at his watch, then up at the line of clocks on the wall, each showing a different time zone. It was just past two in Berlin.
“Right, thank you.” Yes, there was still plenty of time before his appointment at the White House. “I’ll be right down.”
    STARBUCKS
PARISER PLATZ
CENTRAL BERLIN, GERMANY
WEDNESDAY, 1419 HOURS LOCAL TIME
     
Lia DeFrancesca always felt a special thrill when she came here. She could feel the pulse of history in this place.
Her bright red fuck-me heels click-clacked across the brick pavement as she walked quickly across the Unter den Linden from the Hotel Adlon. To her left, across the broad, open expanse of the crowded Pariser Platz, rose the Brandenburg Gate, twelve monumental columns topped by a colossal quadriga, the Roman goddess Victoria’s chariot drawn by four horses abreast.
Once one of twelve gates through which visitors had entered the city of Berlin, the Brandenburg alone survived. It had been a symbol of the Nazi Party when they’d first come to power, and been one of the few structures still standing in the devastation of the Pariser Platz after the war. In 1961, when the Berlin Wall had gone up, the Brandenburg Gate had been just east of the line, in Soviet-controlled territory. The so-called Baby Wall had blocked East Berliners from the Gate, and the west end of the Pariser Platz itself had become part of the infamous