Zimmerman's Algorithm

3.02 Thur. Mar. 25 2009

IT was almost noon, during a brief pause in a flurry of meetings, when the door slammed open in Emmit D'Arcy's office. Colonel Gregory Mecham stood in the doorway, looking as if he'd had no sleep in the last forty-eight hours. D'Arcy looked up from his desk and said quietly, "Colonel, I thought you were still in New York."

Mecham stepped into the office and let the door close behind him. "What the hell have you done, D'Arcy?"

D'Arcy sat up and straightened his glasses. "I don't appreciate that tone, Colonel. You sound as if you're trying to accuse me of something."

"It's as if you went out of your way to lose them, and one of our men got killed in the process. Christ, where was your security? What were you thinking? A civilian flight out of JFK? You were asking for this to happen."

"That's quite enough, Colonel." D'Arcy stood. "You know we're dealing with a security problem. The extraction was engineered to be small and anonymous. I hand-picked those men, and supervised it personally. Do you think I wanted to be shot at? We chose a civilian flight so that there would be no other government personnel aware of our movement."

"They still caught up with you—"

D'Arcy nodded. His expression was grave. "That means something more ominous than a breach in our communications security."

"What?"

"We have a mole, Colonel. Zimmerman has someone helping her from the inside." D'Arcy walked around the table. "Look at the facts, Colonel. The IUF's people have been aware of every move we've made. From the CIA's botched Daedalus sting onward . . ." He patted Mecham's shoulder. "It's a good thing you came in, Colonel."

"What are you talking about? A mole?"

"Look at the timing of this." D'Arcy turned and leaned on his desk, facing away from Mecham. He looked out the window toward the Washington Monument. "Why did they strike when they did? Unless they wanted your people in the NSA to debrief Malcolm and Zimmerman's sister. While you had them, they didn't move. The moment there's a threat that someone else might question them, they made the grab." D'Arcy's hand moved to a small console set in his desk. He pressed a button.

Mecham was backing up. "Are you saying that someone at the NSA is in on all this?"

D'Arcy nodded. "And we're dealing with some carefully engineered disinformation. They didn't shoot our two prisoners, they took them. Why? Unless those two were working with Zimmerman and the IUF?"

"That's crazy. He was shot—"

D'Arcy turned around and faced him. As he did, the door behind Mecham opened. "Do you know a better motive for turning on your own country? Malcolm has, at least, an understandable reason for working with these people."

A pair of Marines stepped into the office and to either side of Mecham. Mecham looked at them, and the color drained out of his face. "What's going on here?"

"I said we have a mole." D'Arcy looked at Mecham. "I hope I'm wrong."

Mecham looked at D'Arcy, and his expression went cold. "You've made one hell of a mistake here."

"Perhaps." D'Arcy took off his glasses and shook his head. "I hope so. But it makes too much sense to ignore. They've had a line on everything we've done. They've obviously turned Malcolm and used him to seed disinformation that's intended to divert us from whatever terrorist activity they're planning. And you were very eager to bring him in. Who better than the mole to debrief Malcolm?"

"You don't know what you're saying."

D'Arcy wiped his glasses. "I want you to know that there are no official charges. At this point we're just being careful. But you will have to be detained until we've unraveled the truth in this matter. You'll be interviewed—"

Mecham nodded. "I know the drill, Emmit. I've done it enough myself."

"Then would you please accompany the Marines here?"

Mecham looked at the Marines next to him and nodded. "You are going to find out just how wrong you are."

"I hope so," D'Arcy said. He turned away from him as the Marines escorted Colonel Mecham out of his office. Once the door closed, D'Arcy whispered to himself, barely voiced, "Sorry, Colonel, there’s no other way. We ’re too close."

They changed cars once, loading Gideon and Ruth into the back of a van. Afterward they stayed on the road for hours. They kept Gideon and Ruth hooded, and only stopped twice, leading them to a bathroom. From the feel of the road under the car's shocks, Gideon suspected that they never traveled an Interstate after leaving the vicinity of New York City.

Gideon thought that placed them somewhere in rural New York or Pennsylvania. When he mentioned that to Ruth in a whispered voice, she responded, "Where are they taking us?"

"I don't know." Gideon edged over in his seat until he was next to Ruth. He grunted when he stopped moving. His arms had fallen asleep, and his bad arm ached. He was beginning to worry about lost circulation. The hood he wore stank of his sweat.

They rode in silence for a while after that. It gave Gideon another opportunity to wonder why the two of them had been taken prisoner. He hadn't said anything to Ruth about it, since he'd have to point out how much easier it'd be for them to have killed them on the road with the driver.

Why would these people need them?

If Julia was really calling the shots here, she might feel something for her sister, ordering her spared. But if that was the case, taking him would make about as much-sense as taking the driver.

It felt like late afternoon when they stopped for the last time. Gideon heard the side door slide open, and a blast of cold air filled the rear of the van. A gruff voice told them to get out. Gideon did his best to stand without help from his arms, and someone grabbed him and pulled him out of the van.

He took a step and felt his feet sink into a layer of snow. In a few moments he was shivering. It was probably twenty degrees colder here than it had been in New York.

Without warning, someone stripped off his hood, and the glare blinded him, making him squint. The cold air was like a slap in the face. While he was dazzled, he felt a knife cut the nylon cord binding his wrists.

He stood there, blinking, eyes watering, trying to rub circulation back into his wrists. It took a moment before he could see much of anything. First, he saw Ruth standing next to him, rubbing her wrists, her face screwed up in a squint as she looked past him.

Gideon turned away from the van and Ruth to look at where they were. The van was parked next to a stand of evergreens that opened out ahead of them into a clearing that must've been a couple of acres. Beyond the trees on the far side of the clearing, Gideon could make out a line of mountains against a painfully blue sky.

The snow covering the clearing was undisturbed; there was only a slight depression to mark where the road they were on continued. Right in front of the nose of the van was a gate that was painted a bright red in contrast against the snow. A battered sign stood next to the gate, and Gideon had to blink a few times before he could make out the words—

"Limited Use Seasonal Highway. Closed Nov. 15-April 15."

Their captors stood around, as if they were waiting for something. Ruth muttered, "Looks like you were right about upstate New York." Her words came out in a puff of fog.

Gideon turned to the man who looked like the leader and asked, "So what are we waiting for?"

The man didn't respond, didn't even look at him. Gideon kept looking at him. He had donned a white parka for the weather, and held a Kalishnikov rifle whose black composite stock stood out against his clothing. This was the man he'd seen shoot Kendal. The expression on his face was frightening, almost mechanical, as if there wasn't any emotion there at all. Gideon looked into that face and wanted to jump the man, strangle him. . . .

Then the man barked something in a foreign language and pointed with a gloved hand. Gideon looked in the direction he indicated and saw a vehicle across the clearing. At first it was hard to make out what it was. It was painted white and difficult to make out against the snow.

As it closed on them, Gideon could see it was a Hummer. He also saw the exhaust stack that marked it as a military, not a civilian model. It pulled up on the other side of the fence.

The leader waved Gideon and Ruth toward it with his Kalishnikov. The two of them slowly waded through the calf-deep snow to the open rear door of the Hummer. The leader followed them, leaving the others to get in the van and drive back down the way they had come.

The man with the Kalishnikov pushed Gideon and Ruth into the back seat, then got into the front passenger seat himself. Once the rear door was shut, the Hummer backed up and turned toward the snow-covered clearing. The snow, which probably would have mired any other vehicle, was pushed aside by the Hummer, spraying up on either side of the vehicle. Clumps of snow obscured Gideon's view out the passenger windows; all he could see was a vague impression of trees passing by as they left the other side of the clearing.

They went a couple of miles into the woods when the driver slowed on the buried highway and took an unexpected turn to the right, pointing the Hummer up the side of the hill next to them.

Gideon craned to see out the front, but what he saw wasn't even a footpath. It was a gully cut in the side of the hill by water runoff. It was a ditch that was barely wide enough for the Hummer, and the driver aimed them straight up it. The grade steepened, but the Hummer's low center of gravity kept the wheels on the road on a grade that would flip over just about anything else. The grade passed forty-five degrees at several points, and there was no point where any two wheels were on the same level.

Ruth grabbed his arm and wouldn't let go during the nerve-racking ascent.

Eventually they emerged on another, more conventional road, that snaked around the hill. The driver turned right again, following this road back the way they'd come. It was a buried dirt road, in worse repair than the first one. Still, it was a relief after the drive up the side of the hill. At this point, the driver seemed very aware of the canopy above them. When Gideon first noticed the driver looking up, he thought it was nothing, but when he started taking turns when the road divided, Gideon began to realize that he was avoiding the paths that didn't have the shade of a lot of branches.

After three or four more miles, they passed a point of transition. It was only marked by a few signs posted on trees by the side of the road: "Private Property," "No Hunting," "No Trespassing." After that, the woods around them seemed to undergo a subtle and somewhat threatening change. The first things that Gideon noticed were the logs and windblown trees—piles of deadwood that were innocuous at first glance, but after seeing a third pile, it was obvious that they were placed by man, not nature, concealing cameras, or some other security measure. A few times Gideon looked up, and saw a bare spot in the canopy supplemented by a sheet of camouflage netting. And once, in the distance, Gideon saw another man with a Kalishnikov, wearing a white parka, appearing as if he were on some sort of patrol.

They were entering some sort of military encampment.

When they reached the end of this private road, Gideon and Ruth stepped out of the Hummer into the road, followed by the man wielding the Kalishnikov, who took them fifteen yards back down the road, behind the vehicle.

Gideon watched as the driver got out of the car and went to a tree by the side of the road. Gideon could see rope and part of a scaffolding—dressed with more camouflage netting—next to the tree. The driver pulled on the rope, and the floor of the forest next to the road opened up.

A camouflaged trapdoor opened up on a dirt ramp that led down into an unlit hole. The driver pulled until the trapdoor was at about a sixty-degree angle, and when he let go of the rope, the door stayed there, expertly counterbalanced. Then he got back in the Hummer, angled back, and backed it into the hole.

"Come on," said their leader, once the Hummer was off of the road.

Gideon looked at-Ruth. She looked at him, still rubbing her wrists. He had the uncomfortable sense that she was relying on him to show her what to do.

He hugged himself. The cold was beginning to seep into his leg and his arm, burning in the newly-healed flesh. When he started walking in the direction the Kalishnikov indicated, he noticed his limp was more pronounced. His leg felt as if he'd been on his feet all day.

The man with the Kalishnikov took them out into a clearing, occasionally prodding them with the rifle.

They followed the private road out into a field. Once they left the woods, the road was marked on either side by a long, gray split-rail fence. The fence enclosed sloping pastures on either side of them, flat white expanses of snow. The pasture to the right sloped down toward a tree-line, and the one to the left sloped upward until it reached a rocky hillside that shot upward at a steep angle.

There was a cluster of buildings far in front of them.

Gideon could make out a Victorian farmhouse, and a weathered gray barn adjoining the left pasture.

It was a long walk toward the buildings. They trudged through the snow, their breath coming out in wisps of fog. The landscape felt oddly empty. The people here had gone to great lengths to cultivate a feeling of abandonment. The one subtle sign otherwise was a complex set of antennae mounted, only half-hidden, in the Victorian's weathered gingerbread.

The Victorian's dark turrets, wrapped in gray shingles, seemed to lean over them as they reached the house. A porch wrapped around the side and front of the house, half in collapse. Parts of it were little more than splintered piles of rotted wood. The intact portion, in front of the main entrance, had a roof that visibly bowed in the center.

Their keeper pushed them toward the stairs. Gideon and Ruth stepped up to the unstable-looking porch. Gideon went slowly, out of fear of putting a foot through a rotten board. Once he stepped onto the snow-covered porch, he realized he needn't have worried. The surface he walked on, under a thin coating of snow, was a new piece of plywood. Once he was on the porch, he could see that there were a number of places above them where metal braces supported what was left of the porch above them.

The main doorway appeared to be boarded shut, but as they approached, the sheet of plywood covering the doorway opened up, swinging out to reveal a stern looking guy in a turtleneck, carrying another Kalishnikov. If it hadn't been for the Russian weapon, the guy in the sweater projected an attitude reminiscent of the plain-clothes Marines.

They didn't get to see much of the interior as they were hustled upstairs. From what Gideon saw, this place had been abandoned at one point. But it was being used for something now. They passed a drawing room that seemed to be the final resting place of every piece of furniture that had been abandoned with the house. Just before they ascended the stairs, Gideon looked down a hallway and saw that the warped, water-stained hardwood floor snaked with cables.

Then they were upstairs, walking down a corridor of cracked plaster and peeling wallpaper. The hallway had once been carpeted, but the carpet, what was left of it, was rolled up and leaning at the end of the hall against a boarded-up window.

Their keepers took them to a room that held a few cots, a desk, and a small computer terminal. Gideon noticed that the desk had a set of cables that went through a hole in the floor that had been made by removing one of the floorboards. The cables included the power cord that led to the standing lamp that was the only light in the windowless room.

"Sit," said the man who had led them all the way from the van. He set down his rifle behind the desk and stripped off his parka. Briefly, Gideon thought of diving for the weapon, but the gentleman with the sweater was still with them, his own Kalishnikov ready.

Gideon and Ruth sat. Gideon couldn't help but sigh with relief as he took the weight off his leg. Both his legs were stinging as ice melted off his too-thin jeans.

The man hung his parka up on a hook in a wall and pulled a small box out from a drawer in the desk. It looked like a small vinyl briefcase. He opened it to reveal a complex telephone. The whole case was about the size of a brick, but it was larger than any cellular phone that Gideon had seen recently.

The man with the phone nodded at the man with the rifle. He received a nod in return, and the man in the sweater picked up the extra rifle and left, closing the door on the three of them.

The man gave them an inscrutable look and keyed a number into his phone. After a few moments he said, "This is Volynskji."

In response he nodded a few times. After a few moments he said, "Is that wise, sir?" A shake of the head. "Even if the mission is compl—" Pause. "Yes. It is your operation." Look up at the two captives. "I'll take care of that now. I'll give you an update as soon—" Nod. "If you say so. No transmissions. I'll defer the report until you arrive."

Volynskji slowly put the phone back on the cradle and closed the small case.

He looked up at the two of them. "I have some questions I need to ask you, but before I do so, I should say something." He walked around the side of the desk. "First, if you're thinking of being uncooperative, you should know that most professionals have the following standing orders—if suicide is not an option, they should cooperate. Every agency who has an operative fall into the hands of the enemy automatically assumes all information possessed by the operative is compromised. Stubbornness on your part will not serve any purpose—except to make things more difficult. For you, not me. All it will cost me is time." He gave both of them a flat emotionless stare that was as bad as any threat. Gideon could look into those eyes and easily imagine what he would do to someone who was "stubborn."

He sat on the edge of the desk, facing them, and asked, "Now exactly what did you say to Chaviv Tischler?"

Volynskji questioned them for several hours. Several times, Gideon thought of trying to overpower the man, but he couldn't see how to do it without raising an alarm that would alert the rifle-bearing guard at the door. So, despite what he thought of the man, and despite his reluctance to answer any questions, Gideon played along with Volynskji. He rationalized that he was protecting Ruth. He was responsible for her being here, and he couldn't allow any reluctance on his part to result in something happening to her.

So, for hours, Gideon answered Volynskji's questions. All of them were directed at him, not Ruth. And the majority were about the old man with the cane and the safe house in New Jersey. Volynskji's questions confirmed Gideon's suspicion that they were Israelis. The name "Chaviv Tischler" belonged to that old man, who was so interested in their conversation in the restaurant. The way Volynskji talked about the man, Tischler was a high ranking member of Israeli intelligence. That didn't surprise Gideon.

What surprised Gideon was the fact that Volynskji didn't ask him one question about the Colonel and the U.S. government officials who had questioned them.

Maybe he already knew all he needed from that. The thought chilled Gideon. It implied that his own government's security was compromised way beyond what Tischler had implied. The Colonel and his people knew that Zimmerman was out there, and should know the extent that compromised them. They would be taking active steps to conceal their movements from the perceived threat. If Volynskji knew the contents of those debriefings—and the focus of his own questions implied that— despite the Colonel's precautions, these people—these terrorists—had penetrated the government far beyond what anyone suspected.

Volynskji kept at the questions until the answers became incoherent because of exhaustion. After that, the guard came in and led them to another room, higher in the building, and locked them in. There was a small window on one wall, an oval about a foot in its longest dimension. The only light came from the moon reflecting off of snow on the sill.