Solstice Page 7

  They didn't say anything. Just looked at him with the word 'So?' in their eyes.

  'So it's like the old saying about monkeys in a room writing Shakespeare. You keep them running like that forever and once in a while you get something weird. Take a look at this and you'll see what I mean.'

  On the screen of the computer was a map of the galaxy, with only the major players marked out on it: the sun at the centre, the planets around it. They were orbiting slowly, randomly. In the corner of the screen a series of numbers in date format were flicking over, too quickly for anyone to read.

  Lieberman watched the display, waited for the moment, then pressed a key. The picture froze where it was and even to them it looked impressive, even to a nine-year-old's eyes there was some awful symmetry here.

  The planets formed a line. The earth was on one side, with Pluto, neatly labelled in red, behind. Aligned together perfectly on the opposing side of the sun were four planets, names flashing: Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

  'See — we know from studies done by NASA that just an alignment of Jupiter and Saturn can cause a twenty per cent increase in sunspot activity. When you add in three other planets in what we call the Grand Cross like this, and whatever effects their gravitational pull might have on the earth, maybe you get even more — or less, that's a possibility too. And…'

  That was enough. He realized it abruptly. They were too quiet and he was just giving it to them too straight, without the caveats.

  'And that happens on Wednesday,' Mo said, no expression on her face at all.

  Lieberman swore inwardly at himself. The date was on the screen. He really shouldn't expect these people to be plain dumb.

  'On Wednesday,' she continued, and walked around the yard as she spoke, arranging all the pine cones into a row, aligning them with the rock, 'we have both this conjunction of planets and the summer solstice. All together.'

  'Correct.'

  Lieberman looked at Annie and felt a little happier. He'd lost her. She'd wandered off somewhere else in her head, found this all too big, too distant to bother her, and he was relieved.

  'And the reason we're here is to record it,' he continued. 'For posterity, some kind of solar project — don't ask, they haven't favoured me with a full brief yet. We're here to watch, make notes, take pictures. See what we can learn.'

  Annie had her hand up again, and Lieberman braced for yet another unsettling question.

  'I need to go,' she said, and he gave an inward sigh.

  'Time for home,' Mo said. 'Say thank-you to Michael.'

  'Thanks,' Annie said flatly, then began the climb back down the steps.

  'Wait for us at the bottom,' Mo said.

  They watched her hop and skip down the hill. Lieberman shrugged his shoulders, felt a little old and stupid after such a rambling display.

  'Long time since I gave a school talk,' he said, shrugging.

  'It was good.'

  The scared side of her had gone. Maybe it had never been there, really; it was just something the burning day had fired in his imagination. But she was a little warmer. That was no trick of the light.

  'You're kind,' he said.

  'No. I mean it.'

  'Annie's quite a kid.' He hesitated a moment, then ventured, 'Is it hard?'

  'What?'

  'Being on your own.'

  Mo gave him a frank look. 'Annie and I… we've been on our own for a couple of years. We have an understanding.'

  He could think of nothing to say, just nodded. This was not the time to ask, he thought. Definitely not. He started tidying his stuff away.

  'Say,' he said after a few seconds. 'You play tennis? I brought along my long-framed Prince tennis racket, which I prefer to think of as the long-framed tennis racket formerly known as Prince. There's an old court I saw back at the house. It's a touch beaten up but I've got a spare racket. And tennis is quick. We could be over and done in thirty minutes.'

  She laughed anyway, and looked frankly into his face.

  'I'm terrible at tennis,' she said, smiling still.

  'I'm great but I have no killer instinct, I drown in sympathy for my opponent. I promise to play down to you. I'll promise to lose if you like.'

  'You're married,' she said, and it was a statement.

  'Was. Strictly single and unattached these days.'

  'Oh.'

  She watched Annie skipping down the steps, following every movement.

  'What kills a marriage in your world, Michael?' she said, turning suddenly to stare into his eyes.

  'Same thing you find everywhere else, I guess. Time. Boredom. Insecurity. Fear.'

  'And hitting on women when you're away from home?'

  She didn't stop smiling when she said it. This was not, he guessed, a judgement.

  'That too. But it's all connected. You'd be amazed how much fear gets to the heart of things, and winds up on the other side with some new label, like lust.'

  She laughed quietly, and he guessed he deserved as much.

  Lieberman's hand reached, automatically, for his head. His thick black head of hair was soaked in sweat. He missed the baseball cap.

  'This isn't a move,' he said. 'I'm just trying to rebuild a few social skills that got lost over the years. Nothing more. Really. If I've offended you in some way, I apologize. I didn't mean to.'

  'No problem. And thanks for the talk. It was… illuminating. And for helping with Annie too.'

  'My pleasure,' he said, meaning it. 'And I'll tell you what. They're throwing some briefing tonight. I'll get you invited if you like. We could both find out a little more about why we're here.'

  'Sure,' she said quietly, and looked down the steps, saw Annie waiting there seated on the stone wall.

  He shook his head, and softly cursed the way the heat was turning his brain. For a moment there he almost thought she looked scared.

  CHAPTER 10

  Wagner's First Day

  Langley, Virginia, 1222 UTC

  Helen Wagner looked at the office and knew it had been swept. It had that antiseptic look that came from polish and machines. People looking for things. People peering into the past. Standard practice when an office in the Agency changed hands under odd circumstances. And something so male about it as well: For all its cleanliness the place seemed untidy, disorganized, just plain wrong.

  Until a week before, this had been the home of her predecessor, Belinda Churton, the woman who'd made the post of head of the CIA's Science and Technology directorate — S&T for short — a real job, not just a passing nod at fashion. In eight busy years, she'd screamed at the men who ran the Agency until they couldn't ignore her pleas. And Helen Wagner had followed her all the way, first as a newly recruited graduate out of MIT, then as number three in the formative years of the directorate's rise to glory, when the Internet and biotechnology came out of the lab and fell straight into the hands of crooks and terrorists everywhere.

  She gazed at her reflection in the long, deep office window, the image hardened by the dazzling daylight outside. It was an attractive face, sympathetic and intelligent, with sharp blue eyes that never seemed to rest. She wore neat black hair tied in a bun, as if to put it in its place and drown a little of her natural beauty. She knew what the whispers were down the corridors, and this was the curse of her looks.

  This hard, somewhat standoffish elegance belonged, they thought, close to the top of the organization, but not at its helm. She lacked the practical, careworn appearance of the person you expected to find running a department of government.

  She wore a grey two-piece suit in light wool, and would take off the jacket, sit at the desk in her cream silk shirt the moment she settled down to the job. Physically, she felt good. She worked out. She looked after herself. She had a strong, curvy body that was guaranteed to turn heads, though she'd long ago stopped noticing. 'Keep the body fit, the mind follows,' her mother had said over and over again, in the long years of waiting, in the self-imposed exile that followed her father's sudden d
eath. It was the kind of pat, easy sentiment that passed her lips so easily, spoken in that curious accent, a mix of Polish, Yiddish, and American, that never changed. This job, this ascent through the Agency was, Helen knew, some attempt at redemption. She wondered what her father would have thought, and knew such rumination was futile, stupid. He'd died when she was two, when the scandal had broken and refused to leave their door. There was nothing in her memory of that time. Her consciousness began later, in the dead, in-between years, waiting in the shadow of this infamous, vanished man.

  Ten years after the Agency had first accused Pieter Wagner, an acclaimed nuclear physicist working at MIT in Cambridge, of spying for the Russians, ten years after they'd leaked the story to the media (lights popping at the front door of their small brownstone house on Beacon Hill, and the constant sight of men waiting outside, yelling questions, never going away), a federal commission had cleared his name, awarded the family close to $10 million compensation, and issued a public apology for the mistake. Which it was. Her father, it turned out, was just the innocent victim of an overzealous employee who thought that a foreign accent and an ancestry in Russian-occupied Poland were, on their own, sufficient grounds for suspicion. The money meant nothing to her, though it would later put her through MIT and pay for a year of research at the Sorbonne. He was gone: wrists slashed with a razor blade in the tiny white-tiled bathroom of the little house by the beach in Maine, the one, she later discovered, they'd rented as some kind of last refuge until the Feds came and broke down the door.

  When he was posthumously cleared, she'd sworn she would become a scientist too, had made that oath in her dark, overheated bedroom on Beacon Hill. It was August 1978 and she was thirteen, already developing a prematurely adult beauty, already aware that she possessed something that made other people uncomfortable. In her own mind this was not a form of revenge. It was all a question of balance. When she joined the Agency, there were no favours, no backward glances, not as far as she could see. She was a scientist, and this was a good science job. If people talked, they talked behind her back, and she didn't even think of listening. The name Wagner had lost some of its topicality, to her great relief. She became herself, a person in her own right, not a portion of his shadow. And then, three years ago, her mother had died, struck down by an out-of-control truck. And the job, which swallowed her, consumed everything she put into it, with Belinda helping every inch of the way, like some surrogate mother and father all rolled into one.

  She knew every inch of this office. Today it looked bare, bleak, and soulless. Belinda always had flowers and didn't care what the old guard thought of them. S&T was on the map; it occupied a growing part of the new Langley complex, employing close to three thousand bright young people who'd come out of college and found themselves thrust straight into the melting pot of almost every advanced science known to man. Thanks to Belinda's persuasive powers and her impressive academic record at Stanford, S&T had recruited some of the finest scientific brains she could find, plucked from the corridors of Cornell and Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, then thrust, without warning, into a world they couldn't hope to understand.

  She remembered standing in front of the desk she now occupied, three months into the job, close to tears, telling Belinda she was resigning, that this was no way for any human being to live. The supposed need for there to be a clandestine veil over her life had killed the few tentative relationships she'd started to build. Worst of all was the one fatal time she'd fallen into bed with a fellow agent and discovered that their professional closeness only made things worse, made her more tongue-tied, more paranoid.

  And Belinda had smiled, talked her out of it, as Helen knew she would, had spoken of how these crises came and went in Agency life, were just steps in the natural process of growing into the secret world. Helen had listened to her talk, speechless at the grasp this woman had of her own lowly work. Belinda was so high in the administrative structure of Langley that she could hardly be expected to recognize a junior trainee. Yet, when the moment came, she knew every last detail of the cases Helen had handled, was able to comment on them with such precision that this couldn't have been a trick, some quick executive briefing fitted in before the interview just to keep some junior employee on the ball.

  When the interview was over, Belinda smiling, extending a hand out over the desk, Helen found it hard to believe she could even have considered leaving Langley. The place was too special. Belinda too. And perhaps, one day, even Helen herself, if she caught enough of her mentor's magic.

  It had been around five on a chill January afternoon. When Belinda knew she'd won, she smiled at Helen, nodded across the room, and said, 'You look like you need a drink, honey. Watch this. I'm going to let you in on a secret.'

  And then she walked across the room, over to the sealed glass window, looked out at the bare winter trees, and pulled up a grid in the air-conditioning system.

  'You know, three years I've been asking those office guys to fix this vent, and three years they just keep forgetting to do it. There are rules about alcohol on the premises, Wagner, and if I ever catch you breaking them you'll be in big trouble, miss. But right now…'

  Her hand dived into the vent and came out with a half bottle of Glenfiddich.

  '… I'm prepared to bend a little. After all, what's the point in being the boss if you can't be allowed a little discretion?'

  They sipped the whisky out of plastic cups, and Helen could still remember how it made her eyes water.

  Belinda seemed ageless and indestructible, an icon of goodness in the occasionally murky waters that went with the job. Then one day she walked out of the office and was gone for good. All because some Montana crazy felt like making a point. All because you could pick up the tricks of the bomb-making trade on the Web, go out and buy the right fertilizer, rent a truck from Avis, and place your deadly mix of metal and chemical right next to a suburban garage, wait there all night, then detonate the thing with a cheap amateur radio remote control the next morning.

  Two weeks later it still made no sense. The FBI was making noises about ecoterrorists, militiamen, and right-wing crazies, but no one had been arrested, and Helen had a feeling that, as the days dragged by, the case was drifting into nothingness.

  The director of the CIA, Ben Levine, had called her into his office on the day the news of Belinda's death broke, given her the temporary deputy directorship of S&T, making her the effective head of one of the Agency's four divisions, all at the age of thirty-five. She should have been flattered. The job tasted like ashes in her mouth. She'd never liked Levine, they both knew it, and she could only guess that he picked her because there really was no choice. S&T, like the Agency, was in the middle of some messy executive regeneration. Larry Wolfit, the quiet, introverted scientist who was Belinda's official deputy, should have been first in line, but got passed over. Helen understood, in an unformed way, why too. Wolfit was a loyal, trusted, diligent S&T executive, but lately had seemed detached from the work, bound up with outside interests that took more and more of his time.

  It had taken five days for her to go through the added security clearances, get some briefing on how the structure worked inside Langley when it came to dealing with the three other directorates: Operations, Administration, and Intelligence. She'd already met the assistant head of Operations, Dave Barnside, the principal liaison officer for the Agency's active service arm. He was one of the old school, bright, tough, and cynical, pushing his mid-forties and resigned to the idea that he'd probably never climb the ladder any further. Barnside made her glad she was in S&T. The rest of Langley was new to her, and she almost came to resent the insularity that Belinda had built into the directorate, the way it operated outside the orbit of the rest of the Agency, at least as far as most of its occupants were aware.

  She took off her jacket, sat down at the large, bare desk, and stared out the window. The weather was dry and scorching again. She wished she'd worn something cooler. The trees looked half-dead; the
grass that ran off into the woods beyond the complex was scorched. She was about to scroll through her E-mail and try to put some priority into the day when the phone rang.

  'Wagner,' she said firmly.

  'There's a car coming for you in ten minutes. Barnside and I are going on ahead for the meeting right now. We'll see you there.'

  Levine's voice sounded as flat and dry as the landscape outside the window.

  'Do I need to prepare?'

  It almost sounded like a laugh. 'No one's prepared for this one. Not even me. We're going to the White House. There's a long day ahead of us.'

  Then the phone went dead.

  Her mind went blank. There was nothing on the agenda, nothing in any of the high-priority E-mails she was now calling up, that could explain this abrupt summons. In her years with the Agency she'd never even been to the White House. It was typical too that Levine had left her in the dark.

  'Bastard,' she muttered, and got up, hooked her jacket off the peg.

  She leaned around the door. Maureen, her executive assistant, had just arrived and was making a pot of coffee.

  'It smells great, Maureen, but you're going to have to drink it by yourself. Put all my appointments on hold until you hear back from me. Anything urgent, you can get me on the mobile.'

  Maureen smiled at her. 'My, that didn't take long, now, did it?'

  She didn't answer, just walked back into the office and took one last look at the empty desk. Then closed the door and walked over to the window. The vent was still dead, not pumping out an iota of cool air. She picked at it with her long, slender fingers, pried it loose, and lifted up the metal grid. There was a half-bottle of Glenfiddich sitting there, half-full. She picked it up, and thought of the hand that had put it there.

  'Jesus, Belinda, I wish to God this was you and not me talking to these people. This feels like one big nightmare.'