Hidden Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure Read online

  Bella’s eyes are dry, but still swollen and red. She’s exhausted. Mack appears unfazed by it all. He’s squeezing lotion from a small tube and rubbing it on his elbows and hands. Neither of them are talking.

  “So I guess it’s my turn,” I say. “Since both of you are jumping to discuss what’s next for our merry band of travelers.”

  “Bella was just telling me about your escape,” Mack says. “Pretty incredible. I guess the Ripley guy is dead though, right?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” I say. “I got this sense from him he was ready to go.”

  “Really?” Bella asks. “Why would you think that?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrug, loosening the belt a little as the plane levels off at altitude. “He knew what he was doing by helping me, arming me with his weapons. He knew the risk and took it anyway.”

  “I knew the risks by sticking with you,” she says. “I don’t have a death wish.”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m not suggesting he wanted to die, only that he’d accepted it. He wanted revenge for his son’s death, and if that came at the cost of his own life, he was willing to pay it. He could have escaped with me if he’d wanted. He stayed behind to make sure I had enough time to get out and keep my promise.”

  “What promise it that?” Mack says, jumping on my admission like a Marine on a hot meal.

  “I told him I’d kill the people responsible for his son’s death.”

  “Really?” Bella looks surprised. Mack doesn’t. “How does that fit in to what we’ve already got going on here? I mean, our plate is full.”

  “It fits in,” Mack says in my defense. “We already plan on handling Sir Spencer. From what he told me, the only other people involved in that mess were your father and the governor. Your father, God rest his soul, has already passed on. So that leaves the governor. That’s the only piece which might not fit, and we could make it fit.”

  “I don’t know,” Bella says. “Maybe we can just forego the ‘eye for an eye’ part of this and focus on what we already have on our plate.”

  “Are you hungry?” Mack asks, putting his hand on Bella’s arm.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You keep talking about plates.”

  “Actually,” she laughs, “I am. We haven’t eaten in, I don’t know, forever.”

  Mack unbuckles his belt and pushes himself to his prosthetic foot. “I’m gonna get us some grub.” He walks to the front of the cabin toward a small galley and the flight attendant.

  “So we’re headed to Washington?” Bella asks.

  “Yes. We’re going to find Sir Spencer. He set me up in Houston, giving information to the media.”

  “How would he do that? Better yet, why would he do that?” Bella questions. “He knows you’re trying to get him the entirety of the process. He knows you want to take care of Blogis.”

  “How?” I look at her like she’s nuts. “He makes a phone call or two to the television stations. He tips them off that I’m involved in George’s death. The reporters then call their sources at Harris County or DPS and confirm whatever Sir Spencer told them.”

  “Okay,” she concedes. “That still leaves ‘why.’”

  “Because he can. He didn’t like the fact that for a moment I had the upper hand, that I was calling the shots. So he gently reminds me of his power, his reach. I don’t think he actually thought they’d catch me. I don’t know if he was even aware I’d reached out to Ripley. I just think he was giving me a big middle-fingered salute.”

  “So what are you going to do when we get to D.C.?” she asks. “Do you know where he is?”

  “I know he’s staying at the Hay Adams Hotel. If he’s not there, we’ll ask around. We’ll find him.”

  “And once we find him?”

  “We get whatever information he has about Blogis.” I swivel the captain’s chair toward Bella and, out of habit more than anything else, lower my voice. “He wants that process. He knows Blogis wants it too. It’s too valuable. And with the instability in the Ukraine, Gaza, and Syria, the bidders are chomping at the bit. You know they are.”

  “But the plan is to get Blogis on our side,” she reminds me. “How is wasting our time in D.C. hunting for Sir Spencer going to help us?”

  “Sir Spencer is our ticket to finding Blogis. That’s the whole reason we risked going to Houston in the first place, remember?”

  Bella sighs and sinks a little into the comfort of the cream colored leather of the captain’s chair. She runs both of her hands through her hair and squeezes her eyes shut, then blinks them open.

  “We know Blogis is still hunting for the process. It’s too valuable for him to have given up on it. We know Sir Spencer wants it.”

  “You’re repeating what I already understand, Jackson,” she says. “But why do we have to go see Sir Spencer?”

  “We need to surprise him. I need to let him know we’re in control. He has to believe he needs us. And as long as we stay a half step ahead, we’ll have that in our corner.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Mack says, returning from the galley carrying a bowl of bar mix and a cheese plate. He slides the plate onto the table between his chair and Bella’s and plops into his seat. “Sir Spencer is a gamer. He’s all about the tradecraft, so to speak. He needs to know we’re players. We surprise him on his turf? That’s a point for us. He’ll give us what we need and we’ll be on our way.”

  “All of this is beyond me.” Bella shakes her head and pops a piece of cheddar into her mouth. “You just tell me what to do.”

  “We need to look at the stuff from the reporter’s apartment,” Mack suggests. “It’ll help us understand what Sir Spencer already knows about Blogis and the process. Then we go in armed.”

  “Good idea.” I reach into my pockets and pull out the thumb drives. “I’ve got the laptop and the hard drive in that bag over there.” I unbuckle and go to unzip the duffel.

  “I’ve got those file folders and the maps,” Mack adds. “There in a backpack next to your duffel.”

  I open the backpack and find the files, along with a stack of folded maps. All of it finds a place on a long burled wood table that runs four feet along the side of the cabin opposite our chairs.

  Mack moves over to the table and leans on it. “As we start to look at all of this, let’s remind ourselves of the score.”

  “What score?” I ask.

  “The pieces of the process,” Mack says, spreading out one of the maps. It’s too big for the width of the table and hangs from it like a tablecloth. “If I remember correctly, Blogis had one piece. He managed to find the piece hidden in Toulon, France, correct?”

  “That’s what Sir Spencer told us.” I start scanning the map. It looks more like a blueprint than a map. “He said there were four pieces. Blogis had one. We had the other three.”

  “Until you destroyed the hard drive,” Mack reminds me, his eyes still on the table.

  “I’m sure the Germans and the Israelis were devastated,” I say snarkily, referencing the buyers Sir Spencer suggested were interested in obtaining the complete process.

  “I’m sure.”

  “So these are blueprints?” I ask. “It’s not a map?”

  “No, ” it’s not a map. It’s a detailed rendering of Brookhaven National Laboratory. Building 197.”

  “What’s in Building 197?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Mack. “But this is detailed down to the number of inches in a hallway, the thickness of the walls, the materials used in construction.”

  “I know what the building is,” Bella says, walking over to us. She’s sipping from a glass of water. “Building 197 at Brookhaven is the Nonproliferation and National Security Department building,” she says, placing the empty glass next to the blueprint. “They do neutrino research.”

  “In this building?” I ask. />
  “Not officially, no. They have other places on the campus where they conduct their public neutrino work. They partner with Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois. They’re part of what’s called the Daya Bay Neutrino Project. They partnered with Japan in the Super-Kamoiokande experiment. Some of the work they’re doing actually connects to Homestake.”

  “In South Dakota?” I ask, shocked I haven’t heard this before, given our history at the bottom of the Homestake Mine, a mile beneath the Earth.

  “The very same,” she says.

  “I’m confused,” says Mack. “How do you know all of this?”

  “Really, guys?” she’s says incredulously. “I was CEO of Nanergetix when we were developing the process, when we were secretly funding the research. Of course I know about all of this.”

  “So what’s going on in Building 197?” I ask.

  “That’s where the unofficial neutrino work is happening,” she says. “It’s no coincidence that they call it ‘non-proliferation’. The federal government was working on the process too. We weren’t the only ones. Building 197 is where we believed they were conducting that research.”

  “Why didn’t I know about this?” asked Mack. “I was your go-to guy, wasn’t I? I mean, you trusted me to kill Dr. Wolf at Homestake. Why wouldn’t you have told me about the government’s work?”

  “Nobody knew everything, Mack,” she says. “It’s called plausible deniability. We were spying on the government. If things went south, not everybody could be in on it, especially the one who killed Dr. Wolf.”

  “Things sure went south, didn’t they?” I understate, and Bella shoots me a look suggesting it was an ill-advised question.

  “So why did George have this in his apartment?” Mack asks.

  “My goodness,” Bella says. “The two of you… for being so smart, you’re both idiots.”

  “Don’t lump me in with him,” I say. “George has it because he thinks there are existing pieces of the process in that building.”

  “That’s my guess,” says Bella. “We knew they were working on something. Wolf believes they were a good six months behind him. But we also had evidence he was secretly collaborating with someone at Brookhaven.”

  “Wouldn’t this have been helpful to know before we traipsed all over Europe?” I complain. “We could’ve started at Brookhaven.”

  “Not really,” says Mack. “Look at this map.” He unrolls another large document that more closely resembles a map than the one already on the table. “Look at all of this security. There’s really only one way in for the public. Here, off of West Princeton. There’s a security building before you get anywhere.”

  “They have a Laboratory Protection Division,” Bella adds. “It’s a government installation under the Department of Energy. You need badges, passes, vehicle authorization, and placards. It’s not as easy as walking up, knocking on a door, and asking for top secret information on technology that doesn’t officially exist.”

  “Oh,” I roll my eyes and laugh. “And finding a single piece of the process in the hidden back room of a liquor store inside an irradiated exclusion zone in the country in the midst of a civil war is easy.”

  “I didn’t miss your sarcasm when I thought you were dead,” says Bella with a smirk. “I’m just saying that given how we were flying by the seat of our pants, breaking into a heavily guarded government installation wasn’t on the list of things to do.”

  “Got it,” I say without sarcasm.

  “What’s this?” Mack points to a handwritten note on the corner of the document. “It says, ‘Corkscrew’. And there’s an email address and a series of numbers.”

  “That’s an IP address,” says Bella. “Those numbers are a server location for a computer.”

  “Could mean anything,” I shrug. “Could be a passcode or a username for something. Keep it in the backs of your minds.”

  “So once we go through the rest of this stuff,” Mack waves his hand at the laptop and stacks of file folders, “and determine that there are pieces of the process hidden at Brookhaven, what do we do?”

  Mack and Bella both look to me, the man with the plan.

  “We break into a heavily guarded government installation,” I answer, “and we take what doesn’t officially exist.”

  ***

  The amount of information George was hoarding in his apartment was worthy of an investigative reporter. He’d done his homework. Amongst the files, both paper and electronic, we found security protocols for Brookhaven, emergency procedures, and staffing levels at every one of the campus’s seventy-five buildings above ground.

  We knew about the underground facilities, more than a dozen of them, that weren’t on the Star Maps tour guide for Brookhaven. We had hi-resolution images of badging for all of the laboratory’s divisions and placards for all of its parking lots.

  Based on George’s extensive research, a lot of which we imagine was aided by Sir Spencer and his deep government ties, we had a good idea about where in Building 197 we could find the government’s version of the process. And from what we could decipher from handwritten notes, Sir Spencer and George believed that one of the labs actually contained an early draft of Dr. Wolf’s work.

  There were also bank records on one of the flash drives, detailing payments from one Swiss account to another; likely payments from Sir Spencer to George. That would explain the reporter’s lavish lifestyle.

  Most importantly, we come to the conclusion that “Corkscrew” is some sort of computer expert. There are multiple references to Corkscrew and the information he was able to relay to George and Sir Spencer. It appears as though this research was months, if not years, in the making.

  “So,” Mack concludes as he begins to fold up the maps and blueprints, “we have enough here to formulate a plan. Don’t you think?”

  Bella nods. “I can’t believe how much of this information George had just sitting in his house. I mean, all of this classified material out in the open.”

  “Sir Spencer has a long reach,” Mack says. “He has access to a lot people and places. You know he was at Thatcher’s side during the Falklands War? And he was one of Reagan’s advisors ahead of the Granada invasion.”

  “He was knighted,” I say as if his influence was obvious. “It wouldn’t shock me if he tried to singlehandedly overthrow a government someday.”

  “Who says he hasn’t already?” Mack jokes. Sort of.

  “And he claims to have less of a handle on things than Blogis,” I add. “He said Blogis is more connected, more powerful than he is.”

  “Do you believe that?” Mack asked.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” I admit. “All of this is so far over my pay grade, it’s ridiculous. It’s like there’s this whole class of people secretly running the world.”

  “You mean secret societies?” Mack questions. “I believe in that stuff. Illuminati. New World Order. It’s real.”

  “No,” I say, waving him off of his conspiratorial cliff. “I don’t mean that. I just mean the real power lies in the money, the industry. The kind of thing that Eisenhower warned against. You know, the Military Industrial Complex and such.”

  “It’s all the same,” Mack says.

  “Still,” Bella says, “it never ceases to amaze me what people are willing to do for money or power.”

  “Really?” Mack laughs. “That sentiment coming from a Buell?”

  “Good point,” she acknowledges.

  “The one question I have,” I say, “is why Sir Spencer hasn’t already gone in and gotten what he thinks is there.”

  “Good point,” Bella agrees. “If he had access to all of this information, why couldn’t get access to the process itself?”

  “We don’t know that he hasn’t,” Mack says. “My guess is that he hasn’t found anyone willing to take the risk. If a nun can get
three years in prison, imagine what some mercenary with a Swiss bank account will get.”

  “A nun?” Bella asks.

  “Yeah,” Mack laughs. “An eighty year old nun broke into a uranium processing facility in Tennessee. She and a couple of other guys in their fifties were protesting. The guys got five years and she got thirty-five months. It was big news when it happened. There were lots of questions about security at nuclear facilities.”

  “How’d they get in?” Bella asks.

  “They cut through fences,” Mack says. “They spent a while in a secure area. That meant the Department of Energy had to enhance its security measures at all of its facilities.”

  “Then maybe that’s why Sir Spencer hasn’t tried it yet, assuming he hasn’t,” I suggest. “It’s too risky. He can’t afford a failed break-in to come back to him.”

  “So we’re going to do it.” Bella’s now the one beaming with sarcasm.

  “If Ethan Hunt can break into the CIA and steal the NOC list we can handle Brookhaven,” I say..

  “Ethan Hunt,” she repeats, “Wait… I got it… Patriot Games!”

  “No,” Mack says, “that was Jack Ryan.”

  “Jack Ryan broke into the CIA?”

  “No, Jack Ryan is the hero in Patriot Games.”

  “Ethan Hunt is Tom Cruise’s character in Mission Impossible. Hunt gets framed for killing his MI team and to earn his reputation back, he steals the NOC list fr—”

  “I got it,” Bella waves me off with a giggle. “You have more useless crap stored in that brain of yours.” It’s good to see her laugh. She’s run the gamut in the last month, week, and hour. Any moment of levity is good.

  It’s cut short when the flight attendant interrupts. “Mr. Quick, the captain would like to see you.”

  ***

  Captain Secousse is playing Angry Birds on his iPad when I peek into the cockpit. The gum is still stuck to the notepad on the wheel.

  “You wanted to see me, Captain?”

  “Yeah!” He snaps to attention and turns in his seat to look at me. “We’re getting close. I just talked to a briefer at LFSS.”