The log cabin was nestled deep in the woods in the center of a two-hundred-acre tract of land in Ulster County, about fifteen miles north of the little town of Pine Bush in neighboring Orange County. The cabin wasn’t visible from the macadam road that ran along the west side of the property. If a curious stranger were to drive down the rutted, unpaved gravel road leading to the cabin, he or she would be greeted by a friendly, white-haired man chopping wood in a small clearing to the front of the log structure. The old man would chat for a bit about how he and his wife—she would be off buying groceries—liked the solitude there after a career spent eighty-five miles south in New York City, where he had worked as a stockbroker for a major Wall Street firm. If necessary, he could easily slip into a conversation about the latest market trends or promising stocks.
When the stranger drove back to the paved road, he or she wouldn’t notice, as hadn’t been noticed during the drive in, that every move was being tracked by hidden cameras and sophisticated electronic sensors buried in the ground and carefully camouflaged in trees and on fence posts. The cabin, the woodcutter, the logs, even the smoke curling from the stone chimney, were all part of an elaborate set, more sophisticated than anything ever devised by Disney or Hollywood. It was there to conceal what lay underground. The cabin hid an elevator that descended to the entrance of a gigantic subterranean bunker with living quarters for twenty people. Branching off the bunker were connecting chambers crammed with electronic equipment, including two advanced Chinese Sunway supercomputers.
✳
Retired Colonel Richard West leaned heavily on his cane as he eased into an overstuffed chair in his office beneath the cabin. He knew he was dying and was glad to be back in the cool semi-darkness of this familiar room after a trip to Langley that had left him drained.
We don’t really know any more now than we did when Truman started this whole business. We’ve made a lot of guesses, and that’s all. This may lead to nothing. Or create more mystery. Goddamn! I want to understand what the hell is going on more than I’ve ever wanted anything. If we don’t—or can’t—understand, what’s the point of the deceptions, the ruined lives, the deaths?
But Richard West knew one thing for certain even as more questions formed in his mind: Absolute secrecy had to be maintained.
CHAPTER 1
Bill Sanders was running hard down a crowded airport concourse, trying to reach Jane and stop her before she got on the plane. Suddenly he was running in slow motion and people were blocking his path with suitcases and baby carriages. An old man in a wheelchair plowed into Bill, deliberately knocking him down. Seeing his victim on the floor, the old man’s mouth of crooked yellow teeth grimaced in an exaggerated glow of sinister self-satisfaction, a look captured more brightly under high-wattage fluorescent lights.
The end of the concourse, where Jane was in a crowd of people boarding an Air France flight for New York, receded into the distance. Now Bill could see the crowd through the wrong end of a telescope. Then he was screaming at an airline official who seemed unable to hear him. LISTEN TO ME, GODDAMMIT! THERE’S A BOMB ON THAT AIRPLANE! A BOMB! The word echoed down a sterile steel corridor. Then Bill heard the hissing of a closing pneumatic door. The official looked at him and smiled. “I’m sorry sir, but that flight is already on the runway and ready to take off. It cannot be stopped at this time. It cannot be stopped at this time. It cannot be stopped. It cannot ....”
Bill jerked awake in a cold sweat. His heart pounded as the recurring dream remained sharp in his mind. Car lights outside a window momentarily confused him until he remembered that he was in a motel room along Interstate 70, a few miles east of Columbus, Ohio. He turned on the bedside light and looked at his watch. Five-thirty. The dream’s images began to break apart and fade, replaced by thoughts of Paul and his plea for help that had drawn Bill west.
He lay back and replayed the previous day in his mind. The New York taxi driver who talked nonstop about how much he missed his family in Ghana as he drove Bill to the Port Authority bus terminal. The surly bus driver who gave him a lecture when he asked to be let off between regular stops in Montclair, New Jersey. Each step of the four-block walk to the Hertz office was almost pleasant by comparison, even with the drag of his duffel bag as it pulled downward on his right shoulder, along with the weight of a backpack stuffed with several books and a laptop computer. He had started renting cars in New Jersey so that he could avoid driving in the maddeningly heavy New York City traffic. The rentals were also cheaper than in Manhattan, which he had discovered last year during a brief affair with a high school teacher who lived in Montclair. Remembering her brought a stab of pain, and shame. He hadn’t been ready for a relationship and handled it badly.
He was in the car and on the road by nine, heading south on the Garden State Parkway, west on Interstate 78 to Allentown, Pennsylvania, down the Northeast extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Valley Forge, and then west on the turnpike. The Saturday traffic was light; he skirted Pittsburgh, had a late fast-food lunch at a turnpike rest stop and rolled into Ohio. The land flattened into fields of dark, rich soil that were being plowed for spring planting.
Bill always felt lighter as he drove west, away from the congestion and hustle of the East Coast. As usual when he traveled, he fantasized about what it would be like to live wherever he was. This time, he thought of moving back to the Midwest. Maybe back to Jefferson.
The emotion of the airport dream that haunted Bill several times a month faded. Over the past two years he often thought of seeing a psychiatrist, but rejected the idea as an invasion of his privacy. He simply didn’t want to talk about his reaction to Jane’s death with anyone. Not yet. Maybe never.
His mind drifted back to Wednesday and lunch with Nancy Luke, his agent. He had returned to New York the previous Sunday from a month-long trip to rural areas of Vietnam and Cambodia where he was researching a travel piece that would be a central chapter in an anthology a friend was editing. The Asia trip had been a good excuse to get out of New York for a while. The call from Paul came Tuesday night; Bill mentioned it briefly when Nancy called him Wednesday morning to confirm their lunch.
Her first question, after they were seated and ordered drinks, was, “Jefferson, Indiana? Where’s that?”
Bill remembered mentally grimacing. Nancy was an Upper East Side New Yorker whose sense of United States geography from west of the Hudson River to California was more than a little vague. She had been Bill’s literary agent for ten years and was one of the four or five best in New York. Their author-agent relationship was based on a bedrock of success and money. Nancy wrangled Bill the best advances and book contracts she could from publishers and got fifteen percent off the top. But in the beginning, when Bill had quit his reporting job to write books and was having little success and making no money, she stuck with him and believed in him. Although she did so out of pure self-interest, he would never forget it. They both recognized they were not close friends, that their relationship was essentially professional. They seldom discussed anything personal. She was too guarded and self-protective—detached, some called her—and Bill had never had any reason to want to break through her defenses. The central axes of their lives could never cross: she grew up in New York, Martha’s Vineyard, and Europe, the only child of a man who had made twenty million dollars by the time he was thirty, and was married to a senior partner in one of the topearning law firms in New York; Bill grew up dirt poor, one of two sons of a hard-scrabble Midwestern farmer and his wife, and had feelings of insecurity about the money he had made, as if it weren’t real or might evaporate at any moment, leaving only a faint green memory. He suffered through interviews and books parties that Nancy and his publisher arranged for him. As he mingled, he was often aware that he was almost certainly the only person in the room who had ever lived in a trailer or whose family had had a car repossessed. As he held a pen to autograph books, he often wondered if his were the only set of knuckles that had been skinned getting a balky tractor started. Had any of the guests ever worried that a cropdamaging spring hailstorm might drive their father to the county welfare office? His motivations to succeed were clear; Nancy’s were subtler, rooted in a sense of family standards and responsibilities.