Chapter Eleven
Washington, D.C.
May 31 -- 12:15 UTC/8:15 am local time
General Cromwell stared across his desk at the Captain who had been sent to brief him on the latest intel. Captain Danko was a short, stocky man in his early thirties, with a tight military haircut, sharp facial features and thick, black-framed spectacles. The man fumbled in his tan satchel for a moment before taking out the color-coded folders that held all the latest intel reports. The General looked at each folder as Captain Danko laid them out on the table. Black folder for the in-house intelligence report, red for CIA, green for DIA, purple for NSA, and blue for FBI. General Cromwell sighed; so much paperwork, so much time lost to inefficiency.
“There’s an interesting report in the in-house folder,” Captain Danko said.
Danko leaned forward and moved to grab the black folder, then paused.
“May I?” he asked.
General Cromwell nodded his assent, and Captain Danko slid the folder closer to himself, opened it and searched through the papers until he found what he was looking for. He took out two sheets of paper that had been paper clipped together and laid them on the desk before the General. General Cromwell picked up the papers and skimmed the first page. It was a report on the suspected kidnapping of a man named Greg Toland from his home in Atlanta three days previously.
“I don’t understand,” the General said. “Why do we care about this guy?”
“I talked to the analyst who filed that report, and I asked him that very question. He said that he wasn’t sure this particular kidnapping was significant, but he decided to add it to the daily briefing report because Mr. Toland’s name and address matched an entry in the BlackShield list, sending up a red flag. As you know, we share with several other intelligence services a database which compiles the names of people who have knowledge of, or have worked on, various black projects carried out by the nation’s defense and intelligence arms.”
“On the basis that, due to the knowledge that these people have of top secret projects, they could be dangerous to us if they were to fall into the hands of an enemy state,” General Cromwell finished. “So what was kind of project was this Toland working on?”
“The analyst who filed the report said that BlackShield didn’t specify. I thought he must be mistaken, so I used my clearance to access the list personally. He was correct. Toland’s name, address and other personal info are all in the database, but there are no details on what projects he has been attached to, or what branch or branches have employed him.”
“Is that usual?”
“No, it isn’t,” Captain Danko said. “I made some calls to friends at the different services and asked them if they knew anything about this guy, or who he might have worked for. None of them knew of him out of hand, but a few of them said they would look into it and get back to me if they found something. About twenty minutes ago I got a call back from an old colleague of mine who works over at DARPA now. He said that Toland once contracted with them. He appears to have worked on only one project over there, but he left five years ago.”
“What kind of project did he work on?” the General asked.
“It was called Project Thunderclap; it was some sort of advanced weapons tech project. My man isn’t sure on the details because the records seem to have been scrubbed.”
The General’s eyebrows went up.
“Scrubbed?”
“Affirmative, sir.”
General Cromwell read the two page report again, with more interest this time. The report was a summary of a missing persons report filed with the Atlanta PD. Greg Toland had been reported missing on the evening of the 28th. That night he had failed to meet his daughter for dinner as previously planned. Concerned, the woman had tried calling her father, but he answered neither his cell nor his landline. She had then gone to his home, where she found the front door unlocked. The house was empty. The woman began to worry that something had happened to her father. While searching the house for some clue to Mr. Toland’s whereabouts she found a blood stain on the carpet near a coffee table. That was when she called the police. The police, taking into consideration the blood stain and the inability to reach Greg Toland, had classified him as “missing and in danger”.
A neighbor reported seeing Toland speaking with an attractive young woman near his stoop sometime in the early afternoon. The neighbor was unable to identify the woman, and police remained uncertain what connection, if any, she might have with Mr. Toland’s disappearance. So ended the summary of the missing persons report. There was an addendum at the bottom of the second page letting the reader know that, as of the filing of the report, Mr. Toland had still not been found, nor had the mystery woman been identified.
General Cromwell placed the report on the desk. He pondered this development, if it could be called that. Could Toland’s disappearance have any connection to Dragon’s Breath? The phone on the desk rang. He checked and saw that the call was coming through on the Blue Line.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Captain,” the General said. “I have to take this call. Leave the folders and I’ll look through them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Find out what you can about that DARPA project. And get a team to Atlanta. I want to know what happened to this Toland guy.”
“Will do.”
Captain Danko stood, tucked his satchel under one arm, saluted and exited the General’s office. The General picked up the receiver and hit a button. The call began with the familiar brief three note ringtone letting him know that this call was being received on a secure line.
“General Cromwell speaking. Go ahead.”
“General, this is Lieutenant Anders from InterCom. Captain Lucy Tinder of SOIC is ready for the telemeeting, sir. Shall I patch her through?”
The Special Operations and Intelligence Command was essentially the UK version of the NTRA.
“Go ahead, Lieutenant.”
General Cromwell hung up the phone. He hit a button hidden under the edge of the desk--one of several buttons with different functions, one of which would bring a security squad rushing into the office if there was trouble--and one section of the wall opposite the General’s desk slid back to reveal a large, flat screen. The screen was dark blue, with the seal of the NTRA emblazoned in its center. After a moment the screen went black, and then the image of a woman appeared, sitting at a desk much like the one the General sat at. Captain Lucy Tinder was a middle-aged woman with medium length blond hair and plain facial features. She had her hands clasped together on her desk. When her image came up on the screen, and presumably General Cromwell’s image came up on her screen on the other side of the Atlantic, she cleared her throat before speaking.
“Good afternoon, General. I suppose good morning would be more accurate, given the time difference.”
“Good afternoon and good morning, Captain. What do you have for me?”
“The John Doe we spoke about Thursday finally came round last evening. He was loopy from the pain meds, and after two hours of getting very little from him we decided to cut off the meds so that he could focus. It was tough on him, but we got some useful info. The man’s name is Kwon Hyun-kyoon, and he is a citizen of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
General Cromwell nodded his head; they had already figured the man to be North Korean.
“He was grateful just to be alive,” Captain Tinder went on. “The day of the crash he was nearly killed by two men who he believes were trying to recover the flash drive he had hidden in his briefcase.”
“Did he give you the password for the flash drive?” the General asked.
“Indeed he did. We have a team examining the contents of the drive, and they definitely shed light on the documents that were also in the briefcase.”
“What can you tell me?”
“Let me ask you General--what do you know of Fireblossom?”
Captain Lucy Tinder spoke for a long time. As she went on a knot of fear slowly tightened
in General Cromwell’s gut.