Dark Zone by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online Page B

she suggested. Mount Ina, was it?”
    The facility in question was a private nursing home where care cost about ten thousand dollars a month. It was an excellent facility, and if the decision had been his, Rubens would have gladly moved the General—and footed the bill personally, if necessary. But the General had expressly forbidden it: his cousin was there, and whether the General stood to inherit his money or not, he hated him. In fact, if he were in his right mind, he probably would have denounced the inheritance somehow or given it away to a charity—preferably one his cousin couldn’t stand.
    “Have you thought about moving him?” asked Brown when Rubens didn’t answer his question.
    “Yes.”
    “You’d pay with your own money, wouldn’t you?”
    “For the General there is nothing that I would not do. He would, however, have felt betrayed if I offered it. He did not take charity. But from an objective point of view, his care now is as good as is possible. The people who watch him are decent people. They are genuinely concerned. That would appear the most important thing.”
    “Do you need additional legal help?”
    “I believe the lawyer I retained will be sufficient,” said Rubens. “And a lawyer from the NSA would only help Rebecca make her case.”
    “Keep me informed,” said Brown, turning his attention to the papers he’d brought along.

    Despite the fact that the two NSA officials were running ten minutes ahead of schedule, Secretary of State James Lincoln and his two aides had beaten them into the Oval Office. Lincoln was holding forth on the importance of rewarding France for its steps over the past year to align more closely with American Middle Eastern policies—a relevant if not uncomplicated point, given the President’s pending visit to France at the end of the week.
    “Ah, there you are, Admiral. Billy, hello,” said President Jeffrey Marcke, swinging upright in his chair. “Secretary Lincoln is just reminding me that the French helped with our Revolution.”
    Lincoln’s smile seemed a little pained.
    “Maybe Admiral Brown will tell us about John Paul Jones,” added the President. He loved to tweak his advisers, and Lincoln was an easy mark. “Didn’t the French give him a ship?”
    “The French have been interesting allies throughout history,” admitted Lincoln. “But they are coming around. They’re trying to make up for their miscues before the Second Gulf War. Better late than never.”
    “Billy has a château in France, don’t you?” said the President, changing targets.
    Rubens winced internally but tried to act nonplussed. “To be more precise, the château is my mother’s.”
    “It overlooks the Loire near Montbazon. Heck of a view,” said Marcke. He had been there when he was still a senator, a few years before. “But if I recall, William, you don’t particularly like the French.”
    “I try not to let personal opinions cloud professional judgment,” said Rubens.
    Jake Namath, the head of the CIA, appeared at the doorway, followed by the deputy director of the CIA for operations, Debra Collins. George Hadash, the national security adviser, was right behind them.
    “Gentlemen, Ms. Collins. Please sit down,” said the President. “The Secretary of State and I have been discussing French history. Mr. Rubens has come to talk about something slightly more recent, with unfortunate implications for the future. William, you have the floor.”
    “In the late nineteen-fifties, the French shifted their nuclear weapons program into high gear,” Rubens said, launching into his brief. “They began refining plutonium and shifted to that as a basic weapons material after working with uranium. In 1960, they exploded a sixty- to seventy-kiloton weapon in Algeria near Reggane in the Sahara. Within roughly a year’s time, there were three more explosions. These were billed as tests, although at least one was a hastily arranged detonation to keep a half-finished weapon