Directive 51 by John Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

assault on the airport was half an hour after that. Maybe, maybe not. Let me get the binoculars and see if they’re still on the ground there. I’ll call you right back.”
    The big white unmarked 787 Dreamliner was not anywhere he could see; he explained the problem, without saying why he was looking, to Tuti, who borrowed the binoculars. “I can tell you for certain it is not there.”
    “How do you know—”
    “Because there is just one large repair hangar at Sentani, the only place where a plane that size could be concealed, and it has room for only one plane at a time. And I see the rebels are towing a Lion Airlines 737 into it right now. So since there is nowhere for it to be, it isn’t there.” Tuti lowered the binoculars. “They teach us these clever tricks, you know, in police school.”
    Bad as the situation was, Cooper laughed, but then he called Jasmine back and told her, and she transferred his call to an Air Force general who brought in an admiral and a Secret Service liaison in conference, and Cooper went over things with them a few times. By the end of that he figured there just wasn’t going to be much to laugh about for quite a while.

ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON, DC. 9:40 A.M. EST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.
    The Department of the Future contained three “Offices-of,” each headed by an assistant secretary. Besides Heather’s Office of Future Threat Assessment, Jim Browder’s Office of Technology Forecasting watched the science and technology possibilities from the perspective of an old grouch of an engineer-science writer who was quite certain that most things wouldn’t work most of the time, and that if they did, it would make things worse. In theory, Noel Crittenden’s Office of Political Futurology tried to understand developing situations around the world, focusing partly on what governments were doing but mainly on trends in the political class and nascent mass movements. In practice, Crittenden was a broad-but-not-deep historian who could easily call to mind six other times when something had happened but couldn’t seem to reach a conclusion if his life depended on it.
    Normally, Heather ignored her two colleagues, with Graham and Allie’s tacit encouragement. Allie liked to say Browder was mad about a girl getting hold of the boy toys like guns and money, and Crittenden’s office was actually the Office of Whatever a Retired History Prof Remembers; she made it abundantly clear that in the battle for funds and attention, she thought Heather’s office was the department’s only real star.
    More than once, Graham Weisbrod had given Allie and Heather a stern lecture about everyone’s being on the same team. Heather wondered if he’d ever said the same thing to the two men.
    So far, the meeting had gone exactly as Heather had anticipated: Browder was vocally, and Crittenden was sullenly, impossible. Browder, with malicious sarcastic glee, had forced Heather to explain and defend each slide, turning aside all suggestions that he wait and ask Arnie in a few minutes.
    Meanwhile, Crittenden looked every stuffy ounce of his Cambridge doctorate. His ancient three-piece suits and the slash of his gray mustache against his dark skin made him look like some old-time big-city mayor of 1990 or so. He sat with his arms folded, his good ear pointed toward Heather, watching each new slide with the same sour glare.
    Crittenden’s the reserve force that’ll come in to loot the dead and shoot the wounded after Browder finishes his massacre. And where’s all the support Allie and Graham told me I’d have? They’re both sitting there like lumps. Allie isn’t even looking up from her laptop.
    Heather drew a deep breath before tackling Browder’s latest hostile question. “That’s why Dr. Yang’s statistical semiotics research is housed in our office of our department. It’s not about intuition or recognizing patterns. It’s about the mathematics that finds things that would be