Free Armageddon by Jim DeFelice, Dale Brown Page B

up to him.
    “Hey,” he said. “Watch it or we’ll fall into that sewer water.”
    “Thanks, Mack.”
    Mack pulled open the screen door and they walked lino what could have passed for a doctor’s waiting room. A young Malaysian sat behind the desk, paging through a magazine.
    “Mark Stoner sent us,” said Breanna.
    “Cheese is expecting you,” said the man, gesturing toward an open doorway to his left. “Go in”
    “Cheese?” said Mack.
    The only light in the room came from a large-screen TV, which was tuned to CNBC. Hunched on the floor in front of a leather couch was a man pounding a keyboard. A bottle of Beefeater gin sat next to him.
    “Hello,” said Breanna.
    The man put his hand out to shush them, then continued typing.
    “You’re Cheese?” asked Mack.
    The man picked up the Beefeater, took a swig, then held it out to them without looking away from his laptop.
    “No thanks:’ said Breanna.
    “I’ll pass:’ said Mack.
    The man took another swig, still typing with one hand. In his thirties or early forties, he was obviously American, wearing a light blue T-shirt  and a pair of cut-off jeans.
    “Stoner’s people, right?” he asked, still tapping his keys. “Yes,” said Breanna.
    “I want to know about some airplanes,” said Mack.
    “I don’t want to know anything. Nothing. Zero.”
    “Mark told me to come here,” said Breanna.
    “Yeah, but I don’t know anything about it, okay? I have a Web link for you to look at in the other room,” he said. “I typed it in already. All you have to do is hit enter.”
    The man typed one more thing on his laptop, then put it down and got up.
    “James Milach. They call me Cheese because I made a killing in the stock market involving Kraft. No shit,” said the American. He shook Mack’s hand—then bent over and kissed Breanna’s. “Beefeater makes me formal,” he said, sweeping away into the next room.
    *   *   *
    MACK THOUGHT FOR SURE HE’D STEPPED INTO AN INSANE asylum. Stoner was a spook, and spooks knew weird people, but this character was—a character.
    But then this had been a particularly perplexing day all around. The sultan had expressed some concern about the Sukhois, but discounted Mack’s theory that they had been responsible for the attack on the merchant ship. The spy network, meanwhile, reported that there had been no activity at any of the airports on Borneo or even nearby Indonesia or Malaysia.
    The Brunei navy’s pet theory was that the ship had been sabotaged by Islamic terrorists, who had placed a bomb aboard. While Mack wouldn’t rule that out, it was a convenient theory in that it kept the navy from having any responsibility. The investigation was continuing; thus far, no survivors had been found.
    “You hit the button, and then you can take it from there,” said Cheese, standing over a Sun Workstation. “You got it?”
    “Sure,” said Breanna. “This is the Web?”
    Cheese smiled at her. “Not exactly. But you don’t want to know too much, do you?”
    Mack rolled his eyes, then hit the key and bent toward the screen. Brown and black shades slowly filled the screen. It took a few moments for Mack to realize he was looking at a satellite photo of the northern part of the island, which was Malaysian territory.
    “Some sort of Russian satellite,” said Breanna, pointing at the characters on the side of the screen. “You think he’s tapped into their network?”
    “I don’t know,” he told her, leaning down to squint at the screen. “But that looks like the outline of a Sukhoi on what looks like a highway in the middle of nowhere. I’m going to have to look at a map but I think that’s Darvel Bay, on the eastern side of Sabah province. That whole area is just jungle. Or at least it used to be.”
    Dreamland
8 October 1997, (local) 1800
    Dog hustled from the Dolphin shuttle helicopter that had dropped him off at Dreamland toward the black SUV waiting to ferry him over to his quarters. He was surprised