The Project 05 - The Tesla Secret

some papers his client wanted, designs by Nikola Tesla. Since then, Jovanovich has killed a half dozen people for the same guy. He says the man is his best customer."
    "He sounds like a real piece of work."
    "He's proud of what he does. Considers himself a professional."
    "His client is probably Foxworth. I wonder why he wanted designs by Tesla? Or how the clerk came by them?"
    "Director, we need to get out of here. The police are suspicious. They let us come back to the hotel but they took our passports."
    "Use the Irish ones."
    "I thought you might say that. Selena is changing her look right now."
    As he said it, she came out of the bathroom. She wore a wig made from shoulder length red hair. The glasses and school teacher look were gone. She had on a tailored green blouse, a stylish skirt and silver earrings in the form of a Celtic knot. Her eyes were covered by green contacts. She looked more Irish than the Irish did.
    "I'm sending you to Portugal," Harker said. "Ronnie and Lamont will meet you in Lisbon. They'll explain the mission. Your flight leaves from Ruzyně at 8:35. The tickets will be at the TAP counter, first class. Get rid of the guns."
    "Already did."
    "H ave a good flight." She broke the connection.
    Nick said, "We're going to Portugal"
    "Portugal? Why?"
    "I don't know. Ronnie and Lamont will brief us when we get there."
    "Are we going to Lisbon?"
    "At least to the airport."
    "They have great cafes there. Good music."
    "In the airport?"
    "Of course not. In Lisbon. And stores for shopping."
    Nick groaned. "Shopping."
    It took him fifteen minutes to change his appearance. A different wig, new contacts that turned his eyes blue. The beard was gone. Different glasses. Different clothes. They left the hotel by a side entrance and avoided the desk. As far as anyone knew, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson were still upstairs.
    Two Irish tourists caught a taxi for the airport.

CHAPTER TWENTY-F IVE

    Elizabeth pulled up the latest pass of SBIRS. The Space-Based Infra Red System consisted of 24 low orbit satellites and 4 satellites high in geo-synchronous orbits. Tracking stations spread across the globe fed a continuous data stream back to the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies. The system's primary mission was to detect and track missiles in the event of a launch, but it had other uses.
    Checking the satellite intel was part of her daily routine. For the past year she'd been watching something in Central Russia on the Western Siberian plain. That part of Russia contained no significant military capabilities. It wasn't much of a factor in the Pentagon's war game scenarios and received little attention. The installation was camouflaged to look like a grove of trees, but the infra red revealed a distinctive shape. It looked as though the Russians were building a pyramid there, which made no sense at all.
    The site was near an abandoned military air base left over from the Cold War, near the fishing village of Irtysh at the junction of the Irtysh and Ob rivers. The Irtysh flowed north from Kazakhstan until it joined the Ob and then continued on to the Arctic Ocean. A paved road, rare in that part of Russia, ran from the town to the base.
    SBIRS had been in operation for several years, but there were gaps in the coverage. Elizabeth pulled up the records for the location and began scanning backward. The pictures moved back in time until the shape changed and disappeared. The outline had first appeared less than two years before. She ran the photos back another two years and stopped.
    Why would the Russians build a pyramid in the middle of nowhere? Why build it at all?
    She began running the sequence forward a day at a time and watched. At first, nothing. Just an abandoned base. An occasional figure, walking. Two men with motorcycles, using the old runways to race each other. Then a sudden flurry of activity. Trucks, men, equipment. She checked the time stamps. Almost three years ago.
    Fences went up. Soldiers began patrolling. The Russians were using the abandoned base for something. Hot spots indicated significant heat sources inside the old hangers, probably large generators. The satellite intel should have been flagged for closer observation, but there was no record of that.
    She followed the trail of distribution for analysis. All surveillance of the area had been tasked to Langley. Even Langley wasn't so incompetent they would miss something as blatant as this. The only possible explanation was that the intel