EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum (3 page)

1

Tuesday
,
31 March (7:23 a.m. CST – Chicago)

Will started the coffeemaker and began emptying the dishwasher. With the cast removed and two weeks of rehab, he could walk with only a minor limp and moderate pain. The soreness in his hips and lower back diminished daily, and the doctors had cleared him to start a walking routine. The apartment complex had a gym with a treadmill, and he planned to start immediately.

A knock on the door startled him out of his morning stupor. He set a dish on the counter and padded barefoot over the cold, hardwood floor. He looked through the peephole and his stomach twisted. How had they found him so quickly? He then realized he’d been out of the Red Box for eight weeks.

He’d been mostly confined to the apartment since his release from the hospital, and it wasn’t in his name. Denise did all the outside work – groceries and running errands. They still found him.

He recognized the men. Both were in their mid-thirties and wore dark suits. The taller of the two, with blonde hair and a millimeter of beard on his face, held a briefcase. The other, shorter and broad shouldered, wore a black knit cap.

Will opened the door and looked at the men.

“Do you remember us, Dr. Thompson?” the taller man asked.

“You’re Scott,” Will replied and then nodded to the shorter one, “and Carver.” The two FBI agents had made an unannounced, late-night visit to Will’s hospital room his first conscious night out of the Red Box.

“We’ve known your whereabouts for a while now, but gave you some time to heal,” Scott said, “and spend some time with your girlfriend.”

Girlfriend?
Will thought.

Will led them into the apartment. The odor of cigarette residue followed one of them. They sat at a small square table in the kitchen. Scott sat directly across from Will, opened his briefcase, pulled out a file, and put it on the table. Carver sat to Will’s left.

“You know why we’re here,” Scott said.

Will responded with a shrug even though he remembered their conversation in the hospital.

“First,” Scott continued, “we need to get you into protection.”

“Am I in danger?” Will asked, not hiding his skepticism.

“We found you easily,” Carver explained.

“Am I in danger right now?” Will asked.

Carver coughed lightly and looked down at the table. “There’s been a leak – records, files, and video footage from your time in the facility,” he explained. “It doesn’t mean anyone has located you yet, but it’s possible.”

Will wasn’t surprised that the videos had been preserved after the collapse of the Red Box facility. Most likely all of the electronic information collected up to that instant was safely stored on another part of the planet. “What am I supposed to do?”

“We’ll relocate you,” Carver said, “but first you’ll go through some training. You’ll need to learn some habits of self-preservation. Once that’s completed, and you’re relocated with a new identity, we’ll integrate you into service.”

“Back up,” Will said and held up his hands. “I hadn’t planned on changing my identity and relocating. And I haven’t agreed to work for the FBI.”

“Regarding relocation,” Carver said, “you’re not the only one at risk. Those around you are also in danger.”

Will thought of Denise and he realized the quandary. If she or Jonathan were in danger because of him, then he’d leave. His parents could also be at risk. “When would all of this start?”

“Training starts next Monday,” Carver replied. “It takes six weeks or so, depending on how fast you learn.”

Scott pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to Will. “Here are the details,” he said. “Firearms training, communications security, survival, driving, surveillance and avoidance, and self-defense training.”

“A lot for six weeks,” Will said.

“Enough to keep you safe,” Carver said as he closed his briefcase. “The address on that form is your rendezvous point with a contact who will bring you to the facility. Be there at 6:30 a.m.”

Will walked the men to the door. As they stepped out, Scott turned to him “Take the training seriously,” he said. “My feeling is that you’ll be needing it.”

Will nodded and closed the door.

One lesson he’d learned during the past two years was that life could change in an instant. Now he had to abandon everything and live somewhere else as someone else.

Although the Red Box had changed him in the most profound way, he’d decided to try to live a normal life. He understood now that that was not possible. He’d always be looking over his shoulder. Someone would always be searching for him.

In the short term, he’d have to trust the FBI. After all, they’d helped free him from the Red Box and shut down the horrific program. His trust was limited, however. The FBI had internal problems: leaks and factions with their own motives.

He poured a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen counter. The effects of the morning’s events would ripple through the future and produce a wake of uncontrollable consequences. He felt as if he were being forced down a path that had the appearance of free will but was actually constrained. It was like floating on a raft on a slowly flowing river: you had some local control of where you were going, but the river determined your final destination. His river, it seemed, was heading for a waterfall.

2

Monday, 20 April
(7:20 a.m. EST – Washington, DC)

Daniel Parsons cringed as he pressed his hand on the wall-mounted scanner pad, yellowed with the oils of thousands of hands. He nearly gagged at the thought of the germs passed to him during this daily operation.

A green light illuminated above the pad and a door slid open. He passed through a narrow entrance into a load-lock, and the door closed behind him. The stale air in the tube always reminded him of his flights between the U.S. and Pakistan when he was a CIA operative. It was amazing how olfactory-induced memories could compress time: the Pakistan assignment had ended twenty years ago.

He walked to the center of the tubular corridor and stood on a pair of worn orange footprints. Seconds later, a door opened on the far side, and he walked out of the load-lock and into a large, marble-floored atrium teaming with people. The clacking of hundreds of shoes resounded from the surfaces of the structure. The southeast wall of the grand foyer was constructed entirely of windows, through which sunlight illuminated lush plants distributed amongst benches that lined the center of the floor. With all of the bustling, one sound was conspicuously absent: voices. Talking of any sort was forbidden in this part of the building, and that included phones.

Daniel weaved his way through the hurried crowd of well-dressed pedestrians to an elevator, and rode it up to the eleventh floor. He emerged in a large reception area, and approached a graying woman dressed in a dark suit-jacket. She was seated behind a long counter.

“Good morning,” she said and glanced at the ID badge clipped to the lapel of his jacket.

“Good morning, Sandy,” he replied. “Weekend went too quickly.” It was nonsensical small talk. The day of the week was irrelevant – they worked every day – and “Sandy” wasn’t her real name.

The woman stood and walked over to a bank of locked drawers embedded in the wall behind the desk. She entered a code on the number pad on Drawer No. 7 and removed a package labeled in red print:
Eyes Only.
She handed it to Daniel along with a receipt.

He signed the receipt and gave it back, put the package under his arm, and started walking down the hall to his office. After just a few steps he found himself practically running.

He arrived at his office door, shifted the package tightly under his left arm, punched in the access code on the electronic lock, and entered.

Morning light shone through the southeast-facing window, illuminating the mess that was his work area. Stacks of files of various heights littered every flat surface like the stumps of a harvested forest. Musty classified documents, and books dating back to the 1920’s, lay open on the chairs, coffee table, and windowsill. Sticky-notes of all colors were stuck to everything and fluttered like leaves in the air that flowed through the vent in the ceiling. It was cluttered, but every page strewn about the large office was crucial to his current project. He knew exactly where everything was.

He put the package on the table, sat as his desk, and logged onto the computer. He scanned his email – nothing important – and returned his attention to the package. He cleared some space on the large couch against the wall on the far end of the office and sat.

Using wire cutters, he snipped the steel wires that bound the cardboard package, and then sliced through the excessive packing tape with a utility knife. He opened the box, removed the contents, and placed them on the coffee table.

He reached for the top of the pile, but then sighed and withdrew his hand. He recounted the events that had brought him to this point. He’d been approaching the final stages of another research project, but was then ordered to stop his work and start his current one. It was highly unusual for someone in his position to get a change of orders under a priority directive. It had never happened to him.

His type of research couldn’t be accomplished without access to the most sensitive information. To this end, he and others in his special group had been given the ultimate clearance. It was a type of access that only a few people even knew about: Omniscient Clearance. It meant he had unlimited access to everything possessed by every government agency – NSA, FBI, CIA – everything. Even the President didn’t have such clearance, and wasn’t even supposed to know about it. The only people who had it were the Director of CIA and the Omniscients
,
or
Omnis, like Daniel.

The Omnis
were under the auspices of the CIA. They wrote in anonymity on sensitive intelligence issues, and their works were, of course, not published in the traditional sense. Daniel had been recruited in part for his performance as a CIA reports officer, a job that had required him to collect information from multiple intelligence sources, identify connections, and formulate the “big picture” for complex intelligence-gathering environments.

Being a single man in his mid-twenties at the time, he hadn’t hesitated to commit to the Omniscients. Now, in his late forties, he knew he’d made the right choice. Every day was filled with intrigue and excitement sans the danger that came with being a CIA operative.

Since the inception of their secretive organization at the end of World War II, there had always been 8 to 12 active Omnis, where active meant alive. Omnis didn’t know each other’s identities. Their finished works, referred to as monographs, were identified on their covers by a title, the date of completion of the project, and the date of induction of the particular Omni who had authored it. The names of the Omnis were omitted to maintain anonymity. The oldest induction date of an Omni that Daniel had come across was 5-12-1945.

Omnis were well-compensated, but the job came with drawbacks, the most difficult of which for Daniel was being forbidden to travel outside the contiguous 48 states. As a former CIA operative, this limitation was stifling. But the excitement of the job made up for it. The information to which he had access was better than traveling anywhere in the world. But that same information sometimes had negative effects. He’d had many sleepless nights in the past twenty years; in some cases it was a thrilling conundrum that had kept him awake. Other times he’d learned something so deeply disturbing that he’d been afraid to close his eyes.

Before his recent reassignment, he’d been researching a project called Red Wraith that was classified as black top-secret – meaning it was a crime to admit that it existed. It was the most frightening of all of the 18 assignments he’d had during his employ as an Omni. It made his dreams so unsettling that any sleep he was able to manage during those nine months had been ineffective. At the end, he’d been so sleep deprived that he’d become physically ill. One morning he’d dozed off at the wheel on the drive to work and ended up in a ditch.

Red Wraith was a continuation by the American government of an ancient Nazi project called Red Falcon
.
The Nazis had started the sinister program sometime before World War II. The timing, in relation to the Holocaust, had made him prickle with suspicion.

The Holocaust had been the perfect landscape for Red Falcon. Too perfect. The nature of the hideous actions carried out as part of the operation weaved seamlessly with those that had occurred in the concentration camps under the guise of medical experiments. Red Falcon and the Holocaust were connected, and Daniel was unable to determine which had started first. His gut told him that Red Falcon was the origin – it was the
reason
for the Holocaust. But he had no proof.

The horrible tortures inflicted upon concentration camp prisoners in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and others had been well known to the public for decades. However, the motives for these experiments had been written off as medical research for the benefit of the Nazi war effort. There was an enormous volume of documentation on the experiments themselves, as well as written communications between the scientists, the SS, and Hitler himself. But there were informational voids and inconsistencies that made the whole picture just not sit right with him.

The Red Falcon files were riddled with references to an undefined term: separation. Phrases such as “we’ve seen marginal evidence of separation” or “progress towards our goal of achieving separation” had appeared sporadically in the documents without explanation. The Nazis had not succeeded in obtaining separation, whatever it was, but that was the underlying objective, and, by extension, the goal of the American Red Wraith project.

The documents he’d collected on Red Wraith had been incomplete, and he’d often hit a wall when he requested information that could fill the gaps. Sometimes he was told certain files didn’t exist. Other times he got no response whatsoever. Nonetheless, he’d been able to establish a direct link between Red Falcon and Red Wraith. It was this connection, and the insidious details of Red Wraith, that had brought on the nightmares. But the meaning of the term
separation
had eluded him, and it antagonized his mind continuously.

The timing of his reassignment was also suspect. He believed that some event related to Red Wraith had led to the removal of the former CIA Director two months earlier. The possibility that the project might still be active disturbed him.

Two unique events had occurred in the past three weeks. First, his research on Red Wraith had been put on hold. Second, he’d been reassigned to a new project that was deemed urgent. The subjects of all of his previous research had been old and dormant; the new project was undoubtedly active in the present.
That
was unusual.

His attention went back to the new pile of documents. He’d been given only two words to start his new research: Operation Tabarin. He grabbed the first folder on the top of the pile and started reading.