When Mrachek had left the trailer to get the blood, Stella'd messed with the closed circuit TV system. Flipping through the dozen-odd cameras they had, she'd seen that they were at a truck stop somewhere in the Mojave desert, maybe Death Valley. There were no other vehicles parked near them, only row upon row of semi trailers parked at the edge of the lot. Dawn was coming, the sunrise an impressive sight even on the grainy color monitor. It felt like the first she'd seen in years.
Then she'd switched to a channel that carried a handheld camera feed. The cameraman followed Mrachek and an armed guard into a cargo container resting on a flatbed freight trailer. The camera had a light on it, so she'd clearly seen the man lying bound on the floor, his limbs secured behind his back in a position that in itself looked like a form of torture. She'd watched as Mrachek had extracted blood from the large, rawboned body, as the guard had complained over and over that they ought to have a flamethrower with this guy, human or not. She'd seen his head, hairless and sunburnt, and when they rolled him over, his face, carved down to sinew and unlovely, proto-Neanderthal bones, and clenched tightly, even in drugged sleep. His mouth worked, bit off the first three swabs Mrachek tried to get between his thin, chapped lips. The guard, in thick, clumsy rubber gloves, had to pry the man's jaw open to get a swab in. Even in sleep. Something about his instinctual defiance appealed to her and would not go away, despite what she heard about him later. This man was someone she'd only ever see on a TV, so it was safe to think about him.
"Are you going to kill him, too?" Stella asked, touching the charts.
"That isn't for me to decide," Mrachek answered, unperturbed. "But then," she said, "I think killing him would be granting him his secret, fondest wish."
One of the monitors blinked on just as Stella was thinking about turning it on. She flinched. The big, dark black man was on the screen, the Major. He was looking at a point just off-screen, the monitor that was showing him the sickbay trailer. He nodded towards Stella, then looked towards Mrachek.
"He's gone," Stella said.
18
Martin Cundieffe had never hungered for power, at least not power for its own sake. Any privilege exceeding the efficient execution of an agent's duty was something akin to hard drugs, not to be considered, lest one be swept away to destruction. He had never even "roast-beefed" a civilian, never flashed his badge to demand preferential treatment. Indeed, his childhood camping trips were stamped with memories of tales his father told over the fire, of vainglorious agents who abused their positions and were toppled by the dreaded Office of Professional Responsibility. The mere notion made him shudder.
Now he shuddered as the symptoms of a new relationship to power began to take hold.
After the giddy thrill of the midnight damage control meeting had been rudely snatched away, he'd settled back into routine, overseeing the minutiae of the section office's daily operations in Lane Hunt's absence, cautiously making inquiries into the China Lake incident and visiting with his mother. There'd been no further contact with Assistant Director Wyler, and only Hunt's increasingly frustrated lack-of-progress reports to process, and the entire situation had been on the verge of being filed in the drawer where Cundieffe kept things he did not officially Need To Know. This was a cardinal phrase in the Cundieffe household, one which Cundieffe had grown up honoring as much as any bright, curious son of a purebred FBI family could. He would never breathe a word of it to anyone, excepting maybe his mother, who still held her oath as a Federal employee as a lifelong sacred trust.
Then, at quarter past seven, not ten minutes after he'd arrived at his desk, came the call from Assistant Director Wyler. He was on a plane, bound for Washington. In light of the Death Valley developments, the FBI was back on the case, if only in a "cooperative" role, and the team was being called back out to Mojave. Would Martin be so good as to meet him at LAX to discuss the "ramifications of China Lake?" A car would pick him up outside the Federal Building and bring him to the airport to pick up the Assistant Director for a brief meeting over lunch. Cundieffe looked around to see if anyone was watching him, leaned back and spun in his chair until the physical dizziness canceled out the mental.
The driver had called at ten forty-five, and held open the door of a discreet black sedan with nearly opaque rear windows. The car had pulled out onto Wilshire and immediately onto the 405 South, where the traffic was moderately backed-up due to highway expansion. Invited to help himself to the minibar, Cundieffe had poured himself a tonic water and watched the endless construction slip past. The relevant files on his laptop were all committed to memory. He'd spent the entire morning composing his briefing, and felt confident that no question of detail or alternate point of view would catch him off guard. Certainly, one's career couldn't help but benefit from such a meeting, but Cundieffe refused to let vanity or ambition color his presentation. He would be a transparent screen for the Assistant Director's understanding of the China Lake incident, or at least the incident as the FBI had been allowed to pursue it—which would be the delicate thesis statement. Beyond that, his recommendation, in a Need To Know envelope of his own, contingent on the Assistant Director's visible and explicit approval of his brief on the case-in-progress. Yes, the Assistant Director would come to feel he'd done the case—and, by extension, the Bureau—a great service by coming to SA Martin Cundieffe.
After fifty-five minutes, the car slipped into the two-tiered traffic loop that fed LAX its human cargo, and the driver hugged the empty inside lane, whipping round the loop and back into the return lane. After the twelfth circuit, Cundieffe leaned forward and tapped on the partition, also tinted, between driver and passenger. "At what time is Assistant Director expected to make his arrival?" he asked. The driver turned and glanced at him for a moment, and Cundieffe thought he saw him shrug.
They circled the terminals eighteen more times before the driver got paged to come to the American Airlines arrivals gate and park. The driver rammed through the logjam of cabs and shuttlevans and SUV's to swoop into an open space in the taxi loading zone. A pair of Somali drivers approached him shouting loudly, but the driver sent them away by tapping the placard on his dashboard. Cundieffe whistled. The human hurricane of the busiest airport on the west coast roared over them like a river around an invisible rock. They sat there for another half an hour unmolested, somewhere in the middle of which Cundieffe guiltily took another tonic water. When Cundieffe spotted Assistant Director Wyler coming out of the terminal with a single briefcase and an overnight bag, the driver instructed him to sit tight and keep his door shut and his window up. He climbed out and met Wyler, took his bag, opened the rear passenger-side door for him, stowed the bag, got behind the wheel and skinned back into the inner lane again, in less time than it took Cundieffe to stammer out a greeting. Wyler nodded blandly and reached for the minibar.
Assistant Director Wyler looked as if he hadn't slept since the fifth of July meeting. On top of his briefcase, he expertly mixed a gin and tonic and quartered a lemon, plopped a segment in. He returned the lemon remnant, then fumbled around inside the minibar for a moment, then hit the intercom button. "Herb, where's all the goddamned tonic water?"
Cundieffe began to stammer out an apology, but Wyler cut him off with a dismissing wave and dug out a can of 7Up. "So," Wyler began after a steadying gulp of his drink, "I agree with your new assessment of the incident, one hundred percent. Top work, Cundieffe. And almost secure. Speaking of which, I have no secrecy document for you to sign. That should tell how you strictly confidential this conversation is. No one hears about it, Cundieffe, not even your immediate superiors. Not even your mother."
Cundieffe nodded, swallowed hard and looked down at his laptop. The only copies were on this computer, and the hard copy he'd printed up at the office. He'd only been connected to the system for a few minutes, to print it, and he'd erased the file's path from the system completely—or so he'd thought. The Assistant Director must've uploaded the file off the system during that time and read it on the plane. "I'm—honored to have had the opportunity—"
"The Bureau is being frozen out of the investigation by the military, because the militia is composed of, led by and/or includes, former or current military personnel, and not just grunts. This group is a brain-trust. Take a look at this, when you get the chance." He passed Cundieffe a Zip disk with a printed serial number on it. "Then erase it. Then burn it. Ah, this looks like a good spot. Herb, let's have lunch."
The car had pulled into short-term parking in the high-rise structure inside the traffic loop of the airport. Herb steered them into a shadowy alcove at the bottom of the structure, where the ramp leveled off before dead-ending at a cage filled with janitors' supplies. "I've got a connecting flight in half an hour, so we'll have to make do," Wyler said. "Hope you don't mind."
Herb slid back the partition and passed through two brown paper bags and some napkins, then climbed out, wandered up to the top of the ramp, and disappeared. Cundieffe tried to hide his disappointment until he opened his sack and a familiar aroma tickled his nostrils. Only one woman made egg salad sandwiches that smelled like this. Wyler must've been watching him, because he explained, "Everyone at the office says you never have anything else, when they see you eat." Wyler bit into his own sandwich, said, "Boy, this takes me back. Your mother uses a touch too much lemon pepper for my taste, but don't ever tell her I said so."
Cundieffe mopped his brow with his napkin, noticed only just in time that it'd come apart and left shreds of sodden paper pasted to his eyebrows. What was there left to say? "Sir, then, if you agree with the summation of facts, then, would it be presumptuous to inquire as to your—the, ah, the Bureau's assessment of my, um, my recommendations, which I suppose were, ah, also, ah, perused?"
"It's a bold course of action, well in touch with your astute evaluation of the probable forces in play, Martin. It's a tribute to your skills that you'd have to go up several levels of authority in the Bureau to see what a stupid idea it really is. No, refusing to cooperate with the military arm of the search would gain us nothing from them but a turf war, and it would backfire on us when this became public. It'd be a bigger plate of shit than the ATF served us when they lost control of Waco." Cundieffe winced at the unsavory language more than the humiliating and tragic memory. "And threatening to go public first would hardly alleviate our culpability in the public eye, even if nothing ever comes of the weapons theft. You may think that, but it's already too late in the game to try to look like boy scouts. We've cooperated with a sweeping regional search in the course of which we've conducted countless surveillances and searches without due process. We'll look like jackbooted idiots."
Properly dressed-down, Cundieffe stared at his hands feeding him the sandwich his mom made for him. He wondered if she put a note in his bag, hoped not. How would that look? He'd been an idiot to presume to propose Bureau policy on an issue of such staggering delicacy and magnitude. He hoped none of this would end up in his file. "I won't make the same mistake again, sir," he said.
"Oh God, Cundieffe, pull yourself together. As you observed yourself, you are not in possession of the full facts. And the Agent-In-Charge on the ground is an idiot. That's why I'm replacing him."
Cundieffe's head whipped around, nearly tearing a muscle. "What?" He massaged his neck, asked, "You mean Special Agent Hunt, sir? He's been head of the Section for four years, and has an exemplary internal report—"
"Hunt's a doorbuster, and always will be. You do most of his paperwork, feed him nearly all of his intel, most of which he doesn't even follow up on. Case in point the current debacle, with its possible connection to the murders in Death Valley."
"I'm sure Agent Hunt is pursuing the search with all due diligence, but if you have someone else to bring in, wouldn't that slow everything down even more, as he was brought up to speed?"
"You're already up to speed," Wyler said, finishing his sandwich and his drink and mixing another.
"Me? What? Sir, there're so many more experienced agents with counterterrorism backgrounds, who've logged more time in the field, let alone commanded a task force…" He ran out of breath and words at the same time, took a deep breath, and—nothing.
Wyler let him dangle for a moment longer, then patted his shoulder and sipped his drink. "You're the only agent in the Bureau whom I completely trust who has any inkling of the true significance of this incident, Agent Cundieffe. You hit the nail on the head at the meeting when you deduced that the terrorist group were military insiders with access to advanced softkill technology, and you pursued that course to the limits of your security clearance. I think you can find them, but Hunt could do that, if he thought more deeply. More than simple policework is called for, here."
Assistant Director Wyler leaned close to Cundieffe, close enough to envelope him in his mantle of booze-breath, close enough to give Cundieffe a split-second spasm of homosexual panic. It was those dirty, nasty stories about Hoover that no agent could completely put out of his mind.
What if he—No
. Such thoughts were unworthy of the Assistant Director, of himself, of the Bureau.
Pull yourself together
.
"The technology used to disable those sailors has been in use for over a decade. The disk I've given you proves that. It was used against the U.S. military and the contras on several occasions in Central America. You were half-right in your assessment of probable suspects. We are relatively certain that the group we're looking for includes former DARPA scientists, as well as defected Army and Navy personnel. The military wants to cover this up because of the black eye it'd give the Navy, and we don't want napalm dropped on Federal property, but the real pearl here is the softkill weaponry, and that's why the DOD's keeping us at arm's length. It's far in advance of anything they've developed, and they want it. With that kind of power, the military could justify expansion of peacekeeping operations abroad to create a de facto American empire, and renew their bid for a domestic policing mission in the major cities, which is the only reason they give a damn about the War On Drugs. It would be the greatest step towards fascism since the HUAC hearings, Martin." He said this with a straight face, so Cundieffe had to assume Wyler honestly believed the FBI was wrong to persecute known Communist subversives. He wondered at the man's politics, but he held his tongue.