"My—my—why, Assistant Director, why haven't we been kept apprised of this?" Cundieffe stage-hissed. "It's our direct area of responsibility."
Wyler forwarded the question, but icily. There was none of his turf-conscious feistiness that he showed off at the Navy briefing last summer.
"Because the FBI isn't prepared for this kind of situation," Hoecker replied. "Your Hostage Rescue Teams are crack units, but they're too small and thinly spread as it is, and the level of secrecy demands plausible deniability. If we can't stop them from happening, we have to keep them from having happened, if you take my meaning, and dead FBI agents wouldn't serve."
Cundieffe shivered. More news blackouts. The media covered the tragedies as arsons, or even accidental fires, and not terrorist bombings, and carefully suppressed details, kept anyone from stringing them together. Each was an isolated incident, happening in a vacuum, making no sound, leaving no trace.
"We have placed all of the remaining outreach centers on rotating surveillance since the Pittsburgh incident. No reports of suspicious activity, no lights in the sky. There is no concentration of patients or staff anywhere in the country to present the kind of target they did last year. This is a new cell, most likely with a new objective."
"The FBI had nothing to do with this surveillance program, did it?" Cundieffe looked sidewise at Wyler, who shrugged minimally.
"I respectfully request," Hoecker said, "that we table this abortive line of discussion and return to the root issue, which is the Mission's probable objectives. There are eighteen defense research projects currently underway in the continental United States, and three more of great import in Alaska. I must add, however, that this information is not for all eyes."
The table-screens went black and the window became a mirror again. The speakers sizzled and died. Wyler stood up from the table. "There's no point in waiting."
"If you'd like me to go outside so you could sit in on the rest of it…"
"What makes you think
I'm
cleared to hear it? Come on, Martin, I'll buy you breakfast."
Wyler opened the door and Cundieffe followed him back out through the gallery to the elevator. Something in the crooked posture of his mentor's back warned not to speak here. In his thumping heart, he was grateful for the silence, because it gave him time to tuck his guts back in.
They disembarked from the elevator car to find the escort waiting for them. They followed him through the silent house, Cundieffe taking in greater detail in the pale, lead-colored morning light seeping in through the narrow windows. He was still not entirely sure that he wasn't dreaming.
The doors opened for them and they stepped out onto the cobbled drive. The Suburban was waiting for them, the driver standing beside the open rear door. Only when they were inside it and bumping through the gates did Wyler turn and look at Cundieffe.
"What did you see?" he asked.
"I—I don't know where to begin. Is there anything they don't know?"
"Only what they don't want to hear," he started, then, "The Mules virtually run the NSA, and its ECHELON project is our principal means of keeping abreast of current events. But not the only one."
"In every way, it was different from the meeting at the Federal Building. There was none of the animal infighting, but—I saw the same mistakes being made."
"What, that they didn't take you seriously enough? That kind of narcissism is dangerous, Martin, to yourself and your work. It is easy to assume that one has all the facts, and thus that one sees the truth. But half of your facts are shadows. There are compartments, and truths within truths. They are at the center, and their view of the mechanisms in play is superior to our own."
"I'd like to review the case files on those bombings, but we're supposed to pretend they never happened. What do I have to do to prove myself worthy of knowing what they know?"
"You'll be given what you need. Trust in them, and I have no doubt that you will become indispensable to them."
"Sir, I don't mean to be impertinent, but how can this addiction to secrecy serve a democratic society? My conclusions are being discounted because of factors I am not allowed to examine or understand. It's–forgive me for saying so, sir—but it's humiliating, and more than a little unsettling."
"And that, Martin, is why you were allowed to come in today. You have an extraordinary intellect, but you are not the only one. If you are to learn to use your talents as your instinct dictates that you must, then you must learn to subordinate yourself to a new order. You are beginning to see beyond the shadows, but you are only halfway out of the dark. Only by this slow progress out of the cave will you come into the sunlight of the truth, and not be blinded."
Cundieffe turned and looked out at the brittle rays of winter sunlight stabbing through the omnipresent cloud cover. Out on the sidewalk, a few joggers and older, ostentatiously foreign men passed in front of the dwindling black-green fortress of the Cave Institute.
I want to serve
, he thought.
But first I have to see.
~8~
Someone had been in her room, she thought as she awakened. The quickening aromas of hot chocolate and orange juice, poached eggs and Canadian bacon lured her out of sleep and softened her fight-or-flight reflexes. Snowy sunlight played silvery fingers over the spare features of her room. She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes, stretched, looked around, and for a moment she could believe that her fondest wish had come true.
She was wearing her old flannel nightgown. The furniture and décor, even the loose personal effects, were all hers, from her apartment in Bishop. They must have taken pictures before they moved it all, because they hadn't misplaced anything, down to the shelving of her books and the arrangement of coats and hats on the rack beside the door. Everything but her phone.
She smelled flowers. Looking over her shoulder, she noticed the vase of bright zinnias, mums and poppies, then her eyes went to the card.
Our Prayers & Best Wishes For Your Recovery
, read the front in faded gold script. All of the ER staff from Bishop County Hospital had signed the inside. Thor, the amorous ambulance driver, had made an imprint on the edge with his dentures. Nurse Fisher, ever the den mother, had taken it upon herself to pen a little guilt-wracking message that Stella couldn't finish without crying.
She remembered then that He was there with her. Inside her. Making a mockery of her solitude.
You needed time for yourself.
"What a joke," she said aloud. "I need the rest of my life for myself. I need my head for myself."
Ask yourself, Stella: where would you be now, if not for me?
She closed her eyes, and the dark was cold and choked with dust, and she felt the concrete slabs crushing her, the tie-rods impaling her…
She screamed and her eyes snapped open. She gripped her comforter so hard it purred and tore between her whitened knuckles.
You were ready to surrender yourself to death. Surrender to life, Stella.
She went to the window and looked out. A field of fresh, unbroken powder stretched out to a pine forest on one side, and a plunging river gorge on the other. Beyond, Stella could see only crystalline wreaths of fog, but her inner ear told her she was on a mountaintop. She remembered nothing about coming here. He'd controlled her from the moment she stepped out of the trailer in Baker, let her see none of the journey. A pair of Radiant Dawn patients trundled by just beneath her window. They looked up and waved as they passed.
"How many slaves do you have here?" she asked. She had come to realize that He was neither God nor Guardian Angel, but she couldn't bring herself to call him by name. There was still an outside chance that she was insane, and the voice in her head a delusion brought on by her ordeal. But she knew different. She knew the patients outside were tuned in to the same voice. She could feel it all around her, as if the building itself were His body. Driving this place, where cancer became the key to an eternity of servitude.
I help all who come to me, in their turn.
"You only heal our bodies to steal them, diablo. Do you even have a body of your own?"
His voice in her head tingled with amusement He tried to share with her, goosing her endorphins.
You are too young to understand. You still can't imagine that when you have died, the world will go on. You don't really believe that the world existed before you were born, or that it was ever anything you could not understand. The world is older than you, Stella Orozco, and older and stranger by far than you or anyone else imagines.
"Spare me your indoctrination bullshit. I'm alive, and I owe you my life. But I'm me. Don't try to take that away, or I'll make you sorry you saved me." She rediscovered the food, mouth watering and stomach groaning, was He doing that to her? Determined not to be shut up any longer than necessary, she wolfed down her food and drowned it as fast as she could.
I am not an invader, Stella. I am your guide. All of us who have undergone the transformation must eventually learn to accept what we have become. This is not easy. You have been told you are going to die, and to make your peace, when suddenly you are not only cured, but reborn—
"Into slavery," she cut in, swallowing a splash of hot chocolate too quickly and scalding her throat. She chased it down with some of the orange juice, fresh-squeezed and almost drugged with vitamins. "This is a fucking jail. Everyone has their own private
you
in their heads, spewing bullshit all day and night, and taking over the controls whenever they zig instead of zag."
You have a hard time accepting what you are. How would the rest of the world understand it? You have to be protected, and, yes isolated, during this fragile phase. You, of all people, must see how what we've done here could be misunderstood, and the terrible harm they can do.
"But you're in my goddamned head! You're in there, so you know how fucking crazy it makes me! How could you do that?"
Why are you all my children? You've engulfed your cancer, tamed it even as it has devoured and remade you. Now your body is a function of your mind, but in the wake of your transformation, you have been pushed dangerously close to madness. See what you might have become—
Blink. Stella's body wriggling worms, no arms legs head, a tumor undulating across the sheets. The sun burns her eyes and her body eats them up, she grows scales and a child's crude rendition of legs, and mouths, eating and vomiting and screaming—
With evolution sped up infinitely, human beings would speciate almost immediately. With every individual a species unto himself, the earth would become an abattoir, with competition on a scale never before seen. I am here to remind you of who you are, Stella, to keep you human. Or at least, as human as you want to be.
"I think—" she fought for breath, for words: "I think I'd be alright on my own…" Hating her weakness, she steeled herself. She would never blink again. "Who made
you
God? Who voted to have you in everyone's heads?"
I am not a god. I only let you believe that because you need it to be true.
"And what about God? You know there's nothing out there that sits in judgment?" She surprised herself with her ridiculous question, because there was no sarcasm in it. She regretted her sincere hope as soon as she voiced it, that there was no God, for surely she was as damned as He. But He only shrank away from her inside her mind, and a fog enveloped her, and it was very hard indeed to remember what she'd asked Him, at all.
I have stolen this fire from the Old Ones who believed themselves gods, and I have learned from their mistakes. I am the eye of the needle through which the world must pass to become Paradise. I only want to help you evolve, Stella. Let me help you.
"What makes me so special? Why do I get to evolve? You've got to know how much I fucking hate you."
Again, laughter and brain-candy.
Your cancer made you special. It was the seed of my gift to you, but that day is coming soon, when I will come into the hearts and minds of all the world's people, and make them one.
"You're going to give the whole world cancer?"
We
are going to give the whole world cancer.
"And if I don't want to?"
I will give the world what it wants. Life without suffering, infinite adaptability, a guide to direct them to the good for themselves and for their planet. I will share this gift with all the peoples of the world. If you try to stop me…
The brain-candy abruptly shut off and her inner ears flip-flopped, and she gasped and clutched the sheets, but still she felt as if she were falling.
Don't make me show you
.
She didn't.
Later, He let her go outside.
The biting cold and ice crystals in the air stung her face and lungs, and she pulled up the hood of the parka she wore. The snow lay two feet deep on the ground, several inches of it fresh powder. The altitude made her giddy, light-headed.
"Where am I?" she asked.
Western Idaho, in the Seven Devils Mountain Range. We are much more isolated here, but much better protected, too.
"I don't see much to protect."
In the spring, this will be a farm. With water from the many streams and generators below-ground, we will be completely self-sufficient. We will thrive.
Her eyes took it all in, but she was surprised by what she felt in His voice. Emotions: pride, love for this place and the people in it. If He thought He was God, he played the role well. God must've felt this way when He turned back the waters of the Flood, and let mankind begin again.