"Mr. Hoecker, how is this connected with the ongoing Mission investigation?"
"No, I'm not aware of any connection," Hoecker said, in a low, withdrawn tone. "What an odd thing to ask." Something even he couldn't discern in the way Hoecker held himself told him the Committee member was almost trying to make it clear he was
lying
. "The world is still a big place, Martin."
"At least tell me one thing, honestly, and for my own edification only. For the sake of building trust. Who is Dr. Cyril Keogh?"
Hoecker blinked. His nose wrinkled in disgust as if Cundieffe had looked at a priceless religious artifact and inquired as to its dollar value. But he said nothing.
"I've tried to look into his background, but there's nothing before ten years ago. He's not just funded by elements of the government, he's been created by them. Who was he before? Come on, Brady, one neutered mutant to another: what is he doing? What
is
he?"
Hoecker looked into his eyes for a long enough time to try to show that he was thinking about it, not just trying to invent a lie. Cundieffe could read lies on men and women like their bodies were trying to betray them, they stank of it. But Hoecker never flinched as he finally answered, "Martin, I don't know. I only know that nobody wants to know." He scooped up the files and slipped them back into his briefcase. Then, seeing the disk still on the table, he stuffed it into Cundieffe's inner breast pocket. "Are you at risk of getting lost? You could follow me back to the freeway, but I've got to stop at Ft. Meade for a briefing…"
Cundieffe got up to see him out, but caught himself on the edge of the table. Both his feet had gone to sleep. "I think I'll stay a few minutes more. You've given me a lot to think about."
"All right, then. Just so I can count on your discretion. You know where to reach me," he said over his shoulder as he left.
Cundieffe sat down and called the waitress over. His voice shook so badly that he had to repeat himself twice as he ordered a steak, rare. He took a single bite from it, spilled cash on the table, and ran.
Cundieffe found Assistant Director Wyler in his office. He ate lunch at his desk, picking over an assortment of fruit from the cafeteria as he glanced at a report. His bifocals rode precariously low on his long nose, giving his sallow watchmaker's face a grandfatherly cast Cundieffe found hard to look at and think at the same time.
Wyler's office gave precious little else on which to gaze for a respite, though he knew his discomfort was carefully cultivated, for it was Bureau tradition. The original Director's office was a model of Spartan plainness, excepting the raised dais on which his desk sat. His anteroom, however, was armored in plaques, honorary degrees, autographs and sundry awards, which spilled out into the hall. His subordinates were always a bit more restrained, but Wyler's office perpetually looked as if it was his first day. The bare, eggshell-colored walls were broken only by two narrow windows overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and a single floor-to-ceiling bookcase. The spare décor gave a brittle tone to voices in the room, so one seemed to be either shouting or whispering.
Before Cundieffe could begin his story, Wyler regarded him with a tight grimace, like he'd just swallowed a very large pill. He knew.
"Sir," Cundieffe began, trying not to stammer, "I tried to call you—"
"Shut the damned door, Martin. I've just been reviewing the supplementary budget requests for the Counterterrorism Response Center."
Cundieffe closed his eyes hard as he turned to shut the door, grateful for the moment to collect his thoughts. How much did Wyler already know, and how much should he tell? He'd been unable to build a cover story. He found himself closing in on the conclusion that his meat-drunk gut had pressed home before he'd left the table. Whether or not Hoecker's far-fetched briefing was true or not, it was most likely a test of his ability to handle secret and illegally obtained information. Whom he trusted it with had to be as important as whom he didn't, but if he couldn't trust his sponsor in the Institute, whom could he trust?
Cundieffe's hand found the door and pushed it closed. He lingered with his back to AD Wyler until his superior said, "Martin, Brady Hoecker called me this morning to ask my permission to brief you on a matter of mutual interest."
Cundieffe turned and crossed the room almost at a gallop, took his seat and gripped the arms. "Is this how it's going to be?"
Wyler peeled off his bifocals and pushed aside his lunch. "Did Mr. Hoecker upset you in some way?"
"No, sir, but it was all very cryptic. I just never dreamed that our work was done in this fashion. He told me about this—"
"I don't need to know about the substance of the briefing," Wyler snapped, then, after two deep breaths, "Information passes to the most appropriate level for direct action, Martin."
"But sir, the—luncheon—did not pertain to my home field office in any way."
"You're not going back home." Wyler got out of his chair and came around his desk. "I've just gotten off the phone with Dunleavy in Los Angeles. Agent Hanchett will step into your post out there, and we'll create a new position for you here." Cundieffe looked up at him, studied him as he went to the windows.
The Assistant Director looked out onto Pennsylvania Avenue for a solid thirty seconds while Cundieffe chewed his tongue. "I guess you hadn't heard, I thought Hoecker might've told you. Maybe even he doesn't know yet. Officially, it's being reported as an accidental explosion, but we know that a probable Mission agent infiltrated the Level IV bioresearch labs at Ft. Detrick before dawn today, and revised the computer records on the Storch remains, rerouting them to be incinerated. While trying to escape, the agent killed six men and wounded nine more, then detonated an explosive, killing himself and eight more soldiers, scientists and technicians. He also got all the samples they'd already collected. They hope to have something to tell the media by tonight." Cundieffe didn't notice Wyler moving until the file the Assistant Director had been reading over lunch swam up into his vision. When his eyes snapped into focus, he felt his lunch rise.
A gutted corridor, the concrete walls buckled outwards, the ceiling collapsed, the floor littered with bits of soldiers, broken doctors. Someone in a containment suit peering down through the hole from the floor above.
Fourteen people dead on an American Army base, and not even a word of it at FBI headquarters, let alone the news. He'd hoped for something out of Ft. Detrick, where his own efforts had turned up nothing. The blood sample he'd collected from the crime scene had been destroyed at a molecular level, nothing more than a few unbroken shards of chromosomes mixed in with the liquefied cells. He concluded that the bullets that killed Storch were made of a solid chemical compound, which dissolved his body as they broke down inside him. Now there was nothing left to tell Cundieffe what Storch had become, let alone why.
"You see the situation we're in," Wyler said. "This is not nonlethal force, Martin. This isn't counting coup. I need your help here, but the Cave Institute apparently needs you more." To Cundieffe's baffled look, he added, "Brady Hoecker is a Committee member, and our highest representative in the NSA. If it's important enough for him to take the trouble to brief you, it's worth your utmost attention."
"Sir, I don't mean to second-guess you or the Institute—" he began, puzzling in his mind's eye over the snapshot of Hoecker denying any connection between Heilige Berg and the Mission. A polished ruse to make the distraction look more enticing? Or was it a distraction? "I just wish to reiterate my conviction that our primary objective is profiling the Mission's objectives, and the Mission's primary objective is Radiant Dawn. I think today's events only underscore that. The body of Sergeant Storch—"
"You have no path that will not end badly for yourself and the Bureau, if you can't separate facts from speculation. The Radiant Dawn village in California was an incidental target of opportunity for the Mission, a demonstration of force perpetrated upon people who were, for all intents and purposes, already dead. Storch was old business. Hoecker has given you a piece of work to do to prove yourself. Take care of it as quickly as you can, and then we'll discuss your role in investigating the Mission."
Cundieffe's voice was harsher than he would have liked, but he was too tired, too confused, to rein it in. "Sir, I must also add that I am very troubled by the seemingly steady flow of tainted leads stemming from unconstitutional abuses of government resources, and by the climate of secrecy which surrounds what I'd always understood to be a relatively transparent federal law enforcement agency. How will a case built by such methods stand against the Mission in a court of law?"
"Martin, you've been here less than a month, so feel free to exercise your naïve idealism when it suits you in polite society, but don't let it blind you to the real world. Secrecy works when it stays secret. The nation doesn't need to know one percent of the acts that have to be committed to protect their safety and their way of life. The world doesn't
want
to know what's happening to it as it grows beyond any sane population controls, doesn't want to see what it's pushing out of the dark as it spreads. My God, Martin, the things you're going to see—"
Cundieffe had gotten hold of himself. He thought so, anyway, until he heard what was coming out of his mouth. "The smoothness with which I'm being handled impresses me deeply, sir. The Institute doesn't want me to investigate the Mission, so I'm being fed clandestine busy-work. Knowing my penchant for secrets and exploiting my relative ignorance, they want me to go into the field and play spy without due process, acting on illegally acquired evidence. Is this a test? Is it even real, or is it some kind of maneuver?"
Wyler only stared at him. He pushed his bifocals up on his nose. Looking down at Cundieffe through their lenses, the Assistant Director's eyes were like glistening jellyfish.
"I suppose you'll know where I'm going when I've filed my travel expense vouchers, then," Cundieffe said and, rose from his chair. Wyler didn't call after him. He might have been invisible as he stalked out of the administrative suites on the fifth floor and down the stairs and out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
~12~
Nobody slept on the plane.
Storch sat and looked out the window at endless clouds, a frozen sea broken here and there by the ragged projecting teeth of what Storch guessed were probably the Rockies.
The other passengers sat and looked at him. The four Missionaries, all of them big bad former spook-soldiers, watching him like children watch the half-open closet door in their bedrooms when the lights go out. One sat across the aisle, two more a couple rows behind him, and the fourth, obviously the leader, stood at the head of the cabin, leaning on the locked door to the cockpit. He didn't look or act military, but he seemed softer than the others, his expression the most detached. CIA, maybe, or an egghead like Wittrock. Every so often, one of them would succumb to exhaustion and his head would roll back, and he would jolt awake with his hand on his sidearm. Storch admired that even this seemed to happen on an orderly rotation, as if even their sleep-rhythms were harnessed to unit integrity.
The man whose face he couldn't stop wearing had been a friend of theirs. No doubt they'd fought together, trusted each other with their lives. At least two of them, he could tell, hated him like poison because of that face.
They hadn't let him out of their sight for a moment in the eighteen hours since they'd unwittingly plucked him out of the mess he'd made of Ft. Detrick. At first, it had made him want to lash out. He'd never liked being stared at, and after the Gulf, peoples' eyes on him felt like fire ants. He understood now that it was not just sickness, but an autoimmune reaction to the stress of his body trying to change. Now that it could, he was afraid of what might happen if he let go for one instant. As the flight wore on, the jouncing shocks of battling weather systems rocking the plane like a cradle, he became grateful for the attention. If they were still just looking at him, he could tell that he wasn't changing again.
The dank recycled air of the plane was pregnant with the Missionaries' collective pressure to talk out of his presence, but they clung to the idea that four of them could subdue him, where two couldn't. He had not slept since he woke up on the slab in Ft. Detrick, unless you counted the catnap he took after Lt. Saticoy's suicide bomb went off under his nose.
The plane was a private twenty-seat passenger jet. The Missionaries escorted him up the stairs and into the cabin with their guns out, but dropped into their seats and picked up where they left off, staring at him, trying to figure out if he was their prisoner, or they were his. One of them, a big, pie-faced grunty type who could only have been a Marine in his old life, insisted on wearing a surgical mask around Storch, even though the others silently ragged his ass about it nonstop with subtle hand and face signals. It was too late, they all knew, to be careful. If Storch was a disease, they had all been exposed. He did nothing to dispel their fears.
They whispered to each other whenever one got up to pace, threw hand signs the rest of the time, suspecting, quite rightly, that he could hear them, but clinging absurdly to silence. He was careful not to learn their names or look to long at their faces, because he would not want to remember them if this ended badly.
In the air, they loosened up, gave him his fill of waterlogged deli sandwiches from an ice chest. They tasted like Play-Doh, but he wolfed down eight of them, feeling his body burning them up and fixing him. They watched him a little more laxly, so he could tell the food was drugged, but it made no difference.
He was shocked to discover that he was in quite a lot of pain, but he'd been too weak to notice before. In moments the pain went away as he made his own painkillers, endorphins coursing down his spine like sunlight. He let his eyes close, and his jaw unclenched for what felt like the first time in years. His body ached as if he'd had open-heart surgery, and itched maddeningly as his skin grew back. He felt himself going slack, slipping away and not caring what they did with him, or where they were going.