"Motor pool," Storch said.
Aranda pointed, edged past him and led, walking backwards. The lights hung from the ceiling lit only the few cubic feet of space directly beneath them a dim sulfur color. "You're going after them alone?"
"I don't know what I'm going to do." He shouldered Aranda aside and saw something at the end of the corridor, began to jog towards it, one arm now wrapped around Wittrock's pipestem chest under his flopping arms.
A vast convex bubble of transparent plastic sealed off the darkness at the end of the tunnel, and as he drew nearer, he saw that it stretched up above the ceiling of the corridor, defining and enclosing a cavern that must be the size of the Astrodome. The darkness beyond resolved into a pattern of spires that Storch recognized, but couldn't place in the context of this place. His first thought was that they must be missiles, that this was some sort of abandoned MX missile silo, a franchise of SAC/NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain. The Mission's final solution, he thought. He barely noticed the Missionaries flanking him as he sprinted past. Major Aranda ran after him, and trailing behind them all, Dr. Barrow, screaming, "Stop him! Stop him there! Not that way, you bastards!"
Storch ran up to the edge of the bubble. The corridor branched off in both directions to encircle the central cavern, which was quite a bit smaller than the Astrodome, as it turned out, and shaped like an ellipse. At the other end, Storch could barely make out the dim lights of other exits. Though clouded by mist and condensation, he could see what was inside the bubble quite clearly, but the Missionaries could have swarmed him twice over as he tried to figure out what the fuck he was looking at.
Inside the bubble, in the deepest cavern sunk several hundred feet into the heart of a mountain, stood a forest. The variety of conifers under the bubble spanned every kind he had ever seen, and they stood in sorted rows, like a Christmas tree lot. Pressing his face against the pliable plastic, he could see only that there was a floor of bare earth, some fifty or sixty feet below where he stood. There was no snow on the trees or on the ground, and the bubble was warm and soft as a sleeping giant's belly.
He'd thought they were nukes. A snorting laugh of mingled relief, bafflement and exhaustion, burst out of him.
He turned just as Major Aranda skidded to a stop beside him and covered him with a shaky gun. "Just back away from there, Storch."
Barrow arrived, out of his mind with panic, but too short of breath to scream any more.
"What is it?" Storch asked.
"Nothing that concerns you, monster," Aranda hissed.
Storch risked another glance at the forest below. Set into the roof of the bubble, funnel-shaped light-fixtures sprinkled faint gray light onto the trees. It was weak, but its spectral brilliance told Storch it was not artificial. Somehow, they siphoned sunlight down here.
"This is the Mission," Barrow said. "To preserve balance: between nations, between species, between man and nature."
"Get the fuck back," Aranda added.
Storch was too puzzled to say anything more than, "Show me the way out."
Major Aranda led him around the domed forest, never taking his eyes off Wittrock under Storch's arm. Storch felt Barrow's eyes on his back like hairs tickling him, tasted the scientist's revulsion and wonder in his clammy sweat. He thought he knew what Storch was, and would gleefully tear him apart to find out. Aliens, pre-human texts, Jesus Christ. But lately, the insane people, all too often, turned out to be right, while those with their wits about him, like the Major here, had no fucking clue whatsoever.
Aranda stopped before a broad, open doorway and stood aside. Storch pivoted to watch him as he passed through and loped across the oil-spotted apron of the motor pool, a low-ceilinged cavern with icicles hanging from the ceiling beams. Trucks of all descriptions, vans and snowmobiles, stood parked in orderly ranks. Storch chose a battered blue Ford pickup and got in. The keys were in the ignition. Aranda stood in the middle of the lot, his gun still pointed at Storch.
He looked down at Wittrock. "You still really need him?"
"More than I'd admit to anybody but God," Aranda said. "Leave him, and stay the fuck out of our way."
Storch started the truck. He let Wittrock's inert body drop to the concrete as he sped out of the cave. He turned a hard left and followed an ascending tunnel. The wheels spun with a disconcerting, impotent squeal, then bit into the ice and hurled the truck forward. Aranda tracked him down the gun until he was out of sight, but didn't shoot.
The tunnel spat the truck out on an icy fire road walled in by towering, snow-crowned aspens. He expected to see soldiers on the road, a barricade, something, but there was only the dark, and the eerie whistling of the winter wind. Storch rolled down the window all the way and floored the accelerator. The truck skidded and swayed, but clung to the road as it twisted and tumbled down the face of the mountain to the valley floor.
He burned, with hunger, waste heat, and degrading adrenaline. Like a sword hot from the forge, he ached to be quenched, to wallow in the snow and melt it all and ride away on the river he'd make, but he didn't dare stop yet.
The wind in his ears, the biting cold, flushed out all the buzzing thoughts that plagued him, for the moment. Time enough to figure things out later, when he was far from anyone who wanted him in a cage, or dead. The Mission had no answers that he could face up to, no explanation that made what happened to him seem any less insane. He couldn't go home, yet; there were too many debts unpaid, and too many questions he'd have to sort out for himself, and somewhere, there was Keogh.
He looked at his hands, at the shiny little horns sprouted from his knuckles. Their task completed, they were already flaking and falling apart. In no time, they'd look like his hands, but even if his left thumb dropped off again, he wouldn't be fooled. They would never really be his hands again.
~15~
In his time in the Bureau, Cundieffe had gotten used to waking to urgent pre-dawn telephone calls. It was the only consistent element in his days, of late. When he sat up in the dark this morning, the phone ringing, he answered it, but he wasn't really hearing anything, because he was still trying to figure out where he was. The blue dark offered little clues, only a baffling but unplaceable distinction from the darkness in which he'd been awakened the morning before.
He held the phone to his ear with his shoulder while he fumbled around on the nightstand for his glasses. A water glass toppled, fat splattering sounds filled the generous space he occupied. Hardwood floors, high ceilings, a balcony overlooking a broad, deserted purple avenue. He was still in Washington.
"Good morning, Agent Cundieffe here—"
Layers of static cackled in his ear: raw radiation waves crashing on shores of red noise, a trunkline call from the sun. A voice swam out of the tempest, a distortion of the static that he strained to sift out of the noise. A chain-smoking computer with a cancerous speech simulator chanted in dead tones like a radio rosary, "The Moon Ladder…the Proto-Shoggoth…the Unbegotten Source…unto whom…all things…"
Still groggy from his carnivorous binge of the day before, he barely heard the words, but lacked the motor impulse control to hang up. "Excuse me? Who is this?"
The noise got very, very loud, but Cundieffe clamped the handset to his ear, because he thought he heard the voice say, "You'd like to know who Dr. Keogh is, who he was before—"
"What do you know about—"
"Ask your mother. Ask her about Dr. Lux. Ask her about the Director's Blue files." The voice went on, but words melted and ran into the sea of distortion, which grew louder and more violent with each passing moment.
Cundieffe blinked, mumbled, "Your connection's breaking up, thank you very much, try again later…" and hung up.
He looked around the room again, confusion broiling in his head like an echo of the static-blasted call. Without his glasses, the room wouldn't come into focus, but he could still see with razor clarity the text, numbers and facts and figures, and the endless sloppy circulatory systems of road maps, the scabrous textures of satellite imagery, that were all he'd looked at from the moment he'd left his disturbing post-lunch meeting with Assistant Director Wyler to when he'd passed out. Here, in the apartment they'd found for him in Georgetown, three miles from Headquarters. A lovely furnished place with hardwood floors, a high, vaulted ceiling, and broken glass and rivulets of ice water traveling across the room. He stepped in both as he crossed to the bathroom counter and retrieved his glasses.
He'd wondered when it would start, the schoolboy's pranks flaming his swift ascent as momma's-boy magic. Such minor irritations had never fazed him in LA, and now, he couldn't be bothered to take offense. By the time he was dressed and ready to leave for work, he'd forgotten the call.
More calls on the way in, stuck in traffic on Rhode Island Avenue, watching fluffy, fat snowflakes turn to colorless slush on the sidewalks as they crept by. Ms. McNulty delivered the keynote address for the day. More work than usual, as AD Wyler would be down at Quantico, reviewing Counter-terrorism retraining procedures and scouting new recruits until well after the dinner hour. Cundieffe would need to brief-back the other Assistant Directors' assistants on the Division's progress after researching and preparing the briefs…
Wyler and everyone else at Headquarters chided him for his West Coast fixation on driving to work, urged him to take the Metro or the bus. After the surreal novelty of commuting past famed monuments and seats of power wore off and became the dreary ordeal of idling in front of them in dreadful weather, he still could not relinquish the wheel. Perhaps it was the imprint of Los Angeles on him, or maybe all the militia scenarios he'd studied for bombing or gassing DC public transit systems to wipe out lower-level bureaucrats of the New World Order and paralyze government without hitting day care centers. He rode the Santa Monica Transit bus up Westwood to the Federal Building at least once a month to show his solidarity with traffic reduction. Perhaps, he thought darkly, it was something newer. He was not
one of them
, after all…
He flipped through messages from Division agents at HQ and in the field on his laptop, informal reports on investigations into the possible whereabouts and objectives of the Mission. The news was all indifferent, inconclusive, or bad: at the top of the hit parade, a helicopter carrying two agents from the Billings resident agency was hit by automatic weapons fire as it flew over the perimeter of the Unorganized Militia of Montana last night. A hysterical revisionist account of the altercation was already spreading via the Internet and fax networks of anti-Federal groups. Coupled with other, less intense confrontations in the last week, the story was already becoming the seed of a new pattern of conspiracy theory. The militias believed the feds were preparing for the much-anticipated pogrom against them that they first saw coming in Waco and Ruby Ridge, and were stepping up their rhetoric and dusting off their stockpiles.
Cundieffe drafted a position paper that would be the first order of business when he finally got to the Hoover Building. Militia properties and other fringe groups would be downgraded, and other elements of the search moved up: decommissioned military bases, private airfields, junk yards and toxic waste dumps. The Mission was not a militia, and would not cooperate with them, let alone hide among them. Evidence of collateral crimes observed during passive surveillance would be recorded, but not acted upon, if the group was not actively committing violent crimes.
There. He finished before he had moved two car lengths, spell-checked and forwarded it to AD Wyler. Less than a month ago, the prospect of writing a policy memo would have stopped his heart. Now, it seemed like so much more drudge work, and worse, it brought home the growing disparity between what he thought the FBI did, and what really happened in the world. If anyone had told him that the power policy memos he'd be writing one day would be painstakingly worded cover stories and outright lies, he would have challenged the slanderer to a duel. But every morning, after sifting through the detritus of the previous day's investigations, he did exactly that. His first memo for the Division had laid out a cover story for the Mission searches, describing a small commando force of American fanatical anti-Federals rumored to have re-entered the country for unknown purposes. Agents across the country, particularly in rural, desolate areas, or areas with large military or federal government holdings, were instructed to report back on anything that might substantiate the rumor. Better safe than sorry, troops.
They had been too late to locate the Mission when they had them trapped in California. Now they had the whole country to search. He could not tell the Bureau what they were really looking for, and he could not legitimately look for what he believed would lead him to the final scenario, the truth that was casting all the shadows that only he seemed to be able to see.
About the only thing that had been quickly and neatly resolved was the Heilige Berg mess Hoecker dropped in his lap, and that had simply been passed off down the chain to the Boise office.
Cundieffe reviewed the disk Hoecker gave him, and plowed through a laundry list of recovered cars stolen from the Pacific Northwest, repainted and sold to used car wholesalers in California and Mexico. The connection to Heilige Berg was tenuous at best, the church having been implicated by a middleman caught with a shipment of cars in Arizona. Nothing remarkable, certainly nothing worthy of the NSA or the almighty EAR. Cundieffe forwarded the information on to the Boise field office's resident counterterrorism expert, who had in turn arranged for the nearest resident agency office in Moscow to put Heilige Berg under surveillance. Cundieffe added a vaguely worded note requesting a fitness report on the compound's inhabitants, to be delivered ASAP. The Moscow agent spent the night in his car on a mountain road, watching the compound through binoculars and taking pictures. He discovered only a happy bunch of gun-toting bible thumping hate-mongers, shooting guns and singing hymns late into the night. In the morning, they brought him a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon, toast and milk—which, Cundieffe gladly noted, the agent politely refused. Surveillance was cut, with a notation to resume in the spring.