"Brady Hoecker, Associate Director, National Security Agency," he said, and he nodded to Cundieffe and his eyes sparked the message that he
knew
, too. "We're just here to listen in, so don't let us cramp your style."
"You pencil-necks can suck each other's dicks on your own time," Nye cut in, dragging Cundieffe back across the gallery to Storch's cell.
Hoecker and Showalter retreated back into the dark and the sentries parted.
"One more thing," Col. Nye said, and smoothly lifted Cundieffe's sidearm out of its shoulder holster.
"I have no intention of harming the prisoner, Colonel," Cundieffe murmured.
"Don't think you could if you tried, but it's not
you
I'm worried about." He swiped a card through a reader slot and handed the card to one of the MP's as the gate popped open.
A second gate inside the first, and Col. Nye opened this one with a key, which he presented to another MP who stood his post in the antechamber between the gates. The guard hung the key around his neck and aimed his rifle squarely at the back of the man sitting in the cell.
Cundieffe stood in the antechamber until Col. Nye shoved him into the cell and slammed the inner gate behind him. "Give a shout when you're done. You have twenty seven minutes." The outside MP opened the card gate for him and slammed it. Col. Nye disappeared behind a wall of guards with their backs turned.
Sgt. Storch sat at a hardwood table with his hands shackled behind his back and bolted to the floor. He wore a collar of plastic with blinking LED's on it: some sort of shock deterrent device, most likely. When the gate shut, he inclined his head slightly; not in surprise, but, Cundieffe thought, to brace for an attack. He stepped into the cell, the greasy crinkle of plastic dropcloth underfoot. He wondered if they intended to execute him here, and wanted to have it clean for the tourists by this afternoon. He gave Storch a wide berth, walking against the brick wall to the far side of the table. He avoided making eye contact until he was sitting opposite the prisoner. Slowly, he laid his briefcase on the table and, slower still, unsnapped the hasps and laid it open before him. Trying to remember that he was here as an interrogator, when he felt like Storch's lawyer. Only then did he stop and look up at Sgt. Storch.
Up until now, Cundieffe had only seen Storch in ID photos, old family snapshots, surveillance imagery and on tapes of closed-circuit security video. That man had looked haunted by some kind of illness which gave his otherwise unremarkable features a harsh, fanatical cast. Here was the illness wearing the smoldering ruin of the man he'd hoped to meet. Storch looked to have lost about fifty pounds in captivity, most of it muscle. His eyes were recessed so far into his head that he looked like a Neanderthal, with his beetling brow and knife-blade cheekbones. His mouth was clamped so tightly shut it was only another wrinkle in his crumpled face. Patches of hair so black it was almost blue stood out from Storch's skull, the rest of it scabbed and bleeding where he'd apparently ripped it out by the roots.
Mostly self-inflicted
Storch's skin hung on him like wet pajamas the color and texture of an onion, and scars crisscrossed it—the inflamed grid pattern of chemical exposure tests, the purple welts of cattle prods, neat seams from surgeries, many more whose causes Cundieffe couldn't begin to guess.
Storch didn't look up from the table, but he didn't seem to be focusing on the things Cundieffe laid out from the briefcase.
"Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch, Fifth Special Forces Group, Retired. I'm Special Agent Martin Cundieffe from the FBI. I realize that the circumstances are not what they could be, but I've come here to talk to you about your role in the Mission's activities of July Fourth through the Tenth, 1999. Am I speaking to Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch?"
No response.
"I don't expect many answers from you, Sgt. Storch. I've read your file, and I know your record in detail. Enlisted, 1983, Basic, then Airborne. You earned your Ranger tab in '84, and served with the First of the Seventy-Fifth Regiment, at Ft. Benning. In 1986, you took the Q Course to become a Green Beret. You stress-fractured your right forearm during an exercise, but concealed it for the remaining week, so you wouldn't be sent back. Did you know they were going to flunk you, Sergeant? You received excellent marks in everything but initiative. It was felt that while you had the will to fight and think as a soldier, you lacked the capability to think for yourself, and would make a superb Ranger. Good soldier, good weapon, but not a warrior. You passed because you wouldn't break, and they needed warm bodies, but the question remains: can you think for yourself, Sgt. Storch?"
Eyes flicked around above his head. No response.
"I realize also that you have been specially trained to resist interrogation and seek any opportunity to escape when held captive in wartime, and that you believe that some sort of state of war presently exists. And who could fault you for that assumption? You have been held without legal due process, and, in the course of your imprisonment, you have been tortured in an attempt to extract the information I am about to ask you for. I know, it strikes me as ridiculous, as well: when all else fails, try diplomacy. But, if I may make so bold, you of all people should be aware of the military's shortcomings with regard to unique situations like this one."
No response.
"Regrettably, I have no power to delay your execution and any cooperation you will offer will have to be for posterity, as nothing, I am given to understand, will result in the commutation or even temporary stay of your sentence. You're a man the United States government wants very badly to kill, Sgt. Storch, though you're already dying of cancer. And they want to do it in secrecy, in silence. Not that they'd have to—if the events of July Tenth, 1999, were made public, they would have little or no difficulty sentencing you to die in the gas chamber in California. There are more than enough rock-solid cases against you to move for the death penalty, so one could make the perverse argument that by executing you in secret, the government is only sparing the citizenry a lengthy and expensive show trial and years of panic and unrest.
"But I don't think anyone I've spoken to knows what really happened that night. I think that you know more than even you realize and are in a position at least to deny the military its precious silence."
He couldn't even tell if Storch was looking at the picture on top of the pile. The photo had been digitally enhanced, so it looked like a Pointillist painter's rendition of a security camera still. In it, a man whom Cundieffe and everyone else had positively identified as Sgt. Storch stood at the counter of the Furnace Creek Sheriff's office, pointing a gun at two men in uniform, one dead, one quite explosively dying. Though his gun hand was a hundred-fingered blur, his head was held as still as if he was posing for the picture.
Cundieffe opened up the first file and held up another picture. It showed Storch's pickup truck. "This truck was found on July Sixth along Highway 190. It was identified as your vehicle and impounded as evidence in the murder of Sheriff James Twombley and Deputy Kenny Landis on the Fifth, though there were several discrepancies observed between the vehicle's condition and the statements of Deputy Danny Asaro and the Death Valley Junction Sheriff's deputies who pursued the alleged murderer. Is this your vehicle, Sgt. Storch?"
No response.
Another photo. The same truck, down to the license plates, but shot through with bullet-holes and shotgun spray. Tipped over in an arroyo, half-buried in dried mud. "This vehicle was discovered by myself and another agent on July Tenth, less than two hours before the Mission dropped napalm on Radiant Dawn Hospice Village. Note that the condition of the vehicle matched the aforementioned statement. There were two trucks with your license plates. One was used to murder two peace officers, the other was found abandoned by the side of the road in the middle of Death Valley. Which vehicle was yours, Sgt. Storch?"
No response.
He closed the file and picked another. He held up a full-color crime scene photo of a male corpse propped up in a chair. An astounding variety of sharp instruments buried in the skull. "This unfortunate gentleman was named Charles Walter Angell, leader of the School Of Night sect in Colma. While the group's twenty-six members were all found dead by some sort of apparent biofeedback mass suicide, Mr. Angell was brutally murdered and suffered considerable postmortem desecration. They are content to believe that you did this."
He laid this photo down before Storch and picked up another. It showed a residential interior, the walls draped in tie-dyed tapestries and beaded curtains. Two bodies lay splayed out side by side in the center of the room. Every sharp object in the house and many not found in any healthy home were jammed into the skulls of the victims. They looked as if they were wearing steel war-bonnets.
"This is Sky and Chrysanthemum Angulo, of Santa Cruz, California. Both were convicted manufacturers of hallucinogens, and they were found murdered in their home, in January of 1988. There were signs of missing property, particularly electronics and narcotics, but their seventeen-year old son, Baron Angulo, was never found. Local authorities proceeded on the assumption that gang drug dealers had killed the Angulos and that their son had either fled or been abducted by the gang. The FBI's San Jose field office concluded that the sole perpetrator was the son, but there has never been an indictment handed down for want of evidence and what records they do have keep disappearing from the NCIC database. He's never been arrested or even sighted. This is the last known photo of Angulo. Do you recognize this boy?"
Storch's eyes might've flicked around in their bottomless sockets. Cundieffe took another look at the photo himself. Bright, mischievous eyes, and the crooked smile of one who has never been punished.
"Several of your former neighbors in Thermopylae positively identified the young man in this photograph as one Ely Buggs, a former employee of yours. Is that correct?"
Nothing.
"In 1996, a hacker penetrated the databases of the Human Genome Project at UC Berkeley, and copied all data in a section of classified research and proprietary DNA-parsing compounds. The FBI's computer crime specialists tracked the source of the incursion to a computer tied into a server network in Mountain View, California. The property owners were a small computer security firm and had no idea about the computer's presence, let alone its purpose. Upon accessing the server, they unleashed a virus which temporarily crashed the FBI's San Jose field office network and contaminated all outgoing e-mail with a Tourette virus, which randomly spikes all messages with obscenities and sundry blasphemous phrases."
Storch might have nodded once.
"Sounds like your employee, doesn't it?"
No response.
"Well, in other news, I went to see your father recently. He's still in solitary confinement, too, at Norwalk. You know that he's been writing a history of the universe, or something of that sort? Well, five months ago, he put it to the torch. No one knows how he started the fire, but he managed to destroy it and half of the ward. The chronicle numbered over seventy thousand pages, nearly five hundred pounds of paper, seven years of uninterrupted work. Since then, he's been locked up and heavily medicated, because he can't break out of the manic compulsion to begin another chronicle. In his more lucid moments, he's been writing it on the walls of his cell, and he explained it to me in excruciating detail before he was put back under sedation. He promises it will be twice as long as the other, which he now believes was erroneous. It begins with your birth, Sgt. Storch. I didn't tell him that you were in any kind of trouble. The doctors say a shock that great could trigger another breakdown."
Cundieffe might've been telling him about his own father, in Japanese. He had expected to have dug out some emotional reaction by now, some sign that a light was still on behind those flat, unblinking eyes. He probed every ghost of a motion for signs of contempt, anguish, rage, menace, fatigue or despair, but the face of the prisoner was mummified, painted on.
"Sgt. Storch, I'm getting a little tired of the sound of my own voice, here. None of this information will exonerate you in the eyes of the United States government because of your participation in the Radiant Dawn massacre and your fatal attack on FBI Agent Robert Niles on the night of your arrest. You are going to die today, while the people who brought you into this, against your will, I suspect, are safely ensconced somewhere in South America, plotting another attack on American soil. Those men out there are hoping you'll make some pitiful deathbed
mea culpa
and give up the Mission's foreign headquarters and in-country operatives and maybe tell them why you did it. And I don't even know why
I'm
the one talking to you, because just before I got here, I think I figured it out."
Storch's ears might have twitched, his brow might've contracted a millimeter or two.
"Shortly after you jumped—or were pushed—out of that helicopter over Liberty Salvage in Baker on the night of the Tenth, you and seven Delta Force commandos were irradiated by a light from the sky, which several accounts dismissed as an astronomical phenomenon or the spotlight of a previously unaccounted-for helicopter on the scene. Then the bomb went off in the Mission HQ."
Storch definitely shivered once, as if his skin had just shrunk a size.
"Within ten days, all seven soldiers were dead. Autopsies revealed a particularly rare variety of cancer tumor spread throughout their bodies. They're called teratomas, Sgt. Storch. They differ from garden-variety tumors in that they normally only manifest in germline cells, and the malignant mass attempts to differentiate into the distinct features of an independent organism. The features are only vestigial, certainly not viable, but more like an incomplete Siamese twin, if I may use a phrase out of political fashion. Or, in this particular case, several twins."