T
HE NEXT MORNING
C
ONRAD STOOD
in his change of clothes outside the Starbucks on Wisconsin looking at his watch. It was barely 5:30 a.m., and already the line to see his old friend Danny Z was out the door.
Daniel Motamed Zadeh—“Danny Z” to friends—worked as a barista behind the counter. Danny had let his hair grow long since his days at the Pentagon and had it in a ponytail, looking like Antonio Banderas in
Zorro
. But Conrad could tell it was him even from the back of the line. Ten minutes later Conrad stepped up to the counter and looked Danny Z in the eyeballs for the first time in a decade.
“Tall nonfat latte,” he told Danny as he slipped him three George Washingtons. “The name’s Bubba.”
Danny marked up the order specs on the outside of an empty white Starbucks cup and looked over Conrad’s shoulder and said, “Next customer, please.”
Just like that, they were done.
Conrad ambled over to the far counter where several patrons waited to pick up their orders—K Street types, a couple of diplomats and a college intern fetching orders for her congressman’s entire staff. He couldn’t help but notice the headline below the fold of the front page of the
Post
that one of the K Street guys was reading:
F
ALSE
B
IOTERROR
S
CARE
C
LEARS
U.S. C
APITOL
Then the guy lowered his paper and looked straight at him. Conrad shifted his gaze quickly to scan the mugs on the shelves to the side. They were always coming up with new ones. He was tempted to buy a pair—one for him and one for Serena.
When a barista called the name “Bob” nobody answered. Conrad figured “Bob” was “Bubba,” lost in translation.
One sip told him that was the case, and as he walked out to the street he looked at the side of his cup and noticed the peculiar markings for his latte: there were the three symbols for the constellations from his father’s tombstone, along with a new, fourth symbol which Danny had inserted.
Strung together the translation on the side of his Starbucks cup read:
Boötes + Leo + Virgo = Bad Alignment.
Tell me something I don’t know
, Conrad wondered, but when he looked back inside the store Danny Z was no longer behind the counter. Another barista, a blonde, was taking orders.
Conrad went round back to the alley and stood by the trash bins behind the store. It was starting to drizzle. He sipped his coffee and waited. Danny Z made slamming good coffee, although this probably wasn’t what his parents in Beverly Hills had planned for their little genius when he went off to MIT.
Danny came from an Iranian family that fled Tehran when the mullahs toppled the government of the Shah of Iran decades ago. They settled in the Trousdale Estates part of Beverly Hills with other Persian Jews and pretty much kept to themselves while sending their kids to Beverly Hills High School, which eventually had so many Persians that by the time Danny was going there the school was printing its programs in English and Farsi. It was only a matter of time before the CIA recruiters called, always looking for a few good Iranians with connections to the old country. Daniel Motamed Zadeh, tired of his cars and Persian princesses and prospects for more of the same, was ripe for a higher calling and became a spy for his beloved America, the Great Satan, so far as the current regime in Tehran was concerned.
Danny Z had left National Intelligence at the Pentagon a few
years back under a cloud of bitter recriminations on both sides. This after he was brought on board to become, in effect, the chief astrologer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Apparently Danny was under the impression that Conrad still worked for the Pentagon. The first thing he did coming out the door with a bag of trash was take a swing at Conrad with it.
Conrad ducked, spilling some coffee and scalding his hand. “Hey, Danny, I’m one of the good guys.”
Danny stuffed the bag into the stinking trash bin. “Bullshit. Your name is Yeats, isn’t it? Just like your old man.”
“He’s dead, remember?”
“Promise?”
“There was a funeral, Danny. You were the only one from the old days not there.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, you’re the only one I can trust.”
Danny gave him a napkin from his pocket. “Better drink it now, it loses its oxidation and flavor in a few minutes. Don’t make me waste a cup of good coffee.”
Conrad wiped the cup and then his hand. He took a sip and nodded his approval.
Danny calmed down, pulled out a cigarette, and started blowing smoke, eyeing him nervously.
Conrad said, “I thought you preferred hookah pipes to sticks.”
“I got religion and gave up all that shit.”
“Since when are cigarettes a sacrament?”
“Since Genesis says that when Rachel saw Isaac from afar ‘she lit off her Camel.’” Danny blew smoke out of both nostrils. “So you’re trying to figure out your old man’s tombstone like the rest of them?”
“The rest?”
“Packard’s people came to me asking about the stars on the tombstone weeks ago. How else do you think I knew about the constellations? You think I’m a psychic now, too?”
Conrad looked at the once-happy Danny and wondered what must have happened to him after the DOD’s intelligence branch stole him from the CIA. It was all bullshit, of course. But the Russians, al-Qaeda, the Chinese and others often timed their rocket launches, terrorist
attacks, and nuclear tests to significant dates. The head of the Russian rocket program had gone so far as to state on record that he believed astrology was a “hard science.” And as long as America’s enemies, both real and imagined, believed in hocus-pocus, the Pentagon figured they had better, too. They plotted every day and date, both historically and astrologically, visible and invisible, in order to predict threats and prepare accordingly.
Danny was a natural, coming from a long line of mystics who allegedly traced themselves back to the Persian Empire, to the Jews exiled to Babylon and taught by King Nebuchadnezzar and his staff of astrologers six centuries before Christ. It made all the Bible-thumper evangelicals in the Pentagon wet their pants to have “the real deal” on their side. The kicker was his name was Daniel, just like the prophet who spelled out the rise and fall of the world’s future empires until the end of time itself.
Conrad said, “Danny, what happened to you?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“You don’t fucking know?”
Conrad shook his head. “I heard they had you working out dates and stuff, right? I figured you got tired of the grind and living in the heads of psychos living in caves halfway around the world.”
Danny took the cigarette stump out of his mouth and dropped it to the wet pavement, stamping it out. He looked up at Conrad. “They were using my charts against special ops.”
“I thought that was the idea, Danny. You think like the enemy and tell the brass, like that splinter Red Cell group of astrologers and psychics they use.”
“No.” Danny laughed bitterly and lit another cigarette. “They started using my charts to mount
our
special ops.”
Conrad’s jaw dropped. “American troops?”
“Like I’m giving ’em a regular meteorological report, only they launch an air strike when Mars is at the Dragon’s Head, screw the full moon.” Danny took another drag. “Admiral Temple told me they’ve been doing it since the Revolution. It’s how we won the War of Independence. It’s how we’ve won every stinking world war since. It’s why the armed forces of the United States are invincible, Yeats.”
“Invincible?”
Danny shrugged. “Stars say so.”
Conrad said nothing, just watched Danny, a man clearly conflicted and depressed. In other words, after enough time at DARPA himself, Conrad was ready to believe him.
“At first, I thought they were bullshitting me, putting pressure on me. Then I decided to give them a bogus chart, just to see what happened. Next day I find out twenty Delta Force troops die, just like that. I get called in. Stars never wrong. I must have been. I promised I’d do better.”
“But obviously you didn’t.”
Danny gave him the evil eye, offended.
Conrad glanced away at the trash bins all around them. They weren’t exactly conversing in the situation room these days.
“So what was it, Danny? Another special op gone bad?”
Danny shook his head. “June 30, 2004,” he said and then paused. “That’s almost four years ago exactly. Holy shit! Now you turn up.”
Conrad scratched his head. Four years ago Conrad was long gone from the Pentagon himself, off in the Andes doing his
Ancient Riddles
show. Then his father mysteriously resurfaced in his life, as was his pattern, and dragged him down to Antarctica.
“So what happened on June 30, 2004?”
Danny told him: “U.S. handover of Iraq.”
Conrad blinked. “The Joint Chiefs had you chart the day the U.S. would return sovereignty to the Iraqis?”
“To the second: 10:26 a.m. in Baghdad, which was 2:26 a.m. here in D.C.,” Danny said. “But then they fucked up. They got word of some assassination attempt in the works on the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi. So Paul Bremer, the coalition’s civil administrator, bumps up the transfer and gives Allawi the leather-bound transfer document and a handshake two days ahead of schedule.”
Conrad stared at him. “And you believe that’s why we screwed up the occupation in Iraq?”
“Fuck, no. But some brass in the Pentagon did. Beats looking in the mirror, I guess. It’s all fucked, man. Axis of Evil. Bullshit! We found shit in Iraq. Meanwhile, the nut jobs in Iran and North Korea are building nukes and passing them around to every lowlife terrorist
group. They’re gonna blow up the whole fucking world. Because we got our heads up our asses.”
Conrad had heard enough to know where Danny stood on the issue. Now he needed to get from Danny what he came for, without sending the poor son of a bitch over the edge.
“Danny, listen to me.” Conrad took a deep breath. “I need to find SENTINEL.”
Danny looked at him like he was the boogie man. “Now you wanna do business with the Masons?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re fucking nuts! All of you!” Danny started turning circles, waving his arms like an inmate in some asylum. “The whole world is fucking nuts!”
“Look, I told you, Danny. You’re the only one from the old days I can trust. You and Sentinel.”
Danny stopped turning, his eyes looking the crazier for it.
“Yeah, well, he’s from your old man’s days, the old-old days. I heard he’s dead. Him and all his Masonic bullshit.”
“Is he?”
Danny finally looked like he was calming down. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“If he were still alive, where would I find him?”
“Some nursing home in Richmond, I think. Near the VA hospital.”
“Really?”
“We can’t all go out in a blaze of glory like your old man, Chief.”
They said nothing for a moment. Conrad listened to the morning rush hour picking up on Wisconsin. The sky was getting lighter, though it was still drizzling. Then Danny seemed to regain his sanity and sight. He looked at Yeats in his rumpled suit and suddenly figured it out.
“Holy shit, Yeats. That was
you
yesterday at the Capitol?”
“Maybe.”
Danny shook his head. “I could have told you it wouldn’t work.”
“The moon in the wrong house or something?”
“Something.”
“How’s tonight look?”
“Seriously?” Danny worked up a quick chart on another Starbucks napkin. “Problem with you is you don’t even know your own birth date. That screws things up some. But based on all your personality quirks, we always figured you for a Pisces. Definitely a water sign.”
A minute later Danny showed him the chart.
It was completely unintelligible to Conrad’s eyes. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re fucked.”
“Seriously?”
Danny nodded and stamped out his second cigarette. “So am I, if I’m spotted with you.”
Conrad pocketed the napkin and turned to go. “You never saw me.”
“I wish,” Danny said, and disappeared back into the Starbucks.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
T
HE SIX-STORY OFFICE BUILDING
in Arlington that houses the headquarters of DARPA attracts scant attention from the commuters emerging from the nearby Metro station or the patrons of the neighboring fast-food joints, gas stations, and multiplexes. Only the lone security guard at the entrance to the anonymous steel-and-glass office tower hints of something inside to passersby, but something no more exciting than a nondescript local bank branch.
Max Seavers was in his glass office on the sixth floor when the call came in: Conrad Yeats had turned up on the grid, and Norm Carson’s team at the Pentagon wanted to move in.
Seavers called them off. “I’ll handle it.” He hung up and placed another call. “This is Nebulizer. I need a Medevac at the helipad. See you in ten.”
Meanwhile, I’m going to need some more juice.
Seavers took the elevator down from his office to the other sixth floor—the one six stories below the building’s underground parking garage. The Meat Locker on sublevel 6, as it was called, was built by his predecessor General Yeats to house an astounding discovery. The Griffter had kept it a secret even from the Pentagon. Seavers learned of its existence only upon taking over the old man’s job, and its revelations affirmed in a thousand ways his choice to heed the Alignment’s call and leave SeaGen for DARPA.
Seavers walked down a long tunnel to a thick metal vault. He swiped his right index finger on the scanner next to the door. He heard
a lock thud and then a series of clicks as bolts moved inside. The two-foot-thick door opened to reveal a contamination room and another vault beyond.
Seavers put on a protective germ “bunny suit” and opened the second vault. Inside was a secret prison that housed one of the most unique enemy combatants America had ever captured.
His code name was HANS, and he was discovered by American troops in Antarctica in the 1940s during Operation Highjump, which was the massive U.S. invasion of Antarctica based on information gleaned from the Nazis in the waning days of World War II. Almost every major American base on the ice continent could trace its origins back to Highjump.
Hans was a corpse, the frozen corpse of a German officer who was part of a secret Nazi base in Antarctica established by the “Baron of the Black Order” himself, SS General Ludwig von Berg. It was at this base that Hitler’s “Last Battalion” apparently stored biotoxins. These biotoxins had been smuggled out of the collapsing Third Reich on U-boats, along with senior Nazis, who then went on to establish new identities in Argentina.
Hans didn’t talk much, but his diseased lung tissue had provided Seavers with the second most important discovery of his life: the Nazis had weaponized the 1918 Spanish flu that had killed more than fifty million humans. In the end, it also killed the Nazis safeguarding their ultimate doomsday weapon. But it breathed new life into Seavers’ research and set him on his present course.
Specifically, Hans’s frozen lung tissue had given Seavers the perfectly preserved live bird flu virus itself. The trouble had been converting it into an easily dispersible aerosol version. In the process Seavers also discovered a prion mutation in the corpse’s brain cells. One drop of fluid drained from the tissue could create a dozen lethal injections. A simple prick by syringe or dart gun caused instant death from apparently natural disease. But it had to be used within 24 hours of extraction or it would lose its effectiveness. Hence his periodic visits to the Meat Locker.
Seavers smiled at his frozen friend. “We’re going to have to make this one fast today, Hans,” he said, looking forward to extracting some cells from Conrad Yeats.