The Book of Truths (13 page)

Behind them, Wahid lifted his hand as much as the restraints would allow and grabbed Rhodes’s forearm. “Help me to be quiet. Please.”

Rhodes shook off the grab, focused on his boss and the general.

Riggs’s face was now within six inches of Upton’s. The general hadn’t raised his voice at all, but the profanity was suddenly gone. There was only the chill of Beacon Hill in December blowing down on the scientist.

Riggs spun away from Upton, just as he’d been taught to about-face as a plebe at West Point sweating through Beast Barracks,
drilling on the Plain. He stopped next to the civilian who’d come in with him. “What do you think, Brennan?”

Brennan nodded. “I like it.”

That was good enough for Riggs. “We’re going to use this, gentlemen. I want a complete briefing for myself and Mr. Brennan on how that can be done in twenty-four hours. The treaty is being signed in seventy-two hours and you have given us a superb tool just in time. Well done. Well done.”

And with that Riggs was out the door. Brennan didn’t immediately follow. He went to Upton and shook his hand. “Good job.” Then he turned to Rhodes and shook his hand also. “Congratulations.” Brennan tried to smooth the ruffled and stormy waters left in his boss’s wake, one of the many tasks he did for the general. Then he left.

Johnston just as quickly regained command. “Get him out of here,” he snapped at the two merks. He stabbed a finger at Upton. “You heard the general. A report in eighteen hours.”

“Twelve hours,” Upton told Rhodes as they walked down the sidewalk of the strip mall. “I want the report on my desk in twelve hours.” He paused in front of an ice cream shop in the same strip mall, three doors down from the interrogation center. A more astute person might have sensed some irony in the contrast, but Upton had been in the world of covert research for too long to have any irony left in him.

“Let’s celebrate,” Upton said, swinging open the door to the shop. “We’ll be getting funding out the ass with General Riggs and that brownnose shit Brennan on our side.”

“It
did
work,” Rhodes marveled as they bellied up to the counter like two gunslingers who’d just taken out all the black hats. “The controlled environment of the lab was one thing. I was worried that we were rushing it and—”

Upton hushed him. “There’s the quick and the nonfunded in our world, son. It’s not like the university labs. We’re in the real world, fighting the real shit. If the boss wanted us to rush it and present it, then we rush it and present it.” He turned to the frowning clerk. “Double serving chocolate, extra nuts and, yes, add the m&m’s.”

“Just a single scoop vanilla,” Rhodes said.

The clerk turned to his task.

Upton lowered his voice. “Six years they were working that guy. And we did it in a minute. If we’d have been done a couple years earlier, we’d have been the ones who got bin Laden, not that CIA bitch. It was like turning on a spigot.” Upton smiled, truly happy, a rarity for him. “He’d totally lost the ability to lie or even withhold the truth. He’d have talked until it wore off.” He looked at his watch. “He’s probably still blabbing away as they haul him back to whatever hole they’re keeping him in here.”

“We need to follow up on that,” Rhodes said. “Make sure the controlled parameters are matched in the field.” He ran his tongue along his upper lip. A slight sheen of sweat covered his forehead.

The clerk handed Upton his heaping cup of ice cream, then went to get Rhodes’s single scoop. Rhodes frowned as Upton shoveled a spoonful of ice cream, nuts, and m&m’s into his mouth.

Rhodes shook his head in disgust. “I’m surprised you ordered the double with nuts
and
with m&m’s considering your
ass is busting out of those pants. You and Riggs. Two big fat pieces of shit.”

“What?” Upton muttered around all the material in his mouth.

“Your. Fat. Ass.” Rhodes emphasized each word. “You’ve gained like what, forty pounds just since I’ve been on the project?”

The second spoonful paused on the way to his mouth. “That’s not funny,” Upton said.

Rhodes snorted. “I bet Linda just hates the thought of fucking you. That’s if you can even get it up around her. She’s a whale, too.”

The clerk was holding out Rhodes’s single serving and Upton slapped it out of his hand as Rhodes reached for it. Upton grabbed a mask out of his coat pocket and slipped it on.

“What the fuck?” Rhodes demanded. “You treat everyone like they’re your servant. I did
all
the work on Cherry Tree. The general saw that right away. It was my idea. He saw through you right away. Your stupid show. You son of a bitch…”

As Rhodes rattled on, Upton simply muttered “Oh, shit,” as he pulled out his cell phone to call in a contain team.

Twelve blocks away, General Riggs’s armored limo paused outside a Washington restaurant. The general stared at Brennan seated across from him. “Still seeing her?”

“Yes, sir.”

Riggs shook his head. “I don’t trust politicians.”

“She’s not a politician, sir,” Brennan replied, reaching for the door handle. “Her father is the politician.”

Riggs leaned over and grabbed his hand for a moment, halting him. “What we just saw is a game changer, Brennan. You get that, right?”

Brennan settled back in the seat. “What do you mean, sir?”

“Think of the power. The power of the truth. In World War Two, Winston Churchill said that ‘in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’”

Brennan was used to the way Riggs worked. Impulsive, prone to overreact, the general had taught himself discipline and surrounded himself with a handful of key people whose job it was to keep him from taking precipitous action. Brennan was one finger on that hand, which was short a couple of fingers to begin with.

“Sir,” Brennan began, skating out onto the thin ice of confronting Riggs’s single-minded vision of the world, “drugging the Russian ambassador with a truth serum might not be a wise course of action. Especially at this delicate time. Could be a Gary Powers sort of moment. The president wants SAD. Congress wants this treaty. Most importantly, the American people want this treaty.”

“You might like his daughter,” Riggs said, “but the president is deluded and the American people are naive. We have the upper hand on the Russians, the Chinese, and everyone else who has a nuke. Why level the playing field with this treaty? It flies in the face of our national strategy and interest. We’ve been sucking hind-tit for decades on this, when we’re the lead fucking horse.”

“SAD greatly reduces the risk of nuclear accident,” Brennan said, “and of terrorists getting their hands on one. Plus, we can’t keep telling other countries not to develop nuclear weapons when we have more than the rest of the world combined.
And
we’re the only country that’s ever actually used them.”

“That’s exactly why we
can
tell them not to develop them,” Riggs said. “I’ve been a soldier for a long time, Brennan. Let me tell you something. If I were a Russian general, I would have a gun to my president’s head, telling him to get us to sign the treaty even as we continued to build our own arsenal while the Americans reduced theirs.”

“That’s a bit paranoid, General.” For a moment, Brennan was afraid he’d crossed a line, but Riggs, surprisingly, laughed.

“You aren’t paranoid if they are indeed out to get you, son. And believe me, those Russian and Chinese bastards are out to get us. That Upton might be a pompous shit with his little show with the needle, but Cherry Tree is special. I can feel it in my bones.

“We have a way to strip away our enemies’ bodyguard of lies. Are we just going to use it on pieces of dirt like that man in the chair and get information that’s six years out of date? Or are we really going to use it? We’ve sat on our nukes for over sixty years and what good has it done us? We could have taken out Russia early in the Cold War with minimal casualties. LeMay knew the numbers. He begged presidents to act and they all ignored him. None of the rest—Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan—would have happened if we’d done what he wanted.”

Brennan frowned at the leap of illogic into the cesspool of paranoia, but knew the ice after his brief rebuttal was too thin to challenge the general anymore. “Sir, even if the treaty gets signed, it will take years to implement.”

“We don’t have years,” Riggs said with surprising anger. “I swore an oath to defend this country with my life and by God”—his fist slammed into the leather seat—“I am going to do just that. Your father understood. He worked with LeMay on Pinnacle. Time is running out on that and time is running out for me.”

“Time is running out on Pinnacle,” Brennan said. “The missile in Nebraska was a close call. We were lucky Masterson’s Nightstalkers were on top of it.”

“Bullshit,” Riggs said. “The damn thing was a dud. No maintenance on it in decades. What the hell is to be expected?”

“We’re maintaining the stockpile as best we can. Outlier weapons…” Brennan shrugged. “We don’t even
know
where some of those are. We didn’t know about this one in Nebraska. That got lost somewhere along the line because of the secrecy.”

“The problem,” Riggs said, “is Masterson’s people are trying to get on top of Pinnacle now. Some idiot left the name in the LCC there.”

“It’s inevitable that word will get out about it,” Brennan said. “It’s a program that’s outlived its usefulness. Masterson has tried to penetrate Pinnacle before and failed. But our luck won’t hold. Maybe we should just abandon it.”

“Pinnacle is a program we need now more than ever, with the treaty coming up. Nebraska was an oversight.” Riggs shifted his bulk on the seat. “There’s something the president is leaving out of all of this and the public doesn’t know. The Rifts. We don’t know what the hell is on the other side of those things. Everyone is so focused on the Russians and the Chinese and Iran, the few who are in the know are forgetting about that. In the beginning, we formed Pinnacle inside the military to prepare for
that
threat.”

“But LeMay co-opted that,” Brennan pointed out.

“LeMay was a hero!” Riggs snapped. Just as quickly, like a summer thunderstorm passing, Riggs smiled, showing shiny white teeth above his square jaw. “Go join your fiancée, Brennan. Give her my best.”

“Sir, I can’t help you if you don’t fill me in on what’s really going on.”

Riggs fixed Brennan with his Beacon Hill stare. “The Russians aren’t the real threat. Don’t get me wrong, I know the treaty has to be derailed and we can use Cherry Tree for that. But when I saw the DORKA blurb about Cherry Tree in the daily intel summary last week, I knew there was potential.”

Brennan’s eyes widened. “You made them do that demonstration.”

Riggs nodded. “Squeezed the balls on the idiot who runs DORKA. You should see the file my people have on him.”

“But why?” Brennan knew the answer. “The treaty.”

“Yes.” He leaned forward. “There are people other than the Russians I need to get the truth out of. We’re in the eye of the storm, Brennan. People are asking questions about Pinnacle. We can’t have that made public. And at the same time, we can’t lose it. The best way to fight having a secret revealed is to learn other people’s secrets.” He laughed. “Mutually assured destruction by truth.

“Pinnacle and the treaty are tied together. And we can’t lose the first and have the second. Too many good men over too many years put everything on the line to defend this country and keep it safe. Not just our country, but our world, from whatever is on the other side of those Rifts. I’m not going to see that undone. Do you understand?”

Brennan knew when to retreat. “Yes, sir.”

“Good, good.” Riggs smiled. “Give your fiancée a kiss for me. Go now.”

Brennan blinked at the abrupt about-face. “Yes, sir.” He fumbled for the door and opened it. As soon as he was out, the armored limo was pulling away, the door slamming shut with a solid thud.

Brennan paused outside the restaurant and took a couple of deep breaths. He was getting sick and tired of the general. In fact,
he was getting sick and tired of a lot of things he had to put up with. He opened the door and entered the pub. Debbie liked to eat at what she called “common folk” places, although he knew her true motivation was to stick out like a sore middle finger and get the admiring glances and muted whispers of admiration that she had graced the common folk with her presence.