But it only got as far as the skin before the observer killed them and slammed the door shut.
The Shadow Company immediately doubled the budget, trying to reproduce whatever happened in that little room. As far as Bell knew, they had never succeeded.
But the skin remained. After a while, the Shadowmen started working with every Company unit.
When Bell first joined, the Shadowmen were only rumors. Occasionally, while on assignment, other members of the Company smirked and talked about the “invisibility cloak.” They were shut up by hard glances from more senior officers before Bell could ask for details.
She accepted that. Information was tightly controlled in the Company. All she knew for sure was what she saw on her missions. Secure buildings, armed guards, gated mansions—none of that was a problem. Shadow Company operatives could follow anyone, anywhere. They could get inside any location. She never knew how, in those early days. All she got were the reports, the intel. She only saw the results.
But when Graves moved her up to a field team, he gave her Hewitt and Reynolds as Shadowmen. But they didn’t start out that way.
They were warm bodies, culled from the hundreds of thousands of people drawing a government paycheck for wearing a badge. They could have been bought in bulk from a federal warehouse. Both were former law enforcement who saw their chance to move up the ladder after 9/11. They were on the right side of the IQ curve. “Bright but unimaginative,” their psych profiles said. Both divorced, wives and families forgotten back in whatever jurisdictions they came from.
Reynolds used to wear a mustache. That was how Bell told them apart back then.
Graves made her watch when they put on the skins. They were in a white room—completely white, even the table and chairs—in a subbasement of a facility paid for out of a classified section of the federal budget.
Bell was behind mirrored glass, along with Graves, looking into the room.
Reynolds and Hewitt entered, confident, swaggering. They didn’t seem to feel any of the unease that crept up Bell’s spine.
On the table were what looked like stereotypical spy costumes, right out of a grocery store aisle at Halloween: slouch-brimmed hats and trench coats, in pure black. Next to those, black sunglasses.
They seemed to eat the light as it hit the table.
At first, Reynolds and Hewitt looked at the outfits, then back at each other, then at the mirror.
Bright, but not imaginative, Bell remembered.
Graves sighed and pressed a button on the intercom.
“Pick up the coats,” he ordered. “Put them on.”
They smirked, made faces at each other. But they did as instructed. Coats, hats, then glasses.
Reynolds said something. Hewitt laughed. Without the intercom, Bell couldn’t hear the joke.
Then the clothing started moving, rippling over them like black water.
“Hey,” Reynolds said, loud enough to hear.
“Hey.”
Graves hit the intercom button again. “Just relax,” he said. “Breathe deep.”
Hewitt was way ahead on that. He was hyperventilating as the dark substance crawled its way up his face.
He turned away, just as the first tendrils reached into his mouth and nose.
They both started screaming. They didn’t sound like men. Any age, any gender, had been stripped right out of their throats by terror. It sounded like the shrieks of children gripped by fear of the dark, completely uninhibited by maturity or restraint, completely void of the knowledge that daylight will ever come or that Mommy will return to kiss it all better.
They curled into fetal balls on the floor, the dark skins constricting around them, seeming to get smaller, tighter.
Bell looked at Graves. He was completely unperturbed.
When she looked back inside the room, she couldn’t find them.
It shouldn’t have been that tough. They were black outlines, dead-center in an all-white room.
But even with the fluorescent lighting, she couldn’t seem to focus on them. They somehow kept shifting, just out of her range of vision. Sliding to the corner of her eye.
She caught a glimpse of men in hats and coats, but that was only their shadows.
Somehow she knew they were in there, moving around. But she couldn’t really see them anymore.
She swallowed, and made her voice sound as normal as she could. “Impressive,” she said.
“Isn’t it?” Graves replied. “Don’t worry,” he added. “You get used to it after a while. Pretty soon, it seems as normal as your morning coffee.”
Bell nodded, but she didn’t believe him. Because it wasn’t her sudden inability to see Hewitt and Reynolds that disturbed her most.
It wasn’t the screaming, because that had stopped.
She heard a new sound, from nowhere and everywhere inside the room at the same time.
They were laughing.
They
liked
it.
BELL HADN’T BEEN lying to Zach. Not a lot, anyway. Much of what she’d told him was true. She just skipped some parts, especially about her decision to join Archer/Andrews, and eventually the Shadow Company.
Bell might have been the first Shadow Company recruit in years to actively seek out the organization, if anyone kept track of that sort of thing. There was no denying she was a genius at research. It enabled her to put together all the disparate, contradictory evidence that led her to the real player behind the scenes.
She had joined the CIA for all the right reasons. Altruism, patriotism, War on Terror, everything she’d said. But then she ran into the facts on the ground, and the facts were, there was no war. A war requires a strategy, and leadership, and an identifiable enemy. Every assignment Bell took, every place she visited, was just chaos. There were thousands of hours of recordings from intercepted al-Qaeda cell phones, and no one who spoke Arabic. Their informants would point a finger at anyone for the right amount of money, so they ended up with genuine terrorists next to a guy who’d only pissed off his brother-in-law. She couldn’t say for sure her work saved lives, or took them.
The only certainty was the money.
Government funds washed over agencies like floodwaters swamping small towns. Over nine billion dollars was missing from the reconstruction of Iraq alone. Bell knew that stacks of bills were simply absorbed by contractors like Archer/Andrews. She knew a guy who’d quit the CIA, spent a mere six months in the Green Zone, and was now retired and building a twelve-room house on a lake.
In Switzerland.
The opportunity was there. She’d have been an idiot not to take it.
It wasn’t that she’d ever been poor. Her parents had always given her everything she needed.
But moving around in the secret world, she discovered she’d been incapable of imagining all the things it was
possible
to want. It wasn’t just the flights in private jets, with Black AmEx shopping privileges at designer shops in Europe as part of her cover. It wasn’t the government salary and the cheap apartment in her real life.
Rather, it was the power and ease that slid around her when she was in the field. It was addictive, living that life, because it was so much
more
, in every single way.
When she would go home to her parents’ little two-bedroom ranch for the holidays, listening to them talk about the great bargains at Wal-Mart this year, all the while pretending to be a dull bureaucrat whose job was nowhere near as interesting as Bobby selling cars at the dealership—well, it embarrassed her, somehow. Not for herself, but for them. How small they were. How little they actually knew. And the idea of having to return to that ordinary, yard-sale version of life wasn’t so much repugnant as it was simply unnecessary.
She had the skills to move on. Archer/Andrews offered her a ticket to the greater world. If she was smart enough, she’d earn a passport and live there forever, not as a citizen, bound not by mere loyalty, but as something a little more tangible—an asset, something far too valuable to ever trade or sell.
First, of course, she had to get the job.
She collected a paper trail that would have been invisible to most people. She secured the data in hard drives and mailed them to dead-drop sites all over the world. If she vanished, the information would go into button-down mode, and automatically be sent along to newspapers and several congressional committees.
Bell had been naïve enough to think that was enough to protect her. As if the Company didn’t have ways of shutting down those kinds of inquiries.
But she didn’t know that, so she felt secure enough to make a phone call to a man in an office in the Pentagon who didn’t exist.
She spoke the code words no one else was supposed to know: “MORDRED, ALADDIN, CONNECTICUT-HULU.”
“I’m listening,” replied the man on the other end.
“I want in,” she said.
They were impressed. They liked her audacity. They brought her on board and gave her a new name. She became Bell.
She hadn’t looked back for a moment, until she met Zach. It wasn’t that she was in love with him—God, no—but he reminded her of things she’d rather forget. Her college-girl idealism, back when she started—and the more disquieting fact that if they were going to make this op work, she was going to have to kill him.
She thought about that after Hewitt and Reynolds left—using the door, thankfully.
She wasn’t sure she could do it. Maybe, if she was smart enough, she could find another way.
Maybe it was time to find another job.
SEVENTEEN
KINGSTON FALLS, INDIANA—Governor Robert Orr declared this small town a statewide disaster area today, sending National Guard troops to restore order and basic services. At least a dozen people are dead, and hundreds more injured, in what some are calling the “Christmas Invasion.” Although what exactly invaded the town is still not clear, as everything from aliens to mass hallucinations have been blamed for the chaos. . . .
—Indianapolis
Post
, December 26, 1984
E
verett sat alone in the mortuary, typing his report into an e-mail. Aside from the clatter of his fingers on the keys, it was quiet.
He liked the quiet. It was the main reason he liked his work.
Everett wasn’t good with people. He knew that. He’d begin talking about something that fascinated him, and then look up at the horror on the faces of the other people in the room. He knew he’d said too much to Barrows and the woman, but he got carried away. He couldn’t help it. The reptilian—what Barrows insisted on inaccurately calling a “Snakehead”—was remarkable. He was just being honest.
He’d always been enthralled with the insides of bodies, the blood, the guts, the squirm-inducing bits and chunks. It was one reason he went into medicine. He thought that his taste for the grotesque would be tolerated, even shared, by other people in his field.
That wasn’t how it really worked. Other doctors found him unsettling and strange. During his training, he once had to be reprimanded when his description of a tumor reduced a patient to a sobbing wreck; apparently the man didn’t share Everett’s admiration for the thing that was going to kill him. “Problems with bedside manner and working with others,” was how one of his attending physicians put it in Everett’s evaluation.
He was gently steered toward a career in pathology. As brilliant as he was, Everett was only at home when surrounded by dead bodies.
Even there, however, Everett didn’t fit in. Determining cause of death was ridiculously easy for someone with his intellect and inclinations. He might have left medicine altogether if the government hadn’t found him. He was put through a security check and then assigned to his own lab, where he got to carve up things that rightfully belonged only in nightmares.
He’d completed his autopsy hours ago and placed the reptilian corpse in one of the cold-storage drawers lining the far wall. As soon as his report was completed, an anonymous group of janitorial workers—all with security clearances even higher than his own—would come to the lab and take the body away. He never saw any of his specimens after he was finished examining them, and didn’t really care by that point. Once he’d unlocked their secrets, he was done with them.
He had to admit, he’d been stalling on the report. He didn’t like the way Barrows had spoken to him. Hustling the woman out of the room, like Everett had upset her. Even in this job, he was considered the freak.
I’m not the one who works with a vampire on a daily basis, Everett thought. He’d met Cade several times, and despite his comfort level with the macabre, he was always left shuddering by the experience.
Although he wouldn’t mind having Cade on the slab sometime. It had been years since anyone working in the government had Cade under the knife. There were all kinds of new discoveries waiting to be made . . .