He found a set of Smithsonian sweats that would fit her and a towel from the stack of things he kept for the nights he slept here.
Bell sat in the growing silence. Zach didn’t know what to say. The reality of dying horribly was always there, sort of a steady background music on the soundtrack of his life. But he really hated these moments where it suddenly came to the forefront and dominated the whole scene.
They sat among the dead mysteries in silence.
“You really don’t think about quitting?” she asked, with the lopsided smile he’d seen before.
“Oh, I think about it,” Zach said. “But I can’t.”
She shook her head, still with the same funny grin.
“You could,” she insisted. “But you choose not to.”
“You could quit, too, if you wanted.”
The smile vanished. “No,” she said. “Not my job. Not at all.”
He waited for her to explain, but she left it there.
“You ever want a normal life?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Why do you ask?”
Before she could reply, Zach’s phone buzzed. He picked it up.
“Leave it,” she said.
“What? Why?”
She pulled him closer. “Oh,” he said.
He lifted her shirt and put his lips to her breasts. She leaned back on the table, guiding his head down her belly.
He was kicking his pants off when one of the interior Reliquary doors came crashing open.
Men with wicked-looking guns, wearing full-body riot gear, aimed their weapons.
Zach looked up. Then looked angry. “God
damn
it, Smitty.”
The man in the lead flipped up the visor on his helmet, revealing a bearded, grinning face. “You didn’t answer your phone,” he said, in a Southern drawl, as if that explained everything.
Bell was busy covering herself.
“Who the hell are you?” she said.
“The cleaners I told you about?” Zach said, pulling up his pants. “This is them.”
“Ma’am,” he said. “Zach, you know we’ve got protocols for a reason.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t you have a dead monster to scoop up?”
Zach was pretty sure he heard muffled laughter from under the other riot helmets.
“You weren’t in the lab. We didn’t know what had happened. Standard operating procedure. Also, I can’t help but notice you’re here with unauthorized personnel.”
“She’s with me. Obviously, I’m fine.” Zach had regained his pants, if not his dignity.
“Obviously,” Smitty said. “But for a minute, it sure looked like you were under attack.”
Zach scowled at him. “Go away.”
“Sorry, kiddo,” Smitty said, still grinning. “I know what it’s like when the adrenaline gets going. Shoot, I remember one time, I was out in the field with this operative from the U.S. Marshal’s Service—”
“Go away now.”
He laughed and signaled his team. The cleaning crew shouldered their weapons and filed out.
Zach looked at Bell, who wavered between anger and laughter. He wasn’t sure exactly how to apologize for this.
“What I get for not answering my phone,” he said. He picked it up and checked the screen.
Something he hadn’t noticed. An e-mail had come through. Delayed by the servers—overburdened government issue, of course, running last year’s software. It was from Everett.
“What is it?” Bell asked.
Some instinct told him to read it first. Maybe it was the interruption by the cleaners, or maybe Cade’s warning was coming back to him. But he remembered how much classified info he’d let Bell see.
“Just a second,” he said. He opened the message and scanned through it.
Everett might have been a little weird, but he wasn’t one of those people who bury points in a report just to fill pages. If he found something important, he put it right at the top.
Zach remembered this. Everett had tried to tell him, right before they left.
“The deceased has a steel plate and bolts in the lower right femur, repairing an old fracture,” Everett wrote. Serial numbers on the plates were run through the medical manufacturers’ databases. The surgical plate was one that was sold in bulk to a Pentagon contractor, later used in field hospitals in Afghanistan. “Specifically, the plate in question was issued to Bagram Air Force Base, where it was used by U.S. Army surgeons to repair the broken leg of an enemy combatant held in custody, Tariq Sharraf,” Everett wrote.
Everett might have been a freak, but he was great at his job. Zach realized he had the first real breakthrough in this mess. He had a name.
“Zach, what is it?” Bell said again, impatience growing.
“Give me ten minutes,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”
IT TOOK HIM TWENTY.
Working on the Reliquary’s computers, he had access to more information than when he was off-site. Through its encrypted communications lines, he could sift through all the massive paperwork generated by the federal government. It was just a matter of finding the right needle in a haystack made of needles.
Bell sat, stewing, clearly unhappy at being made to play Girl Friday while he worked. But he had to check this for himself.
Tariq Sharraf. Several terrorists or suspected terrorists had that name. Several different spellings popped up on no-fly lists, border-watch lists, INTERPOL, and so on. The one Zach was looking for, however, was also known as Tariq “the Mute” for his ability to resist interrogation. That was where he got the broken leg and the surgical repair job, both courtesy of the U.S. government, while he was held at Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan.
The prison at Bagram was notorious; some of the things there made Abu Ghraib look like day camp. An interrogator got frustrated with Tariq and hit him with an aluminum baseball bat—not exactly approved interrogation procedure. Because it was a compound fracture of the femur, and because Tariq was considered high-value, he was rushed into surgery and the repair performed. He was given to the CIA in 2003 for further questioning. His paper trail dead-ended there.
Which meant he shouldn’t have been turned into a Snakehead and shipped to Somalia.
Zach checked the date of Tariq’s release to the CIA again: July 12, 2003.
Couldn’t be a coincidence. Just couldn’t be.
He flipped open his laptop and brought up Graves’s list of assignments and stations again.
There on the screen, just as he’d remembered:
Bagram Collection Point, Combined Joint Task Force—180 (CJTF-180), Afghanistan, 11/11/01 to 08/17/03.
“Son of a bitch,” Zach said.
“What?” Bell said, standing up and crossing to look at the screen with him.
“It’s Graves,” he said. “Graves is the one moving the prisoners. He’s behind the whole thing.”
BELL LOOKED GENUINELY DISTRESSED. “That’s not possible. How did he get the White House to let him investigate himself?”
“I don’t know,” Zach said. “If he’s Shadow Company, then he’s got a connection somewhere pretty high.”
“I don’t buy it,” she said. “You don’t have any real proof. Just because he was there at the same time?”
“The guy he was supposed to deliver for the CIA turns into a Snakehead. That cannot be a coincidence.”
She shrugged, not looking at him. “You really think so?”
“You
don’t
?”
“Close enough, I guess,” she said.
Zach wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but Bell kept talking. “What if he had no choice?” she said. “What if he was ordered to do this?”
Zach was amazed. He couldn’t figure out why Bell was so anxious to stand up for Graves.
“You think that matters? You think there’s any way to say ‘Sorry, my bad’ for this? More important, you think
Cade
will accept that as an excuse? No way. Cade simply can’t let something like this pass.”
“Graves isn’t a lightweight. He’ll fight.”
“He doesn’t seem that frightening.”
“You don’t know him. Nobody does. Most of what I know comes from rumors,” she said. “But I believe them all. Even the ones that contradict the other ones.”
“He’s just a man,” Zach said.
She gave him a sharp look. “Just because you know Cade doesn’t make you an expert on what’s scary,” she said. “Seriously. You have no idea about some of the things he’s supposed to have done.”
Zach thought he heard a little fear in her voice when she said that. Fear, and maybe just a trace of admiration. It irritated him, almost like they were arguing over whose dad was stronger.
Only, he was right.
“You’ve never seen Cade hunt,” he said. “He won’t stop. He can’t stop. Not for anything. No matter what, he’ll find a way. Someone has to pay for this. There has to be blood.”
Bell thought about that. “You’re right,” she said.
She grabbed Zach by the hair and slammed his head into the metal desk. Zach’s eyes were full of pain and surprise. Bell slammed him into the desk again.
Zach’s eyes closed. He fell to the floor, unconscious.
Bell picked him up under the armpits and began dragging him toward the corridor.
TWENTY-FIVE
I Solomon said unto him: “Beelzeboul, what is thy employment?” And he answered me: “I destroy kings. I ally myself with foreign tyrants. And my own demons I set on to men, in order that the latter may believe in them and be lost.... And I will destroy the world.”
—F. C. Conybeare, translator,
The Testament of Solomon
, c. A.D. 100
A
little less than six miles away, a phone rang in a two-story home in the suburbs of Fairfax, Virginia.
The man in glasses was at the dining room table with his wife and kids. She was trying to make it a regular thing—dinner together, as a family, at least one night a week.
She glared at him when he stood, mobile in hand.
“Sorry, honey,” he said, checking the number. “It’s the office.”
She let out a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. Take it. We’re just your family.”
Sarcasm, he thought. If he was lucky, she’d leave it at that. He looked at his children, a boy and a girl, eight and ten. They were tense, waiting for the next move.
He really had to take this.
“I won’t be long,” he said, and got up from the table.
“Eat your dinner,” his wife snapped at the kids. They dug into their food.
The man in glasses felt a stab of genuine regret at causing them pain, and then turned his attention to the phone call.
“What?”
“Complications,” Graves said. “The package didn’t make it to the carrier.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“Wasn’t my idea. The chopper pilot made a detour. Instead of a fully armed aircraft carrier, loaded with young men brimming with testosterone, he put them down on a hospital ship.”
“How did the new viral load perform?”
“Hard to say. I’m fairly certain the carrier agent went critical as planned. Cade went in.”
The man in glasses felt a headache coming on. This just kept getting better. “How many got away?”
Graves sighed. “None.”
“None?”
“You heard me.”
“None? Zero? Not one?”
“I can say it again. It won’t change.”
“Wounded? Any other carriers?”
“He killed them all.”
The man in glasses chuckled. “My God. Just when you think that one can’t surprise you again . . . Well. Where’s Cade now?”
“I dealt with him.”
“Permanently?”
Graves paused, which said it all.
“I didn’t see the body,” he admitted.
The man sucked at a bit of chicken stuck in his teeth. “Well, this is a fairly large pile of shit you’re in, isn’t it? We were supposed to start the outbreak in the Middle East. You know the progression. We should be at several hot zones by now.”
“ ‘ No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.’ You know that,” Graves said. “Cade intercepted our Somali shipment. He was drawn into this much earlier than I anticipated. I had expected our White House contacts to keep him away from us until—”
“You really think the higher-ups will be impressed by those excuses?”
“I don’t answer to you,” Graves said tightly. “You want to get your hands dirty? Hop on a plane. Otherwise, fuck off and let me do my job.”
The man in glasses took a moment. It was still Graves’s show. He had to resist the urge to micromanage. “Point taken. But if you didn’t kill him, you know you will see Cade again.”