“Fucking Prador. He set us up. Wouldn’t be surprised if this was exactly what he wanted.”
“Why are you so afraid of him?”
Zach stopped. Cade could do that. See underneath what you were saying to what you meant. And he had no tact, which meant he didn’t avoid saying it out loud.
“I’m not scared of him.”
“You don’t trust him.”
“He’s the president’s chief of staff, Cade. I trust him as much as I trust anyone else in the White House.”
“You didn’t reveal our source to him. You told him about footprints instead.”
“I wasn’t lying about the footprints. I just omitted the rest. It never hurts to keep a couple things in reserve. Just in case.”
“Then why did this meeting provoke you so much?”
Because that was supposed to be my job, Zach thought, aware of how whiny and childish it sounded, even inside his head. He’d started working in politics before he could vote, and in the last election, ran the campaigns in three states for the president. He was a young political operator with a bright future. Everyone said so.
Most of the time, he could tell himself he’d gotten over it. He knew that this job was more important. He’d learned there were forces in the world hostile to the very idea of human existence, and he helped Cade kill them. It was a lot more direct than his political career. He’d saved the nation a dozen times so far—or at least, he’d helped. That had to be more important.
But there were times he was reminded of what he’d left behind. Like tonight.
“I’m not scared of him,” Zach said again. “But speaking of scared, why wasn’t he afraid of you? You scare everyone.”
“He’s too geed up to notice. Got a skinful of mahoska in him.”
Zach sighed. Cade had been around a long time. As a result, his slang spanned decades. Antiquated terms could come out of nowhere. It got to the point where civilians would notice, and Zach couldn’t have Cade becoming too noticeable. So Zach had taken the rare measure (for him) of giving Cade a standing order.
“Cade, what have we said about using slang?”
Cade grimaced. He spoke mechanically, as if forced: “ ‘ It embarrasses both me and the person forced to hear it.’ ”
“And . . . ?”
Cade frowned at him, but continued: “ ‘And we try to avoid that kind of humiliation whenever we can.’ ”
Zach smiled. It always cheered him up a little when he got to pierce Cade’s cast-iron dignity.
“What did you mean by whatever you said there?”
“All I said was, I suspect it had something to do with medications he takes.”
“Prador’s on drugs?”
“Antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs and tranquilizers,” Cade said. “He’s under a tremendous amount of pressure, and he’s used drugs to cut off almost all of his body’s signals. I could smell it in his sweat.”
“I never get tired of hearing what you can smell.”
“My point is, he is no threat,” Cade said. “I thought you would want to know.”
That was the way Cade saw the world, Zach knew. Threats and prey. The change wasn’t just physical; it went deep into the brain as well, restructuring basic responses. It was the hardest thing to remember, working with Cade. He might look like we do, but he’s nothing like us. Not anymore.
As powerful as Cade was, there were many things he couldn’t do. For instance, he couldn’t take a step outside at noon without burning to death. But that was only the most obvious handicap Cade faced in moving through the human world. On a fundamental level, people knew he didn’t belong. Simple human interaction was often beyond him. He was a predator. He didn’t know how to talk to prey.
That was where Zach came in. He relayed the president’s orders and did the human things that Cade couldn’t. Zach knew that emotions weren’t exactly Cade’s strong suit. When he became a vampire, he was changed on every level—including the way he saw humans. His long life had only separated him further from ordinary people. It was a constant struggle for him to remain in touch with what it meant to feel like one of the people he protected.
Sometimes, like now, it was as if he was running a human emulation program through that computer-quick mind. Zach reminded himself that Cade was trying his best to relate to him as an equal—even as a friend.
It didn’t make him any less annoying, however.
“Thanks, Cade. That’s a big help.”
“You’re welcome.”
Zach began gathering papers into his bag. But Cade wasn’t finished.
“Does your reaction to Prador have anything to do with your lack of sex?”
Zach was completely thrown for a moment. If he’d been drinking coffee, he would have done a spit-take, just like in a sitcom.
“We are not having this conversation,” he said.
Cade didn’t even have the decency to imitate a look of embarrassment. “Your frustration is affecting your work, Zach. It’s been almost a year.”
I could have gone into the Peace Corps, Zach thought. Or worked at the U.N. There was that internship with Greenpeace.
“Since you’ve had sex, I mean.”
“I know what you meant,” Zach snapped. “We don’t all have vampire girlfriends who drop by every few weeks for a little late-night cryptaction. You want to talk about affecting the job? Isn’t that a security risk?”
Cade’s face was stonier than usual. Tania—a female vampire, one who shared a long history with him—was a sore spot. She still fed on humans, for starters.
Zach usually avoided the topic for fear of where that conversation would end. Now he was annoyed, so he jabbed without thinking.
Cade wouldn’t take the bait. “Don’t change the subject,” he said. “You have a problem. We need to address it.”
“Look, Cade. It’s not exactly a babe magnet, this job. I don’t meet many nice single girls. Flesh-eating zombies, yes. Girls, not so much.”
Cade hesitated. He seemed to search for the right words. “I know this is hard for you to hear. But you cannot have a normal life. That’s gone. The sooner you reconcile yourself to that fact, the better.”
“No.” Zach shook his head. “That was Griff’s problem. Not mine. I’m not giving up on my life just because he gave up on his.”
Agent William Hawley Griffin was Zach’s immediate predecessor in the post of liaison. He’d been killed during Zach’s first assignment, at the end of the assault on the White House.
As liaison, it became Zach’s job to go to Griff’s house and organize his effects for any next of kin. He found a nearly empty space with bare walls and thick layers of dust on the furniture. There was an open bottle of whiskey sitting by an easy chair.
Zach also found Griff’s will. There was no next of kin. He’d left the house to whoever came after him in the liaison job.
It was a decent place in a pretty good part of town, but Zach still kept his apartment. He couldn’t bring himself to sell the house, and yet, he couldn’t move in, either. Too much like wearing a dead man’s clothes.
“This is your life now,” Cade said. “That’s what I’m trying to help you understand.”
“Look,” he said. “I appreciate the advice. It’s my problem. I’ll deal with it.”
“Griff used whores,” Cade said.
Zach sighed. “Good to know.” He grabbed his bag and headed for the secret exit to the surface, and the National Mall.
“You’ve got a long flight tomorrow. Get a full meal and some rest.”
He left.
Cade said nothing.
ZACH WENT HOME. He barely even slept there anymore. Most nights, he was in the Reliquary. And if not there, he was traveling from one literally godforsaken spot to the next.
He cracked open his laptop. He needed a little more detail about Colonel Graves.
As the machine booted up, a red beam flashed from the camera mounted in the laptop’s screen, lancing into his eye. At the same time, Zach pressed his index finger into a pad on the base.
He was prompted for a series of codes, and only then did the laptop allow him access.
Pain in the ass, Zach thought. Nobody would believe a word contained in the files, even if they did steal the computer.
Even with all his top-secret database-cracking software, Zach ran into one brick wall after another.
Archer/Andrews was a subsidiary of PKD Ltd., itself a subsidiary of Pickman-Derby, a corporation under so many umbrellas it never saw the sun. He finally gave up trying to track down its true owners.
Graves was another cipher. He was ex-CIA, Zach was pretty sure. The “Colonel” title was something CIA operatives gave themselves when they were on military operations. But Zach had spent a lot of time around real soldiers, and Graves didn’t have the bearing exactly right. His hair was a little too neatly parted. He wore cologne. His grooming spoke of vanity, not discipline.
He found the CIA’s file on Graves after running his name through the NOC list—the “non-official cover” list of all the operatives the Agency would never admit existed. These were the men and women who were buried in false identities as they carried out missions that would never be formally approved, even if the Agency paid all the bills. If they were captured or killed, operatives on the NOC list couldn’t expect a hostage negotiation or a public funeral. At best, they might get a quiet moment of mourning over drinks, or, in rare cases, an anonymous star on the wall at Langley.
The photo with the NOC list matched Graves, but there was a long string of aliases attached to it. Whatever his real name was, it was buried under years of disinformation.
Even in the NOC list, Graves’s bio was heavily redacted. Everything was so classified it hadn’t even been transferred to computer, and any paper records were likely shredded and burned.
All Zach could access on his laptop was a list of assignments, ordered by date and location.
That was enough.
Graves—whatever his real name was—had been a part of every major covert operation the CIA pulled in the past four decades. His résumé read like the Agency’s greatest hits.
Yale degree. Recruited right out of college.
Clandestine service. Attached to various domestic agencies. Again, classified. No big surprise, since the Agency wasn’t supposed to operate on U.S. soil. Locations: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Miami, with trips back to Langley.
Laos. Probably one of the Agency’s advisers to the Hmong fighters, although there was something about Graves being assigned to a different tribe in the highlands on the Vietnam border, the T’Chok.
Thailand, from 1975 to 1980. Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early’80s, followed by Honduras, just in time for the Nicaraguan civil war to heat up.
After that, he simply disappeared from the official records. Crosschecking other government files, Zach found a few other entries. A blurry photograph from a Contra staging base in Honduras. A buried LAPD report from an officer who swore there were CIA men moving drugs in South Central. A reference in a classified section of the first draft of a Senate report on international money laundering. Then, for almost a decade, nothing.
Then 9/11 hit, and the Graves alias began appearing on the NOC list again. Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Uganda.
Around 2003, there was an official waiver and notice of separation from the CIA. Graves was free to pursue a career outside of government. That was about the same time Archer/Andrews began receiving government contracts. Graves began starring in slick corporate brochures that hinted at much more than they actually said.
The weird part: Graves’s age was never mentioned anywhere. Zach tried to do the math in his head, but it didn’t add up. If Graves was twenty-one in 1960, at the start of his career, he was at least seventy-one now. And while he was well preserved, Zach could tell he was human. There was no way he should still be operating, unless he was some kind of real-life mix of Nick Fury and every character Clint Eastwood had ever played.
One other weird thing nagged at Zach. Aside from the work history, there was nothing personal. Usually, Zach could assemble a pretty decent model of a person from this much information. But Graves remained a flat collection of facts. There was no depth to him.
Zach wasn’t a complete idiot. There was a very good chance that Archer/Andrews was itself a front for the Shadow Company, that Graves was involved, or one of his underlings, or maybe someone else inside the firm entirely.
But if that were the case, why would Prador be working with him? Prador could be a prick, true, but he was utterly loyal to the Prez, always had been. And Zach, in all the time he’d watched him, would never have imagined Prador doing something truly evil. It would be like an Eagle Scout selling secrets to the North Koreans.
Maybe this related to the leak in the White House that nearly killed him. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
Zach felt a headache coming on. He hated all this double-triple-crossing stuff. And, as Cade had said back at the Reliquary, it didn’t matter much. If they were going to do this job, they were stuck with Graves.