“What do you want from me?” said Tull. “I told you this is confidential … Can’t we leave it at that?”
“Not if you want to be able to find me when this is over,” said Berenice.
He looked at her.
“That’s what it comes down to, Tull,” she said. “We’re both adults, so if this is the end of what we had, then have enough respect for me to say so.”
“I—”
She stood up and moved in close, pressing her body lightly against his. Tull was infinitely aware of her animal heat, of the familiar curves and planes of her body, of the insistence of nipples hard enough to be felt through the fabric of her shirt and his. She looped her arms around his neck and looked up into his eyes.
“I can bear any truth,” she breathed, “but never lie to me.” She reached for his belt, unbuckled it, popped the top button of his trousers, slid the zipper down.
“I…”
His trousers fell down. Her fingers, clever and cool, slipped inside his boxers, found his hardness, squeezed it, stroked it.
Tull closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against hers. He was breathing as hard as if he’d run up a flight of stairs. So was she, and for a moment they breathed the same breath back and forth.
“Berenice…,” he murmured.
“Please,” she whispered.
And then his lips were on hers. On her lips, on her face, her throat, her breasts.
He reached out and swept the suitcase off the bed and then they crashed together onto the sheets. Their mouths breathed fire, their hands were everywhere. The bird stood on the window sill, silent now, wise enough not to mock this.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, Berenice lay naked on the tangled sheets, the sweat still drying on her skin. Tull could see her through the open bathroom door, through the gap between the shower curtain and the wall.
When he’d left the bed to go into the bathroom, he’d taken the pistol. It lay on the closed lid of the toilet, wrapped in a towel.
Waiting.
While he and Berenice had made love, his thoughts kept drifting from the beautiful woman under him to the gun.
To its elegant lines. To its potential.
To the way in which it simplified things.
He wished she hadn’t asked him about it.
He wished she hadn’t asked him about where he was going. Or when he was coming back.
As the hot water rinsed away the soap and their commingled oils and the scent of her passion, Erasmus Tull tried to keep her in his thoughts. Only her.
But the gun was there. So close.
It never asked anything of him.
It never complicated things for him.
He closed his eyes and leaned into the spray.
And wondered what to do.
What was the right thing to do?
What was the human thing to do?
The shower pounded on his back, his head. The questions pounded inside his mind.
He ached for Berenice. To be with her. To be normal with her. To be able to be normal.
He ached for the gun and its simplicity.
In the past, when he was torn like he was now, the gun always won.
It always won.
Always.
Chapter Twenty-five
VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sunday, October 20, 6:59 a.m.
Mr. Bones left Howard with the staff doctor and went into his office to take a call. He listened to a very trusted and capable operative tell him very bad news.
Per his e-mail of earlier that morning, a team was sent to pick up Captain Joe Ledger of the DMS. They were supposed to hold him for a length of time, then release him. During the detention, agents were to collect his fingerprints for use in building an evidentiary case that Ledger was involved—or perhaps directing—the cyber-attacks. They would also drug him with one of the many compounds useful for eliciting a cooperative mental state. In such a state a subject could be asked to sign his name to any kind of document, or make simple calls, record messages, and even stand for photos. The memories and personality tics would still be in play, but the conscious control would be detached from the events. It was a lovely thing to see; something the Russians had developed a bit too late for it to be of value in the closing days of the Cold War.
The whole process would have taken Ledger out of play for an entire day, and additional drugs like some of the modern benzodiazepine variations would do that. The newest generation of midazolam was always fun for these sorts of things. Then Ledger would be returned to his car with a mild sedative, where he would have awakened to a world that had suddenly decided that he was a very bad man.
It was a simple operation. Ledger would never have been able to adequately explain his brief absence and the evidence would be ironclad. Mr. Bones had ordered variations on this at least a dozen times, never with a hitch.
Except that today there was a definite hitch. Captain Ledger had brutally beaten all four men sent to handle the pickup. Suddenly a very minor detail in a day that had much more important concerns was now a major issue.
“That is very disappointing,” said Mr. Bones.
The caller was silent. Mr. Bones let him sweat for a while.
“I will have it cleaned up, sir,” said the caller.
“Well that would be nice,” said Mr. Bones icily and disconnected.
The good news was that Erasmus Tull was on his way to Maryland. Tull would never have fumbled so easy a play as this. In Mr. Bones’s knowledge, Erasmus Tull had never fumbled anything. The worst that could be said of him was that once or twice he retreated from overwhelming odds, but that was simply good sense.
Mr. Bones activated Ghost Box and began reading updates and reports.
The air show was still on schedule. The prototype of Specter 101 had been safely delivered to VanMeer Castle, and the grandstands were already erected. Not that it really mattered, he mused. He really didn’t care about the plane, nor did Howard, who privately referred to it as the “flying red herring.” But for now, for today, all appearances must be maintained—and that was even more important if the thing in D.C. caused the air show to be postponed.
Christ, that really would give Howard another heart attack. It was a mercy that the minicrisis brought on by the news from Washington was only a “concern” rather than an “event.”
Mr. Bones clicked on to the next item.
The tech teams had managed to launch several flocks of the new pigeon-size surveillance drones. How lovely. Ten flocks in Baltimore, ten in Brooklyn, and five each in nine other locations. The drones were one of Bones’s own toys. Darling little machines. When Howard discovered him, Mr. Bones was the senior designer at AeroVironment, a nano aerial vehicles shop funded by DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. He’d been building unmanned aerial vehicles that looked like birds. The one that sold the project to the DoD was the hummingbird, which was beautifully painted and could flit and fly just like a bird—unless the observer was an expert on hummingbirds. The pigeon drones were more durable and their larger bodies allowed for the inclusion of technical packages for secondary objectives.
It amused Mr. Bones to imagine those flights of pigeons winging their way toward the Warehouse in Baltimore, the Hangar in Brooklyn, and the nine DMS field offices.
Another check mark on his to-do list.
Nice.
He scrolled through more items. More reports of UFOs. He dismissed any sightings in Washington State, Pennsylvania, Utah, Nevada, New Jersey, and New Mexico because the rubes were seeing experimental craft of one kind or another. With the air show pending, everybody in the industry was out test-flying their latest machines. That was fine. The reports from Upstate New York, Rhode Island, Iowa, Wyoming, and Central California were not as easy to dismiss. Frowning, Mr. Bones coded that for investigation and forwarded it to the field team supervisor with a request for twice-daily updates.
The minutes ticked by as he waited to
hear from the doctor.
His phone rang and he saw the code word “Aqualung.”
Erasmus Tull. Odd to get a callback so soon after initiating an assignment. It was too soon for Tull to even be at the airport yet. He picked up the phone, engaged the scrambler, and said, “Yes?”
“I need a cleanup.”
“Already?”
Tull did not reply.
“Where?” asked Mr. Bones.
“The bungalow at Little Torch.”
Mr. Bones took a moment to put that together. Tull was down there with the daughter of Matthijs de Vries, CEO of Donderbus Elektronica.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Bones. “Has there been an accident?”
Tull said nothing.
The line went dead.
Chapter Twenty-six
The Warehouse, Department of Military Sciences field office
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 6:44 a.m.
I rolled past security at the Warehouse, parked badly, killed the engine and hurried over to where the squat and muscular Sergeant Gus Dietrich—Mr. Church’s personal aide and private bulldog—was waiting for me. Ghost was right at my heels.
Dietrich said, “You look like shit, Joe. Can’t hold your booze like you used to? Too many Jell-O shots out of the navel of that Italian broad you brought to the party?”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“There’s that,” he agreed.
I told him about the attack on the street.
“Well damn, son,” he said. “You okay?”
“A bit rattled, highly suspicious, and mightily pissed off.”
“Are you sure these clowns were feds?”
“I’m not sure of any-damn-thing, Gus. All I can tell you is that they weren’t friends.” I handed him four ID cases. “I doubt they’re legit, but let me know if we get anything.”
“Sure.”
“Oh, and there’s this.” I dug the small piece of metal out of my pocket and handed it to him. “Took this off the lead agent. No idea what it is.”
Gus weighed it in his palm. “Don’t weigh nothing. And it’s warm. Could be a tracker or something. I’ll run some scans. But that can wait. Better haul ass—the big man’s waiting for you.”
We piled into a golf cart. Ghost tried for shotgun but I banished him to the back. Gus got behind the wheel and we whizzed off down the halls.
“I took the liberty of calling in your whole staff, Joe,” Gus said. “Top Sims is already here, and he’s got everything in hand.”
Top was my number two. He was the smartest, toughest, and most organized noncom I’ve ever met—and that made him smarter, tougher, and more organized than just about any officer I’d ever heard of. Like Gus, Top was proof that nothing of any historical military importance has ever happened without the presence of good sergeants.
“Something came in right before you got here,” Gus said. “A video file sent by an anonymous source. Wait till you see this, Joe, it’ll blow your socks off.”
“What’s on it?”
He shook his head. “You better see for yourself.”
The Warehouse is the third largest DMS field office. The biggest was the Hangar in Brooklyn and a small step down from that was Department Zero in L.A. The Warehouse was the office whose active range covered D.C., and it was all mine. I ran four field teams out of it—Alpha, Echo, Dogpack, and Spartan—and, including technical, maintenance, and general support, I had a total staff of about two hundred. Right now the whole building was at high alert and there was nobody loitering in the halls, no one anywhere except where they should be.
Gus dropped me outside my office. Church was already there, seated behind my desk with his laptop open. Church glanced at me and Ghost but didn’t say a word. Didn’t ask if we were okay. Didn’t even offer to let me have my own chair. Apparently he forgot to bring his compassion to work today. Again.
Instead, he spun his laptop around and showed me an image. It was the president.
“This came in seven minutes ago,” he said.
“They found him?”
“No,” he said. “Watch.”
He reached out to press a button. The static image of the president resolved into a video. The president sat in a straight-backed chair. He was not visibly restrained, but he sat unnaturally stiff and straight. His skin looked bad, blotchy, as if his blood pressure was firing on the wrong cylinders, and there was a weird glazed look in his eyes.
He spoke in a monotone, without inflection or pause. A tumble of words that had no life at all in them. It reminded me of the computer voice used by Stephen Hawking.
“Rector,” he said, “I need you to do something. I need you to find the Majestic Black Book. You need to find the Majestic Black Book. You must find the Majestic Black Book.”
Then the image abruptly changed. Instead of the president’s face, the screen was filled with an image of an island somewhere in the middle of a blue ocean. There was a line of rocky ridges from some ancient volcano.
The president was back. “You need to find the Majestic Black Book.”
Another image shift, this time showing a satellite image of the whole volcano. It was situated just off-center on an island. The island was small, the volcano was big. The image shifted again to show the same island from a much higher altitude, and that allowed us to see other landmasses.
“Where—?”
Before I could ask a question the image changed once more. Instead of static images, this was a series of video clips. First there was the storm surge as Hurricane Katrina smashed its way through the levees. Then a smash cut to the president repeating: “You need to find the Majestic Black Book.” Then another cut to the tsunami that pounded Thailand the day after Christmas in 2004. Back to the president, same message. Then multiple images of a wall of ocean water sweeping across the coast of Japan. Back to the president. And then something even weirder—something scarier. The waters of the Atlantic rose up and slammed into the coastline of New York, sweeping over the Statue of Liberty, striking the docks, sending deadly waves through the streets, sweeping away cars and buses and all the people. The video clip ended and the satellite image of the volcano was back. That held for ten seconds and then we saw the president again.
“You need to find the Majestic Black Book,” he said. “You don’t have much time.”
The screen dissolved into snow.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Office of the Attorney General of the United States, U.S. Department of Justice
Washington, D.C.
Sunday, October 20, 6:49 a.m.
Mark Eppenfeld looked up as his secretary entered the room. Eppenfeld’s desk was covered with books and papers on constitutional law and the process of succession in times of national crisis. Although it was right and proper for Vice President William Collins to immediately step up so that there was no gap in the administration of the country, Eppenfeld was making notes on topics he knew would come up in the endless press conferences that would commence as soon as this story was released.
“What is it, Marie?” he asked.
“Sir … I have a Mr. Alden Funke on the phone. He’s with the IRS office that liaises with Homeland. He said that he has a matter of great importance to discuss and his immediate superior is out of the country at the financial summit in Stockholm.”
“Tell him to make an appointment, Marie,” Eppenfeld said irritably. “I’m a little busy right now.”
“Sir, he says that this involves that man, Mr. Church at the DMS.”
Eppenfeld gave her a bleak stare, then nodded. “I’ll take it.”
He punched the blinking light on his phone. “What can I do for you, Mr. Frank?”
“Funke, sir. Alden Funke. I—I’m so sorry to interrupt you,” stammered the caller in a thin, nervous voice, “however, I have some information that I believe is of grave national importance and—”
“So I understand. What is that information, Mr. Funke?”
“Well,
sir, we were asked to review the financial records of employees of the Department of Military Sciences…”
“Asked by whom?”
“Um, the request came from the office of the vice president.”
“When?”
“Several days ago, sir.”
Eppenfeld leaned back in his chair and began chewing on the eraser of his retractable pencil. “Go on.”
“I believe we have found something. A rather large something, to be quite frank, in the personal banking records for Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
The Warehouse, Department of Military Sciences Field Office
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 6:55 a.m.
I looked at Church. “What the hell was that?”
“What does it look like?” he asked.
“If this was any other day … I’d say it was a joke.”
“I seriously doubt we are being punked,” he said. Church was a big man in his sixties who looked like someone who had spent his life doing the kind of stuff I do now. Age didn’t have its claws in him yet, and he still looked like he could give anyone in the DMS a serious run for his money. Myself included. Dark hair shot with gray, a blocky build, and calculating eyes behind tinted glasses.
Right now, though, he looked more stressed than I’d ever seen him. A stranger couldn’t tell—to anyone else Church looked like a man in complete control of every aspect of his life—but I could see the cracks at the edges of his calm.
“Who sent it to us?”
“Unknown. I’ve tried to backtrack it but MindReader keeps coming up with an error message.”
“I thought MindReader could track any e-mail or Web site.”
“So did I.”
That hung in the air for a moment, weird and ugly.
“That footage of the wave hitting New York,” I said. “That’s from a movie. I recognize it but I can’t grab the name.”
“I thought so, too. A film about the end of the world. Bug will know. I sent this to him, so we can expect his call any minute.”
Bug was the DMS computer supergeek who was also a pop culture nerd of legendary status.