Any Minute Now (16 page)

Whitman could see that he had piqued her interest.

“Which means what?”

“That we've been caught between the cogs of a government machine that doesn't know what it wants. NSA is like a child with ADHD. Every other minute there's a potential disaster that needs attending to, so the one before is dropped by the wayside. No matter the crisis du jour, the danger posed by Seiran el-Habib is still acute, maybe more so now that time has passed. Since NSA is running around like a chicken with its head cut off I figure it's up to us to make the decision.”

“Without anyone knowing. Without sanction. What will Cutler say?”

“Fuck Cutler. He's become another cog in the great machine. He's lost his sense of purpose.”

“There must be another way.”

“If you think of it between now and the time we land,” Whitman said, “let me know.”

*   *   *

Hemingway came out of his inner office as soon as Julie reported for work the next morning, an open file in his hands. “Lock the outer door.”

When she had done so, he lifted an arm. “Sit.”

Again, she complied silently. Like a dog in front of its master, she thought.

“Report, please,” Hemingway said, standing over her like a university professor.

“Sydny is a dead end,” she said.

Hemingway closed the file. “Nothing's a dead end until I say it is.”

“Here's what Sydny knows.”

“You mean Louise Kapok.”

“By whatever name you wish to call her,” she said. “She thinks Whitman's name is Adam. He told her he's a skip tracer. That's all she wrote.”

Hemingway glared at her as if this dead end was her fault. She instinctively felt cowed, but then she remembered what Whitman had told her. She refused to be intimidated. Instead, she employed the sleight of hand he had suggested. She gave Hemingway her most seductive smile.

“Anything else on your mind, sir?”

Immediately, he recoiled. “That will be all,” he said in a tone she had never heard before, and scuttled back into his office.

The sound of his door slamming behind him brought her an immense measure of satisfaction.

*   *   *

Trey Hartwell was a calligrapher, a cartographer, an illuminator of medieval manuscripts, as well as an antiquarian bookseller. His two main pleasures were ferreting out rare books and sharpening his cryptography. His shop, above which he lived in three-story splendor, was a well-known lair for like-minded individuals—wealthy men of impeccable breeding. It was located in a discreet town house on Dupont Circle. The town house was composed of limestone and was designed by Stanford White; it had a history all its own, which was why Hartwell had bought it twenty years ago, when such town houses could be had for something less than a Saudi prince's fortune.

Over the years Hartwell had amassed a fortune that rivaled that of any Saudi prince. His money, however, did not come from the antiquarian book business, which was not only a niche market but a variable one, as both books and their authors rose in and out of favor like a series of incoming waves. But he had no reason for concern. Other avenues of revenue had opened their arms to him. Like Aladdin in the cave of secrets, he kept finding openings, as he had ever since he had met Preach.

Hartwell had been a sickly boy—pale and weak. He was also short and overweight—the perfect prey for bullies tormented by their own inadequacies. Of course, as bullies will with uncanny accuracy, they found the perfect name for him: Humpty Dumpy. He knew them, intimately, but he could never figure out how to deal with them. Until the tall thin man with the shock of white hair and the piercing blue eyes happened along during the last of his regular street beat downs, ugly encounters that began with his tormentors surrounding him, quick-marching him to a deserted section of the railway yards. Then the taunts would start, proceed to filthy epithets, and end with a barrage of clenched fists striking him over and over. “You go to anyone, Humpty Dumpy, even your mama,” he'd be reminded by Cary, the biggest and meanest, always the instigator, as he lay bruised and half-conscious, “and you're a dead fucking duck. My promise to you, dick-face.” Laughter, receding across the gleaming tracks while the wind rustled the leaves in the trees on the other side of the dilapidated fence.

This particular afternoon, however, was different. High school had let out for the steamy Mississippi summer. The leaden air was filled with barrages of insects, loud as Piper Cub engines.

He was on his back, his ribs and kidneys aching, when he heard a commanding voice say, “Get up.”

He looked between his tormentors' legs and saw a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair and piercing blue eyes. The man was looking right at him and addressed him directly: “Get up, you fool!”

No one else appeared to have heard him. Trey didn't think they'd let him up, but, oddly, they did, backing up a pace as he struggled to his feet. They laughed, though, as he staggered on his sore and swollen left knee.

“Now hit Cary,” the man said.

Trey glanced at him, between the bodies of the boys surrounding him.

“You know you want to.”

Trey did want to, but he was afraid. He knew he couldn't hurt Cary, and the beating that would result would be horrific.

“Nothing to be afraid of,” the man said, as if he had climbed inside Trey's head. And when Trey still hesitated: “Son, do you want to be a victim all your life? That's the path you're on, you know.”

Suddenly, Trey was filled with a violent rage. Curling his fingers into a fist, he struck Cary in the center of his face. To his astonishment, there was a spurt of blood. Cary went down and stayed down. Silence in the circle around him. The laughter died in their throats. Then they broke and ran, leaving Trey alone, standing over the fallen bully.

The man strode closer, to stand only paces away from Trey. “How did that feel?”

Trey stared down at Cary, then at his balled fist, the knuckles spattered with blood. “Good,” he said. “It felt good.”

“Sure it did. Now tell the boy what's on your mind.”

Trey bent down. His heart was hammering against his ribs. His throat was engorged with sick emotion. “If you come near me again…” he stopped; he couldn't go on.

“That's all right,” the man said gently. “Start over.”

Trey swallowed hard, almost choked on his saliva. “If you come near me again, I'll … hit you.”

“Try again,” the man said, so gently this time it might have been the wind skating along the tracks.

Trey's cheeks puffed out. He was sweating with the effort not to vomit. “If you come near me again,” he said to Cary, “I'll kill you.”

Then, unable to bear the sight of his triumph another second, he turned away, only to face the man who introduced himself as Preach.

“Do you want that strength, that power,” Preach said, “even when I'm not here?”

Trey nodded his head. There wasn't even a moment's hesitation.

“All it takes is time,” Preach said. “Come with me.”

“But what about my parents?”

Preach smiled. “They won't even know you're gone.”

And, amazingly, they hadn't.

Hartwell had cause to think of his first encounter with Preach as he closed his shop promptly at six o'clock. Normally, he would spend two hours at the martial arts club, as he did five days a week, but this evening was reserved for the Alchemists. He was fit and strong now, in both mind and body—that was Preach's doing, as was so much else in his life.

He opened the locked door at the rear of his shop, trotted down the stairs. Through another door lay a square anteroom, lined with antique books, all valuable, several immensely so. As he always did, he paused, running his hand over the rough cover of one of these. It was very old, the cover made of the cured skin of an animal—mammal, amphibian, lizard, it was impossible to tell, the march of ages having worn away the specificity. It was Trey's most precious and beloved book. He knew it by heart. One could say it served him as a talisman.

Beyond the anteroom was the much larger meeting chamber, filled with a round polished wood table and seven straight-back cherrywood chairs. Ranged around the buff-colored walls were woodcut portraits of the first ten American presidents.

At precisely 6:25 his compatriots began to arrive. They did so via a rear entrance accessed by a steep flight of stairs that led down to the basement of the town house. In all, six men arrived, all within fifteen minutes of one another, which meant that by seven p.m. the full complement of Alchemists had been achieved. Punctuality was not merely a duty, but a moral imperative with each of the seven. This rectitude was but a single example of their determination to be true to the Alchemists' motto:
Uno Animo, Uno Voluntatis
—One Mind, One Will.

At the stroke of seven the men, who had been standing still and silent, their spines as erect as the chair backs, took their appointed seats in a soft rustle of expensive suit fabrics. It was a sound not unlike the susurrus of cicadas at twilight in high summer. In front of each member was a file in a black jacket. A diagonal red stripe ran across the upper right-hand corner, denoting the content as ultra-secret. These files were never taken out of the town house, and at the end of each meeting where they appeared they were put through a shredder, the shreds then incinerated.

With the flat of his hand on the tabletop, Trey Hartwell called the meeting to order. At table, all members were known by noms de guerre, as they referred to them, taken from the names of past American presidents. Hartwell was Madison. “Going forward,” he said, “if we are to gain complete control of this country's military-industrial complex, we have to provide a service that is capable of winning any kind of war anywhere in the world. As we know from painful experience that's not going to come from shock and awe, missiles, carpet bombing, or any of the other mechanized modes of modern warfare. Against terrorists and insurgents they're all ineffective and outmoded. We're facing a foe that is not afraid to die. This is asymmetrical combat at its most extreme. We must reply in kind, fight fire with fire. We create our own answer—the only answer that makes sense—an answer that will win us the wars overseas: weaponized warriors that leave conventional soldiers in the dust. With extraordinary power, no sense of remorse, prepared to die each time they are deployed.

“These warriors will not be soldiers who are weak-willed and return home only to be a burden on this country and its citizens. When they return home they will be ready for another tour of duty, and another and another, without end. We have taken a page from Putin's book—rounding up criminals, sociopaths, the disaffected, disenfranchised, and the delusional—and have gone a giant step further. The Mobius Project will transform these misfits into the mighty fighting machines of tomorrow, enhanced warriors who will bring us victory wherever they are deployed, in international hot spots with missions whose objectives can adapt to the rapidly changing political environment. And when that happens we will have created an entirely new method of waging war, one that can bring us victory after victory without the humiliation of even a single defeat.”

Every member of the Alchemists nodded his head in agreement. So far, this was all known to them, but they were aware that it was but prologue to the news that was to come.

“Now that Mobius has moved into human trials,” Hartwell said in the deep, sonorous voice of a Southern statesman, “I believe it would behoove us to consider reopening the Well.”

The bombshell dropped, his voice was quickly damped down, the soundproofing swallowing whole all murmur, no matter how minute. There would be no echoes in this room, no matter how heated the conversation became.

“Now hold on a minute,” Jefferson said. He was a slim, silver-haired gentlemen with keen eyes and a Boston Brahmin's accent. He had made his fortune several times over, first in insurance, then real estate, and latterly, in venture capital. “We shut that place down for a number of very sound reasons, not the least was survival.”

“Agreed,” Van Buren said in his clipped Midwestern accent. “The Well became the most dangerous place on earth. It was our personal black site, where we conducted articulated renditions of foreign and domestic terrorists in order to glean knowledge for future projects.”

“And it was shut down,” Jefferson said, “to ensure we wouldn't get caught up in the misguided congressional witch hunt against legal torture of enemy combatants.”

“Everything Congress does is misguided,” Van Buren said, which brought knowing chuckles and guffaws all around.

“That was why all documentation amassed during its existence was destroyed,” Adams interjected, putting an end to the levity. He was a tall, tanned, sandy-haired man from Tennessee who had founded one of D.C.'s most powerful lobbyist firms. He shuddered visibly. “Never again.”

“You're far too squeamish.” Washington had a narrow, angular face with thick salt-and-pepper hair that came down over the tops of his ears.

“Squeamish is one thing,” Jackson, an ex-military man with a tactical bent, said. “Danger is quite another. We are engaged in a precarious situation as it is. Reopening the Well will only add to the potential peril.”

“I disagree,” Hartwell countered. “We embarked on Mobius with a specific goal in mind. Our handpicked emissary has spent months negotiating with the Iraqi Kurds.”

“Preach!” It was like a mini-explosion coming from Luther St. Vincent, known around the table as Washington.

“There's no need to get into that at this stage,” Hartwell said with a quick flicker of his eyes toward Monroe, whose expression was, as usual, entirely neutral. Trey shrugged mentally. Better this way, he supposed. He raised a hand, directed himself to St. Vincent. Best to throw him a bone here, lest he begin his Preach rant again. No one wanted that. “By all means, Washington, pick up the thread. You lit the fire.”