Extinction Machine (13 page)

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.

“Who else has seen this?” I asked.

“I forwarded it to Aunt Sallie at the Hangar, of course, and to Linden Brierly. Otherwise, no one.”

He sent the video from his laptop to the big HD screen on the wall and we watched it a couple of times. It didn’t make any more sense the third time than it did the first time. It was equally freaky and equally frightening.

“The name the president used. Rector? That’s you, right?”

Church nodded. He had a lot of names and as far as I’ve been able to determine, none of them are his real name. Most folks in government circles refer to him as “Deacon.” I often wondered if his own daughter, Circe, knew her father’s real name. I doubted it.

“It’s a name I haven’t used in a while,” he said. “The president knows it from a matter that predates his presidency and may have chosen to use it as a code. However, if I am supposed to infer a specific meaning from it, then so far I am drawing a blank.”

“You’re going to have to show this to Bill Collins, you know.”

Church nodded. “That’s something Linden Brierly will have to manage. I am officially barred from this case.”

“Barred? Why?”

“The acting president has some doubts about my loyalty.”

“Shame I’m not drinking coffee,” I said. “This is a classic moment for a spit-take.”

He almost smiled. “Apparently President Collins variously believes me to be the villain who has been using MindReader to launch the cyber-attacks or a fool who has mismanaged access to MindReader.”

“Remind me again—I know assassination is against the law, but is there a rule against slapping some stupid off of an idiot playacting at president?”

“He is a difficult man to admire,” conceded Church.

I stared at the screen. “What’s this book the
actual
president kept mentioning?”

“The Majestic Black Book,” Church said, putting the full name out there.

“Which tells me nothing. What is it? What’s in it? Who wrote it? And why would you capture the president of the United frigging States to get a copy? I’m guessing it’s not available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.”

You can’t read Church’s eyes. He wears tinted lenses for that very purpose. It’s impossible to guess what he’s thinking or where his thoughts are wandering. While he considered my question he used the tip of his index finger to trace a slow circle on the desktop.

“Until now I believed that it was an urban myth,” he said slowly. “One of those elaborate conspiracy theories that have grown up around secret governments.”

“Ah, secret governments,” I said glumly. “I never get enough of secret governments.”

“They do exist, Captain,” said Church. “Any government as large as ours is compartmentalized. Divisions, departments, and groups splinter off, sometimes because they’ve been authorized to go deep and remain off the bureaucratic grid and sometimes to pursue other less official agendas. Congress knows about some of these and provides a degree of oversight, even if buried under layers of secrecy. Others manage to function within our government but without oversight. A case can be made that America would never have become a country had not a secret society of Freemasons taken charge.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve read Dan Brown.”

Church didn’t smile. “Some of these groups believe—or claim to believe—that they are acting in the best interests of the nation. A case can be built to substantiate some of those claims, just as a case can be built that such manipulation generally has a profit-based agenda attached at some level.”

“And this Black Book? How does this tie into that?”

“To be determined. What little I know of the Black Book comes secondhand from a more knowledgeable source.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “You have a friend in the conspiracy theory industry?”

“Actually, I have several,” he said, reaching for his cell phone again. This time, however, he surprised me. The image on the HD screen changed and suddenly there was Bug.

“Dudes!” he said brightly. “The Majestic Black Book? Are you freaking kidding me here? How cool is my job?”

His name was Jerome Taylor, but everyone called him “Bug.” Even his mother. He’s the only person, aside from Church, who has total access to the MindReader computer system. Bug was a former child-star computer genius who hacked his way into Homeland because he thought it would make a good senior project if he found Bin Laden. He’d been arrested and then Church hijacked him for the DMS. Even though Bug’s early attempt at taking down the head of Al-Qaeda hadn’t worked, years later when he had the full resources of MindReader at his disposal, he was largely responsible for putting Uncle Osama in the crosshairs of the heroes on SEAL Team Six. Bug currently ran the MindReader center at the Hangar in Brooklyn. The high-def screen made it look like he was right there in my office.