Ravenous Dusk (70 page)

A phone rang, a tingling so faint he thought it must be a hallucination. It rang again and again. Mother detested answering machines, saying if she wasn't home, she simply was out of reach, and that should be that. She didn't pick it up. He looked at his watch. It was after three in the morning.

His knees popped loudly when he stood, and he walked slowly out and across the backyard to the kitchen door. The moon had restored at least some natural order to the night sky, though the atmospheric pollution had stained it the color of vitamin-enriched urine.

He went into the kitchen, still redolent of the roast beef Mother had made for dinner. The hearty aromas of home pushed him back into the comfortable ignorance of his boyhood, when he knew that he was different, but the world was good and just. He had eaten only some corn and some more cookies, but hovered over the roast beef until it went cold.

He answered the phone, but he held it away from his ear at first. There was no static on the line, though, only a voice he recognized, asking, "Mrs. Cundieffe? Mrs. Cundieffe? I apologize for the lateness of the hour, but may I speak to your son? It's extremely urgent."

"Brady?"

"Special Agent Cundieffe, my name is Hilton DeVore. I'm an associate of Mr. Hoecker. I presume we are speaking on a secure line?"

Cundieffe sputtered, uncertain if there was a code word involved, or if he should refuse the call on general principles. "Yes, go ahead."

"Your presence is required in Washington immediately, Agent Cundieffe."

"I already spoke to AD Wyler, and I'm on the next plane out. And what is your involvement with the FBI?" "None. I'm speaking for Mr. Hoecker, who is cloistered at the moment. He has a lead for you."

"I just got back from pursuing the last lead I received from Mr. Hoecker, Mr. DeVore, and the only auto theft I observed was the theft of my rental car. I was the only one thrown in jail, and—"

"
Mizz
."

"Pardon me?"

"Ms. DeVore, Mr. Cundieffe." The Mule's voice was nearly an octave lower than his own. "Did you follow the Channing Durban case?"

Cundieffe massaged his temples. The name sounded familiar, but he hadn't come across it in his Mission or Radiant Dawn research. "It escapes me, I'm sorry." His bitterness faded as he began to feel intrigue taking hold of him. It was something in the news, on the back pages, where things like propane explosions in California and military exercise accidents in Idaho ended up.

"The Naval Intelligence analyst from the NSA who went missing last month."

Cundieffe remembered it all now, what little there was. On New Years' Eve, Durban had disappeared, his house ransacked and luggage missing, accounts drained, wife abandoned and shell-shocked. It was suspected that he was a spy and had defected, but to where? That he had failed to turn up overseas only suggested that he had been killed by his patrons, or that he wasn't a spy, and had simply snapped. FBI Counterintelligence had found nothing to suggest that he had been in contact with a foreign power, let alone turning a profit. "Yes, I remember reading about him. Cold case, as I understand. I can put you in touch with the Counterintelligence Division, if you have another hot tip."

"Hoecker wants you. And the Institute is to know nothing of it. Especially not your superiors."

He was flabbergasted. "Why in the world would I want to do something like that?"

"Karl Schweinfurter died en route to Grangeville General Hospital."

"Pardon me?"

"Your witness, Karl Schweinfurter. He died while in Macy and Mentones' custody. They vivisected him, Mr. Cundieffe."

Cundieffe felt dinner turn over inside him. Why would they make up such a thing? Who would be expected to believe it? In light of everything else he saw, how could it not be true? "Why? Why would they do such a thing?"

"That's why they were sent. To collect specimens. To observe. Like you. They harvested his cancer."

"Am I supposed to feel responsible for this?"

"They're looking for Channing Durban. You have to hurry." She hung up.

Cundieffe sat down at the table. He reached for a glass of orange juice, but his hand came back empty the first three times.

What did this have to do with anything else? It had to be misdirection. Or another war. He really didn't know how many they were fighting, after all. But he did know he was already in enough trouble with the Cave Institute and the Bureau.

He got up. Passing Mother's bedroom, he heard her steady respiration and the rustle of starched sheets. He drew the door to and went into his old bedroom.

The walls were still plastered with posters—the periodic table, the solar system, a table of fingerprint types; his certificate from the Academy at Quantico; a photograph of the Director with his father and mother, the stout and deadpan Mr. Hoover awkwardly holding swaddled infant Martin like a smelly but pivotal piece of evidence. All his life had been indoctrination into this world in which he now found himself. All his senses had been honed to seek out secrets, he'd believed, to bring them to light for the security of the American people. All along, he'd had it all backwards.

He sat down at his computer and logged on to a site he'd set up to keep his Radiant Dawn files. He'd known it was a security risk. Every step of gathering them had led to reprimands, and copying them out of the system was a security breach of monumental proportions. But after the pattern of official resistance had led him to believe he'd accomplish nothing for the Bureau by pursuing it, he'd been unable to stand back and let them be deleted. Somebody, somewhere, would thank him for staying on it. He thanked himself, now.

He opened a page of encrypted document scans and entered the eighteen-digit password, and the streams of nonsensical characters vanished, and were replaced by financial statements. He strolled through them until he came to property holdings. Idaho wasn't listed, but the Owens Valley community was. Others—islands—were clumped together, and had no names—only GPS coordinates. He bit his lip and tasted blood.

There it was. No reason to hide it; not even his Father, the custodian of the Director's forbidden Blue files, had ever read them, so why would anyone take notice?

He bowed his head. The weight of the secrets, shadows growing together around his neck, finally pulled him under.

Cyril Keogh was Dr. Lux, Christian Keyes, a man who never was, a traitor who died in a neutron bomb test that never took place, on an atoll that came and went with the tide. His only lasting legacy—the Mission. Now, he—or someone else who looked very much like him, who knew his secrets—had founded Radiant Dawn, perhaps as a means of avenging himself against the government that had used and executed him. If so, why were the Mission seemingly fighting him on their own, while the government abetted and protected him?

He shut off the computer and went back to the kitchen. Secrets piled up on him, burying him alive. He could do nothing to stop it, let alone shed light on them, but he thought—he desperately hoped—he knew someone who could.

He left a message for Storch, then called a cab to take him to LAX.

The brilliant white-gold sunlight and the blue, blue water stabbed his eyes out. His pupils cinched down to slivers as he looked out the crew chief's window at the ocean. There were no islands in sight below to lend a sense of scale, no features to relieve the stark purity of the view, which was as hard and clean and abstract as a geometry proof. The sky, the ocean, mirrors facing each other, the sun and its reflected rival on the face of the waters, following them to their destination. Where they were going was a matter of mathematics, as well, a nameless place no map showed, no history book recorded.

They were twenty thousand feet over the center of the Central Pacific Basin, 1600 miles south by southwest of Hawaii, and nearly six hundred miles north of the nearest inhabited island. The average ocean depth here was about four thousand feet. There were no shipping lanes here, no human or animal presence at all. In a region of the world where every rock large enough to host a palm tree sprouted a village with a culture and a language all its own, this invisible place had gone unnoticed, unnamed until the eggheads came with their bomb, and it became a damned and deadly place unfit for all but the lowest forms of life. When Storch heard Cundieffe's message, he knew this was the place.

The Mission was happy to send him. He could give two shits about their motives. They called it an advanced recon mission to his face, a toxic waste dump among themselves, when they thought he couldn't hear. So much the better.

They verified the target and Don Costello made the arrangements, and the next day they left. He spent the night plundering the Mission's boundless and erudite stores. He had to order some things that raised eyebrows, but Wittrock gave him carte blanche to carry out whatever he could on his back. He stretched their conceptions of what a man could carry, and made an armory of his room. Carrying it was one thing, fighting with it quite another, and he whittled down his selection to fit in a hundred pound pack, with another thirty pounds of ammunition and random gear distributed throughout his jumpsuit. That and the parachute would send a normal man to the bottom of the sea, but he was able to run four flights of stairs in the rig without breaking a sweat.

He stared at the naked blue spot on the map, and at the satellite printout taped up beside it. A ring-shaped coral reef atoll sitting on a spire of a sea mount that reared defiantly up out of the 4400 foot-deep abyssal plain that stretched out for hundreds of miles in every direction. The ring almost completely embraced a lagoon half a mile in diameter. A concrete foundation still stood at the south end of the atoll, where America staged its first and last above-ground neutron bomb test. On the northeast edge of the atoll, a circular knob of island, barely a hundred acres of bald rock and sand and green scabs of vegetation, with a horseshoe of concrete bunkers in the center. Tiny toadstools shaded the rooftops–a research station and satellite relay center, all unmanned because of plutonium in the soil with a half-life of some 240,000 years. The Mission had come across it in tracing the RADIANT command signals, but never had any reason to think it was important.

Storch avoided Stella, but he peered over the edge of the top floor into the forest on the way to the motor pool. It was still dark inside, but he could see the heat of her, prowling. If she saw him, she gave no sign.

He and Costello and his crew of two went down the mountain in a truck to the Blue Mesa reservation's airstrip, and within an hour, they were airborne in the same plane that brought him here only—what, a week ago? They locked themselves in the cockpit, leaving him alone in the cabin for the duration. He dozed with his eyes open and his hands turning the pages of a
National Geographic
.

They landed at an Air Force base somewhere in the desert. His ears popped, and it was sunny outside and four hours had passed. The wind buffeted the small plane as it taxied into an open hangar way down at the furthest end of the flight line. In four hours they could have traveled a thousand miles. It might've been Nellie or Indian Springs or Area fucking 51 for all he cared.