The Alarmists (17 page)

“No, I’m pretty sure I’m not,” he answered.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Because I know pretty much everything you’re working on, and that’s not one of them.”

“Okay, so if we both agree that I’m not writing an article, then who was this guy?”

“Excellent question, my dear Mr. Watson, which is why I offered him a glass of water.”

Brent understood the sentence but failed to grasp the significance, or the smugness in Abby’s voice.

“I don’t follow.”

“For fingerprints.”

“You took fingerprints?”

“I thought he was creepy. And sometimes you just have to follow your gut.”

“Even if you got his prints on a glass, how are you . . . ? Wait a minute, you’re dating that cop, aren’t you?”

“Ick, no,” she said. “Where have you been? That’s been over for weeks.”

“But I’m assuming you at least ended things nicely?”

“Sure. In fact, I’m watching his dog next week when he goes out of town.”

“And?”

“And it’s a mixed breed. Mostly chow, I think.”

“The fingerprints, Abby?”

“Oh. Well, they seem to belong to a guy named Gregory Hickett. One domestic violence charge, which was why he was in the database, but nothing other than that.”

Brent’s thoughts were going in a dozen places, the most important of which was why some guy masquerading as an employee for the
AJS
would be trying to dig up information about him. He was a boring old college professor. It took a few steps down that line of reasoning before he even thought to connect this mysterious visit to his present job. And when he made that connection a line of cold worked its way up his spine.

“Are you there, doll?”

“I’m here, Abby. Look, I need you to do me a favor. Can your cop find out everything he can about this guy and send it on to me?”

When his admin answered, her voice held concern. “Done. Is there something I should know about?”

Brent tried to infuse his response with his customary nonchalance.

“It’s probably nothing. For all I know, it really was a footwork guy for the
AJS
.”

“Who can’t find out what he needs over the phone instead of coming all the way here to spend thirty minutes with your colleagues and to glance at a few of your papers?”

“You never know with the academic sorts,” Brent said.

When a minute later he ended the call, he found that the chill was still there.

—

While the last few years were not without their anxious moments, Arthur Van Camp could not remember a time when he felt as if the entire project were teetering on the edge of a cliff. He suspected that was normal—that any large scale endeavor hurtling toward its culmination brought out the dormant fears of colossal failure. He also understood that he wouldn’t feel that way if he knew what Alan was thinking.

One mistake his rogue vice-president continued to make was to believe that just because the cleanup team was his to command for the duration of Night House, they reported only to him. Van Camp knew that Alan was on task, that Shackleton was prepared, that more than a dozen additional global hot spots were being worked appropriately, and that the Russians were ready to announce a total freeze on wheat exports. With each domino that fell, Van Camp moved closer to achieving the objective he had laid out for himself in a Sunday school class so very long ago.

All of it told him that Alan had been the right man for the job.

It also told him that the man’s endgame did not involve cutting and running. He was intent on finishing the project. After that, Van Camp could only guess.

It was a rare afternoon in that he wasn’t in the office. Instead, he sat near Alan’s wife in her private room, watching the monitor mirror the steady beat of the woman’s heart. It was interesting to him how the line on the monitor seemed so strong. He suspected Phyllis’s heartbeat had the steady regularity of a healthy woman. However, whatever was happening in her mind was keeping her from engaging with the rest of the world.

The seat he occupied, and the hospital room in which it sat, struck a chord in him whose origins were no mystery. When his own wife lay dying, he lost track of the hours he spent at her bedside, holding her hand as she readied to pass. According to the nurses, Alan had done much the same, although his presence did not seem to be as frequent as had Van Camp’s just a couple of years before. It was further proof that Alan was still invested in the project.

Van Camp had already resolved to pay for the woman’s hospital bills, even if her condition warranted an extended stay somewhere. It was the least he could do—a last gesture for a man who had given so much to the company. It was a pity Alan would not be around to reap the rewards of such meritorious service.

December 15, 2012, 3:48 P.M.

“No one would fault you for calling it,” Maddy said. “Like the colonel said, you’ve more than fulfilled your obligation.”

“I can,” Brent said. “I can quit and go back to the classroom and worry until December twenty-first comes and goes, or I can stay here and do what you folks brought me here to do.”

They were in the Pentagon mess. Brent was finishing up an exceptional Philly cheesesteak, after telling Maddy about the call from Abby.

“If I go home now, I’ll just spend the next six days looking over my shoulder. And I’ll probably just keep working on this on my own anyway. If you let me keep my computer.”

Maddy didn’t answer right away. She’d pushed the rest of her lunch away and let her eyes play over the other tables and the men and women, civilian or uniformed, who occupied them.

“I keep forgetting that you haven’t been here very long,” she said. “You slipped right in and it’s almost like you’re a real member of the team. I have to keep reminding myself that you’re a sociology professor. You’re not an anti-terrorism expert, or a spy. So when you get shot at in Afghanistan, and have some guy snooping around your workplace, it’s probably not quite what you were expecting.”

“You’re right. It’s not. But I’m having fun.”

That drew a smile from the concerned army captain, which was what Brent wanted, but he also thought he owed her an honest answer.

“I know you’re not expecting anything from me,” he said. “This is just something I have to do. If I walk away now and someone else dies and I could have done something to help you prevent it, I’m not sure I’d be able to live with that.”

That was the kind of answer he thought Maddy would appreciate, and from the look on her face it appeared to have hit home.

“Besides, you never know when you’re going to need me to save you again.”

She aimed a glare at him in response, and Brent accepted it with a grin.

“And there’s something else,” he said. “Say we don’t find out who’s behind this and the polarizing event happens and they reap whatever profit they expected to gain from it. Do you think that’ll be the end of it? That they won’t start trying to clean up some loose ends?”

He saw her take that in and roll it around, saw the look that came to her eyes as she did so.

“If nothing else, we have to get some security for you,” Maddy said. “If they’re bold enough to show up at your office, they won’t be shy about showing up at your hotel.”

“You mean if the man Abby saw even has anything to do with this.”

“I guess we’ll know more about that when you get the report you asked for.”

“Until then I say we just keep plowing ahead.”

“Fair enough,” she said.

Brent rolled up his napkin and set it on his empty plate. He pushed his seat back, expecting Maddy to follow suit, when he realized that she hadn’t moved.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“What did the colonel drag you into his office for?”

While Brent could hear the casual tone of the question, he also picked up on the nervousness behind it. He wasn’t sure how she’d picked up on the topic of the conversation, but she obviously knew something. It left him with a decision to make, and he decided to choose the path that someone with her ethical standards would appreciate: honesty.

“He asked me what my intentions were as far as you’re concerned,” he said, unable to keep the gleam from his eye.

The candid admission set Maddy back in her chair, eyes wide. “He didn’t.”

“Oh, but he did,” Brent said. “The colonel thinks you’re taking a shine to me, and I think he’s worried that I’m not as good a catch as you deserve.”

He enjoyed seeing how the news affected her. To her credit, she recovered quickly.

“He didn’t actually say ‘taking a shine,’ did he?”

“No, I believe his exact words were that you and I ‘have become close’ during my time with you and the team,” Brent said in his best imitation of the colonel.

Maddy couldn’t help but chuckle, but she still appeared taken aback by the forwardness of her superior officer. Brent, always willing to add fuel to a good fire, decided to make her squirm a bit longer.

“So have we?”

“Have we what?” Maddy asked.

“Have we become close during my stay here?”

The question served a dual purpose. The first was to have some fun at her expense. The second, though, was to use the banter to see if the colonel might have been right. Brent was well aware that he’d thought a lot about Maddy over the last week and a half. It would be nice to know where she fell on the subject.

What he didn’t expect was for the light atmosphere that had settled around the table to vanish. When she answered, after a pause long enough for Brent to have eaten another half of a cheesesteak, both her face and voice were without humor.

“Since you were honest with me, I’ll return the favor. Am I attracted to you? Yes. You’re smart, funny, and not too bad looking. In fact, you’re probably just the kind of guy that I could see myself getting serious about.” She stopped and allowed Brent time to process what she’d said. “But there’s one big problem,” she went on. “And I think you know what it is.”

“You can’t date someone who doesn’t share your religious beliefs.”

Maddy answered with a sad smile. “We’re not talking a different denomination, or even a big point of theology that we can fight about. You don’t believe in God at all, and for me that’s a deal breaker.”

Brent had no answer to that, because she was right. He’d considered and rejected the concept of a god a long time ago and he’d never found sufficient cause to revisit the topic. He was glad that Maddy’s belief helped her, perhaps gave her life more meaning than it might have had, but he wouldn’t cop to something he didn’t believe in, even for someone he was interested in.

Maddy was the first to break the extended silence.

“The colonel’s right about one thing, though,” she said.

“What’s that?” Brent asked.

“You’re nowhere near as good a catch as I deserve.”

And with that she picked up her tray, winked at the professor, and then left him there to think about it.

—

Dabir’s mastery of English was a source of pride for him, but he had to admit to struggling with idioms. Some things did not translate well, lacking the proper context for a nonnative speaker. Tonight, though, he thought he was doing something called
stirring the pot
. What struck him as amusing was that in his country, a person stirred the pot to blend all of its elements, while what he was in the process of doing seemed more like taking a stick to a hornet’s nest. That too might be an idiom, although he supposed such knowledge was not important for his current task.

The copy business, where he stood watching a stack of documents wind through a scanner, was six blocks away from his hotel. At least three such shops were closer, but he’d chosen this one because, as far as he could tell, there were no security cameras. Still, he kept his hat pulled down and avoided raising his head any more than was necessary to complete the transaction with the youth behind the counter.

He still was not sure what he hoped to gain from this act. Beyond the assignments he’d carried out for Alan Canfield, his knowledge of the man’s other operations—if such existed—eluded him. Nor could he be certain that anything the man had ordered Dabir to do was connected to the company for which he worked. He thought it a reasonable assumption and yet he preferred dealing with facts.

If nothing else, the recipients of these pages would be able to make Dabir’s former employer uncomfortable. But he would not make it easy—even for those who would face with him a common enemy. They had spilled the blood of his men at Afar and so he would give them no names. Only a picture. They would do the work themselves, or Dabir would move forward without them.

When the scanner finished its job, Dabir accepted his disk and walked out into the street.

December 16, 2012, 5:47 A.M.

Richards seldom arrived at the office before Maddy or Rawlings. The others, the ones more reluctant to greet the morning, would stagger in an hour or so after those two. The problem was that Maddy and Rawlings also stayed later than most. He suspected he would have to talk to them before too long, and remind them of the importance of a work/life balance.

He’d lived the life of the workaholic for too long and had only been preserved against its deleterious effects on his marriage by the saintly qualities possessed by his wife. Neither Maddy nor Rawlings was married, but the colonel understood that life existed beyond these walls. The worst part was that extended workdays were not requirements for a promotion. Richards would sign the papers recommending rank and transfer to just about anywhere either of them would want to go—and both of them knew that. Yet they kept coming in early and staying late.

The difference today was that both of them had an excuse. As did Dr. Michaels, who sat at the table with them, sifting through the data once again. Confining a search for a potentially catastrophic event into a period of a few days necessitated a temporary forgiveness of the admirable qualities of hard work and commitment. He himself had stayed until after midnight, only to return long before the dawn began to lighten the Washington sky.

“Good morning,” Richards said, and by their reactions it seemed all of them were weary enough for his presence to have remained unnoticed.

After a chorus of acknowledgments, the colonel asked for a briefing from Brent.

“It’s hard to tell, Colonel,” Brent said. “Rawlings found . . .” He fielded a yawn that interrupted the thought. When finished he gave the colonel an apologetic wave and continued. “Rawlings had an interesting idea this morning that I think bears some investigation.”

The professor looked at Rawlings, inviting him to elaborate, but the man had his coffee cup positioned beneath his nose, as if inhaling its rousing properties.

“Before Morpheus claimed the captain, he remarked on the percentage of news stories that seemed to coincide with the events you’ve investigated,” Brent said. “He said it almost seems like the media itself is responsible for the uptick in violent events, if only to give themselves something to cover.”

Before Richards could say anything, Rawlings roused from his coffee worship. “Hypnus,” he said, eyes half closed.

“Pardon?” Brent said.

“Hypnus is the god of sleep. Morpheus is the god of dreams.”

Brent raised an eyebrow, then exchanged a look with the colonel.

“Anyway,” Brent said, “if you think about it, there are some news conglomerates that dwarf just about anything else out there.”

Brent let that statement hang there for the colonel to mull over. Richards could see where Brent was headed, and he liked the fact that they were investigating every possibility, yet he found it an odd idea to advance. While Richards didn’t know much about the news business, he thought of the industry as a reactive one—a corporate segment whose bread and butter involved how it responded to events, not how it manipulated them. But years leading a team with the charge of investigating the strange kept him from dismissing the idea out of hand.

“If you think there’s any merit to it, then keep at it,” he said. “If you haven’t already done so, let the SEC know what you’re thinking. They can start looking at stocks held by news corporations.”

“They’re already on it, sir,” Maddy said. “They’re looking at both domestic and foreign-owned organizations—all the networks, Reuters, the AP, the works.”

The colonel took that in and found himself nodding. It seemed his people—and Dr. Michaels—had it all covered.

“I imagine the rest of the team will be here shortly,” he said. “When they show up, tell them I’ve suspended anything that’s not associated with this research.”

“Yes, sir,” Rawlings said.

After a last glance around the room, and a long look at Michaels to see if anything the two of them had discussed yesterday might have sunk in—of which he found no evidence—Richards proceeded to his office.

Sitting down at his desk, he logged on to his computer and went straight to email. Without fail, between the time he finished up one workday and started another, the email gremlins filled his box with no less than fifty messages. A number of them were sales-related, as the Pentagon’s spam blockers seemed content to stand down and wave as malicious emails zoomed past. A handful were from facilities, with information about anything that might impact entrance to and exit from the building, as well as navigation through it, plus access to any of its services. Most of the rest were work-related—messages from people above and below him in the chain of command. These would be the first read and responded to.

There was, however, a last category that came through on occasion—something from outside that bore neither the defining marks of official business nor the impersonal subject lines that denoted junk. Most of these came from family or from church, schedules for elders’ meetings or children’s Sunday school. Despite the severe demeanor he displayed around work, he enjoyed finding out which Sundays he would get to spend with the second and third graders, supervising a craft or working his way through a Bible lesson. When Maddy had started attending his church, he’d sworn her to secrecy about this softer side of his character. And to his knowledge, she had yet to break that trust.

As he finished scanning his email, he saw something that reminded him of the last category of messages he received. Every once in a while the colonel was surprised by a message from the outside but that addressed some mission the NIIU might have undertaken. Nine times out of ten such a message came from a legitimate researcher—someone attached to a university or recognized scientific institution. The tenth one, though, was often the highlight of his day: an inquiry from a conspiracy theorist. As little as Richards smiled, few things could make him do so as easily as a late-night diatribe from a nut case.

It never ceased to amaze him the way a person’s mind could work, creating government goblins around every corner, or sounding the alarm that the government was engaged in a campaign to keep the people of America from finding out the truth about Bigfoot, aliens, Atlantis, or any of a host of other things. The existence of his unit gave these people all the proof they needed of a government cover-up. The messages themselves were fascinating in their variety, from simple accusations featuring poor grammar and punctuation to well-reasoned, articulate letters that had at times made even the colonel think. Regardless, when he saw what looked like an email questioning NIIU activities, it got his attention, even before official business.

This morning he had one such message. Its subject line said:
I believe you may have killed some of my associates
. He opened it and began reading, a deepening frown spreading across his face. When the text ended, the file continued for another page, revealing a black-and-white photo. It appeared to have been taken in an airport. The man targeted by the camera lens wore a hat and sunglasses, and beyond the fact that he was one of the few fair-skinned people in the picture, he looked like any other businessman dressed for casual travel. Richards studied the picture for a few more seconds before reading through the first few pages again. Before he made it halfway he was sending it to the printer.

After snatching the page up, he took it to the professor’s temporary office, sliding it in front of Brent.

“What’s this?” Brent asked.

“It came in during the night,” the colonel said. “It’s an interesting read.”

Puzzled, the professor pulled the paper closer and scanned it. Richards followed the man’s eyes, and when Brent got to the end, the colonel watched him pause before jumping to the top and starting again. He gave the professor the time he needed to give it a second perusal. When Brent looked up, his eyes were filled with an odd combination of puzzlement and energy.

“This is a recounting of your Ethiopian mission,” he said.

Richards nodded.

“I thought no one knew about this.”

“Beyond the general, and whoever else he had to tell, no one should,” the colonel answered.

Brent looked again at the paper, then back up at Richards. “So how does this guy know about it?”

Richards offered the professor his half smile that wasn’t quite a smile. “Good question. I suggest we start by finding out who that is in the picture.”

—

The colonel hovered behind Snyder as the man pulled up the report provided by the IT staff, and by the time Snyder finished reading it, the colonel had also reached the end so he didn’t need to relay the information to him. However, for the benefit of the others, Richards motioned for him to share.

“They tracked the IP address back to a Kinko’s in Atlanta,” Snyder said.

“Why doesn’t anyone email cryptic messages from home anymore?” Brent asked, but the colonel ignored him.

“One of the guys from IT put in a call to the place and they don’t have any security cameras.”

“Of course not,” Rawlings grumbled.

Richards took the news in stride, and despite the irritability of his team, he knew they would too.

“If you find something you can’t control . . .” the colonel reminded them.

“Then move on to something you can,” returned Maddy. She took the picture and held it up for inspection. “At first glance there’s nothing here that would give us a clue about who this guy is or where he is in the photo.”

Richards knew that when Maddy began an explanation with the words
At first glance
, that meant that a more constructive second glance had already been performed.

“Do you see the dark blur on the wall here?” Maddy asked, pointing at what to Richards looked like a rectangular shadow.

“Not really,” Brent said for all of them.

“We haven’t done a layer lift yet, but with a microscope you can see that it’s a poster,” she said. She looked around the room, perhaps waiting for any one of the men to ask the obvious question. When none of them did, she released an exasperated sigh. “It’s a poster advertising a theater production in Addis.”

“So this is a terminal at Bole?” the colonel asked.

“And there’s something else. The show on the poster had run dates of December sixth through the ninth.”

That took a little longer for the colonel to process, and Michaels beat him to it.

“That puts this guy in Addis within a week of your Afar mission,” the professor said. “Ten days at the outside.”

“If the poster didn’t stay up for a while after the show was over,” Snyder said.

Richards considered both Maddy’s discovery and Snyder’s pessimism and came down closer to the former’s side while reserving the right to change his mind at any time.

“If we can allow a week prior to the first performance for the poster to go up, and if we can accept the possibility that they still haven’t taken it down yet, that leaves us with going on four weeks’ worth of manifests to look through.”

“Looking for what, Colonel?” Brent asked, and when he did, Richards saw that the professor was only speaking up because it appeared no one else was going to. “The only way to match this guy to someone in the airport’s database would be to compare passport photos against a picture that’s so grainy I can’t tell this guy apart from Rawlings.”

“Unfortunately, Dr. Michaels, it’s all we have to go on at the moment.”

The professor looked distressed at that and the colonel couldn’t blame him. Still, they’d solved a mystery or two with less evidence—although not much less.

“One of the things you learn in this job,” the colonel said, “is that you don’t marry yourself to a theory right out of the gate. We’ll investigate this one concurrent with the others.”

With that, the colonel turned on his heel and left, stopping by the kitchenette to get some coffee before proceeding to his office. Once at his desk he returned to the task of checking his email, suspecting he was behind in answering a few from his superiors. That was what made him so irritated when he saw that he’d received a new email message, this one from Congressman Bob Cooper.

Immediately, Richards had two distinct thoughts: that notes from congresspersons were always trouble, without exception; and that the subject line marked this email as one that might better fit with those from the conspiracy theorists. Anything with a subject line “I want my workman’s comp checks from the thieves at Sheffield Petroleum, and by the way, no one seems to know where Ben Robinski is” had to be worth the read. But as Congressman Cooper had never sent him an email for anything beyond business, Richards knew there had to be a legitimate reason for forwarding it.

When he opened it, the congressman’s addendum provided a bit of an explanation.

Colonel Richards, I know you and your boys were out at Hickson Petroleum last week. This one mentions another oil company so I’m passing it along in case it’s related. Besides that, I don’t have a clue what to do with it. Bob.

Thus prepared, Richards dug into the body of the email.

It didn’t disappoint, even if he did have a problem following everything. He had to admit it was one of the more entertaining ones he’d received. The part about a covert months-long drilling venture in Antarctica was a nice touch.