by Don Hoesel
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.
With a rare chuckle he closed the message and checked his watch. He had a meeting with General Smithson in an hour and nothing until then but to exhort his team to action, yet he knew they functioned better without him hovering. It left him with an unexpected—and unusual—block of free time that he wasn’t sure what to do with. He gave a passing thought to starting work on the Bible lesson for Sunday but decided against it. His wife liked to help him with those.
He’d started drafting a letter the previous day and opened the file to see how it sounded after sitting for a while. But as he read through the letter, his mind kept returning to the email he’d just read, and he wasn’t sure when it happened, but at some point the humor he’d pulled from it transitioned to something else.
The email was colorful, that was certain. But there’d also been something businesslike about it, despite the few expletives at the expense of Sheffield Petroleum. On a whim he pulled up a search engine and typed in the name Albert Griffiths and, for good measure, Pendleton Drilling Company, which was where Mr. Griffiths said he’d worked for twenty years. To his surprise he found a link to an employee page on the PDC website. On the page was a picture of Mr. Griffiths. According to the short bio that accompanied the photo, he’d been a supervisor.
The revelation that his email writer was not a complete nut case gave the colonel pause. After considering the matter for a moment, he followed his instincts, picking up the phone and dialing Madigan’s office.
Captain Madigan stepped in soon after, and without preamble the colonel gave up his seat so that she could read the email. When finished she aimed a puzzled look at her superior officer.
“I don’t follow, Colonel.”
“I don’t either,” he admitted. “But I’ve already discovered that Mr. Griffiths is alive and well and formerly a supervisor for an oil company.”
Maddy absorbed that, although the result was another headshake. But before she could voice her disagreement with this line of inquiry, Richards raised a hand.
“Maddy, just dig around for an hour or so. If nothing comes up by then, we’ll drop it.”
Maddy answered with a nod and set to work at the colonel’s desk, which he allowed for the sake of expediency. Meanwhile, Richards picked up his coffee cup from the desk, stopped by the kitchenette for a refill, and headed down to the lab. When thirty minutes later he stepped back into his office, Maddy glanced up.
“I found him,” she said.
“You found who?” Richards asked.
“Ben Robinski.”
“From the email?”
Maddy nodded.
The colonel processed the news, but the meaning of the captain’s statement took some time to arrive. “Wait. What do you mean you found him?”
“It turns out there is a Ben Robinski,” Maddy said. “He lives in Des Moines, and his wife reported him missing this morning.”
“He’s missing?”
“According to the police report, which by the way is going to cost you a favor for the Des Moines chief of police, Ben Robinski signed on to a drilling team for a few months and his wife hasn’t heard from him since.”
“You mean . . .”
“I mean the guy who sent this to you,” Maddy said, holding up a printout of the email, “is not out of his mind. This is legit.”
—
“Albert, telephone.”
As he crawled out from beneath the Charger, Albert grumbled about his wife’s inability to tell whoever was calling that he was busy with something of the gravest importance. That would be the brake lines. Wh
at could be more important than that?
“Is it Pendleton?” he called back. “Or those thieves at Sheffield?”
“Neither, love,” she said.
Had it been Pendleton, they would have asked him to come back to work, citing a lack of skilled drilling supervisors. He would have said no, at least not until the Charger was running. And with all he knew about the Charger’s condition, they could avoid calling him for a few years. If the call had come from Sheffield, he would have been out from under the car fast enough to hurt himself. Now that the phone call from Ben Robinski’s wife had got him thinking about the money again, he found it hard to get it out of his mind.
“Who is it?” he asked as he strode toward the house.
“I don’t know,” Andrea said. “He mentioned something about the military. It sounded important.”
Albert took that in as he walked up the front steps and into the kitchen. What would the military want with him?
“I haven’t missed some kind of compulsory service for immigrants, have I?” he asked Andrea, his hand cupped over the phone.
“Not that I know of,” she said with a headshake.
“Hello,” he said.
“Mr. Griffiths, my name is Colonel Jameson Richards. I’m with the NIIU out of the Pentagon.”
“Are you now?” replied Albert. “Well done, then. I imagine that’s a tough job to get.”
The man who’d identified himself as Colonel Richards paused as if gathering his thoughts.
“Mr. Griffiths, I’m calling about the email you sent to Congressman Cooper yesterday.”
That bit of news surprised Albert into silence. By his reckoning, there were only two reasons the military would be calling: to help him with his workman’s comp issue, or to accuse him of threatening a congressman, which if his memory of the email was accurate, he hadn’t done. Still, he didn’t think a simple workman’s comp claim, however serious to the one waiting for the money, was ever escalated to the military.
“So are you calling to help me out of this workman’s comp jam?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” Colonel Richards said. “I’m calling about the other part of the letter—the one that described the drilling activities in Antarctica.”
