Cunningham hesitated, then responded, “Something I can’t send over an inner-phone connection, even if I knew all the details. Just… just get down to HQ now. As in right now. Top brass from the Air Force said this was a matter of national security. We’re unofficially in a state of national emergency as of 0450 this morning. They’re not telling me everything, but from reading between the lines, I’d have to say there’s some sort of shit-storm brewing. Or maybe it’s already here. Something big; that’s for sure. It’s enough to get the military rattled, and if they’re calling in a PIR Unit, that means…” His brow furrowed.
Scarlet briefly weighed his words, then: “Understood. I’m on my way. McRae, out.”
In a few seconds, their table was empty, with a partially eaten waffle left on one plate.
Chapter Three
If, every day, you bleed, spirit may turn to ash, but backbone turn to steel. Student must know that cuts she receive from time to time in training with sword are part of spiritual path. No feel sorry for yourself, Scarretto-chan, for having scars of training. Your scars are not your shame. Never that. They are your initiation.
— Kimura Ryuu
A black car raced up to the front of the diner, silent as a shadow, then came to an abrupt and equally silent stop. Before any onlookers could gather, Scarlet and Jamison had slipped inside and found themselves within the car’s cavernous, soundproof enclosure.
The outer world fell mute into a dream-like silence; a firetruck might pass by in the next lane with its sirens at full bore, but its blaring alarms would be quieter than a whisper inside the NSB’s car.
“UMBRA-4, this one,” the driver said.
“Understood,” Scarlet responded. Four levels above a Top Secret R-Clearance. Someone was obviously playing this one very close to the chest. She had no doubts that, with such a sensitive matter, she would have access only to the outermost fringes of whatever was really going on; the real core of the case was likely to be kept secret from her, whether by a flat denial of information or by several layers of disinformation. Paranormal Investigative Response Units seldom dealt with anything higher than an UMBRA-2 case, and even then, info was given on a need-to-know basis only.
“Not the usual, is what I gather,” the driver remarked. “They always try to stay calm over there. They don’t want to spook anyone, but this time, their acting couldn’t fool nobody. Something’s got them on edge. I can feel it.” He paused, waiting for Scarlet to pick up on his subtle request for information. No words from Scarlet were forthcoming, however. “Any idea what it is?”
Davidov, the driver, was still very young, still fresh-faced. Through the rear-view mirror, he glanced at Scarlet, making sure she was paying attention.
“Eyes on the road, Davidov,” Scarlet ordered. “We drop off my son first.”
“Ma’am.” He deftly cut in and out of traffic, down congested lanes, heading toward Jamison’s school.
Upon arrival at her son’s school, Scarlet walked him to the front door. Throngs of young children, outfitted with small, colorful backpacks, teemed through the entrance as the school bell rang. She knelt down and kissed Jamison’s forehead.
“Jamie, Mama might not be here to pick you up after school. If I’m not here, Kat will pick you up.”
“Okay, Mama.”
“Be a good boy for me at school today.” She smiled at him.
“Okay, Mama. Be a… good… boy.” He gazed at her for a moment, his soft eyes full of concern, then put his arms around her neck.
She held him for what seemed like a long time, her great love silently radiating for many feet all around them in a shared moment of wordless togetherness.
My son…
They waved goodbye to each other, and his tiny legs carried him into the concrete building, away from the world’s view.
Davidov pulled up to one of the NSB’s underground entrances, per the orders he had from Mr. Smerch, Scarlet’s boss. Down here, they may as well have been parked in a sewer system. The air was wet with the stagnant, unidentifiable odors of the urban underground.
Scarlet stepped out of the car, into the surrounding darkness. “Thanks for the ride, Davidov. Your driving is always top-notch.”
“Sure thing, McRae.”
She was about to close the car door, but Davidov called out to her at the last moment. “Hey, McRae! Uh, can I call you Scarlet? I mean, I, uh…” His wide eyes took in what he could still see of her hourglass figure in the dim light.
She got the subtext easily enough.
“Don’t take this the wrong way. You’re a nice guy, Greg, but…”
“But what?”
She wanted to be delicate. She had no desire to crush someone who had been nice to her and who was, by all accounts, a loyal and dedicated employee of the Bureau.
She ducked her head a little further into the car. “Greg, this isn’t easy for me to talk about, but… after Jake passed away, I gave up on relationships. It’s just me and Jamison now.” She paused to allow her words to sink in, but now she seemed as though retreating into her own inner-world. “Professionally, I have what you might call friends, but I don’t do… I’m not looking for someone right now. Do you…?”
“Ahhh. Right. I… I’m sorry,” he said. His yearning eyes lingered on Scarlet for a moment longer, then fell, and he turned his attention back to the steering wheel. “If you… if you change your mind, you’ll…?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Okay. You’ll let me know.” He gripped the steering wheel and deliberately breathed out as he nodded to himself. “She’ll let me know.”
“I’ve gotta run.”
“Right. Be safe out there, McRae.”
“You’re a sweetheart, Greg. I will.”
She closed the car door, waved goodbye to him. Davidov, casting one more longing, lingering gaze at her through his rearview mirror, drove away.
She went to a secret entrance and swiped her access chip across its sensor, then strode through a narrow, black tunnel, into a basement-level floor of the National Security Bureau.
After a few more locked doors and other biometric security checks, she entered an enormous space in which a labyrinth of titanic, humming, metal boxes stood like a tangle of monuments to an infernal god. The light here was dark-red and dim, almost non-existent, and barely enough for Scarlet to see the path to a set of elevators.
She strode to the elevators and entered her access code.
The security console let out two, small beeps that indicated access-denial.
She tried the code again, but the result was the same.
Christ.
“Problems?” a man said from the shadows, roughly ten yards away.
“You could say that,” she replied. She didn’t have to turn around to recognize who it was. The voice was all too familiar. It was Illias Smerch, Director of the NSB’s PIR Units, and her immediate supervisor.
“We don’t take these elevators this time.” He stepped out of the shadows, revealing his squat frame, a shiny, bald head, and a chubby, hairless face wrinkled and spotted with age. Enormous, dark bags were visible under his eyes, even in this low light.
“What, then?” Scarlet asked.
“This way.” He turned his back to her and beckoned over his shoulder with one hand as he walked to what appeared to be a ventilation duct. It was slightly shorter than he was tall.
With some fiddling around its edges, he opened the vent.
“This way,” he said again.
Scarlet stooped down and followed him inside to a hidden, concrete stairwell that had hand-rails of metal tubing covered in chipped, red paint. She did not recognize this place; indeed, she could not recall ever having been here before. The hum of the great maze of metal boxes was quieter here, but the air was much the same: stuffy, old, almost suffocating, like the air from the inside of a tomb. Apprehension began to grow inside her as her feet ascended the concrete steps.
“I hope you didn’t bring your sword,” Smerch joked.
<
br /> “You’d never let me use it on the job. Otherwise, sir, I would.” Her hands began to tremble slightly, but she forced them to be steady. Though she was relieved that Smerch couldn’t see her hands tremble, she frowned and kept her eyes pointed downward.
Why would he taunt me about Jake’s death? Especially at a time like this?
“Nothing like a pistol to settle matters—or a rifle, for that matter,” Smerch said as he continued his way up the stairs.
More salt in the wounds, Scarlet thought.
He continued, “Explosives and incendiaries work, too. Don’t get me wrong, McRae. I’m old-fashioned, a lot like you are, really, but I never did get why you like swords so much.”
“It wasn’t in my personnel profile?”
“Oh, it was. The vanilla answer, anyway. ‘My master raised me by the sword.’ But that doesn’t explain why you would still want to use it,” Smerch said, his voice getting a little edgier.
So, an insensitive joke that turned into some psychological probing, Scarlet observed. What possible reason could he have for probing my psychology now, of all times? Perhaps he’s testing my readiness for whatever it is that lies ahead?
She decided to play along to see what clues might be revealed by the contents of Smerch’s questions, his framing of them, and the way he asked them.
“Bullets can be traced,” she explained, keeping things vanilla. But inwardly, she recalled the real answer. Swords are not for the weak or the cowardly. They never run out of ammo. They are silent, quick, and deadly, and I like them.
“And you don’t like leaving traces?”
“It’s not in the job description.” Joke right along with him.
“I’ll talk to HR about that.” He chuckled. “Not that a sword is of any use anymore in this day and age. Won’t be saving anybody. Keep your firearms training up, scout. Ghosts and boogeymen have a way of finding their match in a well-placed bullet.” He poked the air once, pointedly, as if his finger were one of those bullets. “Funny how that works, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, I’ll stay trained up.”
“There’s a good girl,” he said almost absent-mindedly, as if he had begun to lose interest in the conversation.
At length, they stopped at a landing inside the hidden stairwell.
Seventeen flights of stairs, Scarlet noted. That puts us on Floor 13 of the Bureau.
She scanned her memory for what might have lain on this floor. Satellite Systems and Cyber-Engineering. Perhaps a subtle nod to the Air Force, she guessed. Are we meeting people so high up the bureaucracy of the Air Force that we’d have felt obliged to nod to them?
Smerch pressed his palm to a piece of the wall, and four, bright lines in the shape of a door appeared within it. The door-shape de-materialized to reveal a short tunnel through the concrete to another space. The two stepped through the tunnel and out into one of the building’s ordinary stairwells which any employee of the NSB would have been familiar with. The passageway closed behind them, and they walked through another door, out onto the 13th floor of the building.
The sounds of bustling people filled her ears. Ordinarily, she would not have noticed it, but the relative silence of her lengthy climb up the hidden, isolated stairwells had made the quiet murmur come across like a wall of noise.
Peering through the windows on this floor, Scarlet could see that the clouds had begun to break. An orange-ruddy light from the morning sun seeped through high panes of one-way steel-glass that composed much of the building’s exterior. The light cast long, shapeless shadows along the marble floor within. Employees walked in every direction. Most bristled with self-importance, while a few others only ambled along, as if not wanting to call attention to themselves.
“Home,” Smerch said, his hands out, palms up, his face all smiles. “Nothing like home, right, scout?”
“Right, sir.”
They continued their walk, but it was not long before Smerch spotted a coffee station and stopped. “Coffee?” he offered.
“Always.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
He filled up two large cups of coffee, taking one and handing the other to his subordinate.
Sipping a soothingly hot coffee as she walked, Scarlet began to think. Conjecture: Someone was watching the elevators. Has our security been compromised that badly? Or was it merely an extra precaution? A private stage for Smerch’s probing of my brain? Was he trying to covertly tell me something? She didn’t know, but she decided to keep the facts of this morning’s stairwell-jaunt in the back of her mind.
This whole exchange was… odd.
She knew better than to ask these kinds of questions outright, though. The NSB’s special agents were, as an ordinary matter of course, to maintain a heightened state of mental acuity as a defense against traps and disinformation, both within and outside of the organization. To ask a question that an agent could have answered for herself was to admit her dullness, laziness, or incompetence. Besides, any answer given was hardly guaranteed to be truthful, as vested interests tended to protect themselves through misdirection, slander, and obfuscation, and it was never entirely clear whom one could or should trust, even within the NSB. Lines of allegiance could often be hidden, and they were prone to shift without notice. As if all that weren’t enough, politics, blackmail, and covert deals tended inevitably to blur and alter whatever lines of loyalty one might have once been able to discern among the vast network of agents, spies, detectives, scientists, and administrators.
Official briefings were another matter when it came to the unstated prohibition against asking obtuse questions, but she found herself seldom asking questions even there. Often, it was better to keep questions to a minimum, lest one needlessly expose an opening for the subversion of one’s stated or unstated missions.
An agent’s intuition and logic should be sharpened to a razor’s edge. I must see through ruses. I must be able to cut to the heart of anything.
She continued to walk behind Smerch as he led her to the designated briefing room, but her pistol felt suddenly heavier in its holster at her hip.
She made sure her hands stayed in the pockets of her coat so that no one could see them trembling from the past.
Chapter Four
At length, Smerch came upon what looked like a solid wall of black granite in a lonely, seldom-used hallway of the floor. A pale, forlorn light from outside shone dimly along the wall’s upper edge. He studied the impassive face of the wall for a moment, then carefully pressed his palm to it at an odd angle.
A door-shaped piece of the wall de-materialized, and he and Scarlet stepped through it, into a large briefing room.
Here, she saw two of the NSB’s six PIR Units. She immediately recognized the NSB personnel present, but there were also three officers from the Air Force, each of them attired in regal, crisp uniforms: a colonel, named Abrams, and two generals, named Polinsky and Zanoria. Everyone was seated in a U-shape around three walls, with the fourth wall reserved for a giant screen.
Scarlet and Smerch took their respective seats.
“Now that everyone’s here, I suggest we begin,” said the colonel, a man with salt-and-pepper hair, eyebrows that turned upward at the bridge of his nose, and a perpetual frown. “This is a very time-sensitive issue, and time isn’t something we have to waste.”
The two generals were leaning back in their chairs, hands clasped over their midsections as they studied the people in the room. Their unapologetic eyes, hard with concern and scrutiny, tunneled into whomever or whatever they looked at.
“This room is clean,” said a small man with a bushy, well-trimmed mustache. That was Spendrick, one of the NSB’s highest section chiefs and Smerch’s immediate superior. He had evidently picked up on one of the generals’ unspoken concerns: Was this room safe from the eyes and ears of those who shouldn’t have access to the information that was about to be disclosed?
Though Spendrick had answered that question in the affirmative, Scarlet didn’t believe h
im for a second. There’s no such thing as a clean room, she recalled. Not in the NSB. Not anywhere where valuable intel might be gathered. Besides, if there were people watching the elevators to spy on me, why wouldn’t they also spy on this room?
She looked intently at the generals to gauge their reaction. Unmoving, they glared at Spendrick like disapproving statues. It was not clear to what extent they believed him; they gave no indication of any change in their attitude or understanding.
And then, in a burst of realization, Scarlet suddenly understood. They’re in over their heads. The generals must be desperate. No wonder they’re so tight-lipped and sitting in a briefing room of a civilian intelligence agency. Over-compensation at its finest.
But that didn’t explain why agents from two PIR Units, of all things, had been brought in for the briefing. There must be something here that defies their explanation. Something paranormal or anomalous. Something outside of the scope of their experiences. That had been easy enough for even a rookie to deduce, but the exact nature of the case was still unclear to her.
Nor was it clear whether she would even be told the complete story of what was going on.
The colonel then spoke up. “We trust that the information we present here will stay here.” His weary eyes locked onto Spendrick’s.
The NSB section chief stared back. “Let’s get the shit on the road, Colonel.”
Abrams raised a hand into the air and snapped his fingers. The lights came down, and the room’s vast screen, nearly 30 feet across, came silently to life. General Zanoria’s coal-colored hands retrieved a cigarette, placed it on his lips, lit it. His languid smoke began to curl upward, and it soon dispersed inside the dark, frigid room.
Showing on the screen was what appeared to be footage from a security camera. Two, giant, chain-link fences, topped with spiraled razor-wire, and shrouded in the night, were speckled with the snowy grain of visual noise from the camera.
“This is a piece of the outer perimeter of Quincy Air Force Base in western Pennsylvania. Time is 02:06:49 this morning,” said Abrams.
The Nightfall Billionaire: Serial Installment #1 (Scarlet McRae) Page 2
