by Glenn Cooper
She shrugged.
“FBI?” Melrose whispered. “CIA? Other?”
“Want me to go ask?” she said sarcastically.
“Heavens no! Bad form. I’ll make some discreet inquiries. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t the machination of Piper’s wife to shadow our investigation.”
Across the room, Kenney was whispering to his people too. “Anne Katherine Locke. She looks just like her photo. Pretty little gal. Barely legal, if you ask me.”
“What’s our move, chief?” Lopez asked.
“Well, our first move is to pray to the Almighty Lord that there’s something on this menu that won’t turn our stomachs inside out. After that, we’ll do what we do best. We’ll follow their asses till they lead us to Piper.”
“I think they made us,” Harper said.
Kenney opened the menu. “What are they going to do? Outrun us in their dinky electric car?”
Nancy wasn’t used to an empty house. It wasn’t so much the part of being alone. Will spent most of his time in Florida while she was in Washington, and Phillip didn’t exactly hang out with her. He stuck to his room most of the time. It was the quiet that got to her.
Phillip had a noisy presence. There was the constant thumping from the subwoofer in his bedroom. And his NetPen was perpetually chiming some kind of alert from Socco and his myriad Net sites. And he never turned the kitchen or living-room TVs off, so there was always a background of voices to squelch.
Now the house was as silent as a tomb, and she hated that.
She was dressed for work and filling her commuter mug with coffee when she began to cry. Her son was missing. Her husband was missing. And her hard-ass boss was asking her to put job and country first. It was too much.
She did what she had been doing obsessively—she voice-dialed Phillip’s phone, then Will’s, and got the same casual greeting messages that seemed so monstrously incongruous under the circumstances.
Next she checked her e-mails and found and reread the same one she’d picked up while still in bed. Ronald Moore, Deputy Director General of MI5 was reassuring her that everything was being done to locate Will and Phillip. One of their “best men” had been deployed into the field with a team to assist the younger case officer, Miss Locke. She could expect to receive regular updates.
Nancy had looked up the particulars on Annie Locke and had snarled at the pretty face on her screen, “Leave him alone, honey. He’s got a bad heart.” She imagined that Miss Locke would have gotten Will’s old juices flowing the way pretty women always did. That rising sap of his had almost killed him at Christmas. But why had he taken her car and ditched her? He must have gotten onto something and didn’t want the baggage of a tyro tagging along. But why hadn’t he called to let her know what he had? Just a ten-second call!
Damn you, Will, she thought. You’re the most exasperating man I ever met. And by the way, I love you.
Director Parish found her the moment she arrived at the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Guess what, you were right,” he said, pouring them both coffees from a carafe on his conference table.
“Right about what?” Nancy asked.
“All of the diplomats who turned tail and flew back to Beijing are alive and well this morning.”
“I told you it didn’t fit.”
“And I already told you, you were right.”
“Then let me catch the next plane to the UK. I need to get over there and find my guys.”
“Ron Moore tells me they’ve got good people on it, Nancy. Here’s the situation. The Chinese aren’t cooling down. They don’t care that the last batch of postcards was a hoax. They believe—or they’re saying they believe—that they originated from the same organization that sent the real ones. They’re asserting they all came from Groom Lake. They’ve lodged a formal complaint with the State Department stating that the threat to their diplomats has taken the crisis to the next level, and they’re demanding to know why the administration is engaging in hostile provocation. As of this morning, they’ve started rattling sabers. They’ve deployed two Shi-Lang-class aircraft carriers and a group of Type 094 nuclear attack subs into the South China Sea heading toward the Taiwan Straits. It wouldn’t surprise anyone at the Pentagon if they used this as a smoke screen for an invasion of Taiwan. The White House, needless to say, is tied up in knots. That’s where we come in. The best way to defang these guys is to prove the postcards did not originate from inside this government. It’s up to us to break this case, which means it’s up to you.”
Nancy sighed, the weight of the world on her narrow shoulders. She had packed a case for England but it would have to stay in her car trunk.
She took the elevator to the fifth floor, where she had carved out a suite of offices and conference rooms for the Chinese Doomsday task force. Throughout her career as a senior-level administrator she’d been a practitioner of centralizing complicated cases. That hadn’t always made her popular at the field-office level where Special Agents in Charge and their staffs often felt usurped by the long arm of Headquarters. But this case was a perfect example of the need for coordination. Postcards had been sent to New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and now Washington. She couldn’t have each field office doing its own thing.
She had plucked a Special Agent from the New York office to come to Washington to lead the task force, aware that she saw a lot of herself in Andrea Markoff, a ten-year veteran of the FBI and a real pistol, always on a full burn and as smart as they came. Markoff was over the moon at being mentored by the highest-ranking woman in the Bureau and was ferociously loyal.
When Nancy stopped by the task-force conference room, Andrea scampered to her side.
“Any progress on the videos?” Nancy asked.
“Cracked it like an egg!” Andrea said. “The new software programs got finished last night, and it looks like they’re working.”
“Let’s take a look.”
Nancy’s mantra had long been: shoe-leather work breaks cases. She’d learned that working with Will on her first big case, and the lesson had been validated over and over throughout the years. The only hard evidence to latch onto were the postcards. All of them were postmarked in Manhattan and all passed through one of seven post-office branches. That meant the sender or senders had in all likelihood physically deposited the cards in several of the 167 street or central boxes that fed these branches.
It was easy enough to narrow down the days in question based on the postmarks on batches of cards and given the near-total blanket of CCTV coverage of Manhattan streets, there was good video for almost every box. The problem was the sheer volume of data. For any day in question, there were twenty-four hours of footage to review for some twenty street boxes or 480 hours of images to scrutinize looking for a recognizable face attached to a letter drop. And multiply that by the eight relevant days over the past two months that corresponded to each batch of postcards. The search for a common face or faces was a classic needle-in-a-haystack scenario.
Andrea’s idea was to get the geeks involved. With Nancy’s blessing, she created a posse of analysts to write code that would compress the videos and include only images where a person’s hand could be seen touching the handle of a postbox.
“It’s running now,” Andrea said. “It’s not perfect, but it’s weeding out 99 percent of the crap.”
An entire side of the conference room was covered by video screens. Andrea called up the January 8 video feeds, and the wall lit with the best angles for the twenty-one postboxes that fed the Village Post Office on Varick Street. “Run images,” she said.
A group of agents and techs in the conference room fell in behind Andrea and Nancy as the chopped-up time-stamped video feeds began playing back.
The algorithms seemed to be effective. The choppy videos were pretty much limited to images of people depositing letters into the boxes.
“This would have been even tougher ten years ago,” Andrea said. “I mean, when w
as the last time you mailed a letter?”
Nancy remembered. When Will was away from her in Florida, she liked to send him real cards, not e-ones. The last was a birthday card in November, something with a sailboat and a sunset. She pushed it out of her mind—she didn’t want to get teary in front of her people.
It must have been a bitterly cold day because many of the people on the videos were wearing scarves and hats. “I’d say there’s only going to be a 50-percent hit rate for facial IDs,” Nancy said.
“If we’re lucky,” Andrea said. “But at least we’ve got time-shrunk material to work with.”
Nancy’s NetPen vibrated. She popped an earpiece in and stepped to the back of the room to take the call.
It was Ron Moore from MI5. She braced herself when Moore’s assistant announced he was coming onto the line. But the call turned out to be an empty piece of courtesy. He was merely informing her that his London team had arrived on the scene in Yorkshire and was going to be deploying into the field shortly. They had a number of leads which they were going to investigate methodically. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Nancy?” he asked by way of signing off.
From the corner of her eye she became aware of something. On one of the video screens.
Her heart went into a full gallop.
“No, Ron. Thank you. Please call if you get anything.” She pulled out her earpiece and shouted across the room, “Middle row! Second screen from the left! Freeze it and go back fifteen seconds!”
Andrea halted that screen with a palm gesture and swiped it into reverse with another. “Play,” she said.
Nancy was close to it now at Andrea’s side. “There! Stop!”
The screen froze. A hatless man had one hand on the handle of a postbox and another hand in the slot.
“Jesus,” Nancy said.
“What?” Andrea looked puzzled.
“That one. Do a facial capture and run it against all your other footage. And do it fast. I know him.”
Chapter 18
Will had an inkling of what he was going to find behind the door, but his suspicion was hardly enough to blunt the numbing reality of seeing it.
He had imagined what it might be like to be in the same room as them, a fly on the wall, but these kinds of musings had been akin to imagining having a time machine to go back and witness the goings-on at the court of King Henry VIII or wander the grottos of Lascaux while prehistoric man painted frescoes.
There were seven of them.
The oldest was perhaps in his seventies, the youngest, not much older than Will’s own son. They sat at two simple tables at the front of the room; unoccupied tables stretched into the black reaches of the chamber.
All seven looked up when they entered. Will saw seven sets of emerald eyes briefly staring at him before they all quickly resumed their work.
“It’s all right, they’re friends,” Cacia said to them soothingly, but it seemed to Will that her words mattered as much to them as reassurances given to household pets. It was her tone that mattered.
There was no fear betrayed in their comportment, no curiosity, no sense of a violation of privacy. They were mute and blank-faced, their lips relaxed in their labors, their eyes nonblinking. Every one of them had longish ginger hair, straight and fine, the older men thinning at the top, showing scaly scalps.
Will was drawn to their hands. Long, delicate fingers grasped black ballpoint pens depositing flowing, cursive script onto white A4-sized sheets of paper. They sat in padded wooden chairs, their paper illuminated by high-intensity lamps. All had the pale complexion of basement dwellers and the spindly habitus of men whose bodies existed only to support the mind.
As he had walked through the Library, he had imagined them wearing the flowing robes of ancient monks, but their garb was commonplace and, as such, incongruous. They had uniforms of a sort but the clothes spoke more to household convenience than regimentation—khaki trousers, white socks and sandals and light blue cotton shirts.
“Dad,” Phillip said.
“I know,” Will replied. “I know.”
They fell silent again watching, slack-jawed as the ginger-haired men did what their kind had been doing since the eighth century: writing down names and dates. And next to each name was the simple notation—natus or mors, born or died.
“Can we go closer?” Will asked.
Haven ushered them in until they were standing between the two occupied tables.
“They’re working on th’ thirteenth of April 2611,” Cacia said softly. “They’ve been on it for almost a week.”
“In that time, about one hundred thousand people’ll be born and one hundred thousand’ll die every day,” Haven said, using the hushed voice one uses in a library. “I totaled it one day when I had nowt better t’ do.”
“They’ll be in balance,” her mother said. “I hope it’s a natural one.”
“It’s my job t’ count th’ pages,” the girl said. “When they get t’ six hundred, Andrew, one of me brothers, binds ’em in a book.”
The body odor of the men, a sweet, fermented smell, filled Will’s nostrils. “What do you call them?” he asked.
“They each have names,” Haven said. “But we call ’em the writers. For twelve centuries that’s what they’ve been called.”
Suddenly Will and Phillip startled when one of the writers in front of them pushed his chair back and rose.
“Don’t worry,” Cacia said. “Haven, take care of Matthew.”
Matthew was young, perhaps twenty, with reddish stubble on his chin and above his lip. He walked toward the door and stood before it, his hands at his side, shifting his weight on his feet.
Haven opened it for him and both of them left.
“He had t’ go t’ th’ loo,” Cacia said. “They’re like children, really. They need constant attending. We’ve got t’ feed ’em, clean ’em, shave ’em—cause they don’t like beards, put them t’ bed at night and wake them up in th’ morning. I’m not complaining—it’s what we do—but it’s a lot of work, I can tell ya. All the Lightburns are involved. The entire farm exists to support ’em. You met me husband and ’is brother. Haven’s got two older brothers, Andrew and Douglas, and an aunt, Gail who’s got two girls, both small. Like I said, it’s our duty. All of us do our part, all our wakin’ hours.”
Will could see that Phillip had shifted his attention from looking over one of the writer’s shoulders to listening to Cacia. “But Haven goes to school,” Phillip said.
“She does, and not of her own choice or our choice. Not by a long shot. She’s always been a free spirit, that one, wandering off, picking ’er wildflowers and following butterflies onto th’ fells. Years back, th’ headmaster of th’ school in Kirkby Stephen was up walking the fells above th’ farm when he happened upon ’er and was curious why he didn’t recognize ’er. She was young at the time and admitted she lived down on the farm. Well, th’ local authorities visited us and wanted to know why th’ girl wasn’t going t’ school. It was a lot of bother. We live off the map as much as we can, you see. We don’t use th’ doctors, don’t take benefits, and here they are, snooping around. We’re used t’ th’ DEFRA people coming ’round t’ tag th’ sheep and cows, but we never had trouble with offcomers muckin’ about with our children. We had to hide th’ young’uns down here with the writers every time some busybody showed up. But they got their hooks into Haven, and we either had t’ send her off t’ school or jump through all sorts of hoops for home schooling, which was even worse since they’d come and inspect ya all th’ time. So aye, Phillip, Haven’s been the only Lightburn who’s gone t’ school. It probably accounts for why she did th’ stupid thing contactin’ you.”
Will jumped in with a question. “There are seven writers. They get old, they die, but they don’t die out, do they?”
Cacia sighed. “Ah, you’ve spotted our biggest challenge.”
Will had found a weak spot. He had to exploit it even if it was going to upset his son. “Tell me,
Cacia, is Haven next?”
Cacia nodded solemnly. “We want her t’ be a wee bit older, but aye.”
Will was right about Phillip because the boy almost came out of his shoes. “Are you serious? With one of them?”
The writers stopped their work at the shouting but resumed in unison a few seconds later.
“It’s our way, Phillip. It’s always been our way,” Cacia answered patiently.
“Leave her alone!” Phillip demanded gallantly. “If it’s your way, why don’t you do it?”
Cacia touched a young writer lightly on the shoulders. “This lad’s mine. And Matthew too.”
Will kept drilling. “How does Haven feel about this obligation of hers?”
“She’s not thrilled, is she? She’s seen the outside world in school. She fancies boys. I reckon she fancies you, Phillip. Maybe all that played into her deciding t’ contact ya. But she’ll do what th’ Lightburn women are supposed t’ do. It’s for th’ glory of God. It’s bigger than us. As it is, our generation’s been slackin’. They’re only seven of ’em now. Look at all the empty tables behind ’em. In the past, there’s been twenty, thirty a time.”
“So it’s up to Haven, then her younger cousins, to get the numbers up,” Will said harshly.
“Dad, we can’t let that happen!” Phillip said.
“I’d respectfully ask the two of you not t’ be judgmental of us,” Cacia said sadly. “There are greater forces in the universe than th’ sensibilities of young girls.”
Haven returned with Matthew. “Dad’s coming,” she said. “We’d better take ’em back t’ th’ dormitory.”
Will had a flood of thoughts. Grab one of the ginger-haired men around the neck and use him as a hostage to get out. Do the same with Cacia or the girl. Do something! But he kept returning to Phillip’s safety and decided to fight with words only.
“Cacia, you’ve got to let us go,” he said. “Haven was right. The world needs to know there’s no Horizon. Billions of people are suffering needlessly, scared to death over something that’s not going to happen.”
