by Noah Mann
“Yes,” Olin said, answering the doubt my slack silence expressed. “The Central Intelligence Agency.”
I shook my head, slowly. There might have been dispute in the gesture. Or just denial.
“You don’t have to believe me, but that won’t change the reality of what I just told you.”
“The CIA,” I said. “The CIA?”
“Langley,” Olin said, with just a hint of nostalgia. “The Company. Whatever you want to call it. Den of spies. Black Ops Central. All of those things are true and false.”
Black is white. White is black.
Neil’s parting words came to me without warning, the flash of memory bursting like a thunderbolt.
Neil...
For a moment I thought of my friend. Just thought of him. Of our simple times. I pictured his dumb smile. Imagined his almost impish laugh. That was how I remembered Neil Moore.
The Neil Moore I knew.
“This makes no sense,” I said, coming up from the recollections.
“Doesn’t have to,” Olin said.
I fixed on the man now. As calm and knowing as his gaze had regarded me, mine now bore at him with the opposite intensity.
“So you’re some master spy, I guess,” I challenged Olin.
The clumsy jab bothered him not at all.
“You can insult me, but your friend is what he was, and what he still is.”
What he still is...
“Are you saying he’s...performing some mission? That his leaving us was planned?”
At that instant, if only for a few seconds, the tables turned, with Olin in the dark without any apparent way to throw light upon what he’d been tripped up by.
“What do you mean ‘leave’?”
I could have easily withheld information, which he clearly was doing, maintaining as much of a one-way flow of information as possible. But I needed to know more. I needed to know what he knew. For my own benefit, and, maybe, for everyone else’s as well.
“A stealth helicopter came down one day and took him and his family away,” I said.
“Family?”
I explained about Grace, and Krista, and the child that they would have had by now, but did not reveal details about the baby, wanting to hold close the fact that my friend’s family had since returned. I shared the tale of how Neil had reached my refuge north of Whitefish, our journey together continuing from there in search of Eagle One. Then to our trek across the wasteland to find the salvation in a greenhouse. And on to our mission north to Skagway, and then south again to our adopted home in Bandon.
“That explains a few things,” Olin said as he processed what I’d just shared.
“To you, maybe,” I told him. “So what the hell is he doing? Why did he leave?”
Olin considered the question for a moment. Then he, too, seemed to summon some memory, a quick glint flashing in his gaze. He smiled at me.
“I don’t know what he’s doing,” Olin said. “I know what he was supposed to do before he took off and joined up with you.”
In that statement I found part of an answer to the question that had nagged since I’d first laid eyes on the stranger by the cabin in the dead woods.
“You were looking for me to find him.”
Olin might have nodded. Or his head might have just shifted as he crafted a response. His momentary hesitation, though, was all the confirmation I needed to my query.
“Why are you looking for him?”
The man, the spy, didn’t answer.
“Why are you looking for him?” I repeated.
“You won’t understand,” Olin told me.
“I’m a fairly bright guy.”
“Intelligence has nothing to do with it,” he said. “Some things people just won’t accept.”
“Try me.”
Olin sized me up for a moment. Not in any physical sense, but in the way I looked at him. My seriousness. It seemed as though he was looking inside me.
“I’m looking for him because he called out to me,” Olin said.
“Do you want to try being a little less vague?”
Olin drew a shallow breath. His gaze dipped to the tabletop.
“Ranger,” he said.
Ranger. Ranger. Ranger.
He looked up after a moment.
“Exactly what you’re hearing on the radio,” he said. “What anyone with functioning com system is hearing.”
“What does Ranger mean?”
Olin hesitated. If what he had said about himself was true, then revealing information was far from second nature to him. The exact opposite, in fact, might very well be the only mode of operation he knew how to function within.
Even for him, though, the realization that times had changed, inexorably and forever, could not be ignored.
“It was our code word,” Olin said. “Whenever we were on missions. It had a specific meaning.”
“And what meaning was that?”
“Danger,” Olin answered.
“So it was a warning?” I pressed. “And you think it still is?”
To these simple questions, Olin offered no response. No direct response, that is.
“The security of a secret increases exponentially as the number of people who know it approaches zero,” he said.
In his own way, Olin was telling me to tread no more on that path of questioning.
“You want me, want us, to believe that the message he’s repeating is meant for you? Just for you?”
Olin sat in silence for a moment, glancing once or twice to the darkened window and the people he knew to be beyond the reflective glass.
“I thought you could help me,” Olin said. “Neil’s movements were traced to your Montana place, then here with the transmissions from the plane you flew in.”
“All while the world was falling apart you people and your technical wizards were tracking him,” I said. “Tracking us.”
“To a dead end, it seems,” Olin said, as if admitting defeat.
He might be doing so, but I was not. I wanted more. I needed more if I was going to fill in the blank spots of my understanding. But snippets of some previously impossible possibility were beginning to form in my thoughts.
“He was on a mission before this all started, wasn’t he?”
Olin didn’t satisfy me with a reply.
“You both were,” I said, letting my supposition encompass him now.
The man’s silence lingered. As it did, my frustration simmered.
“What was your mission?” I asked, some force now in my tone and manner. “The last thing that you did? That he did?”
“You think it’s that easy?” Olin challenged me. “You just say pretty please and I violate an oath I took?”
“I haven’t said pretty please,” I told the man. “And I’m not going to.”
Olin eased back in his chair, relaxing it seemed. Maybe he felt himself freed of the restraints his vocation had placed upon him. Or, possibly, he suspected that I wasn’t up to the task of extracting answers from one who was unwilling.
He was wrong about the latter, if that was his estimation. I’d crossed my own lines of morality in Skagway to pry what was needed from a Russian infiltrator. That bit of me, which I’d long ago thought rock solid, had turned malleable. Our grip on existence was so tenuous that extreme measures, however ugly, were sometimes necessary. I could live with that, even if it made me less of the man I’d always prided myself in being.
Here, though, I doubted any violent coercion would be necessary.
“Look, you’re already keeping secrets,” I told Olin. “You won’t answer some questions, so answer this one. The world your missions were carried out in is gone. The men who sent you on it are probably turning to dust already.”
“The woman,” Olin said.
“What?”
“A woman sent us on our last mission,” he corrected me. “Allison Milbank. And she is dead. I know that because my friend, your friend, he killed her before he headed off west to
Montana.”
So, according to this man, my friend was not only a spy, but a murderer.
“Neil Moore is not who you think he is,” Olin said. “He never has been.”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table.
“What was the mission you two were on?”
Olin’s body tilted forward, his own forearms on the table now, the distance between us narrowed to almost nothing.
“We were sent to get samples of the biological agents,” Olin said. “The blight and its cousin.”
“What do you mean? What cousin?”
The man smiled at me and sat back again, appraising me as one might a child who’d just asked the most precious, obvious question.
“Please tell me you don’t think that dead plants were the intent of this,” Olin said.
“Dead plants have done a number on the neighborhood, if you haven’t noticed.”
“But there are still neighbors,” Olin reminded me, an ominous suggestion in his words.
For an instant I flashed back to Ben. Colonel Ben Michaels. He’d said something, about the Legionnaire officer and the possibility that something more than the blight had been developed by the Iraqi scientist he’d coopted.
“Borgier did have something else,” I said.
Olin reacted visibly as I spoke that name.
“Yeah,” I said, realizing I’d played a card he didn’t imagine in my hands. “Also known as Gray Jensen. An American who was an officer in the French Foreign Legion in Iraq during Desert Storm.”
“So Neil did tell you.”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”
I shared the story of our encounter with Michaels, an Air Force officer on his own desperate mission. And of our escape through a hell fire unleashed upon a swath of Wyoming prairie.
Olin absorbed what I’d just told him and shook his head.
“Madness,” he said.
“There’s a lot of that going around,” I agreed with him.
“Neil knew all this,” Olin said. “He knew it long before your colonel friend told his tale.”
In another time, in the world as it was, I would have denied the man’s statement any quarter in my thoughts. But my friend had held secrets. I knew this. His leaving was for reasons I still did not understand. If he was part of our nation’s intelligence apparatus, as unbelievable as that might have seemed to me, then accepting that he’d known all along what Ben Michaels had told us would not be beyond the possible.
“What else did Borgier have?” I pressed, returning to the line of inquiry which mattered most at the moment. “I deserve to know. We all deserve to know.”
I wasn’t certain if the manner in which I’d implored Olin for an answer had worked, or if he’d already decided the secret was no longer worth keeping. Whichever it was, he held nothing back when he began to speak.
“Your friend and I were tasked with obtaining pure samples of what Borgier had gotten his hands on. BA Four Eleven and BA Four Twelve.”
“What does that mean? Those acronyms?”
“BA,” Olin repeated. “Biological Agent. Four Eleven was the blight.”
“And Four Twelve?”
He hesitated, a half cough, half chuckle filling the void of explanation.
“What do you think?” he asked me.
He knew what I thought. The possibility had been hinted at by both of us earlier in our exchange. BA 412 would be an agent which would affect humans. A blight for our species.
“How bad?”
“If you bury yourself in a salt mine for fifty years while everyone else is dying up top, not so bad,” Olin said. “But if you’re up top...”
Find a hole and bury yourself...
That had been among Neil’s final directives to me. His final warnings. Was this what he’d been referring to? This cousin of the blight and the ravages it might bring to Bandon? To all of us?
“There’s no immunity? No vaccine?”
Olin shrugged and gave a half shake of his head at the likelihood of anything I’d suggested.
“Who knows? Maybe there’s some Yak herder in Siberia whose genetic makeup will leave him as the loneliest man on earth. Except his Yaks are all dead, so he’s already dead.”
I thought on this revelation for a moment. It was no more fantastical than the blight would have been branded a few years before it ravaged the planet. Mother Nature, with a little help from a man of science, had opened her bag of tricks on the whole of humanity. But, if Olin was to be believed, one trick still remained to be used.
“So you and Neil were trying to get samples of the blight and this four-twelve thing so the government could work on a cure,” I said.
Olin’s silence was as far from a confirming reaction as I could have imagined.
“What did you do?”
He took a moment to craft his thoughts. To make them palatable. As it turned out, that was not possible.
“I was assigned to get an original sample of Four Eleven,” Olin said.
“The blight.”
“Right. Neil was attached to a SEAL team that raided a location in the Caribbean where a supply of Four Twelve was supposed to exist.”
“So he got one part of this, and you got the other.”
“I have no idea what he got,” Olin said.
“What do you mean?”
“He delivered his sample to a military lab, and then he split. A few days later the virologists there determined that what Neil had handed over wasn’t anything resembling a viral agent.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was colored water with some dissolved organic compounds,” Olin explained. “Our director, Allison, personally went out to his farm to find out what went wrong. She was thinking that the team had grabbed some other sample by mistake. The next day when our operators raided the place they found his father, offed by his own hand, and Allison Milbank dead with two bullets in her head.”
“Why would he kill her?” I asked.
“What, you think your old friend isn’t capable of cold blooded murder?”
I flashed back to the sight of Neil executing the trio of cannibals we’d come across near my Montana refuge. In that, as disturbing as it was, I’d seen a righteousness. A violent and necessary response to a reprehensible new reality.
But to kill a woman, a superior. There must have been a reason. At least one that he could live with.
“Why would he kill her?” I repeated.
“Fear,” Olin said, holding nothing back on this subject. “It was death. Like nothing the world had seen. We had intelligence that the Iraqi scientist had tested it on an isolated village. Everyone was dead within days of one resident being infected. The whole place was incinerated after the test. Neil was truly scared of what the government might do with four-twelve.”
“Why would he think the government would use it?”
Once again, Olin was quiet, the silence telling.
“He had reason to think they’d use it,” I said.
“You can’t understand what that time was like there, in Washington,” Olin said. “With this slow motion death machine rolling toward the US, there were power grabs. Internal fights. Factions struggling for the little influence they knew would remain after all hell broke loose. The only way to get a handle on it was to get some control.”
“Control?”
Olin nodded.
“Control of what?”
“Of when the blight would explode here,” he said.
For the briefest instant I didn’t comprehend the subtlety of what he was saying. The simplicity. And then, like a bright light flashing once in a dark room, I saw it. I understood.
“We released the blight before it actually got here? In the States?”
Olin cleared his throat. If there had been a pitcher of water and a glass before him, as there might have been at any congressional hearing men like him, and his superiors, were once subject to, I expected he would have taken a long, slow drink to compose his thought
s.
“There was a belief that remnants of society would survive a sudden collapse better than one that crept along,” he explained, though the conviction he held in his own words seemed dubious. “Less time for rioting, the breakdown of order.”
“How’d that work out?” I challenged the man.
“Doesn’t really matter,” Olin fired back. “By the time the worst of the blight was taking hold, the government was fracturing. There were competing orders. Mini coups. Assassinations. You lined up with who you believed in, or who you believed could keep you alive.”
“And who did you throw in with?”
Olin let out a breathy, brief chuckle.
“I stayed with the red white and blue. The home team. The masters who’d engineered the disaster.”
“And Neil went with the Unified Government,” I said.
I’d surprised Olin again, knowing something he’d suspected I had been in the dark about. Grace had enlightened me, had enlightened all of us, upon her return, to the extent she was able.
“How do you know about that?” Olin asked. “He wouldn’t tell you that. Not if he kept everything else from you.”
It was my turn to withhold, and after a few seconds of silence on my end, Olin chose not to press the question any further.
“That name came later,” Olin said. “But the players now were the players then. And your friend, my friend, he chose to walk the path with them. He thought that my side, which used to be our side, might already have Four Twelve, and he couldn’t accept that. Not after realizing his paymasters had advanced the timetable of the blight reaching the U.S.”
“So what did he do with BA Four Twelve?”
Olin’s face shrugged.
“The only man I know who can answer that is Neil Moore,” he said.
“But you have a suspicion.”
“I’m trained to be suspicious,” Olin said.
“You think he took it to the Unified Government,” I said.
To my surprise, Olin shook his head at that suggestion.
“I think he planned to,” Olin said. “To counter what he thought Uncle Sam already had. A sort of germ equivalent of mutually assured destruction.”
MAD. It had been the cornerstone of deterrence in the nuclear age. Using a weapon of such immense destructive power on a similarly armed enemy would bring an equally devastating retaliatory strike. That such a mentality and strategy survived into this new age did not surprise me. That my friend Neil was somehow involved in such machinations did.
