Zeke and I walked down a trail that connected to a jogging loop. I hadn’t run for exercise since the IED, and I was eager to see how healed up I actually was. Zeke was an indifferent runner, and he was getting kind of flabby, but I guess he wanted to see too. We started off slow, real slow, just a little airborne shuffle, but pretty soon I had to hold down my pace. After about a mile, Zeke slowed to a walk, huffing.
“Go on, man. I’m out of shape. I’ll make the circuit at my own speed.”
I nodded, then took off at an easy run. Soon I was feeling really good, kind of high. Runner’s high, I guess. The second mile took me around past the cabin, and I kept on going, waving at Spooky, looking out the upper barn window. I sped up again, stretching out. I breathed deeply and easily, and felt like I used to, before the explosion that broke my body. Better, even. I felt like I was in my teens again, qualifying for track and field. I might have had a shot at the Olympics if I hadn’t enlisted in a fit of patriotic fervor. I was pretty sure I was running at nearly a four-minute-mile pace.
Fantastic. Whatever the downside, this made it all seem worthwhile.
I lapped Zeke in the last quarter-mile, blasting past him to the cabin, then jogging back, cooling down. I walked the last couple of hundred yards along with him.
He looked at me sideways, like I had two heads. “Holy crap. Holy crap,” he kept repeating.
“I try not to put those words together anymore, but I agree with the sentiment,” I answered dryly. “I am a bit hungry, about what I expected. And thirsty.” I ran my head under the outside water pump, then took a bunch of swallows. It tasted metallic. I pumped it a few more times for Zeke, then we walked over to the barn to see what Spooky was doing.
Inside, we found another vehicle, a Toyota SUV, and another, younger man of about twenty-five. He was talking to Tran, and looked a lot like him, at least to my eyes. I was saved from a charge of racial insensitivity by the introduction.
“Vinny Nguyen,” the man said.
Spooky gave him a glare.
“Or Nguyen Van Vinh, if you ask honorable Uncle-san here.”
Double glare.
“I work tech and IT for Brownstone.” At my blank look he went on, “The security contractor. Uncle Spoo-”
Spooky lashed out like a striking snake, to slap Vinny on the back of the head. “You have not earned the right to call me that,” he said harshly.
“Uncle Tran Pham,” Vinny started again, heavily, with a careful sideways look at his uncle, “called me last night and said I’d be helping out. With something. Which he hasn’t explained yet. Nor has he told me how much it pays, or how long the job is, or anything that normal people get to know when they do a job.” He crossed his arms to glare back at Spooky.
Tran snapped, “This is not normal job. Maybe pay a lot, maybe pay nothing. I don’t call you as a favor to you, I call you because you are family and supposed to be trusted. If you can keep your mouth closed. Do not shame me in front of my commander and his comrade.” Spooky might speak English pretty well, but his heart was still in the mountains of Viet Nam, and his diction tended to fall apart under stress.
It occurred to me that he and my dad would get along famously.
Vinny dropped his eyes, the rebelliousness of youth warring with his family, his inherited culture and the force of Tran’s personality. The latter bunch won, and he nodded his agreement. “Okay, okay. What do I need to do?”
Tran pointed at Zeke. “You do what he tell you to. He your boss now.”
Zeke nodded, said to Vinny, “We need to research someone – who he was, who he is, where he works, where he might be now, everything. And we can’t be noticed. There’s big mojo against us, maybe even NSA, so it has to be very clean and light. You up for that?”
“Duh. Nothin’ to it.”
I noticed they had already set up some kind of satellite antenna and a control box up in the barn loft, aimed at the roof. Looking closer, I saw the ceiling looked different above it.
“Plastic, invisible to the satellite signal,” said Zeke, following my gaze.
A cable trailed from the setup down to the floor nearby. The two Nguyens quickly set up a couple of tables and started breaking out computers and mysterious electronic boxes from the Pelican cases in the back of the Toyota.
By the time Zeke and I were done showering and cooking breakfast, the electronic setup was done. We carried the food out to them and everyone ate while Vinny started on his hacking and cracking. I wrote down everything I knew and could think of that would help, which was little enough. I kept myself busy by breaking out my own laptop and doing some general searches – the police blotters near where I lived, anything on my street, Trey’s name, innocuous things like that. I got nothing, so after an hour or so I went back to the cabin to help Zeke with some home repairs, make-work while the wiz kid did his thing.
By lunchtime Vinh had a preliminary outline. “All right, here’s the gist. Is this your girl?” He showed me a picture of Elise, with longer hair.
“Yeah, that’s her.”
“Okay, Elise Wallis is straight up until about five years ago, when she gets diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She gets treatment, goes into remission, finishes her Master’s in microbiology at Texas A&M, gets hired by the CDC – Centers for Disease Control. Cancer comes back with a vengeance after about two years just as she’s finishing up her PhD, at which point she goes on disability and into aggressive treatment, which fails this time. So she’s in hospice, and a month later, she gets hired.” Vinny had a smug look as he spun around in his chair.
“Hired by who? Not the Agency, or you wouldn’t have that look on your face.”
“Nope,” he grinned. “By a little company called Integrated National Strategies, Inc. get it? INS-INC, in-synch! Like the old boy band.” He laughed uproariously and spun again, until Spooky stopped the chair with his foot and a hard look.
“All right. It’s indistinguishable from about a hundred little consulting companies that usually hover around the big defense contractors looking for scraps, usually because they have some Federal set-aside – Service Disabled Veteran Owned, or Minority, or Women-owned, like that. Except this company isn’t a set-aside, and they have never subcontracted with a big company. In fact, I can’t find who pays them, but they seem to have about fifteen employees…most of whom have worked in the black world before.”
“Huh,” said Zeke. “So Elise isn’t working directly for the Agency…but indirectly…”
“Right,” answered Vinny. “These guys got ‘Separate Cell’ and ‘Plausible Deniability’ written all over them. There’s probably only one guy in the company that really knows what’s going on and reports to their masters. The rest just do what the nice people that are paying them gobs of money tell them to.”
I said, “That means when she said ‘company,’ she meant a real company, not ‘Company,’ not Agency. That means we actually don’t even know who they are working for. Could be anyone in the black world – could be any government agency, could be a corporation, a rich individual…could be one canny operator that got ahold of this treatment, and is trying to develop it or market it or whatever…Vinny, what kind of people do they have working for them?”
“Umm…if you can believe their online resumes, looks like a CEO, two program managers, an HR director, an executive assistant, an IT guy, a special security officer – that’s for clearances and information, not physical security. Six personal security specialists – there are your door-kickers and shooters. All of those have military or law enforcement backgrounds…Special Forces, Ranger, Airborne, Force Recon, sniper…Texas Ranger…if they aren’t BSing, a bunch of badasses.” He tossed a pile of stapled papers down on the table. “Figured you’d want to see these. Their dossiers.”
“Anyone named Jenkins?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he picked one of the packets up. “Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Fourth, one of the program managers. Yale grad, BA business, MBA, recruited by these guys straight o
ut of school. Old money, family has investments and concerns up in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Lumber, shipping, some other stuff. Probably being groomed for bigger and better things.” Vinny looked smug.
“Ah. That’s not good.” If I had to kill someone, why couldn’t it have been someone without a rich and powerful family?
Vinny shrugged, looked down for a moment. In fact, unless I missed my guess, he was holding something out on us, savoring the drama and triumph.
I looked at Spooky, raised an eyebrow.
He got it, shifted his stance that conveyed impatience to his nephew.
“Okay, here’s the kicker,” Vinh continued hurriedly. “The other two employees are scientists as well. So we got a microbiologist – Elise – a virologist, and an epidemiologist.”
“Only three. Ah’m only a po country doctah,” I put on my best hick accent, “but that sounds like they were working on the XH. And that narrows it down to some kind of germ. A virus, or other disease pathogen. And I’d have a tough time believing that a team of just three people could come up with something like this, though stranger things have happened.”
Tran spoke up. “Then they did not make it. They study it. Experiment. Decode. Perhaps replicate. Try to fix it, to get rid of the problems.”
I nodded.
“Where are they located?” asked Zeke.
“They have a Norfolk, Virginia office address.”
I felt a surge of relief, and I could see that Zeke had gotten it too. “That means we’re not going up against a well-funded, well-supported Agency effort. It’s something off to the side, something maybe they don’t even know about. Just a couple people probably, maybe only one, and like all bureaucracies, they have been slow to realize what they got. And maybe INS, Inc. hasn’t seen fit to tell them. Maybe their top guy – who’s the CEO?”
“Raphael Keith Durgan. Medical doctor, biologist. Formerly of the USDA, at Plum Island Animal Disease Center.”
“And the Department of Homeland Security took over the island in 2003, with the USDA becoming a tenant,” Zeke chimed in.
“How’d you know that?” I asked, surprised.
He grinned. “You get all over in spec ops.”
I shrugged. “So he’s working on disease, maybe some black projects there, because you know the USDA ain’t the only people doing biological work on the island. Not with Homeland Security running the show. He gets recruited because he has the clearances and has worked on stuff, maybe anthrax or weaponized smallpox or something we’ve never heard of. He gets put in charge of the research effort in this little company because somebody doesn’t want it in the regular system. The heavies are there to keep control of things. Must be the same thugs I saw at the Iron Saddle.”
I was feeling better and better about things, now that I believed this wasn’t an official effort. It was compartmentalized, maybe even rogue. And while the memory of executing Jenkins still pained me, it pained me less now that I knew he was off the reservation, maybe making up his own op as he went along, probably having read too many cheap spy novels. Unfortunately he ran into me. The old me.
I think the new me could have kept control.
One more little piece of the puzzle clicked into place, somewhere at the back of my mind, the part that worked unconsciously. I didn’t know what it was, I just knew it was working, and it would come up with something eventually.
Zeke replied, “That means we got a shot here. They don’t have the resources, unless their sponsor decides to call in some favors.” He looked at me. “Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful. They probably put you on federal fugitive lists, no-fly lists, terrorism watch and report lists. But that’s routine, low-level threat. It means we got breathing room, and it means we might be able to extract your girl Elise, get her away clean and pump her for everything she knows. Figure our next move from there.”
My girl Elise. Funny how that sounded good, though I’d only spent maybe fifteen minutes with her total. We all stared at each other for a few seconds, then I stuck my hand up. “I’m in.”
“Me too,” said Vinny.
Spooky grunted affirmatively.
Zeke grinned even wider. “God, it feels good to be operational again.”
“On your own dime, though,” I said wryly.
“If this thing turns out to be real and usable and helps Ricky, I’d sell everything I have to get it.”
I knew he was dead serious. He loved that kid.
“Well, I got twenty grand you can use.” I tossed him the packet of cash.
-9-
Vinny kept at his cyber-research with Uncle Spooky standing over him. That probably didn’t help much. Zeke eventually said something to the elder Nguyen, so he stalked away to do sneaky Spooky things.
Zeke and I cut back a few bushes that were crowding the cabin, and caught up on personal history. I felt elated but a bit fidgety, waiting on information, like the part between the warning order and the op order, when I knew I had to prepare for something but not for what. Waiting on the intel, which was always the best that could be had but was never as good as you wanted.
Intel specialists, poor schmucks, usually scrawny googly-eyed nerds with oversized Adam’s apples and way too much trivia packed into their noggins. And the worst thing was, for them, if they provided a perfect assessment, everyone just got on with the mission and no one remembered. If they missed anything, everyone hated them and no one forgot.
I’d rather be an operator any day.
I fidgeted until dinnertime, but a lot less than I would have. I could tell Zeke was a bit awkward around me, acting like I might pop or break or grow another head at any time. He tried to cover it, but I could tell. At the same time I was sure he very much wanted to find out what we needed to know. Desperately wanted to cure Ricky, if it could be done. Probably had other plans, as well. Zeke was a thinker, more than I was, and I never thought of myself as a dumb jock. A smart jock at least, if not a geek like Vinh. But Vinny was too young to think more than one or two steps ahead. Zeke was deep. Dummies don’t get to be senior officers in Special Forces.
We had venison for dinner, along with powdered mashed potatoes, boiled peas, bread and butter. It smelled heavenly. Spooky had brought a deer in, a little buck scrawny from winter, but he cooked up fine. I had no idea if it was deer season or even legal. I laughed to myself. My conscience had worse things to beat me up about right now than a deer out of season.
Over dinner, Vinny laid it out. “INS’s office is in Norfolk, but a few phone calls and some pretexting found out that only two people work there. One office, one front desk, one conference room, and a closet. Most of the employees live in Onancock.”
I looked blankly at him. In fact, we all did. I waited for someone to make a vulgar joke about such a funny name.
“It’s a little town up on the peninsula north of Norfolk. Here.” He spun around a map he had printed off, showed us.
“Why there?” I asked.
He smiled, kitty-cream. “I’ll show you. Look over here.” He pointed to the west, off the inner coast of the peninsula, at an island about ten miles off shore from the town of Onancock. There wasn’t even a name printed, but he’d handwritten “WATTS.”
“Watts?”
”Watts Island. Uninhabited for about a hundred years. The INS company bought it from the State of Virginia five years ago for two point five million dollars. Way overpaid for three acres of usable land and a bunch of wet rocks, but the state didn’t ask too many questions. For that price they got an easement to build a facility and do ‘environmental research.’ Here’s imagery.” He laid down three overhead photos of the little island, with good commercial resolution. Not government spy-satellite quality, but plenty for our purposes.
He’d marked the facility with a red circle. It looked like a big all-steel building, with two smaller ones of similar design, one at each end offset, with a parking lot between the three. In it was a lone white jeeplike vehicle. The buildings made a kind of ‘C�
�� shape with the open end to the east. There was a short paved road leading from the parking lot to a pier with a boathouse on the east shore.
On the west side of the complex there was a white ‘H’ in the middle of a cleared circle, the universal symbol for a helicopter landing pad. No helo showed on the photo and there didn’t seem to be a hangar. The only other distinguishing features were some sort of utility installations inside a fence next to the building, probably a pair of generators and what looked like a large and a small satellite dish.
“That’s where they are. I’d bet my next paycheck on it.”
“No deal,” said Zeke. “You make more than I do, and you’re probably right. Great work, Vinny.”
I said so too. Even Spooky looked pleased, which wasn’t something people saw very often.
“So here’s this thing,” I said musingly, “maybe the greatest discovery since fire and the wheel, and it’s all pretty much out in the open to be found.”
“That’s actually the best way to hide something anymore,” said Vinny. “Buried in a mass of innocuous data. I had to dig for this stuff. Without the idea that they had something valuable, they would be just another consulting company among hundreds, sucking down the government cheese and churning out reports nobody reads.”
“The Scarlet Letter,” I said. “Hiding in plain sight.”
“I think you mean the Purloined Letter,” said Zeke. “Unless you think these guys are wearing a mark of shame.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, you never know.” I guess my brain wasn’t perfectly healed yet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
We all looked at the photos for a while, and started familiarizing ourselves with the stack of resumes of the employees. No one had formally spoken it into being yet, but we all knew we were going to be planning a rescue operation.
Eden Plague - Latest Edition Page 28
