He made billions but ran into trouble when America's religious fanatics got in the way of his stem-cell research, which required the destruction of aborted fetuses. They called him a baby killer, these Catholic and evangelical Christian hypocrites, who themselves benefited from his drugs and who carried out "God's work" in Third World countries by administering his vaccines to the poor and sick.
It was then that he began to consider that his great-grandfather, who didn't even work on live embryos but on prisoners as good as dead, may have been misunderstood.
Politics from Nazis or the White House had no place in science, he realized, and neither did religion. But the burdens of government regulations on his company's research became too much to bear. He had nowhere to turn in the private sector-except the Homeland Security-Industrial Complex.
And it was here, outside the gaze of Wall Street and the world, that Seavers found not only billions of dollars at his disposal but the cloak of "national security" to perform the kinds of research and experiments-mostly on enlisted soldiers-that he would never have been able to pull off in the private sector. Literally decades of research had been compressed into less than 36 months. The result was the SeaGen smart vaccine, his crowning achievement.
Now, however, like his great-grandfather, he was reduced to dealing with imbecile masters at the Pentagon, hunting for buried globes, and crossing swords with "astro-archaeologists" like Conrad Yeats.
What an insane world, he thought. Time for a new one.
Seavers heard the bathroom door open and saw a whiff of steam from the shower billow out. Then a long, tan leg emerged from the mist and the naked form of Brooke Scarborough stepped toward him.
Seavers admired Brooke's body as she walked over and slipped under the sheets next to him. It had been weeks since they had sex, and it infuriated him that he had to share Brooke with Conrad Yeats.
Worse, she had put him in a bind with the Alignment, which wanted her dead after she had allowed Yeats to find the code book right under her nose and slip away. He had intervened on her behalf, arguing that the death of Senator Scarborough's daughter would only bring even more unwanted scrutiny at the eleventh hour. Moreover, if there was anyone Yeats would turn to once he popped back up on the grid, it would be her. The Alignment bought his argument, and she had won a reprieve.
So far, however, Yeats seemed to be able to live without her. Brooke was certain that Yeats felt so guilty about reconnecting with Serena Serghetti that he was hiding from her as much as he was the Alignment. If so, Yeats was a weaker man than he thought.
"The president and Packard told me about the globe," he said. "Did you know this was what that tombstone and book code nonsense was all about?"
Her silence said yes. He didn't know which annoyed him more: that the Alignment had kept him out of the loop or that she had. As a biological legacy of the Alignment, he always resented it when those adopted into the organization knew more than he did. Especially the true identity of one or more of the 30 who ruled the Alignment and knew all the names and faces. In two days so would he.
"They want me to find it."
"You?" She looked at him with frightened eyes. "Have you told Osiris?"
"Of course. Nothing's changed. I simply have to keep this globe from falling into the hands of either the Church or the State. And now the federal government has given me the men and muscle to do that. Meanwhile, you're going to have to be on the lookout for Yeats. He has few places to turn now. One of them is bound to be you."
She said nothing.
It was an awkward pause, but Seavers didn't mind her discomfort. In fact, he took perverse pleasure in it and the knowledge of pleasure soon to come.
"Max, you're as cool and confident of yourself as ever," she told him. "But you only know Conrad Yeats the specimen. Not the man."
"Unlike, say, you?" he replied with ice in his voice.
She was terrified. He could see it in her eyes. "I'm just saying that there's always a body count when people go after him."
Seavers let out a loud laugh and couldn't stop laughing. It was too funny, really.
"After tonight, Brooke, the only body you'll need to worry about is yours."
21
THE NEXT MORNING Conrad stood in his change of clothes outside the Starbucks on Wisconsin looking at his watch. It was barely 5:30 a.m., and already the line to see his old friend Danny Z was out the door.
Daniel Motamed Zadeh-"Danny Z" to friends-worked as a barista behind the counter. Danny had let his hair grow long since his days at the Pentagon and had it in a ponytail, looking like Antonio Banderas in Zorro. But Conrad could tell it was him even from the back of the line. Ten minutes later Conrad stepped up to the counter and looked Danny Z in the eyeballs for the first time in a decade.
"Tall nonfat latte," he told Danny as he slipped him three George Washingtons. "The name's Bubba."
Danny marked up the order specs on the outside of an empty white Starbucks cup and looked over Conrad's shoulder and said, "Next customer, please."
Just like that, they were done.
Conrad ambled over to the far counter where several patrons waited to pick up their orders-K street types, a couple of diplomats and a college intern fetching orders for her congressman's entire staff. He couldn't help but notice the headline below the fold of the front page of the Post that one of the K street guys was reading:
False Bioterror Scare
Clears U.S. Capitol Then the guy lowered his paper and looked straight at him. Conrad shifted his gaze quickly to scan the mugs on the shelves to the side. They were always coming up with new ones. He was tempted to buy a pair-one for him and one for Serena.
When a barista called the name "Bob" nobody answered. Conrad figured "Bob" was "Bubba," lost in translation.
One sip told him that was the case, and as he walked out to the street he looked at the side of his cup and noticed the peculiar markings for his latte: there were the three symbols for the constellations from his father's tombstone, along with a new, fourth symbol which Danny had inserted.
Strung together the translation on the side of his Starbucks cup read:
Bootes + Leo + Virgo = Bad Alignment.
Tell me something I don't know, Conrad wondered, but when he looked back inside the store Danny Z was no longer behind the counter. Another barista, a blonde, was taking orders.
Conrad went round back to the alley and stood by the trash bins behind the store. It was starting to drizzle. He sipped his coffee and waited. Danny Z made slamming good coffee, although this probably wasn't what his parents in Beverly Hills had planned for their little genius when he went off to MIT.
Danny came from an Iranian family that fled Tehran when the mullahs toppled the government of the Shah of Iran decades ago. They settled in the Trousdale Estates part of Beverly Hills with other Persian Jews and pretty much kept to themselves while sending their kids to Beverly Hills High School, which eventually had so many Persians that by the time Danny was going there the school was printing its programs in English and Farsi. It was only a matter of time before the CIA recruiters called, always looking for a few good Iranians with connections to the old country. Daniel Motamed Zadeh, tired of his cars and Persian princesses and prospects for more of the same, was ripe for a higher calling and became a spy for his beloved America, the Great Satan so far as the current regime in Tehran was concerned.
Danny Z had left National Intelligence at the Pentagon a few years back under a cloud of bitter recriminations on both sides. This after he was brought on board to become, in effect, the chief astrologer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Apparently Danny was under the impression that Conrad still worked for the Pentagon. The first thing he did coming out the door with a bag of trash was take a swing at Conrad with it.
Conrad ducked, spilling some coffee and scalding his hand. "Hey, Danny, I'm one of the good guys."
Danny stuffed the bag into the stinking trash bin. "Bullshit. Your name is Yeats, isn't
it? Just like your old man."
"He's dead, remember?"
"Promise?"
"There was a funeral, Danny. You were the only one from the old days not there."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning you're the only one I can trust."
Danny gave him a napkin from his pocket. "Better drink it now, it loses its oxidation and flavor in a few minutes. Don't make me waste a cup of good coffee."
Conrad wiped the cup and then his hand. He took a sip and nodded his approval.
Danny calmed down, pulled out a cigarette, and started blowing smoke, eyeing him nervously.
Conrad said, "I thought you preferred hookah pipes to sticks."
"I got religion and gave up all that shit."
"Since when are cigarettes a sacrament?"
"Since Genesis says that when Rachel saw Isaac from afar 'she lit off her Camel.'" Danny blew smoke out of both nostrils. "So you're trying to figure out your old man's tombstone like the rest of them?"
"The rest?"
"Packard's people came to me asking about the stars on the tombstone weeks ago. How else do you think I knew about the constellations? You think I'm a psychic now, too?"
Conrad looked at the once-happy Danny and wondered what must have happened to him after the DOD's intelligence branch stole him from the CIA. It was all bullshit, of course. But the Russians, al-Qaeda, the Chinese and others often timed their rocket launches, terrorist attacks, and nuclear tests to significant dates. The head of the Russian rocket program had gone so far as to state on record that he believed astrology was a "hard science." And as long as America's enemies, both real and imagined, believed in hocus-pocus, the Pentagon figured they had better, too. They plotted every day and date, both historically and astrologically, visible and invisible, in order to predict threats and prepare accordingly.
Danny was a natural, coming from a long line of mystics who allegedly traced themselves back to the Persian Empire, to the Jews exiled to Babylon and taught by King Nebuchadnezzar and his staff of astrologers six centuries before Christ. It made all the Bible-thumper evangelicals in the Pentagon wet their pants to have "the real deal" on their side. The kicker was his name was Daniel, just like the prophet who spelled out the rise and fall of the world's future empires until the end of time itself.
Conrad said, "Danny, what happened to you?"
"You don't know?"
"No."
"You don't fucking know?"
Conrad shook his head. "I heard they had you working out dates and stuff, right? I figured you got tired of the grind and living in the heads of psychos living in caves halfway around the world."
Danny took the cigarette stump out of his mouth and dropped it to the wet pavement, stamping it out. He looked up at Conrad. "They were using my charts against special ops."
"I thought that was the idea, Danny. You think like the enemy and tell the brass, like that splinter Red Cell group of astrologers and psychics they use."
"No." Danny laughed bitterly and lit another cigarette. "They started using my charts to mount our special ops."
Conrad's jaw dropped. "American troops?"
"Like I'm giving 'em a regular meteorological report, only they launch an air strike when Mars is at the Dragon's Head, screw the full moon." Danny took another drag. "Admiral Temple told me they've been doing it since the Revolution. It's how we won the War of Independence. It's how we've won every stinking world war since. It's why the armed forces of the United States are invincible, Yeats."
"Invincible?"
Danny shrugged. "Stars say so."
Conrad said nothing, just watched Danny, a man clearly conflicted and depressed. In other words, after enough time at DARPA himself, Conrad was ready to believe him.
"At first, I thought they were bullshitting me, putting pressure on me. Then I decided to give them a bogus chart, just to see what happened. Next day I find out twenty Delta Force troops die, just like that. I get called in. Stars never wrong. I must have been. I promised I'd do better."
"But obviously you didn't."
Danny gave him the evil eye, offended.
Conrad glanced away at the trash bins all around them. They weren't exactly conversing in the situation room these days.
"So what was it, Danny? Another special op gone bad?"
Danny shook his head. "June 30, 2004," he said and then paused. "That's almost four years ago exactly. Holy shit! Now you turn up."
Conrad scratched his head. Four years ago Conrad was long gone from the Pentagon himself, off in the Andes doing his Ancient Riddles show. Then his father mysteriously resurfaced in his life, as was his pattern, and dragged him down to Antarctica.
"So what happened on June 30, 2004?"
Danny told him: "U.S. handover of Iraq."
Conrad blinked. "The Joint Chiefs had you chart the day the U.S. would return sovereignty to the Iraqis?"
"To the second: 10:26 a.m. in Baghdad, which was 2:26 a.m. here in D.C.," Danny said. "But then they fucked up. They got word of some assassination attempt in the works on the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi. So Paul Bremer, the coalition's civil administrator, bumps up the transfer and gives Allawi the leather-bound transfer document and a handshake two days ahead of schedule."
Conrad stared at him. "And you believe that's why we screwed up the occupation in Iraq?"
"Fuck, no. But some brass in the Pentagon did. Beats looking in the mirror, I guess. It's all fucked, man. Axis of Evil. Bullshit! We found shit in Iraq. Meanwhile, the nut jobs in Iran and North Korea are building nukes and passing them around to every lowlife terrorist group. They're gonna blow up the whole fucking world. Because we got our heads up our asses."
Conrad had heard enough to know where Danny stood on the issue. Now he needed to get from Danny what he came for, without sending the poor son of a bitch over the edge.
"Danny, listen to me." Conrad took a deep breath. "I need to find SENTINEL."
Danny looked at him like he was the boogie man. "Now you wanna do business with the Masons?"
"Maybe."
"You're fucking nuts! All of you!" Danny started turning circles, waving his arms like an inmate in some asylum. "The whole world is fucking nuts!"
"Look, I told you, Danny. You're the only one from the old days I can trust. You and Sentinel."
Danny stopped turning, his eyes looking the crazier for it.
"Yeah, well he's from your old man's days, the old-old days. I heard he's dead. Him and all his Masonic bullshit."
"Is he?"
Danny finally looked like he was calming down. "Maybe. I don't know."
"If he were still alive, where would I find him?"
"Some nursing home in Richmond, I think. Near the VA hospital."
"Really?"
"We can't all go out in a blaze of glory like your old man, Chief."
They said nothing for a moment. Conrad listened to the morning rush hour picking up on Wisconsin. The sky was getting lighter, though it was still drizzling. Then Danny seemed to regain his sanity and sight. He looked at Yeats in his rumpled suit and suddenly figured it out.
"Holy shit, Yeats. That was you yesterday at the Capitol?"
"Maybe."
Danny shook his head. "I could have told you it wouldn't work."
"The moon in the wrong house or something?"
"Something."
"How's tonight look?"
"Seriously?" Danny worked up a quick chart on another Starbucks napkin. "Problem with you is you don't even know your own birth date. That screws things up some. But based on all your personality quirks, we always figured you for a Pisces. Definitely a water sign."
A minute later Danny showed him the chart.
It was completely unintelligible to Conrad's eyes. "And what's that supposed to mean?"
"You're fucked."
"Seriously?"
Danny nodded and stamped out his second cigarette. "So am I if I'm spotted with you."
Conrad pocketed the napki
n and turned to go. "You never saw me."
"I wish," Danny said and disappeared back into the Starbucks.
22
DARPA HEADQUARTERS
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
THE SIX-STORY office building in Arlington that houses the headquarters of DARPA attracts scant attention from the commuters emerging from the nearby Metro station or the patrons of the neighboring fast food joints, gas stations, and multiplexes. Only the lone security guard at the entrance to the anonymous steel-and-glass office tower hints of something inside to passers-by, but something no more exciting than a nondescript local bank branch.
Max Seavers was in his glass office on the sixth floor when the call came in: Conrad Yeats had turned up on the grid, and Norm Carson's team at the Pentagon wanted to move in.
Seavers called them off. "I'll handle it." He hung up and placed another call. "This is Nebulizer. I need a Medevac at the helipad. See you in ten."
Meanwhile, I'm going to need some more juice.
Seavers took the elevator down from his office to the other sixth floor-the one six stories below the building's underground parking garage. The Meat Locker on sublevel 6, as it was called, was built by his predecessor General Yeats to house an astounding discovery. The Griffter had kept it a secret even from the Pentagon. Seavers learned of its existence only upon taking over the old man's job, and its revelations affirmed in a thousand ways his choice to heed the Alignment's call and leave SeaGen for DARPA.
Seavers walked down a long tunnel to a thick metal vault. He swiped his right index finger on the scanner next to the door. He heard a lock thud and then a series of clicks as bolts moved inside. The two-foot-thick door opened to reveal a contamination room and another vault beyond.
Seavers put on a protective germ "bunny suit" and opened the second vault. Inside was a secret prison that housed one of the most unique enemy combatants America had ever captured.
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