Strange Magic

by Justin Gustainis

  “What’s going on, then?” Burnett asked.

  “He knows something,” Hinton said. “Or thinks he does.”

  Stewart raised his hands from his lap and spread them a couple of feet apart. “About what?”

  “Don’t know,” Hinton said. “But if we assume that the leader of the free world hasn’t slipped his cable, then something strange is going on. Maybe even he doesn’t know what it is, exactly. But something... highly unusual.”

  “That would explain this fishing expedition he’s sent us on,” Burnett said.

  “I think he called it a witch hunt,” Stewart said. “Which is also puzzling. A witch hunt, by definition, is a search for something that doesn’t exist. Like McCarthy’s domestic communist conspiracy, back in the 1950s. Why would Leffingwell give us an assignment he believes to be futile? Unless he really is crazy.”

  “Or unless he thinks there really are witches,” Hinton said, as if to himself.

  Stewart and Burnett looked at each other, then at their boss. When the silence had gone on nearly long enough to be unbearable, Stewart broke it, with a single word. “Sir?”

  Hinton gave the DDI a wintry smile. “Don’t worry, Leon—I haven’t decided to join the President in Never-Never Land. But I occasionally wonder if Hamlet was right about there being more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Take that business at the Republican convention a couple of years back.”

  “When Stark was knocked out of contention after his assistant shot him three times?” Stewart said. “Nothing... mystical about that, sir. Insanity, maybe—on the part of the assistant. But nothing... you know.”

  “I wonder,” Hinton said. “There were a lot of rumors flying around at the time—some of them from fairly credible sources. Something about an exorcism being performed on Stark, for instance. And another story about some Secret Service agents being driven temporarily insane by something they saw—something that not one of them remembers now.”

  “With respect, sir,” Burnett said, “that’s tabloid stuff.”

  “Maybe so,” Hinton told him. “But here’s something that isn’t. There was a fella named Quincey Morris—I remember the name because it’s so unusual—who was arrested at the convention and later indicted by a federal grand jury on a list of charges long enough to put him away for ninety-nine years to eternity, if he was convicted on all of them. Either of you remember how the trial came out?”

  Stewart just shook his head but Burnett said, “I never paid much attention to it, sir. It was the Secret Service’s case—and the FBI’s, too, I suppose. Not the agency’s business.”

  “No, you’re right, it wasn’t,” Hinton said. “But that was a trick question I asked you. There was no trial in that case.”

  “Morris copped a plea?” Stewart asked.

  “Nope—he was granted a Presidential pardon, a fact that was definitely not publicized by the White House.”

  Stewart was scratching his chin again. “A full pardon? Interesting.”

  “It gets even more so,” Hinton said. “When I heard about it through one of my White House sources, I was curious enough to do a little research on Mister Morris. No Agency resources were used, which might have been inappropriate—just a few minutes spent with Google.”

  After a few seconds of silence, Burnett said. “You seem to be developing a flair for the dramatic, sir. So, if you’re waiting for someone to feed you the next line, I’ll do the honors. What about Mister Morris was so interesting?”

  “His occupation. Don’t know what the fella puts on his tax form—asking the IRS would have raised too many awkward questions. But, according to Google, Morris’s business card describes him as an ‘occult investigator.’”

  There was another silence, and, again, Burnett was the one to break it. “That’s kind of interesting sir, but I’m not sure how it bears on our current problem.”

  “Only insofar as it references the whole ‘more things in heaven and on earth’ question,” Hinton said. He took a few seconds to rub his big hands over his face. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. It’s our job to obey the President’s orders, whether they seem batshit crazy, or not.”

  Stewart gave him raised eyebrows. “So, we’re going on a ‘witch hunt,’ sir?”

  “Not a witch hunt—a fishing expedition. Put the word out that the Director’s office has reason to believe that something seriously untoward is going on within the agency. Anybody who comes forward will not face retaliation, and may, in fact, even be rewarded. But anybody who is found to be concealing information will face not only summary dismissal but a possible indictment on national security grounds.”

  Barnett pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “That’s a pretty wide brief, sir.”

  “I know that—it’s designed to give anybody with a guilty conscience a bad case of the sweats. Hell, even if the President is straight out of the Twilight Zone on this, there’s a good chance we’ll uncover some malfeasances, large or small, that we didn’t know about. So it’s a win-win.”

  His subordinates may not have agreed with Hinton’s assessment of an inevitable positive outcome, but they did what subordinates always do when given orders from on high, no matter how foolish they may appear. “Yes, sir,” they said, virtually in unison.

  When the car reached its destination in Langley’s secure parking garage, Burnett was barely out of the back seat before his phone—a secure version of the iPhone 6—was in his hands. He had not even reached the elevator before the text message had gone out to Clyde Nealee, his number two.

  My office. Now.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  WHEN THE ELEVATOR from the parking garage brought Ted Burnett up to the third floor of the Old Agency Building, he emerged from it the very picture of calm. He had spent a few moments downstairs composing himself, and nothing in his face, body, or gait gave any hint of the emotions that were churning inside him.

  Room 333 was the office of the Deputy Director for Operations, but you’d never know it from looking at the door, which boasted no identification other than the number plate. None of the rooms at CIA headquarters have identifying information on their outer doors, with the exception of restrooms. If a visitor doesn’t know what room number he needs, then he’s shit out of luck—or would be, except every visitor to Langley is always accompanied by an armed escort who knows the function and occupant of every room in the building.

  Like all the other rooms, Burnett’s office had an electronic keypad in place of a lock. He tapped in the six-digit access code, but was so distracted by his thoughts that he got it wrong. IMPROPER AUTHORIZATION the tiny screen informed him. ACCESS DENIED.

  Burnett tapped in the code again, slowly and deliberately. If he got it wrong twice in a row, security would be alerted and Burnett, Deputy Director or no, would very quickly find himself staring at the business end of several large-caliber automatics in the hands of security personnel. Since he was in absolutely no mood for that kind of nonsense today, he got the access code right the second time, listened for the buzz, and entered his office. He took just a couple of steps inside then stopped, listening to the door close and lock behind him. He took the pause to make sure that the additional frustration caused by the stupid lock was not going to push his temper over the edge where someone could see it displayed. Burnett never showed his feelings in public—ever.

  He walked on, giving his secretary a nod as he passed her desk. He didn’t ask if there were any messages. Something urgent would have prompted either a text message or a phone call. Anything less vital would be found in his email, his voicemail, or, rarely, a written note left on his desk.

  Assistant Deputy Director Clyde Neale was waiting in Burnett’s outer office, thus unknowingly saving himself from the royal ass-reaming that Burnett would have delivered in private had Neale been late.

  Burnett opened the door to his private office and jerked his head toward Neale, ordering him to follow. Inside, Neale closed the door behin
d him and waited to see what particular bug was up the boss’s ass this time.

  At 5’9” and 142 pounds soaking wet, Clyde Neale looked as if he would have trouble contending successfully with a large paper bag. But appearances can, of course, be deceiving. Neale was a twenty-year devotee of Muay Thai, perhaps the most vicious of all martial arts. Two years earlier, he had been confronted by a couple of knife-wielding muggers in the parking lot of a ‘gentlemen’s club’ he’d been visiting on one of his rare nights off. In the files of the DC police, the case was still open, officially listed as ‘double homicide, probably gang-related.’

  “He knows,” Burnett snarled. “The motherfucker knows.”

  It was unclear to Neale as to who the motherfucker in question might be, or what he might know, but experience had taught him that when he was in a rage, Burnett needed to vent for a while before any productive discussion could take place. Neale settled back in one of the comfortable visitor’s chairs and concentrated on maintaining his poker face. When Burnett was in one of these moods, any facial expression on an onlooker could be misinterpreted as amusement or some other inappropriate sentiment, driving the already enraged Burnett to the point of apoplexy.

  Burnett was behind his desk now, bent forward with his palms flat on the old-fashioned blotter. “Fucking Leffingwell has it from some unnamed but irreproachable source that somebody around here is developing a ‘forbidden weapon.’ What exactly such a weapon might be, our esteemed but spineless Chief Executive either doesn’t know or won’t say. But he’s concerned about it, you betcha. And he’s got me and Stewart and even fucking Hinton on the lookout for anything around here that might smell, you know, ‘forbidden,’ and now Hinton is telling us to look for whistleblowers who’ll turn in their bosses, their colleagues—hell, even their fucking mothers, in return for immunity from prosecution and the promise of some as-yet-unnamed reward. Well, let’s you and me be clear on one thing, my friend—if I turn up anybody on this project who looks like he’s even dreaming about spilling his guts, the motherfucker won’t have any guts left to spill, by the time I get done cutting him open, yanking them out a foot at a time, and making him chow down on ’em.”

  Neale sat impassively and listened. He knew the tirade would go on for a while, and it did. But finally Burnett wound down and flopped into his leather desk chair, breathing heavily. He might have run a couple of miles or just finished having sex with a movie star—although the expression on his face would seem to make the second possibility a long shot.

  Once his respiration had returned to something like normal, Burnett got up and walked to a sideboard where he kept a small but well-stocked bar. After pouring himself a double shot of eighteen-year old Glenfiddich, he looked over his shoulder at Neale. “You want anything?”

  This was no more than a courtesy, since he knew that Neale didn’t drink. But it was a welcome sign that Burnett had returned to a semblance of sanity and restraint.

  Once the DDO was back behind his desk and had taken his first sip of the stuff he sometimes called “liquid Heaven,” Neale spoke for the first time since entering the room.

  “So the President knows something, or thinks he does.”

  “Yeah, him and his ‘forbidden weapons,’” Burnett said, and made a rude sound. “He doesn’t have much, or you and I and a few other people would already be behind bars.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Neale said. “There aren’t any federal statutes, or local ones, for that matter, which cover the conjuring of demons.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m sure that wily old bastard Hinton would find something to charge us with. But the fact that Leffingwell knows anything at all, or even suspects anything, is bad fucking news. We’ve got a leak, somewhere—there’s no other explanation.”

  Neale shrugged his thin shoulders. “Not much of a leak, though—otherwise he wouldn’t be just talking about—what did he call them? Forbidden weapons?”

  “He may have a little more than that,” Burnett said. “I was thinking about it on the ride over here. I wouldn’t have thought that a guy like our President could be convinced that demons really exist—not in the sense that you and I know they exist. But in the car Hinton mentioned some guy named Morris, who sounds like he might be a player in this kind of game.”

  “What’s Morris got to do with Leffingwell?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s some kind of connection. Morris was apparently in federal prison last year, awaiting trial on a long list of charges, when Leffingwell wrote him a Presidential ‘Get out of jail free’ card.”

  “Did he now?” Neale brought a small notebook out of his jacket pocket and wrote something in it. “I think we’d better find out a bit more about Mister Morris.”

  With a slight smile Burnett said, “I can’t believe you still write stuff down on paper. Why don’t you get yourself one of those tablets?”

  “If necessary, a piece of paper can be burned, flushed, or swallowed—all of which is more than can be said for one of your tablets,” Neale said. “You were saying that Leffingwell may know more than he’s letting on?”

  “Yeah, I think he just might. I mean, let’s say that Leffingwell’s been told that somebody in the Agency is messing around with demons, and he actually believes it. He can hardly say so, can he? Not in a meeting with high-level people in government. They’d think he was insane—as it is now, Hinton isn’t sure the guy isn’t nuts.”

  “That’s a good point. Leffingwell has to preserve his credibility, doesn’t he?”

  “Exactly. If the President says ‘forbidden weapons,’ he sounds kind of weird. But if he starts talking about people summoning demons, then he’s fucking certifiable.”

  “At least he sounds that way to those who don’t know what we know.”

  “Which is most people,” Burnett said. “And a damn good thing, too. But for now, we need to find out who tipped Leffingwell off that something hinky is going down.”

  “How do you want to handle it?”

  Burnett sat back in his chair, the rich leather creaking in response to the weight shift. “It must have happened the day before yesterday. Hinton says he did a security briefing at 9:00 a.m., and that Leffingwell was his normal, dull self.”

  “And it’s about 7:30 that night when you get the summons to the meeting you just left.”

  “Uh-huh. Something happened between 9:00 in the morning and 7:30 at night, two days ago. Leffingwell either had a meeting, or got a phone call, or received a message, either electronically or by snail mail.”

  “Fortunately,” said Neale, “every damn thing the President does is written down somewhere. Visitors are logged in. All phone calls are logged, both incoming and outgoing. But the mail is going to be tougher. The President’s email is restricted access, unless you’ve got a subpoena.”

  “Subpoena? We don’t need no stinkin’ subpoena,” Burnett said, in an atrocious attempt at a Spanish accent.

  Neale, who had seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre a few times himself, got the joke and laughed politely. He was glad that Burnett’s mood seemed to be improving. Corny humor was a small price to pay, in his opinion.

  “Right,” Neale said. “No subpoena—we can hack his email.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time, either.”

  “Snail mail is gonna be harder, though. Incoming mail is logged, but not the contents—there’s no written record of exactly what he gets.”

  “We’ll worry about that if all the others crap out,” Burnett said. “Somehow I think it would take more than a letter to persuade our esteemed President to believe in the existence of demonic power.”

  “I bet he’ll believe it once the Caliphate is turned to cinders by infernal fire,” Neale said.

  “By then, it’ll be too late—and we’ll be national heroes, anyway.”

  “If it works.”

  “It has to work,” Burnett said. “It has to.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  THE WILLARD HOTEL in Washington is just
two blocks down from the White House, and the two-bedroom suite that Quincey Morris had rented offered a fine view of the National Mall and all its historic monuments.

  The knock on the door came at a little after 7:00 in the evening. Libby Chastain answered it and admitted FBI Special Agents Fenton and O’Donnell into the suite’s living room.

  “The ghost-busting business must be doing pretty well,” Fenton said, looking around the room. “The Willard’s one of the priciest hotels in town, and now I can see why.”

  “Business isn’t bad,” Morris said, walking in from his bedroom. “Besides, what good is money if you can’t buy a few of life’s luxuries? It’s not like I expect to live long enough to retire.” He said this casually, as if the likelihood of his early, violent death was a simple fact with which he had come to terms long ago.

  The FBI agents were directed to the sofa, with Libby and Morris in armchairs opposite. After his offer to order coffee or drinks from room service was politely declined, Morris said, “Although it’s always nice to see you guys, I assume you wouldn’t have said you were coming over tonight unless you had something for us.”

  “Something, yeah,” Fenton said.

  “But a lot?” Colleen added. “Afraid not. Before we offer up our pitiful pennies, I was wondering if you’ve heard anything from the White House.”

  “Not a whisper,” Libby said. “And I made sure President Leffingwell had all my contact information before I left the Oval Office. I checked with Howard Stark earlier today, and he hasn’t heard anything, either.”

  “I guess Leffingwell doesn’t see himself as under any obligation to keep you informed,” Fenton said. “But it sure would be nice if he did.”

  “Damn straight,” Libby said. “And it might still happen. Could be I’ll hear from him an hour from now, or maybe tomorrow—or never. So, while we’re waiting, why don’t you fill us in on what you guys turned up. Pennies are better than nothing, especially when you’re stone broke.”