Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  During their first meeting after he learned, Cundieffe had asked AD Wyler the question that had been uppermost in his mind, if the Director was one of them. Wyler had looked about his office as if, even here, such a secret could not be lightly spoken. But also, he noted, with some disappointment, as if he'd hoped that Cundieffe possessed sharper insight than he did. "Hoover was a man, with all that entails. He had strong homosexual tendencies, but we know that he never acted on them, for fear of compromising his position and the Bureau."

  "But what about…?" he hadn't been able to finish the thought, but it was foremost on the nerves of even the most die-hard Hoover loyalist, and Wyler had caught it. The Director's unseemly attachment to his Assistant, Clyde Tolson, the man who shared his secrets, his companionship and the lonely stewardship of his memory after he finally passed away. On their vacations, the Director had taken mountains of snapshots of his friend, that many apologists had made fools of themselves trying to defend—Clyde sleeping, Clyde sunbathing, and so on.

  "We know that Hoover never acted on his gendered impulses, because Clyde Tolson was one of us."

  As has ever been the case in human affairs, there were many cabals, conclaves and secret powers in federal government, all of them shaping the stuttering, outwardly static progress of government with their infighting and alliances. But they were without exception composed of white males, and subject to the animal programming of their gender and class. Many of them claimed to control the government, but most of them had never even heard of the Mules. None of those who did spoke of them above a whisper.

  Everything in government that worked came from the Mules, or so they would have him believe. In the last century, the United States' slopebrowed alpha male leadership had brought the nation—and, in several cases, the world—closer to the brink of collapse or even extinction than the rest of the world would ever know, no less than nine times, and only the Mules had saved them.

  Cundieffe quickly ascertained that AD Wyler was not parading him around Washington simply to initiate him into the fold. From the questions they asked and the whispered conversations Wyler had with other Mules at the Columbia Club where they met, he had gathered that the twentieth incident was even now unfolding, and he was being groomed to help prevent it. Cundieffe didn't have to read lips or press Wyler to know that they were, all of them, talking about the Mission and Radiant Dawn.

  The Mules were the most powerful group involved, but there were others, some believed to be sympathetic to the Mission, who continued to hamper the investigation, and who may have had a hand in Storch's assassination. Cundieffe had to learn a whole new bag of tricks to compete at this level, because the investigation, and the crime itself, must remain a secret.

  The Cave Institute for Global Policy Review was only one of several dozen Washington-area "think tanks," private foundations devoted to research and advocacy for one group or another. Unlike nearly every other in the Beltway, however, The Cave Institute was that rarest of all birds, a truly apolitical body, composed of members of both major parties, though mostly of bureaucrats and academics with no political affiliation at all. The Institute released studies and statistical analyses of public issues on a daily basis, but almost never made the news, was never cited on the floor of Congress, because its studies contained no political dynamite, and usually focused on issues so far in the future that few legislators would feel secure in introducing them into the record. Some, like their "Statistical Model Of Urban Population Growth, Brazil, 2000-2200, With Branch Models Pursuant To Birth Control Policies" were the kind of dry, tiresome stuff that University professors packed their china in when they moved, while their "Hypothetical Model For The Creation Of An Autonomous Kurdish State" was suppressed for fear of arousing the ire of Iraq and Turkey. Cundieffe knew he'd heard of them before, but couldn't quite place where—perhaps buried in the thickest paragraph of an exhaustive foreign policy article in a newspaper op-ed piece, or perhaps in a rant in one of the hundreds of radical newsletters to which he subscribed. Maybe he hadn't heard of it until he'd begun to meet Mules. But that was what the Cave Institute really was: the seat of the secret, the Illuminated Masters of democracy, the Platonic philosopher-kings who silently kept the world spinning.

  As the Suburban turned off a Georgetown side street less than a mile from the Suites and rolled through an iron gate wreathed in frostbitten ivy, Cundieffe clamped his arms down at his sides and tried to force his hands to sit still in his lap. The Suburban bounced up a cobblestone drive and pulled to a stop before the unlit front portico of the Cave Institute. The driver came around and opened Cundieffe's door, and he climbed out and tried not to look like a teenaged runaway getting off a bus in Hollywood.

  The Cave Institute looked like a castle made of leaves. Two stories high and smaller by far than most private residences in the neighborhood, the building was completely engulfed in a thick pelt of shield-leafed ivy, with only the black hole of the low doorway and a few narrow windows carved into it. A hard-looking man in a black suit came down the broad slate steps to meet the Suburban. The Assistant Director nodded to the man and they both followed him in through the doors, which seemed to swing open of their own accord. Cundieffe was reminded of a bit in a history of ancient Greece, where a philosopher devised a mechanism for the automated opening of doors to impress upon the great unwashed the power of the gods. The doors themselves were eight inches thick and plated in verdigris-encrusted brass, and a tiny gargoyle head that bore a strong resemblance to Socrates peeked at Cundieffe through the ivy dangling from the lintel overhead. The effect would probably be lost on the great unwashed of today, but Cundieffe doubted any but anointed acolytes were allowed to pass through them, anyway.

  Inside, they noisily crossed a groaning mockingbird floor and rushed through dim halls lit only by the colored sensors of various security systems. The furniture was spartan, and introduced to the rooms only to offset the seeming vacancy of the house. There were several libraries with shelves reaching two stories up to vaulted ceilings and ivy-choked skylight windows, but there were no pictures or other decorations on the walls, and precious few places to sit. This might've been the retreat of a particularly stern order of monks. The impression sent was very clearly received—nothing of importance takes place on the surface.

  Sure enough, the escort led them through twists and turns to an elevator discreetly tucked away where Cundieffe might've expected a restroom or a broom closet. He looked to Wyler for cues on how to behave, but the Assistant Director was biting his thumb and staring at something very captivating he saw in the bird's-eye maple wall paneling. The last Bureau meeting they had attended together had included representatives from every branch of the intelligence and military communities who hoped to gut Wyler's new Section before it officially opened, yet Wyler had been nonchalant, openly contemptuous. He looked frightened of getting on this elevator. For Cundieffe, or for himself? "Don't," Wyler whispered in his ear, "if they deign to speak to you, don't lie to them."

  What an odd thing to say! "I wouldn't dream of it, sir, but why? Will there be a lie detector test?"

  "They are lie detectors."

  The escort worked some kind of unseen magic to get the door open, and pressed a button Cundieffe didn't notice to get it to close again behind them. He didn't feel the slightest motion, and thought the elevator must be broken, when the door slid open and they stepped out onto deep green plush carpet. They stood in a corridor of redwood paneling, lit by candles in sconces beneath smoke-blackened busts of philosophers. Cundieffe recognized only a few of them—among them Socrates and Sir Thomas More, whose Republic and Utopia, respectively, had presented models for Mule-managed societies. The obscurer thinkers, he'd learned, were more interesting by far. They were Mule savants, and their treatises were for the eyes of Mules alone. Cundieffe had read selections from a few of them at Wyler's urging: On Instinct, the definitive analysis of the breeding caste, by Guillaume d'Averoigne, who anticipated Freud by three hundred years; The Devi
sing Of Creation, by the Swiss Mule naturalist, Lucanus, who merged Darwin's natural selection theory and Mendel's observations of genetics five hundred years before either of them was born; and the strategic manifesto of the Medieval Order Of The Cave, which surfaced, albeit in a highly adulterated and perverted form, six centuries after its origin, as the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. This last gave Cundieffe pause until he had a chance to peruse the original document, and found that its innovative and utopian concepts for government had been twisted into a black caricature to serve as anti-Semitic propaganda by the Russian noble class.

  Between the lanterns were alcoves, in which were set low, arched doorways, each of them closed and locked by a card slot. Cundieffe thought of interrogation cells, or boxes at an opera. The escort stopped in one alcove and Wyler looked into a retina-scan peephole. The door swung open with an audible hiss of pressurized air. In the event of some disaster, the room they were about to enter was airtight. The Mules' paranoia so far made the precautions of the Pentagon or the FBI seem as lax as a neighborhood library. Wyler stepped into the room and beckoned Cundieffe to follow. The escort closed the door behind them, and Cundieffe noticed a green light beside it turn red. The room they were in did resemble an interrogation cell. It was little larger than a booth, and this was filled with two chairs and a shallow table built into the far wall. The far wall itself was floor to ceiling mirrored glass. Cundieffe wondered briefly if someone could see through, and who was watching them, when Wyler tugged him into his seat.

  The voice of God rumbled out of hidden speakers in the ceiling of the booth. "We had expected you earlier, Wyler. And alone."

  Cundieffe cast the Assistant Director a forlorn look, but Wyler patted his hand and spoke up to the booth at large. "Agent Cundieffe needs to know. He is not an interloper. He is one of us. I am his sponsor." Silence stretched out, into which Wyler weakly added, "A well-informed decision cannot be made without his insight."

  "We have proceeded with other business, but will return to the case in question presently," the voice boomed. "The Secretary of Foreign Intelligence has been called away momentarily. I trust Wyler agrees that his input is also essential to the discussion?"

  "Of course," Wyler said, and leaned back in his seat.

  "Really, sir, there's no need to stick your neck out like this," Cundieffe whispered in his ear. His stomach churned with the basic elation at finding himself here, and the acidic horror of seeing his superior reduced to a craven petitioner. "Everything I learned from Sgt. Storch was detailed in my report—"

  "Nonsense, Martin. I want—I need—for you to see this. Only here can you see the full scope of the battlefield." He leaned forward and spoke into a microphone built into the wall. "Wendell Wyler," he said. "One and not many."

  Cundieffe recognized the phrase immediately. It was from The Republic of Plato, a keystone in his initiation. Closing his eyes for a second, he called to mind the exact words: "The intention was, that, in the case of the citizens generally, each individual should be put to the use for which nature intended him, one to one work, and then every man would do his own business, and be one and not many; and so the whole city would be one and not many."

  Their reflections turned ghostly as the mirror abruptly became transparent, and when Cundieffe beheld the room beyond, he was reminded again of box seats at the opera.

  In movies, the military always has a "war room," with a "big board" displaying the might of the world powers as pieces on a game board, and ranks of technicians at computers like the mission control of a space program. In his second tour of the Pentagon, he'd been allowed to walk past the real war room: a dank, dingy conference room with television monitors and fax machines on one end and a long table with lopsided legs at the other. A cockroach had run across the table during the brief canned speech the tour guide recited, and the doors had remained closed, because it was being fumigated.

  The Cave Institute had a proper war room. Massive screens displayed a patchwork map of the globe, updated in real time by satellites. Periodically, one portion of the map would blow up and spin off to a subordinate screen and text flew across the screen too fast to read. A smoked glass conference table ran the length of the room, with keyboards and more screens built into it. The eleven figures seated at the table were silhouetted by the screens above and all around them, so that Cundieffe could only tell that there were seven "men" and four "women," a totally useless observation, given the circumstances.

  Above the monitors on the opposite wall, Cundieffe could barely make out other observation boxes, some lit and occupied, others dark. Off to one end and recessed below the level of the war room floor was a communications center, with half a dozen men and women in dark suits working at computers.

  But it was none of this that surprised Cundieffe half so much as that the Mule committee seemed to be watching pornography. On all the monitors that weren't showing the world and all its trouble spots, a portly, distinguished gentleman hunched over a desk with his slacks down around his ankles, obscuring a woman who sprawled across the aforementioned desk in a posture of sexual abandon that even the grainy color surveillance video could tell was feigned, and poorly. The act went on for only a few moments, then the man slouched away and tripped over his slacks. His face flicked by the camera's eye for only a second as the man picked himself up and hoisted his slacks, but it was plenty of time for Cundieffe to recognize him as the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services

  Committee.

  "Good night!" Cundieffe exploded. "What are they watching?"

  The question felt idiotic as soon as it left his lips, but Wyler seemed to understand, and took on the right fatherly tone. "In order to make reasoned, informed decisions, the Committee has often been forced to witness unsavory acts."

  "But how did they get such a thing? It's obscene, it's venal, it's—"

  "Utterly necessary. Martin, here we have to look past the world of shadows and appearances to the absolute truth. No means of acquiring it are absolutely unacceptable, when weighed against the consequences of ill-informed decisions. This is unpleasant, but it will help our cause."

  "What? You—the Mules resort to blackmail?"

  "Absolutely not! We have to know exactly what sort of people we are dealing with, whose weaknesses could pose a threat to national security, or to good, responsible government. You did much the same thing with your files."

  Cundieffe blanched. "I fail to see the connection, sir. I violated no one's privacy in collecting the information I did, nor in constructing the behavioral profiles."

  "But you skirted federal law, which proscribes us from spending a penny of federal money to exercise prior surveillance. True, you did it on your own time and with your own money, but you violated the letter of the law to serve the ideal of justice. You felt that because your motives were pure, the collection of the data did not constitute an abuse. You have since fed the results of this unauthorized research into our fledgling National Counterterrorism Database, for which your nation will one day have cause to thank you, and you have voiced no qualms about breaking the law in so doing. It is precisely because of that sort of initiative that you are here today."

  Cundieffe bowed his head. He couldn't believe he hadn't thought this through. Wyler leaned in closer still, so that his flushed face filled Cundieffe's field of vision. "There is something you must understand about us, Martin. We are not a secret government. We are not Illuminati. We are not a conspiracy. We do not rule by force or threat of force, or of humiliation, or even by our wits. We are one voice in the darkness, whispering into the ear of the sleeping world. We whisper counsel, we urge it to be wise and virtuous and to look to the good, and we seek to quietly silence those voices calculated to induce nightmares. We are a listening ear, a watching eye and a voice, but nothing more. The world sleeps on, and sometimes it stirs in fear or wrath, like any sleeping giant. It

  is only our goal to prevent it from harming itself in its sleep."

  "It's not the end I
question, sir. The means—"

  "Make no mistake, Martin. Ethical wordplay has no place here. This is not about justice, or procedure. This is about what kind of world we'll wake up in tomorrow. You know this. It's in you already, or you wouldn't be here."

  Wyler cut off his reply with a wave of his hand, pointing down into the war room. The twelfth committee member took "her" seat almost directly beneath their booth. The booming voice issued forth from the speakers again. "We will now, without further objection, review new developments in the Mission case." A hushed sizzle from the speakers, and Cundieffe could hear the subtle ambient noises of the war room being piped in. Wyler activated a screen built into their table and punched buttons too quickly for Cundieffe to read. A short text message in Spanish appeared, with time/date data and a serial number across the top. Wyler punched a button and a translation popped up.

  PAPA,

  VACATION GOING SMOOTHLY. CHECKED IN AT HOTEL YOU RECOMMENDED. YES, THE OLD MISSION STILL STANDS, BUT NEEDS FUMIGATING. MAMA'S LIST OF THINGS TO BUY IS SO VERY LONG, I WILL HAVE TO BUY MORE SUITCASES FOR RETURN TRIP.

  GIFT ARRIVED IN GOOD REPAIR. DELIVERY MEN WILL ASSEMBLE IT AND DISPOSE OF THE OLD ONE.