GOING SKIING. SEND MORE MONEY.
YOUR SON
An artfully feminine voice took up the briefing. "This e-mail message was sent from the Gulf Breeze hotel in Corpus Christi, Texas, yesterday. The FBI field office was immediately mobilized, without any positive contact or leads as to the sender's whereabouts. The message was posted via a popular South American service provider, who complied in giving us the real address of the destination account, twelve hours ago."
Cundieffe tried to suppress a scowl, but Wyler caught it and asked, "May it please the committee, I would like to know how the message was intercepted and flagged."
The foreign secretary's head inclined in their direction. "A standard NSA sweep of all traffic entering or leaving the United States is mandated by National Security Council Intelligence Directive No.6 even in peacetime. Given the sensitive state of alert, G Group paid particularly close scrutiny to all traffic entering or leaving South and Central America. Semantic irregularities, vague flag words and other keys were entered, and a team of personnel and automated elements sorted the communications virtually in real time. Is that satisfactory?"
"Quite," Wyler said, still looking sidelong at Cundieffe. "Please go on."
"The message was viewed and deleted at an Internet café in downtown Bogota, but the name and address for the account were false. Within the hour, the investigators were advised of a structure fire in the mountains above Bogota by an air cavalry unit of the Colombian Army."
A map of Colombia: a blinking light near the Amazonian floor of the country, beside a river called Cahuinari. "There, they discovered the remains of a highly sophisticated lab facility, with incubators, Level 4 isolation airlocks and industrial production capability."
"I see very little to distinguish it from any of the thousands of narcotics processing plants throughout South America," said a nominally masculine voice.
"The military investigators doubted too, so they called in an American advisor who verified that the facility was a bioweapons lab." Pictures flashed on-screen: an exploded bunker gutting a mountainside, blackened girders and rebar ribbons stretching out like tentacles among wraiths of smoke. Soldiers in full NBC suits sifting through piles of melted machinery and mounds of ash. "There was no trace evidence isolated to tell us what they were making there, but the volume of the production facility suggests that the product was not in gallons or individual bombs, but in tonnage."
Stifling rebuttals before they got beyond a breath, the foreign secretary went on, "None of this meets the full criteria for a full alert conclusively, but the overwhelming evidence—"
"—Suggests that we are being had," another Mule said. "The sophistication of all previous Mission operations should give one pause when considering the ease of interception of the message. Not to mention the fire."
"It doesn't deviate from the pattern at all, Stuart," Wyler said. "Last time, they stole from the United States Navy and stored the napalm right under their noses. The military was served notice of their intentions, and came to harm only when they tried to interfere."
"I agree with Wyler," said a feminine Mule near the end of the table. "This is not a war of terror against the American people. But the last time was merely a shot across our bow. The next will be catastrophic. The foreign secretary is quite up-to-date on what happened yesterday in Colombia. What are we to suppose about today in these United States?"
Cundieffe turned to Wyler and whispered, "How can they be so sure that this has anything to do with the Mission?"
Wyler started to answer, but the booming intercom voice drowned him out. "Agent Cundieffe, the Mission has a long and well-documented resume of espionage and terrorist acts here and abroad. Your briefs on the Owens Valley incident were astute in their observations and daunting in their suppositions, but you could have benefited from a less flawed understanding of recent history."
"I was unaware that any such organization existed before July of last year…" Wyler waved a note under his nose. "CHAIRPERSON."
"Chairperson," he began again, "if, as you say, the Mission is an established terrorist organization, it would have benefited the FBI to have been notified. It might have made all the difference in the world last July."
"Such a morsel of knowledge would have only proved more dangerous, without an understanding of the larger forces in play. Conventional police work was sufficient to lead you to the names of the leaders of the particular cell responsible, but your intuition as to their objective and motivation was, while quite imaginative, totally specious. How much further would your imagination have taken you, if you were told, without recourse to your formidable powers of deduction, that the Mission is composed of many such cells, with many objectives?"
"At the height of the Cold War," began another Mule, "the FBI and the HUAC ferreted out the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs and Alger Hiss, but never scratched more than the surface of the espionage network which had infiltrated all levels of government. The real perpetrators who were stealing our secrets operated independently of Soviet patronage. They constituted a fifth column within our ranks, but they could not be traced by the usual means of Soviet contact or ideology or unaccounted-for wealth."
Cundieffe looked hard at Wyler, who was watching the shadowed speaker with hawkish intensity. Did he know all along, when he was praising Cundieffe for his deductive abilities, where they would lead him? Or was this a revelation to him, as well?
"They believed that by passing on our most sensitive secrets, they were serving their country, and the greater cause of humanity, by working to create what they called a 'balance of terror' between the superpowers.
"Working both within and without the government, their work has been so opaque in its execution that most in the defense and political sectors discount them as a new incarnation of the 'gremlins' U.S. Army airmen claimed sabotaged their planes in World War II. Others have blamed them for all military failures from the leakage of the atomic bomb to the Russians in 1949 to the failure of all tests for a strategic missile defense shield which continue to this day.
"In their work to insure a parity of destructive capability, the Mission has on several occasions used sabotage and even assassination, but nothing of the scale observed in July of 1999. This act constituted their first demonstration of direct force and a willingness to take innocent human lives. We were taken by surprise, and could not conclusively identify the threat until it was too late."
"Then this did have something to do with RADIANT," Cundieffe said.
Rustle of papers and tapping of keys. "We are aware of the RADIANT project, but would advise against drawing any more than a symbolic connection between the two elements. RADIANT was an orbital directed energy weapon program, which resulted in a disastrous test and loss of the satellite in 1984. Sabotage was suspected, but the primary researcher on the project, indeed the scientist directly responsible for the entire project, died shortly thereafter under suspicious circumstances."
Cundieffe sat up ramrod-straight. On a few of the table-screens below, he could see an extreme close-up shot of his own face; thermographic overlays made the flush of blood in his cheeks look like lava flows. He restrained himself from looking around for the tiny cameras. "He joined the Mission?"
"He was murdered by Mission infiltrators involved in the project, who subsequently arranged their own staged deaths and went underground. We don't even know who is in the organization. We are reduced to combing the obituaries and the Pentagon's MIA files to try to deduce who might be a member."
"Respectfully submitted, then, what has the group learned about the Radiant Dawn organization?"
"Nothing that obtains here. They no longer represent a plausible primary target."
Cundieffe covered his mouth before a snort of disbelief could escape. "I find that rather hard to believe, given that nobody's explained why they were one in the first place."
Wyler seething, shiny rivets of sweat popping out of his high-domed forehead. "Chairperson, what I believe Agent Cun
dieffe was trying to communicate—"
"Wyler, does your charge fully understand where he is?"
Cundieffe, hearing the point being snatched back from them, pressed on. "Eyewitness accounts of the raid on the Mission's base at Baker described a light from the sky enveloping the area immediately after the Mission helicopter entered the area and deposited Sgt. Storch. Subsequently, all those irradiated died of cancer, except Sgt. Storch himself, who was diagnosed with cancer shortly before his assassination. But all of this must be familiar to the Committee. I apologize for my impertinence, and for taking up so much of the Committee's valuable time, but given the collateral evidence linking the Mission to RADIANT, I don't see how this body can discount the possibility that RADIANT is still up there, and that its true purpose is somehow tied up in the Radiant Dawn organization, in much more than a symbolic manner."
"You learned this in your interview with Sgt. Storch, I presume."
"I gathered that—"
"While studying at UCLA law school, you compiled a research paper on behavioral profiling of anti-government militants."
Uncertain where this was going, Cundieffe only said, "Yes, Chairperson. I—"
"In the course of your research, you arranged and conducted over nineteen interviews with prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries, all on your own initiative."
On screen: a younger, gawkier, hairier Cundieffe seated across from former Aryan Brotherhood leader Jeremy Yuricich, awaiting execution for four murders at San Quentin. Out of context, the gawky, ramrod-stiff law student seemed to shame the hulking white separatist killer into collapsing all at once, his face wrapped in his tattooed paws. Cundieffe had somehow persuaded Yuricich to meet with him for three afternoons, and tell him his life story. The photo might have been a still from the security camera in the visitors' room, because he couldn't remember any cameras clicking away when Yuricich started to cry.
Cundieffe sat stunned, only half able to hear what the Chairperson was saying, as a realization bubbled up out of the back of his brain. He was not an unexpected guest. This was an initiation and a demonstration, both.
"Yet you failed to extract any practical, intelligible information from Sgt. Storch."
"We're all familiar with the transcripts of Agent Cundieffe's interview," said a gravelly voice with a faint Oxford-bred accent. "It served only to corroborate earlier interrogation reports that the prisoner suffered from dementia. He was a discarded cut-out, with nothing meaningful to offer."
On screen: Cundieffe stumbling and falling as Storch rises from his chair in the interrogation cell. Looping: watch him fall, and Storch rise on puppet strings of invisible lightning.
"It's dangerous to lend too much credence to the ravings of such people," the Oxford voice added, unsubtle acid dripping into Cundieffe's ears.
Cundieffe licked his lips. His eyes burned and his glasses were starting to fog. "Given the environment in which he was held captive, I hardly expected to find him completely lucid, but he did claim that the Mission's objective is Radiant Dawn, and not the government at large. Even if this body is unwilling to concede the connection to RADIANT, I remain convinced that if the Mission is indeed operational and in the United States, then our best chance to find them and stop them from perpetrating mass murder again is to look from Radiant Dawn outward."
"For some time, we have been doing just that," said a somewhat masculine voice that might've come from a computer. Cundieffe recognized this voice, out of all of them. Brady Hoecker, the "consultant" who had sat in on the indoors portion of the interrogation. On the screen: a single-story stucco business park in a Southern California suburb. Sandwiched between Xtra-Sun Tanning Salon and Dr. Zakarian, DDS: RADIANT DAWN HOSPICE OUTREACH CLINIC. Cleverly placed, thought Cundieffe. They must pick up a lot of walk-in traffic from their neighbor. "In the last six months, Radiant Dawn has opened a network of outreach clinics in thirty-five major cities across the country. Each has a staff of no more than ten full-time employees and part-time volunteers, mostly counselors and nursing specialists. In the past four months, five of them have been bombed, and twelve Radiant Dawn employees have been killed."
On the screen: the same business park, packed with emergency vehicles and news vans. Black smoke arrows the gutted building, out of which coroners escort a pair of gurneys with boxes for charred or dismembered remains strapped to them. Hoecker continued: "Thermite and homemade napalm were planted in adjacent offices in the first two, in San Diego and Kansas City, but a car bomb was used for the third. A fourth was discovered in Phoenix, and killed only the outreach counselor who found it. The last one, in Pittsburgh, was particularly messy, and ended with a Mission agent burning down a Radiant Dawn counselor with a flamethrower in the street."
"My—my—why, Assistant Director, why haven't we been kept apprised of this?" Cundieffe stage-hissed. "It's our direct area of responsibility."
Wyler forwarded the question, but icily. There was none of his turf-conscious feistiness that he showed off at the Navy briefing last summer.
"Because the FBI isn't prepared for this kind of situation," Hoecker replied. "Your Hostage Rescue Teams are crack units, but they're too small and thinly spread as it is, and the level of secrecy demands plausible deniability. If we can't stop them from happening, we have to keep them from having happened, if you take my meaning, and dead FBI agents wouldn't serve."
Cundieffe shivered. More news blackouts. The media covered the tragedies as arsons, or even accidental fires, and not terrorist bombings, and carefully suppressed details, kept anyone from stringing them together. Each was an isolated incident, happening in a vacuum, making no sound, leaving no trace.
"We have placed all of the remaining outreach centers on rotating surveillance since the Pittsburgh incident. No reports of suspicious activity, no lights in the sky. There is no concentration of patients or staff anywhere in the country to present the kind of target they did last year. This is a new cell, most likely with a new objective."
"The FBI had nothing to do with this surveillance program, did it?" Cundieffe looked sidewise at Wyler, who shrugged minimally.
"I respectfully request," Hoecker said, "that we table this abortive line of discussion and return to the root issue, which is the Mission's probable objectives. There are eighteen defense research projects currently underway in the continental United States, and three more of great import in Alaska. I must add, however, that this information is not for all eyes."
The table-screens went black and the window became a mirror again. The speakers sizzled and died. Wyler stood up from the table. "There's no point in waiting."
"If you'd like me to go outside so you could sit in on the rest of it…"
"What makes you think I'm cleared to hear it? Come on, Martin, I'll buy you breakfast."
Wyler opened the door and Cundieffe followed him back out through the gallery to the elevator. Something in the crooked posture of his mentor's back warned not to speak here. In his thumping heart, he was grateful for the silence, because it gave him time to tuck his guts back in.
They disembarked from the elevator car to find the escort waiting for them. They followed him through the silent house, Cundieffe taking in greater detail in the pale, lead-colored morning light seeping in through the narrow windows. He was still not entirely sure that he wasn't dreaming.
The doors opened for them and they stepped out onto the cobbled drive. The Suburban was waiting for them, the driver standing beside the open rear door. Only when they were inside it and bumping through the gates did Wyler turn and look at Cundieffe.
"What did you see?" he asked.
"I—I don't know where to begin. Is there anything they don't know?"
"Only what they don't want to hear," he started, then, "The Mules virtually run the NSA, and its ECHELON project is our principal means of keeping abreast of current events. But not the only one."
"In every way, it was different from the meeting at the Federal Building. There was none of the
animal infighting, but—I saw the same mistakes being made."
"What, that they didn't take you seriously enough? That kind of narcissism is dangerous, Martin, to yourself and your work. It is easy to assume that one has all the facts, and thus that one sees the truth. But half of your facts are shadows. There are compartments, and truths within truths. They are at the center, and their view of the mechanisms in play is superior to our own."
"I'd like to review the case files on those bombings, but we're supposed to pretend they never happened. What do I have to do to prove myself worthy of knowing what they know?"
"You'll be given what you need. Trust in them, and I have no doubt that you will become indispensable to them."
"Sir, I don't mean to be impertinent, but how can this addiction to secrecy serve a democratic society? My conclusions are being discounted because of factors I am not allowed to examine or understand. It's–forgive me for saying so, sir—but it's humiliating, and more than a little unsettling."
"And that, Martin, is why you were allowed to come in today. You have an extraordinary intellect, but you are not the only one. If you are to learn to use your talents as your instinct dictates that you must, then you must learn to subordinate yourself to a new order. You are beginning to see beyond the shadows, but you are only halfway out of the dark. Only by this slow progress out of the cave will you come into the sunlight of the truth, and not be blinded."
Cundieffe turned and looked out at the brittle rays of winter sunlight stabbing through the omnipresent cloud cover. Out on the sidewalk, a few joggers and older, ostentatiously foreign men passed in front of the dwindling black-green fortress of the Cave Institute.
I want to serve, he thought. But first I have to see.
~8~
Someone had been in her room, she thought as she awakened. The quickening aromas of hot chocolate and orange juice, poached eggs and Canadian bacon lured her out of sleep and softened her fight-or-flight reflexes. Snowy sunlight played silvery fingers over the spare features of her room. She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes, stretched, looked around, and for a moment she could believe that her fondest wish had come true.
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