"You used him," Cundieffe accused. "You ruined his life."
"I'm not done with him yet, not by a long shot, nor you, neither." He let Cundieffe feel the cold, rigid muzzle of the rifle against the hollow of his jaw, enough firepower to put his egg-shaped head in orbit. He propped the gun against his boot, so he wouldn't have to hold it all the way to West Virginia. "Let's go see him."
Whoever first coined the homespun wisdom that those deprived of sight compensate with their other senses, thought Cundieffe, was utterly deprived of imagination, and probably was never blind for any length of time, either. For though his sense of the barrel that never left his neck was preternaturally keen, indeed, the rest of his brain had pooled its energies in imagining the most awful possible ends, and couldn't be prevailed upon to discover where he was. So caught up in this pointless pursuit did he get, that the gun reintroduced itself with painful alacrity more than a few times to bring his mind back to the business at hand.
Worst of all, Greenaway had not seen fit to bind his hands, as if to dare him to try to make some move to escape. They stayed put in his lap, but it took an act of will not to go for the door handle and dive out, or try to remove the sweltering, itchy wool muffler tied tightly around his head.
He was in a Range Rover traveling west through the heart of the Beltway, but between the cushioned suspension of the Range Rover and his unfamiliarity with the geography of the Capitol, he had all but abandoned hope of visualizing their position. All he could say with certainty was that they were not taking him home to the Georgetown Suites.
Two men sat up front, one driving and listening to but not speaking into a headset, while the other slept, faintly snoring and grinding his teeth.
Cundieffe had expected to be interrogated, to have to say, "I don't know," a lot, and get hit a lot, as well. But Greenaway started talking as soon as they got up to freeway speed. His voice was hoarse and frayed, laced with defiance, but so very tired. Cundieffe felt cold fingers tickling the valves of his heart; if he simply told Greenaway what he knew, he might get out of this alive. But Greenaway wanted to confess to him, as he apparently couldn't to any of his own men.
"It wasn't just revenge. I really believed the Mission were the real enemy. I hated you cocksuckers, don't get me wrong, but it lit up my brain when I saw what they were capable of. These were the fucking traitors who'd made every mess my men had to clean up. I saw it so clear, I couldn't see anything else—not Radiant Dawn, not who I was dealing with. And then it was too late. We were up there, dug in, ready to kick God's ass, if He had the bad judgment to cross us, but then they came, they came up out of the ground, geek, and we shot them but they wouldn't die, and what the fuck would you have done in my place, you fucking four-eyed fuck? All my goddamned men, each fucking one of the bastards worth a hundred of you, and they killed them all like they were already just meat. That's when I knew the whole goddamned thing had been a setup. That's when I realized who the really real enemy really was—"
Greenaway's ragged voice trailed off into the gritty hum of the engine. The gun jiggled against Cundieffe's carotid artery, and he held his breath, asked, "What about Durban?"
Greenaway made Durban his mole in the NSA to get intercepts that documented the government cover-up of the events of July, '99. He got the files, and convinced Durban he'd been suckered by Russians. But he got more than he asked for.
"There was something else, but it wasn't decrypted. I have no fucking clue what's on it, but I know Durban read it. It scared him badly enough that he didn't decrypt it, but he gave it to me."
"The Royal designation is an outmoded and almost mythic classification, something only Presidents and their elite security circles handled. It's probably about RADIANT. True, the government built it, but they had no idea—"
"Bullshit! What did they think it was for, solar fucking energy? It was a weapon, and they thought it was theirs. They just didn't know what the fuck they'd made. But I think they do, now."
"RADIANT was destroyed last week. Something new is on the horizon."
"That's not my goddamned problem, and it's not yours, either. Right now, I am the only goddamned problem you have."
"Why am I here, now? Why do you need me?"
"Need help getting in to Durban. Can't shoot him. And I want you to be there to see it, when it comes out. I want you to explain to me how the fuck this is business as usual. Then maybe you'll want to help me fuck your dickless friends."
"I'm not worth bargaining for, to them. I'm a probationary. They've been testing me, and I think I failed them."
"I don't care," Greenaway snarled. "You're still neck-deep in the shit. You knew what they were doing. You've known about the whole fucking thing for six months. I haven't seen any exposés on Radiant Dawn on Nightline or 20/20, so I don't suppose you felt compelled to tell anybody, did you?"
Cundieffe shook his head vigorously, but Greenaway urged him to talk with a judicious jab of the gun-muzzle. The insight stuck him like an ice pick between the eyes, because it was the one angle that had never, ever come to light, in all his months of turning it over in his head. And why? Trust in the Cave Institute, in the system? No, because in the end he'd lost faith in them, too. Trust in himself, which was a nice way of saying blind, idiot arrogance, was why he'd kept his mouth shut. He, Martin Cundieffe, dickless detective, had to see for himself what lay at the bottom of it all, and damn the rest of the world.
Cundieffe told him everything he knew about RADIANT, and about the Cave Institute, about how they covered up the nuke in California and the Baker raid, and Heilige Berg. He left out only Storch—he couldn't say why, but he ran off on enough tangents to get prodded, as it was, and he couldn't explain Storch without thinking a good deal about it first. Somehow, what happened to the poor, sick Gulf War vet had been the saddest, strangest part of the whole affair. Finally, he told Greenaway about how Keogh started the Mission.
When he had run breathlessly up to the moment Greenaway's thugs carjacked him and sputtered to a stop, the old soldier sat in intense, deep-breathing silence for a long while. "What a clusterfuck," Greenaway whispered at last. "And your fucking people made it happen."
"They let it happen," he admitted, surprised at himself as he said it aloud. The fog that had wrapped it up all these many weeks, he now saw, had been the smoke from his ideals burning, and with a breath, he blew it all away. "They seem to have been more concerned all along with getting something from the parties involved in the war, and with keeping the whole thing a secret, than about preserving order or stopping the fighting. I—I've begun to suspect that there is something more behind the true identity of Dr. Keogh or the Mission's DARPA scientists, but I never knew what it was. It was us behind it all, but not all of them. One of them tried to get me to see, and he said there were others in the inner circle, who wanted to stop it…"
"They used you, geek," Greenaway's hot spit hit his cheek. "Just like they used me. They buried it all. Do you think, when this is over, they won't bury you, too?"
"Lieutenant Colonel Greenaway, can I offer you a bit of advice?"
His captor made only a tired sigh. Taking silence as assent, he said, "Don't you see yet that this isn't your war to fight? Your reasons for being here are purely psychotic, if you'll pardon the judgment implied by the term. Your grievances are all tied up in your own unwillingness to face your own impending mortality. The Mission shoots you down in California, humiliating you in the last op of your career, so you start a blood feud with them. That goes…um, badly, so now you launch a jihad against the Cave Institute. This isn't about stopping them to you, anymore. This can only end one way, with you dead."
He waited to get hit or shot, but instead, the muzzle went away, and the knot at the base of his skull was undone. The blindfold fell away. He blinked, tried to rub his eyes, but his hands were still dead in his lap. The Range Rover braked and the engine shut off.
Greenaway leaned in close, his breath rancid with hunger and coffee. Cundieffe marveled a
t the almost cancerous exhaustion etched in Greenaway's features. The terrifying old soldier he remembered from last summer looked ten years gone. His eyes, glassy red bulbs with a few strands of unbloodshot white woven through them, pinned Cundieffe to the seat more ruthlessly than had the gun. "You're saying I'm too stupid to get this done. That's why you're here. But don't feel bad for me, geek. If I lived through all this, I'd just kill myself sooner or later, anyway."
Cundieffe let himself be dragged out of the Range Rover. He slipped on his glasses, pinching at the tape holding them together. He expected to be blinded, but the night was almost darker here than it'd been behind the blindfold. Clouds split open in rifts on the upper-atmosphere winds, and the starlight reflected off a steep hillside directly in front of them, caked in a foot of fresh powder. He slipped right off his feet on his first step, but Greenaway caught him, steadied him, and pointed him up the hill.
Looking around, he saw very little to recommend itself in the way of a landmark. Trees, tall and wild but stooped under heavy mantles of snow, surrounded the field on three sides, sparse here, but forming a curtain screening off the top of the hill from the unplowed two-lane road. The road wound out of sight in only a few car-lengths behind a stand of pines on one side, and a sheer rock ridge on the other. Beyond that, more trees, a narrow valley that probably bedded a frozen-over stream, and mountains forever beyond that.
They were in a virgin old-growth pine forest some two and a half hours—say, for the sake of argument, one hundred twenty miles—out of Washington, DC. He'd overheard other agents at Headquarters talking about skiing a couple hours out of town on the weekends in the Shenandoah Mountains in Virginia. Past that lay the George Washington National Forest in West Virginia. It amused him more than it should that Greenaway had taken him across state lines, making this a federal crime.
"You go up there," Greenaway said in a low, brittle voice. His hand disappeared into his parka, and Cundieffe flinched away, but the hand came back out with a compact disk in a dull steel jewel case.
"Why me? Why don't you—?"
"He knows us."
"And you trust me to come back?"
Greenaway smiled big and bad at him. "If you got any guts in you at all, you read what he gives you. You'll come back. Besides, we'll see you." He looked past Cundieffe, who turned to see the sleeping passenger stir and get out. He produced a binocular night vision rig out of nowhere and slipped it on his head. He shuffled around to the trunk and got out the longest, meanest sniper rifle Cundieffe had ever seen. It was almost as long as the sniper was tall, and had a scope suitable for picking the tops off the heads of Martians on their home planet. With a nod to Greenaway, he trudged up the hill and instantly vanished.
"Where am I going?" Cundieffe demanded.
Greenaway pointed at the stand of trees up the road. Cundieffe stared but saw nothing until he realized Greenaway wasn't pointing at a place, but at one of the trees, which he suddenly saw was not a tree at all. Though of the same height as the others, its branches were steel and plastic, and cables ran from it, camouflaged by the evergreen canopy, to other artificial trees, presumably down the length of the valley.
"Cellular relays, but the atmosphere and the ore deposits fuck up the signals, so there's hard cable." His pointing finger ran down to the telephone pole's base, where a cable entered a buried plastic pipe that ran, visible only as a slight depression in the snow, up the hillside and into the trees where the sniper had gone.
"Follow the cable. He's waiting at the other end, about an eighth of a mile back in the trees. And watch out for traps, the woods're full of 'em."
Cundieffe stopped and hugged the nearest tree, studying the ground. He knew plenty about the kind of booby-traps anti-government nuts liked to deploy, had read all the online manuals, watched all the videos one could buy at the gun shows and militia conferences, had even co-authored a piece on the subject for the Bureau's Hostage Rescue Team field manual. But only now did it occur to him that he'd never seen one in the field, and he had no idea what to look for.
Greenaway's harsh laughter made him clutch tighter to the tree. "I'm just fucking with you, geek. It's all clear, just get your ass up there."
He let go of the tree and started picking his way up the hill. His imagination was still goosed up from its enhanced role in his blindness, putting tripwires, ruby laser beams and snares everywhere he looked. The depression he was supposed to follow vanished almost instantly in the dark and snow, so he trudged along in the general direction the cable had been headed. He stared at the ground intently, but the harder he looked, the denser the trees grew together, the darker it got, the less he saw.
He'd been kidnapped by an Army-trained killer who had gone rogue, not to mention insane. He was out in the woods, fumbling around in the dark on his way to meet the maniac's last victim and flush him out, with only a sniper for company. He froze and tried to make his ears hear everything from here to the Capitol, but he got no sense of where the sniper had gone to ground. Were his orders to kill Cundieffe out here? Was the whole thing a ruse? If so, it was an unnecessarily complicated one, since Greenaway could have shot him in the head at any time on their drive. More likely, the sniper was to shoot Durban—hence, both of them—once he'd served his purpose. He would have to warn Durban, once he found his cabin—if the runaway NSA man was even out here—
Snap out of it, he told himself. You're not a door-buster, you're a bookworm, but you've got to stop thinking and act, if you want to come out of this alive. See what's in front of you. Be in it—
He took a step. Nothing killed him. Scanning the ground, he took another. So far, so good. A few die-hard bushes pushed up through the frozen snow, but there were no traps in sight, no claymores or nail bombs. The hillside leveled off in a shallow ledge choked in pines, but he could just make out the rocky pile beyond ascending to scrape the lowest of the scudding clouds. He stopped and leaned against a tree, mopped freezing sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. Grateful for the level ground, he started across it, thinking, if he's out here, it'll be here. It better be, or…or what?
He didn't see anything in the dark until he took another step and all the klieg lights in the world switched on, and then all he saw was light.
He threw his arms up and hit the ground, more by accident and panic than training, but it saved his life, just the same. A white-hot buckshot wind tore down his back. He burrowed face-first into the crusty snow, scraping his face and breaking the arm off his glasses.
"Lieutenant Durban!" Cundieffe screamed into the snow, "don't shoot! I'm unarmed! I'm not here to arrest you, I just want to talk—"
He hazarded a peek up from his snow-angel foxhole, holding his glasses on with one hand. A tiny log and fieldstone cabin stood back against the foot of the rocks, windows shuttered, a Unabomber ski lodge. Two forty-foot pine trees broke through the roof. Spotlights blazed down on him from the branches, obscuring the shooter, painting a compass rose of fluttering shadows around him as he rose to a kneeling position with his arms akimbo behind his head.
"My name is Martin Cundieffe, from the FBI. I know what really happened to you, and I'd like to help you!"
No answer, but no more shooting, either. Encouraged, he pressed on. "I know what you did, and I think I know why. You want to clear your name. You want justice to be done, but you're afraid for your life. I can bring you in as a witness, not a suspect. I can help you get your life back."
A sickening knot gathered in the pit of his stomach. He wasn't lying, but Greenaway's lackey could make a liar of him in an instant.
"You're alone?" A haggard male voice shouted.
He sucked in a deep breath. "More or less. I can explain everything if you let me come in. I sincerely want to help you, and I think you know things that fit into my own investigation."
"The Bureau wants me dead. I read their mail. Don't lie to me."
"They don't know what I know," he said weakly.
"If they knew what I know, you'd be here
to kill me," Durban answered, but Cundieffe saw him come out in front of the cabin. He was tall and sturdy, shaggy-bearded and wild-eyed, and for a moment, Cundieffe thought he must've blundered into the wrong psychotic hermit. This man looked as if he'd been out here alone for years, not a month. He wore a camo-print parka with a fur-fringed hood. A massive knife hung in a buckskin sheath from his belt, the point of the blade reaching to his knee. He cradled a Mossberg twelve-gauge pump in one arm. He wore snowshoes, and crossed the open patch of snow between them in odd, sideways steps that struck Cundieffe as signs of mental collapse until it hit him that, yes, the yard must be stiff with traps.
The mountain man stopped in front of him and prodded his sopping wet front with the shotgun. Grunt of satisfaction, then he pulled Cundieffe to his feet and led him across the yard. "So you are Lieu—"
Durban jerked him off-balance. "Shut up, I have to think. I forget where a lot of this shit is."
Inside, the cabin was bigger than it seemed from without, but Durban had packed it with a survivalist's wish list: beside a wood stove and a cot with a sleeping bag on it were stacks of canned goods, camping supplies, firearms, computers, closed-circuit monitors. Cundieffe eyed these last items with a new twinge of fear. He moved to step in front of the one that framed the Range Rover parked beside the road, but Durban had already seen it. "Start by explaining them," he said, tapping the screen.
He looked at Durban with his mouth hanging open. He felt acutely strange here, in the presence of a man who'd been only a hypothetical fugitive, a collection of files from which he'd deduced a scenario. What disturbed him was how right he'd been. The Naval officer's eyes burned patriotism and hunger for justice. He wanted to tell somebody, but was that why he also looked slightly insane?
"They're not friends. They brought me here. They're the people that operated you, got you to steal those documents. They're not the Russian mafia."
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