“I didn’t ask that,” Collins snapped. “I asked for a status report.”
Brierly was young for his directorship but he was a very experienced agent. He never let his personal feelings color his words or flavor his tone.
“At this time we have not located the POTUS,” he said crisply. “The first lady is being interviewed by one of my best men along with a staff psychologist. Ditto for the president’s body man and the team who were on duty outside the room.”
There was a heavy pause in which Brierly knew he was supposed to appreciate the full weight and scope of the acting president’s imperial disdain.
“Have you searched the building?”
No, asshole, Brierly thought, that never occurred to us. So glad you called.
“Yes, sir. Every room, every closet, under every desk.”
“And the transponder? Still no signal?”
“That is correct, sir.”
“Have you considered that the surveillance systems and computers may have been compromised?”
“Yes, sir. We have teams—”
“I’ve requested specialists from my Cyber Crimes Task Force,” Collins said briskly, emphasizing the word “my,” as if he was anything more than a nominal head of the investigation. “They’ll be there within the hour. You are to give them full access and total cooperation.”
Brierly frowned. “Sir, surely you appreciate the necessity of keeping this matter restricted to as few people as—”
“A great number of those few people are suspects.”
“I understand, sir, however we have protocols for this kind of an investigation and—”
“Protocols? For this kind of thing? Really? Tell, me, Brierly, when have you ever even heard of this kind of thing? This is outside of the scope of your experience,” said Collins, leaning on the word “experience,” making a point with a sledgehammer. “And surely even you have to realize that this is connected with the terror campaign being waged against our country. Get your head out of your ass. Expect my team within the hour.”
“Yes, sir,” said Brierly in as flat a monotone as possible. “Thank you, sir.”
“Brierly … this happened on your watch.”
“Thank you, Mr. President, I am fully aware of my responsibilities in this matter.”
And fuck you, you arrogant little shit.
“We are going to have to discuss your handling of things,” warned Collins.
“Yes, sir.”
“And one more thing,” said Collins. “I don’t want to hear about you running to Church or the DMS with this.”
“May I ask why not? Something like this could not have been accomplished without advanced technology and the DMS is—”
“The DMS is on my list, Brierly. Don’t think they’re not.”
“What exactly do you mean, Mr. President?”
“Surely it’s occurred to you, Brierly, that only a system as sophisticated as MindReader could have accomplished the intrusions and done the damage we’ve seen. Either Church is involved or he’s bungled his own security so badly that someone else has accessed MindReader and is using it to systematically attack some of this nation’s most highly classified projects.”
“Mr. President, are you accusing Mr. Church of—”
“I’m not accusing anyone of anything yet. When I do it will be spelled out on a federal warrant. In the meantime, you might want to decide where your loyalties lie.”
“Sir, I—”
The line went dead.
Brierly looked down at the cell phone. He took a moment to compose his face and then hurried down the hall to the president’s bedroom. Lyle Ames met him at the door.
“Talk to me,” said Brierly, and he could hear the edge of pleading in his own voice.
Ames, an old friend, touched his arm. “There’s nothing here, Linden. I mean nothing. No signs of a struggle, no forced entry. Video of the hallway verifies the report of the agents on the door. If the president was abducted by force there is no sign of it. Nothing.”
Brierly lowered his voice to a sharp, confidential tone. “That’s not acceptable, Lyle. I just had my ass handed to me by our new president. He’s sending some agents from his Cyber Crimes Task Force and he expects us to cooperate with them. If there’s anything to find I want us to find it, not them.”
Ames grunted. “The only thing we have is something two agents found on the lawn. They found it during the first sweep of the groups, so the timing fits, but we have no idea what it is or what it means.” He produced a high-res color print and handed it to Brierly. “It’s about ten feet across, so to get a clear picture I had to put a guy in a helicopter.”
Brierly frowned at the image. “This was on the lawn?”
“Pressed into it, yes.”
The pattern was odd but orderly; a strange ratcheted pattern, radiating out clockwise from a smaller circle at its center. On the top arc of the circle were three smaller circles in descending size.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s not the symbol of any terrorist organization I’ve ever heard of. We’re running it through the symbols and logos database.”
“Are you sure this was left by whoever abducted the president?” asked Brierly.
“Not sure of any damn thing,” confessed Ames. “It was on the lawn and the agents walking the grounds say that it wasn’t there before the alert.”
“I want to see the surveillance cameras for this part of the lawn.”
Ames cleared his throat. “Those cameras have a four-minute window where all they show is static. The pattern is not there before the static and is there afterward.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Collins is going to call that a cyber-attack and he’ll use it to take this whole thing away from us.”
“I know.”
“Besides — it’s bullshit,” snapped Brierly as he slapped the picture against Ames’s chest. “You can’t make something this big and complicated in four minutes. Come on, Lyle, I don’t need fucking fairy stories right now. Give me some actual goddamn evidence.”
Ames colored. “Linden, I’m giving you what we have and aside from this thing on the lawn we have nothing. We’re working everything. We have the first lady downstairs. I spoke with her already, but she said she slept through it and didn’t wake up at all until Gil and the door team entered the room.”
Brierly searched his face and took Ames by the elbow, pulling him out of earshot of the other agents. “And—?”
“And I believe her. We can ask her to take a polygraph, but I know what it will say.”
“Will she consent to a blood test?”
Ames nodded. “Already has. She insisted we do it, and she wants those results as badly as we do. We’re also running tests on the glass of water beside the president’s bed, his toothpaste, pills in all of the bottles in the medicine cabinet…”
“He doesn’t take a lot of pills.”
“I know, most of them are vitamin supplements, but we don’t know if he took anything tonight. Or if the first lady took anything. She says that she doesn’t even remember lying down.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s what she said. She and the president came into the residence, changed into pajamas, and that’s it. That’s all she remembers before the agents opened the door and woke her up.”
“How was she when she woke up?”
“Borderline hysterical, but that was a reaction to the events. She didn’t appear logy or dazed. None of the reactions you’d expect from a chemical sedative. Even so, there might have been something in her system, maybe slipped into something she ate or drank. We’ll look for contact substances, too — something that could have been placed on a surface they might have touched.”
Brierly nodded. “What about Gil Shannon?”
“Same thing. I have two men with him now — both top interrogators — and they’re working him pretty hard. I spoke with the agents who were at
the POTUS’s door and I laid it on pretty thick, too. Promise of immunity if they had anything to do with this and could provide actionable information.”
Brierly grunted. “You get approval from the attorney general?”
“No, the AG’s in Florida. I lied. I figured, fuck it.”
“What’d you get?”
“I got some very angry, very outraged agents who I think will pass a polygraph. But … they also know that they’re done as far as the Service goes.”
Brierly said nothing.
Ames sighed. “I guess we’re all done. I know I am. POTUS goes missing while I’m shift supervisor? I won’t be able to get a job guarding a landfill after this.”
“If you do, put in a good word for me, ’cause I’ll be the first one out on my ass.”
Brierly knew that he would be in the crosshairs because some people were going to try and use this to build or protect their own careers by making sure they were seen as executioners of the guilty. Brierly would go down as the Secret Service director who had managed to lose the president. You don’t recover from a career stumble like that. Even if this turned out to be something completely beyond Brierly’s control, he would take the bullet. A head must always fall, otherwise the system looks like it’s driving on a bad tire.
They traded small, grim smiles, then turned to survey the bedroom.
There were a dozen people in there. Forensics techs dusting and collecting. Photographers. Agents looking everywhere in hopes that they’d be the ones to find the first thread. Every single person in the room looked frightened, even the techs who had no reason to be.
He stared down at the empty bed, and its emptiness seemed to mock him. The heavy covers, the rumpled sheets, the dented pillow. The absence of sense.
“Let me see that goddamn photo again.”
Ames handed it over. Brierly scowled at it. It was bullshit. Total bullshit. No way it could be connected.
“God … we need the Deacon and his geek squad. We need the DMS.”
“It’d be your ass, Linden. The president said not to call him.”
Brierly bared his teeth. “My president didn’t give that order.”
Chapter Twelve
VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sunday, October 20, 6:07 a.m.
Mr. Bones was Howard Shelton’s minion. It was not how it was supposed to be, but it played out that way. It was an arrangement that developed over time and it settled into a relationship that worked for them both. Bones — whose real name was Alfred Bonetti — knew that he was never going to be the alpha of their little pack. Howard was, and that was clear from the first time they met.
“Minion” was, perhaps, an inexact word, but after nine years Mr. Bones did not know which would be a better fit. Ostensibly he and Shelton were colleagues, two of the three governors of Majestic Three. In practice, Howard was the mastermind and Mr. Bones was…? What? Assistant was the wrong context. Lackey was too weak. Henchman was a bit old-fashioned. Enabler was too New Age. Number two sounded scatological.
He liked “minion.” Minion had a strangely appealing ring to it. It made Mr. Bones feel like he was an acolyte in some secret cult of immortals.
Fun stuff.
There were even sacrifices. Last week it was the entire staff at the Wolf Trap lab. Some good people, too, including that redheaded secretary. Yum. A body in a box now, of course, but yum once upon a time.
He and Howard were in the big kitchen at Shelton’s estate in Pennsylvania. The kitchen was enormous and the estate was positively obscene. Howard had the entire VanMeer Castle disassembled and brought over from Europe, then rebuilt with a few alterations. Howard and Mr. Bones referred to it as their “secret lair.”
They were mad scientists, after all, and that was a hoot.
Howard poked at half a grapefruit. “How the fuck am I supposed to feed my brain with this shit?”
Mr. Bones peered at him over the glasses that were halfway down his nose. “You’re not. The protein drinks and the vitamins and the flower essences are for your brain. This is to keep your waistline and your IQ from reaching parity.”
“Tastes like sour piss.”
“And you’d recognize that taste how?”
“Oh, very funny.” Howard speared a chunk of fruit, shoved it in his mouth, winced, and chewed.
Bones poured himself a fresh cup of coffee, added some hot to Howard’s, and went back to studying the data flow on his laptop. It was an odd-looking computer, known within M3 circles as a Ghost Box, and it was unlike anything on the market. There were two wings that folded out from the screen to form a three-sided box above the keyboard. This allowed for some very nice holographic imaging. There was also a unit attached to the back that looked like an extended-use battery, but wasn’t. This was an encryption-intrusion drive that allowed the Ghost Box to operate in almost the same way as the MindReader system. It was a much newer technology than MindReader, and it combined elements of the Chinese GhostNet along with a few radical design jumps drawn from technology sources particular to M3.
“What’s happening in the world?” asked Howard.
It was not a general question. The information that flowed across the laptop was a very private news feed comprised of information, updates, and intelligence from hundreds of sources within the M3 network, including quite a lot of it that came from sources that had no idea they were reporting to senior members of a secret cabal hidden within the U.S. government. Some of those people would have rebelled at the idea and they would begin inconvenient witch hunts. As neither Mr. Bones nor Howard Shelton fancied having their heads on poles, they kept such information on a need-to-know basis.
“It’s been a busy night.”
“Give me the highlights,” said Shelton. “Don’t tell me stuff I don’t need to know about.”
“Okay … well, the air show is still on track, though two more exhibitors have dropped. Belmann-Kruas and Mitsubishi are out.”
“Good. That’s what — eight gone?”
“Seven, GE decided to stay in. Apparently they were able to transfer their entire project to Houston, so all they really lost is four days.”
“Hm. Should we hit them again?”
“Oh, I think we have to.”
“Do it.”
Mr. Bones nodded. For seven weeks now they had been running a very carefully crafted series of cyber-attacks. Ghost Box’s intrusion technology allowed them to sneak into virtually any company’s computer and, once in, introduce viruses of all kinds. Some were tapeworms with very specific agendas, some were what Howard called “romper-stomper programs” that just randomly destroyed things. So far every major private contractor working with the Department of Defense had been hit, and the DoD itself had taken a few punches below the belt. Even Shelton Aeronautics had been attacked, though this self-immolation had been carefully planned to give a very realistic appearance of maximum damage to their new Specter 101 ultra-high-speed stealth aircraft program. As far as anyone in the upper echelon of the industry was concerned, Specter 101 promised to be the first of a brand-new generation of stealth craft. A Mach 20 masterpiece that was a ghost to everybody’s radar.
It was the lamb that Howard was placing on the altar that was the Project.
The real Project.
The Project that M3 had been working on for a very long time.
Everything else — even the quite lovely Specter 101, mattered so much less. Just like the sixty employees at Wolf Trap mattered so much less.
“If you want to hide in plain sight,” Bones had said when he’d suggested the slaughter to Howard, “and even get some sympathy from people who would ordinarily love to see your spleen on a platter — namely the boards at Boeing, Lockheed, and all the rest — then become a victim. Let them console you, Howard. Hell, let them pity you. God knows they will. So will everybody who reads a newspaper or logs on to a news feed. You’ll be the heroic Howard Shelton, publically mourning at funerals, donating gaud
y amounts of money to trust funds that provide for the offspring of whoever works at Wolf Trap. You’ll embody the tragedy so much that you’ll receive more sympathy cards than all the families together.”
Howard Shelton had stared at Mr. Bones for nearly a full minute before he said, “You are an actual evil genius.”
“This I know.”
“If you had a twin sister I’d bang her silly.”
“That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard,” laughed Mr. Bones.
That discussion was two months ago. The slaughter was a little over two days ago. The offices of Shelton Aeronautics were so crammed with sympathy bouquets that it looked like a tropical rain forest. The president had called. The CEOs of every major defense contractor called. Celebrities had called. It was delicious.
“How would you like to hit GE this time? Cyber or something more physical?”
Howard thought about it as he winced his way through another chunk of grapefruit.
“Let’s up the game. I think a fire in the corporate offices might do it.”
“Done,” said Mr. Bones and sent a coded e-mail to someone who loved to play with matches. Then he wired a third of the payment to a Cayman Island account. Good faith money for a useful contractor.
“What else?” asked Howard.
“Well … if we’re going to keep this up, then we’re going to have to give the feds someone to look at. Too much blame is being directed at China, and they’re starting to complain to us.”
“Pussies.”
“Agreed, but they do have a point.”
Howard pushed the grapefruit aside. “God, I’d rather eat a dead rat than another piece of that shit.”
“Lose forty pounds and we can discuss pancakes.”
Howard sipped his coffee. “So, you want to throw someone to the wolves. Good call. But who?”
“I still want to point them at Mr. Church.”
“Good luck.”
“Oh, come on. He’s mysterious, he’s devious, and people don’t even know his real name. He’s perfect.”
“He’s a Boy Scout,” said Howard. “The only reason you think he looks good for it is because he has MindReader, but it’s a bad fit.”
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