“My razor’s in the bathroom, dear. I don’t have to knock.”
“Well, stop sneaking around. Find a less annoying compulsion.” She fumbled for her bedside clock. “What time is it?”
“Six in the evening. What’re you doing asleep, anyway?”
She gave him a puzzled look. “You know I’m up all night just like you.”
“Yeah, but I don’t sleep all day.”
“I was taking a brief nap. Anyway, you don’t sleep at all.”
“When I have Abby back in my bed, I’ll sleep.” He saw the tightening around her eyes, the downcurling of her mouth. Why did he say things like that? Did he want to hurt her? “Meaning that I’ll never sleep … except with you.” He leaned down and kissed her cheek.
She drew away.
He sat down on the foot of the bed. “A twenty-three-year-old kid named Albert Doxy—yes, that Doxy—was killed in his West Wing office today.”
“Jesus.”
“He was decapitated. Clean cut, precision.”
“Them?”
“That’s why I need access.”
She was silent. They were considering the same question: how to get him into the loop of the murder investigation without breaking secrecy.
The public believes that presidents know all the secrets. The truth is that they are told as little as possible. Nobody in intelligence wants attention from the executive level unless it’s a legal requirement, least of all people like Flynn and Diana and their colleagues in Detail 242. The group of them were keeping the most dangerous secret in human history. Flynn could not imagine what somebody like Bill Greene might do with knowledge of the alien presence, especially since it was hostile. When he came to understand how dangerous this all was, and how helpless we really were, he might do any damn thing.
The revolution on Aeon had put the criminal class in power. The decent people who had been trying to stop them were now either fugitives or dead. Exploitation of Earth had ceased to be illegal. Now it was the law. Previously, they’d been dealing with isolated criminals. Now Aeon itself was the criminal.
If the public found out what it really meant when people disappeared, as they were doing at an ever-increasing rate worldwide, there would be absolute panic. With the entire world in an uproar, Aeon’s game would get harder. Right now, all Aeon had to deal with was the careful pushback of the detail, protecting one individual or another, stopping an incursion here and there, doing enough to preserve at least a semblance of human safety, but not enough to make Aeon lash out.
Public panic would definitely make Aeon lash out, and what that might involve nobody could tell, except that it would certainly be extremely dangerous.
“Can we trust Cissy with anything beyond what she knows already?” Diana asked. “We may have to.”
“She’s got Lorna’s toughness and brains.”
“And Bill’s unpredictability, from what I’ve seen. What if she showed up on 60 Minutes with this?”
Flynn knew where this was going, and he didn’t like it. Diana could have Cissy killed. Contrary to popular belief, the president is not the only American official with the legal power to cut such orders.
“She’s reliable.”
Diana’s ice-crusted eyes met his. “So you say.”
“If we ever get this thing under control, there’s history as yet unwritten, and you’re in it. So how do you want to be remembered, as a kid killer? You need to get me in there, D. Tonight. And leave Cissy to me.”
“I can do that, but you’re gonna have to avoid Lorna and Bill on your own.”
“Assuming they live out the night.”
“You protect them!”
She walked into the sitting room adjacent to her bedroom, her long legs flashing in the last light slanting in the window.
She was his commanding officer. Officially.
They lived together here in Georgetown. Unofficially. Sometimes.
When the nights wore on them, they brought each other comfort.
They were and were not in love.
He could not imagine life without her, but he wanted to. He wanted to continue to be loyal to Abby.
Diana was already on the phone in her adjacent office, speaking softly and intently. Had he wished, he could have picked up every word; he had that kind of hearing. There was no point, though. She would succeed in what she was doing. Her clearance was literally higher than the president’s, and her authority was very extensive. In the end, it emerged out of a level of government so deep and so powerful that not even the most off-the-wall conspiracy theorists would believe that it was there. Or that it was as small as it was, just a few experts in things like genetics and neuroscience, exobiology and esoteric communications devices. And a supervisor to whom Diana reported, but whose name and place in the tangled web of government was kept from her underlings, which included Flynn—at least officially.
It had not always been this way. They had started out as part of the FBI. An alien cop had been attached to the unit.
Now Aeon was hostile and the lid was on.
Diana hung up and came back into the bedroom. “Go over to H Street. They’ll orient you and send you to the White House.” She paused. “The director’s strung, Flynn. He sounded like a scared child.”
“Did he have any idea what he’s actually dealing with? I mean, given a weapon like that, it’s not a stretch to think aliens might be involved.”
“You’ll need to determine that.”
Flynn drove through the evening streets of Washington, passing along H Street. Across Lafayette Square he could see the White House. There were figures on the roof, barely visible, but there. Every light that could be turned on was blazing away. Understandable.
Secret Service HQ is a nondescript building on a nondescript street, in keeping with the low profile that the agency considers important to its mission.
Flynn entered and was quickly passed by the challenge desk. He was using his real identity. There had been no time for anything else.
He was taken up to the crisis center by an agent armed with a small pistol in an ankle holster and a Sig Sauer under his arm, probably with one of the new DAK triggers. In Flynn’s opinion, it wasn’t the best Sig Sauer and they should never have moved to it. The SA/DA version has only one trigger reset point, not the two of the DAK trigger. In heat, who’s going to remember which reset to use?
The agent was left-handed, as Flynn could see from the positioning of the shoulder holster. As they ascended in the elevator, Flynn watched him in the reflection in the door. Carefully.
The crisis center was smaller than he had expected, centered by a long oak conference table. There were five people present, all males, all armed. He recognized only one of them, the director, Simon Forde. He’d never met him, but he’d seen him on television.
As he entered, nobody reacted, let alone uttered a greeting. In fact, nobody spoke at all. Their eyes were mean pins, ten of them.
“I realize that this is an intrusion,” he said, “but I have no choice but to be here, just as you have no choice but to accept that.”
“This is Flynn Carroll,” Forde said. “He’s deep alphabet and he wants to sniff under our tails.”
Flynn looked from man to man. “What I need now is access to the body. I need to see the remains.”
“No press,” Forde said. “You’ll be looking at a felony. Know that.”
Flynn let his contempt live in his eyes. Forde glanced down at his notepad and moved his pen. In the privacy of his mind, Flynn identified him as the sort of person who can waste the lives of others in service to the rules. He would not forget this.
“We need to know something from you,” one of the other men said, this one young, his face civil-service bland. He had his job, he was good, he was marking off the years until retirement.
“Sure thing. Shoot.”
“Take a look.” He threw an image of a young man strolling, seemingly casually, down a corridor with a file in his hand. It was the f
irst time Flynn had seen Al Doxy, and his immediate response was that the puffy kid’s body language was a lie. The tight shoulders, the head thrust forward, the quick, stiff movements: This was a frightened walk.
Then Flynn recognized the file identifier, and when he did he had to fight back any visible trace of the surge of surprise that swept over him.
“Did you recover that file?” he asked, his voice carefully modulated to conceal his inner horror.
“We did not, and the identifier isn’t recognizable.”
It wouldn’t be, not to them. There was no way he would tell them anything about it, nor reveal that files with that identifier were only stored physically, rather than being scanned into the electronic system. Electronic files are open doors. Paper files locked in underground storage facilities are far harder to access.
“I need to see the body.”
“Who are you, Mr. Carroll?”
The inevitable power play. “You have my ID.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Freelance.”
“We’re not stupid,” Forde said. “We’re thinking, with the resources you probably command, you can help us.”
Flynn said nothing.
“Look, you’re talking about the most incredible security breach in history. It’s the White House, for God’s sake! Tell us what you know.”
Flynn said nothing.
The room crackled with tension. Flynn had identified the positions of all the guns. He could take these men out before they could get off a shot, all of them, even the ones with decent pistols.
“DIA? No, too low-level. NSA? No, too operational. NRO? Not a techie. So where are you from, Mr. Carroll?”
What he knew about that file was that its loss was the most serious problem he could imagine, not only for him personally, but for his entire operation.
“I need to see the body,” he repeated, his voice carefully modulated, expressing a calmness that he did not feel.
Forde glared back at him.
“I need to see it now.”
Silence.
“Director Forde, I have the authority.”
His face was stone. His eyes bored into Flynn’s. “The body’s been moved to the Navy Yard. There’s a coroner’s facility there. We’ll let them know you’re coming.”
“Thank you.” He stood up. “I’ll want the coroner’s office cleared of personnel. I don’t want anybody to observe me.”
“What about the doctor? To explain the wounds?”
“Nobody’s to be in the facility.” He tossed Forde a cell phone. “When you’ve got me included on your White House detail for tonight, call me. All you have to do is press talk. The phone will do the rest.”
“On the White House detail? Are you serious?”
“Not really. Jacking people like you up is my hobby.”
“We can’t put you on the White House detail. You have no idea how things work.”
“Nobody will see me.”
“What if they do? The president wanders at night.”
“Nope. Bill Green sleeps like a hibernating grizzly and Lorna wakes up at five, so I won’t worry about him and I’ll avoid her.”
“I can’t let you impersonate one of my officers.”
“OK, then, let’s be clear: If I’m not in there, there’s a reasonable possibility that they’ll be murdered in their sleep. You will bear responsibility for that.” He pointed from man to man. “You. You. You. You. Your responsibility.”
There was an uneasy stirring around the table.
Simon Forde looked down at the phone. “I’ve never seen one of these.”
“It’s from the future.”
CHAPTER FIVE
HE LEFT Forde staring at the small instrument in his hand. It was GSMK CryptoPhone modified to support quantum encryption. The phones had been especially created for the detail by a high-end Russian hacker who called himself “Dimitri Kronos.” He thought the work he did was for the Russian mafia, and so was afraid to provide anything but his best. If he’d known that his real client was an American intelligence unit, he would have provided his worst.
Back in his car, he called Diana. “We have a problem. This kid was walking into the White House with our paperwork in his hands.”
“What?”
“Our core file. No question. Organizational structure, identities, all the fundamentals. I saw the file identifier on the folder he was carrying. And it’s gone. No sign of it.”
“Aeon has our core file?”
“So it seems,” he said.
The Navy Yard is a big place, but its coroner’s unit a very small one, with facilities for three cadavers. It’s not refrigerated, because it’s intended only for temporary use, if somebody in the facility dies suddenly. But in 2013 there had been a mass shooting here. Twelve people had died very damn suddenly on that occasion, and as he pulled up to the low gray building where the unit was located, he wondered if it had been put to use then.
He’d been waved onto the facility when the security police identified his license number. They had instructions not to approach the car and to allow him to park anywhere he wished. Diana’s usual excellent work.
He turned off the car and opened his jacket in order to expose his pistol. He entered the building. At the end of a narrow corridor was a small sign on a door: CORONER.
He had been unusually effective when it came to cleaning up criminal elements from Aeon. In fact, he was the only cop who was effective, at least in the field. Diana was good at deskwork and planning, but he was the one who could go out into the forests or down into the caves where Aeon’s biorobots lurked and actually get kills. When the biorobots had been run by a few criminals, he had been a constant target. Now that the criminals were the government of the planet, the danger he was in had escalated even further.
They were capable of fielding bios that appeared to be human, but when you shot them, the skin sank against the metal frame in such a way that made it immediately apparent that they were anything but. When they were functional, though, they were very, very good.
So, were such things behind that door waiting for him? He had no reason to think so, but nevertheless his pistol slipped into his right hand. It happened so quickly that it would have seemed to an observer like a magic trick, as if the gun had appeared out of nowhere. As he drew, he simultaneously threw the door open. He determined that the room was empty except for a stainless steel double sink along one wall and an examining table at its center, its surface scuffed dull from many years of use. On the wall opposite the sink were three cabinets held closed by heavy-duty handles.
He could see by the fact that the handle had no dust on it that they had used the center drawer. He grasped it, felt a click, and stopped. Another pull and the door would swing wide.
Again, he braced the pistol. Only then did he open the door.
Darkness within. The odor of raw, dead blood. Total silence, no movement.
He released the handle, drew a small flashlight out of his pocket, and trained it on the dark.
What he saw was a corpse, and only that. He pulled at the gurney it was on, and it rattled forward on old rails.
The body was naked and headless. Tucked in between the legs was a black plastic bag.
Carefully, he ran a hand over the gray skin of the corpse. He next opened the bag and drew out the head. A human head weighs about three pounds, and he didn’t notice anything unusual about the weight of this one. The young face was intent, the lips parted in a way that suggested pleasure. Pleasure in death? Why? Was it relief, or had whoever killed him somehow deceived him about what was happening?
He looked a long time into those eyes. Given the weapon used, he probably hadn’t even realized that he was being killed. It had been strung from wall to wall where his throat would connect with it when he sat down and bent to his work. There would have been a sharp stab of pain as it slid through his neck but his head would have fallen off before he could so much as cringe.
?
??Why did you have our dossier, Albert Doxy?” he asked, speaking to himself, his soft words sinking into the quiet. “Where did you get it?”
Over the past year, their unit’s files had been moved to the Iron Mountain facility in Rosendale, New York, one of the most secure such operations on the planet. And yet, here was a twenty-something with arguably its most sensitive file in his hands, walking into the White House from an unknown destination.
He called Diana. “The cadaver’s ready to move. I’ll wait here with it until the mortuary team shows up. Where are we taking it?”
“The coroner’s facility at Langley,” she replied. “It’s been cleared for you. Nobody will stop the wagon, nobody will do any ID checks. Just be sure you’re directly behind. They’re expecting a caravan of two vehicles—you and the coroner’s vehicle, that’s it.”
“Got it.”
While he waited, he examined the wound. When he set the head back on the neck, it appeared that the boy was wearing a thin red string.
He called Diana again. “I’m going to want you to start examining the Secret Service video, and also find out if they had any surveillance in the kid’s office. Go over it frame by frame, layer by layer.”
“I’m doing it now.”
“Inform me the moment you get a hit. If you do.”
The coroner’s team appeared in the doorway, three men and a woman.
“We’re ready,” the team leader said.
As they moved toward him, Flynn held up his hand. “Slow down. I want your units and your names. I need to do some clearances.”
They traded glances. This wouldn’t be a familiar procedure to them, but they had never encountered this level of security before. Once they were back out in the hall, he ran their names through the CARAT system, which addresses all accessible information databases on the planet, including many that are believed by their owners to be encrypted. In two minutes, he had all their records. They were all Air Force personnel, which was good. The USAF had a good security system and a good relationship with his own unit. Seeing nothing unusual in the records, he continued with his work.
He put both the body and head in a single body bag that he pulled from the supply closet beside the sink. He zipped the bag and put yellow plastic tape over the head of the zipper. Under no circumstances could these people be allowed to see the headless corpse. Media types would pay a fortune for a shot of somebody who’d been beheaded, and when it was discovered that the crime had been committed in the White House, six figures would be in play.