“You do realize that we’ll be on video.”
“Turn it off.”
“I don’t have the authority.”
He called Diana. “I need you to get the video turned off in—” He addressed the young man. “What room?”
“Four. We’ll use four.”
He said, “Dissection room four at the ME’s office,” and hung up. “No video, so no report.” He didn’t say this, but this kid and everybody involved at the medical examiner’s office were also going to sign confidentiality agreements.
“I have just one other question.”
“No you don’t.”
“Not even one?”
Flynn did not reply.
The dissection took two hours. First the skull was opened and the brain extracted. “I am seeing a puncture wound in the surface of the cerebellum. Rather than begin at the Lewy Body landmark, I will dissect following this wound. I note that there is a postmortem point of incision in the skull above the wound that extends through the derma, indicating that an instrument was inserted into this brain after death.”
“Son, I need you—”
“Doctor. I’m a doctor.”
“Sorry, Doc. I’m just nervous as hell right now. I need you to forget the entire dissection routine and get down to where that opening ends and see if there’s anything left there, any scrap of material.”
“This is the most curious thing I’ve ever encountered in my career. Just for my own peace of mind, can you give me some idea here?”
“He died in the service of his country. These are the remains of an American hero.”
The young doctor was silent for a moment, his head bowed. “May God receive his soul.” Carefully, he did his dissection, using a delicate brain knife, working until he had spread a dozen slices across the worktable. “Nothing,” he said.
“Microscope. Can you do that?”
“Absolutely.”
Flynn watched as he made an ultrathin slice that centered on the spot where the now-removed implant had rested. He slid it into the microscope and they both watched the screen as it focused.
“There’s material there.”
As Flynn had hoped, the implant had been seated long enough to have begun growing in. “Get that,” he said. “I need that.”
“What the hell—it’s a metal base with cilia growing out of it. What is that thing?”
There was no legal way for Flynn to explain. He said, “Please mount it on a slide that I can carry with me.”
Silently, the doctor did as he was ordered, and as silently Flynn left, taking all of the biologicals with him. In the end, they would be cremated and returned to the family, but they would not be left in hospital mortuaries or coroner’s offices. The body itself was at this moment on its way to a specialized facility at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where extremely sensitive materials were destroyed in a superheated furnace. The family would be given the ashes in a nice urn, and the Intelligence Medal to bury with them. The ashes would not be their son’s, of course. The specialized burn was necessary because there could be something else in the body, some other piece of high-level technology, that normal cremation would leave exposed, and still dangerous.
Flynn put most of the remains in the trunk of his car, but the slide with the implant fragment on it he laid on the seat beside him. It looked like nothing, hardly visible at all, but he knew how powerful it actually was. These things did not die, and a small part of one was just as potent as an intact object. It would take it longer to grow back to full size and full strength, that was all.
It was now afternoon, hard sun, the trees whipped by a brisk north wind, leaves rushing along the street, the old Federal houses of Georgetown seeming to watch him, their windows eyes. He’d been working for something close to twenty hours at this point. Not good, even for him. But typical.
He shook off the exhaustion. There would be no sleep tonight, and maybe not for a while. He didn’t really sleep, anyway. He waited. “Guarded sleep,” the doctors called it. It wasn’t good, but it was better than ending up wherever Abby had gone.
He and Diana had Zone 2 permits for their cars, but they used Colonial Parking across the street; best to keep their vehicles out of sight. After he pulled into his space, he wondered if he should take the thing into the house at all. But the wall safe had been specially designed to hold “extremely mobile” objects. It had been created by their scientific team after they’d come to understand that Aeon could deploy implants that were capable of homing in on their victims from a distance, entering the body without leaving a scar, and seating themselves.
He got out of the car and went quickly across the street to the yellow three-story house, carrying the implant in his pocket and feeling like a damn fool for doing it.
He loved this house. It had been built in 1817, in the building boom that followed the American defeat of the British in the War of 1812, and the subsequent opening of more trade in the region.
He waited for a moment before the facial recognition system identified him. The door clicked faintly, and he opened it. There were cameras hidden in every room, covering the entire structure, even the four feet of crawl space above the top floor, and the roof as well. A hand-clap sequence could drop steel doors between all the rooms and seal the entire structure off from the outside. If somebody was let in whom the facial recognition system didn’t recognize, they couldn’t enter any rooms but the kitchen, parlor, dining room, and guest bathroom without being coded. Should they go into a restricted room without the system getting the proper clearance code, the room would be instantly sealed by its steel doors and window coverings.
“I called Emmett,” Diana said as he entered her office.
He hardly heard her. He wished that he could tell her what he was about to do, but it was too dangerous. As hard as they worked to keep this house free of hostile surveillance devices, it was never possible to be entirely sure.
She was going to suffer like hell, poor damn woman. She cared too much, was her problem, and caring about people like Flynn was never a good idea.
She was sitting at her desk, which was lined with screens on which various images danced—of street corners, of the interior of the White House, and of Flynn’s car. The image of the car was frozen in a close-up of the implant, which had been on the front seat.
There was a heavy scent of cigarette smoke in the room.
“You’re smoking again.”
“Don’t like it, leave.”
He didn’t like it, but if he wanted her in his life, the cigarettes were going to come, too. She used them only when she was apprehensive—or, to put it more accurately, sick with fear.
“Put that damn thing in the safe,” she said, her voice so tense that it sounded as if she were being choked.
The wall safe was open. He put the evidence bag inside and closed it.
“Why the hell did you move it in an evidence bag? What were you thinking?”
“That I had no other container.”
“Should’ve called me. Should’ve waited.”
The screens showed a dozen different images of the interior of the White House—all the public rooms, some parts of the Residence and the West Wing.
“I see you’re in the White House.”
“Some. Most of the official spaces are clean, unfortunately. Not the Oval, though.” She tapped a square on her iPad and one of the screens changed to a familiar scene. The Oval Office was empty. “He spends his working hours either in his office in the Residence or in the study. He probably knows that the Oval is covered.”
She next picked him up in the Rose Garden.
“I don’t like that, him outside alone,” Flynn said.
“No.”
“How often is he out there?”
“He plays tennis, Flynn.”
Diana put up a new video clip. Lorna was in bed. Ginny was walking around the room naked, looking for something.
“I thought you said the bedrooms were clear of sur
veillance.”
“This is an old system installed by German intelligence. After Obama pissed them off by bugging Merkel’s cell phone, they retaliated. The Secret Service found it in a sweep about four days after it was installed. Now it’s mine.”
Their doorbell rang downstairs and the system put Emmett’s face up on the screen. Diana buzzed him in. He was cleared for the downstairs, the stairway, and this room. He showed himself up.
Emmett had been among the first to be recruited into their scientific team. By training, he was a biologist. He was a tall man with long, careful hands and quick, uneasy eyes. If he hadn’t looked so much like a spy, he could have been one. He came into the room almost furtively, moving, as he always did, like a man who was going into hiding. He carried the portable containment, fifty pounds of woven carbon fiber and tempered steel.
“Get the damn thing in there,” Diana snarled. “I want it out of my house pronto.”
“Hello, you two, it’s good to see you again.”
“Do it!”
Emmett unlocked the containment. “Ready.”
Flynn opened the safe and took out the evidence bag. He gave it to Emmett, who stared down at it.
“Get it sealed!” Diana shouted. “For God’s sake!”
“No. No, wait.” Emmett looked from one of them to the other. He still held the evidence bag in his hand. He said, “This isn’t alien manufacture. This is one of ours.”
“Did you know this, Flynn?”
“I thought it was possible.”
Emmett took the object out of the evidence bag and held it in the palm of his hand. “This is dead. Ours don’t reconstitute or penetrate. I worked on the encapsulation for these, actually.”
Ordinary people worried about Facebook and Google invading their privacy, or the NSA listening in on their calls. But that was primitive stuff. The brain is accessible to very deep invasion, and this was an example of what our own intelligence community, back-engineering from Aeon’s crumbs, now had at its disposal. Using a small microwave transmitter, the implant could be used to turn off the host’s consciousness without shutting down the rest of his mind. He could then be interrogated, and he would have no memory of it at all. People like Doxy, placed in positions of extreme sensitivity but judged to be not reliable, were implanted like this so that they could be routinely questioned without their knowing it.
“I need to file a report,” Emmett said. “Most of this thing is in the wild now. Do you guys know who took it?”
They couldn’t tell him that. His job was cataloging and maintaining objects like this, not tracking them down when they were stolen.
“Guess not. I get that. Whoever it came out of, that person is now dead.”
“He is,” Flynn said.
Emmett left, his footsteps pounding on the stairs and shaking the house. He wasn’t a particularly big man, but it was an old house and he was in a hurry.
Diana lit another cigarette off the first one. Flynn took them both and put them out.
“Do that again and I’ll beat you up.”
“Sounds like fun.”
She laughed. “So Iran assassinates Doxy and harvests one of our implants. I get that. They’d lust after a low-tech implant like the ones we create. They’ll never manage to duplicate one of Aeon’s beauties, but they might be able to manufacture ones like ours. But why was he carrying the detail’s core file, which Iran now also has?”
“This was about the implant, but it was also about our file. Aeon wants it, and this was the only way to obtain it. Or the most reliable way. Iranian agent. Perfect surrogate.”
“Aeon and Iran working together?”
“Looking more and more possible.”
“The detail has no assets in Iran, and we can’t ask CIA covert to work on it, not without blowing hell out of our internal cover.”
“Then it’s up to us.”
“Yeah, well—no! Oh, no, Flynn! Don’t even think about that.” She was silent for a long time.
“Speaking of assassinations,” she finally said, “there was one in Iran. One of their nuclear experts was gunned down by motorcyclists in Tehran. The proximity of the two events suggests they could be related.”
“I think the first step is to find out just exactly what in holy hell the Iranians are doing in the middle of this.”
“Agreed. How?” She lit another cigarette, puffed it once, then held it away when he tried to grab it. “No.”
“I love you, I—” He stopped, shocked at his words. A nervous smile flashed in her eyes. They were colleagues who sometimes bedded together, but that described half of the intelligence community. Love was not part of it. Not supposed to be.
As if she could hear his thoughts, the joy that had flickered in her face like heat lightning faded quickly away.
She put out the cigarette. He saw a flush rise up her neck and set her cheeks aglow, just like when she was mad. Was she mad? She said, “Let’s reach for that damn kid, pull him in and shake him.”
“Sure. Might help.”
Over the next half hour, they tracked the Iranian kid, reconstructing his movements of the previous night, watching on satellite footage as he threaded his way through the park, then out onto the highway. They watched him get picked up by a blue SUV. As it pulled away, Diana got a clear look at the license plate. It took the computer a few seconds to correlate with the make and model of the car, then to display the title and the owner’s driver’s license.
“Sure enough, Persian community,” Diana said. “Went to a MISIRI safe house.”
“I could pay them a call.” He wouldn’t, he didn’t care, but he needed an excuse to get out of here without uttering a word about what he was actually planning to do.
“What about the president? What about the White House? You need to go back there.”
“Either I sit over there and wait for something to happen, or we find out what this is about and stop it before it goes any further. Our choice. Or yours, actually—you’re the boss.”
She scrawled something and held out the paper. “It’s near Embassy Row.”
He took the paper, crumpled it up, and tossed it in a trash can. “I know where it is.”
“But you couldn’t?” She paused, frowned slightly. “You’re telegraphing that the kid’s location doesn’t actually matter. You’re not really after—” She clamped her jaw shut.
He nodded.
“OK. I get it. I think.”
Not a word of what he was about to do could be said aloud. If Aeon was involved in all this, then they were being watched right now. Iran couldn’t bug a place this secure, but Aeon certainly could.
She needed to realize what he was actually doing. If she did, he’d have the backup he needed where he was going, and he had little doubt that it would be very needed. If not, then he was going to be putting his head into the jaws of the lion, and doing it alone. You don’t escape that.
He left, but did not go across to the parking garage. Instead he headed into the freshening north wind. He was looking for a taxi, and after a block or so, he found one. He took it first to his apartment.
“Wait for me.”
“You got it.”
He went up in the elevator, walked down a long corridor lined with black doors, and stopped before his own. This was hard. It was always very hard. So he hesitated, and at a moment when seconds might count. He smelled the odor of steak cooking in a nearby apartment, heard people laughing, music, then the shouts of children, faint and poignant.
He entered the darkness of his foyer. He didn’t turn on any lights. He didn’t need to, and showing light in here right now would be a bad idea.
He went into his bedroom and opened the wall safe in the closet. He pulled out nine thousand “cured” dollars—cured in the sense that they had been gotten from his bank in return for a cashier’s check, and had now been out of circulation for more than a year. He kept a hundred grand in cash handy, and twenty thousand in gold coins. You didn’t need gold in Iran;
dollars there were as desirable and easier to use. Despite the treaty, Western credit cards didn’t work, and the ATMs would be useless to what to all appearances he would be: a Swiss arms dealer. But it didn’t matter. The Iranians were famished for hard currency, and the nine grand—as much as he could carry without questions being asked—would go more than far enough.
He hadn’t been planning to go into the second bedroom. In fact, he’d told himself he would not, absolutely not, do that.
He crossed it, drew the drapes, and then turned on a single lamp, but not enough to reveal any light through an unnoticed gap in the curtains.
Not even Diana was invited here, and had she come, she would have been horrified by the number of pictures of Abby on the walls. He’d taken down the “Abby Room” in his house back in Texas, telling Mac and his other friends that he was putting her behind him. But it wasn’t true. He had moved her here. He had tried and tried to leave her behind, but nothing worked. When he needed her so badly that he could bear it no longer, he would come to this room, which was his secret home.
“I love you,” he’d said to Diana. He wanted to love her, that was the truth of it. He wanted to accept his grief for Abby and the baby. He looked from one photo to another, Abby on her front porch back in the depths of time and happiness, Abby on Serena, her hilarious, wonderful horse with the improbable Roman nose, he and Abby drinking at Scholz Beer Garten in Austin. Then the harder one: their wedding picture—two nervous Texas kids grinning hard, hand in hand, knuckles white. Then the worst one of all, the one he told himself never to look at again every time he did: the sonogram. Tiny image, hands fisted, eyes open, the sense of amazement that lives in the faces of babies.
He changed into a business suit, grabbed a pouch with the deepest, most solid identity he possessed in it, and got the hell out of there.
He got into the cab and slammed the door. “Reagan,” he said. The driver responded with a grunt.
He was going to the one place on Earth that mattered the most in all this, the place that was the unexpected and most certainly deadly center of the operation. He was going to Tehran.
CHAPTER EIGHT