Eden Plague - Latest Edition (36 page)

“Hired by who? Not the Agency, or you wouldn’t have that look on your face.”

“Nope,” he grinned. “By a little company called Integrated National Strategies, Inc. get it? INS-INC, in-synch! Like the old boy band.” He laughed uproariously and spun again, until Spooky stopped the chair with his foot and a hard look.

“All right. It’s indistinguishable from about a hundred little consulting companies that usually hover around the big defense contractors looking for scraps, usually because they have some Federal set-aside – Service Disabled Veteran Owned, or Minority, or Women-owned, like that. Except this company isn’t a set-aside, and they have never subcontracted with a big company. In fact, I can’t find who pays them, but they seem to have about fifteen employees…most of whom have worked in the black world before.”

“Huh,” said Zeke. “So Elise isn’t working directly for the Agency…but indirectly…”

“Right,” answered Vinny. “These guys got ‘Separate Cell’ and ‘Plausible Deniability’ written all over them. There’s probably only one guy in the company that really knows what’s going on and reports to their masters. The rest just do what the nice people that are paying them gobs of money tell them to.”

I said, “That means when she said ‘company,’ she meant a real company, not ‘Company,’ not Agency. That means we actually don’t even know who they are working for. Could be anyone in the black world – could be any government agency, could be a corporation, a rich individual…could be one canny operator that got ahold of this treatment, and is trying to develop it or market it or whatever…Vinny, what kind of people do they have working for them?”

“Umm…if you can believe their online resumes, looks like a CEO, two program managers, an HR director, an executive assistant, an IT guy, a special security officer – that’s for clearances and information, not physical security. Six personal security specialists – there are your door-kickers and shooters. All of those have military or law enforcement backgrounds…Special Forces, Ranger, Airborne, Force Recon, sniper…Texas Ranger…if they aren’t BSing, a bunch of badasses.” He tossed a pile of stapled papers down on the table. “Figured you’d want to see these. Their dossiers.”

“Anyone named Jenkins?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he picked one of the packets up. “Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Fourth, one of the program managers. Yale grad, BA business, MBA, recruited by these guys straight out of school. Old money, family has investments and concerns up in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Lumber, shipping, some other stuff. Probably being groomed for bigger and better things.” Vinny looked smug.

“Ah. That’s not good.” If I had to kill someone, why couldn’t it have been someone without a rich and powerful family?

Vinny shrugged, looked down for a moment. In fact, unless I missed my guess, he was holding something out on us, savoring the drama and triumph.

I looked at Spooky, raised an eyebrow.

He got it, shifted his stance that conveyed impatience to his nephew.

“Okay, here’s the kicker,” Vinh continued hurriedly. “The other two employees are scientists as well. So we got a microbiologist – Elise – a virologist, and an epidemiologist.”

“Only three. Ah’m only a po country doctah,” I put on my best hick accent, “but that sounds like they were working on the XH. And that narrows it down to some kind of germ. A virus, or other disease pathogen. And I’d have a tough time believing that a team of just three people could come up with something like this, though stranger things have happened.”

Tran spoke up. “Then they did not make it. They study it. Experiment. Decode. Perhaps replicate. Try to fix it, to get rid of the problems.”

I nodded.

“Where are they located?” asked Zeke.

“They have a Norfolk, Virginia office address.”

I felt a surge of relief, and I could see that Zeke had gotten it too. “That means we’re not going up against a well-funded, well-supported Agency effort. It’s something off to the side, something maybe they don’t even know about. Just a couple people probably, maybe only one, and like all bureaucracies, they have been slow to realize what they got. And maybe INS, Inc. hasn’t seen fit to tell them. Maybe their top guy – who’s the CEO?”

“Raphael Keith Durgan. Medical doctor, biologist. Formerly of the USDA, at Plum Island Animal Disease Center.”

“And the Department of Homeland Security took over the island in 2003, with the USDA becoming a tenant,” Zeke chimed in.

“How’d you know that?” I asked, surprised.

He grinned. “You get all over in spec ops.”

I shrugged. “So he’s working on disease, maybe some black projects there, because you know the USDA ain’t the only people doing biological work on the island. Not with Homeland Security running the show. He gets recruited because he has the clearances and has worked on stuff, maybe anthrax or weaponized smallpox or something we’ve never heard of. He gets put in charge of the research effort in this little company because somebody doesn’t want it in the regular system. The heavies are there to keep control of things. Must be the same thugs I saw at the Iron Saddle.”

I was feeling better and better about things, now that I believed this wasn’t an official effort. It was compartmentalized, maybe even rogue. And while the memory of executing Jenkins still pained me, it pained me less now that I knew he was off the reservation, maybe making up his own op as he went along, probably having read too many cheap spy novels. Unfortunately he ran into me. The old me.

I think the new me could have kept control.

One more little piece of the puzzle clicked into place, somewhere at the back of my mind, the part that worked unconsciously. I didn’t know what it was, I just knew it was working, and it would come up with something eventually.

Zeke replied, “That means we got a shot here. They don’t have the resources, unless their sponsor decides to call in some favors.” He looked at me. “Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful. They probably put you on federal fugitive lists, no-fly lists, terrorism watch and report lists. But that’s routine, low-level threat. It means we got breathing room, and it means we might be able to extract your girl Elise, get her away clean and pump her for everything she knows. Figure our next move from there.”

My girl Elise. Funny how that sounded good, though I’d only spent maybe fifteen minutes with her total. We all stared at each other for a few seconds, then I stuck my hand up. “I’m in.”

“Me too,” said Vinny.

Spooky grunted affirmatively.

Zeke grinned even wider. “God, it feels good to be operational again.”

“On your own dime, though,” I said wryly.

“If this thing turns out to be real and usable and helps Ricky, I’d sell everything I have to get it.”

I knew he was dead serious. He loved that kid.

“Well, I got twenty grand you can use.” I tossed him the packet of cash.

Vinny kept at his cyber-research with Uncle Spooky standing over him. That probably didn’t help much. Zeke eventually said something to the elder Nguyen, so he stalked away to do sneaky Spooky things.

Zeke and I cut back a few bushes that were crowding the cabin, and caught up on personal history. I felt elated but a bit fidgety, waiting on information, like the part between the warning order and the op order, when I knew I had to prepare for something but not for what. Waiting on the intel, which was always the best that could be had but was never as good as you wanted.

Intel specialists, poor schmucks, usually scrawny googly-eyed nerds with oversized Adam’s apples and way too much trivia packed into their noggins. And the worst thing was, for them, if they provided a perfect assessment, everyone just got on with the mission and no one remembered. If they missed anything, everyone hated them and no one forgot.

I’d rather be an operator any day.

I fidgeted until dinnertime, but a lot less than I would have. I could tell Zeke was a bit awkward around me, acting like I might pop or break or grow another head at any time. He tried to cover it, but I could tell. At the same time I was sure he very much wanted to find out what we needed to know. Desperately wanted to cure Ricky, if it could be done. Probably had other plans, as well. Zeke was a thinker, more than I was, and I never thought of myself as a dumb jock. A smart jock at least, if not a geek like Vinh. But Vinny was too young to think more than one or two steps ahead. Zeke was deep. Dummies don’t get to be senior officers in Special Forces.

We had venison for dinner, along with powdered mashed potatoes, boiled peas, bread and butter. It smelled heavenly. Spooky had brought a deer in, a little buck scrawny from winter, but he cooked up fine. I had no idea if it was deer season or even legal. I laughed to myself. My conscience had worse things to beat me up about right now than a deer out of season.

Over dinner, Vinny laid it out. “INS’s office is in Norfolk, but a few phone calls and some pretexting found out that only two people work there. One office, one front desk, one conference room, and a closet. Most of the employees live in Onancock.”

I looked blankly at him. In fact, we all did. I waited for someone to make a vulgar joke about such a funny name.

“It’s a little town up on the peninsula north of Norfolk. Here.” He spun around a map he had printed off, showed us.

“Why there?” I asked.

He smiled, kitty-cream. “I’ll show you. Look over here.” He pointed to the west, off the inner coast of the peninsula, at an island about ten miles off shore from the town of Onancock. There wasn’t even a name printed, but he’d handwritten “WATTS.”

“Watts?”

”Watts Island. Uninhabited for about a hundred years. The INS company bought it from the State of Virginia five years ago for two point five million dollars. Way overpaid for three acres of usable land and a bunch of wet rocks, but the state didn’t ask too many questions. For that price they got an easement to build a facility and do ‘environmental research.’ Here’s imagery.” He laid down three overhead photos of the little island, with good commercial resolution. Not government spy-satellite quality, but plenty for our purposes.

He’d marked the facility with a red circle. It looked like a big all-steel building, with two smaller ones of similar design, one at each end offset, with a parking lot between the three. In it was a lone white jeeplike vehicle. The buildings made a kind of ‘C’ shape with the open end to the east. There was a short paved road leading from the parking lot to a pier with a boathouse on the east shore.

On the west side of the complex there was a white ‘H’ in the middle of a cleared circle, the universal symbol for a helicopter landing pad. No helo showed on the photo and there didn’t seem to be a hangar. The only other distinguishing features were some sort of utility installations inside a fence next to the building, probably a pair of generators and what looked like a large and a small satellite dish.

“That’s where they are. I’d bet my next paycheck on it.”

“No deal,” said Zeke. “You make more than I do, and you’re probably right. Great work, Vinny.”

I said so too. Even Spooky looked pleased, which wasn’t something people saw very often.

“So here’s this thing,” I said musingly, “maybe the greatest discovery since fire and the wheel, and it’s all pretty much out in the open to be found.”

“That’s actually the best way to hide something anymore,” said Vinny. “Buried in a mass of innocuous data. I had to dig for this stuff. Without the idea that they had something valuable, they would be just another consulting company among hundreds, sucking down the government cheese and churning out reports nobody reads.”

“The Scarlet Letter,” I said. “Hiding in plain sight.”

“I think you mean the Purloined Letter,” said Zeke. “Unless you think these guys are wearing a mark of shame.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, you never know.” I guess my brain wasn’t perfectly healed yet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

We all looked at the photos for a while, and started familiarizing ourselves with the stack of resumes of the employees. No one had formally spoken it into being yet, but we all knew we were going to be planning a rescue operation.

I felt elated, but uneasy. I didn’t want to be put in the position of injuring or possibly killing someone. While I had no problem with killing in self-defense – I’d done it before, to defend my patients or myself – one of the reasons I became a PJ was to get out of the business of assaulting the enemy as my primary mission. It was a fine line, I knew, maybe so fine that some people couldn’t see it. But saving lives is what I wanted to do, not take them. But even if we, yea verily, opened the benighted eyes of the poor misguided researchers and consultants, there were six security specialists, probably good Americans all, who would be doing their duty as they saw it by trying to stop me. Kill me, maybe, protecting their people.

And the idea of putting Elise at risk, of her becoming collateral damage, made me positively sick, almost frantic. I had no idea why I was feeling this way, unless it was from the XH. Maybe it was because she bit me? Like there was really some biological connection between us now? It made no sense, but I knew how I felt.

The good thing was, as far as I knew, I would be very hard to kill. This might give me some leeway to not kill them, strangely enough. Normally, when it was a matter of a split second, you didn’t hesitate, just put two or three center mass, and if they died, they died, because if you didn’t, they would do the same to you. But now, I could pick a shot. I could take a hit, maybe, especially if I had a Kevlar vest and helmet. I felt confident that hits to my limbs would take care of themselves, as long as I had food and water and a little bit of time. Elise had recovered from a hideous amount of damage in just a few minutes, though she might have collapsed from starvation if I hadn’t fed her.

That was a scary thought, though. If we were captured, we were as vulnerable as anyone, especially if they knew about the XH. Someone could torture us, and the XH would try to heal even if it killed to do it.

Another piece of the puzzle fell into place, but it was still fuzzy. That couldn’t be the whole downside. That was like saying a revolutionary super-tank got bad gas mileage. The tradeoff was obviously worth it, if it ruled the battlefield.