Authors: Jonathan Maberry

Joe Ledger (15 page)

“And I suppose if there was a file conveniently labeled ‘Changeling’ I shouldn’t let it lay there and gather dust.”

Church snorted. “If life were that simple, Captain, we would be out of jobs.”

“I thought the ATF had feet on the ground there.”

“They didn’t see anything last night.”

“And the cops did?”

He spread his hands. And I had a sneaking suspicion that he had something to do with that police drive-by and any subsequent report. Made me wonder if there was anything to see. ATF boys are usually pretty sharp.

“Besides,” added Church, “the ATF team has declined to break the seal and enter the premises.”

“Why?”

“Because if anything is disturbed or if there is any procedural error when someone does step inside, then that agency takes the political hit.” He shook his head. “If you look too closely for logic you’ll injure yourself.”

“Okay, I get that the bullshit factor is high. But why me? Why send a shooter?”

“Because you were a cop before you were a shooter. If nothing else, you should be able to determine if the place has been broken into. Work it like a crime scene.”

“And if I find someone poking around in there?”

His smile was small and cold. “Then you have my permission to shoot them.”

Nice. You can never really tell when he’s joking.

“One more thing,” said Church as I stood, crossed the room, and reached for the doorknob. “Our friends in the U.K have expressed some interest in this matter. They red-flagged some of the negotiations between the Koenig Group and North Korean buyers, and they’ve been hunting for any possible information on Changeling. They’re sending a special agent to liaise with you. Her name is Felicity Hope. Expect her call.”

“She’s with MI6?”

“No,” he said, “Barrier.”

Barrier was Great Britain’s so-secret-we’ll-bloody-well-shoot-you group that was the model for the DMS. Church had helped set it up, and once it proved to be invaluable against the new breed of 21
st
Century high-tech terrorist, he was able to sell Congress on the Department of Military Sciences. But just hearing that name was the equivalent of a swift kick in the nuts for me.

Grace Courtland had been a senior Barrier agent. She’d been seconded to the DMS at Church’s request, and for a few years she was Church’s top gun. Maybe the world’s top gun. I worked alongside her, respected her, fell in love with her. And then buried her.

The pain was too recent and too real.

Church adjusted his tinted glasses. I knew that he was following my line of thought and gauging my reaction. I also knew that he wouldn’t say anything. He wasn’t the kind of guy who engaged in heart-to-hearts. What he gave me was a single, brief nod, just that much to acknowledge the memory. He loved Grace like a daughter. His pain had to be as intense as mine, but he would never show it.

It cost me a lot to keep it off my face.

Chap. 3

Twenty minutes later I was in a Black Hawk helicopter, heading away from Baltimore’s sunny skies toward the coastline of southern New Jersey.

The rest of my team—all of the two-legged variety—were scattered around the country looking at potential recruits. We’d lost some players recently, and we had the budget and the presidential authority to hire, coax, or shanghai top shooters from law enforcement, FBI hostage rescue, and all branches of Special Ops. For guys like us it was like being turned loose in a candy store with a credit card.

We flew through sunlight beneath a flawless blue sky.

When the Koenig Group had gone private a few years ago, they moved out of a lab building on the grounds of the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, an air force base sixteen miles southeast of Trenton, and purchased several connected buildings once occupied by a marine conservation group that had lost its funding. I pulled up the schematics of the place on my tactical computer. The place looked like it had been designed by whoever built the Addams Family mansion and the Bates Motel. The centerpiece was a faux Victorian pile that was all peaked roofs, balconies, widow’s walks, gray shingles, and turrets. Almost attractive but overall too austere and grim-looking. To make it worse, the conversion people had added wings and side buildings to the main structure, all connected by covered walkways that gave the whole place a haphazard, sprawling appearance. Unlovely, unkempt, and supposedly unoccupied. Seen from above via satellite, it looked like several octopi had collided and somehow melded, then were covered with shingles and paint. Charming in about the same way a canker sore is appealing.

The files on the research being conducted at the Koenig Group were sketchy. On the books, the teams were collating and evaluating data from several thousand smaller biological and genetic projects from around the world. Dead-end projects that had been canceled either because they were too expensive when measured against predicted benefits or because they’d hit dead ends. The Koenig teams had scored some hits by combining data from multiple stalled projects in order to create a new and more workable protocol, largely influenced by recent advances in science. A transgenics experiment that was infeasible twenty-five years ago might now be doable. The original hypotheses were often well in advance of the scientific capabilities of the day. The Koenig people sometimes had to sort through mountains of old floppy disks—back when they were actually floppy—or crates filled with digital cassette tapes, and even tons of paper to put a lot of this together. It was painstaking work that was often frustrating and futile…but which now and then yielded fruit.

Shame that those bozos didn’t share all of that fruit with the U.S. of A.

Dickheads.

The frustrating thing for us, though, was that we really didn’t know all they’d discovered. When the task force kicked the door in, they found a lot of melted junk and very little else. And the management team at Koenig apparently kept their employees compartmentalized so that few of them knew anything of substance. Probably because most of them would have made a call to Uncle Sam if they were in on it. Or they’d want the Koenig people to pad their paychecks. Either way, from what I read in the file, there were only three genuine villains, and they were under indictment and under surveillance.

So who was messing around inside the building? And what were they looking for?

Church didn’t think this was anything more than a look-see by someone who used to be a detective. He didn’t offer backup except for a Barrier agent who would
liaise
with me. Whatever that meant, given the circumstances. Maybe whenever she landed Stateside we’d compare notes over diner coffee and that would be that.

But as I looked at the satellite photo of the sprawling, ugly building I began to get a small itch between my shoulder blades. Not quite a premonition, but in that neck of the woods. What my grandmother used to call a “sumthin’,” as in “sumthin’ doesn’t feel right.” My gran was a spooky old broad. In my family no one laughed off or ignored her sumthin’s.

I gave myself a quick pat-down to make sure I’d brought the right toys to this playground. My Beretta 92F was snugged into its nylon shoulder rig; the rapid-release folding knife was clipped in place inside my right front pants pocket. There was a steel garrote threaded through my belt, and I had two extra magazines for the Beretta.

The sad part was that this was how I dressed all the time. I had this stuff on me when I went to Starbucks to read the Sunday papers. I would have had it on me at the ballpark watching the Orioles spoil the day for the Phillies. I would like to be normal. I’d like to have a normal life. But when I joined the DMS, I left normal somewhere behind in the dust.

The Black Hawk flew on through an untroubled sky.

Chap. 4

While I flew I read some reports from Dr. Hu. Even though he hadn’t yet gotten concrete information on the Changeling Project, MindReader had compiled bits of information that added up to a pretty disturbing picture of what they
might
be doing at Koenig.

Transformational genetics is a branch of science that scares the bejesus out of me. It has some benign and even beneficial uses, but the DMS doesn’t go after doctors trying to cure a genetic defect. No, the kind of scientist we tend to encounter is often best visited with a crowd of torch- and pitchfork-bearing villagers.

Here’s an example, and this is why palms were sweating as I read those reports. Hu found clear evidence of several covertly funded studies to create an “elastic and malleable genetic code.” One that was able to “withstand specific and repeatable mutagenic changes within desired target ranges consistent with military applications.” These programs have an end goal of “at-will theriomorphy.”

Yeah.

Short bus version of that—included courtesy of Dr. Hu, who has little faith in my ability to grasp basic concepts—is that the North Koreans and Chinese have been funneling money into research for practical science that would allow a soldier to change his physical structure at will and at need. To transform from human into something else.

Hu could only speculate on what that other shape might be. His speculations included an insectoid carapace, gills, resistance to radiation and pollutants, retractable feline claws, enhanced muscle and bone density, night vision. Stuff like that.

True super soldiers. But not entirely human super soldiers.

You see why I occasionally have to shoot people?

Before I joined the DMS this was science fiction stuff, comic book stuff. Now, it was nightmare stuff because the science was out there. All it required was enough funding, little or no oversight from either Congress or human rights organizations, and a flexible set of morals. Sad to say, all of that is possible.

We are living in a science fiction
age. Or, maybe it’s a horror story.

Mad scientists like Frankenstein? That’s almost a joke. Frankenstein, at least, was trying to do some good for humanity. He was trying to conquer sickness and death.

Guys like the Koenig Group…well, what the hell do you even call men like that?

Chap. 5

I had the pilot do a slow circle of the Koenig place and then set me down in the parking lot. The building extended onto a wharf in the bay. There were slips for six small boats and one large one, but nothing was currently tied up. No cars in the parking lot, either. The left-hand neighbor was an industrial marina for craft that serviced the big dredging platform six miles off the coast which kept pumping sand back to shore to replace what Mother Nature and global warming were taking away. The right-hand side was protected marshland. A billboard proclaimed that an exotic animal park would be opening soon, but the paint was peeling and faded, and the board looked twenty years old. The only exotic animal I could see among the marsh grass was a Philadelphia pigeon looking confused and out of place.

There was a single car parked on the street, a dark blue Crown Victoria. It was unmarked but it was so obviously a Federal vehicle that it might have had FEDS stenciled on the doors. One of these days the government will grasp the concept that plainclothes and undercover should include a component of stealth. Just a tad would go a long way.

I jumped down from the open side door, bent low, and ran through the rotor wash as the Black Hawk lifted away. The pilot would take the bird to a helipad near the Cape May lighthouse and wait there. We have several Black Hawks at the Warehouse, and we used this one for jobs that required less of a shock-and-awe effect on the locals. It was painted a happy blue and had the logo of a news wire service on it. No visible guns or rockets. Not to say they weren’t there, but this was not a time to show off. We already had some rubberneckers slowing their cars down to look at the big blue machine.

I let the helo vanish into the distance and silence return before I approached the building. The ATF agents were standing beside their car, both of them in off-the-rack suits and wearing identical expressions of disapproval. They both began shaking their heads as I approached.

“You can’t be here,” said the taller of the two.

I held up my identification. The DMS doesn’t have badges or standard credentials. When we needed to flash something we picked whatever would get the job done. I had valid ID for CIA, ATF, DEA, FBI and every other letter combination. The one I showed them was NSA. It was as close to a trump card as you can get, and they were the only organization that didn’t have boots on the ground during the raid on the place. Church was working with the director to use them as referees for the jurisdictional dispute.

The ATF boys glanced at the badge and at my civilian clothes—jeans and an Orioles home-game shirt—and gave me looks that said they didn’t give a cold shit.

“Need to go inside,” I said.

“Show me some paper,” said the shorter of the two.

I dug into my back pocket and produced a letter Church had prepared for me. It was a presidential order allowing me access to assess the integrity of the scene. They read it carefully. Twice.

“You can’t take anything out,” said the tall one.

“Don’t want to,” I said.

“We’ll have to search you when you come out, you know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Don’t fuck with anything in there.”

“I won’t.”

“We don’t want trouble,” said the short one.

“I’m on your side, guys.” I pasted on my most charming smile.

The short one gave me another up and down inspection. “NSA recruiting ball players now?”

“It was my day off,” I said, leaning on “off” enough to convey irritation. Not at them, but at the system. “I had tickets for the doubleheader.”

That did the trick; they relaxed and nodded.

“Sucks to be you,” said the tall one and gave me half a mean grin.