by Jim Geraghty
Below her, Alec gurgled, “Call Saint Patrick.”
The inflatable raft returned back to the Babitonga, where Alec’s leg could get properly bandaged. Katrina was calculating how they could make a second assault on the island when she turned and saw Ward dragging a crate to the center of the deck. He cracked it open, and upon confirmation that it contained what he had hoped, his face broke into a gleeful smile.
“Oh, yeah!” he shouted with glee. He lifted one of the Brazilian navy’s flash-bang grenades.
As Ward chuckled, Katrina envisioned him as Kool-Aid Man.
***
For the next twenty minutes, Ward and Katrina gradually crept up the path to the abandoned laboratory, every few minutes throwing a flash-bang grenade onto the path ahead of them. Each blinding light and deafening boom set off a furious movement in the trees, grasses, and underbrush, scattering the snakes away.
The laboratory, had it ever been completed, would have been a gorgeous modern temple of research, an ivory sanctuary in the dense green trees halfway up the island’s lone peak, and a monument to science and man’s ability to colonize even the most hostile environment. Alas, storms, humidity, mold, and the rest of nature’s flails had tortured the half-completed structure. Some force had ripped the doors from the hinges, and vines conquered the entrance. The vines strongly resembled snakes, and within the entryway, incomplete electrical wiring hung from the skeleton of the ceiling … also resembling snakes. Katrina felt like she was stepping into an H. R. Giger painting designed to make her think everything around her was a snake.
“How about I throw a bunch of flash-bangs in and burn the whole place out?” Ward offered.
“How about we try not to burn up any actual intelligence?” Katrina countered.
They proceeded down a dark hallway, hearing hisses and slithers behind the walls. Despite the ominous sounds, Katrina carefully studied where the vines had been stripped away from the doorframe before them.
Someone had tried to chop away and clear out the overgrown chaos that had overtaken the main chamber of the laboratory. The pair turned on tactical flashlights, illuminating a lair worthy of Rotwang, Caligari, or Moreau. Three giant, door-sized tables were covered with compressed gas cylinders, glass containers, bottles connected with rubber hosing and duct tape, tubes, hundreds of bottles of substances both labeled and unlabeled, Pyrex containers, jugs, coffee filters, thermometers, cheesecloths, rubber gloves, a gas mask, aluminum foil, a Bunsen burner, measuring cups, hotplates, and laboratory beakers. The jumbled equipment covered part of the floor as well, creating a ton of perfect hiding places for the island’s vipers. Ward and Katrina trod slowly and carefully, until turning a corner. She gasped, he let out a short, muffled burst of profanity.
The far corner of the room featured a desk and large chair, with a figure seated, head thrown back, mouth wide open, eyes staring at the ceiling.
“Dead at least a few days,” Katrina pronounced.
The corpse was a mess. Each stark-white hair on the head seemed to have a mind of its own and pointed in a different direction, creating Einstein-esque chaos atop his dome. He had probably once been handsome and tall; his eyes were a cloudy pale blue, still piercing in the face of the team’s flashlights. But the wrinkles in his face had deepened to canyons; his eyelids heavier. He had tried to shave, and had several days’ growth in the shaved places, longer chunks in other areas. He wore a white dress shirt—long since yellow and brown from sweat stains, smeared with grime—yet buttoned up to the top button. His pants, once khakis, were torn at the calves. The feet were covered in yellow and yellowish-green blisters. Neither Katrina nor Ward succeeded in suppressing a shudder at the aftereffect of the viper bites.
Ward reached into his vest pocket and removed a printed-out copy of a passport photo. He held it next to the corpse’s head
“Dr. Neuse, I presume?”
Katrina kneeled down and examined the corpse’s hands. The right hand held the chair’s armrest, fingernails digging into the wood. The left pointed toward the empty desktop.
“This guy could have used some antivenom,” Ward said with a shake of his head.
“Even without chemicals, he points,” Katrina murmured, closely examining his left hand and the index finger directed at the desktop. She banged the desk a few times, hoping to scare out any hiding snakes. Once certain it was free of hostile reptiles, she looked closely at the desk, around it, behind it, and then finally got on all fours and looked under it.
Hidden under the desk was a sheaf of five papers, covered with increasingly frantic writing and doodles.
Katrina recoiled as she turned to the last page.
Katrina studied the papers for a few moments, attempting to decipher the decaying scrawl, when something that had been bothering her became too strong to ignore.
“Do you smell something?”
Ward accidentally knocked over one of the glass bottles in the lab, but it didn’t break.
“I’m standing in Frankenstein’s meth lab, in front of a rotting corpse, I smell a lot,” Ward said, turning back to her. He opened his mouth to speak, then suddenly inhaled.
“No, I mean something different, something chem—” she stopped. She felt it on the back of her neck. Something had touched her and pulled back. She looked up and saw Ward’s eyes, bulging like a pair of ping-pong balls, staring behind her head. She could hear it, sense it, feel it.
Ward put his finger to his lips, carefully slung his rifle over his shoulder and moved his hand slowly toward the holster on his belt. Katrina contemplated whether she could turn and grab the snake, or just leap away. With his eyes, Ward instructed her to not move, and he had just put his hand on his sidearm when—BLAM!—the lancehead viper, shot through its head, tumbled to her feet like a rope, the rest of its body limp. She let out a short scream and stumbled back a few feet, sending glass beakers skidding across the floor.
In the doorway stood Alec, dripping wet from head to toe, and holding up a smoking handgun. He hobbled closer on a heavily bandaged leg.
“What are you doing here?” Katrina gasped. A wave of odor hit her like an ocean wave hitting a child at the beach. “And what’s that smell?”
“Cleaning chemicals,” Alec announced. “Snakes smell with their tongue, and they’re really sensitive … so I went to the first lieutenant’s storeroom. Figured if I doused myself in enough cleaning solution, douse my boots in ammonia, I’d keep ’em away.” He held up his smaller gun to Ward. “Good thing one of the Brazilians lent me a nine-millimeter, huh?”
“Nice shot,” Ward said with a nod. “I’d hug you, but you smell like you’ve been waterboarded with Pine-Sol.”
Katrina went to hug him, then hesitated and covered her nose and mouth. “Sweetheart, dousing yourself in cleaning fluids can’t be healthy. Don’t poison yourself, I still plan on having your baby someday.”
Alec looked around at the mess. “What do you guys think, he was working on some sort of chemical bomb?”
Katrina held up Neuse’s journal. “Worse,” she declared. “How about some sort of debilitating fear drug?”
CHAPTER 17
March
To: Raquel Holtz,
From: Merlin
Francis Neuse! Believe it or not, I went to one of his talks, incognito, probably more than two decades ago now. I was working in a lot at the time, Silicon Valley, cyber-security, that sort of thing. Out there in California, the line between high society and the indisputably insane is a thin, permeable membrane; Jerry Brown used to hang around with Reverend Jim Jones of Kool-Aid fame. The Beach Boys hung out with Charles Manson. William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn helped spring Timothy Leary out of prison. (This was before they got tenure.)
One of our consultants was really into , and he kept raving about Neuse. At this point, we were looking for any analytical edge, and if the tech geniuses at the dot coms were trying LSD as a form of creative steroids, we weren’t ready to completely dismiss the idea if they could prove it w
orked.
They talked me into going to one of Neuse’s talks, and I was completely unprepared for what a loon he turned out to be. Riveting speaker, though. He would lead the audience, step by step, so gradually down the path of his nutty ideas, that most didn’t notice they were nodding along to talk of magic and pseudoscientific nonsense. He said all geniuses are considered madmen at first, and he argued that human society had missed so many potential insights and breakthroughs, as those who had been dismissed as mad in the past may have simply been misunderstood geniuses. He said he had studied Tesla, alchemists, occultists, theosophists, Turkey’s whirling dervishes, every holy man in Tibet and Nepal, the rumors of the dugpas, qi, you name it. I remember him insisting that he had, in the past, slipped into some world beyond ours, or another world draped over ours like a tablecloth on a table, speaking almost like poetry—I remember this phrase, “with a curtain of the symbolic color through whose folds I pass”—this was about moving to this other world.
He believed that the barrier between these other worlds and ours was quite thin; he seemed quite convinced that most interruptions to electrical currents reflected interference from this other world. He also believed that this other world of souls and dream-like symbols could be seen by people, and that this explained sightings of ghosts, angels, UFOs, and the monsters under the bed.
The crowd of new-age crystal wearers seated around me ate all of this up with a spoon. I saw a man attempting to impose a theological logic upon his LSD hallucinations. But I did like one thought I had when I left his event that evening. Every time I’ve had a good feeling about someone and it proved well founded, or a feeling of ominous distrust of a stranger and it panned out, I chalked it up to instinct. Francis Neuse would have argued that in that first instant of warmth or wariness, my mind had caught a fleeting glimpse of that person’s soul.
—Merlin
CHAPTER 18
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
FRIDAY, MARCH 19
It was an old trick, but Raquel was desperate; she hung around the elevator that CIA Director William Peck used and ambushed him as soon as he and his personal detail emerged. Like a school of fish turning in unison, the men on the detail moved with great purpose; the rumor around the intel community was that Peck was pre-taping an appearance for the Sunday’s Meet the Press.
“Director, I need five minutes of your time,” Raquel said, striding toward him. A defensive lineman in a dark suit stepped toward her with a palm raised, as if directing traffic to stop, but Peck put a reassuring hand on the detail man’s shoulder.
“Holtz, thank you for crawling out of your hiding place over at Liberty Campus,” Peck said in what was supposed to be a playful taunt but didn’t really hide his contempt. “Would whatever you’re about to tell me help explain why the German government keeps asking me about American agents in Berlin the night of the café bombing?”
“Only tangentially, sir,” Raquel said, not skipping a beat, and wondering just how much of what she had told Mitchell and Horne had actually made it to the director. “This is part of my team’s continuing effort to investigate potentially overlooked avenues and sources of intelligence. We think the group responsible for the New York broadcast has been researching a variation of BZ, a chemical agent that can cause hallucinations and panic attacks.”
Peck stopped, reached for the folder, and gave it a glance.
“Brazil?” She nodded. He continued walking and reading, and she walked with him. She began to speak, but he held up his hand. He read and walked, only once letting out a giggle and asking, “Alec got bit by a snake?”
“Yeah, he’s fine, physically. Of course, each time he retells the story, the snake gets bigger.”
Peck laughed. By the time they were crossing the seal in the main lobby of the headquarters building, he was handing her back the file.
“Very dramatic,” he concluded skeptically. “Snake Island. Long-lost mad scientist. A secret formula that paralyzes people with fear … maybe if you guys hadn’t been such a clique, and you had gotten the IOC or CTC to sign off on this analysis, I’d give you more than five minutes.”
“Sir, whatever you think of my team or myself, I’m begging you to put that aside and focus on—”
“On what, some nut-job’s diary says demons with skulls for faces made him cook up a drug formula for panic attacks? You worked the Threat Matrix, you know this sort of lunatic chatter comes in all the time. Everybody and their brother here runs into some big talk that ends up being nothing and tries to get it the PDB.,” – the President’s Daily Briefing, considered the most important and prestigious work of the CIA. “We hear crazy stories and claims every day. Take a number.”
“Sir, I thnk—”
“We have official channels, Holtz,” Peck declared. “Use them.”
CHAPTER 19
NBC NEWS STUDIOS
4001 NEBRASKA AVENUE
WASHINGTON, DC
“Chuck, let me be clear,” CIA Director William Peck said, leaning toward the host of Meet the Press. “This group, Atarsa—which is, apparently, is the name of the symbol behind her—is high on theatricality, but low on resources. They have a flair for dramatic spectacle, but we should not overstate their ability to threaten the American people.”
A bit more than an hour earlier, Peck and his security detail arrived at the NBC News studios in Washington, a complex that combined impressively modern technical equipment such as giant satellite dishes and a looming broadcast tower with sadly boxy and outdated 1950s architecture, the color and shape of a group of wet cardboard boxes pushed together.
Peck had pushed for doing the interview remotely, but bringing the host and a camera crew to the agency’s headquarters in Langley presented all kinds of security headaches. The host and all of his producers pledged to bend over backward to make an in-studio interview work. They never got around to mentioning their insistence wasn’t just the better chemistry of a face-to-face interview; the network’s producers had noticed that certain administration officials would claim they couldn’t hear the question or were getting static feedback during remote interviews, just as the questions started to get difficult. The network’s tech guys could never determine any cause for the conveniently timed, seemingly one-sided technical difficulties. Occasionally a slower-witted guest would be asked by the host, “Can you hear me?” and answer, “No, I can’t.”
A high-profile guest like the CIA director couldn’t be expected to settle for the green room Keurig. Peck was ushered in directly to the host’s office, decorated with memorabilia from campaigns going back decades. After a few moments of chuckling about the DUPONT ’88 poster, the director shifted to small talk about his grandchildren’s soccer team and the host countered with tales of his children’s grammar school exploits. Both concurred that winning a war against ever-evolving terror groups was easier than getting kindergarteners to spread out and stop clumping together around the ball. After the casual, off-the-record coffee chat, Peck followed the eager staffers to makeup, was outfitted with a lapel microphone and earpiece, and stepped onto the set.
Peck recited his memorized talking points. “At times like this, we harness our resources, look for innovative solutions, and work in close cooperation with our allies for a multifaceted approach that adapts to changing challenges.”
The host stifled the urge to congratulate the director for setting the new Guinness Record for “Most Buzzwords and Clichés Stuffed into a Single Sentence.”
After a few minutes of back and forth, the host had wondered whether he should stop the interview or take a break; there was more than a little glint of sweat on the director’s forehead. His voice was growing louder, and he was speaking faster, hiswordsrunningtogetherlikethis.
“How certain can you be that this group won’t be able to kill more Americans?”
“We can’t be certain, because we can’t protect everybody!” the director exclaimed, to the surprise of everyone in the room�
�including himself. “The expectations upon us are immeasurable, impossible—we’re expected to know what everybody in the world is doing all the time, everywhere! If it’s not al-Qaeda, it’s ISIS, when it’s not ISIS, it’s the Khorasan Group, or the Haqqani Network, or the Brotherhood of Eblis, or Hadramout—”
“But, Director,” the host interrupted. Unbeknownst to him, Peck had begun listing nascent terror groups that the US government had never discussed before.
“It’s like everybody’s walking around in this trance, completely oblivious to reality and how the world really works!” Peck spoke louder, eyes starting to bulge. “How are we supposed to protect people when they choose to go hiking over the Iranian border? Why do Americans walk around thinking these countries are as safe as going to the local mall?!” The host stared, marveling that one of the highest-ranking officials in the US government, the keeper of the nation’s secrets, was starting to sound like a ranting Larry David.
He tried to steer the conversation, “So you seem to be suggesting that Americans need to get used to—”
“We sit around debating if this kind of chaos is the new normal—what the hell is normal anymore? The other day the Azeri trade minister is at a closed-door lunch meeting with the Saudi ambassador, just reaches across the table and stabbed the ambassador with his knife! Nobody knows why! Just happens! Guy goes nuts without warning, nearly starts a war! What are we supposed to do about that?”
The host stared back, marveling that the rant was becoming a full-blown meltdown. Usually these sorts of off-the-cuff rambling tirades were reserved for the president.
“Are there spies in our ranks? Probably! CI branch theorized there were two moles on my senior staff last year! How am I supposed to watch my back twenty-four/seven? Are they gonna get me in my sleep? Walls, borders—we’ve got thousands of people coming into our country every day, any one of them could be a bug. People aren’t what they seem. Most people can’t see them, but I’m starting to see! Walking around like sock puppets, something’s pulling the strings, hand up their—”