The Omega Project

by Ernest Dempsey

  The two friends made their way, carefully, down a narrow path that led toward the mouth of the river. It wasn’t completely frozen yet, but it was on its way. Thin sheets of ice floated on top of the water, colliding as they began to form a solid bridge across the cold liquid.

  The snow got a little shallower as they descended the hill but then deepened again at the bottom where wind had blown great drifts up to the base of the climb. The two kept going, pushing ahead against a bitter easterly wind. Sean pulled his hat down over his ears more than once to make sure the appendages kept warm. The breeze stung at his skin, though he didn’t dare complain. Tommy wasn’t complaining, and so neither would Sean.

  The path that led down the hill vanished in the white covering, and so the two were forced to make their own way, marching carefully across a meadow toward the wide confluence.

  When they reached the edge of the water, the two turned left and headed west toward the mouth of the river. The river narrowed rapidly as the two progressed, walking underneath another rock outcropping that jutted up from the earth.

  “That has to be it,” Sean said through the polyester mask. He pointed straight ahead.

  “Yeah,” Tommy said with a nod. “Looks like it.”

  They pressed on, but it was slow going as the two men waded through the accumulation of snow.

  When they were about fifty yards from their destination, Tommy’s right foot sank deeper than he expected, and he let out a yelp.

  Sean spun toward his friend, reacting instantly. He saw Tommy drop almost knee deep in the drifts. Sean stabbed out his right hand and wrapped his gloved fingers around his friend’s forearm.

  Tommy did the same, wrapping his fingers around Sean’s wrist.

  Sean tugged. “Come on, Schultzie,” Sean gasped.

  Tommy tried to walk his way up out of the hole, planting his left foot on what he hoped was solid ground, and then pushed hard with his quadricep while Sean continued to pull.

  Tommy was a good twenty pounds heavier than Sean, but not too heavy that Sean couldn’t use leverage along with his friend’s effort to get him out. Schultzie’s right foot came free, and he sprang out of the depression in the ground.

  Sean went sprawling backward, landing in snow that went up above his face.

  Tommy nearly landed on him but caught himself enough to take two clumsy steps before coming to a stop.

  Sean popped up and looked at his friend, disregarding the powder on the back of his hat and jacket. “You okay?” he asked, glancing at Tommy’s right foot. His first thought was that Schultzie had fallen into a puddle or an offshoot branch of the river. Something like that would soak his foot and lower leg in freezing cold water.

  “Yeah,” Tommy said, glancing down at his muddy boot. “I’m good. Just a soft spot in the ground, I guess. Probably from snowmelt or maybe a little runoff from the river.”

  Sean nodded and let out a relieved sigh. He didn’t need to tell him to be more careful. Tommy was already being careful, and the last thing he would want was to be chastised. “Just lucky it wasn’t worse,” Sean commented.

  “You got that right. I guess we need to watch it.”

  Just like Sean thought: no need to warn him.

  “Let’s take it a little slower,” Sean said, “we’re almost there.”

  The two moved ahead, this time at a more gradual pace, each planting their feet in the snow and then pushing down warily until they were certain it was solid underfoot.

  The rock outcropping looped in front of them; less than thirty yards away now. The gray stone rose up from the ground and then bent outward slightly, like some ancient natural tower. The river seemed to spring up from under it, driven by an unseen force deep within the ground. Sean made his way over to the shore where timid ripples of the clear liquid lapped against the forming ice that abutted the dirt and rocks along the edge. He looked into it for a moment and then stole a sharp glance back toward the SUV. It was still there, alone in the lot, and from what he could tell, there was no one else around.

  Part of him wasn’t surprised. It was cold and miserable, though the locals were likely accustomed to this sort of weather. Then again, he doubted anyone following them were locals. Whoever was behind the presidential abduction could be from anywhere, even foreign. There was simply no way of knowing.

  “So,” Tommy said, cutting into the silence that only the wind dared interrupt, “we’re looking for a rock that is out of place, right?”

  Sean recalled the clue left by James Madison. “Yeah, that’s what the letter said.” Then he recited it. “Where disappointment dwelt in the hearts of the men, a second piece leads the way to what he feared. Find it near the serpent’s head, beneath a stone misplaced long ago, and you will be one step from what took the fabled city of Plato.”

  Tommy nodded, unimpressed. He’d witnessed Sean’s odd ability to remember things with remarkable accuracy. It was a trick he’d seen over and over again throughout their thirty-plus years of friendship.

  “You hesitated,” Tommy said.

  Sean snorted a laugh. “For dramatic effect. But also because of what we’re talking about here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you get it?”

  “Get what?”

  Sean couldn’t believe Tommy wasn’t making the connection. “Plato? This riddle; it’s talking about Atlantis.”

  Tommy felt a rush shoot through his body. “How in the world did I not see that before? You’re right! James Madison wrote a letter about Atlantis.” He couldn’t contain the excitement in his voice.

  Tommy pointed at the rock outcropping and tried to collect himself, reeling in his fervor. “You think this is the stone misplaced long ago?”

  Sean drew a long breath through his nostrils and wandered over to the base of the rock plinth. His head gradually tilted back as he looked up, scanning the tower of stone for a clue as to what they were supposed to find.

  But it all looked the same, only broken up in a few places with cracks and sections that had fallen off long ago.

  “I guess we’re going to have to do a little work.”

  31

  Billings

  The FBI employs around thirty-five thousand people. Agent Matthew Petty had at least twenty of those working directly under him. He had his superiors to answer to—directors, subdirectors, and so on—but for the most part he could run his own game.

  He’d been undercover a handful of times, most of them dangerous situations. Twice he’d infiltrated deadly cartels, one based in Juarez and the other in Guadalajara. He was accustomed to being on his own, not being tethered to a half-dozen other agents.

  That he could move faster, get things done quicker in the field, on his own, and be less noticeable, was the main source of his irritation at the moment.

  He was on the phone with his boss and didn’t like what the man was saying.

  Ted Hollis was more than just the big boss. The FBI had a leadership structure arranged much like a spider’s web. It was intricate, stretching over a vast network of agents, support personnel, and specialists. The system was broken down into different, often complex categories, but the top of the food chain was simple enough for everyone in the agency to understand.

  There was the director, the deputy director, the associate deputy director, and the chief of staff. Those final three positions composed the senior staff of the bureau.

  Hollis was the director, which put him in charge of the entire agency. And he wasn’t happy with Petty.

  Petty sat in his car for a moment as the director ran through a series of political nightmares he was juggling. Each one of the problems he listed was directly related to the missing president.

  “How is it that one of the most famous people in the world, with a face that almost everyone knows, somehow managed to up and disappear like a fart in the wind?”

  Petty ignored his crass comment. He was wondering the same thing, though, and had—up to that point—only come up with
fragments of an explanation. While Petty didn’t necessarily like the director as a person, he respected the position and the authority the man wielded.

  Hollis had been the one to invite Petty into a new subset of the bureau, a group known only to a few, called Group Z. While the FBI certainly had agents out in the field either working autonomously undercover or in the open in certain theaters, Group Z was designed to allow greater freedom for agents who’d shown tremendous promise during their careers. Only agents who exhibited a talent for getting results on their own were invited in.

  Requirements were stringent. To even be considered, an agent was required to have performed a minimum of two assignments under deep cover. The training was difficult, too, even more so than the usual regimen general agents were put through. Intensive psychological testing was conducted on every subject to ensure they were both mentally prepared for the rigors of what was to come, as well as clever enough to improvise on the fly, especially in dire situations.

  Petty had jumped at the chance when Hollis offered. Taking the job meant he’d have to be on the road more, almost all the time, but that’s what Petty wanted. Getting out of DC wasn’t a bad thing. He loved the town, but the traffic, the constant hustle and bustle, and wading through the knee-high manure of committees, meetings, and filing reports was something he couldn’t escape fast enough.

  Now, instead of reporting to a conference room full of peers and supervisors, he reported to Hollis—and only Hollis.

  Not that this way of doing things didn’t have its challenges. Petty recalled reading a quote from Aristotle about how the most efficient form of government was a monarchy with a good monarch. He still doubted that would work in practice, though he’d learned that the theory was very true. Committees were too much like big government, squabbling about mission statements and arguing over the best way to get things done, often without accomplishing anything.

  There were, of course, drawbacks. Hollis was headstrong, and his ego was infamous in the law enforcement community. He’d been a federal agent his entire career, grinding his way up the ladder with hard work and fierce determination. He, like Petty, didn’t appreciate reporting to others, playing by others’ rules. Most of the people in the bureau knew that was why he’d pushed so hard to become the director.

  No one could deny the man’s pedigree, his résumé, and his intense ambition. John Dawkins had made him the twenty-first director of the FBI during his first stint in office and had kept him around during the second. From the sound of it, the new president had no intention of removing him from office. Hollis had done an impeccable job of doing the Washington dance, bobbing and weaving his way through the political maze and coming out clean on the other side. If Hollis kept it up, he’d soon take his place alongside the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Robert Mueller, the two longest-serving directors in FBI history.

  Petty respected that about him, along with the fact that no one had ever been able to dig up any dirt on the man. Petty had done his best to keep his record just as spotless, and he hoped Hollis appreciated that. Just as with Hollis, Petty’s only vices were a good cigar now and then and a nightcap of bourbon.

  All that was far behind Petty at the moment as he listened to his superior rage on the other end of the line.

  “I’m working on it, sir,” Petty said in response to the rhetorical question Hollis had asked. “I have a few good leads.”

  “Leads?” Hollis’s voice thundered. “I don’t care about the friggin’ leads, Petty. We know who took the president. We know it was Sean Wyatt. We know where he lives. Where he eats. Where he works. We know everything about the man. We know he got married recently, though we don’t know much about his wife.” He paused at the tripping point in his rant. “That doesn’t matter,” he corrected quickly.

  “My point is we know who we’re looking for. Why in all of God’s green goodness can we not find him?”

  Petty swallowed hard. He understood the director’s anger and frustration. He was feeling the same emotions, though not able to direct them at anyone in particular. He took out his irritations on the pillows of the hotels he stayed at or at the firing range, at the gym, or out running hill sprints. Petty’s life was one of solitude. Both of his parents had died years ago. Cancer ripped his father away from him; his mother a victim of a heart attack. He’d made few friends at the bureau, which was another reason he made a perfect candidate for Group Z.

  Unfortunately, Petty couldn’t tell the director what he was thinking. He knew Sean Wyatt was a master of the disappearing act. He’d done it for years now, even after leaving government work to go into a private project with his friend Tommy Schultz. The truth was, Sean could go anywhere, be anyone. Petty was lucky he’d been able to put together a couple of weak leads. He knew it was better than what anyone else had come up with so far. Most of the available investigative manpower in the government was on the case. The NSA was doing their thing, listening, watching, and waiting for a mistake to pop up on their screen like a big red flag. The FBI and CIA were also doing everything they could to locate the missing former president.

  Petty kept his finger on the pulse of all their efforts, as best as one man could anyway. So far, he hadn’t heard anything except the sounds of the other branches—as well as his own—spinning their wheels.

  “I’m on Wyatt’s trail, sir,” Petty said. “I’m closing in on him. I should have him within the next day or two.”

  “He’s on the move?” Hollis skipped through any potential details about what was going on and went straight to the assumption. That was one thing Petty liked about the guy: he could connect dots rather quickly.

  “Looks like it, sir.”

  There was a momentary pause on the line, and Petty imagined the man rubbing his chin with a thumb and index finger as he pondered what that could mean.

  “Why?” Hollis asked, smashing the silence with his baseball bat of a voice. “Why would he be moving? That would make things extremely difficult.”

  “I don’t know why, sir.” The admission stung even though Petty knew it shouldn’t. He’d done more, gotten further in this investigation than anyone else. “And I agree,” he added quickly. “It doesn’t make sense. Transporting a prisoner like that, across the country, would be difficult to say the least. Not to mention that prisoner happens to be a high-profile person.”

  “So, why? Why isn’t Wyatt holed up somewhere in a cave or in the mountains or in an underwater laboratory in the ocean?”

  Petty knew better than to snort at the last comment, even though every fiber of his being wanted to. It was a humorous comment by his boss but one that hadn’t been made for entertainment. He was merely conveying the extensive capabilities of the man they were hunting.

  “I’ve been working on that, sir. The only thing I can come up with is that Wyatt knows if he sits still too long, we’ll zero in on him sooner or later. Not many people understand our processes, systems, and way of doing things in the field better than him. He’ll try to stay a step ahead of us the whole time.”

  “He’s doing it.”

  “I know…” He let the words hang for a moment.

  “Is there something else, Agent Petty?” The gruff voice on the phone softened for a moment as the director picked up on something that was left unsaid.

  He was good at making those kinds of reads on people—another reason he’d climbed the ladder to the top.

  “Yes, sir. There is.”

  “Well? I don’t have all day, Agent.”

  “First,” he hesitated, “I’m not sure Wyatt took the president.”

  Another silence bomb hit the line, and for eleven seconds no one said anything. Petty waited for it.

  “What in the Sam Hill do you mean, you don’t know if Wyatt took the president? Of course he did. He said so on the video we received.”

  “I know, sir. And I’m still on his trail, but we never saw Wyatt on the video. He didn’t show his face. Don’t you think that’s a tad odd?”

&nb
sp; “Are you saying he was set up?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  “Why are you just now coming to this conclusion?”

  “A man was seen in a diner out here last night. He stopped a robbery, might have even saved a few lives in the process. The man was different in appearance, for the most part, than Wyatt, but there were some things witnesses said that made me think it was him. He must have changed his look.”

  “Obviously. What’s your point?”

  “Sean Wyatt knows he’s a fugitive,” Petty said. “He knows we’re after him, that every agency across the nation is tracking him down. He’s a hunted man. Why would he risk going out of his way to stop a robbery at a diner when he knew that could also mean more people would potentially recognize him? I mean, he took the weapons from the thieves, gave them to a customer and one of the waitresses, then told them to call the cops. That doesn’t sound like something a guilty person would do, especially someone who’d abducted a former president.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Petty could tell he had his boss on the same train now, both from the hesitation in the older man’s voice and in the agreeable way he commented. Knowing that, Petty pushed in to his next point.

  “There’s something else, sir.”

  “What's next, you gonna tell me he's walking on water and raising the dead?”

  Another gruff example of Hollis’s humor. Petty cracked a smile but didn’t laugh. “No, sir. This has to do with a homicide in Billings, Montana.”

  “Billings? A homicide?”

  “I managed to piece together a trail after Wyatt left Atlanta. He’s going west, as I mentioned in our conversation yesterday and in my reports.”

  “Hard to forget.”

  “Anyway, he came through here. I couldn’t have been more than a few hours behind based on what witnesses said.”

  “More witnesses?”

  “Wyatt and another man, probably Schultz, stopped in a fast food place here in Billings. Witnesses said they saw the other man leave first, then the one we think might be Wyatt. Shortly after, a man was found dead out in the parking lot.”