Finally, Derek said, in as judicial a tone as he could muster, “If I may, I’d like to request a full list of all the people who have been made aware of our undercover operative status.”
“I’m not sure I appreciate your tone, Dr. Jenner. You may have grandiose ideas about being some sort of secret agent, but I’m sure some could argue that you’re little more than a poacher on the government payroll.”
“Some?”
“No one I’m associated with, of course.”
“Of course not, governor, and I apologize for my tone. However, there is still the fact that our status is not public knowledge and, in fact, requires a security clearance of at least...”
“I’m a publically elected leader, Dr. Jenner, with powerful friends. In four years I’ll most likely be running for a seat in the Senate, which I fully expect to win. After that, who can say? It would behoove you to not worry about what clearance I might or might not have. Know that, should I ever obtain the seat which I truly have my heart set upon, I will be sure to remember those who played ball with me.”
“As well as those who didn’t?”
“Precisely.”
As far as Derek was concerned, this conversation was rapidly crossing the line from annoying to maddening. He was a conservationist when he could afford to be, and a hunter when he needed to be. This crap held no interest for him. That didn’t mean he liked being dicked around, though, which was exactly what Yarlberg was doing. The man was a skilled politician, so Derek wasn’t going to win a war of words. The fact that he was also a spoiled asshole, obviously used to getting his way, was merely exacerbating the situation. It wasn’t enough to bring his team in to do whatever job he wanted done – he had to pound it into their heads who was in charge.
Fortunately, Mitchell, the consummate researcher, spoke up before Derek could voice his opinion. “Mr. Krychech, the governor was telling us of some sort of problem related to the area’s history. What kind of problem are we talking about?”
Derek gave him a small glance of gratitude for steering the conversation back to business. They could always sort out the pissing match later.
“Donald, please,” the man replied meekly. “We have a potential ... situation in the Pine Barrens.”
“Situation?”
“Yes,” he replied. “Six months ago, we started getting disturbing readings from one grid deep in the Wharton State Forest. Nothing conclusive, mind you.”
“What kind of readings?”
“Concerning toxicity levels in the groundwater. That area has been a problem on and off. Seems every twenty or thirty years...”
“So what you’re telling us,” Derek said, “is that you have an environmental disaster in the making. Is that correct?”
“I prefer not to use that word, Dr. Jenner.”
Derek ignored him. Turning back to Yarlberg, he asked, “Exactly why are we here, governor?”
“Very well, I’ll be frank with you. However, be warned that this doesn’t leave this room. I don’t need to remind you of the consequences.”
Derek somehow bit his tongue. He was happy to see the rest of his team do likewise, Francis especially. The big man didn’t suffer bullshit artists lightly. If not for Derek’s earlier intervention, he would have most likely told the good governor to kiss their collective asses.
No doubt taking their silence as agreement, Yarlberg said, “To put it concisely, the good ole boys who used to do business out that way were some pretty big players in those days. When they closed up shop, they did a shit job cleaning up after themselves, and their pockets were deep enough to ensure that nobody made any stink about it.”
Donald nodded and added, “There are at least a dozen major abandoned facilities scattered throughout the region, that we know of anyway.”
“That you know of?” Mitchell asked.
“You have to understand, some of these go back centuries. Many of the original business entities no longer exist, and those that do aren’t particularly eager to air their dirty laundry. Once something is reclaimed by the forest, oftentimes you wouldn’t even know it’s there unless the floor rotted out beneath you and dropped you into a subbasement.”
“And, hypothetically speaking, what would one find in such a subbasement?” Derek asked.
At this, Donald looked highly uncomfortable. Finally, he answered, “That’s the problem. We don’t really know.”
CHAPTER 10
“So let me see if I have this straight,” Derek said after the AEP director had finished. “A section of the Pine Barrens might be teeming with toxic waste...”
Donald shook his head. “I didn’t say that!”
“Sorry. Has become a potential environmental situation. Better? And you’re trying to keep it out of the press?”
“The Pine Barrens is a federal reserve,” Yarlberg explained. “If people learn it’s been compromised in this way, it could become ... uncomfortable for me.”
“I don’t get it,” Francis said. “Why wasn’t all this crap cleaned up years ago? I mean, you knew about it, right?”
“Money,” Danni replied, ending her silence. “A cleanup of that scale wouldn’t be cheap.”
“Smart girl.” Yarlberg once again gave her an appraising glance. “The costs are simply prohibitive for this or previous administrations. As a result, we have adopted an unofficial policy of cleaning things up as issues are discovered.”
“Reactive instead of proactive,” Derek surmised.
“Budget conscious,” Yarlberg corrected.
“So this whole thing is a smokescreen, I get that,” Derek countered. “But why us? Why bother with this Jersey Devil garbage when you could have just made up any excuse to keep the public out while your people clean up? I assume this isn’t the first time this has happened.”
“You assume correct. Nor do I think it’ll be the last.”
“So what makes this different?”
“Mr. Krychech?”
Donald looked at the governor. At his nod, he began to speak. “That’s just the problem, Dr. Jenner. We’re not entirely sure it is garbage anymore.”
“Go on.”
“A few months ago, one of my men and his wife went missing. It wasn’t until he failed to report back in at the office the following week that we realized something was amiss.”
“What was this man doing out there?”
“He works ... worked for me in data analysis. We were short on field techs, so he was asked to go out and take samples from the affected area.”
“He wasn’t a field specialist?”
“I know what you’re getting at.” Donald folded his arms across his chest, looking more the petulant child than a government official. “Maybe he just got lost. That was our assumption, too.”
“He wasn’t lost, though, was he?” Danni asked, suddenly showing interest.
Donald shook his head. “No, at least we don’t think so. When he didn’t turn up, I sent a man to his house, then...”
“At what point did you call the police?” Mitchell interrupted.
“Well...”
“Mr. Krychech handled this as an internal investigation,” Yarlberg replied, “at my personal request.”
Mitchell looked like he wanted to say something else, but Derek cut him off. “Let Mr. Krychech finish his story, please.”
Donald, looking more nervous than ever, waited a moment to see if there were any more interruptions. When none came, he continued. “We then remembered that John, the man who went missing, had borrowed a state vehicle for the weekend. When we remotely activated the built-in GPS, we saw it was parked out in the Barrens. Naturally, I sent a man out to investigate.”
“And...?”
“He found the vehicle, but there was no sign of John or his wife.”
“Did he look for them?”
“No, and that’s where things started to get odd. I sent out Charlie Halstead. He’s worked for the department for twenty years, one of our senior field techs. This man has
been in and out of those woods dozens of times, not to mention in half the sewers of the state.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I’m trying to tell you, he’s not a skittish fellow. But he hightailed it right out of there rather than grab his gear and look for John. The man was spooked. Said he felt like he was being watched the whole time. Heard some weird noises, too.”
“That’s not exactly...”
“I’m not finished, Dr. Jenner!”
Derek could see he was worked up. He just wasn’t sure why. “Sorry. Please go on.”
“I sent out a search team after that. Five men, all of them experienced in the field. They left in the morning. By mid-afternoon, one of them found John’s discarded pack. Not too far from there he found ... well, he wasn’t sure at the time, but it was John. It was hard to tell. The man was literally torn apart.”
Danni let out a small gasp. Derek turned to her for a moment, but she nodded to let him know she was okay.
“His wife?”
“No sign of her, but that wasn’t all. The man who found John phoned it in and then returned to the vehicles. A short while later, two of the others arrived there in a state near panic.”
“Panic?”
“Yes. One reported the same thing that Charlie had. A feeling of being watched and some strange noises off in the brush.”
“The other?”
“He saw ... something. He didn’t stick around to find out what, but I know this man. He doesn’t spook easily.”
“You said there were five.”
Krychech paused and then looked toward Yarlberg, who again nodded for him to continue. “We don’t know what happened to the other two. They never returned to the rendezvous point.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Derek could have gladly throttled them all. “So let me get this straight,” he said through gritted teeth. “You have three missing people, and one dead...”
“Five,” Yarlberg said.
“Excuse me?”
“We’re assuming five at the moment. The State Police got a report a few weeks back that a couple of college students disappeared during a camping trip around there. Both had a history of drugs, so we’ve been able to keep it under wraps, but one of their mothers has been making a stink about it.”
“And that’s when you finally decided to call us in?”
“More or less. That’s when I put some feelers out amongst my contacts. I’d heard rumors about the existence of your little group. You’re not nearly as discreet as you think.”
“Apparently not.”
“Imagine my surprise when you ... what you do, I mean ... turned out to be real. Of course, this all assumes it actually is real. You wouldn’t be the first bunch to defraud the U.S. government.”
“I can assure you what we do is very serious,” Derek replied. “I assume you got a peek into the Forest Service’s cryptid archives.”
The governor raised his eyebrows. “I’m privy to no such information.”
“Nice to see some things are still a secret.”
“Your point, Dr. Jenner?”
“My point, governor, is that you know what we do, but do you know how or even why we do it?”
Yarlberg quickly glanced at his people before turning back to Derek. “No, I’m afraid I do not, but I’m sure you’ll be happy to explain it to me.”
“Quite happy,” Derek replied blithely. “We don’t just pack up our bags when someone has a bigfoot sighting. The government has a relatively expansive archive of cryptid activity, including: species, territory, and even estimated populations.”
“Excuse me,” Donald interrupted. “The government is aware of these things, but keeps them quiet? Why would...”
“I don’t know, Mr. Krychech. That knowledge goes deeper down the rabbit hole than I have access to. What I do know is that, for whatever reason, they wish it to remain a secret. Sometimes the territory of these cryptids overlaps with populated locations. When that happens, we get a call. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. The government gets to keep things under wraps, and we get to save a few lives in the process. Everybody’s happy that way.”
“Okay, I see your point,” the governor replied. “That’s exactly the sort of...”
“No, it’s not,” Derek said. “You have a few vague legends, even vaguer sightings, and absolutely no archive data or even fossil records to back it up. What you do have is a fairly significant missing persons list. That’s a job for the cops, not us.”
“Under normal circumstances I would agree, but this is a sensitive issue and police involvement would...”
“Leak to the press?” Danni surmised.
Yarlberg narrowed his eyes at her. “Something like that.”
“It’s not all vague,” Donald piped in.
“Excuse me?”
“Exactly that, Dr. Jenner. We have reason to suspect there’s something out there, and it’s not just based on what a few of my men saw.”
“Go on.”
“When we found John Guiterrez’s remains, we also found something else.”
“What?” Mitchell asked, perking up.
“We’re not sure. Some sort of secretion ... mucus, maybe saliva.”
Derek replied, “You yourself said that the area was potentially a hotbed of toxins.”
“It’s nothing like that. The chemical composition is all wrong. We don’t know exactly what it is, but we’re pretty sure of one thing.”
“Which is?”
“Whatever it is, it’s biological.”
CHAPTER 11
The meeting broke up soon after. Eric Zeist was assigned as the team’s personal liaison to the governor, although Derek didn’t buy that excuse. He knew exactly what Zeist’s job was – to babysit them.
The team was taken back to their vehicles. They pulled out, followed closely by the security director and a few of his men. Their first stop was the Burlington campus of Rutgers University. The plan was to assess the lab being loaned to them and make any additional equipment requests if necessary. Once they were set up, Donald Krychech would send over the samples he had collected. Mitchell and Derek would perform the initial analysis – the hope being there was recoverable DNA in the sample. If so, it could be run against the vast species database maintained by the Fish and Wildlife Service, including several species that weren’t publically known.
Of course, that all assumed the sample was viable – a big if.
“We’re being played like grade-A chumps,” Francis complained through the Bluetooth speaker. They were government grade and heavily encrypted. Considering that most of Zeist’s equipment appeared to be over-the-counter, it seemed a safe bet that they weren’t eavesdropping.
“I’d rather be a chump than a piece of meat,” Danni said from the driver’s seat. “That guy Yarlberg is a creep. Felt like he has tentacles for eyes.”
“He lays a finger on you...” Francis warned, but Danni cut him off.
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