A Dark Perfection

by James, Mark

  “That he is. Consider his strategic position: his best friend, Osborne, has brought someone in from the outside, into their inner circle, and secretly at that – this lawyer fellow, O’Neill. The same individual who is now accused of being a terrorist collaborator. He should be worried.”

  Lucien was always fascinated by how smaller minds worked. He turned towards Jessup. “What would you do next?”

  Jessup realized how infrequently the director looked at him directly. Not as in looking at him, but looking into him. It was disquieting. In fact, he found this whole room disquieting: the portrait looming behind him, staring down on him, the African mask with the nails driven into it, the Egyptian scarab that Lucien used as a paper weight, all orchestrated into a dark weave of shape and color.

  “As you once said, sir, when the next move is not assured, we should ask ourselves: what would our enemy not want us to do? What’s the tactical move that would most expose their underbelly? I would go after Osborne. He’s the confidant of Walker. If Osborne is made unavailable to the president, then Walker necessarily becomes more isolated, more vulnerable, more apt to make mistakes. It would be like chopping off the president’s right hand.”

  Lucien appreciated his underling’s instinct for the jugular. He enjoyed watching the small mind move, the brain stem twitch. But Lucien also knew – could sense – that Walker’s deeper weakness lay elsewhere.

  “Remember the definition of forbearance, Agent Jessup. It is the ability to withhold that which is due until the moment it can be delivered with utmost potency.”

  “Tell me, where is this O’Neill now?”

  “Presently, unknown. When we entered the medical facility, the insertion team found the guards disabled. O’Neill and the terrorist girl were gone.”

  Jessup paused. He possessed further information on the terrorist girl – her first name, a possible new location – but he didn’t want to tell the director until he was absolutely certain. The director could sometimes react unpredictably when lead information later turned out to be false. Jessup had felt that whip.

  Lucien remained still, letting Jessup feel the silence. He sensed something deeper in his underling.

  “Sir?” Jessup finally said.

  “The reason that we can’t find O’Neill and this terrorist girl,” Lucien explained, “is because they don’t want us to find them. They are utterly consumed in the task. Thus, this becomes the loci where the needle becomes applied. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir. We already have all of the transit points secured and the Surveillance-Net is operational. We gained dual access with the NSA last week, thanks to our friends on the Hill. We’re sweeping all government safe houses. Although I can’t believe Osborne would be naïve enough to stash O’Neill there.”

  The director considered the playing field; on where to march the phalanx next.

  “Do you remember that campus police report we found last year?” he asked, smiling with his next thought. “The one on Osborne and O’Neill, during the time they were at the FBI academy?”

  “Yes, sir. But they were only witnesses to the bar fight. They actually broke it up, called the police and then the ambulance. Nothing much there.”

  “Take the report and give it to Dr. Thornan. Tell Thornan that I want it to appear as if they were involved in the fight – just enough of a change in the police narrative to raise a question.”

  “But Osborne and Walker, they’ll just deny it. And their campaign teams must have vetted it long ago. Plus, they’ll have a copy of the original report. They’ll release it and it’ll all go away.”

  “That may be true, but it will take them a two-day news cycle to right that ship. In the meantime, Osborne will see his and O’Neill’s face splashed across the evening news – his face across from O’Neill’s, the one man he wants to be a ghost, especially now.”

  Jessup looked perplexed. He saw the raw logic, but in the end it seemed to be a waste of resources.

  The director sensed the indecision. “Mr. Jessup, we need to begin the ticking of a top, a progressive iteration. Thus, also tell Thornan that I want him to simultaneously release the original report alongside this doctored one. But I want the original report itself to be another fake. However, in this faked original report I want the forgery to be discoverable, so that some savvy reporter will see that it’s a fake. And then release them both at once.”

  Jessup squinted, “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand.”

  “Listen closely: I want the original report to appear as if someone doctored it to hide the false version that we are releasing in the second report. Not only will Osborne and the president be defending themselves on the second version – where Osborne and O’Neill look like they were involved in the fight – but will also be defending the position that they doctored the first report. The two versions become mutually reinforcing, the fog of confusion increased. After they’re released, leak it to our blogger contacts that the administration may have doctored the original police report during the first campaign so that Walker could get elected. Then coordinate this with our people on the Hill. I want those congressmen screaming like the pathetic magpies they are.”

  Jessup still didn’t understand, yet knew better than to ask again.

  “Also, have Agent Barberi come in from the field. I want an update on those Croatian accounts. Last, call Congressman Deerfield and schedule lunch today at Bistro Les Viviers in the Hotel George. Tell Deerfield I want to discuss warrants and I expect cooperation. If he hesitates in any way, tell him that I authorized you to utter this one word, Magnolia.”

  Neither Agent Jessup, nor any of the GMA Agents, knew of the director’s extra-Agency operatives and operations – the hungry former agents existing on the fringes, the mercenaries existing outside of any laws or restrictions, the people who did things for him.

  “Magnolia, sir?” Even as Jessup said the words he realized his mistake.

  Lucien looked at him with the darkness of a thousand lost lives and then, abruptly, calmed.

  “Now, Agent Jessup, consider this next question carefully. Do you have anything else to report?”

  Jessup recalculated his previous decision. “Yes, sir. The medical facility staff, although unsure, disclosed that the terrorist girl’s first name is Aisha. In Arabic, it means, alive. We’re not sure whether that’s relevant in any way.”

  “And?”

  “And,” he continued, a stutter creeping into his speech, “this Aisha girl may have been taken to an NSA facility in Virginia, the most recent one. We received a thermal ping from the new Surveillance-Net on a possible track-back from there to the medical facility. It seems the NSA countermeasures aren’t fully implemented either.”

  The director didn’t ask why this information had been omitted and he turned in his chair. Through the large picture window he could see the river freezing up.

  Jessup rose.

  “I’m not through with you, Mr. Jessup. I want an insertion team into that Virginia NSA facility.”

  Jessup froze. “But we’re talking about the NSA here, sir, not some rural cop station. They hand out sizable stints in Leavenworth for that kind of thing. Plus, we don’t know that she’s actually there.”

  Lucien smiled to himself, gazing out the window. “She’s there,” he whispered.

  “Protocol 13. Do it – tonight.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything else, sir?”

  “Leave. And send in Ms. Newberry. Tell her to bring her things.”

  Jessup skirted through the door and a moment later the GMA intern, Sandy Newberry, entered. As Lucien had requested of her recently, she wore a ribbon in her hair, her makeup soft like a girl’s cheek, like a Gibson girl he’d once seen in an 1890’s poster. She needed to look her part.

  Unknown to Sandy Newberry, the director had been reading a copy of her diary and had seen that, at first, she’d been honored by his attentions, even though she’d never done anything like this before. Her entries then became addled, avoidin
g their mention. In the last pages, as the pen pressed harder, she said that she felt trapped, frightened.

  When they were together, he could feel this in her and it excited him – her hesitancy, the fear running through her.

  As she entered the room, he was already in front of the desk. She walked up, eyes downward. He guided her shoulders as she kneeled, dropping her note pad and starting. He could feel her hot nervous breath, then rougher, like he’d shown her.

  The ticking of a top, its momentum building towards release – this was the way of the world, empires rising, empires falling, no soul immune from the waves of Time.

  The ancient Roman Empire “fell” over the span of three hundred years, the people cheering in the Colosseum oblivious to their building fate, even as they fed on the centuries’ past riches. The Roman historian Gibbons had called it debauchery, but beneath, it was no more than the ticking of a top.

  Of a river into rapids.

  Everything in our world – each river, every system – moves in a cascade from order to erosion, from order to chaos. Alexander the Great realized this truth as he stood atop a desert steppe and gazed over his vast throng of troops.

  Viscount Aimeric Lucien – a modern Khan – knew this same truth, here, now.

  He could feel his energy rise, moving towards her. She reflexively jerked against his hand holding tight to her hair.

  When the glow hit, another truth came over him.

  The vice-president would be easy to control.

  †

  The furtive call from Dr. Prevot came before dawn. The doctor had been working through the night and the sudden ringing awoke Garneau with a start.

  “Etienne?” Garneau said, rubbing his eyes. He leaned over and told Elise it was nothing.

  “Say again, Etienne?”

  “They’re here!”

  “Who? Who’s there?”

  He could hear shouts and a metallic crashing sound.

  “It’s the National Police, your people! And the Americans, they must be behind this. Please, Henri, get down here, vite!”

  Another shattering sound and Prevot dropped the phone. Garneau heard distant yelling.

  Garneau threw on some clothes he found in the bathroom corner, wrote Elise a note, jumped into his Citroen and drove through the predawn streets with abandon – street lights flipping past, the tires squealing through the red lights. Once at the lab building, he bounded down the stairs and pushed open the lab’s swinging doors.

  It was eerily quiet.

  The room looked as if a hurricane had blown through. Prevot sat in a corner in the only upturned chair. He rose slowly, as if a hundred years old. In each hand he held a coffee cup, balancing across the room and avoiding the file cabinets that were toppled like ruins.

  He smiled wryly, “They missed the cups…”

  His calmness caught Garneau by surprise and Prevot saw the look. “It’s the calm of utter futility, Henri. Fifty years of work, gone.”

  Garneau looked around at the walls, wires hanging and ends stripped. “All of it?”

  “They simply ripped the computers from the walls – hard drives, monitors, all of it – threw it in the laundry carts they’d brought with them and rolled it all out. I stood on the steps and watched them drive off. Three vans worth.”

  He looked lovingly at the scanning electron microscope unscathed in the middle, as if immune. “They tried to take her apart, but it was too heavy and one of them cut his hand. He cursed it and I cursed him back. I thought he was going to hit me, but someone must have told him I was off limits, because, you know, I could see that he wanted to, it was in his eyes. I know he was an American, though. He had perfect teeth.”

  “Merde,” Garneau said, taking in the destruction.

  “Give me one moment,” he said, taking out his cell phone. He dialed the home number for the Director-General, Pierre-Louis Chastain.

  Garneau took a few steps and the call picked up. “Hello, Pierre-Louis. Sorry for calling so early. Yes. I’m fine. Well, actually not. I need some help. You know Dr. Prevot…”

  “Where are you going to be?” Chastain asked. “And I can reach you on this number, correct? Henri, give me an hour and I’ll get back.’

  “Yes, yes. The doctor has been up all night. I’m taking him down the street to a café; get some coffee into him. We’ll wait there.”

  Garneau took Dr. Prevot by the arm and helped him down the stairs. Although Prevot’s eyes remained defiant, he seemed enormously aged by the experience. At the café, his coffee cup rattled against the saucer.

  “If I was younger, Henri, I tell you, I would have skulled them, I really would have. It’s damn hell getting old, nothing more to say about it.”

  Garneau had recently turned sixty-two and this was the year that those long forgotten sports injuries had begun to resurface, reminding him that the past was never truly gone.

  “I know, old friend. Life just keeps going on. Elise pulled a muscle in her hip last week, coming down the stairs – no slips, the same stairs as always. I could tell it upset her. Didn’t say anything for a few days, then a tiny tear one night. We were reading in front of the fire and there it was.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Oh, not much. Like you said, not much to say. She said she was just being silly. But I know that last month she said off-handedly that she doesn’t feel as pretty anymore. Maybe it’s harder for them, what with all of the magazines and the television heads screaming all of the time. She’s still the prettiest girl at the dance to me.”

  “And you, Henri?”

  “Well, you have a few years on me, Etienne, so who am I to complain? I suppose I’m simply an old mountain, wearing away. Not bad, all and all.”

  “And, of course, you have Elise.”

  “Yes, no regrets there. I think of her and the small puppy – innocent souls all – and the rest amounts to little things.”

  Garneau paused. “The regrets…you know, maybe it’s not about getting old, the old bones. Maybe it’s the regrets, living in the past, that makes one feel old? Do you have any, Etienne?”

  “Not really, a few old ghosts here and there, nothing real. I have Colette too, and the children.”

  Dr. Prevot reflected on the lab in disarray. He looked up, “It’s only more things, isn’t it?”

  A lazy drizzle had started and they looked out from under the canopy.

  “Yes,” Garneau said, “simply more things.”

  “Too bad, though,” he continued, his inspector self returning, “that I didn’t have the foresight to have you send me that data on the U.S. Ambassador. It would be my guess that someone didn’t want us to find something.”

  Prevot reached into his pocket and slid a flash drive across the table. “Ah, Henri, what do you say to me, seemingly all of the time, Ye of little faith?”

  Garneau looked over his glasses, smiling, “You old dog...all of it?”

  Prevot smiled devilishly.

  Garneau was about to ask a question and his phone rang softly from his pocket. It was Chastain. He cupped his ear from the rain and listened closely.

  “Yes, thank you again, Pierre-Louis.”

  He replaced the phone and leaned forward, staring into the rain.

  “What is it, Henri?”

  Garneau looked up, the scenarios spinning through his mind.

  “It wasn’t the Americans, Etienne. And it wasn’t us. Chastain is sure of it.”

  “But I saw the badges.”

  “Fakes.”

  Garneau looked back into the random drops, looking for a connection. “Merde,” he finally whispered. He could count on one hand how many times he’d sworn in the past year and here he’d cursed the skies three times in a week. He was simply not going to let this go.

  Prevot saw the frustration. “What is it, Henri, what’s wrong?”

  “We don’t have a clue who they are.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Ghosts, Etienne, ghosts. At least for now.”


  15

  Lani sat alone in the back of the speeding limousine, her emotions a swirl of instinct and reason. She couldn’t see where she was and they’d refused to tell her where they were going.

  What was happening to her?

  Two men in dark suits had appeared at her hotel room door unannounced and stern in demeanor. They appeared older, which seemed odd. She saw how they were holding themselves – tensed, hair-trigger. She demanded credentials. They refused and handed her a phone. On the other end, a voice claimed that it was Mackenzie Osborne. It sounded like him, but anything could be faked these days. The voice said she was in danger and that Jack was involved and was waiting for her at an undisclosed location. He refused to speak further, citing her protection. She needed to leave immediately.

  “Who the hell are you?” she cursed into the phone.

  The voice then asked her to wait.

  She watched the men in the black suits, gauging a possible escape route as a minute dragged into the next.

  The tone clicked and she could hear a strange whirring sound. A second voice answered.

  “Detective Keno, this is President Walker. Do you recognize my voice?”

  She waited.

  “Ms. Keno, I understand your reservations, but you need to go with these men.”

  Admittedly, it sounded like him. And no voice sounded like that.

  “Detective, please, if you will, conduct a quick analysis: how probable is it that someone could find two people that sound just like us – Mac and I? Ms. Keno, are you there?”

  “Yes, still here. Tell me why?”

  “Not possible, detective. I have a resolution, though. Can you see the Washington Monument from your window?”

  She moved to the window, closely eyeing the men in the suits.

  “Yes.”

  “The light at the tip–do you see the beacon? Watch closely…”

  She leaned forward. At the tip of the obelisk was a strobe light, a warning for planes.

  The light kept blinking, over and over. She was about to hang up and run for the door when the light disappeared.

  The room was silent as she counted to herself: one, two, three, four…