“Never as ‘Captain’ Ledger,” I said.
“No, and that’s the most troubling aspect of this. That designation is only ever used within certain levels of the intelligence and justice communities. You hold no verifiable rank. The press should not have been able to tag you in this way.”
“Which means what?” asked Bunny. “Did one of those Secret Service goons out him?”
Before Church could ask, a new banner appeared beneath the video footage of Auntie, Ghost, and me fighting together.
Rogue Agents from the Department of Military Sciences
We stared at that.
Church, who had been standing, sat down slowly and heavily in the leather chair behind the desk. He removed his tinted glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Well,” he said slowly, “isn’t that interesting.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Church put all of the DMS field offices on secure lockdown. So far, no reporters or crowds had materialized at any of them, but this wasn’t a time to take chances. Top and Bunny wanted to go out and help with rescue efforts in D.C., but Church nixed the idea.
“Even if you carry false ID,” he said, “someone in the Secret Service or other agencies with which you’ve interacted over the years could recognize you.”
“There are people who could use our help,” protested Top.
Church wouldn’t budge. “And if you are recognized, that will cause enough of a stir to draw resources away from those same people. You could create a distraction that does more harm than any good you might accomplish. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but while I commend your generosity and compassion, you would be of greater use elsewhere.”
“Where, exactly, sir?” asked Bunny, his face flushed with anger.
“In San Diego,” said Church. “Echo Team is composed of mostly new operators. Two of them have never been in a DMS action; one came in at the end of the Dogs of War event but without real training. And the fourth, Agent Duffy, is new to his role as team sniper. None of them have gone into the field as a DMS team. With everything that is happening, I would be comforted in knowing that they are ready to roll.”
“Against who?” growled Top.
“That’s always a challenge for us, First Sergeant; but when we come up with that name I want you ready to charge the field. And trust me, gentlemen, we will find out who is behind this.”
They didn’t like it, but we all knew Church was right. Top and Bunny stood. We don’t stand at attention in the DMS, and we don’t salute, but they both gave the impression of doing both. Mr. Church rose and offered his hand, nodding to each as they shook. I saw the guys out to the parking lot, and asked them to take Ghost along. The fur-monster wasn’t happy about it, and gave me an I’m going to pee in your shoes look as he trudged along behind them.
Brick intercepted me on the way back inside and handed me a new cell phone. Same make and model as mine but with a hardened case.
“Bug downloaded all your contacts and apps,” he said, “so you’re ready to roll.”
“Thanks,” I said, and began to slip it into my pocket, but he shook his head.
“Joe, when’s the last time you spoke with Junie? She’s at the Hangar now and would probably take it as a comfort if she heard directly from you that you’re all right.”
He clapped me on the shoulder and went inside. Brick is one of the good guys. Because he’s this huge, battle-scarred old soldier, it’s easy to make the wrong assumptions about him, but there are good reasons Church picked him as his aide. Brick is smart, educated, kind, lethal as fuck, subtle, and compassionate. He is the nicest of people most of the time, but you absolutely do not want to get between him and someone he wants to protect.
I stayed outside to call Junie. She answered on the first ring.
“Joe!” she gasped. “Are you okay?”
“I am.”
“Thank God. I love you,” she said, and there was such heart, such meaning in her words that I felt an actual warm glow in my heart. Don’t laugh, it happens; even to cold and cynical freaks like me.
“I love you, too, sweetheart.” I closed my eyes and conjured a memory of her. Tall, with wild blond hair that always looked like she’d stepped off a windy moor. The bluest eyes in creation, and splashes of freckles across cheeks and nose, and across her chest. When she wasn’t in the field in a third-world country, she tended to wear flowy peasant skirts in floral patterns and sheer white blouses. Her jewelry tended toward silver and crystals and rare stones in irregular shapes. Lots of rings on every finger and jangly ankle bracelets. Recently she’d had the phases of the moon tattooed across her left side so that the full moon was on her back and the new moon under her breast.
“You’re in New York?”
“At the Hangar, yes. Toys and I flew out. Joe, it’s so awful about Aunt Sallie, D.J., and Sam.”
We talked about our fallen friends for a while. Sharing fears, offering mutual comfort. The survival tactics of frail and compassionate human beings. Then Junie shifted gears and said she’d seen me on the news.
“Does that mean they’re going to arrest you?” she cried.
“They can try.”
“No,” she said sharply. “Don’t do that. Don’t give me that kind of macho bullshit answer, Joe.”
I winced because she was right. Junie is way more mature than I’ll ever be. Bravado may be good for trash talk and psyching one’s self up, but it’s often bullshit and it’s evasive and she deserved better from me.
“Sorry,” I said. “Really. Look, Junie, this scares the piss out of me, too. No joke. But we are the DMS. I’m going back in in a second to talk to Church and Bug about what we can do, and you have to know that we’re going to have options on how to spin this.”
“Can it be spun?” she asked. “I mean, they mentioned your name and they mentioned the Department of Military Sciences. What’s that expression you like so much? You can’t unring a bell?”
I leaned against the cold concrete wall next to the ER entrance. An ambulance was parked, engine off but the red and blue lights still turning, slapping me with color as if in silent reminder that the whole country was an active crime scene. Thanks, O subtle genies of the universe, I get the metaphor.
“Yeah,” I said to Junie. “And no, you can’t. Don’t know what’s going to happen to us yet. Church is not exactly BFFs with the president these days. Even before all this today we’ve kind of been expecting something from the White House. Like our charter being run through the shredder.”
“Do you think he’ll actually do that?”
I leaned my shoulder against the cold cinder block wall. “I don’t know, babe. Things have been going south for us these last couple of years. Hell, for almost as long as I’ve been with the DMS. First Hugo Vox turned out to be a bona fide supervillain, then MindReader gets hacked and hacked again. And on and on.”
“Right, but now you have MindReader Q1, or is that closing the barn door…?”
“It might be.”
We were quiet for a moment.
“Joe,” she said after a while, “I miss you.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve missed you so much lately.”
“I know. Me too.”
“No,” she said, “I mean I think we need to talk.”
“Now? About what?”
“Not now,” she said, “and not on the phone.”
I tensed the way you do when you know a punch is coming but you don’t know from which angle or how hard.
“Junie…,” I began, but let it fade.
“We’ve been apart so much these last couple of years,” she said. “I feel like we’re becoming strangers to each other.”
“You know who I am, Junie. I know who you are. Just because we’re both busy doesn’t change that.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No, damn it,” I said.
“Don’t yell, J
oe,” begged Junie. “Please. I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“What you’re doing is scaring me. I love you.”
“And I love you,” she said. “This isn’t about love.”
“Then what is it about?”
Her pause was long enough to make my jaw hurt from clenching. “I’m tired, Joe.”
“Tired of what? Us?”
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry. Let’s talk some other time.”
“Hey, wait, you can’t leave me hanging like this.”
“It’s okay, Joe. It’ll keep.”
“No, tell me—”
“I love you, Joe,” she said, and then the line went dead.
I went inside. The hallway was empty, and so was I.
I nearly called her back. But didn’t. My need told me to do the former, but my instincts—faulty as they sometimes were—stayed my hand. Instead I stood there, leaning against the wall, wanting to bash my head against it. I’d have done it if there was even the slightest chance that it would force the world to make sense.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
DRIVING IN MARYLAND
Valen drove at five miles over the road speed, only used the fast lane for passing, and made sure he used his blinkers to lane-change. The car Gadyuka provided was a two-year-old Nissan Ultima, one of the most common cars on American roads. Silver color; the second-most popular hue after white. There were no bumper stickers on it and absolutely nothing to make it stand out. He would never have driven anything that looked sporty, and certainly nothing red, because red cars are pulled over by highway patrol more than any other cars, even when driving at the speed limit.
The credit cards he had belonged to one of the deeply positioned American spies, a third-generation sleeper. The cards were clean and the accounts they drew on were years old and sensibly maintained. He had a driver’s license with his face, but the name attached to the account. As he drove, he listened to news radio and tried not to cry.
He turned off of George Washington Memorial Parkway onto the exit for I-495, heading toward Maryland. Heading west. He had more than two thousand miles to drive. Planes and trains weren’t safe anymore. Not since he’d let the government agent see his face.
Joe Ledger. The psychopath who worked for the Department of Military Sciences. It had definitely been him, of that Valen had no doubt. He watched the footage on Fox News over and over and over again of the same man and the same dog fighting people on the steps of the Capitol Building.
He hadn’t told Gadyuka about the encounter while recovering the machine. All he said was that he recovered the damaged machine without incident. A lie.
Why had he lied? Why hadn’t he told her about Tasing the man? Why hadn’t he told her when he’d realized who that man was? Why?
Valen drove.
He kept looking in the rearview mirror. It would be many miles before he realized who he was expecting to see behind him. And it was no comfort at all to see no one.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
“Bug,” I said as calmly as I could, “tell me I am not well and truly screwed.”
I was in a borrowed doctor’s office with Church, using a wall-mounted Scroll for the teleconference. A Scroll is Doc Holliday’s tweak of the flexible computer screen. It looks like a big map on thick paper, but the material is actually a blend of several polymers with flexible circuits built in. Once unrolled it can be attached to any flat surface. The skin acts as a high-resolution screen that made it look like Bug was in the same room with us.
Bug—born Jerome Leroy Williams—is smallish, medium brown, with colored contacts and a perpetual smile. Except now that smile looked fragile. He wore a Wakanda Forever long-sleeved T-shirt and was surrounded by computer monitors and pop-culture action figures of Black Panther, Shuri, Luke Cage, Ant-Man, The Wasp, Falcon, Doctor Strange, and Agent Dana Scully. At least they were the ones I could identify.
“Here’s the situation,” Bug said, trying to sound upbeat despite the sweat glistening on his face, “your name is out there, Joe. The photo is out there, and so is the video footage. So is the DMS’s name. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they haven’t ID’d Aunt Sallie, and she’s registered at Johns Hopkins under an alias no one is ever going to break.”
“That’s something,” I muttered.
I knew Brick always had a professional makeup kit with him, and he could transform me into someone who could ride in an elevator with my own brother without being recognized. That wasn’t the problem. The press was tearing themselves apart trying to figure out who and what the DMS was. The story was even competing with the mounting death toll in the nation’s second-worst earthquake ever.
“Who outed us?” I asked.
“We don’t know for sure,” said Bug. “The story broke on Fox and MSNBC within minutes of each other. Anonymous tips that came in on cell phones belonging to key news producers. I hacked both phones and verified that the calls originated from the same cell phone. Before you ask, the cell was a burner bought for cash at a Target in Virginia. I had Nikki go through the store’s video records and we have a good image of the man who bought it.”
An image flashed onto the screen, showing a man in jeans and a blue windbreaker moving away from a register toward the exit. The image froze and expanded to show his face.
“He looks kind of familiar…,” I said.
“He should,” said Bug. An overlay of facial recognition software isolating sixty-two unique points on the man’s face, head, ears, throat, and shoulders. A second window popped up to show the same man much more clearly. It was from an official ID for the United States Secret Service, and I knew him at once. It was my buddy Lurch from the cemetery.
“When was this video taken?” I asked.
“The day before you beat him and his buddies up,” said Bug. “So, this thing was in motion before you ever got to D.C. Oh, and Mr. Church already brought me up to speed with your theory. I wish I could say that it was too weird to be likely, but, dude, this is us.” He spread his hands.
“It’s fair to say that we are on the outs with the current administration,” Church said as he sat and studied the last piece of a cookie. “This is something we’ve seen coming. They want us gone, for whatever reason. Probably because it’s well known that our loyalty is not conditional. What troubles me, though, is the apparent clumsiness of it.”
“You’d rather they were sneakier?”
“I admire quality tradecraft, but this may be a mix of ham-fisted clumsiness and very sophisticated subtlety. I think the group behind this agenda—what you and Bug tend to call the ‘Big Bad’—has done its work with great skill. So great that we haven’t caught a whiff of it and even now only have a theory rather than facts. On the other hand, the task of taking you off the board was handled badly. That suggests that either we are still missing something about the nature of that pickup, or the skill of the Big Bad does not translate as it goes lower on the chain of command.”
“Leaning toward that last one,” I said, and Bug nodded. “We know for a fact that the Secret Service and some of the other agencies are not playing the same kind of pro ball they used to or should be.”
Bug raised his hand. “Um, I think the pickup on Joe was considered scut work, and they only give that stuff to the back-benchers. Look, we’ve run deep backgrounds on all the agents involved in the two pickup attempts. If we wanted to take the Secret Service apart, we could. They’re classic examples of job promotion based on favors rather than merit. Not exactly illegal, but unethical as all get-out. A lot of the better agents have either been transferred to other assignments or encouraged to change jobs. Some of the better ones have gone to work for private security firms. So, if the Big Bad influenced someone in the White House to pick you up, they didn’t have the best tools for that job.”
“The upshot of that, no matter how it was handled,” I said, “is that we, too, had our a
ttention drawn to D.C., and as a result we may be looking in the wrong direction.”
“That is almost certainly the case,” said Church. He selected another cookie and tapped crumbs off it. “We are a secret organization created during an earlier administration. We’ve been instrumental in taking down corrupt politicians before, admittedly as side effects of other cases. We have MindReader. Perhaps this Big Bad has, directly or through agents positioned to appear as close and loyal advisors, convinced POTUS that if we lose our charter we will slink away, pull the plug on MindReader, and cease to be a threat.”
“But…?”
Church took a bite and munched for a moment. His eyes were steady as lasers. “We have not tried to be a threat. It would be unfortunate if we were forced to make that kind of play.”
That hung in the air for a moment. Bug and I exchanged a look. We were on the same side as Church, but he scared us both. That is not an exaggeration.
Bug cleared his throat. “And, there’s also the fact that a lot of people in Washington still don’t understand how the DMS works. MindReader isn’t government property. It belongs to Mr. Church. None of the DMS operations are funded by the United States government. Except for the access and freedom of action we get from the charter, we’re entirely separate. So, we could actually just up and leave.”
“Sure,” I said, “but if we take our dolls and dishes and leave the tea party, then what? It’s not like the war ends if we opt out.”
Church almost smiled. “No.”
“So, what do we do? Starting with the DMS being outed, I mean? And my face on every freaking news feed.”
“Bug…?” asked Church mildly.
“Okay, in the short term,” said Bug, “I’ve hacked into all of the news feeds and uploaded every bit of cell phone video data they’ve received. They’ve been playing fast and loose with how they’re reporting it. Probably based on the biased tip from your Secret Service buddy. If you watch all of the videos you can see that people were fighting in the streets and that you were defending yourself. And, once Auntie collapsed, anyone can see that you and Ghost are protecting her.”
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