A man briskly strode across the run-up area toward her. Tara immediately sized him up. Federal agent, to be sure. He was an Asian man in his mid-thirties, a serious set to his jaw. His tailored coat very nearly hid the bulge of a shoulder holster. The charcoal suit was practically government-issue. Tara could see the knife-sharp creases in his slacks from yards away. Well-shined shoes spoke to seriousness and attention to detail.
“Dr. Sheridan?” he asked over the ringing in her ears.
“Yes.”
The agent offered his hand in a brusque handshake. “I’m Agent Li. Welcome to New Mexico. This way, please.”
“Thank you.” Tara slung her bag over her shoulder and trotted off after Li. She noted he didn’t look back to see if she followed him. He skipped the terminal entirely and headed to the parking area, flashing FBI credentials at a guard. Tara glimpsed them as he tucked them back in his coat pocket.
They weren’t real.
Tara had seen credentials of all descriptions. She knew what to look for, and the way Li had hesitated for an instant before he chose a pocket to reach into suggested he had more than one set on his person.
Bemused, she followed him to his car, a nondescript dark sedan with blue and white U.S. government plates. As she took her time unloading her bag into the backseat, he scanned the parking area. He jingled coins in his pocket, an unconscious gesture of impatience.
“So,” she began conversationally, as Li climbed behind the wheel and put the car in gear. “Who do you really work for?” She kept her tone light, as if she asked about the weather.
Li had stretched his arm behind her seat as he backed out of the parking space. He paused, and an eyebrow crawled up his forehead. He answered carefully, “My creds say I work for the Bureau.”
Tara smiled. The evenly parsed answer wasn’t a lie. It suggested Li was uncomfortable with lying. And that was a good thing. “I’ve held all kinds of creds, myself. Some real, some not. Which ones of yours are real?”
Li pulled out of the parking area, glancing sidelong at her. “Department of Justice, Special Projects Division.”
Tara nodded, willing to accept that vagary for now. “You didn’t seem the military type.”
Li frowned. “Your investigative skills are still sharp, Dr. Sheridan.”
“I try.”
“Your file’s been heavily redacted.” Li took a left turn onto a two-lane highway. His tone was direct, matter-of-fact. “What remains describes your academic background. . . PhD in psychology, though you never practiced. Several academic articles on Jungian psychology, Gestalt therapy, and synchronicity. A short stint profiling with Special Projects, in behavioral science profile investigation. What is it, exactly, that you do?”
She shrugged. “I find people. As you said, I was a profiler.”
“And now?”
“And now, you could say I’m a consultant.”
Stalemate. Neither one wanted to give up information that wasn’t need-to-know. Tara changed the subject. “How did you draw babysitting duty?”
Li paused. She’d hit the nerve of his impatience.
“I’m not in charge of this investigation.” Tara saw by the tightness around his eyes he was doing as he was told to do, and he didn’t like it. But he conformed to the rules.
Tara reached over, hit the power button on the car radio. Unexpectedly, the sounds of death metal rattled through the car, shaking the glass in the windows. Tara lifted her eyebrows and looked at Li. Interesting.
Li gripped the wheel with both hands and stared resolutely into the distance.
She turned down the volume, but just slightly. “Where are we going?”
“The last location Lowell Magnusson was seen.” He stabbed a thumb at the backseat. “Your radiation suit’s in the trunk. I brought extra duct tape.”
THE CRIME SCENE WAS STRAIGHT OUT OF A SCIENCE-FICTION film. In an ancient caldera nestled in a plain between the mountains, grasses drenched with ash twitched in the chill breeze. A concrete ring looped in on itself in a figure eight, curving around a half-destroyed structure at its heart. It reminded Tara of aerial photos she’d seen of crop circles. A hastily erected tent covered the plain concrete block building, white plastic snapping like a surrender flag in the wind. People wearing hazmat gear streamed in and out of the tent, carrying metal scraps and radiation detectors. Long plastic hoses connected to trucks on the remote dirt road snaked into the tent like tentacles. It seemed as if a giant alien jellyfish had descended from outer space upon this sere place, and was busily consuming and regurgitating spacemen. Fire trucks parked beside it seemed like small toys seen from this distance. A fine dusting of snow had begun to filter down from the gray sky, frosting the scene with an otherworldly gleam.
Military police rimmed the perimeter, checking cars at the gate. When Agent Li pulled up, the MP was apparently unimpressed with his credentials, handing them back with white gloves that smelled like gunpowder. Tara sat back in her seat, arms folded. Territorial bickering. This could take a while.
“Sorry, sir. Essential personnel only.”
“We’re here with clearance from DOJ Special Projects Division.” Li handed over a sheaf of papers the MP frowned at.
“This isn’t a DOJ installation. This facility is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army.”
“I understand that. DOD asked us to be here.”
“I’ll have to check with my CO.”
“You do that.” The MP walked back to the gate, speaking into a staticky radio. Li glared through the windshield at him, fingers drumming out an impatient rhythm on the steering wheel. Tara glanced at the chain-link fence, eying the ribbon razor wire curled over the top. Interesting. The top segment of the fence was slanted inward, a design typical for prisons: it made it more difficult to climb up the slant. Contrary to the MP’s behavior, this installation was apparently just as concerned with keeping people inside the fence as it was with keeping people out. Perhaps the people who worked inside were less than enthusiastic about being there.
“Is this part of Los Alamos National Laboratory?” she asked, watching the snow spiral over the fence.
“Officially? No. It’s technically farmland.”
“Nice crop of spacemen down there.”
“It does belong to them.” Li blew out his breath in frustration. “As such, our jurisdiction is limited. Special Projects is here as a formality, to do any civilian legwork off-site and bless the findings of the military investigators.” His mouth twisted, as if the words tasted sour.
“This isn’t your usual area of expertise, is it?”
Li glanced at her. “White-collar crime. Embezzlement. That sort of thing. Shady balance sheets and stock market manipulation.”
“So what did you do to get sent here?”
Li shrugged, glared at the MP. It seemed they would be here a long time. “Once upon a time, I caught a senator doing a very bad thing with campaign finances.”
“Hookers and beer?” Tara guessed.
“Hookers and cocaine.” Li gave a half smile that crinkled his face. Tara liked the expression. . . a crack in the official façade. “And clown porn.”
“Clown porn?” Tara wrinkled her nose.
Li shuddered. “Clown porn. That stuff’s surprisingly expensive.”
“Didn’t end well, did it?”
“Evidence miraculously disappeared before I could get it to the grand jury. Let’s just say I’m in purgatory until Bozo the Senator’s term runs out.”
The MP had finished talking to his radio. A Jeep rolled up, and a familiar figure swung out of it and strode to Agent Li’s car. He was dressed as a civilian in an overcoat and tie: no military uniform, no spaceman suit. Closely cropped gray hair framed a sharp-edged face, punctuated by nearly invisible glasses with weightless frames. He bent to look in the car window, cocked his head.
“Dr. Sheridan,” Agent Li began, “this is my case supervisor, Division Chief Corvus.”
Corvus kept his hands in his pockets
. “Tara. Nice to see you’re well.” His gray gaze seemed to disassemble her, molecule by molecule, for evidence to the contrary.
Tara’s mouth felt dry as lint. “Richard. Congrats on the promotion.”
“Thank you. The Division was never the same without you. We were sorry to see you go. And even sorrier to have lost track of you.” His solicitude was plastic, obligatory. “I have to admit to being rather. . . startled to learn from the powers-that-be that you’d decided to rejoin us.”
Tara smiled, though it did not touch her eyes. He didn’t want her here. The order had come from above. She had no idea how far above, had no idea how far the Pythia’s reach extended, but it had been far enough to annoy Corvus.
Tara gestured with her chin to the scurrying white figures in the caldera. “What’s going on down there?”
Corvus’s eyes flickered past the fence. “Magnusson’s particle accelerator blew up, and they’re checking for residual radiation from the accident.”
Tara’s mouth twisted. Corvus called it an accident. He’d already made up his mind. “Have you been down there?”
Corvus smiled. “I thought I’d let you two look around.” He gestured for the MP to reel back the gate. “Get back with me when you’re done.”
Agent Li put the car in gear and coasted past the gate. “I didn’t know that you knew Corvus.”
Tara frowned. “He and I were assigned to the same unit, several years ago.” She stubbornly refused to elaborate.
“Is it normal for him to be so. . . hands-off?”
“What do you mean?”
Li gestured to the plastic bubble and frustration shone in his voice. “He hasn’t even looked around. I haven’t worked with him long, but. . .”
Tara smirked. “Small piece of advice, Agent Li. Richard Corvus never gets his hands dirty, nor is he in the habit of putting himself in harm’s way. He doesn’t want to get any glowing particles from the atom smasher on his new suit.”
Li’s eyes widened at her directness. “I, uh. . . Thanks for the tip.”
“Sure.” Troubled, Tara turned away and looked at her reflection in the window, a pale ghost against the desert landscape. She’d half expected Li to jump to his supervisor’s defense. She’d said what she did to both provoke him and warn him. Li seemed a decent enough guy, and she didn’t want what had happened to her to happen to him.
TARA’S BREATH FOGGED THE PLASTIC SHIELD OF THE RADIATION suit helmet, obscuring her vision. The white disposable Tyvek suit was too large; it pooled around her wrists and ankles, cold and sticking to her skin. A suit like this wasn’t intended to prevent direct touching or inhalation of radioactive particles, and was nowhere near as safe as a dense material like Demron or a vapor-sealed Level A encapsulation suit. Although Li had double-secured the seams with duct tape to try and make it vapor-tight, Tara knew that a thin suit like this didn’t provide a complete barrier against radiation. The military wouldn’t have enough encapsulation suits on hand for a disaster like this. The suits at least offered some protection and, maybe more importantly in military-think, they made people feel safer.
She could hear her breath rattling in the flimsy respirator helmet, swirling, making fog-ghosts, and being sucked back through her mouth and the filter. It seemed like a walking meditation, as she could not escape her own breath. She tried to focus on it, even it out, while ignoring the zing and panic of thoughts that buzzed between her ears. At this elevation, her inhalations felt shallow in her lungs. She smelled chemical fire-retardant foam, and it made her eyes itch.
As soon as she’d donned the hood, she’d felt trapped. The air, thin at this elevation anyway, seemed entirely too close and stale. She had to be careful to control her breathing. Her chest tightened. Tara had the sense of being suffocated in a plastic bag. If she breathed too quickly, the plastic crackled. She tried not to envision sucking the plastic into her nose and mouth, choking her. Tara took deep draws of air, trying to compensate for her fear and the weak oxygen.
Breathe. Just breathe, she reminded herself, trying to resist the urge to rip the mask off her face.
She turned her head, and the hood did not move with her. Agent Li had carefully duct-taped the hood to her shoulders and the gloves to her sleeves. The suit was one piece, footed like children’s pajamas, crinkling as she walked. She held her small digital camera wrapped in a plastic storage bag concealed in her palm. She always took a camera to every crime scene: the lens of a camera could capture details that were easily missed but could be detected and dissected later. She paused to catch her breath under the guise of snapping a few photos.
Breathe.
As she trudged behind Li into the caldera, the black grasses whipped snow in their wake. Snow spat from the sky, dusting the ground. Glass particles strewed the snow, like sequins on a wedding gown, crunching underfoot. The footprints they made were uneven, the plastic booties shifting in shape with each step. They stepped over the shallow concrete tracks spreading over the caldera. They reminded her of pipes, and her feet rang hollow against the surface as she clambered over. Based on what little she knew about the technology, she supposed these were the conduits through which the particles were accelerated, to be crushed together at the nexus where their paths crossed in the now-destroyed building.
Seeing the other suits milling about, she realized they were all entirely indistinguishable from one another. Anyone could be here; she had no way of measuring rank or looking anyone in the eye, a true handicap to her work. It would be like working blind.
Her heart hammered, and cold sweat trickled between her shoulder blades. She closed her eyes to center herself and listened. The wind rattled plastic, sliced through the grasses, cut through the zing of Geiger counters and the low murmur of voices. As barren as this place looked to the eye, it seethed with something that made her skin buzz.
Perhaps it was the altitude. Or the residual radiation.
Breathe.
Breathe.
She followed Agent Li to the massive tent, and he drew the veil-like plastic aside. Her breath snagged in her throat as she stepped into an entirely different world.
Chapter Three
WHILE THE caldera had been pristine white, nearly peaceful in its sterility, the inside of the shell of the tent seethed black and chaotic and filthy. Like a crushed beer can cast aside by a hungover god, the peeled-open particle accelerator was ripped apart from its moorings. It lay on one side, steel skin sheared back to reveal blackened guts of tightly spiraled copper tubing, wires, and ash. It was massive, at least two floors high, laced by the remnants of ladders. Carbon dusted the scene in a fine blanket of sticky black, obscuring the hazard signs still remaining on the walls and filtering like silt from the twisted ceiling beams. Above, the roof had dissolved, revealing an artificial white plastic sky. Two exterior walls were similarly missing, concrete blocks shattered and strewn on the ground. Like ants searching for food, workers vacuumed up debris with long hoses, carrying it away in handcarts. The spacemen-ants precisely and quickly swarmed over the machine. There was no indecision, no hesitation or flinch; these were soldier ants. Soldier ants with special expertise in these types of cleanups.
Other workers sealed charred electronic components in plastic bags, cataloguing the remains in the autopsy of this monster. Tara surreptitiously snapped a few photos with the tiny camera in her hand, hidden in the too-large folds of the glove.
“They’re destroying the scene,” Li muttered. “There’ll be no evidence left by the time we get to it.”
“We’d better work quickly.” As she breathed, Tara could feel the plastic sticking to her back like an ever-shrinking second skin. She would like nothing better than to get in and out quickly. She wanted to see the scene, to get some feeling for the place Magnusson had spent his days, to get a sense of the invisible fingerprints he’d left on his corner of the world.
“Who’s in charge here?” Li asked a passing worker-ant, but was ignored. He caught the sleeve of another, repeating his d
emand, and was shrugged off.
“There.” Tara pointed to a suit tapping away at a bright yellow laptop perched on a wheeled cart, covered in a clear plastic bag. She’d seen how the other people diverted their paths around this person, like water around a rock. A man, Tara guessed, by the build and height. Clearly, he was someone important.
Li strode to the white-wrapped figure. “Are you in charge?” His voice was muffled by the plastic and filters, but sharpness still crackled in his tone.
The figure turned. Through the plastic shield, she could see the burn of blistering blue eyes. No verbal acknowledgement, only that scalding glare.
“Are you in charge?” Again, the test of wills.
“Who’re you?” A voice like gravel. He sounded as if he smoked steel wool.
“Agent Li, Special Projects Division. Who are you, and why are you dismantling my crime scene?”
The blue eyes crinkled in amusement. “Major Gabriel, Defense Intelligence Agency. And let me clarify a couple of things for you, Agent Li.” Gabriel stepped close, towering a head over Li. To his credit, the agent didn’t budge.
“First, this is a U.S. Army installation. This is not ‘your’ playground. This is not ‘your’ anything.” The major’s forceful breath mushroomed the hood of his suit. “Second, this is not a crime scene. It’s not a crime scene until I decide this is a crime scene. Are we clear?”
“Absolutely, sir.” Tara stepped forward, letting her fingers rest lightly on Li’s sleeve in warning. She could feel him glowering at her, and sweat glossed her brow. She extended her sticky-gloved hand to Gabriel. “Tara Sheridan. We just need to do a quick look over. Standard procedure, fill out some forms, and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Gabriel took her hand, and she felt the tension in his grip. “Ms. Sheridan.” He flipped his gaze, bright as cornflowers, to Li and back to her. His weathered skin looked sunburned beneath the plastic shield. He wasn’t assigned here; he was too much brass. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to bring him in from somewhere distant, some latitude that had enough sun this time of year to burn flesh.
Dark Oracle Page 3