The R.E.M. Project_A Thriller

by J. M. Lanham

  Dawa’s stern expression grew out of his distaste for Donny’s attitude, but he did make a valid point. They had no idea who this Paul Freeman really was—only stories from Claire about their escape from Costa Rica. After that, the Book of Paul seemed to head into a tailspin. Claire had had a plan (albeit a flimsy one) to take down Asteria, and Paul had pretended to go along with it, right up until the point he’d stolen her car and headed for the hills.

  When Donny would bring this up during their sporadic long-distance phone calls, Claire would always take up for Paul, saying he’d had no other choice but to flee with his wife and kid, that she would have done the same thing had she had the well-being of her family to think about.

  This never sat well with Donny, and Dawa knew it. It also wouldn’t be the first time he had to play the good cop for the sake of moving the mission along. “Please forgive us for asking such questions, Paul. But I am sure you already know how sensitive this situation is.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can you tell us when was the last time you spoke to Claire?”

  “Monday night. I got myself pulled over earlier that day, and I panicked. I had been off the grid for the last six months, and I was convinced my license was going to show up on the radar. So I turned to the only person I knew I could trust.”

  “The same person you left hanging in Atlanta last winter?” Donny asked. Paul’s eyes cut over toward the aggressor, but he ignored the remark.

  He addressed Dawa. “Claire filled me in on everything she’d been through over the last six months, although most of it I already knew. She was living with Alejandro Aguilar in San José and looking into the whereabouts of the other outliers while doing her best to keep a low profile. What I didn’t know was that she’d taken a keen interest in the site surrounding Tanner’s facility—the facility that was supposedly destroyed in the Poás eruption.”

  “And now she’s not answering her phone,” Dawa replied. He turned to Donny. “Perhaps she has ventured into dangerous territory, Donald.”

  “That’s what I think,” Paul said. “She told me she was hiking into Poás National Park first thing Tuesday morning, said it would take at least a day to confirm whether or not the facility had been completely destroyed. She also told me if I didn’t hear from her within 36 hours to contact this man.” Paul reached in his pocket and handed Dawa a wadded piece of paper. “His name’s Colin Kovic, currently with Central Intelligence. He was Claire’s contact for this little operation she had undertaken.”

  Donny jumped to his feet so fast he would’ve lost his shoes had they not been laced up right. “THE CIA? These are the same bastards who have been trying to kill us for the last six months? And you’re telling me Claire was working with them? Sorry, pal, but I call bullshit.”

  “Look, she couldn’t tell me much because she was with someone. Probably Aguilar or one of his guys. And I don’t like this anymore than you do. This Kovic guy is the last person I want to call. Honestly, I hadn’t even given it a thought. I was convinced she would have rang Donny by now.”

  “Jesus”—Donny looked down at Dawa—“tell me you don’t believe any of this shit!”

  The man sat and thought. Then said, “Honestly, Donald, at this point I am not so sure.”

  “Well, I am,” Donny said, pointing a firm finger at Paul. “This guy’s flipped, and he’s going to end up leading Tanner’s old CIA buddies right to us!”

  Paul hopped up, and once again he was in Donny’s face. “Listen, asshole. I’ve had about enough of your lip. You think because you made a career out of telling lies that everyone else is as untrustworthy as you?”

  Donny grabbed Paul by the shirt with one hand and drew the other back to take a swing. Paul cocked his arm in return, but neither had time to strike a first blow. Dawa was just about to break the two apart when the phone rang. Everyone froze in place, eyes only moving to look down at the flashing cell vibrating on the meditation room floor.

  It was Claire.

  Chapter 18:

  The Kovic Connection

  “Claire? Where are you? Is everything okay?” Donny was in a panic, frantically asking questions while Dawa crowded in to get closer to the phone. He silently mouthed for Donny to put it on speaker, and with the touch of the screen Claire’s voice echoed from the phone as if she were calling plays to the three men through a distorted megaphone.

  She said, “I’m fine now, Donny. A little shaken up, but I’ll be fine.”

  Heavy static and garbled tones on the line led Dawa to believe she was on a satellite phone. Odds were whatever trouble she was in, she was still in the thick of it. He leaned in and said, “Claire. This is Dawa Graham. It is good to hear your voice.”

  “Likewise, Dawa.”

  “We have Paul Freeman here”—he motioned for Paul to come closer and say something—“and he tells us you two have recently been in touch.”

  Paul chimed in, “Hey, Claire. Glad to hear you’re all right.”

  “Thanks, Paul. And Dawa, you’re right. Paul contacted me a couple of days ago and I asked him to do me a favor. If he didn’t hear from me by today he was supposed to contact a man by the name of Colin Kovic.”

  Paul cut his eyes over toward Donny again, silently telling him I told you so. Donny ignored it and asked Claire, “Why would you be in contact with the CIA, Claire? These people want us dead. How can you trust anyone out of Washington?”

  “One question at a time, Donny. This isn’t a press conference.”

  Dawa said, “I think it would be wise to fill us in on the agency connection, Claire, so we can move on.”

  “Right. About the CIA. The reasoning was twofold. First, I had good intel from a source within the agency that higher-ups with knowledge of Tanner’s post-retirement project had detailed files on the remaining outliers. We went back and forth for a few weeks, only to catch wind of rumors going around that the outliers had been located and detained.”

  “Sounds like they picked up where Tanner and Doyle left off,” Paul said.

  “Exactly. I also received some vague information on some state-owned land in the Virginia mountains, but details about the relevance to our case here never came through.”

  Dawa asked, “What happened?”

  “My source at the CIA disappeared into thin air.”

  A moment of silence halted the meeting. Finally, Dawa said, “You mentioned a twofold approach . . .”

  “Yes. With my source missing in action, piecing together this intricate puzzle came to a stalemate. Nothing was adding up, and I needed fresh intel. So, I decided to contact—no, had to contact—the agency directly and divulge some of what I already knew in exchange for cooperation in Costa Rica.”

  “What kind of cooperation?” Donny asked.

  “A black op, one with only a handful of players involved, Kovic and myself included. The agency didn’t know what the condition of the facility was, let alone what kind of information Tanner and Doyle had left behind. They knew the former company men had a project in place that was well-advanced from what they had been trying to accomplish, but weren’t sure if any of their research survived the volcanic blast.”

  Paul asked, “So why send you?”

  “Because I was the only person alive who had seen the inside of the facility and made it out in one piece.” She paused, then said, “Well, you did too, Paul. But I’m pretty sure their calls kept going straight to your voicemail.”

  “Hysterical,” Paul groaned.

  “Anyway, the goal seemed simple enough: I was to infiltrate the facility, gather whatever evidence survived the eruption, then escape to the nearby hills to complete the mission from there. That meant laser-painting the facility so F-22s could lock in and level the place once and for all.”

  Paul said, “But that didn’t happen, did it?”

  “No, of course not. I got Aguilar to go with me because he knew the area well. We had no trouble getting past the guards on the outer parameter, but we got caught a couple of mil
es from the facility. That’s when we discovered the facility didn’t just survive the op, but was being brought back online by the Costa Rican government so they could use Ocula for themselves.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Paul said as he crossed his arms and shook his head in disbelief.

  “I wish I were. But according to my sources inside the Costa Rican government, the discovery had become the country’s number-one priority. It was like an atom-bomb kit, complete with materials and instructions, had landed on the government’s doorstep. That’s why, as bad as I hated to, I had to contact the CIA. I needed help, and the entire connection was simply a tool to get close to the facility to make sure it was destroyed for good. I had already planned to keep any intel I found to myself. Plus, I knew that the agency’s involvement was limited to aerial surveillance and reconnaissance from above, so I would have had a good chance of escaping on foot, especially with Aguilar’s help.”

  “Well, what about Aguilar?” Paul asked. “He still bitching about the Mercury he loaned me?”

  Claire didn’t speak for a moment, then her voice cracked. “Han . . . I mean, Aguilar. He didn’t make it, Paul.”

  The boys’ end of the line went silent again. They stood in the meditation room, hovered around Donny’s phone, disturbed by what they were hearing. Paul was the only one who had met Aguilar—the man who had lost his life. But all three of them were sickened by the amount of pain their friend Claire had suffered, not just in the last three days, but for the better part of a year. All at the hands of Asteria.

  Finally, Paul offered his condolences, and the rest of the men followed. Never one to dwell on her thoughts for long (mainly because so many of them were too damn painful), Claire solemnly thanked them, and then continued. “After we were captured, we were held at gunpoint just outside of the facility by a man named Gabriel Prado. He said he was the head of Costa Rica’s security force. He revealed the government’s plans to weaponize Ocula using what he called the Yankee facility, and that’s when Alejandro attacked. It gave me a chance to escape, but I didn’t stop to think about what his fate might be until it was too late . . .”

  Dawa said, “There is no way you could have known, Claire. Alejandro Aguilar decided to take action in a way that would increase his friend’s chance of survival. What he did was very brave, Claire, and he did it for you. His last hope was for your safety. Do not be ashamed of honoring his wishes.”

  They couldn’t hear it, but Claire was wiping tears from her eyes. She had grown accustomed to her thick skin, but the thought of Aguilar’s death wouldn’t let up and weighed heavy on her soul. “Anyway,” she pushed forward, “Kovic obviously screwed me. I was supposed to make contact with them around the same time I was to call Ford, but my slight delay obviously resulted in some itchy trigger fingers. It wasn’t ten minutes after my escape that I heard bombs being dropped on the facility.”

  “And you’re sure it’s destroyed this time?” Paul asked.

  “Positive. I could see the flames rising into the sky from my position, followed by the largest tower of smoke I’ve ever seen in my life. The ground shook so bad from where I was standing that I had to sit. The entire north side of the volcano must have been leveled. Yeah, there’s no doubt that place is little more than a smoldering quarry by now.”

  “And where are you?” Donny asked.

  Claire hesitated, then said, “I’m safe. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

  A thought crossed Dawa’s mind. “Claire, listen to me. This is very important. Have you contacted this Kovic person since your escape?”

  “Of course not! Double-crossing son of a bitch tried to blow my ass to kingdom come.”

  “Good. Very good. You see, Claire, your contact at the CIA must think you are dead, or at least suspect it. Is that safe to surmise?”

  “Yeah,” Claire said. “Unless they had eyes in the sky. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Satellite surveillance can do a lot of things, but it can’t cut through Costa Rica’s thick jungle canopy.”

  Dawa said, “Perhaps we can use this knowledge to our advantage. Tell us, Claire. Will you be able to return to the States soon? With Paul and Donny here at the monastery, your return would bring together almost all of the outliers—at least the ones we know about. That would certainly put us in the best position to move forward with our case against Asteria.”

  Claire picked up on a word. “Almost all the outliers, Dawa?”

  “Yes. There is another outlier we have located. A young man by the name of Fenton Reed.”

  Claire asked, “Who’s Fenton Reed?”

  Chapter 19:

  A Cabin in the Woods

  It was the middle of August in the humid Virginia mountains, and Colin Kovic was steaming in more ways than one. It had been less than two days since CIA Director Lancaster took him off the Costa Rica assignment; now he was baking in the western Virginia hills while overseeing a black op he wanted nothing to do with. All because of Stephen Cline’s big mouth, and his incessant need to impress the new director.

  Brownnosing bastard.

  Kovic lifted a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead, a ritual he was forced to repeat every five minutes. He stood on the porch of an old cabin and watched a woodpecker working on a home for itself halfway up a pine tree by the dirt road leading in to the site. He wondered how the creature had the energy to work in this heat, because he sure as shit didn’t have any. It was hot, humid, and no place the middle-aged field agent wanted to be.

  Kovic was stuck at Skyline, and he was pissed.

  There was a good reason the thirty-by-thirty cabin-slash-decoy was made to appear rundown, rustic, and unwelcoming. Like many of the CIA’s safe houses and black sites, it was designed to hide in plain view, with a dreadful, almost haunted ambience meant to discourage hunters or hikers or wandering woodsmen from snooping around. The cedar-shingled roof was sagging and covered with moss; horizontal wallboards were full of knotholes with plenty of sawmill-grade wood to keep the carpenter bees busy; and the rotten front porch had more holes and gaps exposing the braces and dirt below than it did walking space.

  In front of the cabin, a hog-wire fence with old pallets patching the gaps wavered as it ran its crooked lines fifty feet out from the cabin, then thirty feet across the front where it met the trail coming in. Bleached-out varmint skulls and whitetail deer tines hung from fence posts and trees around the perimeter, with No Trespassing signs, Confederate flags and lethal-force warnings rounding out the rural decorations.

  It was an ominous, secluded stronghold; the kind of place parents told their kids to be wary of, and everything the average person would do anything in their power to stay away from.

  And, it was all for show.

  In reality, the exterior cabin was a kind of rural shell, wrapping up a top-secret compound in the woods in a not-so-tidy white-trash package. Surveillance cameras and thermal sensors were scattered across a five-mile radius, hidden in the trees and stumps and rocks and fence posts. The area surrounding the site was under twenty-four-hour satellite surveillance to keep an eye on anything moving into the area. Even the cabin windows were bulletproof glass, with dirty curtains covering faux scenes of rural interior living on the other side. It was another aspect of the facility that would have never passed the smell test under close scrutiny, but that only reiterated the point of the clandestine site: to ensure no one stumbled across it to begin with.

  The stateside facility was also much larger than it appeared from the outside. Instead of burrowing hundreds of feet below the surface like the Asteria-funded Costa Rica facility, the CIA’s Skyline cabin backed up to an undisclosed mountainside and ran the length of two football fields—plenty of space to house labs and employees and equipment . . . even a few illegally-held detainees.

  It was enough to make Kovic sweat—along with the wretched humidity. He looked up from the cabin porch and cursed the sun, now high in the sky and cooking anything on the forest floor unlucky enough to be le
ft out of the sparse shade of the surrounding skinny pines.

  Kovic lifted his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead one last time, then turned back toward the door. A crooked NO SOLICITING sign hung by a single nail. Kovic lifted the sign and revealed what looked like just another carpenter bee hole.

  It wasn’t. He inserted his finger and a button clicked. Immediately, the heavily weathered board-and-batten door slid into the left-side doorjamb, exposing a sleek, steel-reinforced door that came complete with a keypad and thumb scanner. Kovic entered the code and placed his thumb on the touchpad, and soon he was in.

  The small lobby just inside the front door made up the first chamber of the facility. Toward the back, an armed guard sat at a desk behind a pane of bulletproof glass and barked instructions. Kovic complied and stepped forward to the retinal scanner. A horizontal laser painted the whites of his eyes red before a pleasant chime and automated voice confirmed his identity.

  The guard said, “Okay, Mr. Kovic. You may proceed.” The agent nodded, and moved forward into a large fluorescently lit room. This was what the other agents called the bullpen. Almost two dozen desks filled the central space, separated by glass-pane cubicles once occupied by the agency’s top scientists.

  That was until Asteria had snatched away the cream of the crop, offering them better pay and incentives to take a Costa Rican vacation in the name of groundbreaking research. Once Tanner and Doyle had had the power of George Sturgis’s checkbook at their disposal, the government’s copycat project had quickly come to an end.

  Kovic walked past the desks and computers, pondering the recent shutdown. The general public had a habit of thinking the government had the funds to finance any project, no matter the size, no matter the scope. What they didn’t realize, however, was that the real power players of the twenty-first century were large multinational corporations—especially companies like Asteria.