A gutted corridor, the concrete walls buckled outwards, the ceiling collapsed, the floor littered with bits of soldiers, broken doctors. Someone in a containment suit peering down through the hole from the floor above.
Fourteen people dead on an American Army base, and not even a word of it at FBI headquarters, let alone the news. He'd hoped for something out of Ft. Detrick, where his own efforts had turned up nothing. The blood sample he'd collected from the crime scene had been destroyed at a molecular level, nothing more than a few unbroken shards of chromosomes mixed in with the liquefied cells. He concluded that the bullets that killed Storch were made of a solid chemical compound, which dissolved his body as they broke down inside him. Now there was nothing left to tell Cundieffe what Storch had become, let alone why.
"You see the situation we're in," Wyler said. "This is not nonlethal force, Martin. This isn't counting coup. I need your help here, but the Cave Institute apparently needs you more." To Cundieffe's baffled look, he added, "Brady Hoecker is a Committee member, and our highest representative in the NSA. If it's important enough for him to take the trouble to brief you, it's worth your utmost attention."
"Sir, I don't mean to second-guess you or the Institute—" he began, puzzling in his mind's eye over the snapshot of Hoecker denying any connection between Heilige Berg and the Mission. A polished ruse to make the distraction look more enticing? Or was it a distraction? "I just wish to reiterate my conviction that our primary objective is profiling the Mission's objectives, and the Mission's primary objective is Radiant Dawn. I think today's events only underscore that. The body of Sergeant Storch—"
"You have no path that will not end badly for yourself and the Bureau, if you can't separate facts from speculation. The Radiant Dawn village in California was an incidental target of opportunity for the Mission, a demonstration of force perpetrated upon people who were, for all intents and purposes, already dead. Storch was old business. Hoecker has given you a piece of work to do to prove yourself. Take care of it as quickly as you can, and then we'll discuss your role in investigating the Mission."
Cundieffe's voice was harsher than he would have liked, but he was too tired, too confused, to rein it in. "Sir, I must also add that I am very troubled by the seemingly steady flow of tainted leads stemming from unconstitutional abuses of government resources, and by the climate of secrecy which surrounds what I'd always understood to be a relatively transparent federal law enforcement agency. How will a case built by such methods stand against the Mission in a court of law?"
"Martin, you've been here less than a month, so feel free to exercise your naïve idealism when it suits you in polite society, but don't let it blind you to the real world. Secrecy works when it stays secret. The nation doesn't need to know one percent of the acts that have to be committed to protect their safety and their way of life. The world doesn't want to know what's happening to it as it grows beyond any sane population controls, doesn't want to see what it's pushing out of the dark as it spreads. My God, Martin, the things you're going to see—"
Cundieffe had gotten hold of himself. He thought so, anyway, until he heard what was coming out of his mouth. "The smoothness with which I'm being handled impresses me deeply, sir. The Institute doesn't want me to investigate the Mission, so I'm being fed clandestine busy-work. Knowing my penchant for secrets and exploiting my relative ignorance, they want me to go into the field and play spy without due process, acting on illegally acquired evidence. Is this a test? Is it even real, or is it some kind of maneuver?"
Wyler only stared at him. He pushed his bifocals up on his nose. Looking down at Cundieffe through their lenses, the Assistant Director's eyes were like glistening jellyfish.
"I suppose you'll know where I'm going when I've filed my travel expense vouchers, then," Cundieffe said and, rose from his chair. Wyler didn't call after him. He might have been invisible as he stalked out of the administrative suites on the fifth floor and down the stairs and out of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
~12~
Nobody slept on the plane.
Storch sat and looked out the window at endless clouds, a frozen sea broken here and there by the ragged projecting teeth of what Storch guessed were probably the Rockies.
The other passengers sat and looked at him. The four Missionaries, all of them big bad former spook-soldiers, watching him like children watch the half-open closet door in their bedrooms when the lights go out. One sat across the aisle, two more a couple rows behind him, and the fourth, obviously the leader, stood at the head of the cabin, leaning on the locked door to the cockpit. He didn't look or act military, but he seemed softer than the others, his expression the most detached. CIA, maybe, or an egghead like Wittrock. Every so often, one of them would succumb to exhaustion and his head would roll back, and he would jolt awake with his hand on his sidearm. Storch admired that even this seemed to happen on an orderly rotation, as if even their sleep-rhythms were harnessed to unit integrity.
The man whose face he couldn't stop wearing had been a friend of theirs. No doubt they'd fought together, trusted each other with their lives. At least two of them, he could tell, hated him like poison because of that face.
They hadn't let him out of their sight for a moment in the eighteen hours since they'd unwittingly plucked him out of the mess he'd made of Ft. Detrick. At first, it had made him want to lash out. He'd never liked being stared at, and after the Gulf, peoples' eyes on him felt like fire ants. He understood now that it was not just sickness, but an autoimmune reaction to the stress of his body trying to change. Now that it could, he was afraid of what might happen if he let go for one instant. As the flight wore on, the jouncing shocks of battling weather systems rocking the plane like a cradle, he became grateful for the attention. If they were still just looking at him, he could tell that he wasn't changing again.
The dank recycled air of the plane was pregnant with the Missionaries' collective pressure to talk out of his presence, but they clung to the idea that four of them could subdue him, where two couldn't. He had not slept since he woke up on the slab in Ft. Detrick, unless you counted the catnap he took after Lt. Saticoy's suicide bomb went off under his nose.
The plane was a private twenty-seat passenger jet. The Missionaries escorted him up the stairs and into the cabin with their guns out, but dropped into their seats and picked up where they left off, staring at him, trying to figure out if he was their prisoner, or they were his. One of them, a big, pie-faced grunty type who could only have been a Marine in his old life, insisted on wearing a surgical mask around Storch, even though the others silently ragged his ass about it nonstop with subtle hand and face signals. It was too late, they all knew, to be careful. If Storch was a disease, they had all been exposed. He did nothing to dispel their fears.
They whispered to each other whenever one got up to pace, threw hand signs the rest of the time, suspecting, quite rightly, that he could hear them, but clinging absurdly to silence. He was careful not to learn their names or look to long at their faces, because he would not want to remember them if this ended badly.
In the air, they loosened up, gave him his fill of waterlogged deli sandwiches from an ice chest. They tasted like Play-Doh, but he wolfed down eight of them, feeling his body burning them up and fixing him. They watched him a little more laxly, so he could tell the food was drugged, but it made no difference.
He was shocked to discover that he was in quite a lot of pain, but he'd been too weak to notice before. In moments the pain went away as he made his own painkillers, endorphins coursing down his spine like sunlight. He let his eyes close, and his jaw unclenched for what felt like the first time in years. His body ached as if he'd had open-heart surgery, and itched maddeningly as his skin grew back. He felt himself going slack, slipping away and not caring what they did with him, or where they were going.
They went berserk, pointing their guns at him and screaming at him to sit down and stop it. His window was a black mirror. He didn't look like Sati
coy, anymore. The olive pigment fled his skin, which became an ugly, marbled purple and bluish white where shattered capillaries and deep tissue trauma were dissolving. He still didn't recognize the face that glared at him. It was a mask of wet clay, streaming and twitching and becoming someone else.
Ignoring their panic, their guns, Storch bolted to the restroom, where he suffered and savored his first bowel movement in two weeks. His mind ran in circles, saying his name, telling him his life to keep hold of himself. He heard the distinctly alien clink of metal at one point, and, rising to take a peek, observed no less than five 7.62 millimeter rifle slugs embedded in his stools.
He avoided the stainless steel mirror on the door until he had to look at it to get out. He froze, his fist raised up at the strange reflection.
"Is that you?" his reflection asked him. His face still looked like a mask made of roadkill, but it was his face. His eyes were not gray or brown, but gold-flecked green. His scalp was already blue with a new crop of his own black hair pushing up through burn scabs like filthy snow. His nose was cocked a few degrees off center where he'd broken it when he was fourteen. His body remembered. His body lied…
Thoughts, crazy, unworthy thoughts, flooded him. He was dreaming, he was the reflection trapped in the mirror. His eyes turning gray, his hair going white, his teeth long and crooked, smiling Keogh, and he was falling back—
Stop it
"Where the hell've you been?" he asked his reflection, flinching at the sound of his own voice. The harrowed face in the mirror looked even worse than he felt.
Storch went back to his seat, the agents backing up the aisle from where they'd been camping out beside the lavatory. He touched his face— his face—and then looked at his hands. His left thumb had been gone for nine years, he'd gotten used to having a reptilian paw, but now it was whole. His resurrected thumb traced the crooked contours of his nose. That had not healed, or rather, it had grown back the way he remembered it. Why not? He'd become Corporal Wynorski and Lieutenant Saticoy completely enough to fool their comrades, without even trying, without even knowing. His own face was only one more mask, now, and he could trust it no more than he could anyone else.
He'd thought he'd hit bottom when they took away his life and his home. Again, when they coerced him to do horrible things, and showed him still more horrible things. And again, when he lost control over his mind and his body, yet still could not die. Now, he was free. No more voices in his head, no more blackouts. But now his own body had become a survival machine he couldn't control, a species of one, like the monsters in Spike Team Texas. There was no one at the controls that he could see, and he was afraid to look any deeper.
What's still mine? What's still me?
He knew that he was letting it happen. He was going insane. Like his father, and that was the next step to becoming just like Dyson, Avery and Holroyd. He knew it, but he couldn't stop it, indeed he almost couldn't wait for it to happen, because when he lost the power to reason, to remember, he would be truly free. Whoever picked him for this fate just should've known better.
The plane touched down on a plowed private airstrip surrounded by pine trees and snow-streaked blackness. Watching one of them reset his watch, he confirmed that they were on Mountain time. Biting subzero wind blasted in the open doorway. His ears pop pop popped, his jaw clamped. He felt light-headed, tingly, starved for air. Colorado, maybe Utah.
The area had been cleared of all but a few perimeter guards in civilian winter gear. With two agents before and two behind, Storch climbed down from the plane and crossed the runway to a van, while the pilot met with the ground crew to secure the plane.
The driver was one of them, much older, but not officer material. He climbed out of the van when he saw Storch coming with them, backed away with his hands up. When one of the agents from the plane approached him, he turned and ran. The masked Marine drove.
The airstrip was far from any signs of habitation, and they skirted any as they drove out. Storch saw a road sign indicating that they were on the 127, and that the town of Gunnison was three miles away. Another sign marked the boundary of the Blue Mesa Indian reservation. They turned onto another highway, the 135, headed north, towards Crested Butte and a long list of ski resorts.
Nobody seemed to care that he was watching their route. He knew they'd argued about it, but in the end none of them was dumb enough to try to blindfold him. They seemed evenly split between being more confident and more nervous as they got closer to home. He wondered how much headquarters knew about what they were bringing back. He watched the terrain roll by, touching his face every so often. Scratching his scalp, tracing the crook in his nose, over and over.
The van turned off the state road and meandered down a narrow valley with a plaque welcoming them to the Gunnison National Forest. They stopped twice to take down heavy chain barricades across the unpaved fire road. The snow outside was waist-deep. He saw them signal someone in the woods each time they got out, but it was still too dark to make anything out.
They could be hiding an army here. How big could the Mission be?
"We need to talk," Storch finally said. Nobody responded. He stood up and before anyone had reacted, he was right behind the masked Marine with his arm around the thick, stubby neck, and he said, "Stop."
The van bucked and lurched into the first stages of a front wheel stand, and everyone but Storch tumbled forward. A gun went off once, a back window exploded, but everyone checked out okay.
"What's up ahead?"
The obvious officer in the group bit his lip and looked thoughtful, while the others just stared. "You're expected," he said, in a soothing hostage negotiator's voice. "You know as much as we do, beyond that. Nobody wants trouble, but if you've come to start some, friend, you won't go away disappointed."
"My name is Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch, Fifth Special Forces Group. I served in the Gulf War."
"We know," another one put in. "We were detailed to kill you."
He looked hard at them, let go of the masked Marine. "I don't want trouble. I just want to know some things. You got a cellular phone?"
The brains shook his head. "They don't work here. We've got a CB."
"Use it. Tell your friends to behave. If I'm fucked with, you don't want to know what I'm capable of." And neither do I.
The van crept higher and deeper into the forest, taking more forks than Storch could keep track of, within a few miles of the first turnoff. As dawn peaked over the Divide, they pulled up at a dead end abutting a huge palisade of snow.
Even with the thick winter coat, Storch could recognize the signs of a mining operation. The face of the mountainside before them was dynamited away to a sheer wall, and the shape of the palisade suggested it was made of the earthen tailings from a shaft. The agents backed away from the van to give themselves room as Storch stepped out. Fresh powder squeaked underfoot, and he sank in up to his knees. The agents waved him forward, but he stood his ground, and they finally started crab-walking sideways over the palisade. He followed them, eyes going in all directions until he thought he might be growing new ones.
He stopped at the top, looking back over his shoulder at the first rays of dawn through the warring clouds smeared across the horizon. How long had it been since he'd seen a sunrise? Not since RADIANT, at least.
The leader and the masked Marine stood on a concrete plug just inside the mouth of a condemned mine shaft. The vertical shaft had been filled in, he remembered they did this with some dangerous mines in Death Valley. The other two agents passed him, headed back to the truck.
Storch stopped. "We're all going down," he said.
"Somebody's got to move the truck," one of them answered, clambering back up the crumbling palisade. "We're exposed up here."
He didn't like having them at his back, but the leader beckoned to him, and he cautiously approached, looking around, taking in the crackle of melting ice in the trees, the rustle and reek of the agents' bodies in their stale clothes, the piercin
g purity of the frozen mountain air. He breathed in the gelid cold, exhaled clouds, let his fear wash out as the first faint tracers of daylight began to warm and feed him. If I'm about to get killed for real this time, he thought, feeling stupid but thinking it anyway, thank you for this.
Storch stepped onto the concrete, and almost immediately, it began to sink into the shaft. The officer blandly played tour guide. "This was a silver mine, until it was condemned around 1930. It was renovated by the National Forestry Service in the sixties as part of a special project. But they abandoned it, too."
"What kind of project?"
"You'll see."
Storch guessed they'd descended about forty feet when the elevator jolted to a stop. Before them, a massive steel door was set a foot deep in the concrete, a placard at eye-level: NATIONAL FORESTRY SERVICE RESEARCH STATION NO.7. Looking up, Storch felt as if he were standing at the bottom of a missile silo. A hatch had closed over their heads when they went down the shaft, so there was only a cone of shadow, where he'd hoped to see some fleeting trace of the dawn.
He didn't need to watch the agents. He could feel them filling up the space around him. They vibrated with nervous tension, but didn't move. The officer said, "Before you go getting any stupid ideas, we're all expendable. You won't get a damned thing for us."
"We know how to fix your kind, now," the masked Marine added. "Fucking mutant."
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