by Bob Mayer
“Can you put it in a drink?” Riggs asked. “Drop some in a glass of water?”
Upton’s eyes shifted to Rhodes and Riggs didn’t miss it, turning his imperious gaze to the younger scientist. “You were the grunt on this, weren’t you, son? You did all the dirty work?” He didn’t wait for an answer, indicating he believed his suspicion was correct, and whether it was or not in reality, it now was in this room.
“I did the lab work, sir,” Rhodes managed to get out.
“So can we?” Riggs pressed.
“I don’t know, sir.”
Riggs frowned. “Okay, listen to me.” He glared at Upton and then Rhodes. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. You’ve used this on a human before. You had to, because as you pointed out with your dipshit, not-funny joke, rats can’t tell the truth. All you could tell by injecting them was whether they’d fucking die or grow a second head, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “How many times have you tested it on humans before this and how?”
Upton swallowed. “Three times under tight lab protocol.”
“On who?”
“Subjects supplied by the Agency.”
“Subjects supplied by the Agency’s merks from Deep Six you mean,” Riggs corrected. “Which means people that were snatched somewhere and are never going to see the light of day again and we don’t think hold any useful information.”
“I guess, sir,” Upton said.
“You didn’t ask?”
“No, sir.”
“Did that right at least,” Riggs said. “I don’t do dog and pony shows. So if you know it fucking works coming in, tell me it fucking works, then show me it fucking working, but don’t fucking lie to me, understand?”
Upton nodded, but a small flicker of defiance still flared up. “We weren’t ready, sir. We anticipated more trials and at least six months of analysis before field deployment.”
“Then maybe you should have waited,” Brennan said in a calm voice, trying to smooth the storm-tossed waters in the room.
“I was ordered by directive to do this,” Upton argued. He belatedly added: “Sir.”
“By who?” Brennan asked.
Upton spread his hands in surrender. “A directive from the head of DORKA. I tried getting clarification. I sent a memo telling him we weren’t ready. I was told to do this anyway.”
Riggs had already moved on, ignoring Upton’s excuses. “We need to take this to the next level ASAP. Slip it to the Russian ambassador. If it doesn’t go through the stomach, then we jab him with a fucking umbrella like the Russkies used to do to assassinate people.
“We need to find out if they’re as full of shit as I suspect they are about the nuke treaty. Pulling a fast one on us to make up for their crappy-ass military. Couldn’t beat us fair, so no doubt the sons of bitches will cheat like they’ve been doing ever since Truman wouldn’t let George S. loose on them.” He used Patton’s first name, as if they had an intimate relationship, which he actually believed, given Patton had also felt he’d served in other armies at other times.
“The Cold War is over,” Upton said without thinking, chagrined that Riggs had jumped from him to Rhodes so quickly with the credit and then getting his ass reamed for his stupid ploy—it was accepting that the show had been stupid he couldn’t get past. On top of the fact he hadn’t wanted to do this in the first place.
The room froze, even Wahid in his drug-induced state picking up the momentary arctic blast from the general and pausing in his monologue of truth.
Riggs, strangely enough, smiled. He walked up to Upton, who surrendered four steps until he bumped against the table, unable to retreat, like Custer upon his final hill.
“The Cold War was never cold,” Riggs said. “Do you know what the life expectancy of a second lieutenant commanding an armored platoon in the Fulda Gap was if World War Three broke out? Eleven seconds. I was there. We didn’t think it was cold at all. When a T-72 tank mirrored your every move with its main gun? When an ‘accidental’ round comes across all the barbed wire and tank traps and blows up a track full of your soldiers and everyone hushes it up because the Cold War is supposed to be cold?”
Behind them, Wahid lifted his hand as much as the restraints would allow and grabbed Rhodes’s forearm. “Help me to be quiet. Please.”
Rhodes shook off the grab, focused on his boss and the general.
Riggs’s face was now within six inches of Upton’s. The general hadn’t raised his voice at all, but the profanity was suddenly gone. There was only the chill of Beacon Hill in December blowing down on the scientist.
Riggs spun away from Upton, just as he’d been taught to about-face as a plebe at West Point sweating through Beast Barracks, drilling on the Plain. He stopped next to the civilian who’d come in with him. “What do you think, Brennan?”
Brennan nodded. “I like it.”
That was good enough for Riggs. “We’re going to use this, gentlemen. I want a complete briefing for myself and Mr. Brennan on how that can be done in twenty-four hours. The treaty is being signed in seventy-two hours and you have given us a superb tool just in time. Well done. Well done.”
And with that Riggs was out the door. Brennan didn’t immediately follow. He went to Upton and shook his hand. “Good job.” Then he turned to Rhodes and shook his hand also. “Congratulations.” Brennan tried to smooth the ruffled and stormy waters left in his boss’s wake, one of the many tasks he did for the general. Then he left.
Johnston just as quickly regained command. “Get him out of here,” he snapped at the two merks. He stabbed a finger at Upton. “You heard the general. A report in eighteen hours.”
“Twelve hours,” Upton told Rhodes as they walked down the sidewalk of the strip mall. “I want the report on my desk in twelve hours.” He paused in front of an ice cream shop in the same strip mall, three doors down from the interrogation center. A more astute person might have sensed some irony in the contrast, but Upton had been in the world of covert research for too long to have any irony left in him.
“Let’s celebrate,” Upton said, swinging open the door to the shop. “We’ll be getting funding out the ass with General Riggs and that brownnose shit Brennan on our side.”
“It did work,” Rhodes marveled as they bellied up to the counter like two gunslingers who’d just taken out all the black hats. “The controlled environment of the lab was one thing. I was worried that we were rushing it and—”
Upton hushed him. “There’s the quick and the nonfunded in our world, son. It’s not like the university labs. We’re in the real world, fighting the real shit. If the boss wanted us to rush it and present it, then we rush it and present it.” He turned to the frowning clerk. “Double serving chocolate, extra nuts and, yes, add the m&m’s.”
“Just a single scoop vanilla,” Rhodes said.
The clerk turned to his task.
Upton lowered his voice. “Six years they were working that guy. And we did it in a minute. If we’d have been done a couple years earlier, we’d have been the ones who got bin Laden, not that CIA bitch. It was like turning on a spigot.” Upton smiled, truly happy, a rarity for him. “He’d totally lost the ability to lie or even withhold the truth. He’d have talked until it wore off.” He looked at his watch. “He’s probably still blabbing away as they haul him back to whatever hole they’re keeping him in here.”
“We need to follow up on that,” Rhodes said. “Make sure the controlled parameters are matched in the field.” He ran his tongue along his upper lip. A slight sheen of sweat covered his forehead.
The clerk handed Upton his heaping cup of ice cream, then went to get Rhodes’s single scoop. Rhodes frowned as Upton shoveled a spoonful of ice cream, nuts, and m&m’s into his mouth.
Rhodes shook his head in disgust. “I’m surprised you ordered the double with nuts and with m&m’s considering your ass is busting out of those pants. You and Riggs. Two big fat pieces of shit.”
“What?” Upton muttered around all the material in his
mouth.
“Your. Fat. Ass.” Rhodes emphasized each word. “You’ve gained like what, forty pounds just since I’ve been on the project?”
The second spoonful paused on the way to his mouth. “That’s not funny,” Upton said.
Rhodes snorted. “I bet Linda just hates the thought of fucking you. That’s if you can even get it up around her. She’s a whale, too.”
The clerk was holding out Rhodes’s single serving and Upton slapped it out of his hand as Rhodes reached for it. Upton grabbed a mask out of his coat pocket and slipped it on.
“What the fuck?” Rhodes demanded. “You treat everyone like they’re your servant. I did all the work on Cherry Tree. The general saw that right away. It was my idea. He saw through you right away. Your stupid show. You son of a bitch…”
As Rhodes rattled on, Upton simply muttered “Oh, shit,” as he pulled out his cell phone to call in a contain team.
Twelve blocks away, General Riggs’s armored limo paused outside a Washington restaurant. The general stared at Brennan seated across from him. “Still seeing her?”
“Yes, sir.”
Riggs shook his head. “I don’t trust politicians.”
“She’s not a politician, sir,” Brennan replied, reaching for the door handle. “Her father is the politician.”
Riggs leaned over and grabbed his hand for a moment, halting him. “What we just saw is a game changer, Brennan. You get that, right?”
Brennan settled back in the seat. “What do you mean, sir?”
“Think of the power. The power of the truth. In World War Two, Winston Churchill said that ‘in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’”
Brennan was used to the way Riggs worked. Impulsive, prone to overreact, the general had taught himself discipline and surrounded himself with a handful of key people whose job it was to keep him from taking precipitous action. Brennan was one finger on that hand, which was short a couple of fingers to begin with.
“Sir,” Brennan began, skating out onto the thin ice of confronting Riggs’s single-minded vision of the world, “drugging the Russian ambassador with a truth serum might not be a wise course of action. Especially at this delicate time. Could be a Gary Powers sort of moment. The president wants SAD. Congress wants this treaty. Most importantly, the American people want this treaty.”
“You might like his daughter,” Riggs said, “but the president is deluded and the American people are naive. We have the upper hand on the Russians, the Chinese, and everyone else who has a nuke. Why level the playing field with this treaty? It flies in the face of our national strategy and interest. We’ve been sucking hind-tit for decades on this, when we’re the lead fucking horse.”
“SAD greatly reduces the risk of nuclear accident,” Brennan said, “and of terrorists getting their hands on one. Plus, we can’t keep telling other countries not to develop nuclear weapons when we have more than the rest of the world combined. And we’re the only country that’s ever actually used them.”
“That’s exactly why we can tell them not to develop them,” Riggs said. “I’ve been a soldier for a long time, Brennan. Let me tell you something. If I were a Russian general, I would have a gun to my president’s head, telling him to get us to sign the treaty even as we continued to build our own arsenal while the Americans reduced theirs.”
“That’s a bit paranoid, General.” For a moment, Brennan was afraid he’d crossed a line, but Riggs, surprisingly, laughed.
“You aren’t paranoid if they are indeed out to get you, son. And believe me, those Russian and Chinese bastards are out to get us. That Upton might be a pompous shit with his little show with the needle, but Cherry Tree is special. I can feel it in my bones.
“We have a way to strip away our enemies’ bodyguard of lies. Are we just going to use it on pieces of dirt like that man in the chair and get information that’s six years out of date? Or are we really going to use it? We’ve sat on our nukes for over sixty years and what good has it done us? We could have taken out Russia early in the Cold War with minimal casualties. LeMay knew the numbers. He begged presidents to act and they all ignored him. None of the rest—Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan—would have happened if we’d done what he wanted.”
Brennan frowned at the leap of illogic into the cesspool of paranoia, but knew the ice after his brief rebuttal was too thin to challenge the general anymore. “Sir, even if the treaty gets signed, it will take years to implement.”
“We don’t have years,” Riggs said with surprising anger. “I swore an oath to defend this country with my life and by God”—his fist slammed into the leather seat—“I am going to do just that. Your father understood. He worked with LeMay on Pinnacle. Time is running out on that and time is running out for me.”
“Time is running out on Pinnacle,” Brennan said. “The missile in Nebraska was a close call. We were lucky Masterson’s Nightstalkers were on top of it.”
“Bullshit,” Riggs said. “The damn thing was a dud. No maintenance on it in decades. What the hell is to be expected?”
“We’re maintaining the stockpile as best we can. Outlier weapons…” Brennan shrugged. “We don’t even know where some of those are. We didn’t know about this one in Nebraska. That got lost somewhere along the line because of the secrecy.”
“The problem,” Riggs said, “is Masterson’s people are trying to get on top of Pinnacle now. Some idiot left the name in the LCC there.”
“It’s inevitable that word will get out about it,” Brennan said. “It’s a program that’s outlived its usefulness. Masterson has tried to penetrate Pinnacle before and failed. But our luck won’t hold. Maybe we should just abandon it.”
“Pinnacle is a program we need now more than ever, with the treaty coming up. Nebraska was an oversight.” Riggs shifted his bulk on the seat. “There’s something the president is leaving out of all of this and the public doesn’t know. The Rifts. We don’t know what the hell is on the other side of those things. Everyone is so focused on the Russians and the Chinese and Iran, the few who are in the know are forgetting about that. In the beginning, we formed Pinnacle inside the military to prepare for that threat.”
“But LeMay co-opted that,” Brennan pointed out.
“LeMay was a hero!” Riggs snapped. Just as quickly, like a summer thunderstorm passing, Riggs smiled, showing shiny white teeth above his square jaw. “Go join your fiancée, Brennan. Give her my best.”
“Sir, I can’t help you if you don’t fill me in on what’s really going on.”
Riggs fixed Brennan with his Beacon Hill stare. “The Russians aren’t the real threat. Don’t get me wrong, I know the treaty has to be derailed and we can use Cherry Tree for that. But when I saw the DORKA blurb about Cherry Tree in the daily intel summary last week, I knew there was potential.”
Brennan’s eyes widened. “You made them do that demonstration.”
Riggs nodded. “Squeezed the balls on the idiot who runs DORKA. You should see the file my people have on him.”
“But why?” Brennan knew the answer. “The treaty.”
“Yes.” He leaned forward. “There are people other than the Russians I need to get the truth out of. We’re in the eye of the storm, Brennan. People are asking questions about Pinnacle. We can’t have that made public. And at the same time, we can’t lose it. The best way to fight having a secret revealed is to learn other people’s secrets.” He laughed. “Mutually assured destruction by truth.
“Pinnacle and the treaty are tied together. And we can’t lose the first and have the second. Too many good men over too many years put everything on the line to defend this country and keep it safe. Not just our country, but our world, from whatever is on the other side of those Rifts. I’m not going to see that undone. Do you understand?”
Brennan knew when to retreat. “Yes, sir.”
“Good, good.” Riggs smiled. “Give your fiancée a kiss for me. Go now.”
Bre
nnan blinked at the abrupt about-face. “Yes, sir.” He fumbled for the door and opened it. As soon as he was out, the armored limo was pulling away, the door slamming shut with a solid thud.
Brennan paused outside the restaurant and took a couple of deep breaths. He was getting sick and tired of the general. In fact, he was getting sick and tired of a lot of things he had to put up with. He opened the door and entered the pub. Debbie liked to eat at what she called “common folk” places, although he knew her true motivation was to stick out like a sore middle finger and get the admiring glances and muted whispers of admiration that she had graced the common folk with her presence.
Brennan frowned, surprised at the thought, because it had never occurred to him before. They’d always eaten at places like this, ever since first dating sophomore year in high school. Brennan spotted the Secret Service agents before he spotted Debbie and, already simmering over Riggs’s diatribe and off-kilter by his own thoughts, his attitude took another sharp turn in the wrong direction.
Debbie was staring at her phone, oblivious to the world around her. She had the agents to take care of that for her, Brennan thought as he sat down across from her. She didn’t look up for four seconds.
He knew because he counted, just like when they used to play touch football as a kid after the ball was “hiked” and before you could rush the passer—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Miss—Well, okay, just under four seconds, but that was three too long.
“Hey,” she said with less enthusiasm than Brennan desired. “You’re late.”
“I was with the general.”
Debbie rolled her eyes, which he really hated. “How is the old Lightning Bolt?”
“We just had a most interesting experience, very positive,” Brennan said, forcing some cheer into his voice. “Let’s order champagne to celebrate.”
She raised her eyebrows. “In the middle of the day? How daring of you!” she added with a laugh. “That’s my old Bren. You’ve been much too serious lately.” She reached across the table and placed her hand over his. “What was so interesting and positive?”