Agent William Hawley Griffin was Zach’s immediate predecessor in the post of liaison. He’d been killed during Zach’s first assignment, at the end of the assault on the White House.
As liaison, it became Zach’s job to go to Griff’s house and organize his effects for any next of kin. He found a nearly empty space with bare walls and thick layers of dust on the furniture. There was an open bottle of whiskey sitting by an easy chair.
Zach also found Griff’s will. There was no next of kin. He’d left the house to whoever came after him in the liaison job.
It was a decent place in a pretty good part of town, but Zach still kept his apartment. He couldn’t bring himself to sell the house, and yet, he couldn’t move in, either. Too much like wearing a dead man’s clothes.
“This is your life now,” Cade said. “That’s what I’m trying to help you understand.”
“Look,” he said. “I appreciate the advice. It’s my problem. I’ll deal with it.”
“Griff used whores,” Cade said.
Zach sighed. “Good to know.” He grabbed his bag and headed for the secret exit to the surface, and the National Mall.
“You’ve got a long flight tomorrow. Get a full meal and some rest.”
He left.
Cade said nothing.
ZACH WENT HOME. He barely even slept there anymore. Most nights, he was in the Reliquary. And if not there, he was traveling from one literally godforsaken spot to the next.
He cracked open his laptop. He needed a little more detail about Colonel Graves.
As the machine booted up, a red beam flashed from the camera mounted in the laptop’s screen, lancing into his eye. At the same time, Zach pressed his index finger into a pad on the base.
He was prompted for a series of codes, and only then did the laptop allow him access.
Pain in the ass, Zach thought. Nobody would believe a word contained in the files, even if they did steal the computer.
Even with all his top-secret database-cracking software, Zach ran into one brick wall after another.
Archer/Andrews was a subsidiary of PKD Ltd., itself a subsidiary of Pickman-Derby, a corporation under so many umbrellas it never saw the sun. He finally gave up trying to track down its true owners.
Graves was another cipher. He was ex-CIA, Zach was pretty sure. The “Colonel” title was something CIA operatives gave themselves when they were on military operations. But Zach had spent a lot of time around real soldiers, and Graves didn’t have the bearing exactly right. His hair was a little too neatly parted. He wore cologne. His grooming spoke of vanity, not discipline.
He found the CIA’s file on Graves after running his name through the NOC list—the “non-official cover” list of all the operatives the Agency would never admit existed. These were the men and women who were buried in false identities as they carried out missions that would never be formally approved, even if the Agency paid all the bills. If they were captured or killed, operatives on the NOC list couldn’t expect a hostage negotiation or a public funeral. At best, they might get a quiet moment of mourning over drinks, or, in rare cases, an anonymous star on the wall at Langley.
The photo with the NOC list matched Graves, but there was a long string of aliases attached to it. Whatever his real name was, it was buried under years of disinformation.
Even in the NOC list, Graves’s bio was heavily redacted. Everything was so classified it hadn’t even been transferred to computer, and any paper records were likely shredded and burned.
All Zach could access on his laptop was a list of assignments, ordered by date and location.
That was enough.
Graves—whatever his real name was—had been a part of every major covert operation the CIA pulled in the past four decades. His résumé read like the Agency’s greatest hits.
Yale degree. Recruited right out of college.
Clandestine service. Attached to various domestic agencies. Again, classified. No big surprise, since the Agency wasn’t supposed to operate on U.S. soil. Locations: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Miami, with trips back to Langley.
Laos. Probably one of the Agency’s advisers to the Hmong fighters, although there was something about Graves being assigned to a different tribe in the highlands on the Vietnam border, the T’Chok.
Thailand, from 1975 to 1980. Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early’80s, followed by Honduras, just in time for the Nicaraguan civil war to heat up.
After that, he simply disappeared from the official records. Crosschecking other government files, Zach found a few other entries. A blurry photograph from a Contra staging base in Honduras. A buried LAPD report from an officer who swore there were CIA men moving drugs in South Central. A reference in a classified section of the first draft of a Senate report on international money laundering. Then, for almost a decade, nothing.
Then 9/11 hit, and the Graves alias began appearing on the NOC list again. Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Uganda.
Around 2003, there was an official waiver and notice of separation from the CIA. Graves was free to pursue a career outside of government. That was about the same time Archer/Andrews began receiving government contracts. Graves began starring in slick corporate brochures that hinted at much more than they actually said.
The weird part: Graves’s age was never mentioned anywhere. Zach tried to do the math in his head, but it didn’t add up. If Graves was twenty-one in 1960, at the start of his career, he was at least seventy-one now. And while he was well preserved, Zach could tell he was human. There was no way he should still be operating, unless he was some kind of real-life mix of Nick Fury and every character Clint Eastwood had ever played.
One other weird thing nagged at Zach. Aside from the work history, there was nothing personal. Usually, Zach could assemble a pretty decent model of a person from this much information. But Graves remained a flat collection of facts. There was no depth to him.
Zach wasn’t a complete idiot. There was a very good chance that Archer/Andrews was itself a front for the Shadow Company, that Graves was involved, or one of his underlings, or maybe someone else inside the firm entirely.
But if that were the case, why would Prador be working with him? Prador could be a prick, true, but he was utterly loyal to the Prez, always had been. And Zach, in all the time he’d watched him, would never have imagined Prador doing something truly evil. It would be like an Eagle Scout selling secrets to the North Koreans.
Maybe this related to the leak in the White House that nearly killed him. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
Zach felt a headache coming on. He hated all this double-triple-crossing stuff. And, as Cade had said back at the Reliquary, it didn’t matter much. If they were going to do this job, they were stuck with Graves.
Zach scanned the files again, looking for anything he might have missed until his vision blurred.
Finally he switched off the laptop and turned out his overhead light. He couldn’t get a handle on the guy. It was like trying to grab smoke.
Might as well get some sleep, Zach decided. After all, Cade would have plenty of face time with the man soon enough.
ZACH COULDN’T SLEEP. He tried to watch TV, but nothing was appealing. He couldn’t watch reality shows because seeing people pretend to have a life made him even more aware of the lack of his own. Horror movies bored him now; once you’ve seen the real thing, even the best special effects look hopelessly cheesy. And that was all his five hundred channels seemed to offer.
He thought about it, put on his jacket, and got as far as the door of a strip club before he turned back around and went home again.
He was going to get a life. He wasn’t going to end up like Griff. He wouldn’t pay for someone to rub up against him, and he was damn sure not going to die alone.
CADE PUT ONE CHANGE of clothes into a bag. That was as close as he got to a normal human’s preparations for a trip.
Then he went to the small fridge and re
moved a waxed-paper carton, about the size of a half-gallon container of milk.
It was filled with animal blood—a mixture of cow and pig.
He looked at the carton for a long moment. Then he put the container in the microwave on the counter and waited for the beep.
Cade didn’t like feeding. Or rather, he liked it too much. And he didn’t like being reminded of what he was.
But it was necessary. He had work to do. He needed his strength. He had every reason to feed.
He told himself that as he opened the carton, forcing his movements to be steady and deliberate and slow.
The steaming blood flooded into his system, flushing his pale skin briefly before settling into deep, capillary-rich beds of tissue inside his body.
Two long gulps, and it was all gone. Cade shuddered and grit his teeth to keep from breaking out in a smile.
He loved it. Even this pale, weak imitation of human blood. He loved every drop.
Cade shook himself and threw the empty carton across the room. Someone might have even said he looked disgusted.
“Did you enjoy watching that?” Cade asked, apparently to the empty room.
A figure emerged from the gloom at the back of the Reliquary. She appeared to be a young woman, barely out of her teens. Strawberry-blond hair and an irrepressible smile.
It just happened that her cute little grin had fangs.
“I always like watching you, Cade.”
Tania. Cade’s sometime ally, sometime lover, and constant reminder. He’d once promised to save her. He’d failed.
Since then, she had become strangely proprietary of him. She followed him, appearing in his life from time to time, even helping him on his missions. But she had no love of humanity. Unlike Cade, she embraced what she was.
She had been showing up more often in the past year. He always knew when she’d gotten into the Reliquary. Despite what Zach had said, Cade had not invited her in. In fact, he’d changed the codes on the locks. She always got past them.
She looked at the bag. “Oooh. A vacation. I could use some time away.”
“You’re not coming.”
“I’m sure I could if we worked at it.”
Cade tensed and spun on her. “I am not joking.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “You’re no fun tonight.”
“I can smell the kill on you, Tania.”
“I never promised to be a martyr like you, Nathaniel. I get hungry.”
Tania had never fed on an innocent in Cade’s presence. But to come here, stinking of fresh blood, that was a deliberate provocation.
“Do you think I’ll simply let you go on like this forever?”
That banished the mischief from her eyes. “Sweets,” she said, “what makes you think you let me do anything?”
It had never come down to an actual physical confrontation between them. Maybe she was only biding her time until she could be sure who would win.
They stared at each other for a long moment. Then Tania smiled again.
“If you’re going to be such a stiff, I might as well look elsewhere for my entertainment tonight.”
She paused, waiting for his reply.
“Lock the door on your way out,” Cade said.
She frowned at him, and then was gone.
Tania was right. He was troubled, although no one else could have ever noticed it. He knew this shouldn’t be happening.
He looked at the sharp, jagged teeth on what looked like a man-sized piranha’s head, floating in a jar of formaldehyde. It was remarkably similar to the skull emerging as the beetles chomped noisily on the severed head.
The plaque read SKELETAL REMAINS FROM INNSMOUTH, MASS., 1928.
Innsmouth.
As foolish as it was, he’d really hoped he’d killed them all.
Innsmouth, Massachusetts, 1928
The fires were mostly out, although they still smoldered along the wharf. Cade kept well clear of them as he searched for survivors in the ruined pilings sunk into the sand. Dawn was less than an hour away, but the tide would be in before then. He had to get to them before the water did.
Above him, the men from the Treasury Department stomped in their asbestos-lined uniforms, carrying large tanks of fuel on their backs. Occasionally, he heard a shout, and then the squalling as something wet and fleshy burned beneath their torches.
Cade hoped they’d be careful enough to avoid doing the same to him.
But it wasn’t likely that any of the T-men would come down here. The three federal agents who’d tried to search the underside of the wharf had been found in pieces when the tide receded. This was why Cade was on this mission: he was much more comfortable in the dark.
Still, it wasn’t as easy as he expected; his sensitivity to heat was no asset. The things he looked for were cold-blooded, and the nearby fires were only confusing. His enhanced sense of smell was clotted with stagnant water, the town’s sewage and rotting fish.
He almost walked past the nest.
Cade’s boot squished into something with a different texture than all the other dead things down here. Something springing with life, enough to burst and spew its contents all over.
He looked down. A clutch of fish eggs, each the size of a man’s fist. The one he smashed held one of the creatures in its tadpole stage; its tail thrashed uselessly as it tried to breathe with unformed gills.
There should be more, Cade thought. But there were only a half dozen or so, caught in their own slime.
He looked up.
In the shade of what was left of a plank, a huge sac of the eggs clung to the top of a piling, quivering like jelly as the things inside squirmed.
Cade opened his mouth to summon one of the T-men.
Then something whipped from around the piling and attacked.
It moved almost as fast as Cade at his top speed, and he had been fighting and killing these things all night. It managed to get him down in the salty muck and slash at his face with its claws and long teeth.
Cade fended it off and clouted it in the skull, hard. The skull dented, but the thing kept snapping with its piranha-like jaws. Its eyes bugged out, yellow and mad. Although it wore the dress of one of the townspeople, there was nothing human left in it. Its transformation was complete. It had probably been down here for months. That’s why they missed it when they firebombed the temple, and the old houses.
Cade kicked the thing away, sending it flying. It bounced off one of the big logs like it was rubber and scrambled to attack again. Cade girded himself to deliver the killing blow.
A tommy gun roared above him, and the thing went down, lead tearing through its gelatinous skin. It deflated more than bled, collapsing slowly to the dirty beach.
Cade looked up. The man in charge of this assignment looked back through one of the holes in the wharf. He was already more serious than his age would have indicated—barely into his twenties. Cade saw gray hair at his temple. A mission like this one would only add to it.
“Are you all right?” the T-man asked.
“Fine,” Cade said.
“You seemed to be having some trouble.”
Cade pointed to the spot where the egg sac still held. “Mothers tend to be vicious when guarding their young.”
The T-man pursed his lips in distaste and called to some nearby men. “Let’s get those flamethrowers over here. Nothing gets back into the sea. Nothing!”
He looked back at Cade. “Anything else down there?”
Cade shook his head. “I believe that’s the last of them. For this town, anyway. Someone will need to track down the remaining members of the Marsh family.”
For a split second, the young treasury agent’s stone-faced veneer cracked, and Cade could see the fear and nausea well up in him. “There are more.” It wasn’t a question, but he seemed to hope Cade would contradict him.
“You’ll probably never see any of them,” Cade said. “This was an emergency. I don’t know how it got this far. Usually, I will handle so
mething like this alone.”
The T-man shook his head. “I don’t know how you do it. No. That’s not it. I don’t know why you do it. Aren’t you more like them than us now?”
Cade was not insulted by the question. He was not human. He knew that under other circumstances, these men would be tempted to burn him into ash. Only the weirdness around them, and Cade’s ability to fight it, made him an ally rather than another nightmare.
“I haven’t completely lost sight of what it means to be human,” Cade said.
“I’m not questioning your loyalty, Mr. Cade. You’ve saved our lives a dozen times tonight. Whatever happens, I’ll remember that. But I want to know: what keeps you on our side?”
Cade considered the question. The other men, with the flamethrowers and gasoline, made their way carefully up the rotting wharf. The sun was coming up. He’d have to get out of here soon. But he could see from the look in the federal agent’s eyes that he would not leave without an answer.
“Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?” Cade asked.
The young treasury agent shook his head.
“I took one. And I keep my word.”
Cade sloshed through the seawater, now around his ankles, as he searched for any more of the creatures. Above him, the wharf exploded into fire and smoke, and a hundred tiny abominations squealed as they burned.
FIVE
Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the State.
—James Jesus Angleton, CIA chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975
DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, VIRGINIA
Cade and Zach were in a small, private hangar at Dulles before sunup.
On paper, the facility was leased by Executive Transport, a privately held charter flight company. Executive was owned, according to the documents filed with the state, by a series of shell companies, their officers and directors buried in mounds of paperwork.
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