The Dragon Factory Page 8

  “Bigger than the Vice President launching a witch hunt?”

  “Potentially,” he said.

  “Swell. Okay, I’ll go see what I can do . . . but one last thing about the Vice President: if anyone else at the DMS gets hurt because of this—politically, legally, or otherwise—then I’m going to want to do some damage.”

  “Are you talking about revenge, Captain?”

  “And what if I am?” I snapped.

  There was a sound. It might have been a short laugh. “I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.”

  With that he disconnected.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Saturday, August 28, 10:15 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 45 minutes

  Mr. Church closed his phone and laid it on the desk in front of him. He was a big man, broad shouldered, blocky, strong. There were gray streaks in his dark hair and old scars on his face, but rather than serving to reveal his age they stood as marks of use; their presence toughened him in ways the people who knew him could recognize but not define.

  For over a minute he sat with his big hands resting on either side of the phone, which sat just off-center of the green desk blotter. He might have been a statue for all the animation he betrayed. His eyes were only shadows behind the lenses of his tinted glasses.

  To his left was a glass of water, no ice. Beside it was a plate of vanilla wafers. After he’d sat for two full minutes, Mr. Church selected a cookie and bit off a piece, munching it thoughtfully. He brushed a crumb from his red tie.

  Then he swiveled in his chair and reached for his office phone. He punched a code to engage the scrambler and then entered a special number. It was answered on the fourth ring.

  “Brierly,” said a crisp male voice.

  “Linden,” said Church, “I know you’re busy, but I want you to listen very closely. This is a Brushfire Command Protocol.”

  “Ah,” said Brierly, “it’s you. I was hoping you lost my number.”

  “Sorry to disappoint. Please verify that you’re on active scramble so we may proceed.”

  Brierly made a sound that might have been a curse, but he verified the scramble. Linden was the Regional Director of the Secret Service and was directly responsible for overseeing the safety of the President while the Commander in Chief was in Walter Reed for his heart surgery. One slip and Brierly would be working out of a field office in the Dakotas. A successful job, on the other hand, could be the last résumé item needed for the step up as overall Director of the Secret Service, which would make Brierly the youngest man to hold that office. The hot money—and the heavy pressure—was on him during the current crisis.

  “Here is the Brushfire code,” said Church, and recited a number-letter string that identified him and his authority to make this call.

  Brierly read back the code, moving one digit and adding another.

  Church repeated the code and made his own two-point change.

  “Verified,” said Brierly. “Brushfire Protocol is active.”

  “I agree,” said Church.

  “You just activated a Presidential Alert, my friend. We’d better have missiles inbound or Martians on the White House lawn. You do know what’s happening today?” Even with the mild audio distortion of the scrambler, Brierly’s sarcasm was clear as a bell.

  Church said ten words: “The Vice President is trying to take down the DMS.”

  “What?”

  Church explained.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Esquire,” Brierly growled, “the President will fry him for this. I mean fry him. Even if he has the Attorney General in his corner, Collins can’t possibly believe that he’s going to make a case against you.”

  “He seems to think so.”

  “This is weird. I know him pretty well, and this is not like him. For one thing, he doesn’t have the balls for this.”

  “Then he grew a set this morning. For now let’s assume he wouldn’t attempt this kind of play if he didn’t have some interesting cards in his hand. What they are and how he’ll ultimately play them is still to be seen.”

  “I’m starting to get a bad feeling about why you called me.”

  “Listen to me, Linden. If the VP gets MindReader he also gets everything stored in MindReader. Take a moment and think that through.”

  Brierly didn’t need a moment. “Christ!”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t you take it offline? Dump the hard drive and wipe it with an EMP?”

  “Sure, and we’d lose active tactical analysis on forty-six terrorist-related database searches, including the two assassination plots your office sent to us. If MindReader goes blind, then so does the Secret Service, a good chunk of the DEA, CIA, FBI, and ATF, and Homeland will essentially have its head in a bag. We lose our data sharing with MI6 and Barrier, not to mention certain agencies in Germany, Italy, and France. We’d be playing Texas hold ’em with blank cards.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Church . . . you should have shared this system with everyone from the start.”

  “Really? You’d personally like to see everyone from the VP on down have total access to your records? You’d want to grant everyone in every agency the ability to read all secrets and access all files without leaving a footprint? You’d want all of the President’s personal business made public?”

  “I—”

  “Two words, Linden: ‘Houston Marriott.’ ”

  Brierly hissed, “Don’t even joke.”

  “I’m not joking, and I’m not threatening. With the President out of power, MindReader and the DMS are vulnerable. I’ll hold the line, but I don’t think either of us want to see what happens if this turns into a shoving match between the NSA and my boys.”

  “They have you outnumbered and outgunned, Church.”

  “You’ve met Major Courtland and Captain Ledger, I believe. You’ve seen them in action. Where would you place your heavy bets?”

  “This isn’t the O.K. Corral.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” Church agreed, “but the VP is making a hard play. He’s well organized, too, and using a lot of field resources. None of this went through e-mails or active command software packages, so he must have set it all up via cell phone or word of mouth. He knows enough about MindReader to do an end run around it for this operation.”

  “You sound calm about it,” Brierly said.

  Church bit a cookie, said nothing.

  “You’re describing a coup.”

  “No, this isn’t directed against the President, and the VP will probably yield power in the proper way and at the proper time. But ultimately this could bring down the presidency. Maybe the VP knows that, maybe he doesn’t . . . but the effect will be the same. So, indirectly this is an attack against the President.”

  “No kidding.”

  “This is time critical for another reason,” Church said. “We’ve just started picking up the threads of something that could be a significant threat. That’s Threat with a capital T. We’re probably already coming into this late—that’s the nature of these things—but with all of my people dodging the NSA or gone to ground we could fall completely behind the curve. I need the Vice President to call off the dogs so we can get back to work.”

  Brierly sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

  “What do your loyalties suggest you do?”

  “Switching jobs sounds good right now. I hear they’re hiring at Best Buy.”

  Church crunched his cookie, drank some water, waited.

  “It’s not like I can strong-arm a doctor and force him to revive the President. He’s in recovery now, but there are protocols.”

  “Yes, and Brushfire is one of them.”

  “I’m going to lose my job over this.”

  “Not if the President takes control before we lose MindReader.”

  Brierly was a long time thinking it through. Church had time for a second cookie.

  “Okay,” Brierly said, “bu
t when the Commander in Chief is back on the checkerboard I’m going to dump all the blame on you.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “And what if we fail? What if the Veep gets control of your records?”

  “That might require alternatives you cannot hear from me. Not even unofficially.”

  Brierly cursed.

  “Linden,” said Church quietly, “this is not a fight of my choosing, and I don’t know why the VP is risking so much here, but we cannot let MindReader be taken. It’s your job to make sure I don’t need to get creative while trying to keep it.”

  “ ‘Creative’ doesn’t sound like a very nice option.”

  “It isn’t,” said Church. “So let’s both do what we need to do to keep that option off the table. I’ll do what I can for as long as I can, but I’d like to hear a clear weather report from you soon.”

  “Okay. I’ll find the chief of surgery and see if I can appeal to his patriotism.”

  “You know my number,” Church said, and disconnected.

  He set the phone down on his desk blotter. He laid his hands on either side of it and sat quietly in the stillness of his office.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Deck

  Saturday, August 28, 10:16 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 44 minutes E.S.T.

  “They’re landing,” Otto said as he set down the phone.

  He and Cyrus stood in the command center of the Deck. All around them hundreds of technicians were busy at computer workstations. A second tier of workstations was built onto a metal veranda that circled the central area. The clackity-clack of all those fingers on all those keys was music to Cyrus’s ears.

  Below the command center, visible through clear glass panels in the floor, were two isolated cold rooms. The left-hand one was crowded with fifty networked 454 Life Sciences sequencers. Technicians in white self-contained smart suits worked among the computers, constantly checking their functions and monitoring every minute change. The right-hand room looked like a brewery in which vast tanks worked around the clock to grow viruses.

  The tank directly below Cyrus’s feet was dedicated to mass-producing a weaponized version of the human papillomavirus that had been genetically altered to target Hispanics. Sure, there was crossover to some white population because racial purity was—sadly, as far as Cyrus and Otto were concerned—more myth than truth, but the rate of cervical cancer for female Hispanics was 85 percent and the crossover to Caucasians only 6 percent. The synthetic growth medium they were currently using allowed for a 400 percent increase in growth time. The tanks had been running so long now that Otto estimated that they would have enough to use it to launch the second phase of the Extinction Wave in sixteen weeks rather than the previously anticipated thirty months. Cyrus only wished that they’d settled on this new method last year so that it would have been ready with the rest of the first phase.

  Thinking about it made Cyrus want to scream, to run and shout with joy.

  “We should close up,” advised Otto.

  “I know; I know.” Cyrus waved his hand peevishly. “It’s just that I hate to do it.”

  “We can’t let the Twins see—”

  Cyrus silenced him with a look.

  “They probably won’t even come in here.” However, Cyrus knew that Otto was quite right. Taking chances was never good at the best of times, but with the Extinction Wave so close—so wonderfully, delightfully close—nothing could be left to chance. And neither of them trusted the Twins.

  “I wish we could bring them in,” said Cyrus.

  Otto turned away so Cyrus wouldn’t see him roll his eyes. This was an argument that had started before the Twins had hit puberty, and he and Cyrus had come at it from every possible angle too many times to count.

  “Everything in their psych profiles suggests that they would oppose the Wave.”

  “I know.”

  “Their ideologies are too—”

  “I know.”

  Otto pursed his lips.

  “Mr. Cyrus, their plane is touching down as we speak.”

  Cyrus sighed. “Very well, damn it.” He flapped his hand and turned away.

  He walked slowly away, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed thoughtfully. At the door he paused and turned to watch as steel panels slid slowly into place to hide the rooms below. Heavy hydraulics kicked in and Cyrus glanced up as shutters rolled into place to hide nearly 80 percent of the technicians. A faux wall rose up to cover a half-mile-long corridor that connected the Deck to the viral storage facility buried under the hot Arizona sands. The whole process took less than three minutes, and when it was completed the room looked small, almost quaint. High-tech to be sure, but on a scale suited only for research rather than mass production. Cyrus sighed again. It depressed him to have to hide this from his own children. Just as it depressed him that his children were such serious disappointments.

  “I’ll be in the garden,” he said to Otto. “Bring them to me there.”

  Otto bowed and watched him go.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Deck

  Saturday, August 28, 10:22 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 38 minutes E.S.T.

  Paris’s cell rang as their plane was rolling to a stop on the tarmac.

  “Yes?” he answered in a musical voice.

  “It’s me,” said J. P. Sunderland.

  “And—”

  “It’s a wash. We hit all of the DMS bases likely to have a Mind-Reader substation, but without an Executive Order to shoot, the best we could manage was a standoff. Actually, kiddo,” Sunderland said, “we have several agents in the hospital and ears are up in local and regional law coast to coast. The Vice President is probably going to get his ass dragged before a subcommittee for this.”

  “So,” Paris said with ice, “basically you fucked it up.”

  “Basically, yes.”

  “You could at least sound contrite.”

  “Blow me, snowball,” said Sunderland. There was no heat in his voice; there never was. He was too practiced a game player to let any bad hand of cards, or even a bad run of cards, fracture his cool. “This was a fifty-fifty at best and we all knew that going in. You and your sister called this play. I was against it from the start as you well know. It’s a waste of resources that could have been better used further down the road.”

  “We need that system. Without MindReader the money train’s going to slow to a halt, J.P.”

  “I’ll practice singing the blues later. Right now it looks like the NSA will be stalled long enough for the power to shift back to the President. And, like I said, we may lose the Vice President over this.”

  “What a pity,” drawled Paris. “That would bring the free world to its knees.”

  “Okay, fair enough, who cares if he sinks? Point is, the NSA ploy would have had more pop to it if we’d used it when the big man was dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  Paris laughed. “What are you saying? That you plan to have Church whacked?” He liked saying the word “whacked.”

  “Me? Hell no . . . but there’s a rumor in the wind that there’s a contract out on him. Church and a few other troublemakers. If I didn’t know your dad was on a leash I’d say it was his kind of play. Doesn’t really matter, though. With any luck whoever has the contract will close it out before all the dust from today’s cluster fuck settles down. Otherwise Church might start looking around to see what’s in the wind, which is exactly what none of us wanted.”

  Hecate had been leaning close to Paris in order to hear the conversation. Their eyes met and they shared a “he has a point” look.

  “So now what?” Paris asked.

  “Now we let the NSA thing play out. It’ll still take a while for the President to take back the reins, so we’ve still effectively hobbled the DMS for the rest of today. Maybe into tomorrow, but that’s starting to look like wishful thinking. After th
at we let the Vice President play the rest of his cards. Throw some scapegoats to the congressional wolves, yada yada . . . and then go to the next phase.”

  Paris looked at Hecate, who nodded.

  “Okay, J.P. You have any other ideas for how to get hold of Mind-Reader?”

  “A few,” Sunderland said. “But nothing we can try until after Church is out of the mix.”

  “Shit.”

  Sunderland chuckled. It was the deep, throaty, hungry laugh of a bear who had a salmon gasping on the riverbank.

  “Now,” he said, “let’s talk about Denver.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, Maryland

  Saturday, August 28, 10:31 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 29 minutes

  I was waiting by the exit for my ride when my phone rang. I looked at the screen. Grace. Normally that would make me smile, but I had a flash of panic wondering if something bad had happened to her.

  “Hello?”

  “Joe . . . ,” she said, sounding on edge.

  “Hey,” I said. “Eggs?” A coded query about scramblers.

  “Of course, you sodding twit.”

  “Nice language. You kiss the Prime Minister with that mouth?”

  She told me to sod off, but she said it with a laugh. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Grace Courtland, an agent for the British government and now head of the Baltimore Regional Office of the DMS, was one-third my local boss, one-third a comrade in arms who had stood with me in several of the weirdest and most terrible battles since I’d started working for the G, and one-third my girlfriend—and if anyone has ever had a more interesting, complex, and smoking-hot girlfriend, I never heard about it. The relationship was not a public thing; we were trying to keep it off the public record, though we were both realistic enough to accept that we were working with about a hundred class-A trained observers, so our little clandestine fling was probably old news in the pipeline.