Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero (10 page)

Alan said, “Ted was so determined to finish up this year, despite the accidents. The guy never gave up.”

Calvin said, “We used to sit around for hours poring over the maps of the lakes. Man, ten thousand lakes! Me thinking, Which ones have the diamonds? Him going on about plants and algae . . . Who cares about that goddamn stuff? Huh?”

The music was free. Someone had fixed up one of those rotating mirror spheres so it threw sparks of bright, multicolored light across the audience and stage. The mood was slow and easy, even when the music was vibrant. The Barrowtones usually played until 2 or 3
A.M.

“Are you looking for me, Colonel?”

The sharp, British-accented voice startled me, coming from close behind me. I turned and looked into a stunningly gorgeous woman’s face, framed by a lioness mane of red hair so close that it almost brushed my head. The eyes were deep aqua, the nose classic, and the teeth as white as in a TV commercial. She seemed to throw off heat. The freckles—a light copper color—were so numerous they seemed more like a tan. The lips glistened. Karen’s shampoo smell mixed suddenly with something stronger: musk and alcohol and tobacco.

“
I’m
the one looking for you,” corrected Eddie.

“You’re a major. He’s a colonel. He’s the boss,” she said, staring boldly into my eyes. “Want to dance?”

“Have a seat. Join us. Let’s talk.”

“I don’t want to talk. I want to dance.”

It was not a social invitation. I recognized a calculated preemptive strike. Merlin had told me she was a professional agitator. Mikael stared up at the model-quality face with fascination. Eddie looked wary and Karen surprised. If I stood up, if I danced with her, I knew instinctively this would cripple every future argument with Karen limiting time she spent with Mikael Grandy.
I’m not the one who walked off with that woman!

I needed to ask questions. I stood up. Tilda Swann reached for my hand. No way, I thought, but followed her out onto the floor anyway; an act which, I knew, constituted a strategic loss on the field of domestic tranquility. No sex for you tonight, Joe!

I tried to ask questions but she had none of it, not at first. She was the kind of dancer who probably got sex-crazed cavemen to kill each other with clubs. She closed her eyes, pretending not to be aware of me, yet her rotating hips managed to stay close, and her arms wove circles in the air . . . the effect one of abandon, and of consciousness of the eyes upon her. She was trying to irritate and she was succeeding. She was so beautiful that most men in the rink stared. A guitar player hit a bad note. Deputy Luther Oz, on the drums, glared with disapproval. He’d heard Merlin warn me in the chopper to keep to the medical end, leave interviews to the cops.

When the song was almost over, when she knew I’d be walking off in a moment, she leaned close, breath warm in my ear. “Blame it on Greenpeace,” she said.

“You don’t strike me as a victim, Ms. Swann.”

“Because I’m good-looking? Your oil rig has an accident? Your whaling ship spills oil? Blame Greenpeace!”

“Are we going to talk or just rant?”

“Fire away,
mi
colonel! Batteries three and six aimed at the
Rainbow Warrior
!”

It was like starting a conversation in the middle; no preliminaries. Well, two could do this. She did not seem like someone who would respond to any subtle strategy except to mock it, and she was clearly clever enough to recognize any roundabout approach.

I said, “Okay, straight out. You were seen tampering with the Harmon’s water.”

She stopped dancing. Hands on slim hips. Then she smiled. “Good for you! Who exactly saw me?”

“We have a record of it.”

Lips curling. “Uh-huh. A camera, you’re saying?”

“Audio recording,” I said. Her perfume was getting to me.

“Oh, audio! Someone
heard
me tamper with water. I wonder! What do you hear when that happens, gurgling? And who is this ‘we’ anyway? The Marines?”

“The police, Tilda.”

“I’m a little confused. Which one are you?”

“I’m helping them out,” I said.

“Are you sure?” She resumed dancing, rotated her hips like a Brazilian at Ipanema. The top and bottom parts moved in entirely different rhythms. She said, “What are you really doing here anyway? In Barrow?”

“Dancing.”

“Touché. Oh, too bad, the music stopped. So tell me, Colonel.
Just what did you guys do to them
?”

“Excuse me?”

From our table where Karen watched, and I could feel her eyes on us, we probably looked like a couple caught up in intimate conversation. Tilda Swann’s eyes sparked with passion, and her fragrance overcame the mélange of sawdust, sweat, and bad electronics that seemed a permanent background in the old rink. The finger that poked me in the chest was slender. The wrist was encircled by a single silvery bracelet. Her rage, unfeigned, blotched her angular cheeks with color.

“What was it, Colonel? What did you guys do on the tundra when nobody was looking? What was
tested
? A gas?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Anthrax? Radiation?? Give me a break, jarhead. Two detectives show up at my hotel this afternoon and want to know if I was anywhere near the warehouse that held water for the Harmons? It’s not just me, you know, that you’re accusing. My organization is used to being attacked.”

“No one accused you. You’ve got the wrong idea.”

“Really!” The finger poked me again. The floor had cleared but we remained in front of the stage, face-to-face. I grabbed her wrist to stop the poking. She didn’t even look down at her hand. People stared at us. She was fury incarnate, that blown-up passion represented one of the finest acting jobs I’ve ever encountered, or the best ambush.

She said, softly, “I want you to know that I called Washington. We have people there and in London and every fucking capital in the world. And, Colonel, those people are making inquiries. Why are two Marine officers here, asking about bad water? Why are local detectives in Alaska co-opted into the goddamn U.S. military machine?”

“How do you know what I’ve been doing?”

“
How do I know?
Because when someone starts asking about me, I ask about them, too. That’s how I know!”

“And how well did you know the Harmons?”

“Little accident? Little gas leak? Planning on blaming Greenpeace? It won’t work. I’ll find out what you did.”

•   •   •

WE WENT BACK TO THE TABLE, WHERE KAREN PAID MORE ATTENTION TO
Mikael than before, like I wasn’t there.
Screw you, Joe, for ignoring me.
Tilda pulled up a chair between me and Eddie. Karen smiled dazzlingly and asked Mikael to dance. She flashed me a look when she stood up. Not rage. Just a kind of raw intensity. Karen looking from Tilda to me, sensing more than just antagonism. The whole scene one of crazy feminine misinterpretation. Planet of the women. Planet of miscommunication. Planet of trouble for Joe Rush.

“I didn’t touch their water, Colonel. I didn’t even
know
them. But if you’re thinking that somebody tampered with supplies, why not talk to those two perverts from Texas, brother and sister, my ass. Why not grill the pilots and mechanics. No. Gotta be Greenpeace. You know why people always think it’s Greenpeace?”

“Why?”

“We’re convenient targets.”

Eddie said, “I thought it’s because you always claim the credit!”

Karen was back and she’d had enough. “Joe, let’s go home.”

•   •   •

IF I THOUGHT IT WAS COLD INSIDE, THAT WAS NOTHING COMPARED TO
what happened when we stepped outside, and into the small, streetlamp-lit parking lot. We were on another planet. Merlin had been right. In the time between my entrance here and my departure, winter had arrived. The temperature had plunged. The season had crashed down with all the swiftness of an avalanche in the Rockies.

Everything was the same, but different. The night air was brittle. Our breath had steamed out before but now it shot away in small, white puffs. Even Karen, mad as she was, stopped dead and looked outward . . .

I had the sense of the horizon contracting, the planet shrinking, the sky losing its third dimension: depth. Altitude sucked down, gravity grown monstrous. Distance seemed eradicated and the scale of the place shrank. There was a
drawing-in
feeling, a sense of reduced possibility. There was, in the air, a palpable promise of isolation.

Take care of yourself. Winter is back.

I shivered as the air knifed through my parka. The stars blinked, as if startled, then cloud cover smothered them up. The moon went from a low orb to a suggestion. Breathing seemed like something we needed to plan. The smell had altered, too, the briny ocean tinge was gone, as was the peaty wet mud and decayed floral essence of autumn tundra. Now an almost sterile frigidity had replaced it.

And the rhythmic background
shoosh
of that vast sea across the road—as we rode silently home—went from liquid to something filled with friction. As if shore was trying to extend, reach out, become tectonic.

“I had to talk to her,” I said.

“Of course.”

I did not need this shit. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”

“Oh? Maybe it’s me that needs to do it, you mean?”

We slept in the same bed that night, but as separate planets. We woke the next morning and said we were sorry and the argument had been stupid. We made love. We made up.

Outside, there was frost on the window. Outside, the sky had a sucked out, ominous cast. Inside, we made coffee and cooked our breakfast but the residue of something distasteful remained in the hut. I was glad when Eddie arrived to pick me up, for us to head over to the lab, to check the samples. I was glad to get away from Karen, I had to admit. The truck passed the Harmon hut, where the lights were off. It passed the oil hut and Bruce Friday’s hut and the hut where Kelley’s friend lived, where lights glowed.

Goddamn Tilda Swann!

We took the curving half-mile road that linked the huts to the new twenty-five million dollar Arctic Research Center where we had our lab, and planned to redo Sengupta’s toxic tests just to be sure. Eddie said, “Uno, can I just say one thing?”

“No.”

“It’s that when you two were dancing last night, I mean, speaking as your friend, it looked pretty close.”

“What did I just tell you?”

“I’m only trying to explain—”

“Your superior officer, Major, gave a direct instruction, and it is for you to shut up.”

“But our unit doesn’t follow instructions.”

I sighed. “Then do it as a favor, Eddie.”

He quieted but the phone began buzzing. I was surprised to see that the call was coming from the cellular phone of Valley Girl, except if it was 8
A.M
. in Barrow, then it was 4
A.M
. in Washington, when Valley Girl would never, ever be at work. She’d not even be awake. Valley Girl came in at ten, left at nine at night.

“Joe Rush!”

It was her, all right, but she was home, she said, not at the office. She sounded scared, her voice an octave higher than usual. This was the first time in three years of speaking to her that I’d heard her words come out as exclamations, not questions.

“I’m being arrested,” she said. “Men are here from Defense Security. I’m in my bathroom. They’re in the hallway. I need help. It’s because of what you asked me to do.”

They were going to put Valley Girl in handcuffs when she walked out of her bathroom, she said, crying. They’d banged on the door of her townhouse fifty minutes ago, four of them, at 3:10
A.M.
, shown Pentagon ID, seized her laptop and desktop computers, searched her two-bedroom apartment and warned her that another agent was under the bathroom window, outside, so don’t try to climb out. They’d taken all drugs from her medicine cabinet before letting her shut the door. They’d terrified her cat, Ephraim, who was meowing under a couch.

There’s no way they’d let her go into her bathroom alone normally, no way they wouldn’t have confiscated the cell. So someone is listening to us.

“They think I’m a traitor, like Edward Snowden,” she said, voice quaking.

I asked her, playing to the larger audience that monitored us, “Did you do what I told you to?” I envisioned listeners in a cubicle, or van, vultures who ate sound.

“Yes, Colonel.”

“Do anything extra?”

“No, sir.”

“Explain exactly what you
did
do?”

“I went to appropriations to see if monies had been allocated for toxics or germ testing in Alaska, going back seventy years. I cross-referenced grants. I checked AEC and Threats Reduction, and PC’s and PU’s (private companies and universities) contracted for this sort of work. I ran all social security numbers of the victims, like you said, for links.”

“Try to break in anywhere?”

“I backed off if I saw ‘Classified.’”

“Which you did, I gather.”

“In 2008. Something called, ‘Enhancing Warfighters.’”

“How did you learn that Enhancing Warfighters existed, so you could make that request?”

“I found a reference in a grant to U Alaska, and another in an Army cognition study downgraded to normal classified two years ago.”

I considered. “You’re saying that you sent in a proper request asking for details of Warfighters?”

She sniffled. “Like we always do.”

“Did you get an answer?”

“It’s that these people showed up.”

I nodded, but of course she could not see me. She was terrified and I was growing angry. I cautioned, “Listen to me. If there’s anything else I need to know,
now
is the time to say it. If you did something else, forced a back door, tried your way in somewhere, hacking,
anything,
tell me now. I won’t be able to help after this.”

She was crying openly. I envisioned a shaking female hand cupping a tiny phone. “Are you kidding? I saw the scare movie that the security guys showed us when I joined up. It’s just . . . just that . . .”

I felt my breath catch. “Just that what?”

“Well, you said to concentrate on toxics or germs, and Enhancing Warfighters was experiments, all right, on volunteers, but with magnets. Do magnets count?”

“‘Magnets’?” I asked, surprised.

She’d always had a good memory, one reason I used her. “It’s called ‘transcranial magnetic stimulation.’ The Biosciences and Protection Divisions carried it out. Trying to get soldiers to do tasks better, using electrical current, magnetic coils . . . something about revving up cortical brain tissue. I didn’t exactly understand it, sir.”

“On human subjects, you said?”

“Volunteers, sir. And in military prisons.”

“So you asked for more details?”

“Yes, Colonel. You said to look at any experiments involving people or livestock, so I did.”

If this description was honest, she’d not exceeded instructions. In my three years of dealing with her, I had found her never to exaggerate. I said, “You did right. You used judgment and initiative.”

Which means, if she’s telling the truth, her normal request triggered this raid, not any breach.

I asked, “Was Clay Qaqulik part of this brain study?”

“I never got that far! The security people showed up.”

“
Okay. Don’t worry. Sarah, keep the line open and tell the people outside—in a loud voice—that you’ll walk out holding a phone.”

“But why should I say . . . Oh, my God! OH, MY GOD!”

“Just leave the phone on so I can hear. Calm down. Tell the person in charge that I want to speak to him.”

A minute later I was speaking with a woman identifying herself as Air Force Major T. J. Cobb of the Pentagon’s Office of Defense Security. She had a soft, feminine voice, a hint of southwest twang; Arizona maybe, or New Mexico. But there was no softness in the accusation coming over the line.

“You admit, Colonel, that you ordered Sarah Kemp to try to break in to classified files relating to certain activities that occurred in 2008?”

“Are you a lawyer, Major Cobb?”

A pause. “How do you know that?”

“Because you talk like one. And because only lawyers use the word ‘certain’ that way. They do it when they don’t want to tell you what they mean.”

“Sir, I’m asking the questions,” she responded smoothly. “Yes or no?”

I said, harshly, for emphasis, “I did not order her to break in anywhere, nor did she try to, so don’t suggest she did. She made a legal request through channels. You will not handcuff her. You will give her time to dress properly and then politely escort her to wherever you’ve been told she is to go. You will leave food and water for her cat. You will not mistreat her, am I clear?”

“Colonel, I report directly to General Wayne Homza.”

I sighed.
Why am I not surprised?

I snapped, “And he works for someone else, and
she
works for someone else. Get it? A chain?
Am I clear
?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,
what
?”

“Yes, sir!”

Standoff. She wouldn’t tell me more.

In the background, I heard Valley Girl crying, and then the sound grew distant, so I envisioned big men escorting a tiny girl—I always imagined Valley Girl dressed out of a sorority house . . . she probably looked nothing like that—down carpeted townhouse stairs, into predawn suburban Virginia, toward a couple of big black Chevrolets—the Pentagon seems to be the only loyal customer left for GM’s rattletrap vehicles—with tall antennas on top.

I called the admiral via encrypted sat-Skype to relay what had happened and up swam his secretary, Pauline, a large, pear-shaped fifty-nine-year-old chain-smoking grandmother, who sounded hoarse and showed none of her usual cheeriness. Her mascara had run down her rouged cheeks. Uh-oh
,
I thought. Pauline was not normally emotional.

“The admiral is gone, Colonel.”

“Find him, please, Pauline. Is he at lunch?”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” she gasped. “He’s been
replaced
. General Homza took over and he’s in Admiral Galli’s office now, going through the drawers.” Her voice became a whisper. “They were shouting, him and the admiral. General Homza said to patch you through if you called. I’ll be reassigned, sir. They’re shutting down the unit.”

“You’ll be fine, Pauline.” I soothed, hoping I was right. “Let me talk to General Homza.”

Click . . .

The screen went fuzzy for a millisecond. It did that sometimes from solar flares. Suddenly leaping forward on-screen was Homza, a blunt, fit-looking, middle-aged man wearing the two stars of a U.S. Army major general, and sitting behind the admiral’s Civil War–era walnut desk. Posture, ramrod. Behind him was the left side of the admiral’s World War One oil of the Coast Guard cutter Tampa, being torpedoed by a U-boat; flames high, crew members leaping into the sea.

The eyes of the man looking back at me were steely-gray, inside wire-rimmed spectacles; the jaw was smallish for the round face, the cropped hair thinning, the few remaining bristles those of a tough, aging boar. I judged him a hard fifty. The mouth was set, the voice tight; the overall effect one of vigorous disapproval.

“Colonel Rush,” he said, neutrally.

“May I ask, sir, what has happened?”

“Well, where to start,” he said with disgust. “The admiral has been running this unit haphazardly.” His disapproval hinted at satisfaction,
I told you so
, and suggested that any alleged lapses had provided Homza opportunity. He went on. “Special privileges. Avoidance of rules. Your girlfriend for instance, Colonel. Granted security clearance!”

“She had that already, sir, at Electric Boat.”

“Not from us. Starting now, share classified material and your pillow talk,” he said, as if those two words constituted a perversion, “will have dire consequences.” He looked disgusted. “Are we clear?”

“Sir, my original deal with the admiral—when I extended my tour—was contingent on Karen being in the loop.”

He looked astounded. “Your deal with the United States of America is not. Your personal life is not my concern. You’ve also shared information with local police. Admiral Galli failed to discipline you.
Strike two.
I’ve long argued that we need to rein in loose cannons around here, your unit in particular.”

I thought,
Put everyone under your control, you mean.

I said, “You’re closing us down?”

“You had your people in D.C. exceed your mandate, poke around in places that don’t concern you. Strike three. When this mission is done, you’ll be moved out of research, into field units.”

I did not back down. “Sir, if by
exceeding mandate
you’re talking about Project Enhancing Warfighters, Sarah made a legal, logical inquiry. I was sent here to check on special projects. I’d say that human experimentation counts.”

I saw a sneer. “Colonel. That sounds like Auschwitz. I’m authorized by the secretary of defense himself to tell you that, in Warfighters, no work was done near Barrow. Furthermore, all volunteers in that failed experiment are fine today, living wholesome lives, in different places, and none suffered side effects. So let’s put this to rest.”

“That was always my intent, sir,” meaning:
Then why not send me what I asked for?

He seemed surprised that I was still pushing. Generals don’t explain things to colonels. But his eyes shifted. His jaw muscles clenched. He didn’t just order me to shut up. Something else was going on here.

He said, “We don’t think it’s in the public interest to advertise every detail of every experiment. There isn’t a government anywhere that isn’t, at any given moment, looking at new germs, electrics, gasses. We both know what happens when you tell the public that. Shit blows up, shit that you’ll agree we do not need.”

“Sir, my people aren’t the public. Sarah’s vetted for classified material.”

“You are
not
to involve yourself further in an investigation that has no bearing on your mission. Just finish up, fast.”

Surprise! I’d been expecting to be pulled out, if Homza was closing the unit. “You’re keeping us here, sir?”

A sigh. “Your patron Admiral Galli made one last argument. He said the locals like you, and can make trouble in Washington if they feel jerked around. And that although
we
do not think a quarter-century-old law relevant here, it
is
law so someone has to carry it out. Five years from now, there will be no need for this. This is the last time.”

Now I understood.

“You’re ordering me to find nothing?”

A pause. “You’ve been up there for months and found nothing so there is nothing to find. You and Major Nakamura take four more days, file your negative report, and come to D.C. At that point we’ll discuss your future, and also the future of Sarah Kemp, who for now remains in custody.”

“Like a hostage?”

He drew in a sharp breath and I took a deep one. “Sir, I’d like to see the files on Clay Qaqulik. That’s my right as investigator. I want to see Warfighters to determine if it
is
part of my mission. Or, General, I respectfully request that we include a note in my findings stating that I was instructed to avoid asking certain questions.”

He didn’t move for a moment.

“Thin ice,” he said.

“Sarah only did her job,” I said.

“Remember what I said about pillow talk, Colonel.”

He clicked off.

•   •   •

THE SCREEN SHOWED GRAYISH SNOW. I TURNED ON THE LIGHTS. EDDIE
Nakamura was seated at the opposite table in a lab coat, his mask on, preparing to run a back-up screen on the samples—blood, skin, and hair—that we’d taken from the victims and cabin. Ranjay had done one already.

Eddie said, “Way to go, One. How to make friends and influence people.”

“Hey, he’s sending the files. It worked.”

“Sheep-dipped? Or real?”

“Who knows?”

“Sometimes I think on the day that Lord Jesus comes back to Earth, even then, the assholes will still play politics.”

Clay Qaqulik’s files were forwarded to us twenty minutes later, and I consumed them, looking for any connections, links, hints. He’d been stationed in Germany and California, not Alaska. His psych reports were clean and his FBI files complimentary. Unless his records had been sheep-dipped, there was nothing indicating involvement in any Army experiments.

Eddie looked puzzled. “Then why the big deal when Valley Girl asked for this? All they had to do was send.”

“She gave Homza the opportunity he’s been waiting for. He couldn’t care less about the files. Politics is right.”

“What do you make of Major General RoboCop?”

“He’s telling us he is big and we are small. He’s offering us an opportunity to fall in line, Eddie. That stuff about discussing our future? For Homza, training the rogue dog is a special challenge.”

“We’re rogue dogs? Woof!”

“Finish the screen, Eddie. We leave in four days.”

The clock was ticking now. Four days was nothing. In Eddie’s gloved hand sat a small rectangular plastic dish the size of a tape cassette, lined with three dozen small, half-inch-deep wells. Eddie deposited different blood samples into each well, then poured in reagents. He refrigerated the dish. If, during the next twenty-four hours, a sample turned bright green, it meant we had a poison. If the sample remained unaffected, it was harmless when it came to the specific toxics that we tested for.

“Hey, One! What are you going to do about Karen? You told off RoboCop, but truth is, he can yank you, or arrest you, he can stick you in ward seven,” he said, referring to a fourth-floor hallway at an Air Force mental hospital in Nevada. “Or he can do it the bureaucratic way, bust you down, post retirement, wipe away your pension.”