Mark of Evil (33 page)

“He’s a widower, as you probably know, but he isn’t dating, if that’s what you mean. He’s pretty straightlaced. Religious type.”

“No, not that. Something else.”

“Oh?”

“About getting his autograph,” Malatov said with a grin. “Getting it from him personally, I mean. I’m a big fan of his.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, he’s very approachable.”

Malatov was pleased with that.

Arnold continued, “I’m sure that most of our basic procedures here will be similar to your last assignment. Where was it?”

“Miami.”

“Right.” Agent Arnold paused and studied Malatov carefully. “I was reading something about Florida recently. Maybe it was in
National Geographic
, but I can’t recall exactly.”

Malatov leveled an intense visual bead on Agent Arnold. “Yeah?” he said.

“Yes,” Agent Arnold continued. “An article about diving for buried treasure off the Florida Keys. Men looking for a trunk full of Spanish doubloons.”

Their eyes locked as the two men studied each other. Both knew that the room was full of tiny video cameras and voice recorders. Malatov arched his eyebrows with a feigned look of innocent interest. “You don’t say. Diving for treasure. That sounds exciting.”

“Well,” Agent Arnold said, rising to his feet, “let me show you to your locker. Then I’ll show you around the White House grounds.”

Two floors up, in the Oval Office, President Hank Hewbright had his suit coat off and his tie loosened. He was sitting on the couch with a posture of exhaustion. At the same time his face radiated a strange expression of calm. It wasn’t a look of resignation. More like a quiet acceptance of things as they really were—things that might not be changeable, despite his position as chief executive, even if he wished otherwise.

Vice President Darrell Zandibar sat across from him, looking formal and a little stiff.

Hewbright was blunt. “Darrell, I need to know if the press reports are accurate.”

“Which ones?”

“I think you know. About your disagreement with me. Your saying that my administration needs to change direction on the Global Alliance issue. That we need to ‘link arms’ with the Alliance. I think that’s the way you put it.”

“That’s accurate,” Zandibar said.

“Then we have a serious problem,” Hewbright retorted. “You’re free to disagree with me—but privately, not publicly.”

“The Global Alliance sanctions are crippling us,” Zandibar shot back. “If we don’t dial back the economic vise they have us in, we won’t have much of a country left.”

Hewbright thought on that. “Darrell, I asked you once, before the Senate trial, whether you were prepared to take over if I was removed from office. You said that you didn’t want that for yourself. Do you still feel that way?”

“Well, Hank, you beat the Senate charges. They didn’t remove you. So the idea of my replacing you—stepping in—that’s all moot now. It’s off the table. Isn’t it?”

The president took a long, hard, burdened look at his vice president. “Unless something should happen to me, of course.”

“That isn’t going to happen.”

“Can we be sure? For some time, the international media has been quoting you more than me. Almost daily. As if it was just a matter of time. As if the news media, the elite press that’s controlled by the Global Alliance, knows something I don’t.”

Hewbright stood up and stretched and then sauntered over to the Resolute Desk, where he had a pile of papers he still needed to review.

Zandibar also rose from his chair, looking a little uneasy, as if he didn’t know whether to excuse himself or to stay.

The president leafed casually through a few of the documents on his desk. Then he threw out a final comment, almost as an afterthought. Not based on anything except the quiet, inexplicable certainty down deep that, having defied the brutal Global Alliance thus far, his luck
might be running out. “Darrell, an interesting historical anecdote—in the weeks leading up to Lincoln’s death, history tells us that the city of Washington was awash with rumors about plots mounting against him. Interesting thing about that. This city never has been able to keep a secret. Not really.”

Then he looked up and stared his vice president in the eye.

FORTY-FIVE

ANIMAL TESTING LAB #6—DIGITAL IMAGERY LAB

New Babylon, Iraq

Ethan March hung lifelessly from the straps in the testing lab like a gutted animal after the hunt. The holographic image still hovered in the air in front of him while the two lab scientists talked.

The blond, broad-shouldered lab technician with horn-rimmed glasses was shaking his head. He was trying to explain the anomaly. “The metrics I’m looking at show that he’s in a state consistent with death. Heart rate. Pulse. Respiration. Just nothing there. He’s functionally deceased. I don’t think the chancellor is going to be pleased with this. I thought the point of the experiment with this particular subject was to demonstrate capture ability over the brain functions of nontaggers. And to extract information from him.”

The chief stood next to him. “No, I’m satisfied now with the termination option we’ve developed with our chimps, and now with Mr. March, our human subject. The laser-focusing technique is excellent. A direct signal to the part of the cortex that will stop the heart. But you’re right. The chancellor didn’t want to waste this subject on testing the termination control. What we really wanted with this human subject was a complete capture of the neuron firing process in the brain.” He looked at the monitor connected to the EEG leads wired to Ethan March’s skull.

“Yet, oddly, he’s not flatlining,” the chief said. “Perhaps he’s in a permanent vegetative state.” He strode over to a panel and tapped in the code for brain neuroinformatics analysis. “Let’s see what thought processes are going on inside that skull. There should be no imagery or language waves.”

It took only a few seconds for a trail of digital code to stream across the screen. “I’m getting something,” the chief announced. “Okay, it’s analyzing his brain language process.” He touched the screen for the icon to decode the language portion of Ethan’s brain waves.

A few seconds passed. The monitor cleared. Then the results appeared on the screen.

The chief looked, and then he looked again. He scowled. “What is this? What’s going on?”

The lab tech dashed over next to him. He looked at the screen and shook his head in disbelief. It was a sentence, translated from Ethan’s brain by the computer program. It read,
Greater is He that is in me, than he that is in the world.

They both looked up at Ethan through the big plate-glass window that separated them from the testing room. The chief cocked his head as if he sensed something coming, something far beyond science or advanced technology, but that he could not have stopped in any event.

A sudden brilliant flash of light illuminated the lab-testing room, like a nuclear fission, and the big plate-glass window separating Ethan from the two men in the blue lab coats shattered into a billion shards. The blast exploded into the control room and blew the two scientists back against the wall, where they hit with sickening
whacks
and then fell to the floor, unconscious. The monitors, keyboards, digital imagery equipment, biometric instruments—everything was sparking and smoking and beginning to melt with a nauseous, toxic stench.

Hanging from his straps, Ethan opened his eyes just in time to see the holographic image that had been floating in the air before him begin to roil and ignite, as if it had caught on fire. It burst into a million digital dots until it finally vanished like a bad dream.

KARBALA AIRPORT, IRAQ

Pack McHenry had picked the Karbala airport as their staging destination for the rescue operation. It was a strategic decision, and he felt good about it. Sort of.

France had begun to expand the airstrip back around 2013 in a joint deal with Iraq, and Pack had insider relations with French aviation authorities and the
Aeroports de Paris
dating back to his CIA years. He felt confident that fact would help clear the landing of the Dassault Falcon jet with a minimum of questions. More important, they would also need to take off—hopefully with Ethan in tow—like a bat out of a bat cave, with a minimum of hassle from airport personnel on the ground.

But there was a third reason: the airstrip was less than one hour’s fast drive from New Babylon. There were no speed limits, the highway was straight between Karbala and Babylon, and it cut through flat desert lands. As long as they looked out for locals with donkey-driven
carts that might be in the middle of the travel lane, they would be okay. Depending again on a few other minor details, like whether they could even get their hands on Ethan and then stuff him into the vehicle, all of course without being surrounded by a thousand armed Alliance forces.

The other alternative would have been to try to rustle up a Blackhawk helicopter, drop it in really close to Ethan’s place of confinement, and to zip in and out with lightning speed. All of that would have been great, except when Pack tried to explore that option, it proved harder than he expected to get his hands on a chopper in short order. And of course there was the other problem: he had no idea where Ethan was being held. Maybe it had been wishful thinking, but he knew Ethan was a resourceful guy, and he’d half hoped Rivka would receive some kind of message from him by now. But Pack had talked to her twice before landing. Each time she said the same thing and harbored the same miserable tone in her voice: she had heard absolutely nothing from Ethan.

Pack, Victoria, his two pilots, and his two special-ops guys now stood in the private airplane hangar on the edge of the airport. A French agent of the Global Alliance was checking their incoming flight plan and their impressively doctored passports and asking a few standard questions. No, they weren’t bringing fruits or vegetables into the country. Their “business” in Iraq? They described it as “research at the ancient ruins at Babylon.”

Pack had been assured by one of his contacts that he could trust the airport agent with
Philippe
on his nametag standing in front of him. But Pack made it a habit never to bank his life on that kind of assurance.

Philippe handed their passports back to them and passed the flight plan over to the pilots.

Pack flashed an easy smile. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Philippe said. But he didn’t elaborate. He only stared.

“Is there some kind of issue here . . . ?” Pack asked, pursuing it a bit.

“Yes,” Philippe replied. He had the kind of expression traffic cops usually gave drivers when they pulled them over and were stupidly asked, “Is there a problem, Officer?”

Pack pressed. “Can you tell us the issue?”

Without moving his head, Philippe darted his eyes around, casing out who might be close. Then he bent forward and his eyes softened. “You need to know, Mr. McHenry, that inside New Babylon, in the digital testing laboratory building, a general alert has been sounded. I have no other details. Thought you should know. Godspeed, sir.”

FORTY-SIX