Ravenous Dusk (34 page)

Cundieffe had been relieved that this test, if test it was, was quickly put behind him. The Mission project, coordinating dozens of resident agencies' searches and investigations without telling them what they were really looking for, and drafting threat assessments for every conceivable type of target left Cundieffe barely enough time for half a good night's sleep. But for quite some time, he had been working on cat-naps to steal time enough to pursue the still murkier suspect, Radiant Dawn.

Cundieffe hunted high and low for information on Keogh, but only stepped on toes for nothing. Keogh's personal records were sparse; he secured only the summaries of Keogh's personal tax records before he was cut off. Before ten years ago, his filings were painfully simple, with taxes paid from salary from something called the Scepter Corporation, though Cundieffe's efforts to find background on any company by that name yielded only dummy mail drops and business licenses in various states. Cundieffe smelled CIA-style front companies, and the tax records themselves seemed bogus as well, or at least retroactively filed on the same date. If he was government-backed, Cundieffe would have no more definite proof of it. Keogh, born full-grown, like Botticelli's Venus, stepping out of a seashell, his present unrolling into the past and covering—what? Hooves and a tail?

Radiant Dawn's tax records were sacrosanct, the IRS liaison told him. To open them would take an act of God—namely, the earth opening up and swallowing the vast majority of federal judges who would rule on such access, as well as the hospice's most excellent law firm.

He considered an alternate approach, tracking the patients who used Radiant Dawn's nationwide network of sixty-eight outpatient clinics. He was able to gather from their website that no medical treatment was offered, only counseling and hospice care in the patient's own home. Nowhere in the literature or on their website did they promise more than spiritual healing, and nowhere was any kind of retreat or hospice community mentioned.

The rest of the world made him believe the group was only laying low in America, because it was so very busy elsewhere. His patchy Russian evidence, and even patchier word from Africa, told of disappearances on a scale unheard of since the purges of Stalin and Mbutu. There was no explicit connection to Radiant Dawn or Keogh, and he had no proof that the man or his followers had even visited those countries. All he had were the flyers: obscurely worded, crudely printed, untraceable sheets proclaiming a healing miracle in the remote back-country, with no contact, no identification. Eight hundred cancer patients were believed missing in the Ukraine alone, closer to two thousand in Uganda and Kenya, with figures impossible to obtain from Somalia or Ethiopia. So much smoke, so much day-to-day catastrophe swarmed the preindustrial and post-communist regions that the vanishing of sick people hadn't even caught a reporter's eye, yet. He wondered how much the governments of those countries knew about what was happening, or if they would try to stop it.

And his own government was no better.

If they were adamant about suppressing the very existence of the Mission, they were seemingly phobic about admitting even to themselves that Radiant Dawn was anything more than it seemed. He had yet to summon the courage to call Radiant Dawn what he really thought it was, even to Wyler. He hadn't yet put it into so many words, himself.

Is it a cult?

Is it a plague?

Is it—

He became aware of the honking, and that it was directed at him, only after the light had turned yellow. He was at the front of the line at 17th, where Pennsylvania detoured around the White House, and was closed to traffic. He reflexively stepped on the gas, and the Chrysler sedan lurched into the midst of a crowd of demonstrators crossing against the light. Cundieffe screamed. He stomped on the brake, and the car bucked and bowed to the pedestrians, who cursed him and slapped his hood with their picket signs. The light turned red.

By the cut of their clothes, Cundieffe supposed they were European or yearned to be mistaken for same, and by their age and hygiene, he expected they were grad students and dropouts. They looked lost and routed, a loose pack of thirty or so, some carrying bullhorns, but shouting nothing. He read one sign as a girl shook it at him. DNA-ALTERED FOOD=MUTANT BABIES. A lurid graphic of the equation featured a popular fast-food logo begetting a pasted-on autopsy photo of an acephlic stillbirth. An otherwise naked man with waist-length dreadlocks wore a sandwich board with a graphic of a pair of hunters aiming at each other's heads: SAVE THE ANIMALS! HUNT EACH OTHER!

He was still six lights from the Hoover Building when the urge to call his Mother hit him. His eyes fixed on the bumper ahead of him, goosed the accelerator every so often and checked his blind spots for hippies.

He picked up the cellular phone and hit the speed-dial before the manifold ramifications hit home. He didn't—wouldn't—tell himself that this was about this morning's call. He just wanted to hear her voice. He'd been too busy to send more than a couple postcards since he last left Los Angeles. She'd left a few phone messages at his hotel room, simply, "It's your mother…" and the click of the line going dead. She'd always done that, hated talking to machines. It meant nothing. She was fine.

So why, with literally a hundred other calls to make, call her now? It was not yet five in the morning, back there. But Mother rose at four without fail, fixed herself a breakfast and read a book or baked something while lying in wait for the morning paper. She would be near the climax of her daily vigil, and as keenly awake as at any hour of the day.

"Good morning." He warmed up ten degrees just hearing her. His Mother sounded like everyone's Mother. She could make hard-bitten cops hang their heads in shame.

"Mom, it's Martin."

"Heavens, Martin, what an hour to be calling. Why aren't you at the Bureau?"

"I'm stuck in traffic, Mom. Foul weather, protestors, it's like a festival. You should come out."

She laughed musically. He could hear the echo of it off the sun-faded walls of their family room. "I hope they're giving you important work to do, over there, or I might have to come out."

Don't joke about that, Mother.
He hadn't even come close to broaching the subject of his gender, or lack thereof, with Mother, didn't ever want to. He didn't know how to discuss anything but work with her, had only found the means to hold meaningful a conversation with Mother at all when he'd learned the language of the Bureau. But could he even speak Keogh's name? It was top secret, and Mother understood secrecy. Her words with him would be harsher than Wyler's harshest if he compromised a case. But the voice on the phone…if it wasn't a dream, he realized, breaking out in dum-dum bullets of sweat, it was quite probably another test.

"Mom—how're the trees?"

"I haven't seen hide nor hair of those pesky whiteflies, if that's what you mean, but still no proper oranges."

"And the hibiscus, it's alright, too?"

"Martin, really, what is this about? Are you in some sort of distress?"

"Mom, did you or Dad know anybody called Dr. Lux?"

"Isn't that an old brand of washing soap, Martin?"

"Um, no, Mother, I'm pretty sure it's a person, or a pseudonym for a person. It's Latin," he added, childishly showing off for her. "It means 'light.'"

Mother clucked her tongue a full measure as she racked her secretarial brain. Finally, she said, "No, that doesn't ring a bell. Frank didn't see many doctors, Martin, you know that. Hadn't much use for them. Why would you ask?"

"I—" Lies failed him. This was Mother. "I got the strangest phone call, Mother, from a man who told me to ask you about this man, and about the Director's Blue files. And I thought it was nothing, but maybe, when you were at the Bureau—"

Mother made a sound like she'd swallowed her teeth, which, of course, was ridiculous, she had all her own teeth, she bragged she could tow a boat with them. "Martin, is this a secure line?"

"It's encrypted, but it is a car phone—"

"You improvident fool, hang up this instant. This is something we could only discuss in the flesh. Hang up, Martin—"

He disconnected and hung up like his hand was burned, and caught himself a moment later sucking his thumb.

There was more waiting at the office, more than enough to put his conversation with Mother out of mind.

First thing in the morning, he went into one of the Bureau's sensitive briefing rooms, acoustic black holes suspended inside the frame of the building on cushions of springs and sonic baffling, with white noise generators shushing mutely inside the walls. He sat at a heavily shielded computer and accessed Arpanet, the Pentagon's ultra-secure computer network, and read freshly hacked NSA intercepts. The Cave Institute had set up a Q Clearance and a limited access account for him, which enabled him to go straight to a link where any information they thought relevant to him was posted. This ceased to be an exhilarating thrill halfway through the first morning, when he saw the sheer volume of traffic. He had entered a long list of watch-words to flag messages he hoped would lead him to the Mission and/or Radiant Dawn, but even though he suspected his daily feed was skimmed and harshly edited before he got it, it was by turns exhausting and embarrassing, but almost never illuminating. On a good day, there were less than fifty messages, nearly all irrelevant trash or filler. Today there were over two hundred.

There were a few interesting tidbits, now and again. There was the visiting Russian GRU general who met the American Deputy National Security Adviser at a reception at the Kennedy Center, a week ago, and asked him quite plainly about US orbital directed-energy weapons programs. He was suspiciously bold and candid, and even more suspiciously sober, as he threatened to rub the Americans' faces in a gross military misadventure in the immediate future, before his own staff escorted him out.

There was the World Health Organization inspector who planned to address the Organization of American States tonight about the growing problem of medical vanishings in South America, which he proposed was a result of worsening health crises and poverty among the nation's vast rural Indian population. So hungry and diseased were many whole Indian communities in the shantytowns adjoining the cities in Matto Grosso and Amazonas, that they now showed signs of doing away with their sickest. Where cancer rates were near epidemic proportions, whole family groups had vanished in this manner. There was talk of a Messianic movement among the poorest in Rio and other big cities, of sick people going away to be healed, and the authorities there believed they might have mass suicides on their hands, if only they could find the bodies.

A more mundane avalanche of individual intelligence reports from the past twelve hours cluttered his Bureau e-mail. With follow-ups from the last week, interoffice flak and miscellaneous junk, it kept him busy for the rest of the morning. As the sun crept westward, the traffic would swell into a digital replica of the morass he'd spent the morning in, himself recast as the bottleneck, a farsighted, single-lane tollbooth operator. Of all the four thousand employees packing Headquarters, he was the only one who knew what to look for.

The Mission would not announce its presence by taking potshots at helicopters or sticking up banks. But he waded through every daily report from every office that dealt with any form of paramilitary activity, from every local law enforcement officer or private citizen who had contacted the Bureau, from every other federal law enforcement agency in the nation. Every other day, he chaired a meeting of the Counterterrorism Division's liaisons with the ATF, DEA, INS, and CIA, and combed through their traffic, as well. The others were competent and astute, and gave him all he could hope for, given that they had no idea what they were really looking for. It was like a Bureaucratese twist on the old biker gang saw—three men can keep a secret, if two don't Need To Know. It was like trying to assemble a puzzle, when you didn't know what it looked like or how many pieces it had, and the mail kept dumping big bales of random puzzle pieces across your desk on an hourly basis.

On the off-chance he thought he found a piece of the puzzle, he was to bring it directly to Wyler, where, presumably, it would be put in place in the shadowy recesses of the Cave Institute. The rest, he sorted into various boxes—some to be reviewed by Wyler or the AD's of other Divisions, or into the oceanic filing system, to wash up on another desk, someday.

Cundieffe ate his lunch at his desk as he reviewed another type of file. These were very old, and most had never been committed to the digital database. They were background check and security clearance files on all the scientists who had worked in sensitive aspects of the government's myriad of research programs. At the rate of fifty a day, he hoped to complete the stack by Christmas. He knew that he had a counterpart doing the same thing at the Pentagon, digging through the dossiers on every former officer in all branches of the military, who deserted or who got psyched out or killed in action under less than conclusive circumstances– people like Major Delores Mrachek of USAMRIID. Whatever shook loose from that Augean pile would be hitting his desk next week.

So far, he had isolated no less than thirty-eight candidates for further investigation, and he knew he'd only scratched the top. Thirty-eight exceptional scientific minds, burned out by questionable military research and cut loose to parts unknown after having been granted clearance to design and study weapons of mass destruction. The defense cutbacks in the early nineties created the lion's share of them, disaffected young Livermore whiz kids deprived of their toys when the SDI budget dried up. He'd have to narrow down the search parameters, if he wanted to get anywhere. The Mission couldn't be that large of a conspiracy.
Surely not as large as the Cave Institute, right?