Ravenous Dusk (35 page)

As he read them, he tried to put himself in the mindset of the few Missionaries they had already identified. It was a corrosive idea, that so many of the United States' brightest minds, unified in the pursuit of national security, could turn against the government, becoming in effect all that they had fought against–anarchy, terror, genocide. What had they seen, to change them? Like artists and politicians, scientists cultivated spheres of patronage and spawned apprentices who would bear their mentor's name and ideas into the future. The Mission had to have other brilliant, embittered minds that had dropped out of the defense industry, or who worked on within it as moles, even now. The thought chilled him, and kept him working when the lights over the other cubicles began to go dark. It was Wyler's words, or rather Cotton Mather's that drove him:
The more cultured and intelligent you are–

Dr. Cornelius Darwin Armitage was a theoretical physicist, PhD. from Caltech at 23, who wrote many of the Atomic Energy Commission's earliest reports on the supplementary effects of radiation and nuclear explosions, such as the EMP. He worked at Los Alamos from 1953 to 1964, then moved west to Livermore, where he conducted cutting-edge research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Blue sky stuff, no details given, but Cundieffe already knew the last project he worked on was RADIANT. A clipping from a notice in
Aviation Week
, Sept. 15, 1984: "He was uniformly described as a brilliant thinker, a great humanitarian and a staunch patriot, and made extraordinary contributions to the field of energy weapons research until his abrupt retirement and tragic accidental death. His contributions to the Star Wars program will continue to guide his successors for decades."

Armitage was a founding father of the Mission, and probably had a hand in developing its arsenal of soft-kill technology. Cundieffe had been assured by AD Wyler, though shown no proof, that Armitage was dead once and for all as of July of last year. The image was pure propaganda: a rogue terrorist leader with the wolves at his door, dead by his own hand in a bunker, the pyrrhic climax of a quixotic massacre. He would be a better villain–and an even greater hero to the antigovernment radical right–than Timothy McVeigh, if his story ever got out.

Not so well-loved, but no less a threat, was the man who, Storch had said, currently led the Mission. Dr. Calvin Wittrock was a double-threat, a chemist and aerospace engineer, PhD from MIT at 24, part of the team responsible for the first developments in Stealth technology, but primarily attached to a slew of "unspecified" research projects at Edgewood Arsenal and Pine Ridge, the Pentagon's principal chemical weapons production facilities. His later work, like Armitage's, focused on nonlethal projects. He came to Livermore in 1983 to consult with the labs' R Program weapons designers to "reduce the imaging signature of missiles and orbital laser platforms." Like RADIANT.

Dr. Wittrock left the defense industry in June of 1984 to work for a pharmaceutical company at a field research facility in the jungles of eastern Colombia. He was reportedly kidnapped and murdered by "narcoguerillas," though the event, usually a flashpoint for media outrage, never showed up in American newspapers. The implication was that Wittrock was no longer a U.S. citizen, and probably working for a drug cartel. The Bureau's Colombian legat filed a report, but nothing conclusive could be proven. They found no one who could attest that Wittrock was in the country, let alone abducted. "The hands delivered to the US Consulate in Bogota were so badly damaged and decomposed that no positive identification could be made," the legat explained. He seemed glad to leave the whole situation in the hands of the State Department, which promptly forgot the whole affair. Wittrock went to ground in South America then, as he had last year. But he hadn't just vanished into the Amazon to fake his death: the ruined laboratory in the mountainous Colombian jungle hinted at years of secret Missionary projects, and its destruction now hinted at completion—but for whom?

Troops were drilling non-stop at Livermore, Los Alamos, Alamogordo, Ft. Detrick, Cheyenne Mountain, the MX and Minuteman missile silos, Ft. Meade, Langley and everywhere else the government of the United States of America did things the people weren't supposed to know about. Cowboy and Indians games, but so far the media had been placated by statements about routine security reviews.

In the wake of the explosion at Ft. Detrick and the Wen Ho Lee debacle at Los Alamos, the public liked to see its secrets aggressively defended. The government could well afford to run soldiers in circles and rack up live fire exercise accidents while Cundieffe picked through the careers of defrocked atomic wizards. They had to know the Mission wouldn't be coming for them.

Who they
were
officially coming for remained an open-ended question that no one had deigned to answer for him. Neither had anyone in real power dignified his RADIANT theory with a response. Quite by accident, he'd come across a news spot on the radio, three days before, about a fire that razed a Radiant Dawn Hospice Outreach Center in San Diego. The local newspaper's site carried a short article about the fire, which was believed to be accidental, and which occurred after hours, when the building was unoccupied. A picture of the center's senior counselor, a bald, middle-aged woman who gripped a flowery hat in her hands as she surveyed the charred ruins. In the picture, standing off a good thirty feet down the sidewalk, two men in dark suits and shades looking on. Cundieffe studied them until his eyes refused to see straight. Were they government investigators, or Missionaries, revisiting their handiwork, or were they just arson detectives with nothing better to do on a Sunday morning?

He had to believe that this made sense to somebody in the invisible hierarchy. RADIANT was the connection and the key, and he had to hope that whoever was putting the puzzle together and looking over the complete picture could see what was happening. They were One, And Not Many. They had to know the best path. He had to believe in them, as he believed in himself.

Everyone else in the office had gone two hours ago by the time he put down the files and laid his head on his desk to rest his eyes. Somewhere, very, very far away, he heard a vacuum.

He might have dozed off for a few minutes, because he jolted and said something to the effect of, "Yes, sir, it's on its way, sir," when his computer beeped at him and his phone rang at the same time. Picking up the phone, he recoiled from a blast of keening static like a dental drill in his ear, slammed it back in its cradle. It was too much like the crank-call dream he'd had this morning, if it was a dream.

A window on the monitor advised him that he'd received an e-mail with an attachment. There was no return address, no subject line, and nothing on the screen, just the attached, unlabeled file.

He moved his hand to delete it, suspecting a virus. A second window popped up on top of the unopened e-mail: a progress bar creeping towards 100%. "Printer #3403 Working…"

Cundieffe hit all the cut-off buttons to no avail, then turned off his computer. He stood up and looked down the ranks of darkened cubicles to the main corridor. There was no one else here. He no longer heard a vacuum.

Slowly, as if there were a tiger somewhere in the office, he crept out of his cubicle and half-ran, half-skipped to the printing station. The big workhorse inkjets sat silently in rows like washing machines, but the HP laser printer at the end of the row whispered as it pushed a fresh photographic image out onto its drying tray.

He looked over his shoulder at the vast, empty office again. Surely, this was some kind of network breakdown. He hadn't asked for anything to be printed, he hadn't even opened the damned thing, but who'd believe that it wasn't his fault. Less than a month at Headquarters, and—

Cundieffe looked now at the photograph, and his raving stopped dead in its tracks. He took off his glasses and held them up close to the image, blinking spastically to bring his damnably feeble eyes into focus.

It was a grainy black and white snapshot of three rows of tweedy, bespectacled men standing in a desert. Across the scrubby plain behind them loomed a skeletal metal tower with a bulbous pendulum hanging from the apex. They were talking to someone off-camera, looking at the ground, smoking cigarettes or pipes; not posing, and the blurred edges of the photo and the grittiness of the exposure told him that it was taken with a vintage Minox spy camera. The men looked like college professors and engineers, rumpled tweed trousers and shirtsleeves, thick glasses, bemused, put-upon expressions and grievous sunburns. They were scientists, and the pendulum was an atom bomb. This photograph was taken at the height of the Manhattan Project, at the core of the most secret enterprise in human history.

He knew this because the Limited Atomic Test Ban Treaty ruled out above-ground testing of nuclear weapons in 1963. He also knew this because he recognized one of the men in the front row: J. Robert Oppenheimer, godfather of the atomic weapons program at Los Alamos in the 1940s. His security clearance was revoked in 1954 after scathing HUAC hearings unearthed some Red unpleasantness in his family background. Apropos of nothing, he remembered a recording of Oppenheimer he'd heard somewhere. The outcast atomic visionary read from the Hindu
Bhagavad-Gita
, seeking an ancient precedent to his apocalyptic invention. In the telephone call, he heard again the haunting hollowness of Oppenheimer's voice as he read the words of Vishnu: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Looking deeper, straining harder, he recognized another man, in the back row, on the far end. The high forehead, the chiseled features and penetrating eyes that looked like coins in the desert sun. Looking not a day younger than the pictures of him on the Radiant Dawn website. It was Dr. Cyril Keogh.

He walked back to his desk with the picture clasped in one hand behind his back. Still scanning the office, listening for distant, muffled laughter. Someone was fooling around with him, someone who knew what he believed and how passionate he was about his work. If this paste-up job was as sophisticated as the telephone call about Mother was crude, it only

pointed more vehemently at a single source.

More tests.

It was enough to make a man want to use profanity aloud.

His phone rang.

He picked up the phone, but he held it away from his ear at first. There was no static on the line, though, only a voice he recognized asking, "Cundieffe? Agent Martin Cundieffe?"

"Brady?"

"Why aren't you in Idaho?"

Cundieffe's anger sprang out of the knotted muscles of his neck and jaw and seared down the line like hot wax breaking through the wall of an unevenly burnt candle. "I met with you the other day at great risk to my job, most of which these days seems to be researching…crap that I don't understand and which nobody else either knows or cares about, but which consumes all my time, leaving me no leisure whatever to play games with a fraternity of…of asshole mutant bureaucrats. I work diligently and without cease for justice every day and night of my life, and I hold myself to a higher standard than either the Bureau or any other agency of the government of this great nation. In short, I do not test well when I feel I am…when I'm being f-fuh-f-fucked with, Mr. Hoecker. Do I make myself clear?"

Had he just
sworn
? He didn't even hear breathing on the line. Well, damn him, if he expected an apology. "Brady, are you there? Did I make myself clear? Why in the world would I want to be in Idaho?"

"It's not about stolen cars, Martin. It's about
everything
."

He started to make good with a retort, but the dial tone cut him off. He laid the phone to rest on the cradle and sat down hard in the chair.

The phone rang again.

He began to walk away from it, but the anger and the paranoia were too much for him.

"Agent Cundieffe?"

"Who is this?"

"I'm sorry, sir. It's Agent Pete Waters, from the Moscow, Idaho, resident agency. I did the surveillance on Heilige Berg, the other night?"

"Right, right, I remember. You didn't find anything. Listen, I appreciate your diligence, but this is not a terrorism case. You said yourself that they didn't appear to be doing anything, and car theft is not a counterterrorism issue, in any case. Until there's some new development—"

"A boy from the compound ran away from the place in a stolen car last night. He hot-rodded into White Bird and crashed into the Dairy Queen. He's in sheriff's custody, right now."

"Is the Dairy Queen in an adjoining state, Agent Waters?"

"No, sir, it's the one right there in White Bird."

"Don't call me again."

"Sir, I was told you'd want to know about this." The Moscow agent sounded exasperated beyond measure, as if he were going to hang up, himself. "The boy's not too badly banged up, but he's real sick, throwing up, can't walk straight. He demanded police protection, but he won't go to the hospital. Says he needs to be locked up and a doctor needs to come to see him."

"Get to the point, Agent Waters, please. What is he so afraid of?"

"He said his church group was taken over by aliens. He says they poisoned the water and the food."

"The boy watches too much bad television."

"He said the aliens came from a place or a thing called Radiant Dawn."

His teeth gritted so hard he tasted a chip on his tongue as he shouted at the idiot agent from Moscow. "I don't know who put you up to this, Waters, but there's going to be hell to pay to OPR, come morning, if I don't get a straight explanation from you about this…this
shit
!"

Shocked gasp on the other end, a hand over the receiver, Waters laughing at him? "This kid is a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi fruitcake, sir, but he's telling the truth about one thing. He's got big tumors all over him like you wouldn't believe. He's real, real sick. They want to fly him out to the University Medical Center at Boise, in the morning—"