Ravenous Dusk (80 page)

Cundieffe thought of the thing he'd shot and blown up and burned in the Heilige Berg slaughterhouse. He thought about the sample he hadn't turned in to the lab yet. It was still in the Thermos in his battered briefcase, back in his suite. He hadn't touched it since he'd come back. It was part of what happened up there that he'd rather not remember, and until he received corroboration that it had even happened, he preferred to treat it as a phantasm. He thought about turning it in. He thought about throwing it in the Potomac, or into a blast furnace.

And then there was the question of Chan Durban. This kind of work was what he excelled at: picking a man's motivations apart and heading him off at his own conclusions.

He read the fitness reports and files on Durban, even the former Naval Intelligence officer's less classified memos, in order to get a feel for his mind. He found a man whose patriotic fervor permeated every routine duty, a man who probably hummed the Battle Hymn of the Republic as he ordered office supplies. A man who, for seven years, had monitored the most secret gleanings of the NSA's eavesdropping network with aplomb and discretion that would have earned him a place of honor in Hoover's Bureau. He had belonged to over nineteen chat lists on national security and foreign policy, and never tipped a secret, though his forceful arguments had the unmistakable backing of one who knows more than he reads in the news. He was addicted to the rush of talking politics and military history, and his presence on most of the lists was both sorely missed and savagely celebrated.

Cundieffe saw immediately how Greenaway must have operated Durban. Turn his patriotism against the NSA by spilling just enough to make him think enemies within the corridors of power were using the flag as a cover for atrocities. That it was the truth made it no less of a shrewd screwing, because Durban must have delivered dynamite into the rogue Lieutenant Colonel's hands. It could only be RADIANT dirt.

When Durban delivered it, Greenaway must have turned on him, because Durban vanished. Greenaway could rationalize anything, but he doubted the ex-Delta Force cutthroat would coldly kill a brother soldier. He hated the system, but loved the men, and subscribed to some sort of bloody-minded warrior's creed that would let him throw Durban to the wolves, but never put him in a shallow grave himself.

So Durban was alive and probably still in the United States. His love of country would not allow him to leave, and his training would show him how not to be found. He would know that he could just as easily hide in their midst, as in the middle of the Amazon. Probably feeling guilty for having betrayed his country, but still fired by what he'd seen, he would hope to clear his name by revealing the black intercepts, but he would do it smart, he would do it slow. He would be lurking in some sub-basement of the digital underground, putting out feelers to people who could help him bring his secrets into the light.

Cundieffe accessed CARNIVORE and put it onto a sweep for untranslatable encrypted files. CARNIVORE could crack PGP and other off-the-shelf systems with ease, but had to send tens of thousands of custom jobs to NSA, many of which took months to crack, and were stored until their priority became such that they got kicked up to the top of the waiting list. He forwarded a raft of such troublesome postings to the NSA's Bureau site. With luck, one of them would reflect Durban's fervent and smart, but now bitter, patriotic streak, and he would have his man.

Durban could be located because he was only a man—smarter and better-trained than most, but ultimately predictable. Paradoxically, the hundreds of missing people from the Radiant Dawn compound in Idaho were out of his reach, because their motives were inscrutable. What did Dr. Keogh want? Not to cure cancer, surely. He realized that was the bait that drew others to him. But cancer was not what human beings had come to believe it was, and Keogh knew it. He used cancer, as he used those who suffered from it, to affect some kind of change. But what did Keogh
want
? He saw himself not merely as an individual, but as a mutation, a macro-evolutionary event. A new species. What, then, did a new species want? To spread. To unify. To squeeze out all competition, and dominate.

The trees, spreading cancer. RADIANT pouring cancer out of the sky, but changing pre-existing cancer, not curing it, but growing it, changing it—into new flesh. The satellite was gone, but Keogh seemed unfazed.

He used the trees to spread cancer. He would use the people the same way. The missing people were carriers. They would spread out to sow their disease, their message of change. But first, they would come together to become One—

A little bit more before he went to bed. How he wished he were in LA, and going home to his house. He punched in a batch of the e-mail addresses for the Radiant Dawn outpatients in San Diego, jimmying into them with barely perceptible effort by another program in his toolbox. He was sickened by all the junk mail that pinpointed the cancer patients' fateful demographic. Alternative cures, spiritual guidance, lucky charms, funeral insurance. But in a few of them, he found something unusual. Flight confirmations. London. Munich. Tokyo. Paid for on different credit cards, none of which belonged to the addressees. All departing from LAX tomorrow night.

Tomorrow. The e-mails had been sent only yesterday, days after RADIANT was shot down. It could mean only one thing. There had to be another mode of spreading the disease that was Keogh, and these people had been infected—absorbed. They were going to be One—

He rubbed his eyes and looked at his watch. Eleven thirty. Outside, sleet fell like tracer fire in the blackness. He looked around him, noticing for the first time that the office had emptied hours before. In the cavernous hush, his pulse throbbed in his ears. He jumped when his phone rang. "Agent Cundieffe—"

"Martin, please come into my office." It was AD Wyler.

Cundieffe peered out through the glass of his cubicle for a long moment before he stepped out into the open. He understood Durban a little better now, because how was his situation any different? He'd thought he was doing the right thing, and now he'd been caught. That was how he felt. Reasons and ideals that were burning in his mind blew out and away, so much ash raining down through his mind's eye as he crossed the vast room and stopped before AD Wyler's door.

He hadn't seen the Assistant Director come in, and he'd been hard at work since before sunrise this morning, leaving only once to eat and use the restroom. He only noticed how long he'd been standing before the door when Wyler's voice boomed from the other side. "Come in, Martin. Ms. McNulty has gone home for the day."

Nervously, he shuffled through the anteroom, eyeing Wyler's secretary's desk as if she might be lying in wait behind it. Wyler's office door stood ajar, with the buttery yellow light of his desk lamp creeping out across the brown-carpeted floor. Cundieffe peeked inside, then crept in and closed the door behind him.

Wyler looked as if he'd been living in the office in the same suit, sleeping under the desk, if at all. His eyes were drawn down by black-blue bags, and his wrinkles had deepened until the shadows made a jigsaw puzzle of it. His hands played over the keyboard of a laptop sitting on his desk beside his government-issue terminal. A SCSI cable connected the two computers with a sleek briefcase with blinking lights on it—some kind of huge storage drive. The monitors of both computers were shut off, but Cundieffe could hear the drives clattering frantically. He frowned, hiding his mouth behind his hand as he turned and found a seat opposite the desk. The Assistant Director was locally copying off the network— untraceably clearing out the FBI's internal files. Such a thing was unheard of, but AD Wyler made no moves to stop or hide the transaction. He looked hard at Cundieffe for a long time, as if he was sucking the truth out of Cundieffe's eyes. Finally, he said, "I've been away all this week preparing another domestic crisis management center in West Virginia. I've only came back to copy some files, but I'm gravely disappointed to find that I was needed here. You've been meddling in Counterintelligence business, Martin."

His palms dripped. He looked around the sparsely furnished office. Every glass surface, every picture on the wall, hid a camera. They watched. "I believed it was related to the larger Counterterrorism case I'm pursuing, sir. Lt. Durban was manipulated by parties unknown to steal classified communications intercepts from the NSA that pertain to the Mission. I think I'm close to locating him, sir."

"Stop looking."

"What, sir?"

"Brady Hoecker has strayed out of the consensus view on this situation. His faction is flirting with heterodoxy, and I don't want to see you dragged down with him."

Cundieffe played to the walls. "But sir, all he did was feed me information that's led me deeper into the investigation. He only wants the truth to be known."

"We know the truth. Do you? He's been forced to recruit probationary members like yourself, whose understanding of the bigger picture is still foggy. When you see the whole, only his paranoia explains the variance in analysis."

"What—what happens to those who—stray out of the consensus view?"

Wyler rolled his eyes. "When shown how their perception varies from orthodox policy, they recant and beg the pardon of the group."

"But the government—we—cover for Keogh."

"It could be misinterpreted that way, yes. But imagine how the situation would deteriorate if Keogh weren't contained, and it became public knowledge that he had a cure for cancer, albeit one with dangerous side effects?"

"And Keogh is at war with the Mission."

Wyler nodded.

"But Keogh—perhaps the real Keogh, founded the group that eventually became the Mission."

"Yes, it's all very complicated. The situation is coming to a head rather rapidly, and there's no room for multiple paths of action. Radiant Dawn is indeed a grave threat to our national security and our way of life, but it's also a means to an end which all, in the final analysis, would find desirable. We don't expect you to understand such paradoxes, but in the fullness of time, trust that you will see it."

Cundieffe blinked. This was what he'd hoped to hear, but now it only felt like pacification, like stroking. "What is Keogh? Is he just a terrorist, or is he a disease, or is he the cusp of an evolutionary leap, like us?"

Wyler scoffed, shuffled some printouts on his desk and shoved one of them across the desk at Cundieffe. His eyes felt like peeled potatoes in his head, but he squinted until he made out the type.

RADIANT DAWN SURVIVAL SEMINAR

Come participate in a unique one-day event that could change your life. Learn about a revolutionary new treatment modality that is giving hope and adding life to those suffering from terminal cancer. We know you've been approached by opportunists, seeking only profit, who exhaust your precious time and energy with claims that don't pan out. Radiant Dawn has been researching cancer survival strategies for sixteen years, and has discovered a breakthrough like no other. If you believe, as we do, that cancer is not the end, and if you want to live, come and spend the day with us at this no-cost, no-obligation seminar.

Del Sol Amphitheatre

Wilmington Fairgrounds

2019 Industry Dr.

Wilmington, CA

Sunday, February 8, 2000

9AM to 1PM

Tomorrow.

"When this is over, you'll get clearance to review the Miskatonic Protocols, which will explain the whole thing. Suffice to say that Keogh is the earth's past come back to haunt us. We are the future. When we come into our kingdom, the world will never face such a threat again. Now go home and get some rest. You're going to need it."

Cundieffe retreated without another word and followed orders. He got his coat and went to the elevator, still chewing on what he'd seen in the Assistant Director's office. Absurdly, he was reminded of one of his Mule history lessons. As the custodians of civilization, his kind had on numerous occasions found itself charged with saving the works of civilization. When the Holy Roman Empire crumbled and the long night of the Middle Ages fell on Europe, it was Mule scholars who hoarded the knowledge of antiquity in abbeys and monasteries, while their gendered counterparts in the Catholic Church thought only of saving their own skins.

Wyler's new division had been working day and night to get the new Headquarters Domestic Management Center up and running, and Cundieffe knew there'd never been talk of an off-site center in West Virginia. Such a thing would only be conceivable if Washington itself was destroyed, or overrun by civil unrest—or a plague.

What's going to happen?
he asked the fisheye security camera in the ceiling of the elevator.
What are you going to let him do?

The passenger in 22A was being difficult.

The crew of the Island Air Boeing 707 had already disconnected his pager button and relocated seven of their sixty-two passengers out of earshot of the irritant, so that the only passengers left around him were the two Caucasian men who accompanied him when he embarked on Kiribati. Left to his own devices in the back of the cabin, adrift in two empty rows of bright orange seats, the difficult passenger still found ways to make his presence known.

"Excuse me, Miss?" he flagged down the stewardess. "You're of Polynesian descent, right? I was curious if you could tell me something, because I was reading your delightful in-flight magazine about the history of the South Pacific, and it seems there are some gaps you could fill in. D'you have any more of those macadamia nuts? I'm ravenous…thanks, so anyway—

"I've heard that you people evolved parallel to homo sapiens, but descended from, or at least crossbred with, a race of intelligent proto-humanoid fish that used to exist in these parts. You know, your ancestors in Ponape or wherever would stake out their virgin womenfolk on the beaches, and the Deep Ones would come rolling out and knock 'em up, and the offspring would appear human for about fifty years, but then they'd start to display amphibious traits—gills, webbed fingers and toes, and stuff, and finally return to the sea to perpetuate the cycle, which is why you people all look so well-preserved. And I read somewhere else that you people didn't acquire human traits at all until you ate Captain Cook…hey, don't go away, I'm talking to you—