Ravenous Dusk (84 page)

Still shaking like a wet cat, Cundieffe climbed into the Range Rover, slid over to make room for Greenaway. His head bobbed and nodded, taking everything in. Greenaway plucked off his thick horn rim glasses and stuffed them into his breast pocket, blindfolded him with a damp wool scarf, cinching it behind the geek's big balding dome until his ears flared bright red. "You don't need to see where we're going."

"Maybe I can save you some time, and both of us a lot of trouble," Cundieffe said, in that reasonable hostage negotiator's tone that made Green away want to smash the rest of his wormy little face in. "Radiant Dawn is coming together soon—"

"I don't give a shit about those mutant motherfuckers," Greenaway growled in his purpling ear. "I want your masters, little dog. I want to jerk the leash they've got on you, and strangle them with it."

The Range Rover threaded its way through the evaporating crash scene and headed north to K Street, an expressway that turned into the Whitehurst Freeway after the harrowing ordeal of Washington Circle, which was only half a bitch at this late hour. He watched the signs roll past, Canal Road to M Street, across the Francis Scott Key Bridge, into Rosslyn onto the westbound 66.

"You're making a tremendous mistake, Lieutenant Colonel," Cundieffe wheedled. "They're trying to stop him! The Mission was his creation. We're not the ones—"

"They're running it, and you know it. I have proof."

"Channing Durban. You have something called ROYAL PICA—"

Greenaway didn't like that. The little geek knew. But of course, they knew everything. He smelled it on Cundieffe, the same smashed-ant stink of their lair, where they'd let him think he was blackmailing them—

Cundieffe risked a sickly smile. "Only you can't read it. We're looking for him, too."

Greenaway grinned big and broad. The wormy fuckers didn't know everything. "Oh, but
I
know where he is. Been keeping tabs on the poor bastard since we operated him back in January."

"You used him," Cundieffe accused. "You ruined his life."

"I'm not done with him yet, not by a long shot, nor you, neither." He let Cundieffe feel the cold, rigid muzzle of the rifle against the hollow of his jaw, enough firepower to put his egg-shaped head in orbit. He propped the gun against his boot, so he wouldn't have to hold it all the way to West Virginia. "Let's go see him."

Whoever first coined the homespun wisdom that those deprived of sight compensate with their other senses, thought Cundieffe, was utterly deprived of imagination, and probably was never blind for any length of time, either. For though his sense of the barrel that never left his neck was preternaturally keen, indeed, the rest of his brain had pooled its energies in imagining the most awful possible ends, and couldn't be prevailed upon to discover where he was. So caught up in this pointless pursuit did he get, that the gun reintroduced itself with painful alacrity more than a few times to bring his mind back to the business at hand.

Worst of all, Greenaway had not seen fit to bind his hands, as if to dare him to try to make some move to escape. They stayed put in his lap, but it took an act of will not to go for the door handle and dive out, or try to remove the sweltering, itchy wool muffler tied tightly around his head.

He was in a Range Rover traveling west through the heart of the Beltway, but between the cushioned suspension of the Range Rover and his unfamiliarity with the geography of the Capitol, he had all but abandoned hope of visualizing their position. All he could say with certainty was that they were not taking him home to the Georgetown Suites.

Two men sat up front, one driving and listening to but not speaking into a headset, while the other slept, faintly snoring and grinding his teeth.

Cundieffe had expected to be interrogated, to have to say, "I don't know," a lot, and get hit a lot, as well. But Greenaway started talking as soon as they got up to freeway speed. His voice was hoarse and frayed, laced with defiance, but so very tired. Cundieffe felt cold fingers tickling the valves of his heart; if he simply told Greenaway what he knew, he might get out of this alive. But Greenaway wanted to
confess
to him, as he apparently couldn't to any of his own men.

"It wasn't just revenge. I really believed the Mission were the real enemy. I hated you cocksuckers, don't get me wrong, but it lit up my brain when I saw what they were capable of. These were the fucking traitors who'd made every mess my men had to clean up. I saw it so clear, I couldn't see anything else—not Radiant Dawn, not who I was dealing with. And then it was too late. We were up there, dug in, ready to kick God's ass, if He had the bad judgment to cross us, but then they came, they came up out of the ground, geek, and we shot them but they wouldn't die, and what the fuck would you have done in my place, you fucking four-eyed fuck? All my goddamned men, each fucking one of the bastards worth a hundred of you, and they killed them all like they were already just meat. That's when I knew the whole goddamned thing had been a setup. That's when I realized who the really real enemy really was—"

Greenaway's ragged voice trailed off into the gritty hum of the engine. The gun jiggled against Cundieffe's carotid artery, and he held his breath, asked, "What about Durban?"

Greenaway made Durban his mole in the NSA to get intercepts that documented the government cover-up of the events of July, '99. He got the files, and convinced Durban he'd been suckered by Russians. But he got more than he asked for.

"There was something else, but it wasn't decrypted. I have no fucking clue what's on it, but I know Durban read it. It scared him badly enough that he didn't decrypt it, but he gave it to me."

"The Royal designation is an outmoded and almost mythic classification, something only Presidents and their elite security circles handled. It's probably about RADIANT. True, the government built it, but they had no idea—"

"Bullshit! What did they think it was for, solar fucking energy? It was a weapon, and they thought it was theirs. They just didn't know what the fuck they'd made. But I think they do, now."

"RADIANT was destroyed last week. Something new is on the horizon."

"That's not my goddamned problem, and it's not yours, either. Right now, I am the only goddamned problem you have."

"Why am I here, now? Why do you need me?"

"Need help getting in to Durban. Can't shoot him. And I want you to be there to see it, when it comes out. I want you to explain to me how the fuck this is business as usual. Then maybe you'll want to help me fuck your dickless friends."

"I'm not worth bargaining for, to them. I'm a probationary. They've been testing me, and I think I failed them."

"I don't care," Greenaway snarled. "You're still neck-deep in the shit. You knew what they were doing. You've known about the whole fucking thing for six months. I haven't seen any exposés on Radiant Dawn on
Nightline
or
20/20
, so I don't suppose you felt compelled to tell anybody, did you?"

Cundieffe shook his head vigorously, but Greenaway urged him to talk with a judicious jab of the gun-muzzle. The insight stuck him like an ice pick between the eyes, because it was the one angle that had never, ever come to light, in all his months of turning it over in his head. And why? Trust in the Cave Institute, in the system? No, because in the end he'd lost faith in them, too. Trust in himself, which was a nice way of saying blind, idiot arrogance, was why he'd kept his mouth shut. He, Martin Cundieffe, dickless detective, had to see for himself what lay at the bottom of it all, and damn the rest of the world.

Cundieffe told him everything he knew about RADIANT, and about the Cave Institute, about how they covered up the nuke in California and the Baker raid, and Heilige Berg. He left out only Storch—he couldn't say why, but he ran off on enough tangents to get prodded, as it was, and he couldn't explain Storch without thinking a good deal about it first. Somehow, what happened to the poor, sick Gulf War vet had been the saddest, strangest part of the whole affair. Finally, he told Greenaway about how Keogh started the Mission.

When he had run breathlessly up to the moment Greenaway's thugs carjacked him and sputtered to a stop, the old soldier sat in intense, deep-breathing silence for a long while. "What a clusterfuck," Greenaway whispered at last. "And your fucking people made it happen."

"They let it happen," he admitted, surprised at himself as he said it aloud. The fog that had wrapped it up all these many weeks, he now saw, had been the smoke from his ideals burning, and with a breath, he blew it all away. "They seem to have been more concerned all along with getting something from the parties involved in the war, and with keeping the whole thing a secret, than about preserving order or stopping the fighting. I—I've begun to suspect that there is something more behind the true identity of Dr. Keogh or the Mission's DARPA scientists, but I never knew what it was. It was us behind it all, but not all of them. One of them tried to get me to see, and he said there were others in the inner circle, who wanted to stop it…"

"They used you, geek," Greenaway's hot spit hit his cheek. "Just like they used me. They buried it all. Do you think, when this is over, they won't bury you, too?"

"Lieutenant Colonel Greenaway, can I offer you a bit of advice?"

His captor made only a tired sigh. Taking silence as assent, he said, "Don't you see yet that this isn't your war to fight? Your reasons for being here are purely psychotic, if you'll pardon the judgment implied by the term. Your grievances are all tied up in your own unwillingness to face your own impending mortality. The Mission shoots you down in California, humiliating you in the last op of your career, so you start a blood feud with them. That goes…um, badly, so now you launch a jihad against the Cave Institute. This isn't about stopping them to you, anymore. This can only end one way, with you dead."

He waited to get hit or shot, but instead, the muzzle went away, and the knot at the base of his skull was undone. The blindfold fell away. He blinked, tried to rub his eyes, but his hands were still dead in his lap. The Range Rover braked and the engine shut off.

Greenaway leaned in close, his breath rancid with hunger and coffee. Cundieffe marveled at the almost cancerous exhaustion etched in Greenaway's features. The terrifying old soldier he remembered from last summer looked ten years gone. His eyes, glassy red bulbs with a few strands of unbloodshot white woven through them, pinned Cundieffe to the seat more ruthlessly than had the gun. "You're saying I'm too stupid to get this done. That's why you're here. But don't feel bad for me, geek. If I lived through all this, I'd just kill myself sooner or later, anyway."

Cundieffe let himself be dragged out of the Range Rover. He slipped on his glasses, pinching at the tape holding them together. He expected to be blinded, but the night was almost darker here than it'd been behind the blindfold. Clouds split open in rifts on the upper-atmosphere winds, and the starlight reflected off a steep hillside directly in front of them, caked in a foot of fresh powder. He slipped right off his feet on his first step, but Greenaway caught him, steadied him, and pointed him up the hill.

Looking around, he saw very little to recommend itself in the way of a landmark. Trees, tall and wild but stooped under heavy mantles of snow, surrounded the field on three sides, sparse here, but forming a curtain screening off the top of the hill from the unplowed two-lane road. The road wound out of sight in only a few car-lengths behind a stand of pines on one side, and a sheer rock ridge on the other. Beyond that, more trees, a narrow valley that probably bedded a frozen-over stream, and mountains forever beyond that.

They were in a virgin old-growth pine forest some two and a half hours—say, for the sake of argument, one hundred twenty miles—out of Washington, DC. He'd overheard other agents at Headquarters talking about skiing a couple hours out of town on the weekends in the Shenandoah Mountains in Virginia. Past that lay the George Washington National Forest in West Virginia. It amused him more than it should that Greenaway had taken him across state lines, making this a federal crime.

"You go up there," Greenaway said in a low, brittle voice. His hand disappeared into his parka, and Cundieffe flinched away, but the hand came back out with a compact disk in a dull steel jewel case.

"Why me? Why don't you—?"

"He knows us."

"And you trust me to come back?"

Greenaway smiled big and bad at him. "If you got any guts in you at all, you read what he gives you. You'll come back. Besides, we'll see you." He looked past Cundieffe, who turned to see the sleeping passenger stir and get out. He produced a binocular night vision rig out of nowhere and slipped it on his head. He shuffled around to the trunk and got out the longest, meanest sniper rifle Cundieffe had ever seen. It was almost as long as the sniper was tall, and had a scope suitable for picking the tops off the heads of Martians on their home planet. With a nod to Greenaway, he trudged up the hill and instantly vanished.

"Where am I going?" Cundieffe demanded.

Greenaway pointed at the stand of trees up the road. Cundieffe stared but saw nothing until he realized Greenaway wasn't pointing at a place, but at one of the trees, which he suddenly saw was not a tree at all. Though of the same height as the others, its branches were steel and plastic, and cables ran from it, camouflaged by the evergreen canopy, to other artificial trees, presumably down the length of the valley.

"Cellular relays, but the atmosphere and the ore deposits fuck up the signals, so there's hard cable." His pointing finger ran down to the telephone pole's base, where a cable entered a buried plastic pipe that ran, visible only as a slight depression in the snow, up the hillside and into the trees where the sniper had gone.

"Follow the cable. He's waiting at the other end, about an eighth of a mile back in the trees. And watch out for traps, the woods're full of 'em."