The Alarmists (14 page)

He saw Maddy shiver at the thought.

“And when I glanced up at my father, he was looking at me, like he was waiting for the question.”

“What question?” Maddy prompted.

“Well,” Brent said, “nothing I’d heard in church prepared me for what I saw that day—what some guy with a bone necklace and scars down both cheeks did to a bunch of kids. And the thing I kept thinking was that the kids weren’t much older than I was.” The professor shook his head at the memory.

“So my dad explains what’s going on, how this is a ritual designed to appease whatever god these people worshiped, and for a kid raised in the Baptist church, let me tell you, it was quite an eye-opener. But do you know the most vivid memory I have from watching that program?”

Maddy did not and signified so with a single headshake.

“My father’s arm around me the whole time. The man loved me, I was certain of it. And once I realized that, it was like I had the green light to sift through things on my own.”

The professor might have said more, but his seat afforded him a view of the plane and he saw the propellers begin their spinning, which would carry him and Maddy over the ocean. Ten seconds later, a private entered the waiting area and signaled that it was time for them to board.

December 14, 2012, 9:33 A.M.

Alan Canfield knew all about lines. For years, as he’d navigated his way up the ladder at Van Camp Enterprises, he’d measured success by recognizing which lines he could cross and which ones he best respect and leave alone. Although the last few years had done much to blur his respect for lines, in each instance he’d justified his actions, resetting the lines with the authority granted him by his position. However, even he knew that what he’d set in motion crossed a line impossible to uncross, speaking some profound word of finality on the stakes of the project.

One did not murder an American military officer, and attempt the same on another, without repercussions. At this point he knew the cleanup operation in Balkh had failed, though he thought it might give the NIIU pause. And he also knew something he hadn’t before the attack, namely that only one of his targets was military. The other was a civilian consultant.

Nonetheless, the deeds were done, which meant that he had to intuit how things would unfold from that point onward. He harbored no delusions that the attacks would dissuade this team from their investigation. On the contrary, what he’d hoped to accomplish was the refocusing of their investigation on standard terrorist targets. All he needed was for them to remain occupied for eight more days. After that, they could navigate their investigation to the doorway of Van Camp Enterprises for all he cared. For if Canfield could pull it off, the CEO of the company, the one responsible for the entire operation, would be dead.

What he couldn’t do was continue his absence from the office for the intervening time period. To that point, he could chalk up his failure to return his boss’s calls to the extraordinary number of things on his plate, including his wife’s condition. Under normal circumstances few employers would begrudge a subordinate the time necessary to deal with such a grave family issue. However, Arthur Van Camp was not most men, and the duties assigned to Alan were of paramount importance.

Still, absolution was not what Canfield sought. Instead, he hoped for a general sense of disappointment from Van Camp. Disappointment was acceptable. It did not intimate suspicion.

The elevator deposited Canfield on the forty-third floor, where it was a short walk to his office. He failed to acknowledge his administrative assistant, who seemed surprised to see him but who quickly donned the proper sympathetic look in honor of Canfield’s wife. Once in his office he closed the door and set the file he was carrying on his desk. Before sitting, he went to a file cabinet, inserted a key, and found a bottle of bourbon secreted beneath a collection of old documents. Unlike Van Camp, who was allowed to keep his liquor in the open, Canfield had to partake on the sly. He uncapped the bottle and poured some into the ice-filled Styrofoam cup he’d brought with him. He took a long sip. Then he crossed to the window and looked down on the city below. While his office offered a magnificent view, Van Camp’s offered a much better one.

And the successful completion of Project: Night House was the key to that better office. With that thought in mind he left the window and went to his desk, sitting and opening the topmost file: a brief dossier with a photo attached.

Colonel Jameson Richards had a wife named Emily and a daughter who lived in Seattle. Her name was Molly.

In the next file, Captain Jim Rawlings. Divorced and with custody of a son, who was seven.

David Addison was married with no children, while Sylvester Bradford had five children with his wife—Connie was her name.

Captain Amy Madigan had a sister in Vegas. Other than her sibling, she had no immediate family that he’d unearthed, although she did visit a grandmother in a retirement home in Cleveland a few times a year.

Dr. Brent Michaels, the sociologist who was on the verge of bringing the whole operation down on Van Camp’s head, had no immediate family. In fact, beyond his university job, Michaels didn’t seem to have any attachments at all.

Canfield studied the rest of the names on the list, minus one Anton Petros. It was possible that what he’d done so far would buy him the time he needed, but he couldn’t count on that. He had to be prepared, which meant knowing the enemy. The problem with that was there were a growing number of people fitting that description. And he didn’t know if he could identify all of them.

He lifted the Styrofoam cup and took another drink.

—

A tranquil domestic household did much to make a man forget about life’s ills. Albert wasn’t sure where he’d heard that little nugget, but he couldn’t argue with it. He couldn’t remember a moment in the last twenty years in which he’d been more content than he was now. Who’d have thought it all came down to heat and a good woman? He said as much to Andrea as his newly awakened wife snuggled in the crook of his arm.

“It’s because people overthink things,” he explained. When relaxed, the South London accent—almost lost after so long living among Americans—really came out. “Keep it simple. That’s what I always say.”

Andrea tipped her head so she could see his face. “I love it when you let your accent have its way.”

He grinned at the mirroring of his own thoughts. It was true; were he to meet up with his mates, they would give him a brutal ribbing, tell him he’d been Americanized.

“I was thinking the same about you, love,” he said.

She snuggled in closer, and after a few minutes he thought she’d gone back to sleep. He tried to follow suit and had almost succeeded when her question brought him back.

“Who was the woman on the phone yesterday?” she asked.

Drowsy as he was, it took a moment for Albert to remember what his wife meant.

“Someone named Ruth. Said she was married to Ben—one of the men on the Antarctica job.”

“And . . . ?” Andrea pressed.

“And what?”

“Well, what did she want?”

“She said she hasn’t heard from him since he left for Antarctica. I guess she’s worried about him.”

“I don’t blame her,” Andrea said. “If you were gone for three months without a word, I’d be out of my mind with worry.”

“What makes you think you’re not already out of your mind?” he said, then kissed her on the top of her head.

“I’m in Arizona with a man who has three broken-down cars in the front yard. Of course I’m out of my mind.”

He laughed, closing his eyes to resume what he hoped would be a quick jaunt back to sleep.

“So are you going to call?”

His eyes popped open again. “Call who?”

“How would I know? I heard you tell this poor woman you were going to make a call or two.”

“Oh, that,” Albert said. “Alright then. I’ll do that later today.”

This time he didn’t close his eyes. Twenty years of marriage had granted him the ability to feel it in her body before the words left her mouth. Even so, she almost lulled him into a sense of complacency by holding it in for a half minute or so, until he began to think it might have been a false alarm.

“If I were that poor woman—”

“Alright,”
he said. With a grunt he removed his arm from beneath her head and got out of bed, grumbling all the way to the kitchen. He had to wade through the mountain of papers, note pads, and various other items on the kitchen table before he found the address book.

In thirty minutes he’d ascertained quite a bit. One was that few people liked getting phone calls before ten in the morning. Another was that none of the real friends he’d had on the Antarctica job—no offense to Ben Robinski—had been heard from either. And a third was that regardless of the fact that he’d submitted a workman’s comp claim to the number he’d been given, he had yet to receive a red cent.

“What kind of operation do they have running here?” he asked himself as he sat on the wobbly chair between the table and the refrigerator.

—

Until that morning Brent had always thought of himself as a coffee snob. He usually bought the more expensive darker blends, and while he appreciated the drink’s ability to pick him up when he needed it, he was no addict. That morning, though, it performed only one function: fuel.

When the plane landed last night, he suffered through a mercifully short debriefing at the hands of the colonel and accepted a ride to his hotel, where he collapsed into a dreamless sleep until Richards called to wake him. Maddy, having been cleared by the base medical staff in Afghanistan, was able to fight off the colonel’s request that she be transported directly to the hospital and instead slept in her own bed.

Looking across the table at her, in uniform but still sporting the sling, he saw that she looked as tired as he felt. He took another sip of the bitter brew.

In one sense, the room’s atmosphere reminded Brent of the coauthoring sessions he’d undertaken back when he was trying to get his name out there, collaborating on a book with a well-known name and scholar in order to enhance his own career. He’d work until he couldn’t mumble a coherent word, then collapse for a few hours before rising to do it all over again. In this case, though, the room also contained a somber air—the specter of their fallen friend.

“What I don’t understand,” Rawlings said, “is how people can let themselves be led around by the nose.”

Although Brent had given Richards an overview of his new theory—that some entity was nudging the world into panic for the purpose of profiteering from it—they’d done little groundwork. Most of the energy spent in this building over the last few days had gone into investigating the murder of Anton Petros. The professor understood the need to do right by the man, but the part of him that saw the big picture knew that their time should be focused on the broader investigation.

“What I mean is, why do people take everything they see on TV as gospel? Some newsperson says something and everyone just eats it up.” Rawlings paused as if considering his own words, then shook his head and said, “And it’s not just television. I can’t believe the number of people who read something on an Internet message board and buy into it without any critical thought.”

Brent kept a sardonic chuckle to himself. “People have a need to think that something bigger than themselves is going on.” When Rawlings answered with a puzzled look, Brent added, “For most of human history, people had gods to believe in. It gave them the assurance that something existed that transcended their own small, pathetic experience. Since World War II, though, God’s slowly been taking a backseat, and that’s leaving people scrambling for something else to latch on to.”

“What does God have to do with World War II?” Maddy asked.

“Nothing.” Then he paused and said, “Or maybe everything. Who really knows? What I’m trying to say is that World War II saw the juxtaposition of two events that have shaped the American collective consciousness. The first was the move toward secularism—humanism, scientific inquiry, that sort of thing. The second . . . well, that
is
tied to the war.”

Brent enjoyed an audience, which was why he’d ended up teaching. As he looked around the table now, he saw some of the same interested expressions he could pick out among his students back at the university.

“The bomb,” he said.

“What? You mean nukes?” Snyder asked.

“The Manhattan Project,” Brent said. “If you look back through the history of the presidency, you can argue that the Manhattan Project was the event that solidified the federal secrecy concept.” At registering the non-grasping faces around the table, he said, “I’m sure most of you are aware that the project was such a secret that not even the vice-president knew about it, right? In fact, the level of infrastructure that had to be created to keep it all quiet was a pretty big accomplishment, logistically speaking.”

“Right,” Rawlings said. “But what does that have to do with the gullibility of the American public?”

“Everything,” Brent said. “Think about it. For more than a hundred and fifty years people went about their lives assured—probably naïvely—that the government was acting in their best interests. At the same time, they had the secondary assurance that even if the government took a misstep, they could count on providential design. Then all of a sudden you get something like the bomb, along with professors and scientists telling you that God is dead, and you’re left wondering if everything you’ve ever been told is a lie.”

He saw a few lights go on.

“I guess that would be a scary place to be if you’re not used to it,” Maddy mused.

“Is it any wonder people see conspiracies everywhere?” Brent asked. “Or that some people can buy into just about anything someone says?”

Maddy frowned at that.

“I would think it would be just the opposite,” she said. “Wouldn’t never knowing who was telling you the truth force you to think critically?”

Brent was smiling and shaking his head before she’d finished the question. “Most people don’t want to do the heavy lifting. They just want something to believe in.”

In the silence that followed, Rawlings jumped to the logical conclusion.

“So this polarizing event you mentioned—that has to be something like a terrorist attack, right?”

Brent understood the underpinnings for that line of reasoning. As a military man, Rawlings was wired to think that way. And in truth, something like 9/11 made the most sense to him too.