Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (6 page)

Beyond, one could go left into the headmistress’s office proper, or right into a room she used for private conferences. It was into the latter room that Jack was led. His silent escort left him at the door, disappearing presumably to handle other pressing concerns.

When Jack stepped into the room, a man looked up. He was perched impatiently on the edge of one of the two facing sofas separated by a glass-topped coffee table. Nina raised a hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled. “This is First Deputy Hugh Garner.”

“Please sit down,” Garner said with a smile as narrow as his retro tie. He was a tall man with prematurely gray hair, severe as his smile or his tie. He had a face Jack associated with a late-night TV pitchman—smooth of cheek, shiny of eye, his manner confident or glib, depending on your point of view. One thing Jack could see right away: He was a purely political creature, which put him at odds with Jack, and therefore dangerous. “You need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible.”

He offered a sheaf of papers—forensic reports, possible witness interviews, search results, photos of everything that had been vacuumed up from Alli and Emma’s room. (Jack couldn’t help thinking of it in that way.)

Nina Miller settled herself by scooping the sides of her skirt under her thighs. Her eyes were bright, inquisitive, completely noncommittal.

Garner said, “First thing: We’ve sent out a news brief on the reason for government agents here, as well as the whereabouts of Alli Carson.”

Jack, preoccupied with the reports, did not immediately respond. He had stood up, moved over to the window so sunlight spilled across the pages. He kept his back to the others, shoulders slightly hunched. He tried to relax his body without much success. The letters,
words, clauses, sentences on the pages swam in front of his eyes like terrified fish. They swirled like snowflakes, spiraled like water down a drain, pogoed like Mexican jumping beans.

Jack was having trouble finding his spot. Stress always did that to him, not only made his dyslexia worse but interfered with the techniques he’d been taught to work around it. Like all dyslexics, he had a brain designed to recognize things visually, not verbally. The speed of his thought processes was somewhere between four hundred and two thousand times faster than for people whose brains were wired for word-based thought. But that became a liability around written words, since his mind buzzed like a bee trying to find its way into a blocked hive. Dyslexics learned by doing. They learned to read by literally picturing each word. But there was a host of disorienting trigger words, such as
a, and, the, to, from
—words crucial to decipher even the most elementary sentences—for which no pictures existed. In his lessons, Jack had been asked to make those words out of clay. In fashioning them with his hands, his brain learned them. But stress broke the intense concentration required to read, stripped him of his training, shoved him out onto a rough sea of swirls, angles, serifs, and, worst of all, punctuation, which might have been the scratching of a mouse against a wedge of hard cheese for all the sense he could make of it.

“There’s no way of knowing, however, how long our disinformation will hold up. On the Internet, where every blogger is a reporter, there’s a limited time we can keep something like this a secret,” Garner continued.

Jack felt the others’ eyes on him as he crossed the room. He spoke up, more to distract himself from his growing terror than from a need to engage Garner. In fact, his fervent wish was for a sinkhole to open up under Garner and Nina Miller, swallow them whole, but no luck. When he looked, both of them were still alive and well. “How long do we have?”

“A week, possibly less.”

Jack turned back to the gibberish that spitefully refused to resolve itself into language.

“You aren’t finished yet?” Garner said from over Jack’s right shoulder.

“I’m sure Mr. McClure needs a moment to orient himself to our standards of methodology,” Nina said, “which are quite different from those of the ATF.” She walked over to Jack. “Am I right, Mr. McClure?”

Jack nodded, unable to get his vocal cords out of their own way.

“ATF, yes, I see.” Garner’s laugh held a rancid note. “I trust our protocols aren’t too difficult for you to follow.”

Nina pointed to paragraphs on certain pages, read them aloud, as if to speed the process of familiarization by highlighting elements the team found of particular interest. Jack, his stomach clenched painfully, felt relief, but with it came a flush of secret shame. His frustration had morphed into anger, just as it always did. Trying to control that poisonous alchemical process was the key to maneuvering through the briar patch of his disability. He shuffled the papers as if scanning them for the second time.

“The reports contain no pertinent information, let alone leads or conclusions as to which direction the investigation should go,” he said. “What about the private-security people, any last-minute changes in the night watchmen, and have you reviewed the CCTV tapes for last night?”

“We’ve interviewed the security personnel.” Nina took the file from him. “No one called in sick, there were no sudden personnel substitutions. Neither the men on duty nor the tapes showed anything out of the ordinary.”

Had Nina read off sections of the report to help him? Had she somehow found out about his secret? Bennett wouldn’t have given him up, no matter the pressure, so how?

Garner said, “Edward Carson prevailed on the president to have
you reassigned to us. I’m not one to beat around the bush, McClure. I think his interference is a mistake.”

“A moron could understand president-elect Carson’s line of reasoning,” Jack said with a deliberate lack of edge to his voice. “I’m intimately familiar with the college grounds and the surrounding area. And because my daughter was Alli Carson’s roommate, I’m familiar with her in ways you or your people can’t be.”

“Oh, yes,” Garner sneered. “I have no doubt Carson considers those assets, but I have another take. I think this intimacy is a personalization, and will play as a detriment. It will distort your thinking, blur your objectivity. You see where I’m going?”

Jack glanced briefly at Nina, but her face was as closed as a fist.

“Everyone’s entitled to his opinion,” Jack said carefully.

The narrow smile appeared like a wound. “As the head of this task force, my opinion is the one that counts.”

“So, what?” Jack spread his hands. “Have you brought me here to fire me?”

“Have you ever heard of ‘missionary secularism’?” Garner continued as if Jack hadn’t spoken.

“No. I haven’t.”

“I rest my case.” Garner flipped the file onto the carpet. “That’s about all those reports are good for—floor covering. Because they’re built on old-school assumptions, we have to give those assumptions the boot or we’ll never get anywhere on this case.” He perched on the edge of the sofa again, linked his fingers, pressed the pads of his thumbs together as if they were sparring partners about to go at it. “It can be no surprise even to you that for the past eight years the Administration has been guiding the country along a new path of faith-based initiatives. Religion—the belief in God, in America’s God-given place in the world—is what makes this country strong, what can unite it. Move it into a new golden age of global influence and power. But then there are the naysayers: the far-left liberals, the gays, the
fringe elements of society, the disenfranchised, the deviants, the weak-willed, the criminal.”

“The criminal—?”

“The abortionists, McClure. The baby killers, the family destroyers, the sodomites.”

Again, Jack glanced at Nina, who was flicking what appeared to be a nonexistent piece of lint off her skirt. Jack said nothing because this argument—if you could call it that—was nonrational, and therefore not open to debate.

“There’s a Frog by the name of Michel Infra. This bastard is the self-proclaimed leader of a movement of militant atheists. He’s on record as claiming that atheism is in a final battle with what he terms ‘theological hocus-pocus.’ He’s far from the only one. In Germany, a so-called think tank of Enlightenment, made up of Godless scientists and the like—the same dangerous alarmists proclaiming that global warming is the end of the world—are promulgating the devilish notion that the world would be better off without religion. The president is beside himself. And then there’s the British, who haven’t had a God-driven thought in their heads in centuries.
The God Delusion
is a book written by one of them.” He snapped his fingers. “What’s his name, Nina?”

“Richard Dawkins,” Nina said, emerging from her near-coma. “An Oxford professor.”

Garner waved away her words. “Who cares where he’s from? The point is, we’re under attack.”

“What’s further aggravated the Administration,” Nina continued blandly, “is a recent European Union survey asking its citizens to rank their life values. Religion came in last, far behind human rights, peace, democracy, individual freedom, and the like.”

Garner shook his head. “Don’t they know we’re in a religious war for our very way of life? Faith-based policy is the only way to fight it.”

“Which is why this Administration is hostile to the incoming
one.” Having awoken, Nina now seemed on a roll. “Moderate Republicanism as represented by Edward Carson and his people is a step backward, as far as the president is concerned.”

“Okay, this is all very enlightening,” Jack said, “but what the hell does it have to do with the kidnapping of Alli Carson?”

“Everything,” Garner said, scowling. “We have reason to believe that the people who planned and carried out the kidnapping are missionary secularists, a group calling itself E-Two, the Second Enlightenment.”

“That refers to the ongoing—often violent—conflict originating in Europe’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment,” Nina said.

“A so-called
intellectual
movement,” Garner sneered, making the word synonymous with
criminal.

“Reason over superstition, that was the Enlightenment’s battle cry, led by George Berkeley, Thomas Paine, who returned to the pioneering work of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo, and Isaac Newton,” Nina said. “And it’s E-Two’s credo as well.”

“I never heard of them,” Jack said before he could stop himself.

“No?” Garner cocked his head. “Your ATF office was forwarded the official memos Homeland Security sent around. The last one was—what?—but three months ago.” He leered like a pornographer. “If you didn’t see it, either you’re negligent or you can’t read.”

“What makes you think this organization is involved?” Jack, the bile of anger feeding the heat of his shame, asked. “The most likely suspects are Al-Qaeda or a homegrown derivative.”

Garner shook his head. “First off, the terrorist chatter’s been elevated for about ten days now, but you know that ebbs and flows, and a lot of it is just trying to play with our minds. There’s nothing there for us. Second, there have been no unusual movements in the suspected cells we have under surveillance.”

“What about the cells you know nothing about?” Jack said.

Nina looked at Garner, who nodded.

“Show him,” he assented.

Nina fanned out a handful of forensic photos of two men, naked from the waist up, with fatal wounds on their backs.

Jack studied the visuals with a relief only he could fully comprehend. “Who are they?”

“The Secret Service personnel assigned to guard Alli Carson,” Garner said while Nina’s lips were still opening.

Jack felt an unpleasant prickling at the back of his neck. The news just got worse and worse. The photos showed the respective bodies in situ.

“The killers are professionals,” Garner said with an unforgivable degree of condescension. “They know how to kill quickly, cleanly, and efficiently.” He pointed. “They took their wallets, keys, pads, cell phones. Just to rub our noses in it, I guess, because we’ve locked down everything belonging to or attached to these two individuals, so there’s nothing the perps can do with the personal items. And see here.”

Beside each body, partially wedged beneath their left sides, were what appeared to be playing cards.

He peered more closely. “What are those?”

Garner dropped two clear plastic evidence bags onto the photos. Each one contained a playing card. Drawn in the center of each card was a circle with a familiar three-pronged symbol: a stylized peace sign. “During the war in Nam, U.S. soldiers used to leave an ace of spades on the bodies of their victims. These E-Two sonsabitches are doing the same thing, leaving their logo on their victims.”

Reaching down to his feet, he pulled a document out of a briefcase, read it out loud. “Faith-based initiatives and policies are spreading from America to Europe, where faith-based reasoning is taking root in the burgeoning Islamic populations of France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, et cetera. All too soon, Muslims will be running for office in these countries, and faith-based initiatives will begin there….” There followed a list of statistics showing the alarming rise
of Muslims into Europe, as well as increasing militance of certain sections.

“Here.” Garner handed over the manifesto. “Read the rest yourself.”

Jack, who was inordinately attuned to such undertones, wondered whether Garner suspected—or, worse, knew. Chief Bennett had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep Jack’s secret under wraps, but with the Homeland Security geeks, one never knew. They were as zealous as a Sunni imam, and if they didn’t like you—and clearly Garner didn’t like Jack—and if they felt threatened by you—and clearly Garner felt threatened as hell—they would move heaven and earth to find the skeleton in your closet, even if it was an enigma wrapped inside a conundrum.

Jack stared down at the impassioned tract, which was signed “The Second Enlightenment.” It contained a stylized peace sign identical to those on the playing cards found on the Secret Service detail.

“It’s official now,” Garner said. “E-Two are terrorists of the first rank. They won’t hesitate to kill again—I can guarantee you that because E-Two’s manifesto calls for a drastic change in the current president’s faith-based policies before he leaves office. We believe that it is seeking to discredit him in front of the entire world, to sabotage his legacy, to force him to admit that his policies are wrong.” He took the document back from Jack. “It’s clear from the evidence that E-Two has abducted Alli Carson. I want all our energies concentrated on this organization.”