Twelve weeks earlier:
Mike Fleming was on his way home from his office at the DEA branch, completely exhausted.
Sometimes, when he was extremely tired, he'd lose his sense of smell. It was as if the part of his brain that dealt with scents and stinks and stuff gave up trying to make sense of the world and went to sleep without him. At other times it would come back extra strong, and any passing scent might dredge up a slew of distracting memories. It was a weird kind of borderline synaesthesia, and it reminded him uncomfortably of a time a couple of years ago when he'd been on assignment in some scummy mosquito-ridden swamp down in Florida. The hippie asshole he was staking out had made the tail, and instead of doing the usual number with a Mac-10 or running, had spiked his drink with acid. He'd spent a quarter of an hour in the bathroom of his hotel room staring at the amazing colors in the handle of his toothbrush, marveling at the texture of his spearmint dental gel, until he'd thrown up. And now he was so tired it was all coming back to him in unwelcome hallucinatory detail.
Mike worked in Cambridge, but he lived out in the sticks. The T only took him part of the way, and as he stumbled onto the platform he realized fuzzily that he was far too tired to drive. Did I really just pull a fifty-hour shift in the office? he wondered. Or am I imagining an extra day? Whatever the facts, he was beyond tired. He was at the point where his eyelids were closing on him, randomly trying to fool him into falling asleep on his feet. So he phoned for a taxi, nearly zoning out against a concrete pillar just inside the station lobby while he waited. The cab was stuffy and hot and smelled of anonymous cheap sex and furtive medicinal transactions. It was probably his imagination but he could almost feel the driver watching him in the mirror, the itchy, prickly touch of the guy's eyeballs on his face. It was a relief to get out and slowly climb the steps to his apartment. "Hello, strange place," he muttered to himself as he unlocked the door. "When was I last here?"
Mike knew he was tired, but it was only when he mis-entered the code to switch off his intruder alarm twice in a row that he got a visceral sense of how totally out of it he was. Whoa, hold on! He leaned against the wall and yawned, forced himself to focus, and deliberately held off from fumbling at the manically bleeping control panel until he'd blinked back the fuzz enough to see the numbers. Two days? he wondered vaguely as he slouched upstairs, the door banging shut behind him. Yeah, two days. A night and most of a day with the SOC team picking over the bones of the buried fortress, then a night and most of the next morning debriefing the paranoid defector in a safe house. Then more meetings all afternoon, trying to get it through Tony Vecchio's head that yes, the source was crazy—in fact, the source was bug-fuck crazy with brass knobs on—but he was an interesting crazy, whose every lead had turned over a stone with something nasty scuttling for cover from underneath it, and even the crazy bits were internally consistent.
Mike stumbled past the coat rail and shed his jacket and tie, then fumbled with his shoelaces for a minute. While he was busy unraveling the sacred mysteries of knot theory, Oscar slid out of the living room door, stretching stiffly and casting him a where-have-you-been glare. "I'll get to you in a minute," Mike mumbled. He was used to working irregular hours; Helen the cleaner had instructions for keeping the cat fed and watered when he wasn't about, though she drew the line at the litter tray. It turned out that unlacing the shoes took the last of his energy. He meant to check Oscar's food and water, but instead he staggered into the bedroom and collapsed on the unmade bed. Sleep came slamming down like a guillotine blade.
A couple of hours later, Oscar dragged Mike back to semiwakefulness. "Aagh." Mike opened his eyes. "Damn. What time is it?" The elderly tom lowered his head and butted his shoulder for attention, purring quietly. I was dreaming, wasn't I? Mike remembered. Something about being in a fancy restaurant with—her. The ex-girlfriend, the journalist. Miriam. She'd dumped him when he'd explained about The Job. It'd been back during one of his self-hating patches, otherwise he probably wouldn't have been that brutal with the truth, but experience had taught him—"Damn." Oscar purred louder and leaned against his stomach. Why was I naked from the waist down? What the hell is my subconscious trying to tell me?
It was only about six o'clock in the evening, far too early to turn over and go back to sleep if he wanted to be ready for the office tomorrow. Mike shook his head, trying to dislodge the cobwebs. Then he sat up, gently pushed Oscar out of the way, and began to undress. After ten minutes in the shower with the heat turned right up he felt almost human, although the taste in his mouth and the stubble itching on his jaw felt like curious reminders of a forgotten binge. Virtual bar-hopping, all the aftereffects with none of the fun. He shook his head disgustedly, toweled himself dry, dragged on sweat pants and tee, then took stock.
The flat was remarkably tidy, considering how little time he'd had to spend on chores in the past week—thank Helen for that. She'd left him a note on the kitchen table, scribbled in her big, childish handwriting: milk stail, bout more. He smiled at that. Oscar's bowls were half-full, so he ignored the cat's special pleading and went through into what had been a cramped storeroom when he moved in. Now it was an even more cramped gym, or as much of one as there was space for in the bachelor apartment. He flipped the radio on as he climbed wearily onto the exercise bike: Maybe I should have held the shower? he wondered as he turned the friction up a notch and began pedaling.
Fifteen minutes on the bike then a round of push-ups and he began to feel a bit looser. It was almost time to start on the punch bag, but as he came up on fifty sit-ups the phone in the living room rang. Swearing, he abandoned the exercise and made a dash for the handset before the answering machine could cut in. "Yes?" he demanded.
"Mike Fleming? Can you quote your badge number?"
"I—who is this?" he demanded, shivering slightly as the sweat began to evaporate.
"Mike Fleming. Badge number. This is an unsecured line." The man at the other end of the phone sounded impatient.
"Oh, okay." More fallout from work. Head office, maybe? Mike paused for a moment, then recited his number. "Now. What's this about?"
"Can you confirm that you were in a meeting with Tony Vecchio and Pete Garfinkle this afternoon?"
"I—" Mike's head spun. "Look, I'm not supposed to discuss this on an open line. If you want to talk about it at the office then you need to schedule an appointment—"
"Listen, Fleming. I'm not cleared for the content of the meeting. Question is, were you in it? Think before you answer, because if you answer wrong you're in deep shit."
"I—yes." Mike found himself staring at the wall opposite. "Now. Who exactly am I talking to?" The CLID display on his phone just said number withheld. Which was pretty remarkable, on the face of it, because this wasn't an ordinary caller-ID box. And this wasn't an ordinary caller: his line was ex-directory, for starters.
"A minibus will pick you up in fifteen minutes, Fleming. Pack for overnight." The line went dead, leaving him staring at the phone as if it had just grown fangs.
"What the hell?" Oscar walked past his ankle, leaning heavily. "Shit." He tapped the hook then dialed the office. "Tony Vecchio's line, please, it's Mike Fleming. Oh—okay. He's in a meeting? Can you—yeah, is Pete Garfinkle in? What, he's in a meeting too? Okay, I'll try later. No, no message." He put the phone down and frowned. "Fifteen minutes?"
Once upon a time, when he was younger, Mike had believed all the myths.
He'd believed that one syringe full of heroin was enough to turn a fine, upstanding family man into a slavering junkie. He'd believed that marijuana caused lung cancer, dementia, and short-term memory loss, that freebase cocaine—crack—could trigger fits of unpredictable rage, and that the gangs of organized criminals who had a lock on the distribution and sale of illegal narcotics in the United States were about the greatest internal threat that the country faced.
When he was even younger he'd also believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.
Now . . . he still believed in the gangs. Ten years of stalking grade-A scumbags and seeing just what they did to the people around them left precious little room for illusions about his fellow humanity. Some dealers were just ethically impaired entrepreneurs working in a shady high-risk field, attracted by the potential for high profits. But you had to have a ruthless streak to take that level of risk, or be oblivious to the suffering around you, and the dangers of the field seemed to repel sane people after a while. The whole business of illegal drugs was a magnet for seekers of the only real drug, the one that was addictive at first exposure, the one that drove people mad and kept them coming back for more until it killed them: easy money. The promise of quick cash money drew scumbags like flies to a fresh dog turd. Anyone who was in the area inevitably started to smell of shit sooner or later, even if they'd started out clean. Even the cops, and they were supposed to be the good guys.
Ten years ago when he was a fresh-faced graduate with a degree in police science—and still believed in the tooth fairy, so to speak—he'd have arrested his own parents without a second thought if he'd seen them smoking a joint, because it was the right thing to do. But these days, Mike had learned that sometimes it made sense to turn a blind eye to human failings. About six years in, he'd gone through the not-unusual burnout period that afflicted most officers, sooner or later, if they had any imagination or empathy for their fellow citizens. Afterward, he'd clawed his way back to a precarious moral sense, an idea of what was wrong with the world that gave him something to work toward. And now there was only one type of drug addict that he could get worked up over—the kind of enemy that he wanted to lay his hands on so bad he could taste it. He wanted the money addicts; the ones who needed it so bad they'd kill, maim, and wreck numberless other lives to get their fix.
Which was why, a decade after joining up, he was still a dedicated DEA Special Agent—rather than a burned-out GS-12 desk jockey with his third nervous breakdown and his second divorce ahead of him, freewheeling past road marks on the long run down to retirement and the end of days.
When the doorbell chimed exactly twenty-two minutes after the phone rang, the Mike who answered it was dressed again and had even managed to put a comb through his lank blond hair and run an electric razor over his chin. The effect was patchy, though, and he still felt in need of a good night's sleep. He glanced at the entry phone, then relaxed. It was Pete, his partner on the current case, looking tired but not much worse for wear. Mike picked up his briefcase and opened the door. "What's the story?"
"C'mon. You think they've bothered to tell me anything?" Mike revised his opinion. Pete didn't simply look tired and overworked, he looked apprehensive. Which was kind of worrying, in view of Pete's usual supreme self-confidence.
"Okay." Mike armed the burglar alarm and locked his front door. Then he followed Pete toward a big Dodge minivan, waiting at the curb with its engine idling. A woman and two guys were waiting in it, beside the driver, who made a big deal of checking his agency ID. He didn't know any of them except one of the men, who vaguely rang a bell. FBI office, Mike realized as he climbed in and sat down next to Pete. "Where are we going?" he asked as the door closed.
"Questions later," said the woman sitting next to the driver. She was a no-nonsense type in a gray suit, the kind Mike associated with internal audits and inter-agency joint committees. Mike was about to ask again, when he noticed Pete shake his head very slightly. Oh, he thought, and shut up as the van headed for the freeway. I can take a hint.
When he realized they were heading for the airport after about twenty minutes, Mike sat up and began to take notice. And when they pulled out of the main traffic stream into the public terminals at Logan and headed toward a gate with a checkpoint and barrier, the sleep seemed to fall away. "What is this?" he hissed at Pete.
The van barely stopped moving as whatever magic charm the driver had got him waved straight through a series of checkpoints and onto the air side of the terminal. "Look, I don't know either," Pete whispered. "Tony said to go with these guys." He sounded worried.
"Not long now," the woman in the front passenger seat said apologetically.
They drove past a row of parked executive jets, then pulled in next to a big Gulfstream, painted Air Force gray. "Okay, change of transport," called their shepherd. "Everybody out!"
"Wow." Mike looked up at the jet. "They're serious."
"Whoever they are," Pete said apprehensively. "Somehow I don't think we're in Kansas any more, Toto."
A blue-suiter checked their ID cards again at the foot of the stairs and double-checked them using a sheet of photos. Mike climbed aboard warily. The government executive jet wasn't anything like as luxuriously fitted as the ones you saw in the movies, but that was hardly a surprise—it was a working plane, used for shifting small teams about. Mike strapped himself into a window seat and lay back as the attendant closed the door, checked to see that everyone was strapped in, and ducked inside the cockpit for a quiet conference. The plane began to taxi, louder than any airliner he'd been on in years. Minutes later they were airborne, climbing steeply into the evening sky. In all, just over an hour had elapsed since he answered the phone.
The seat belt lights barely had time to blink out before the woman was on her feet, her back to the cockpit door, facing Mike and Pete. (A couple of the other guys had to crane their heads round to see her.) "Okay, you're wondering where you're going and why," she said matter-of-factly. "We're going to a small field in Maryland. From there you're going by bus to a secure office in Fort Meade where we wait for another planeload of agents to converge from the left coast. Refreshments will be served," she added dryly, "although I can't tell you just why you're needed at this meeting because our hosts haven't told me."
One of the other passengers, a black man with the build of a middleweight boxer, frowned. "Can you tell us who you are?" he asked in a deep voice. "Or is that secret, too?"
"Sure. I'm Judith Herz. Boston headquarters staff, FBI, agent responsible for ANSIR coordination. If you guys want to identify yourselves, be my guest."
"I'm Bob Patterson," said the black man, after a momentary pause. "I work for DOE," he added, in tones that said and I can't tell you any more than that.
"Rich Wall, FBI." The thin guy with curly brown hair and a neat goatee flashed a brief grin at Herz. Undercover? Mike wondered. Or specialist? He didn't look like a special agent, that was for sure, not wearing combat pants and a nose-stud.
"Mike Fleming and Pete Garfinkle, Drug Enforcement Agency, Boston SpecOps division," Mike volunteered.
They all turned to face the last passenger, a portly middle-aged guy with a bushy beard and a florid complexion who wore a pin-striped suit. "Hey, don't all look at me!" he protested. "Name's Frank Milford, County Surveyor's Office." A worried frown crossed his face. "Just what is this, anyway? There's got to be some mistake, here. I don't belong—"
"We'll see," said Herz. Mike looked at her sharply. Five assorted cops and spooks, and a guy from the County Surveyor's Office? What in hell's name is going on here? "I'm sure all will be revealed when we arrive."
A minivan with a close-lipped driver met them at the airport. At first it had looked as if he was heading for Baltimore, but then they turned off the parkway, taking an unmarked feeder road that twisted behind a wooded berm and around a slalom course of huge stone blocks, razor-wire fences, and a gauntlet of surveillance cameras on masts. They came to a halt in front of a gatehouse set in a high fence surrounding a complex so vast that Mike couldn't take it in. Members of a municipal police force he'd never heard of carefully checked everyone's ID against a prepared list, then issued red-bordered ID badges with the letters PV emblazoned on them. Then the van drove on. The compound was so big there were road signs inside it—and three more checkpoints to stop and present ID at before they finally drew up outside an enormous black glass tower block. "Follow me, and do exactly as I say," their driver told them. The entrance was a separate building, with secured turnstiles and guards who watched inscrutably as Mike followed his temporary companions along a passageway and then out into a huge atrium, dominated by a black marble slab bearing a coat of arms in a golden triangle.
"I've read about this place," Pete muttered in a slightly overawed tone.
"So when do you think they bring out the dancing girls?" Mike replied.
"When—" Lift doors opened and closed. Pete caught Herz watching him and clammed up.
"Rule one: no questions," Herz told him, when she was sure she'd got his attention. She glanced at Mike as well. "Yes?"
"Rule two: no turf wars." Mike crossed his arms, trying to look self-confident. You worked for the DOJ for years, mucking out the public stables, then suddenly someone sent a car for you and drove you round to the grand palace entrance . . .
"No turf wars." Herz nodded at him with weary irony. Suddenly he got the picture.
"Whose rules are we playing by?" he asked.
"Probably these guys, NSA. At least for now." Her eyes flickered at one corner of the ceiling as the elevator came to a halt on the eighth floor. "I assure you, this is as new to me as it is to you."
Their escort led them along a carpeted, sound-deadening corridor, through fire doors and then into a reception room. "Wait here," he said, and left them under the gaze of a secretary and a security guard. Mike blinked at the huge framed photographs on the walls. What are they doing, trying to grow the world's biggest puffball mushroom? All the buildings seemed to have razor-wire fences around them and gigantic white domes sprouting from their roofs.
A head popped out from around a corner. "This way, please." Herz led the group as they filed through the door, informatively labeled room 2b8020. Behind the door, Mike blinked with a moment of déjà vu, a flashback to the movie Dr. Strangelove. A doughnut-shaped conference table surrounded by rose-colored chairs filled the floor at the near end of the room, but at the other end a series of raised platforms supported a small lecture theater of seats for an audience. Large multimedia screens filled the wall opposite. "If you'd all take seats in the auditorium, please?" called their guide.
"The film you're about to see is classified. You're not to make notes, or talk about it outside your group. After it's been screened, an officer will brief you in person then take you through a team setup exercise so that you know why you're all here and what's expected of you."
Pete stuck his hand in the air.
"Yes?" asked the staffer.
"Should I understand that I'm being seconded to some kind of joint operation?" Pete asked quietly. "Because if so, this is one hell of an odd way to go about it. My superior officer either didn't know or didn't tell. What's going on?"
"He wasn't cleared," said the staffer—and without saying anything else, he left the room.
"What is this?" Frank demanded, looking upset. "I mean, what is this place?"
The lights dimmed. "Your attention, please." The voice came from speakers around the room, slightly breathy as its owner leaned too close to the microphone. "The following videotape was shot by a closed-circuit surveillance camera yesterday, at a jail in upstate New York."
Grainy gray-on-white video footage filled the front wall of the theater. It was shot from a camera concealed high up in one corner of the ceiling, with a fish-eye lens staring down at a cell maybe six feet by ten in size.
Mike leaned forward. He could almost smell the disinfectant. This wasn't your ordinary drunk tank. It was a separate cell, with whitewashed cinderblock walls and no window—furnished with a bunk bolted to the floor, a metal toilet and sink bolted to the wall, and not a lot else. Single occupant, high security. This is important enough to drag me out of bed and fly me six hundred miles? he wondered.
There was a man in the cell. He was wearing dark pinstriped trousers and a dress shirt, no tie or jacket: he looked like a stockbroker or Wall Street lawyer who'd been picked up for brawling, hair mussed, expression wild. He kept looking at the door.
"This man was arrested yesterday at two-fifteen, stepping off the Acela from Boston with a suitcase that contained some rather interesting items. Agents Fleming and Garfinkle will be pleased to know that information they passed on from the preliminary debriefing of source Greensleeves directly contributed to the bust. Mr. Morgan here was charged with possession of five kilograms of better than ninety-five percent pure cocaine hydrochloride, which goes some way to explain his agitation. There were, ah, other items in the suitcase. I'll get to them later. For now, let's just say that while none of them were contraband they are, if anything, much more worrying than the cocaine."
Mike focused on the screen. The guy in the cell was clearly uneasy about something—but what? In solitary. Knowing he was under surveillance. After a while he stood up and paced back and forth, from the door to the far end of the cell. Occasionally he'd pause halfway, as if trying to remember something.
"Our target here has no previous police record, no convictions, no fingerprints, nothing to draw him to our attention. He hasn't even registered to vote. He has a driving license and credit cards but, and here's the interesting bit, some careful digging shows that the name belongs to a child who died thirty-one years ago, aged eleven months. He appears to be the product of a very successful identity theft that established him with a record going back at least a decade. This James Morgan, as opposed to the one who's buried in a family plot near Buffalo, went to college in Minnesota and obtained average grades, majoring in business studies and economics before moving to New York, where he acquired a job with a small import-export company, Livingston and Marks, for whom he has worked for nine years and six months. According to our friends at the IRS, his entry-level salary was $39,605 a year, he takes exactly three days of sick leave every twelve months, and he hasn't had a pay raise, a vacation, or a sabbatical since joining the firm."
The man on the screen seemed to make up his mind about something. He ceased pacing and, rolling up his sleeve, thrust his left wrist under the hot water faucet on the sink. He seemed to be scrubbing at something—a patch or plaster, perhaps.
"James Morgan lives in an apartment that appears to be owned by a letting agency wholly owned by a subsidiary of Livingston and Marks," the unseen commentator recited dryly, as if reading from a dossier. "He pays rent of $630 a month—and you guessed it, he hasn't had a rent rise in nine years. And that's not the only thing that's missing. He isn't a member of a gym or health club or a dating agency or a church or an HMO. He doesn't own an automobile or a pet dog or a television, or subscribe to any newspapers or magazines. He uses his credit card to shop for groceries at the local Safeway twice a week, and here he screwed up—he has a loyalty card for the discounts. It turns out that he never buys toilet paper or light bulbs. However he does buy new movie releases on DVD, which is kind of odd for someone who doesn't own a DVD player or a TV or a computer. Once a month, every month, as regular as clockwork, he makes an overnight out of state trip, flying Delta to Dallas-Fort Worth, and while he's away he stays in the Hilton and makes a side trip to buy a Glock 20C, four spare magazines, and four two-hundred-round boxes of ammunition—although he never brings them home. Luckily for him, because he doesn't have a firearms license valid for New York State."
On the screen, something peeled off Morgan's wrist. He rubbed it some more, then turned the faucet off, raised his arm, and peered at whatever the plaster was concealing.
"Checking our records, it appears that Mr. Morgan has purchased over sixty handguns this way, spending rather more on them than he pays in rent. That's in addition to his other duties, which appear to include smuggling industrial quantities of pharmaceutical-grade narcotics. Now, this is where it gets interesting. Watch the screen."
Mike blinked. One moment Morgan was standing in front of the washbasin, peering at the inside of his wrist. The next moment, he was nowhere to be seen. The cell was empty.
Off to one side, Frank from the Surveyor's Office started to complain. "What is this? I don't see what this has got to do with me. So you've got a guard taking kickbacks to fool with the videotape in the county jail—"
The lights came up and the door opened. "Nope." The man standing in the doorway was slightly built, in his early forties, with receding brown hair cropped short. He smiled easily as he stepped into the room and stood in front of the screen. It's him, Mike realized with interest. The commentator with the dry sense of humor. "That wasn't something we pulled off a tape, that was a live feed. And I assure you, once those data packets arrived here nobody tampered with them."
Mike licked his lips. "This links in with what Greensleeves was saying, doesn't it?" he heard himself ask, as if from a distance.
"It does indeed." The man at the front of the auditorium looked pleased. "And that's why you're here. All of you, you've been exposed in some way to this business." He nodded at Mike. "Some of you more than others—if it wasn't for your quick thinking and the way you escalated it via Boston Special Operations, it might have been another couple of days before we realized what kind of intelligence asset you were sitting on."
"Greensleeves?" Pete asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. "You mean the kook?"
Mike shook his head. Source Greensleeves, who called himself Matthias, and who kept yammering on about hidden conspiracies and other worlds in between blowing wholesale rings like they were street-corner crack houses—
"Yes, and I'm afraid he isn't a kook. Let me introduce myself. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Eric Smith, Air Force, on secondment to NSA/CSS, Office of Unconventional Programs. I work for the deputy director of technology. As of an hour ago, you guys are all on secondment from your usual assignments to a shiny new committee that doesn't have a name yet, but that reports to the director of the National Security Council directly, via whoever he puts on top of me—hence all the melted stovepipes and joint action stuff. We've got to break across the usual departmental boundaries if we're going to make this work. One reason you're here is that you've all been vetted and had the security background checks in the course of your ordinary work. In fact, all but one of you are already federal employees working in the national security or crime prevention sectors. The letters have gone out to your managers and you should get independent confirmation when you get back home to Massachusetts and New York after this briefing round and tomorrow's meetings and orientation lectures." Smith leaned against the wall at the front of the room. "Any questions?"
The guy from the DOE, Bob, looked up. "What am I doing here?" he rumbled. "Is NIRT a stakeholder?"
Smith looked straight at him. "Yes," he said softly. "The Nuclear Incident Response Teams are a stakeholder."
There was a hissing intake of breath: Mike glanced round in time to see Judith Herz look shocked.
"We have reason to believe that fissionable materials are involved."