The Dragon Factory by Jonathan Maberry
“Yep.”
“Something bigger than the NSA? This Russian thing, whatever it is.”
“Whatever it is, yes,” I said.
“So. Now’s not the time to debrief.”
“Right.”
He nodded. Rudy is the best of companions. He knows when to stop harping on a point, and he knows how to give space, even in the cramped confines of a compact car. We drove the rest of the way in silence.
We took the first exit off the JFX and headed west and north on a number of seemingly random roads, but then twenty minutes later Rudy pulled onto a rural road and drove a crooked mile to an upscale small private airfield. He made a bunch of turns until finally pulling to a stop fifty feet from a sleek late-model Learjet.
The stairs were down and the pilot sat on the top step reading Forbes and sipping Starbucks out of a paper cup. As we parked he folded the magazine and came down the steps to meet us.
“Captain Ledger?” he said, offering his hand. “Marty Hanler.”
I smiled. “Marty Hanler . . . the writer?”
“Yep.”
Rudy whistled. Hanler’s espionage thrillers always hit the number one spot on the bestseller lists. Four of them had been made into movies. Matt Damon was in the last one and I had the DVD at home.
“You going with us?” I asked.
“Be more efficient that way,” he said. “I’m flying this bird.”
Rudy blinked.
Hanler was amused by our reactions. “A buddy of mine called me and said you needed a lift.”
“A ‘buddy’?” I asked.
“Yeah. Your boss, the Deacon.”
“He’s . . . your ‘buddy’?”
Hanler was in his mid-sixties, with receding gray hair and a deep-water tan. Bright blue eyes and great teeth. He winked. “I didn’t always write books, fellas.”
“Ah,” I said. His handshake had been rock hard and he had that look that I’ve seen in other old pros. The “been there, done that, buried them” sort of look.
“Come on,” he said. “The Deacon asked me to fly you to Denver.”
“Good luck, Joe,” Rudy said, and I turned in surprise.
“Wait . . . you’re not coming with me?”
He shook his head. “Church wants me local so that I can help the staff deal with everything that’s going on.”
“And who’s going to help you with this crap?”
“My good friend Jose Cuervo.”
“Ah,” I said. We shook hands. “In the meantime, stay low and stay loose.”
“And you watch your back, Cowboy.”
“Always do.”
Hanler said, “When you fellas are done spooning maybe we can get this bird in the air.”
I shot him the bird and he grinned. Three minutes later we were in the air heading west to Denver.
Chapter Twenty-Three
MacNeil-Gunderson Water-Bottling Plant, Asheville, North Carolina
Two weeks ago
Hester Nichols was a nervous woman. For twenty years she had overseen production of bottled water at the big plant in the mountains near Asheville. She was there when MacNeil bought the plant from the bankrupt soda company that had owned it since the fifties, and she was there when the Gunderson Group bought a half interest in it during the spring-water boom of the nineties. When she was promoted from line supervisor to production manager she had suffered through three FDA inspections, two audits, and a transport union strike. Each of those were stressful, but they were also part of the job, and she weathered the storms one after the other.
Now she was actually scared.
It wasn’t just the unsmiling faces of the quality control advisors from Gunderson who hovered over employees at every step of the bottling process. It wasn’t even the fear that the IRS would somehow discover the new offshore account that Otto Wirths had set up for her.
What worried Hester was that she didn’t know what was in the water.
Otto told her that it was safe. But he had a weird little smile on his scarred face, and that smile haunted Hester, day and night.
She stood on the metal catwalk, fingers curled tightly around the pipe rail, and looked down at the production floor.
MacNeil-Gunderson owned three plants. Two in North Carolina and one in Vermont. This one was the largest—a massive facility that had the second-highest bottled water output in the South—and Hester oversaw the bottling and shipping of twelve hundred bottles per minute. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was just a drop in the bucket of the 170 billion liters of water the industry bottled worldwide, but it was a high-profit business.
Her plant did not bother with spring water but went for the more lucrative purified-water market. Hester had overseen the installation of top-of-the-line reverse osmosis water purification systems and the equipment for enhancing taste and controlling odor through activated carbon. The water was sterilized by ozone and then run through remineralization equipment before flowing like liquid gold into plastic bottles. The plant was fully automated, with only a skeleton crew of mechanics and quality-control technicians on hand. It was much easier to slip things past a small crew, and in the current economy few employees risked making any kind of fuss. Except for shipping, MacNeil-Gunderson was a nonunion shop, and that helped, too.
Before Otto had walked up to her in the parking lot of a Quick Chek four months ago, Hester’s main concern was playing spin doctor for press questions about the source of the water. A Charlotte newspaper had broken the story that purified bottling plants used water from any source, including tap water, seawater, brackish water, river water, polluted well water, and even wastewater streams. The paper emphasized that and glossed over the fact that purification was the key. And the water was actually pure. Or at least as pure as the FDA required.
Until Otto Wirths.
Wirths had offered Hester an absurd amount of money. The kind of money that made her knees weak, that actually took her breath away. More money than Hester could make in twenty years as a manager. Wirths showed her credentials that proved that he was CEO of the Gunderson Group. He could have fired her, but he never even threatened that. Instead he offered her money, and that was enough to buy her cooperation. And maybe her soul. Hester wasn’t sure. He only wanted two things from her: to allow him to provide the quality-control specialists for the plant and to make sure she paid no attention to whatever additives they chose to add to the water.
“It won’t affect the taste or smell,” Wirths had said; then he gave her a sly wink. “But . . . don’t drink it, my dear.”
When Hester had hesitated, Otto Wirth added another zero to the money he offered. Hester nearly collapsed.
She wrestled with her conscience for nearly a full minute.
That was at the beginning of May and now it was near the end of August. Seven hundred and twenty thousand bottles an hour. One million, seven hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred bottles a day. For four months.
What was in the bottles? The question nagged at her every day, and every day the money in that offshore account seemed smaller; every day she wondered if she had sold her soul for too small an amount.
Her fingers were so tight on the pipe rail that her knuckles were white. She stared down at the production floor as the thunder of the machinery beat at her like fists.
What was in those bottles?
Dear God, she thought, what is in that water?
Chapter Twenty-Four
Near Barawa, Somalia
8 days ago (Friday, August 17)
N’Tabo stopped on the twelfth circuit and lighted a cigarette. He smoked one for every dozen turns around the compound, rewarding himself for four kilometers with an American Marlboro. He liked the menthol ones. The moon was a dagger slash of white against the infinite black of the sky. He could only see a few stars; the lights on the perimeter fence washed the rest away. N’Tabo was okay with that. He wasn’t much of a star gazer.
He took a deep drag on the Marlboro, enjoyin
The rifle on his shoulder was heavy—an ancient AK-47 that his boss had given him ten years ago. It kicked like a cow and the strap had worn a permanent callus over his shoulder from shoulder blade to nipple. No amount of padding or aloe seemed to keep it from rubbing a groove in him. He believed he’d wear that mark until he died. Of course he figured he’d be dead by the time he was thirty anyway. The boss’s crew—the deputy warlords, as they called themselves—would probably shoot him just because they were bored, or because he was pissing against the wrong tree, or because he was just there. They were like that. Three of N’Tabo’s friends had been killed like that in the last six years. For fun or for some infraction of a nonexistent rule. It made N’Tabo wish that the Americans would come back. At least his father and two of his uncles had died in a real battle, back in Mogadishu. Allah rewarded death in battle. How would He reward death by boredom?
The cigarette was almost down to the filter and N’Tabo sighed. Just below the surface of his conscious thought he wished that something—anything—would happen just to relieve the tedium. The thought had almost risen to the point of becoming words on his tongue when he heard the sound.
N’Tabo froze with his hand midway to taking the cigarette from between his lips. Had he heard it or was his mind using the ordinary sounds of the jungle to play tricks on him? It wouldn’t be the first time.
He tried to replay the sound in his mind. It had been a grunt. Low, soft, the kind someone might make if they bumped into something in the dark.
N’Tabo spit out the cigarette and as he turned he swung the gun up, his hands finding the familiar grips without thought, his ears straining into the darkness.
But there was only silence. By reflex he tuned out the ordinary sounds of the dense forest and the desert that surrounded it. The sound had come from the west, toward the arm of the jungle that separated the compound from the town beyond. N’Tabo waited, not daring to call out a challenge. Raising a false alarm would earn him a chain whipping at the very least. Two men had been whipped last week. One had died, and the other’s back was an infected ruin of torn flesh over broken bones.
So N’Tabo stood there with his gun pointed at a black wall of nothing, and waited.
Ten seconds. Twenty.
A minute crawled by. The only sound was the tinny sound of a Moroccan radio station from inside the compound and the ripple of laughter from the deputy warlords who were playing poker in the blockhouse where they bunked.
From the forest . . . nothing.
N’Tabo licked his lips. He blinked sweat from his eyes.
He waited there for another whole minute, and then gradually, one stiff muscle at a time, he relaxed. It was nothing.
Then a voice said, “Over here.”
It was low, guttural, a twisted growl of a voice. And it came from behind him.
N’Tabo did not understand the words. He spoke four languages—Somali, Bravanese, Arabic, and English—but the voice had spoken in Afrikaans, a language he’d never heard.
Not that it mattered. He jumped and spun, and as he landed three things happened all at once. He saw the person who had spoken—a strange, hulking figure silhouetted against the stark glare of the compound lights. N’Tabo opened his mouth to shout a warning. And the figure behind him whipped a huge hand toward him and closed it around his throat. All three things happened in a microsecond.
N’Tabo tried to shout, but the hand was too strong—insanely strong—and not so much as a hiss escaped the crushing stricture. He tried to fire his weapon, but the gun was ripped out of his grip with such savage force that N’Tabo’s hand was folded backward against the wrist and a half-dozen small bones snapped, the ends scything through the cartilage and tendons. The pain was massive, but N’Tabo had no voice with which to scream at the white-hot agony in his arm. Within the cage of iron fingers his throat began to collapse and he could hear his own neck bones grind. The trapped air in his lungs was a burning fireball.
N’Tabo swung his other hand at the figure holding him; he used every last scrap of strength he possessed and he felt his fist blows slam into shoulders and arm and face. His attacker did not even flinch. It was like beating a statue, and N’Tabo’s knuckles cracked on the hard knot of the attacker’s cheekbone.
A different and far more impenetrable darkness began to engulf N’Tabo, blossoming like black poppies in his eyes. The last thing he saw before the darkness took him was a line of brutish figures swarming out of the shadows and leaping up absurdly high, grabbing the top of the corrugated metal compound fence twelve feet above the hard-packed sand. One by one the figures hauled themselves up and over the wall.
Blood roared in N’Tabo’s ears, but he heard two distinct sounds.
The first was the mingled chatter of gunfire and the high-pitched shrieks of men in terrible pain.
Then he heard his own vertebrae collapse with a crunch like a sack dropped onto loose gravel. N’Tabo clearly heard the sound of his own death, and then he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
In flight
Saturday, August 28, 10:47 A.M.
Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 13 minutes E.S.T.
I had the Lear to myself and sank into a large leather swivel chair next to a self-service wet bar that saw a fair amount of action during that flight. I’m pretty sure black coffee laced with Kentucky bourbon is neither tactically sound nor medically smart in light of what I’d been through and what might lie before me, but damn if I didn’t give a shit. It felt good going down, and since I didn’t want it to be lonely I had another. I also wolfed down six packets of salted peanuts. I’ve never understood why they can’t put a decent serving in a single bag.
After we were at cruising altitude Hanler put it on autopilot and came back to show me how to use the videoconferencing setup; then he retired to the cabin, cranked up an old Bob Seger and the Silver Bullets CD. Either he didn’t want to participate or his current involvement with Church didn’t extend to DMS secrets.
I clicked on the remote and immediately the screen popped on with a real-time webcam of the video lab at the Warehouse. I had ten seconds of an empty room and then Dr. Hu came and sat down. He was wearing jeans and a Punisher T-shirt under a white lab coat that probably hadn’t been washed since last winter. Instead of his name he had “Mad Scientist” embroidered over the pocket. Hu was a Chinese American übergeek who ran the DMS science division; he was a few thousand neurons beyond brilliant, but he was also an insensitive asshole. If the building was on fire and it came down to a choice of saving him or my favorite pair of socks, he’d be toast. He hated me just as much, so we had a balanced relationship.
“Captain,” he said.
“Doctor,” I replied.
All warmth. Like a Hallmark special.
He said, “Has Mr. Church told you anything about the video?”
“Just that it came from an anonymous source and that it’s tied to whatever’s brewing.”
“It’s because of the video that Hack Peterson rolled Jigsaw Team,” Hu said. “We received that video two days ago. We ran the faces of each of the people in the video through our recognition software and got some hits. Mr. Church will conference in with us to discuss those with you. Bottom line is that one of the faces is that of a man known to have been associated with a major subversive organization back in the Cold War days. Don’t ask me for details, because Lord Vader hasn’t deemed it necessary to share those with me yet.”
Cold War, I mused. Grace was right.
“You know,” I said, “Church could be eavesdropping on this call.”
I said it just to be mean and Hu looked momentarily unnerved, but he shook his head. More to himself than to me. “Point is, Church initiated a MindReader search on the man and found that almost everything about him has been erased from government databases. MindReader
“ ‘Footprints’?”
“Sure . . . think of them as scars from where data was forcibly erased from hard drives. It’s like forensics . . . every contact leaves a trace.”
“Except for MindReader.”
“Well . . . okay, except for MindReader. I think one of the things bugging the boss is that it would take a system a lot like MindReader to expunge this much information. Mind you, MindReader wouldn’t have left a mark, so we’re not looking at someone using our own system . . . but this is weirdly close.”
“Not sure I like the sound of that.”
“No one does. Anyway, we used MindReader to do extensive pattern and connection searches and located relatives of Gunner Haeckel, the man from the video. Stuff this other system, good as it was, missed. We accessed court records from family estates and pending litigation. His only living relative was an uncle who died in 1978.”
“And . . . ?”
“And everything the uncle had is stored at a place called Deep Iron, which is a private high-security storage facility a mile under Chatfield State Park in the foothills of the Rockies, southwest of Denver. Mr. Church sent Peterson and his team to the facility at dawn this morning. He never reported in.”
“What kinds of records are stored there?”
“We don’t know. The Deep Iron system only lists them as ‘records.’ Could be a collection of old forty-fives for all we know. All sorts of things are stored at Deep Iron. People store yachts, film companies store old movie reels, you name it. And about a million tons of paper and old microfilm records.”
“And we don’t know how it relates to the video?”
“No, so Church is looking for you to get us some answers. Your boy Top Sims is already in Colorado.”
“Call Top ‘boy’ again, son, and you’re likely to end the day as a girl.”
He blinked. “It wasn’t a racial slur,” he said defensively. “It’s street talk. You know . . . Echo Team are your boys and all.”