“No argument.”
“Those other two, though,” she said, “now that’s a horse of a different color. I spoke with Top and Bunny and had them go through the whole thing, and something weird popped up.”
“Um, Doc…? There’s not one part of this that isn’t weird.”
“No, something weird er. I’ve read through a lot of your cases, and son, either you’re crazier than a dog in a cat factory, or you’re plum unlucky.”
“Both,” I suggested.
“That’s the consensus around here, too. Point is, I need to ask you a question. Those two Closers on the road… did they look at all familiar?”
“You mean generally, in the fact that they were Closers, or personally?”
“Personally,” she said. “Have you ever seen those two men before?”
“Maybe. There was something vaguely familiar about them, but no… I don’t think we ever had a conversation. I have a good head for faces.”
“Weird. I asked Top and Bunny that same question, and they said more or less the same thing.”
“So what?” I asked.
“So,” she said, “you may not recall their faces, but MindReader pinged their fingerprints, and you have met them before. In fact, you were in a hell of a fight with them a couple of years ago.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, but even I could hear the uncertainty in my voice. There really was something about them.
“Let me nudge your memory. It was a case before my time. You and the boys were at Shelton Aeronautics in Wolf Trap, Virginia. You got into a tussle with two men who showed you FBI badges. Do the names Henckhouser and Spinlicker tickle you at all?”
“Sure,” I said. That was early on in the Extinction Machine case. We were running down some leads on a case and stumbled onto the first two Closers we ever met. What we didn’t know at the time was that they’d just slaughtered everyone who worked for Howard Shelton, who we later learned was one of the governors of Majestic Three. Agents Henckhouser and Spinlicker put up an incredible fight, nearly beating the three of us to a pulp, and then nearly frying us with microwave pulse pistols. First of those we’d seen, too. “But the guys we fought on the road didn’t look like the agents from Wolf Trap. No way it was them. Not unless they had some serious cosmetic surgery.”
“Or something,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, Captain, that they may have some technology for changing their appearances. The fingerprints Bunny lifted from their vehicle are a perfect match, however. No question at all.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Those Closers in Wolf Trap worked for M3. They killed the staff at Shelton’s lab as a way of hiding his involvement.”
“Can you be certain of that?” asked Doc. “Meaning, can you be certain the two men you encountered at Shelton’s lab were the ones who actually committed those murders?”
“The staff were killed by MPP blasts.”
“Yes, but you later determined that Howard Shelton and the M3 scientists had developed their own versions of microwave guns. Just as Bill Hu developed his versions. Can you say for sure that the guns the agents had in the loading bay were the same kind? Exactly the same? Can you say for sure that the weapons they fired at you on the road in Maryland were the same as Shelton’s?”
I looked at her, then at Ghost, who had nothing to say but contrived to cock an eyebrow.
Into the silence, Doc said, “From the reports, it was three days from the time the Closers met you and your guys in Virginia to when they abducted the president. Plenty of time to have evaluated your efficiency, maybe checked you out — however they do that sort of thing — and opted to orchestrate things so that it would be handed off to the organization you worked for. After all, the DMS is designed to handle the weird stuff, and it doesn’t get weirder than that.”
“Doc,” I said, “that’s a hell of a jump.”
“It’s an intuitive leap,” she corrected, “and one I wouldn’t have made if it hadn’t been for those fingerprints.”
“Yeah, okay, but we gave the Black Book back. We shut down M3. All that’s over with.”
“Tell that to the Closers, hoss. Makes me wonder what they would have said had you had an actual conversation with them instead of setting an ambush.”
“Seemed reasonable at the time.”
“No doubt,” she said with a sigh, clearly not agreeing. “And that brings me to the second thing. As soon as we started getting reliable intel on the explosions around D.C. I had Nikki begin running random pattern searches to look for any common element. I admit it was reaching, but that’s why we do pattern searches. If you don’t look, you can’t find.”
“And did you find anything?”
Doc grinned at me like a happy cat in a canary store. In the short time I’ve known her I’ve learned that she does that when she has something juicy and nasty. She grooves on the grimmer aspects of the job.
“Although there was a lot of violence throughout the city, both aggressive to others and self-inflicted, in areas where bombs went off there was a greater concentration.”
“Which tells us what? That the bombs drove people crazy?”
“No,” she said. “The aberrant behavior stopped after the explosions. What I think is that whatever caused that behavior is tied to the bombs. I think those bombs were there to hide evidence. Maybe destroy whatever was affecting behavior.”
I turned off the video and took the controls back from Calpurnia. I needed to feel a measure of control. The drugs were helping my back, but the pain was still there.
“What kind of device could do that?” I asked.
“I have no dadgum idea, sweet cheeks,” she said. “I want you to find whatever they were blowing up. Maybe some of them malfunctioned — it was an earthquake, after all — and if so, I want you or Sam to make me a happy girl and deliver one to me with a big red bow on it.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and ended the call.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
The team of women moved like ghosts through the shadows, and everywhere they looked they saw death, destruction, and mystery.
The citadel had stood for over a thousand years, and had endured battles, sieges, takeovers, and atrocities. Yet somehow it had endured, even if partially ruined. Now it was a completely dead thing. The earthquake that rocked the region did what no armies ever managed to do. The walls were heaps of shattered stone, exposing framing timbers like broken bones. Tiles and windows were smashed to fragments as fine as powder.
Qadira, the team leader, stood by the stump of a massive pillar and shone a flashlight down into an opening that was too regular to have been caused by the vagaries of a shivering landscape. She fanned the dust away and saw the top of a stair, and below that another. Cracked and treacherous, like everything else, but still there.
“Over here,” Qadira called in a language that only a few hundred people on Earth knew, a language used exclusively by them. By the Mothers of the Fallen, and by their Arklight field teams. “The signal came from here. We must be quick. The United Nations peacekeepers will be here soon to evaluate the disaster.”
The other women picked their way through the rubble. The youngest of them, Adina, a girl of seventeen but whose face was pinched and scarred and stern, said, “Violin can’t be alive down there.”