“Like…?”
“North Korea, China, Iran.”
“Yikes. So we shut them down?”
“So we shut them down,” he agreed. “The task force made arrests, cleared out the staff and sealed the building. Aunt Sallie has been assembling a team of special investigators, forensics experts, and scientific consultants to do a thorough analysis of the work done there and a full inventory of research and materials. Until then, no one is allowed inside, regardless of federal rank. Every agency in the alphabet wants in on it, and as a result the whole place has been sealed for months, pending the outcome of the jurisdictional knife fight that continues as we speak.”
“But the bad guys are out of there?”
“Yes. And that was enforced with fines, termination of licenses, confiscation of some research materials and computer records, charges against two administrators and one senior researcher, and a pending court case that will likely result in prison for at least one of those persons, if not all three. There are also fourteen members of the senior scientific staff as yet unaccounted for.”
“A second site?” I suggested. “Another lab elsewhere?”
“That’s the thinking, but so far we haven’t been able to get a line on where that lab is or even if it’s on US soil — though none of the missing scientists has flown out of any domestic airport. In itself, that means little because there are too many ways to export people from this country without raising a flag.”
“They could be in North Korea for all we know.”
“Agreed. As far as the Koenig facility, the building has been under constant surveillance since the doors were shut. Two-man teams, alternating between foot patrols and in-car observation. That responsibility has been shared on a rotating basis. Every five days another agency takes the job. Currently it’s ATF.”
“Okay. Why am I warming up my helicopter?”
“Our agents were first in the door, so we’re the organization of record that shut it down. By default, it’s up to us to sweep up any debris.”
“So, I’m what? A janitor?”
“Let’s face it, Captain,” Church said dryly, “it’s not the worst thing either of us has been called in this job.”
I sighed. Church shoved the cookies toward me, but I shook my head. There’s no moral justification for a vanilla cookie when every store in the free world sells a variety of chocolate-themed cookies. Like Oreos. It’s closer to an American icon than Mom’s apple pie ever was. Church didn’t have any Oreos, so I sat there cookieless.
“If this place has been sealed for a couple of months, what’s the hurry?” I asked.
“Apparently, when we shut them down they didn’t entirely take it to heart.”
“Naughty, naughty,” I said. “But this sounds like something the FBI should be doing. I know for a fact that they love this kind of bureaucracy. It gives them that tingly feeling in their nice gray wool trousers.”
Church gave me a look that could best be described as pitying. “They haven’t yet won the toss of the bureaucratic garter. If they go in, then someone in congress will be accused of favoritism.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
He nodded. “There are times I envy drive-through window employees at McDonalds. Red tape isn’t a factor when ordering fast food.”
“No joke.”
We gave each other small, bland smiles.
I folded my arms. “Again I ask — why now?”
“There was a police report of lights on inside the facility late last night. Officers on scene found the rear door broken open, but a quick search of the premises yielded no results. The intruders must have fled.”
“Could the intruders have been some of the missing scientists?”
“Certainly a possibility.”
“But why break in? What’s left to steal?”
“Unknown. When the Koenig senior staff realized the hammer was about to fall they tried to clear things up in a hurry. A lot of material was destroyed to keep it from falling into our hands and, by association, a congressional committee. The task force recovered melted disks, destroyed hard drives, and that kind of thing. Bug put his team on it to see if there was enough left to determine whether they trashed the actual records or if what we recovered was pure junk. Computer records are small and easy enough to hide. The task force might have missed a flash drive or some disks. If someone was there last night, it’s likely they removed whatever was hidden. However, we do need to check.”
“Swell.”
“What little we did recover,” Church continued, “tied into something that’s clanged a few warning bells for MindReader.”
When the DMS was formed it was built around a real mother of a computer system that was entirely owned by Mr. Church. Aside from being enormously powerful and sophisticated, MindReader had two primary functions. First, it collated information from all major intelligence networks, including some who didn’t know their data was being mined, and then looked for patterns. Often different agencies will have gotten whiffs of things or obtained pieces of information, but MindReader sorted through all of it and began assembling fragments into whole, actionable pictures. A lot of our effectiveness is built on being able to spot trouble before it literally blows up in our face.
MindReader’s other function was actually its scariest aspect. It could intrude into virtually any other computer system, poke around, take what it wanted, and then rewrite the target’s security software so there was absolutely no record of the intrusion. All other intelligence software leaves some kind of scar on the target system; MindReader is a ghost.
“What bells?” I asked, not really wanting to know.
“Sadly, it’s vague. The North Koreans and Chinese were both providing funding for a project codenamed ‘Changeling.’ We don’t know the nature of the program, but when nations who don’t always have our best interests at heart are willing to transfer funds in excess of fifty million….”
He let the rest hang.
“Have you talked to Dr. Hu about this?”
Hu was the head of the DMS science division. He was both a super-genius in multiple disciplines and a world-class heartless asshole. We have failed to bond on an epic level.
“Dr. Hu is intensely interested in it because he feels it may be connected to a project we caught wind of last year that dealt with transformative genetics.”
“I don’t even like the sound of that.”
“Neither do it. It’s a radical branch of transgenics in which animals of various kinds are given gene therapy in order to provoke controlled mutations. We saw some of that in the Jakoby labs.”
“Ah,” I said, loading that syllable with as much scorn as I could. The Jakobys were a family of brilliant geneticists. Immeasurably dangerous. Their Dragon Factory laboratory was used to create animals that, at least, looked like mythical creatures. Big game hunters paid millions to hunt unicorns and centaurs. It didn’t matter than the animals were genetic freaks whose DNA was now hopelessly corrupted. Nor did it matter that the resulting mutations were often painful for the animal and virtually guaranteed a short and agonizing life. None of that mattered. The novelty market allowed them to raise money for more destructive projects, including ethnic-specific pathogens intended to fuel a new genocide.
We shut them down. Hard.
It was at the Dragon Factory that Grace died.
“Do these Koenig assholes have the Jakoby research? ’Cause if they do, I’m going to find them and remove important parts.”
“It’s unlikely. MindReader would have flagged that. But it seems that their scientists were working along dangerously similar lines. To what end we don’t know. Once the red tape is sorted out I intend to have our people be first through the door to do a thorough examination of any materials left intact.”