“Must be pissing you off that we’ve had to wait so long.”
He said nothing, and nothing showed on his face, but there was a palpable feeling of tension buzzing around him. Yeah, he was pissed.
When he finally spoke, it was a shift in topic. “Last night’s police report opens a door of opportunity. We have a chance to put someone in the building. Not to remove anything, of course, but to have a quiet look around without eyes on him. I’d like that to be you.”
“And I suppose if there was a file conveniently labeled ‘Changeling’ I shouldn’t let it lay there and gather dust.”
Church snorted. “If life were that simple, Captain, we would be out of jobs.”
“I thought the ATF had feet on the ground there.”
“They didn’t see anything last night.”
“And the cops did?”
He spread his hands. And I had a sneaking suspicion that he had something to do with that police drive-by and any subsequent report. Made me wonder if there was anything to see. ATF boys are usually pretty sharp.
“Besides,” added Church, “the ATF team has declined to break the seal and enter the premises.”
“Why?”
“Because if anything is disturbed or if there is any procedural error when someone does step inside, then that agency takes the political hit.” He shook his head. “If you look too closely for logic you’ll injure yourself.”
“Okay, I get that the bullshit factor is high. But why me? Why send a shooter?”
“Because you were a cop before you were a shooter. If nothing else, you should be able to determine if the place has been broken into. Work it like a crime scene.”
“And if I find someone poking around in there?”
His smile was small and cold. “Then you have my permission to shoot them.”
Nice. You can never really tell when he’s joking.
“One more thing,” said Church as I stood, crossed the room, and reached for the doorknob. “Our friends in the U.K have expressed some interest in this matter. They red-flagged some of the negotiations between the Koenig Group and North Korean buyers, and they’ve been hunting for any possible information on Changeling. They’re sending a special agent to liaise with you. Her name is Felicity Hope. Expect her call.”
“She’s with MI6?”
“No,” he said, “Barrier.”
Barrier was Great Britain’s so-secret-we’ll-bloody-well-shoot-you group that was the model for the DMS. Church had helped set it up, and once it proved to be invaluable against the new breed of 21st Century high-tech terrorist, he was able to sell Congress on the Department of Military Sciences. But just hearing that name was the equivalent of a swift kick in the nuts for me.
Grace Courtland had been a senior Barrier agent. She’d been seconded to the DMS at Church’s request, and for a few years she was Church’s top gun. Maybe the world’s top gun. I worked alongside her, respected her, fell in love with her. And then buried her.
The pain was too recent and too real.
Church adjusted his tinted glasses. I knew that he was following my line of thought and gauging my reaction. I also knew that he wouldn’t say anything. He wasn’t the kind of guy who engaged in heart-to-hearts. What he gave me was a single, brief nod, just that much to acknowledge the memory. He loved Grace like a daughter. His pain had to be as intense as mine, but he would never show it.
It cost me a lot to keep it off my face.
Chap. 3
Twenty minutes later I was in a Black Hawk helicopter, heading away from Baltimore’s sunny skies toward the coastline of southern New Jersey.
The rest of my team — all of the two-legged variety — were scattered around the country looking at potential recruits. We’d lost some players recently, and we had the budget and the presidential authority to hire, coax, or shanghai top shooters from law enforcement, FBI hostage rescue, and all branches of Special Ops. For guys like us it was like being turned loose in a candy store with a credit card.
We flew through sunlight beneath a flawless blue sky.
When the Koenig Group had gone private a few years ago, they moved out of a lab building on the grounds of the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, an air force base sixteen miles southeast of Trenton, and purchased several connected buildings once occupied by a marine conservation group that had lost its funding. I pulled up the schematics of the place on my tactical computer. The place looked like it had been designed by whoever built the Addams Family mansion and the Bates Motel. The centerpiece was a faux Victorian pile that was all peaked roofs, balconies, widow’s walks, gray shingles, and turrets. Almost attractive but overall too austere and grim-looking. To make it worse, the conversion people had added wings and side buildings to the main structure, all connected by covered walkways that gave the whole place a haphazard, sprawling appearance. Unlovely, unkempt, and supposedly unoccupied. Seen from above via satellite, it looked like several octopi had collided and somehow melded, then were covered with shingles and paint. Charming in about the same way a canker sore is appealing.
The files on the research being conducted at the Koenig Group were sketchy. On the books, the teams were collating and evaluating data from several thousand smaller biological and genetic projects from around the world. Dead-end projects that had been canceled either because they were too expensive when measured against predicted benefits or because they’d hit dead ends. The Koenig teams had scored some hits by combining data from multiple stalled projects in order to create a new and more workable protocol, largely influenced by recent advances in science. A transgenics experiment that was infeasible twenty-five years ago might now be doable. The original hypotheses were often well in advance of the scientific capabilities of the day. The Koenig people sometimes had to sort through mountains of old floppy disks — back when they were actually floppy — or crates filled with digital cassette tapes, and even tons of paper to put a lot of this together. It was painstaking work that was often frustrating and futile…but which now and then yielded fruit.
Shame that those bozos didn’t share all of that fruit with the U.S. of A.
Dickheads.
The frustrating thing for us, though, was that we really didn’t know all they’d discovered. When the task force kicked the door in, they found a lot of melted junk and very little else. And the management team at Koenig apparently kept their employees compartmentalized so that few of them knew anything of substance. Probably because most of them would have made a call to Uncle Sam if they were in on it. Or they’d want the Koenig people to pad their paychecks. Either way, from what I read in the file, there were only three genuine villains, and they were under indictment and under surveillance.
So who was messing around inside the building? And what were they looking for?
Church didn’t think this was anything more than a look-see by someone who used to be a detective. He didn’t offer backup except for a Barrier agent who would liaise with me. Whatever that meant, given the circumstances. Maybe whenever she landed Stateside we’d compare notes over diner coffee and that would be that.
But as I looked at the satellite photo of the sprawling, ugly building I began to get a small itch between my shoulder blades. Not quite a premonition, but in that neck of the woods. What my grandmother used to call a “sumthin’,” as in “sumthin’ doesn’t feel right.” My gran was a spooky old broad. In my family no one laughed off or ignored her sumthin’s.
I gave myself a quick pat-down to make sure I’d brought the right toys to this playground. My Beretta 92F was snugged into its nylon shoulder rig; the rapid-release folding knife was clipped in place inside my right front pants pocket. There was a steel garrote threaded through my belt, and I had two extra magazines for the Beretta.