Greene felt that his “freak” diagnosis was the most clinically accurate assessment. There was a lot of savantism in the world, but there was no one like Prospero Bell. The question that burned hottest in Greene’s mind was what the boy would do with all of that brainpower. He had hinted that he had a plan, but so far had kept that secret to himself.
Prospero’s intense hatred and distrust of his father was a common topic for them, and the old man wanted Greene to determine the best way for the elder Bell to gain the trust of his son. Not the love. All that mattered to Oscar Bell was a useful trust.
But that was only a secondary goal for Greene and he didn’t devote much time to it. Instead he focused on something he found far more interesting. It was also the thing that most deeply concerned Prospero.
Prospero was absolutely convinced that he was not human. Not entirely.
And he was equally convinced that he was not from this world.
CHAPTER THREE
“What’s the op, Boss?” asked Bunny, the big kid from Orange County who looked like a plowboy from Iowa. His dog tags said he was Master Sergeant Harvey Rabbit, but not even his parents called him by his first name. Bunny was the muscle and in many ways the heart of Echo Team. “Those ISIL shooters find a two-for-one sale on snowshoes?”
“Funny,” I said. “But no.”
We were aboard an LC-130 Hercules, a big military transport plane fitted out with skis. None of us liked the fact that our plane had to have skis. I had a third of Echo Team with me. Two operators: Bunny and Top — First Sergeant Bradley Sims. My right and left hands.
“We going way down south to get out of the summer heat?” drawled Top.
“This is a look-see,” I told them. “This gig is a handoff from our friends in the CIA.”
“We’re all going to die,” said Bunny.
“There’s a bright side,” I told him. “The quarterback who handed it off was Harcourt Bolton.”
Both Top and Bunny came instantly to point, grinning like kids.
“Seriously?” said Bunny, wide-eyed. “Wow. We made it to the pros.”
“I thought he retired,” said Top. “Glad to hear he’s still in the game.”
Guys like us don’t much go in for hero worship. The exception is when the hero in question is someone like Harcourt Bolton. If America has ever had an agent on par with the movie version of James Bond, then it’s Bolton. He’s the spy’s spy. Cool, suave, sophisticated, incredibly smart, and very capable. I may be one of Uncle Sam’s top shooters, but Bolton is the Agency’s sharpest scalpel. And it’s not too much of a stretch to say I’m captain of his fan club. Harcourt Bolton, Senior, was someone I knew very well. Or, should I say, I knew of very well. His role as a semicelebrity gazillionaire philanthropist, entrepreneur, and notorious playboy was tabloid legend. He was like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne — a rich man who always seemed to be caught in a paparazzi photo with this year’s supermodel while spending his days investing in worthy causes to better humanity. It was the kind of superstar status that never seemed quite real, because how could someone be that rich, that lucky, that smart, and that generous all in one lifetime?
That’s the Bolton the general public knew. I’ve heard my lover, Junie Flynn, talk about getting him involved in some FreeTech ventures in developing countries. Using money and technology to save whole villages.
My guys and I knew the other side of him, however. We knew that the Bruce Wayne cover was just that. A cover. A brilliant cover, actually, because just as Bruce Wayne had that darker vigilante side with an obsession for flightless mammals of the family Chiroptera, there was a hidden side to Harcourt Bolton. He was, by anyone’s estimation, the greatest spy who has ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. That is saying a lot. No matter what the public perception is of the CIA, they are not, on the whole, a clown college. There is a very effective little office within the CIA that makes sure the Company is regarded from a skewed perspective, because it lowers the expectations of the bad guys.
The other side to Bolton’s career was the above-top-secret operations, the real 007 stuff. Like infiltrating and destroying a secret North Korean missile base that was primed to detonate the Cumbre Vieja volcano, which would have sent five hundred cubic kilometers of rock into the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in a two-thousand-foot-high tsunami. It would have wiped out the African coast, Southern England, and then the eastern seaboard of North America.
Then there was the bioweapons lab buried four stories beneath a Siberian work camp. Bolton went in alone, killed sixteen people, and blew the lab pretty much into orbit.
And the time he ripped apart a coalition of rogue Saudi princes who were financing ISIL. Bolton wore a disguise, spoke flawless Arabic, forged perfect credentials, and once he had ingratiated himself with the group, he shot all seven of them and uploaded a computer virus that stole their data and destroyed the target computers.
I could go on.
And on. I could obsess and go full-tilt fanboy on him. I would buy an action figure of Harcourt Bolton and, yes, I would take it out of the package and play made-up adventures with it. If someone told me he could turn water into wine, my only question would be whether it was red or white. And the answer would probably be the 1982 Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande. Not because it’s the most expensive, which it’s not, but because while the 1982 is not a classic Bordeaux, it has an over-ripe, exotic quality that he’s discovered would make any woman on Earth instantly disrobe. That’s how Bolton would do it. Guys like him walk on water and make the rest of us look like grubby amateurs. Even my personal hero, the late, great Samson Riggs, couldn’t hold a candle to him.
Bolton was the top field operator for a lot of years. Much longer than most guys manage it. He never seemed to want to retire and I could understand that. When you’re at the top of your game — especially this game — there’s a real fear that if you head to the showers and let a newer, younger, and less experienced player step up to bat, then he won’t know better than to swing at fastballs and sliders. You stay in the game because you know it better than the other guys. Or at least you think you do. Maybe it’s an ego thing — and that’s got to be a chunk of it — but you know how far you’ve gone in the past to take the bad guys down, you know the tricks that worked for you time and again, and you don’t want to take that skill set out of play. It’s why so many guys like us die out there, caught in the moment when age and experience can’t make up for the fact that you’ve lost a step getting to first base. You fall, and maybe your arrogance and fear drags someone else down, too. Maybe a lot of people. But how can you not risk it?
Bolton risked it, and he had a couple of missions go south on him. Luckily the DMS was there to back his play when things fell apart. I was the relief pitcher on the last two of Bolton’s operations. I got the saves and the DMS got the credit, even if it was only an off-the-radar pat on the back by the president.
Bolton was done as a field op, though. His team was reassigned and he was given a nice desk in a nice office and people were very nice to him. Which must have been hell for a guy like him.
However, anyone who thought Bolton would just walk off the field and go sit on a porch at the Old Spies Retirement Home was sadly mistaken. Because he’s a class act, and maybe an actual superhero, he shifted his gears and over the last few years he’s worked his old network of contacts to get mission intel for younger CIA turks, and even for the DMS. Serious intel. If he’d been regarded as a superspy before, you can double that since then. His network was so deeply embedded in the global underworld that none of us could figure out how he did it. Someone hung a nickname on him that got some traction. Mr. Voodoo. If Harcourt Bolton says something hinky is happening — even if no one else has heard a peep about it — then you lock and load. So if he passed along intel on this job, it was on us to nut up and earn that level of professional respect.