She reached for it, an automatic movement, then she pulled her hand back.
“You don’t want me,” she said, her voice small and weak. “I… this is all horrible, but I put in my time. I can’t go through this again.”
Murray’s lip curled up ever so slightly, a snarling old man who wasn’t used to hearing the word no.
“Worst loss of life in a naval engagement since Vietnam, and it happened right here at home,” he said. “Three ships destroyed, one damaged, about three billion dollars’ worth of military assets gone, and we have no idea what really happened. So pardon my indelicate way of speaking my mind, Montoya, but look at the motherfucking pictures!”
He was going to yell at her? Like she was some intern who would jump at his every word?
“Get Frank Cheng to look at them,” she snapped. “He’s your fair-haired boy.”
Murray nodded. “So you know Cheng’s the lead scientist. I see you haven’t completely tuned out.”
She huffed. “It’s not like Cheng makes it hard. He probably has reporters on speed dial so he can make sure his name gets out there. Send him to your task force. He might even bring along a camera crew.”
Murray’s eyes closed in exasperation. Cheng’s desire to be recognized as a genius clearly rubbed the director the wrong way.
Clarence reached out and took the envelope. Murray slowly sat back — even that minor motion seemed to cause him pain — and stared at Margaret. His fingertips played with the brass double helix atop his cane.
“Operation Wolf Head’s primary research facility is on Black Manitou Island, in Lake Superior,” he said. “That’s where Cheng is. He made the case that he should stay there to provide continuity for the entire process, as opposed to being the first person to examine the bodies.”
Margaret couldn’t hold back a smirk. She should have known Cheng’s desire to be quoted stopped at the edge of any actual danger.
“What a surprise,” she said. “I guess you get what you pay for, Murray.”
The old man’s wrinkled hands tightened on the cane.
“I wanted to pay you,” he said. “You said no. But that doesn’t matter now, because I’m not the one asking this time — I’m here on direct orders from President Blackmon. She wants you on-site, immediately.”
That numb feeling returned. For the second time in Margaret’s life, a sitting president of the United States had asked for her. By name. She’d answered that call once, for Gutierrez; look where that had gotten her, gotten him, gotten everyone.
She heard a rattle of paper. She looked to her left: Clarence had taken the photos out of the slim envelope. He’d looked at them and was now offering them to her.
Margaret still didn’t take them. She knew what would happen if she did.
“Printed pictures, Murray?” she said. “With your black budget you can’t afford a fancy tablet or something?”
“Nothing electronic,” Murray said. “Not out here, anyway. It’s a lot harder to make paper go viral.”
She thought it odd to hear someone that old use a term like go viral. Most people Murray’s age barely understood what the Internet was.
Clarence put the pictures in her lap. She looked down, an instant reaction, saw the one on top, and couldn’t look away.
It was a photo of a drawing: a man sitting in a corner, covered in some kind of bulky blanket. No, not one man… two… maybe even three. There was only one head, but sticking out from the blanket she saw four hands.
The original drawing looked water stained. Whoever had drawn it had done so quickly, yet there was no mistaking the artist’s skill — the subject’s open eyes looked lifeless, stared out into nothing.
Why were the men hidden under the blanket? No, it wasn’t a blanket at all… it was a membrane of some kind, wrapped around dead bodies, parts of it attached to the wall, to the floor. It wasn’t an impressionist’s take; the artist had seen this, or at least thought he’d seen it.
“Murray, what the hell is this?”
“One of the bodies we recovered from the Los Angeles had that on her person,” he said. “The artwork is good enough that we were able to confirm visual ID — the subject of the drawing is Ensign Paul Duchovny, who served onboard the sub. Obviously there are others in there with him, but since we can’t see their faces we can’t identify them.”
“Did you send divers into the sub?”
“No one has gone near it,” Murray said. “The sub is off-limits until we get our analysis team set up. It’s nine hundred feet deep, so people can’t go down without specialized equipment. On top of that, there’s a radiation leak. We don’t even know if it’s safe to enter the wreck. Right now all our intel is coming from UUVs.”
Margaret looked up. “UUVs?”
Clarence answered. “Unmanned underwater vehicles. Sometimes autonomous, like a robot, but most of the time they’re controlled from a person on a surface ship.”
Margaret again looked down at the picture. “Who drew this?”
“Lieutenant Candice Walker,” Murray said. “She escaped the sub, made it to the surface. Unfortunately, she died before divers could get her to medical attention. She was just as crazy as Dawsey — cut off her own arm with a reciprocal saw just below the right elbow. She used her belt for a tourniquet and cauterized the wound, but it wasn’t enough. She escaped the sub by wearing an SEIE suit, a bulky thing that lets submariners rise up without suffering pressure effects. We think her tourniquet came off when she was exiting the sub, or maybe while she ascended. Since she was in the suit, she had no way of tying the belt off again. Her picture is next.”
Margaret flipped to the next page, then hissed in a breath. A dead girl wearing battered, blood-streaked dark-blue coveralls. A lieutenant in the navy, based on her insignia — a highly trained adult, although her face looked all of eighteen. The girl’s right arm was a horrid sight: seared flesh and protruding, blackened bone. Extensive blood loss made her skin extremely pale. She had a bruise under her right eye and a long cut on her left temple.
Margaret thought of the first time she met Perry Dawsey.
He had been a walking nightmare. A massive, naked man, covered in third-degree burns from a fire that had also melted away his hair, leaving his scalp covered with fresh, swelling blisters. His own blood had baked flaky-dry on his skin. A softball-sized pustule on his left collarbone streamed black rot down his wide chest. His knee had been shredded by a bullet fired from the gun of Dew Phillips. And worst of all — even more disturbing than the fact that Perry clutched his own severed penis in a tight fist — the look on his face, those lips caught between a smile and a scream, curled back to show well-cared-for teeth that reflected the winter sun in a wet-white blaze.
Perry, mangled almost beyond recognition. This girl — correction, this naval officer — much the same.
Margaret shuddered, imagining a saw-toothed blade as a buzzing blur, jagged points scraping free a shred of skin or a curl of bone with each pass…
“Did the autopsy confirm she died from blood loss?”
Murray frowned. “You’ve been out of the game longer than I thought, Doc. We didn’t do an autopsy yet. The Los Angeles had a mission to recover pieces of the Orbital. You remember the Orbital, right? The thing that made the most infectious disease we’ve ever seen, a disease that turned people into psychopaths? The thing that made little monsters that tried to open a goddamn gate to another goddamn world? The thing that forced us to nuke the Motor City to stop that gate from opening?”