The woman frowned. “Are you going to have to kill us now?”
“I wish,” Johnston muttered. “How much contact did it take to vector?”
“Not as much as I wished.” The woman turned back to the men surrounding her. It was like watching a white-coated, fully clothed orgy as she ran her hands over her colleagues. They’d all been down here way too long.
Johnston closed his eyes and played back the scene in the interrogation room. Who’d touched who?
His eyes flashed open. “We’ve got to get ahold of Brennan. And the interrogators. This thing is out!”
He ran for the door and the one scientist not participating in the chaste orgy ran after Johnston and grabbed his hand just before he could make his escape. “‘Do you mean an African or European swallow?’” he said, then collapsed laughing, letting go.
Johnston stared at his hand for a moment, swallowed hard, then went out the door, locking it behind him, ignoring Upton’s protestations that he wasn’t infected.
Yet.
Johnston locked himself in his office. He picked up the special line — the one that he’d always known that if he had to use, his career was over — and dialed 666.
Chapter 8
Moms hated the Pentagon. Literally, although she wasn’t too fond of it figuratively either. In its brochure and press releases, the Department of Defense boasted that a person could get from any one place in the Pentagon to another in seven minutes or less.
Unless they were a person like Moms.
Going to a place only someone like Moms wanted to go.
She’d already passed through three security checkpoints, all on the supposed lowest level. That didn’t bother her as much as simply getting in from the parking lot to the first checkpoint. All the rank irritated her. They had full-bird colonels here doing the work of secretaries. One-star generals fetched coffee. The place was so top-heavy with eagles and stars it was amazing anything got done.
And the ribbons. Every officer’s jacket uniform was so laden with them above the left breast pocket, she was surprised they all weren’t walking tilted over. She’d been out of the “real” army not that long — okay, a while — but she didn’t recognize what some of the awards were for. Most of the ribbons indicated combat duty, and it was rather easy to tell the difference between those in this building who would rather be there than here. This was a world away from where the soldiers on the ground implemented the policies that flowed out of the building.
She turned down a hallway and another desk blocked the way. Two military police, honest-to-God soldiers, not contractors, stood behind the desk, which was manned of course by a full-bird colonel. He looked up at her, noted the civvies, ran his eyes up and down her body, checked her hand for an Academy ring (she never wore her West Point ring), then sighed as he mentally slotted her: another military person turned play-spook.
“Can I help you?”
Moms took out her real ID and flipped it open.
The colonel popped up. There was no rank or name on the ID, just her clearance and a QR code. It was enough to get him to his feet, because he only saw that clearance a couple of times a month, even three security checkpoints in. There were fewer than fifty people in the country who held it, and only a few visited the Pentagon. And when they did, they normally came in the VIP entrance through the underground parking lot, whisked by two-star generals to whatever briefing they were to attend by a four-star general.
Moms still hadn’t said a word. The colonel took her ID and scanned the QR code with a handheld device. It beeped green. Then he picked up another handheld device.
“If you don’t mind, ma’am?”
Moms stood still as he shone it in one eye, then the other, checking her retinas. It flashed green.
The colonel waved her through, the two MPs stepping aside. She walked down the hall and then a set of stairs to a sublevel that wasn’t supposed to exist according to the brochures and press releases. None of the doors were open. There was no bustle of people going about. The work down here was done behind closed doors, in hushed tones, with a minimum of what the army called “dissemination of information.”
She reached a desk set in an anteroom, behind which sat an elderly man peering at a newspaper through glasses perched on his bulbous nose.
He looked up and smiled. “Good day.” He waved the paper. “Got a mudder running the fourth tomorrow, but don’t know if the weather will agree. You play the ponies?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Smart girl.”
Moms couldn’t remember the last time she’d been called girl.
“Who do you want to chat with?”
“Pay.”
He nodded sagely. “No one gets paid enough that comes through here.”
“I’m getting paid too much.”
A frown crossed his wrinkled face. “That’s not good either.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“You’ll be wanting to talk to Mrs. Sanchez then.” He glanced at his computer screen. “Moms, is it?”
“Yes.” The odd single name, no salutation, seemed not to bother him in the slightest.
He pulled open a drawer and extracted a thick, brown file. He broke the seal on it, reached in, and pulled out a stapled set of purple paper. Moms recognized the paper and the handwriting on it.
He ran his finger down it. “Fourth-grade English teacher?”
“Mr. Carletti.”
“Name of the second street you lived on?”
“Same as the first street,” Moms said. “Taylor Lane.”
He smiled. “That was one of those they told you to mix up, eh?”
He asked six more questions, two of which also had mixed answers. Eight questions and answers out of the five hundred on the purple paper that she’d filled out many years ago when she’d first been submerged into the world of Black Ops. It was the last check and balance. Technology could be fooled, scanners could be overridden, but the human memory checked by another human and then twisted by deceit was the final obstacle. She knew there was probably some sort of weapon in the man’s other hand and was certain there were guards behind some of the doors scattered about, watching this play out on video screens, ready to burst in at the wrong answer. If she got it wrong, they wouldn’t be cuffing her and reading her rights.
“Very good,” he finally said. He placed the purple paper back inside the folder and slid it back into his desk. He hit a button underneath his desktop and a door swung open, revealing a room the size of a telephone booth.
It didn’t have a telephone. Just a chair.
“Enjoy the ride,” he said.
Moms got in and sat down. The door hissed shut. There was a slight jolt, then she was moving sideways, which was a bit disorienting. She came to a jarring halt, and then she was moving backwards. She thought of a horror movie she’d watched on Netflix in her bunk at the Ranch one night, The Cabin in the Woods, and how all these creatures from nightmares were kept in little cubicles deep under a government-run facility. Each cube could be moved about as needed. That’s what the subworld of the Pentagon reminded her of.
Except she was the one being moved about to go meet someone in one of those cubicles. If she was Nada, she would know what that made her, but being Moms, she’d long ago accepted that the world needed people like her and places like this. Nada accepted it also, but it just depressed him.
With another jerk, the booth came to a halt and the door swung open. Moms stepped out.
A chest-high counter, like the DMV, awaited her. Except there was no “take a number and take a seat.” That was the job of the old man reading about horses. They couldn’t have the people who came to this part of the Pentagon seeing each other and perhaps recognizing that person on a mission or while walking through the mall with family. It was called Black Ops for a reason.