“I said I’ll be back,” Mike snapped, hurrying toward the vestibule. “Just got to take a call.” He paused in front of the camera as the inner door slid shut, so the guard could get a good look at him. “Why don’t you work on the dictionary for a bit? I’ll be back soon as I can.”
One of the guards outside Matt’s room had a Secure Field Voice Terminal. Mike took it, ducked into the Post-Debriefing Office, plugged it into one of the red-painted wall sockets, and signed on to his voice mail. The joy of working for spooks, he thought gloomily. Back at DEA Boston, he’d just have picked up the phone and asked Irene, the senior receptionist, to put him through. No pissing around with encrypted Internet telephony and firewalls and paranoid INFOSEC audits in case the freakazoid hackers had figured out a way to hack in. Sometimes he wondered what he’d done to deserve being forced to work with these guys. Obviously I must have done something really bad in an earlier life. “Mike here. What is it?”
“We got the thumbs-up.” No preamble: it was Colonel Smith. “BLUESKY has emplaced the cache and on that basis our NSC cutout has approved CLEANSWEEP and you are go for action.”
“Whoops.” Mike swallowed, his heart giving a lurch. “What now?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m on the twenty-fourth—sorry, I’m in Facility Lambda. Just been talking to Client Zero.” More time-wasting code words to remember for something that was really quite straightforward.
“Well, that’s nice to hear. Listen, I want you in my office soonest. We’ve got a lot to discuss.”
“Okay, will comply. See you soon.”
Smith hung up, and Mike shut down the SFVT carefully, going through the post-call sanitary checklist for practice. (A radiation-hardened pocket PC running some exotic NSA-written software, the SFVT could make secure voice calls anywhere with a broadband Internet connection—as long as you scrubbed its little brains clean afterward to make sure it didn’t remember any classified gossip, a chore that made Mike wish for the days of carrier pigeons. And as long as the software didn’t crash.) “Got to go,” he told the guard. “If Matt asks, I got called away by my boss and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He signed out through the retinal scanners by the door, then waited for the armed guard in front of the elevator bank. Mike gestured at one of the doors. “Get me the twenty-second.” The guard nodded and pushed the call button. He’d already signed Mike in, knew his clearances, and knew what floors he was allowed to visit. A minute later the elevator car arrived and Mike went inside. It could have been the elevator in any other office block, except for the cameras in each corner, the call buttons covered by a crudely welded metal sheet, and the emergency hatch that was padlocked shut on the outside. No escape, that was the message it was meant to send. No entry. High security. No alternative points of view.
Mike found Smith in his office, a cramped cubbyhole dominated by an unfeasibly large safe. Smith looked tired and aggravated and energized all at once. “Mike! Grab a seat.” He was busy with something on his Secure Data Terminal—a desktop computer by any other name—and turned the screen so that Mike couldn’t see it from the visitor’s chair. “Help yourself to a Diet Coke.” There was a pallet-load of two-liter plastic bottles of pop just inside the door—it was Smith’s major personal vice, and he swore it helped him think more clearly. “I’m just finishing . . . up . . . this!” He switched the monitor off and shoved the keyboard away from him, then grinned, frighteningly. “We’ve got the green light.”
Mike nodded, trying to look duly appreciative. “That’s a big deal.” How big? Sometimes it was hard to be sure. Green light, red light—when the whole program was black, unaccountable, and off the books, who knew what anything meant? “Where do I come into it?” I’m a cop, damnit, not some kind of spook.
Smith leaned back in his chair. With one hand he picked up an odd, knobby plastic gadget; with the other he pulled a string that seemed to vanish into its guts. It began to whirr as he rotated his wrist. “You’re going into fairyland.”
“Fairyland.”
“Where the bad guys come from. Official code name for Niejwein, as of now. The doc’s little joke.” Whirr, whirr. “How’s the grammar?”
“I’m—” Mike licked his lips. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I try to talk to Matt in hochsprache, and I’ve got some grasp of the basics, but I have no idea how well I’ll do over there until—” He shrugged. “We need more people to talk to. When can I have access to the other prisoners?”
“Later.” Whirr, whirr. “Thing is, right now they’re our only transport system. Research has got some ideas, but there’s a long way to go.”
“You’re using them for transport? How?” Mike frowned.
Smith smiled faintly. “You’re a cop. You wouldn’t approve.”
I’m not going to like this. “Why not?”
“The first army lawyers we tried had a nervous breakdown as soon as we got to the world-walking bit—does posse comitatus apply if it’s geographically collocated with the continental USA?—but I figure the AG’s office will get that straightened out soon enough. In the meantime, we got a temporary waiver. These guys want to act like a hostile foreign government, they can be one—it makes life easier all round. They’re illegal combatants, and we can do what we like with them. There’s even some question over whether they’re human—being able to cross their eyes and think themselves into another universe is kind of unusual—but they’re still working on that case. Meanwhile, we’ve found a way to make them cooperate. Battle Royale.”
“Tell me.” Mike sat up.
Smith reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled something out. It looked like a giant padlock, big enough to go round a man’s neck. “Ever seen one of these?”
“Oh shit.” Mike stared, sick to his stomach. “Shining Path used them . . .”
“Yeah, well, it works for our purposes.” Smith put the collar-bomb down. “We put one on a prisoner. Set it for three hours, give him a backpack and a camera, and tell him to bury the backpack in the other world, photograph the location, then come back so we can take the collar off. We’re careful to use a location at least five miles from the nearest habitation in fairyland, to stop ’em finding a tool shop. So far they’ve both come back.”
“That’s—” Mike shook his head, at a loss for words. Ruthless sprang to mind. Abuse of prisoners was another unwelcome thought. Something about it crossed the line that divided business as usual from savagery. Fucking spooks!
Smith grinned at him. “Before we sent them the first time, we showed them what happened when one of these suckers counts down. Trust me, we’ve got no intention of killing them unless they try to escape.” Whirr, whirr. “But we can’t risk them getting loose and telling the Clan what we’re doing, can we?”
“Crazy.” Mike shook his head again. “So you’ve got two tame couriers.”
“For very limited values of tame.”
“So.” Mike licked his dry lips.
The thing in Smith’s rapidly swiveling hand was now making a high-pitched whine. He caught Mike staring at it. “Gyroball exerciser. You should try it, Mike. They’re really good. I’m spending too much time with this damn mouse, if I don’t exercise my wrist seizes up.”
Mike nodded jerkily. What’s going on? Smith was serious-minded, committed, highly professional, and just a bit more paranoid than was good for anyone. The collar-bomb thing had to be a need-to-know secret. “So why are you telling me all this?”