Halon-Seven (39 page)

Surprisingly, all at once, Bayer’s access to the military and scientific reports dried up. At first he suspected he couldn’t find the location where later reports were warehoused—likely the result of them being misfiled. But he soon found ancillary reports indicating some sort of catastrophe had taken place at the military facility in the wilds of Siberia. The reports had ceased because something had caused Alexander’s Fountain to go critical, and somehow the accident had literally wiped the installation from the face of the map.

After that, the military machine had gone to considerable lengths to hide the fact that the military laboratory ever existed. But by this point, Bayer was not willing to let things go. These long forgotten reports held the key to fulfilling the goals of his project in the present.

In the months that followed, according to the logs, Bayer got himself in great trouble with his superiors. He became consumed with discovering what had happened to Alexander’s Fountain. He lost his position as team lead and was later removed from the project entirely. After that, he was moved to less prestigious posts, conducting what amounted to busy work. The logs showed that this initially bothered Bayer, though he soon grew to see the reprimand as a chance to spend more time digging into Alexander’s Fountain. His largest problem quickly became that there simply was no more information to be had. After the destruction of the facility, all reports entirely ceased. Though he thought the project might’ve been renamed or reclassified, Bayer found no evidence to support the theory. He found it strange, but it seemed the loss of the facility was a black eye the government wanted to expunge from history.

Sitting back in his chair, Dargo pulled off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. He’d read hundreds of pages from Bayer’s personal journal, and after all that he’d seen, one observation stood out from all others. Bayer had started writing as a normal, if uptight, self-absorbed individual. But once he sunk his teeth into the meteorite research and the mystery of Alexander’s Fountain, the man had grown steadily more obsessed and less stable. Dargo now believed his concern over his employer’s motivations was well founded. This man was not to be trusted.

Still, he wasn’t sure what to do about it. A wise man would simply walk away. But that was unprofessional, no matter how intelligent it might be. Plus he and his men had been paid, thus far, in good faith. Walking away would reflect badly on Dargo’s standing in the professional community. Not to mention that walking away now could be unsafe. Dargo already suspected Bayer had murdered his predecessor.

But truth be told, Dargo had to admit he had concerns for the Meridian team should he pull the ripcord now. Bayer seemed to be teetering on the brink of doing something disastrous. What exactly, Dargo wasn’t sure. But each time they spoke, Dargo had the feeling Bayer was on the verge of giving one foolish, bloodthirsty order or another. Bayer wanted Meridian so badly that he wasn’t thinking straight. If Dargo were to leave, he feared the entire research team might pay the price. Not that he owed them anything. Certainly not Cyrus Cooper.

The fact that Cyrus was involved at all deeply troubled Dargo. Anger welled from the pit of his stomach every time he thought of the man. If it weren’t for Cyrus, Natasha would be alive today.

Dargo clamped his eyes shut and tried to push away thoughts of his little girl. His little girl? Did he truly still think of her like that? Well, why not? She would always be his little girl, even though she had been twenty when she died. A grown woman by any standard. But still his little girl.

It pained him, even now, to think of the mistakes. So many mistakes. They seemed a lifetime ago. But he could still see her smile, still see the light in her eyes. She’d been precocious, a force of nature. There had been a stubborn streak in that girl that knew no boundaries. Still, he’d never seen her as happy as when she was with Cyrus.

The fact that she had been with Cyrus at all was a mistake. A cruel twist of fate had left Dargo’s employer indebted to Cyrus. But complicated didn’t begin to describe the circumstances leading to what had transpired. There was more than enough blame to go around. The Coalition was at the top of the list when Dargo attributed blame. The principals of that group had orchestrated all that had happened. And Cyrus had been Coalition—might still be, Dargo now reasoned. If that was the case, there would be a reckoning.

Still, he reminded himself, Cyrus hadn’t been Coalition when Natasha first met him. That much he now knew for certain. And Dargo had to admit that she might have been better prepared for the threats she faced if he’d been more honest with her in the time before her death. There was more than enough blame to go around, he reminded himself once more.

It could have gone so differently,
Dargo reflected. It had been a disaster that was decades in the making. With time, Dargo had gained painful perspective. He hadn’t been the only man to lose a loved one to that foolish spy game. When all was said and done, there was no question that Cyrus had loved Natasha. For more than a year following that day, Dargo had watched from afar as losing her had nearly killed the young man.

Dargo snatched the glass from the counter beside his laptop and took a long slow drink. The stereotype was not lost on him, the angry Russian, sitting in the dark and drinking Vodka. He didn’t care. Sometimes a stereotype was accurate. It didn’t matter that he rarely touched the stuff these days. For some reason, over these last few years he found that, rather than relaxing, drinking only made him angry. Today it was fine. He was already angry. He missed his little girl.

Dargo took another drink and refilled the glass. He took a deep breath and looked at the freshly filled glass. His gaze was lost in the thick fluid for some time. He shook his head and set the glass back down. Then he pushed it across the counter, as far as his arm would reach.

Things used to be much simpler. When had that changed? He hated Cyrus! Well—perhaps he wanted to hate Cyrus. In some ways it made things easier. Things were complicated before Cyrus had come into the picture. Dargo had deep regrets that predated Cyrus. But there was no changing things now. If he were honest with himself, he would admit that Cyrus had actually saved Natasha’s life on more than one occasion. Literally saved her life… Was it fair to blame him for her death, when she would’ve been gone long before, had it not been for him?

Damn it, he hated that boy!

When he took another deep breath, Dargo realized he’d been grinding his teeth. There was no doubt about it—it was time to get out of this line of work. Everything had gone off the rails. He was working for a man who, more and more, was proving to be unstable. At the same time, Dargo found himself running surveillance—more precisely, hunting—a man he somehow both hated and respected at the same time.

Dargo was not prone to complex emotion. What he sensed was a harbinger. Things were not right here. More and more, he believed that things were going to end badly.

Trying to push these thoughts from his mind, he went back to the notes he’d taken while reading Bayer’s journal. The man had fallen from grace in the eyes of the Science Academy. He had used his increasing free time to widen his search of the directorate’s archives. That was when he found a clue. They were records that were initially only tangentially related to Alexander’s Fountain. But he followed the trail, and it was the thread that eventually led to Professor Walter Meade.

Bayer initially located a shipping manifest showing the transfer of technical hardware to the Alexander’s Fountain laboratory less than a week before the facility was destroyed. Bayer was about to pass the shipping record by until he noticed the sheer volume of hardware being transported to the laboratory. It wasn’t much of a leap to think such hardware was moved to the facility to conduct some kind of research on Alexander’s Fountain. The only problem was that the manifest didn’t detail the hardware being transported. And none of the documents Bayer found detailed a test within that timeframe.

On its own, this didn’t help Bayer with his search, so he worked backward, using the shipping records as a starting point. He backtracked the shipment to the costal port where it arrived in Russia. From there, he tracked it back to the freighter which transported it. The freighter had no more detail on the shipment’s contents, so he had continued working backward. This was where Bayer was truly surprised. He found that the shipment originated in the United States. New York City, to be precise. After New York, the trail became nonexistent. But Bayer was shocked that the technical hardware destined for a secret facility in Russia would have started its journey in the United States. Particularly at that time in history.

Lacking additional leads, Bayer had gone back to the records. Shipping records held no answers, so he widened his search to any records pertaining to the same timeframe and specific to the United States. It took him almost six months, but he finally found a tenuous connection. Bayer located reports indicating that, in the weeks leading up to the shipment’s arrival in Russia, his country had conducted some sort of covert operation within the borders of the United States.

In this case the timing fit, but the information was incredibly scarce.

Again rubbing his eyes, Dargo reflected on how much easier the research might’ve been if the records were computerized back when Bayer was doing this research. The man had literally spent months searching through forgotten archives all over Russia. Bayer had started out as an intelligent and dedicated scientist. But this mystery became his white whale, and he had literally thrown away a promising career in pursuit of it.

From there, Bayer had visited the United States. A Russian making such a trip was virtually unheard of at the time. This would have been during the Cold War. Though, from the sound of the journal entries, it was likely the Soviet government would’ve been happy to be rid of Bayer by that point.

Nonetheless, Bayer followed the trail to the United States where he somehow located records detailing the warehouse facility from which the Russians had stolen the American equipment before smuggling it back to their shores. These records led to the name Rumsfeld Pellagrin, Walter Meade’s predecessor on the Meridian project. So, naturally, somewhere along the way, Bayer had connected Pellagrin to Meade.

All of this brought the journal to the present day. The entries were nonspecific, but it seemed that over time, Bayer’s pursuit of the miracle power source from the Alexander’s Fountain experiments had led to the project Meade’s team was developing. The project they called Meridian. Some kind of teleportation device.

Teleportation still seemed like science fiction, as far as Dargo was concerned. But he couldn’t deny what he’d witnessed first hand. He and his team had sightings of Cyrus Cooper and Reese Knoland in California one minute and in Chicago moments later. As impossible as it seemed, teleportation was the most viable explanation. It was this technology that Bayer sought to control. But what was he trying to build in Europe? And why was Bayer, already a very wealthy man himself, setting up loans with some of the largest banks in Switzerland?

Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

Thursday, 2:20 pm (12:20 pm Colorado Time)

It had already been a productive day, and it wasn’t even noon yet. At least not on the West Coast. The constant shifts in time zone were wearing on Cyrus.

Taking a slow, casual look around the reading room, he made sure no one was paying him undue attention. Less than a half dozen people sat at tables scattered around the room, each engrossed in reading of their own. It took only a moment to locate a table near the window with a sweeping sightline, allowing him to keep every occupant in view. He had retrieved a packet of information from a dead drop on his way to the Library of Congress building. Against her better judgement, Special Agent Mindy Shaw had come through and left the files he’d requested. The records detailed the upper echelon of the Alvares drug cartel.

It had taken some maneuvering to convince Shaw that it was better for her not to ask questions. That was easier said than done because, when he requested the information on Alvares, he had specifically instructed her to ensure that nothing she provided could blow back on her. It didn’t take a Washington insider to read between the lines. She had known Cyrus was taking some kind of action against Alvares and didn’t want the provided intelligence back-tracked to her. She hadn’t liked the arrangement, but she owed Cyrus so that loyalty had won out.

Shaw deserved credit. He’d put her in a difficult situation. She could’ve simply refused to help. It would’ve been completely understandable. Or she could’ve backed out gracefully, claiming that she couldn’t get the information from the computer network. It was true that any records she accessed via the FBI’s mainframe were tagged, reflecting her access. Therefore, pulling files via the mainframe was off limits. To avoid that, she had gone low tech. There was plenty of non-digital intelligence available to an agent who knew not only where to look, but how. In the end, she made a routine visit to the records room, ostensibly to review files from an unrelated case. While she was there, she copied what he needed pertaining to past and present investigations of Alvares.

She hadn’t needed to explain to Cyrus how she’d done it. He knew how he would do it, if he’d been in her place. What impressed him was that she had come through. That, and she’d provided the information with nothing more than a request that he not get killed.

Now he sat at one of the library reading desks, leafing through the files. He considered Bola Alvares’s summary report: male, Hispanic, six foot two, two hundred forty pounds. The man had a shaved head, stone cold dark eyes, and he was built like a wrecking machine. Alvares clearly spent a lot of time in the gym. That meshed with what Cyrus found in the man’s psych profile. Alvares ruled his crew with an iron fist. He was known to be brutal both with the competition and within his own ranks. The man’s physical bulk and reputation were powerful forms of intimidation. Cyrus wondered how the man would react to someone who didn’t care about his looks or his reputation.