Joe Ledger (16 page)

“And a hearty fuck you, too,” I said under my breath as I headed to the building.

It was no less ugly from ground level and perhaps a little less appealing. It was bigger than I expected. Three stories in parts, with lots of shuttered windows and reinforced doors. A discreet sign on a pole read, THE KOENIG GROUP, with a phone number for information.

I removed a small earbud, put it on, and attached an adhesive mic that looked
like a mole to the side of my mouth. Two taps of the earbud connected me to Bug, the computer
über
-geek who provided real-time intel for all fieldwork. Even though this was a low-profile job, DMS protocol required that I use my combat call sign.

“Cowboy’s online.” 

“With you,” said Bug.

“What’ve you got?”

“We did a thermal scan on the place, but it’s cold. No one home.”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

I walked around the building. It really was a large mess. The additions and walkways looked almost like they’d grown organically, expanding out of need like a cramped animal. The paint jobs didn’t match section-to-section, and for a company with a lot of private funding the exterior of the joint was poorly maintained. Weeds, some graffiti, trash in the parking lot.

“Place is a dump,” I said.

“Better inside, from what I hear,” said Bug. “Some cool stuff.”

A red DO NOT ENTER sticker was pasted with precision to the center of the front door. I ignored it and used a preconfigured keycard to gain entry.

“Going in,” I said quietly.

“Copy that,” said Bug. “Watch your ass, Cowboy.”

“It’s on the agenda.”

The entrance lobby was small and unremarkable. A receptionist’s desk, some potted plants, and the kind of framed pictures you can buy at Kmart. Bland landscapes that probably weren’t even places in New Jersey. The lights were out, which was surprising since the key-reader was functional. The entrance hall was dark, and daylight didn’t try too hard to reach inside. When I tried the light switches all I got was a click. No lights.

I tapped my earbud. “Bug, I thought the power was still on.”

“It is.”

“Not from where I’m standing.”

“Let me check.”

I removed a small flashlight from my pocket and squatted down to shine the light across the floor. The immediate entrance hallway had a thin coating of damp grime on the floor—a side effect of the building’s position near a bay and a swamp. There were footprints in the grime, but from the size and pattern it was clear most of them had been left by responding police officers. Big shoes with gum-rubber soles. The prints went inside and then they came out again. If there were prints by an intruder, they were lost to the general mess left behind by the cops. Pretty typical with crime scenes, and pretty much unavoidable. Cops have to respond and they can’t float.

I tapped my earbud again, channeling over to Church. “Cowboy to Deacon.”

“Go for Deacon.”

“Did anyone have eyes on the cops who came out of the building last night? Are we sure they weren’t carrying anything? Or had something in their pockets?”

“The ATF agents on duty last night searched each officer,” said Church. “It was not well-received.”

“I can imagine.”

And I could imagine it—responding blues getting a pat-down by a couple of Federal pricks.

“Why didn’t the ATF agents accompany them inside?” I asked.

I could hear a small sigh. “The ATF agents had left the scene to pick up a pizza.”

“Ouch.”

“Those agents have been suspended pending further disciplinary action.”

“Yeah, fair call.”

“Which is why the ATF is rather prickly about your being there.”

“Copy that.”

I channeled over to Bug.

“Where are we with those lights?”

“Working on it.” 

The lights stayed off, though.

There was a closed door behind the reception desk, so I opened it and entered a hallway that was as black as the pit. There was no sound, not the slightest hint that I was anything but alone in here, but regardless of that I drew my pistol. It’s hard to say if, at that moment, my caution was born out of a concern not to accidentally disturb any evidence left behind or because the place was beginning to give me the creeps.

The hallway hit a t-juncture. Each side looked as dark and uninformative as the other, but I took the right-hand side because that was my gun-hand side. I know. I’m a bit of a superstitious idiot. Sue me.

The side hallway wasn’t straight but jagged and curved and turned for no logical design reasons that I could see. Maybe there was something about the foundation structure that required so unlikely a design plan, but I couldn’t imagine what. The result was something that—as I walked through the shadows—triggered odd little thoughts that were entirely uncomfortable. The unlikely angles combined with the mildly curving walls and low gray-painted ceiling to give the whole place a strangely organic feel. Like a building that hadn’t so much been designed as allowed to grow. Like roots of a tree. Or tentacles.

Yeah, I shouldn’t be in here. I should be out in the bright sunlight watching a bunch of millionaires in white, black, and orange stretch pants hit a small white ball around a grassy field.

“You’re a fruitcake,” I told myself, and I had no counterargument.

I followed the flashlight beam down the crooked hallway until it ended at a set of double-doors made out of heavy-grade plastic. The kind meant to swing back when you pushed a cart through them, like they have in meat-packing plants.

A charming thought.

I pushed one flap open and peered into the gloom. The beam of the flashlight swept across a storage room stacked high with boxes of equipment and office supplies. There were bare patches on the floor where I assumed boxed files once stood, but they’d been confiscated by the task force. Motes of dust swirled in the glow, spinning like planets in some dwarf galaxy. They looked cold and sad.

As I began to let the flap fall back into place something caught my attention.

Nothing I saw or heard.

It was a smell.

A mingled combination of scents, pleasant and unpleasant.

A hint of perfume, the sulfur stink of a burned match, old sweat, and spoiled meat.

The movement of the swinging door somehow wafted that olio of scents to me, but it didn’t last. It was there and gone.

It was such an odd combination of smells. They didn’t seem to fit this place. And they were transient smells that should long ago have faded into the general background stink of dust and disuses. Except for the rotten-meat smell. That, I knew all too well, could linger. But this was a research facility not a meat-packing plant. There shouldn’t be a smell like that in here.

My brain immediately started cooking up rationalizations for it.

An animal came in here and died.

The staff left food in the fridge when the place was raided.

And….

And.

And
what
?

I tapped the earbud.

“Bug, what’s the status on those damn lights?”

There was a short burst of static, then Bug said, “—er company.”

“You’re breaking up. Repeat message.”

“The power is on according to a representative of the power company.”

I moved through the swinging doors and found a whole row of light switches. Threw them.

Stood in the dark.

“Negative on the power, Bug. Call someone who doesn’t have his dick in his hand and get me some lights.”

He paused, then said, “On it, Cowboy.”

The storage room had two interior doors, one of which opened into a bathroom so sparkling clean it looked like it had never been used. The only mark was a smudged handprint on the wall above the toilet. The smell hadn’t come from here.

The other door opened onto another jagged hallway that snaked through the building. The walls were lined on either side with closed doors. A lot of doors. This was going to take a while.

Dark and spooky as the place was, it seemed pretty clear that nobody was home but me. I snugged the Beretta into the padded holster but left my Orioles shirt open in case I needed to get to it in a hurry.

For the next half hour I poked into a variety of rooms, including storage closets of various signs, a copy center, a staff lunchroom, offices for executives of various wattage, and labs. Lots and lots of labs.

I entered one at random and stood in the doorway, doing what cops do, letting the room speak to me. There were rows of black file cabinets, sealed with yellow tape that had an ominous-looking federal seal from the Department of Justice. A dozen tables were crowded with computers and a variety of scientific instrumentation so sophisticated and arcane that I had almost no idea what I was looking at. The floor was littered with papers, and here and there were fragments of footprints on the debris.

Watching the room told me nothing.

I backed into the hall and did a quick recount of the laboratories just in this wing of the building. Nine.

“Bug,” I said, tapping the earbud.

“Cowboy, the power company insists that there is no interruption to the Koenig Group facility. They are showing active meters.”

I grunted and filed that away. Maybe it was something simpler, like breakers. To Bug I said, “How many labs are there in this place?”

“Twenty-two separate rooms designated on the blueprints as laboratory workspaces.”

“Jeez…”

“And one designated as a proving station.”

“Proving what?”

“Unknown. None of the employees interviewed by the task force has ever been in there, and the three executives under indictment aren’t talking.”

“So we have no real idea what they were doing there?”

“Not really,” he said, and he sounded wistful about it. “I wish we could have gotten those computer records. I’ll bet there was some cool stuff there.”

Cool.

Much as I like Bug, he shares a single characteristic with Dr. William Hu. The two of them have an absolutely unsavory delight for any kind of bizarre or extreme technology. For Hu, the head of our Special Sciences Division, it bordered on ghoulishness. Hu loves to get his hands on any kind of world-threatening designer plague or exotic weapon of mass destruction. A few months ago, when Blackjack Team out of Vegas took down a Chechnyan kill squad who had a hyper-contagious version of weaponized Spanish Flu and were planning on releasing it into the water supply of a large Russian community near Reno, Hu was delighted. A total of fifty-three people dead and an entire water supply totally polluted for God knows how many decades, and he was like a kid with a new stack of comics. He actually admires the kind of damaged or twisted minds that can create ethnic-specific diseases, build super dirty-bombs, and create weapons capable of annihilating whole populations. I’ve wondered for years how much of a push it would take to shove Hu over to the dark side of the Force.

Bug, though, didn’t have a mean bone in his body. For him it was a by-product of a life so insulated from the real world that nothing was particularly real to him. Only his beloved computers and the endless data streams. Something like this lab was probably no more real to him than a level in the latest edition of
Gears of War
or
Resident Evil
.

For my part, I am not a fan of anyone who would put extreme weapons into the hands of people so corrupt or so driven by fanaticism that they would turn the world into a pestilential wasteland just to make an ideological point.

Fuck that. For two pennies I’d call the Black Hawk and see what twelve Hellfire missiles and a six-pack of Hydra-70 rockets could do to sponge this place clean.

“Where’s that proving station?” I asked. He sent a step-by-step to my mobile phone.

As I made my way along corridors lit only by the narrow beam of my flashlight, I thought about the work that went on here. During the flight I’d had time to go over some of the background on the Koenig Group. They were originally a deeply integrated division of DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is an agency of the Department of Defense responsible for developing new technologies for the military. Koenig Group people worked on every aspect of DARPA before they went private, and that meant that they had the opportunity to see not only what was currently in development for modern warfare and defense, but also what was being looked at for future exploration.

Of late I’ve come to realize that when it comes to keeping in front of the global arms race, there is virtually no line of exploration that’s definitely off the table. So, without government oversight, where had the twisted minds here at Koenig gone?

I reached the end of one hallway and passed through a security door that lead to another corridor lined with doorways that looked exactly like the one I’d just come from. So much so that I actually went out the door and stood looking at the doors and then turned around and looked at the new set. The absolute similarity was unnerving and disorienting.

I called up the floor plan on my mobile and studied it.

“Bug,” I said, “somehow I made a wrong turn.”

Bug didn’t answer.

I tapped the earbud.

“Cowboy to Bug, do you copy?”

Nothing. Not even static.

I tapped my way over to the command channel. “Cowboy to Deacon,” I said, trying to reach Church.

Still nothing.

I turned around and looked down the hall. The beam cut a pale line that pushed the shadows back, but not much.

Suddenly I caught the smell again.

Sulfur, human waste, and spoiled meat. And the aroma of perfume.

I don’t remember moving or pulling open my shirt, but suddenly my gun was in my hand. Even though the whole place was absolutely still and quiet, I yelled into the darkness.

“Freeze! Federal agent. I’m armed.”

My words bounced off the darkened walls and melted into nothingness.

Then, from behind me, someone spoke my name.

A woman’s voice.

Soft.

Familiar.

Achingly familiar.

An impossible voice.

“Joe….”

I whirled, gun in one hand, flash in the other, pointing into the darkness.