Ravenous Dusk (16 page)

He grabbed his briefcase and got out the door at the first sounding of Wyler's horn, and ten full seconds before his five AM wake up call.

He stopped short just outside his door, and had to grab the railing as a gust of wind laced with beads of icy rain slashed at him. He could almost see the heat streaming off his body and into the ravenous predawn sky.

Down in the lot, a black GMC Suburban idled with its lights off. Behind triple-tinted windows, the interior was as inscrutable as the inside of an egg. Cundieffe looked around, but saw no other cars waiting. Painted in chiaroscuro black and blue and chrome, the lot was packed in silent ranks of sedans and SUV's. To his knowledge, the Assistant Director never traveled in a hulking utility vehicle, just the standard issue Ford LTD, though he had a support staff driver. But then, he had only been the Deputy Assistant Director, then. As the highly visible head of the new counterterrorism division, he would need more security than ever before. And now, with an emergency briefing at the Institute…

Something Wyler himself had told him at his first brush with Mule society:
the more powerful they become, the more invisible…

The rear passenger-side door opened and Wyler leaned out. "Get in. The war's back on."

Holding his briefcase over his head to shield it from the stinging rain, Cundieffe got a running start and leapt more or less completely into the back seat, hauling himself the rest of the way in by the seatbelt. The Suburban took off, the door slamming shut under the inertia that pressed Cundieffe face-first into the back of his seat.

As he righted himself, he studied the Assistant Director, and decided that if he were to look at himself through his superior's eyes this morning, he'd have to blur his own vision somewhat. Wyler looked as if he hadn't slept, and he held a drink in one shaky hand. He watched Cundieffe with the same subdued impatience that he'd displayed when he led the junior agent into the restroom at China Lake, and told him what he really was and why he was really there.

"What do we know, sir?"

"Very little, but that's why I wanted you along now. There's been a major break on the location of the Mission command element in South America, and some telecom activity inside Texas that suggests that they have already arrived on U.S. soil."

"That's incredible. I suppose the NSA intercepted communications from their foreign base of operations?"

"They don't use phones, Martin. They're not idiots. They used encrypted postings on a BBS to prepare the faithful who remained behind for the return invasion."

"My, it seems awfully quick, doesn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I thought that decryption of sophisticated encrypted text was somewhat time-consuming, even if you knew where to look…"

"You have objections, yes. But what are you trying to say?"

Cundieffe squirmed. He felt his hair writhing out of place on his skull as he tried to speak. "Isn't it illegal under even the narrowest interpretation of the Telecommunications Privacy Act for a private group to handle such information? I mean—"

"Martin, it is imperative that you understand something. We are fighting terrorism, which is low-intensity warfare, granted, but it is war on the American people, and on the American way of life. We would be shirking our duties to those people if we did not pursue their enemies with all due diligence, and all the resources available. Liberty and privacy are relative luxuries in time of war, but that is why it has been our especial duty to violate them with the least possible harm. Not the FBI, Martin.
Us
. America has
always
been at war. And we have
always
been listening."

"I've just—" Cundieffe faltered, trying to steer the conversation into less prickly territory. "I realize extraordinary means must be used to catch this extraordinary group, but I feel like I'm still not up to speed. What would drive the most brilliant scientists in our weapons programs to wage war on their own nation like this—"

"Cotton Mather," Wyler said. To Cundieffe's quizzical look, he added, "The father of American Puritan philo—"

"Right, right, but what's he got to do with it?" Cundieffe was thoroughly nonplussed.

Wyler quoted effusively with more than a glint of sarcasm in his eyes, "'The more cultured and intelligent you are, the more ready you are to work for Satan.'"

Cundieffe could not meet Wyler's gaze any more, and took up his briefcase. It was still dripping half-melted sleet onto the plush floormats. "I also have the case files you needed, sir, and my summary report on progress on the murder of Sgt. Storch."

"I've already read all there is to know. Forget about him, Martin. He's not FBI business, anymore. Nothing you see or hear this morning can be disclosed or used as evidence in the pursuance of FBI matters until you are given notice, is that clear?"

Cundieffe nodded.

"Good. Now, where we are going, you are going to meet with resistance. You may be ordered to leave, but you are not going to."

"I don't want to cause any friction, sir."

"But you will. We are a subspecies, but the Cave Institute is a society. One must be sponsored to be accepted, but the process is long and arduous. Your background with the FBI and your discretion in the Mission affair in California are barely enough to get your foot in the door."

Cundieffe let his voice get as weak and unconvincing as he could make it. "Sir, if there's any possibility of this reflecting badly on you, I don't want to impose. You could always brief me later…"

"This is a matter of national security. And you are my Agent in Charge on this case."

"But if I'm not to use any of the information we're going to receive this morning, how is my presence going to serve any purpose?"

"Because by the time we've digested the information and formulated a plan, we will also have conceived a legitimate channel for it to come to our attention. We will then be able to act on it decisively and finally. Last time, we let the military play their games, and nearly one hundred innocent civilians were incinerated. This time, we will manage the situation from start to finish, and order will prevail."

Cundieffe withdrew into himself. He didn't bring up the other contents of his briefcase, which he'd hoped to discuss. Instead, he looked at the drink in Wyler's hand, a sign of weakness that he hoped would not further jeopardize the investigation.

He didn't notice Wyler watching him until the glass was swept up under his nose. "Would you like one?" the Assistant Director asked. Cundieffe's nose was stung by a bitter aroma that tweaked the olfactory sweetmeats in the floor of his brain. What could the Assistant Director be hooked on, that could make such a stench? Absinthe?

"No, sir," he fumbled. "It's a little early for me…"

"Imbecile," Wyler snapped. "It's herbal tea."

Martin still found it hard to believe that he (he still thought of himself as a "he," Wyler had explained that to do otherwise could precipitate a psychotic breakdown) was not a man like the others, but something else entirely.
A sub-species, a symbiotic worker caste,
they called themselves.
The future
, their eyes said.

The enormity of it was still a long way from coming home, because it was the kind of world-changing revelation that alters the way one sees the sky, the world, his face in the mirror. His reflexes for dealing with such fundamental paradigm shifts had atrophied since their last major challenge, when he discovered that neither the Director nor his Father were immortal. To know of the Mules and what they did in secret to keep the world from falling apart from one day to the next was not so different, he supposed, from learning first hand of the hand of God. For the time being, it was merely curious, that he had never seen it, seen them—seen
himself
.

He had always been a passionate student of human nature. As a child, he'd had to mimic normal behaviors to avoid being beaten constantly. He found most human behavior utterly ridiculous, until he began to understand the nature of the axes on which they turned. Dominance and self-gratification ruled most, and in many it hollowed them out and made them into machines, destined to harm themselves and others in their blind animal madness. His parents might have had some influence in guiding him towards his career, but it was in his nature to study people, and to seek to protect society from the bad ones. Now, he knew where it came from, and that he was not alone.

In his earlier visits to Washington, AD Wyler had introduced Cundieffe to eight Mules that he knew about, and perhaps three times as many that he couldn't be sure about. It was not something one could immediately pin down. There was no syndrome that Cundieffe had yet identified, and he struggled to isolate one.

Excessive hygiene, perhaps, but that could be put down to the deficiencies in hormones, the elegant efficiency of the immune system, the strict adherence to proper diet, that caused them to have no native odor whatsoever. Those cast as males tended towards academic tweediness or invisible gray flannel, with no power tie posturing or cosmetic adornment, and a tendency towards premature baldness and a total lack of body or facial hair. The "females" were indistinguishable from all the other frosty power-suited lady politicos in government, but those whom he knew were Mules seemed to represent the asexual ideal towards which all other career women strove: waspish in figure, crisply coiffed and almost stingingly brisk in conversation.

Intelligence, certainly: Cundieffe had yet to meet one who didn't make him feel like a rank idiot. That was par for the course in Washington, he knew, but the Mules he'd met had done so effortlessly and with none of the self-conscious relish that he'd observed in gendered bureaucrats. He'd found he got in trouble the least when he addressed a new acquaintance as "Doctor," and tried to steer conversation away from his own alma mater.

Power, obviously, but never for its own sake, and never in elected positions. Attending a series of odd briefings with a motley assortment of upper-level functionaries of federal agencies, Cundieffe had found that the Mules placed their numbers in bureaucratic positions where they wielded the most possible power over policy with the least visibility. Positions of titular power and ready media access were left to hacks and empty suits, but their briefings and position papers almost invariably came from Mule subordinates. The Mules he'd met so far included one other FBI Assistant Director; an assistant chairman of the Federal Reserve; the executive secretary of the Office of Management and Budget; a senior administrator at the Centers for Disease Control; the assistant director of the Environmental Protection Agency; the deputy director of the Department of Energy; the vice chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; the civilian deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; and the Ambassador to Switzerland. Nearly all of them had remained in their present positions through at least the last three administrations, watching them come and go as they quietly ran the nation. An outside observer, even armed with the understanding of what they were, could only guess at who was what by the absence of attention, the omission of the kind of human errors and excesses that cropped up in nearly every career, sooner or later. It was a chilling field of speculation, that everyone who didn't turn up on the eleven o'clock news could be one, and could only be ruled out when they ruined themselves in a scandal.

During their first meeting after he learned, Cundieffe had asked AD Wyler the question that had been uppermost in his mind, if the Director was one of them. Wyler had looked about his office as if, even here, such a secret could not be lightly spoken. But also, he noted, with some disappointment, as if he'd hoped that Cundieffe possessed sharper insight than he did. "Hoover was a man, with all that entails. He had strong homosexual tendencies, but we know that he never acted on them, for fear of compromising his position and the Bureau."

"But what about…?" he hadn't been able to finish the thought, but it was foremost on the nerves of even the most die-hard Hoover loyalist, and Wyler had caught it. The Director's unseemly attachment to his Assistant, Clyde Tolson, the man who shared his secrets, his companionship and the lonely stewardship of his memory after he finally passed away. On their vacations, the Director had taken mountains of snapshots of his friend, that many apologists had made fools of themselves trying to defend—Clyde sleeping, Clyde sunbathing, and so on.

"We know that Hoover never acted on his gendered impulses, because Clyde Tolson
was
one of us."

As has ever been the case in human affairs, there were many cabals, conclaves and secret powers in federal government, all of them shaping the stuttering, outwardly static progress of government with their infighting and alliances. But they were without exception composed of white males, and subject to the animal programming of their gender and class. Many of them claimed to control the government, but most of them had never even heard of the Mules. None of those who did spoke of them above a whisper.

Everything in government that worked came from the Mules, or so they would have him believe. In the last century, the United States' slopebrowed alpha male leadership had brought the nation—and, in several cases, the world—closer to the brink of collapse or even extinction than the rest of the world would ever know, no less than nine times, and only the Mules had saved them.

Cundieffe quickly ascertained that AD Wyler was not parading him around Washington simply to initiate him into the fold. From the questions they asked and the whispered conversations Wyler had with other Mules at the Columbia Club where they met, he had gathered that the twentieth incident was even now unfolding, and he was being groomed to help prevent it. Cundieffe didn't have to read lips or press Wyler to know that they were, all of them, talking about the Mission and Radiant Dawn.