He almost smiled. “No MIB, nothing retroengineered from crashed UFOs, no rayguns. The name, as I said, is functional. Department of Military Sciences.”
“A bunch of science geeks playing in the same league as Homeland?”
“More or less.”
“No aliens?”
“No aliens.”
“I’m no longer in the military, Mr. Church.”
“Mm-hm.”
“And I’m not a scientist.”
“I know.”
“So why am I here?”
Church looked at me for almost a minute. “For someone who is supposed to have rage issues you don’t anger very easily, Mr. Ledger. Most people would be yelling by this point in an interview of this kind.”
“Would yelling get me back to the beach any sooner?”
“It might. You also haven’t asked for us to call your father. You haven’t threatened me with his juice as commissioner.”
I ate another cookie. He watched me dismantle it and go through the entire time-honored Oreo ritual. When I was done he slid my glass of water closer to me.
“Mr. Ledger, the reason I wanted you to meet the FBI agents today was because I need to know if that’s what you want to be?”
“Meaning?”
“When you look inside your own head, when you look at your own future, do you see yourself in a humorless grind of following bank accounts and sorting through computer records in hopes of bagging one bad guy every four months?”
“Pays better than the cops.”
“You could open up a karate school and make three times more money.”
“Jujutsu.”
He smiled as if somehow he’d scored a point and I realized that he’d tricked me into correcting him out of pride. Sneaky bastard.
“So, tell me honestly, is that the kind of agent you want to be?”
“If this is leading up to some kind of alternative suggestion, stop jerking me off and get to it.”
“Fair enough, Mr. Ledger.” He sipped his water. “The DMS is considering offering you a job.”
“Um hello? Not military? Not a scientist?”
“Doesn’t matter. We have plenty of scientists. The military connection is merely for convenience. No, this would be something along the lines of what you do well. Investigation, apprehension, and some field work like at the warehouse.”
“You’re a Fed, so are we talking counterterrorism?”
He sat back and folded his big hands in his lap. “ ‘Terrorism’ is an interesting word. Terror ” He tasted the word. “Mr. Ledger, we are very much in the business of stopping terror. There are threats against this country greater than anything that has so far made the papers.”
“ ‘So far.’ ”
“We-and when I say ‘we’ I embrace my colleagues in the more clandestine agencies-have stopped fifty times as many threats as you would believe, ranging from suitcase nukes to radical bioweapon technologies.”
“Yay for the home team.”
“We’ve also worked to refine our definition of terrorism. Religious fundamentalism and political idealism actually play a far less important role, in a big-picture sense, than most people-including heads of state, friendly and not-would have the general public believe.” He looked at me for a moment. “What would you say is the most significant underlying motive for all world strife-terrorism, war, intolerance the works?”
I shrugged. “Ask any cop and he’ll tell you that,” I said. “In the end it’s always about the money.”
He said nothing but I could sense a shift in his attitude toward me. There was the faintest whisper of a smile on his mouth.
I said, “All of this seems to be a long way from Baltimore. Why’d you bring me here? What’s so special about me?”
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Ledger, there have been other interviews like this.”
“So, where are those guys? You let them go back to the beach?”
“No, Mr. Ledger, not as such. They didn’t pass the audition.”
“I’m not sure I like how you phrased that.”
“It wasn’t meant to be a comforting comment.”
“And I suppose you want me to ‘audition’ next?”
“Yes.”
“How does that play out? Bunch of mind games and psych tests?”
“No, we know enough about you from your current medical records and fifteen years of psych evaluations. We know that in the last couple of years you’ve suffered severe losses. First your mother died of cancer and then your ex-girlfriend committed suicide. We know that when you and she were teenagers you were attacked, and that some older teens beat you nearly to death and then held you down and made you watch as they raped her. We know about that. We know you went through a brief dissociative phase as a result, and that you’ve had some intermittent rage issues, which is one of the reasons you regularly see a therapist. It’s fair to say you understand and can recognize the face of terror when you see it.”
It would have felt pretty good to demonstrate the whole rage concept to him right then, but I guessed that’s what he would be looking for. Instead I made my face look bored. “This is where I should get offended that you’ve invaded my privacy, et cetera?”
“It’s a new world, Mr. Ledger. We do what we must. And yes, I know how that sounds.” Nothing in his tone of voice sounded like an apology.
“So, what do I have to do?”‘
“It’s quite simple, really.” He got up and walked around the table to the curtain that hung in front of the big picture window. With no attempt at drama he pulled back the curtain to reveal a similar room. One table, one chair, one occupant. A man sitting hunched forward, his back to the window, possibly asleep. “All you need to do is go in there, then cuff and restrain that prisoner.”
“You kidding me?”
“Not in the least. Go in there, subdue the suspect, put him in cuffs, and attach the cuffs to the D-ring mounted on the table.”
“What’s the catch? That’s one guy. Your goon squad could have-”
“I am aware what overwhelming force could do, Mr. Ledger. That’s not the point of this exercise.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a pair of handcuffs. “I want you to do it.”
Chapter Five
Easton, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 2:08 P.M.
THE FIRST THING I noticed when I opened the door to the interrogation room was the stink. Smelled like a treatment plant. The guy didn’t stir. He was slim, probably shorter than me, dark-skinned-Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Black hair that was sweat-soaked and lank. He wore a standard orange prison jumpsuit and he seemed completely out of it, his head hanging almost down to his knees.
I stepped into the room, conscious of the big mirror on my left. Mr. Church would be watching me, probably eating another vanilla wafer. The door closed behind me and I turned to see Buckethead staring at me through the glass. For a second I thought he was smiling, and then his expression registered. It was more like a wince, a flinching twist of his face as if he expected a scorpion to jump out at him. Even behind a steel door the agent was spooked by this guy. Swell. I held my cuffs in my right hand and extended my left in a calm, assertive gesture, palm outward. It looks placating but it’s right there in case you need to block, grab, or hit.
