He didn’t comment. He wouldn’t.
“Dr. Sanchez will be on the first thing smoking.”
“I don’t need a shrink,” I began irritably, but he cut me off.
“I’m not sending him to hold your hand, Captain. Dr. Sanchez has a great deal of experience with post- traumatic stress, and much of that can be ameliorated if dealt with from the jump.”
That was true enough. Rudy was an old friend and he was my own post-trauma shrink before he became my best friend. Since we both signed onto the DMS he’d been the voice of reason and everyone’s shortest pathway to a perspective check. Even, I suspected, for Church himself, though Rudy refused to discuss it.
Church said, “You’ll liaise with Barrier and offer them any support you can. Barrier knows that anything they tell you will be processed through MindReader, and they’re comfortable with that. They don’t have anything as sophisticated, so we may get some hits before they do.”
Barrier was the global model for effective covert counterterrorist rapid-response groups, and it actually predated the DMS by several years. Church had tried to get the DMS in place first, but when Congress wouldn’t green-light the money he served as a consultant to the U.K. to build Barrier. When that organization proved itself to be an invaluable tool against the rising tide of advanced bioweapon threats, the Americans finally got a clue and Church built the DMS. The Barrier agents I’d met were every bit as good as our guys, most of them having been handpicked from the most elite SAS teams.
However, hearing the name Barrier inevitably conjured the image of Grace Courtland.
Maj. Grace Courtland had been Church’s second in command at the Warehouse, the DMS field office in Baltimore. She was a career military officer and the first woman to join the SAS as an active operative, and the permanent liaison between Barrier and the DMS. She was tough, smart, and beautiful, and she was my direct superior in the chain of command. At the end of August, against all common fucking sense, we fell in love. That was wrong in a whole lot of ways. Rudy tried to warn me, but I brushed him off and told him to mind his own business. And yes, I know that as he was the DMS shrink this
Grace and I knew that a love relationship, no matter how discreet, made us fly too close to the flame. As agents of the Department of Military Sciences we tackled the deadliest threats imaginable, so personal entanglements could only end in trouble. In our case, it ended in disaster. We faced off against a threat so huge that books will be written about it. At the end of it, the good guys won and I lost. I lost Grace. She died saving us all, and I think I died, too. Part of me, anyway.
Since then I’ve knocked aimlessly around Europe with my dog, Ghost, a specially trained DMS K9. We got into a couple of scrapes together while doing some unofficial stuff for friends of Mr. Church. I hadn’t actually quit the DMS, but I didn’t want to return to the Baltimore Field Office. Grace would not be there. The place would be full of echoes, of shadows and memories. Of ghosts.
Originally, I had come to Europe on a hunting trip. The bastard who shot Grace escaped the bloody resolution of that case. He escaped and went into the wind. As a going-away present, Mr. Church left me a folder full of leads, travel documents, and money, and, without ever saying so, his blessing.
Ghost and I went hunting, and after many weeks we ran our prey to ground. There’s an unmarked grave on one of the Faroe Islands off the coast of Denmark. I pissed on it after I hand-shoveled the dirt and rocks over what was left of the body.
It didn’t bring Grace back, but I believed that somewhere—maybe in Valhalla—her warrior’s soul approved.
Damn it.
Church apparently got tired of the silence on my end of the phone and plowed ahead. “Your current credentials will get you into the investigation. I advised the President and Prime Minister about your participation. And … I’ll likely be on the same flight as Dr. Sanchez. Do you want me to bring Jerry Spencer as well?”
Jerry was the top forensics man I knew. He’d joined the DMS at the same time I did. His genius was in walking a scene and letting the evidence talk to him.
“Absolutely. As soon as the ashes are cool enough to walk, I want Jerry in the smoke. It should all be over by the time he gets here, because at this point it doesn’t look like the fire department is doing anything but containment on this. It’s all going to burn down. What’s my play?”
“Be available to the Brits. They’ll tell you what they need.”
“Where’s Gog and Magog? Shouldn’t they be on this?”
These were the two DMS teams permanently stationed in Great Britain. Gog was based at the Regent’s Park Barracks on Albany Street in London; Magog was hosted by the forty-eighth Fighter Wing at the Lakenheath RAF base in Suffolk. I worked with both of them on my second mission after signing on. We tracked a network of Iranian terrorists who were selling yellowcake by the hundredweight to terrorist groups. That’s not something you serve at birthday parties. It’s a uranium derivative used in the preparation of fuel for nuclear reactors. Look it up in
“Gog is dealing with a critical matter in Prague. Magog is in Afghanistan dismantling a Taliban bioweapons team. At the moment you’re the only senior DMS agent in the U.K.”
“Swell.”
“The London counterterrorist offices have both accepted my offer of your services.”
“Why would they want my help?”
“Because I briefed them on the Seif Al Din,
“Good. You know,” I said, “of the big-event terrorist attacks we’ve seen—the Alfred P. Murrah Building, both World Trade Center attacks, the London subway bombings—they were all one and done, followed by a lot of gloating via the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll throw myself into this with a will, but unless this is one of our playmates, then I’m just another pair of boots on the ground.”
“I’m no more psychic than you are,” said Church, “but I believe that there is a clock ticking somewhere. Maybe the Kings, maybe Al-Qaeda. Besides, terrorism notwithstanding, this is a crime and you’re a cop. Work the crime. Somebody has to have survived. Somebody has to know something.”
“Any chance you can send Echo Team over here?”
“They are out at Area 51 and—”
“Wait—what? There’s an
Church sighed. “At times you’re as bad as Bug and Dr. Hu. Yes, Captain, we have an Area 51 and no, Captain, there are no UFOs there. Nor are any alien autopsies being performed there.”
“Damn.”
“It is, however, a classified area, and Echo Team is providing backup for Lucky Team out of Vegas and the intelligence investigators from Nellis. Possible security breach, but so far no fireworks.”
“Crap. Can you send them my way when they’re finished kicking E.T.’s ass?”
He grunted. “Why? They’re not investigators.”
“They can handle door knocks and Q and A.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” He paused. “Bottom line, this needs to be handled with precision. We dropped the ball on 9/11. We reacted too slowly and often the wrong way. We have to do better this time.”
“‘We’? This isn’t the U.S.A.,” I reminded him.
“How does that matter? This is an attack on humanity. There are sixty million people in Britain.”
Wow, I really was off my game if I walked into that.
“What if Al-Qaeda or one of the other usual suspects steps forward to claim responsibility for this?”
“Best-case scenario, we establish some fresh leads that will maybe result in a useful joint Barrier-DMS action.”
“Worst case?”
“We lose the thread of this and have to wait for something else to happen.”
I looked across the road to where one of the brand-new towers was crumbling, the charred bones of the building collapsing under its own deadweight. More of the black smoke billowed up and turned a horrible morning
