The Rift

CHAPTER 6

The term LoJack was invented to be the opposite of hijack, which was a little too cute for Neeley.

It was also too easy. Neeley distrusted easy. It wasn’t exactly one of Gant’s rules that he’d pounded into her during their years together, hiding from the covert world. It was implicit. Gant had taught her a lot, some of it skills that civilians paid a lot of money to learn such as skiing, parachuting, mountain climbing, and so on. However, he’d taught her the hard way. In adverse weather. Carrying heavy loads of gear. At night. And they’d done some of it under the most difficult circumstances of all: when trying to track down and kill someone or, worse, when someone was trying to do the same to them.

But the Support personnel interviewing the driver of the Prius stolen at the Gateway Arch had learned that the car was equipped with a LoJack system. At three in the morning and in a rush, Burns hadn’t had the opportunity to be picky. The VIN and unit number had been sent out to police across the country and it had turned up, driving across Illinois and on into Kentucky. Police were warned to note location of the transmitter but to not approach under any circumstances.

Neeley knew this was part of why Hannah had been quick to take over the mission of bringing down this Burns fellow. They had his location (the transmitter’s location, Neeley corrected Hannah, which was not exactly the same as the person) and could continue to track him. The issue was whether to take him down now or see where he was going and what he was planning to do.

While the Nightstalkers might be bitching about having the op taken from them, this really was the Cellar’s area of expertise: tracking down rogue agents from the covert world. If Neeley notched her various guns, there would be a lot of notches. Also her knives, her garrote, and her bare hands. Every niche had its artists, those who took the simple job, the craft, to levels others could barely conceptualize but that the artist could embody. Neeley was an artist in death. She had learned early on that the actual, final act, while important, was not the key to success. It was the preparation, the planning, the consideration of every possible contingency that were the keys to making sure the art went one way and not the other.

Thus Neeley was in a hangar at an auxiliary airfield at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. A field that was headquarters for the original Task Force 160, the Nightstalkers, to be confused with the Nightstalkers out of the Ranch outside of Area 51. Neeley thought the cover name using a Special-Ops unit another too-cute idea.

Then again, she thought as she looked at the various displays, she could simply be getting more paranoid, less patient, and just too damn old for this BS. She was seeing ghosts behind every operation lately, although the reality was there were indeed ghosts and shadows and double and triple crosses. She found the Nightstalkers’ outrage that the Cellar was taking over this Sanction a bit ironic considering how straightforward most Nightstalker missions were compared to Cellar operations. They might be bizarre and weird, but they were usually clear as to who or what the bad guy/thing was.

The Cellar was the Cellar. Few had ever heard of it. Few needed to hear of it. It was whispered of in the world of covert ops and in the halls of Washington, much like not-so-nice parents might tell their children of a horrible beast hiding in their closet that would come out and torment them if they were bad.

The airfield was near a large fenced compound, where rows and rows of grass-covered concrete bunkers with rusting steel doors had once held a large number of nuclear warheads, a leftover from a supposedly bygone day of the Cold War. Fort Campbell was also the home base of the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). It straddled the Tennessee-Kentucky border, about sixty miles northwest of Nashville.

Neeley had landed via Gulfstream just a few minutes ago and she was in a Tactical Operations Center (TOC), set up by TF-160. The signal was on I-24 approaching Nashville. From there, it could go in several directions: southwest toward Memphis (doubtful since it would have turned south earlier), south toward Birmingham, southeast toward Chattanooga and Atlanta and beyond, or east toward Knoxville. It might even backtrack north toward Indianapolis, but that was doubtful because it could have turned earlier.

Since LoJack worked on FM, it was line of sight. TF-160 had a Quick-Fix helicopter in the air, at high altitude and several miles behind the Prius, tracking it. Neeley looked at the large computer display as the Prius reached where I-24 and I-65 joined together above Nashville. In a few minutes they’d have an idea which general direction it was moving on to.

No one else in the TOC had any clue why they were following the car. The orders had come in from higher and thus they would obey. It was a mind-set Neeley was used to but sometimes found disturbing, because the people at the top sometimes might have their own agenda. She’d traveled to South America earlier in the year with Roland to deal with two high-ranking CIA agents who’d manipulated data for their own personal advancement.

Neeley trusted Hannah with her life. She had to. Time and again she’d gone on missions, trusting only Hannah’s word.

But.

Gant had told her to trust no one.

Ever.

But he’d trusted her. He’d died in her arms.

If it were easy, anyone could do it. The schizophrenic nature of covert operations where the simple operation could actually be a double-cross, which could actually be a cover for a triple-cross, which might simply be some bureaucrat trying to advance their career, not giving a damn how many operatives died because of the lies and manipulations that took their toll.

What was truth?

Neeley’s phone buzzed. There was no question who it was, since only one person had her number. Neeley pulled the phone out but paused before activating it. The weight of that thought, that there was only one person who had her cell number, had never pressed down upon her with so much force.

She hit accept. “Yes?”

“Someone is using the Loop,” Hannah said without preamble. “Mrs. Sanchez was contacted by one of her former personnel. The message is heading to a third cutout.”

“Someone’s being very careful.”

“The message originated in the Knoxville, Tennessee, area,” Hannah said.

“Who do we know there?” Neeley asked as she looked at the map display and spotted Knoxville, to the direct east of Nashville along I-40.

“We’re checking the files,” Hannah said. “But it seems to be coming from the outside to the inside.”

From a civilian? Neeley wondered. She’d been a civilian once herself. A civilian who’d walked into an airport with a bomb packed inside a gaily wrapped package, before the time of 9/11. That was when she met Gant and left the civilian world far behind.

Neeley stepped back into the TOC and looked at the screen. The flashing dot indicating the Prius had just passed downtown Nashville. It then moved onto I-40 east.

“My Sanction is heading in that direction.”

“Yes. That is why I called.”

Something was off. Neeley had known Hannah too many years. “This is a Sanction, correct?”

“Correct. The Sanction has three confirmed murders.”

“Should I allow the Sanction to get to wherever and whatever his objective is?”

A long two seconds. Silence followed. “I’ll get back to you on that as quickly as I can.”

The phone went dead and Neeley stared at it for a very long time, ten seconds, while her mind went into dark corners.

Which wasn’t unusual.

Ivar’s locker was squared away, his deployment gear was packed according to Protocol, and now they were driving alongside that third-longest airstrip in the world at Groom Lake, aka the heart of Area 51. Doc was at the wheel of a jeep, only slightly more modern than Colonel Orlando’s had been, which meant it was ancient. Ivar had to wonder why the Nightstalkers used such antiquated vehicles here.

Doc had been talking, almost nonstop, all morning and into the afternoon, bombarding Ivar not only with the history of Rifts and Fireflies, but also dipping deep into his own well of knowledge to discuss various theories. His theories on Rifts. It wouldn’t have taken Frasier, the Nightstalkers’ shrink, to point out that Doc was overcompensating, threatened by another scientist’s presence on the team.

Ivar, being a physicist, of course, didn’t make such a psychological analysis of the situation. He just thought Doc was acting pretty much like every professor he’d ever worked for on his path to get his own PhD. Self-centered, convinced they had all the answers when they didn’t even know what most of the questions were, and, most of all, being about one-upmanship.

Aka a dick.

Two massive hangar doors cut into the side of Groom Mountain were partially open, and Doc drove right up to them, guards waving them through after scanning their eyes. Ivar caught glimpses of aircraft he didn’t recognize scattered throughout the hangar, but Doc drove straight to the far wall. Two guards scanned their eyes once more and then allowed them access to an elevator.

“They rely a lot on eyes being the true window into our souls here,” Ivar said.

“Save it for Eagle,” Doc said shortly. “He likes that kind of philosophical stuff.”

They got into the elevator.

“It takes a while,” Doc said as the doors slid shut after they entered.

“How far down?” Ivar asked as the elevator began to accelerate into the Earth.

“Two miles.”

That took ten minutes and it seemed Doc had run out of things to talk about, so the only noise was the whirring of the elevator’s engine. Actually, Doc never ran out of things to talk about or ways to spread the wealth of his knowledge. His mind had slipped into a dark rut — more a valley, actually — which it always did whenever he went down to the Can. The left side of his brain, the numbers side, was calculating the tons of pressure accumulating around them as they descended and how small a mass of protoplasm his body would be crushed into if it all collapsed.

Sometimes being smart had its disadvantages.

“The Can is a Super-Kamiokande,” Doc said as he gave up, knowing he’d be crushed into a tiny, tiny object if everything imploded.

“Like the one in Japan?”

“Yes. Early on when they started digging into Groom Mountain to develop the base, they did soundings and found a large, natural void deep underground. No one thought it was of much use until we realized we needed to build the Can.”

“And the Can detects Rifts.” Orlando would have been proud, because Ivar made it a statement, not a question.

The elevator came to a halt and Doc opened the metal gate. A corridor carved out of solid rock beckoned. They began the two-hundred-yard walk down it, fluorescent lights flickering overhead.

It ended, opening to a cavern eighty yards in diameter.

“The Japanese have one, we have one, and the Russians have one,” Doc said as they walked out onto metal grating suspended over still dark water.

“So you can triangulate.” Another statement.

Two people were on duty, staring at computer monitors with the glazed look of someone who spent 99.9 percent of their time doing nothing with nothing happening. Ivar understood that. He’d spent a lot of bench time doing the exact same thing.

Doc and Ivar walked over. “The Can picks up muonic activity, which Rifts give off when they begin to form. Gives us thirty-eight minutes of warning at least. That’s the fastest from first indication to activation recorded. We usually get more time.”

Ivar looked over the shoulder of an operator. Four large displays were further broken down into data boxes with various electronic readings, graphs, and charts. He began to ask questions of the two operators, much to the irritation of Doc, who finally walked away to a stack of printouts and began going through them.

Even the operators eventually had enough of the questioning and turned back to their screens. Ivar walked out onto the metal grating that extended over the dark pool of water covering the stainless steel tank, which was sixty meters wide and deep. Along the walls of the tank, over 20,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) were patiently waiting for incoming muons. PMTs are extremely sensitive light sensors that can detect a single photon as it travels through and reacts with water. They were all linked together with the output displayed on the computers at the workstations.

The tank was filled with very pure water. The surface was dark black and Ivar found it quite mesmerizing. Pretty much everyone who came down here did. Ivar knelt and glanced quickly over; Doc was flipping through some charts and the two operators weren’t visible, hidden behind their large monitors. He pulled a small black orb out of his pocket, pressed the top, was rewarded with a slight buzz, and dropped it into the water. Then he stood, hands on the railing.

After five minutes, Doc had enough, dropping the readouts. “Let’s go. All that matters is that we get our Rift alerts.”

“Really?” Ivar was surprised. “But if we don’t understand the Rifts, how are we going to stop them completely? Moms said—”

“We know enough to shut one when it happens,” Doc said.

“Seems a bit shortsighted,” Ivar said.

Doc stopped abruptly and faced Ivar. He jabbed a finger in his chest. “When you have more time on the team, then maybe you can question me. For now, I suggest you shut up and learn.”

Ivar didn’t step back. “Excuse me, Doc, but you didn’t know how to shut the Rift in my lab. You didn’t even know what the hell that was in my lab. I barely remember what I was doing. This thing seems to be evolving, changing, as Ms. Jones said. Think about what happened in North Carolina in my lab. This guy, Burns, coming through in St. Louis. The scientist who opened the Gateway Rift received a fatal dose of radiation, yet Burns apparently is still moving about. And what he did to the Snake. That’s all something new, right?”

“You did not even get your PhD,” Doc said. “Do not dare lecture me.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Ivar said.

Both operators had turned their chairs around to observe the fireworks, which was more interesting than the screens they’d been watching. Which was unfortunate, because in one of the data boxes on one of the screens, there was a slight disturbance — not muonic, and not enough to trigger an alarm, but something, a slight surge.

Something that should have been noticed.

“It’s just a piece of paper,” Ivar said. “You can wipe your ass with it.”

Instead of continuing the fight, Doc headed for the elevator. “You coming?” he added over his shoulder.

The operators turned back to their screens and all was normal.

At least it appeared that way.

Scout was getting antsy. She’d ridden back home, hiding in her room, waiting for her iPhone to come alive with a message from Nada. Her mother was still off doing whatever it was that her mother filled her days with. Probably shopping for a pot or something. And then for something to put in the pot. Then something to put the pot on. Then she’d come home and spend hours trying to figure out the exact right place to put the pot. Decide there was no exact right place. And spend tomorrow returning the pot, along with the thing she’d wanted to put in the pot. And the thing she’d wanted to put the pot on.

The usual crap.

Scout was curled up, arms around her knees, on the window seat in her bedroom staring out at the river.

It was no longer as enchanting as it had been.

A crackling noise caught her attention and she cranked open the window and leaned out. The metal skeleton holding up the power lines had a slight golden glow on the one leg the black line had been heading toward.

Not being an expert on unnatural forces except for her brief stint with the Nightstalkers, Scout figured she ought to be cut some slack for her guesstimate being off as she watched the glow go up the leg, as if steel were turning to gold.

It reached the first arm holding a power line and moved vertical.

Without even realizing she was doing it, Scout’s hand went into her pocket and she pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. She’d quit, really, last week, but circumstances were getting a bit weird.

She scratched a wooden match on the roofing tile outside the window just as the glow touched the wire. Her shoulders were hunched, expecting an explosion, a ball of flame, an earthquake, flying monkeys, something.

But nothing. Except the gold didn’t spread any more on the tower.

The cigarette dangled from Scout’s mouth, unlit as she waited, until she cursed as the match burned down to her fingers. She dropped the match and took the cigarette out of her mouth.

She realized the thump of the pile driver had stopped and spared a glance across the river. The workers were staring at the tower also, gesturing and talking among themselves. Scout felt a sense of fellowship and also relief that she wasn’t just imaging all of this.

Everything stayed exactly like it was for almost a minute; then, as if the metal tower digested a big ball of gold, the orb flowed out of the wire, back down the tower, and into the earth.

Scout leaned farther out of the window, in danger of toppling to the ground. She could see what the men on the river couldn’t. The golden pulse came out of the leg, into the ground, and along the black line she’d spotted earlier in the day.

Then it was in the water, a very slight golden mist, slowly spreading outward in all directions. It reminded Scout of a nature channel show where a python had imbibed a deer whole and it went down the gullet and the python slithered back into the water in order to digest the large meal.

The men on the barge had already dismissed it and were back at work, pounding away.

“It just ate a lot of power,” Scout whispered to herself, not knowing how she knew it, but she knew it.

And there was no doubt that wasn’t a good thing.

She pulled herself back in the window and grabbed her iPhone. She texted the same number.

And was rewarded with “NUMBER OUT OF SERVICE.”

“Come on, Nada,” Scout said.

Captain Griffin was on the roof of the White House, watching the sky with his binoculars. When he scanned south, the Washington Monument crossed his field of vision. As he did every time he saw it, he thought how odd it was that the monument was two tones. The obsessive part of him wanted to run over and paint it all one color, although the two tones came from different shadings of marble used in the construction, not different paint. And the two different types of marble came about because while initial construction of the monument began in 1848, it ground to a halt in 1854 because of the Know Nothing Party.

Really. The Know Nothing Party. Griffin liked that. He could think of a lot of politicians who could be charter members.

Then, of course, there was the Civil War, which put a damper on building as Washington became the most heavily fortified city in the world at the time. Lincoln did insist work continue on the Capitol Dome and managed to see the Statue of Freedom placed on top, although he did not live to see it totally completed in 1866.

And even after the Civil War, for the Washington Monument, there were more politics. So for twenty-three years, like a broken shaft, the one-quarter-completed monument graced Washington’s skyline, testament to a broken country.

It depressed Griffin to think that Abraham Lincoln never saw the completed monument. He often wondered how the various presidents felt when they gazed out from the White House. It was a hobby of Griffin’s to study the history of Washington, D.C., and the buildings and countryside around the White House. He was a big believer that one’s environment affected a person greatly.

They really should have matched the stone, Griffin thought as he completed his sector, then started over, jumping three-quarters right quadrant so that anyone observing him wouldn’t see a pattern, because there was no pattern.

Patterns were bad for effective security.

And thinking about security reminded him of the kerfuffle over the holidays when the White House had gone into lockdown and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff had lost his mind and committed suicide in the command bunker under the East Wing.

So they said.

Griffin had been on leave and was sorry he’d missed the excitement, but the Keep had handled things well and gotten him up to speed on what had really happened. The world was a much more dangerous place than the average person realized.

Or needed to know.

The Monument flashed by in his binoculars again as he circled back. When he redid his kitchen in Virginia, the contractor tried to pawn off two different granites on him. Said it looked cool. Not. The guy was just trying to unload stuff he’d bought for someone else after the other person reneged. Two tones in the same object just didn’t work.

He was so lost in thought he almost didn’t hear the phone.

Warren Zevon.

He kept the binoculars to his eyes with one hand as he pulled the phone out of his pocket and hit the accept key by feel. Then he glanced down, verified the message, and forwarded it, all automatically.

Then he lowered the binoculars and forwarded the message to the Keep. As it zoomed out of his phone to a tower, then back here to the White House, just one floor below him, where the Keep kept her office, he shook his head. There were those who believed the Loop was secure, a way those in the know could pass messages outside the system.

There was no outside the system. Not in a world where there were people like Hannah in the Cellar and the Keep in the White House and Ms. Jones at Area 51 and Mrs. Sanchez in the Pentagon comptroller and the other powerful denizens who ruled the dark world of covert ops. There was only what they allowed.

The world was a dangerous place and there were people who dealt with those dangers.

And for that, Captain Griffin was very grateful, unlike the many who decried every dollar spent by the government.

He knew the message was encrypted with a one-time program. He shook his head. They should have stuck to nonelectronic encryption. Use the same agreed upon page from Tale of Two Cities and a trigraph. Sometimes the old ways were the best.

Captain Griffin put the phone back in his pocket and scanned the grounds. There was a small patch of browning grass amid the sea of green. Some sprinkler head had to be off.

He made a mental note to tell maintenance about it at the end of his shift.

“He’s pulling off I-40,” the specialist who was sitting at the large display announced.

“Refueling?” someone asked.

Neeley walked over and stood behind the specialist, watching the image. The Nighthawk tracking the Prius was at a high enough altitude and far enough away that it couldn’t be heard and was just a distant black speck in the sky from the target vehicle.

The Prius drove past the cluster of gas stations at the exit. It continued along a secondary road, winding its way into the Tennessee countryside.

Neeley’s phone buzzed and she stepped outside to take the call. “Yes?”

“It’s a Sanction,” Hannah announced.

“He’s turned off the interstate,” Neeley said. “I’m not certain where the target is headed.”

“Most likely Knoxville,” Hannah said. “A message is being passed on the Loop via five cutouts. It originated in the Knoxville area.”

“The terminus?”

“We’re past cutout three now,” Hannah said. “Two to go to the terminus.”

“Shouldn’t we wait—”

“I want this shut down now. The Nightstalkers can deal with Rifts and Fireflies and all their other anomalies, but Burns, no matter where he’s been or what’s been done to him, is rogue. He was rogue before he got sucked through that Rift and he’s rogue now. I want this done before it escalates into who knows what. Not even Ms. Jones understands what’s going on.”

“Roger,” Neeley said as she twirled a finger on her free hand at the officer in charge. He sent a crew chief running toward the Nighthawk waiting nearby. Seeing him coming, the crew was already cranking up the engine. “Has anyone been able to at least determine what Burns’s real name was before he joined the Nightstalkers?”

“Ms. Jones did remember that,” Hannah replied. “Joseph Schmidt. Beyond that, not much. He came out of Delta Force and we’re running down all the former members of that team who have ‘disappeared.’ Unfortunately, there are quite a few and some have been disappeared so well, they never existed as far as we can tell. The Nightstalkers are very efficient about that.”

“Okay. Schmidt.”

“Be careful,” Hannah said. “And make sure you secure the remains. We’ll want to ship it to Area 51 for the Archives.”

“Roger.” Neeley waited, listening to the static from the encryption.

Finally Hannah spoke. “Good luck.”

The line went dead.

Neeley closed her eyes. She thought back to Vermont, to burying Gant, to the rest of that winter alone in the bitter cold, barely feeding the fire enough to survive.

You came into this world alone; you leave it alone.

Neeley went back into the TOC.

“He’s stopped,” the specialist reported. He pointed at the screen. “I ran it. It’s a care facility. Elysian Fields.”

Neeley considered this misdirection.

“Maybe he’s visiting family?” someone suggested.

The problem, Neeley knew, was that there was no way she could check further on Burns’s background. Like some other covert units, once someone became a member of the Nightstalkers, their past disappeared. They were gone from the face of the Earth, every record of their existence wiped clean. It was a two-edged sword, because if they went rogue, it was that much more difficult to track down someone who didn’t exist. Neeley had run into the problem numerous times in the past.

Hannah had a point and this development backed it. If Burns ditched the Prius, they’d lose the advantage of the LoJack. Neeley shouldered her field pack and ran for the Nighthawk. They were airborne and racing southeast at max speed.

She opened up her laptop and contacted the IT expert for the Cellar, directing him to hack into the database for Elysian Fields. She scanned the list of patients. Fifth one down was a Peter Schmidt. Father? Brother? Neeley checked deeper. Peter Schmidt was seventy-two years old. Diagnosis, advanced Parkinson’s. In a coma. So, most likely father.

Sentimentality was a weakness. One Neeley had found useful in the past to track down rogues. She wondered what it would be like to care so much about someone that even though Burns had to know they were after him, he still took the time to break Protocol to visit his father.

Startled by a sudden memory, Neeley’s head snapped up. She closed her eyes, trying to remember the conversation so many years ago she’d had with Hannah, about the death of Hannah’s parents, a huge force in shaping her into what she was now.

Hannah’s parents had died in a car crash. But it wasn’t that simple. Hannah had pieced it all together from memory and told Neeley the story while they were on the run, being chased by a rogue Cellar agent, while at the same time being part of Nero’s grand plan to find his successor. The manner of her parents’ deaths was a large piece of what put Hannah on Nero’s radar.

Hannah had been six years old. Her father had been picked up by the local sheriff for public drunkenness, apparently not a rare event. Her mother took her daughter to pick him up from the station, shoving her in the backseat. Neeley smiled grimly, thinking of Dr. Golden and her recurring theme: childhood trauma. She wondered if Hannah had ever told Golden this story of her own trauma.

Doubtful.

On the way home, Hannah made the mistake of speaking, of asking. There were many times when asking any question was not good. Her father had turned around and slapped Hannah so hard he bounced her head off the side window. Then he’d slumped back and passed out.

Hannah had remembered that her mother started talking, but in such a low voice, and her head hurt so much she couldn’t remember or tell Neeley what her mother had said. Hannah had fallen asleep in the backseat and woke up only when she heard the train.

She’d remembered few details, just the blinding light of the on-coming train and her mother reaching back to her and grabbing her hand and asking for forgiveness.

Then the train had hit.

The newspaper article about the “miracle” child who survived such a horrific accident must have piqued Nero’s interest deep inside his cave underneath the NSA. Such an odd and touching story. What fertile psychological ground. Who knew what could blossom in a person’s psyche from such an event?

It was a story Hannah had only told once as an adult: to Neeley. Not even to her husband, who had also betrayed her. Then Neeley realized why she was remembering Hannah’s story. What was key about it. It was the final thing Hannah had said to her at the end of that story in the French restaurant in Strasbourg as they got up to leave: “Because I know betrayal too. But I know something you don’t. Sometimes betrayal is the only love left. Remember that.”

Neeley’s eyes flickered open as the crew chief tapped her on the shoulder. “Six minutes out!”

Neeley wondered what role Burns’s father had had in his life to cause him to deviate from whatever his plan was to visit him. To make himself vulnerable to visit someone in a coma. What was the point? He wasn’t the same man who had raised Burns. He was the husk of a person who couldn’t see or hear.

Neeley was split between envying Burns and despising him for his weakness. The chopper was descending and she tapped on her screen, shifting to GPS mode. She’d designated a landing zone out of hearing distance from the home. An unmarked car, keys in, was waiting there for her. Neeley did one last check of her gear, making sure she had a round in the chamber of her pistol and that her various other weapons were accessible.

She was ready.

The chopper touched down next to railroad tracks. Neeley hopped off and the chopper popped back up into the sky and moved away to await her call for extraction. Neeley got in the car and drove, checking the GPS.

It didn’t take long to get to Elysian Fields. There were only a dozen cars in the parking lot, the Prius one of them. Neeley walked in the front and flipped open her badge to the person on duty behind the desk and then flipped it shut.

“Schmidt?”

The old black woman in a starched white nurse’s uniform behind the desk didn’t even blink. “Might I see that badge again? Long enough so I can read it, miss?” Her name tag read Washington.

“Certainly, Nurse Washington.” Neeley bit back her frustration. There was always someone who had to do it by the rules. Neeley opened her badge and held it out. What this old woman didn’t know was that the people who made the rules also had the power to break them. She remembered Gant’s three rules of rule-breaking:

Know the rule.

Have a good reason for breaking the rule.

Accept the consequences of breaking the rule.

And if this woman didn’t let her pass, Neeley was quite prepared to break more than just some rules.

Nurse Washington nodded. “Room one-one-six, Special Agent Curtis.”

“Thank you,” Neeley said. As she walked away, she saw Washington writing something down. More rule-following. Probably calling the local field office to confirm her identity. Which would, of course, confirm it, because Special Agent Curtis, out of Washington Headquarters, was indeed in their database.

As soon as she was around the corner from the busybody, Neeley drew her pistol and screwed on the suppressor.

There was a slender window allowing someone to peer into room 116 and Neeley angled up to it. Burns was standing next to a chair, facing a bed in which an old man lay. The old man was hooked up to various machines and his eyes were closed. Burns had his back to the door.

Another violation of Protocol.

He leaned forward and ran a hand tenderly over the old man’s brow, avoiding the breathing tube. Even in the hallway, Neeley could hear the rhythmic thump of the ventilator. Burns sat back down and reached into his long coat. Neeley brought the pistol up, estimating how much firing through the glass would affect the trajectory of the bullet.

But Burns had a book in his hand. A well-worn book that he opened. He began reading from it, his voice low, hard to understand. Gently, Neeley grasped the lever to open the door. There was no click and she edged the door open. No squeak on hinges.

She could hear the words now. Burns was reading in German and it took her a moment to access that rusty part of her brain that had learned German while living in Berlin. Burns was reading from Siddhartha in the original language.

She brought the pistol up, aiming at the base of his skull.

But she didn’t pull the trigger, instead listening to the rhythm of the words. She’d forgotten the harsh lyricism of the original language. She took a step closer.

It was jarring when Burns switched to English and abandoned the words of the book. “I knew you would come.”

He shut the book but didn’t turn.

Neeley pressed the muzzle of the suppressor against the base of his skull. A violation of Protocol as she was negating the gun’s standoff capability by getting within arm’s reach. A slight shock ran through the gun and tingled her hand. She sensed, more than felt, the shock rush through her body, then there was nothing.

“I was also drawn to this place,” Burns said. “Can you feel it?”

“Feel what?” Getting in a discussion with a Sanction: definitely a violation not only of Protocol but also of Gant’s rules. And just plain stupid. Neeley felt it all unraveling, every rule, every Protocol, every piece of common sense.

“The regrets,” Burns said. He nodded toward the old man. “He regrets he spent more time at work than he needed to, trying to get that position he never got, getting that extra percentage of pension that his wife did not get to enjoy. So he never really knew his children, even his wife. And then it was gone all so soon. It’s a deep pool that rests over this entire place. Regret.”

“What do you regret?” Neeley said. “Going rogue?”

“Am I rogue now?” Burns asked. “And I can feel your regrets.”

The lights in the room flickered and then went out. At the same time, the ventilator stopped.

Down the hallway alerts were going off as other life-sustaining machines ground to a halt. In the distance, Neeley could hear a generator coughing, trying futilely to come to life and restore power. Voices were shouting as nurses responded to the emergencies.

“Is he your father?” Neeley asked, taking a step back, regaining her standoff distance.

“No.” Burns stood and turned. His face didn’t shock Neeley. She’d seen the images and worse in battle. “I did a search en route for someone like this. Amazing that there are so many Schmidts. Sort of like there are so many Smiths in English. This was convenient.” He glanced over this shoulder at the old man who was now struggling to breathe. “I have no clue who he is. He might well be a distant relative. But then we all are related, aren’t we? Some say a good percentage of the population is related to Genghis Khan. Apparently he liked to spread his seed as he conquered the world.”

Neeley’s finger was on the trigger, but she was hesitating.

Violating Protocol.

“My father,” Burns said, as if searching for a memory. “He was a weak man. But my grandfather. He was a very special man.”

“You didn’t follow in his footsteps,” Neeley said.

“You think you know what you don’t know,” Burns said, his eyes beginning to flicker in color. “But I know what you know.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why did I draw you in?” Burns asked.

Neeley’s finger began to pull on the trigger but then Burns’s face rippled, as if the structure underneath were alive. The skin smoothed out, then shifted, and—

“Gant?” Neeley knew it wasn’t Gant. It couldn’t be. He was dead. But that’s who she was looking at. Her finger left the trigger.

Gant’s eyes began to glow, a slight golden tint easily visible in the darkened room. “The same reason you are here with that gun. Trying to do what we believe is the right thing.”

The voice wasn’t Gant’s and her finger went back on the trigger, pulling, but the light leaping from those eyes was faster, hitting her in the chest and knocking her back. The gun fired, but the aim was off, the bullet thudding into the ceiling as Neeley fell backward.

She had a protective vest on, but she hadn’t been shot. Whatever it was that had hit her wrapped tight around her heart and squeezed. She felt pain like she’d never experienced before, an elephant sitting on her chest. Someone was leaning over her. Gant’s face dissolved, back to Burns’s scarred one. Then everything went black.

Burns didn’t even look back at the old man, whose chest was no longer rising and falling. He tucked the book into his coat, knelt next to Neeley, and removed the car keys and the radio and the cell phone from her pocket. He stood, stepped over Neeley, and walked out of the room.

As he did so, the power came back on.

He went into the parking lot. Her car was easy to find. Burns keyed the radio and spoke in an excited voice: “Hello? Hello? This woman has been hurt! She needs help.”

As he waited, he walked around the car, head cocked as if listening, and then reached under the right front wheel panel and grabbed the tracker. He removed it and stomped on it. He heard a helicopter inbound.

The Nighthawk came racing in just above the tree line when the golden light flashed from Burns’s eyes and hit it, shutting everything on board down.

The pilots never had a chance to react; they were too low. The helicopter hit like a rock, tumbling, ripping apart, blades churning, breaking, flying through the air, and then the chopper exploded.

Burns got in the car and drove off.

Back inside the facility, Nurse Washington threw open the door to room 116. She immediately saw that the old man in the bed was dead; she’d seen a lot of dead old people from the doorway of rooms in this place and she knew dead.

The woman, the FBI special agent, confirmed as legitimate by the local field office, wasn’t breathing either. But she was fresh dead. Nurse Washington had seen that enough also.

Washington yelled, a voice that carried throughout the entire facility. “Crash cart to one-one-six!” She knelt next to Neeley. “Knew that man was a servant of the devil the minute he came through the door. And knew you were trouble, too, the moment you walked in. And I still don’t believe you are what you say you are.”

Then she began to perform CPR.