No Man's Land

22

ROGERS PARKED THE van well off the grounds of Fort Monroe and finished the trek on foot. This early in the morning, he was the only one out and about.

The salt air hit him from the channel, and far out in the water he could see the white lights of a passing ship. It was cool, quiet, and peaceful.

Depending on how things went, that could all change very quickly.

He knew exactly where he was going and wanted to get there quickly and unobtrusively. There were few who could move with more stealth than Rogers. That had been beaten into him for so long he could think of no other way.

The building was just up ahead.

He had passed it earlier.

Building Q.

He did nothing but watch for an hour.

It was now five minutes past four.

The private security did a sweep on the half hour, he noted. One went left, the other went right, and they crossed in the rear. A third guard remained at the front gate.

Standard protocols all the way around.

Predictable.

Which was what was wrong with the standard protocols all the way around.

As soon as all three guards were clustered once more at the front, Rogers moved. It took him ten seconds to scale the rear fence. He did so barely making any noise. He dropped within the grounds and looked around, keeping low.

He scuttled over to a set of rear entrance doors. They were metal below and chicken-wired glass above. He peered inside and saw the alarm system.

It glowed red. It was active.

You didn’t waste guards and a security system on a building that housed nothing important.

The building was eight stories high, perhaps the tallest here other than the Chamberlin building. Back when the fort was being constructed, land was plentiful and elevators nonexistent. Thus the Army had opted for low-rise construction.

He took off his shoes and socks, tied the laces together, and swung them over his neck, each shoe dangling on either side of his head.

He found a handhold in the brick veneer of the building and gripped the masonry with a strength that would be unimaginable for even the best rock climbers in the world. His fingers and toes were actually digging into the hard surfaces. The skin there had been replaced with a synthetic tissue. That was the reason the police couldn’t take prints from him. The synthetic looked and felt like the real thing, but it was far tougher than human skin, which would be bleeding from the friction with the stone.

He began to climb.

This was not the first time he had scaled this building, although not as part of his official training. He had simply done it on a bet.

He had won the bet. Ten bucks.

He reached the top ledge and vaulted over the edge and onto the flat, pebbled roof. The heavy HVAC systems that climate-controlled the building were housed up here. And there was, of course, an access door.

He hoped that his memory held up, for this was the critical point.

He reached the door. It was padlocked.

One pull and the clasp anchoring the lock tore free from the door.

He gripped the knob and turned it.

He took a breath and held it.

He was not experiencing fear. He could no longer feel that.

He was thinking about his exit strategy if an alarm went off.

Guards in front. Roof alarm. They’ll secure the perimeter. How long will that take? I’ll go over the rear side, down to the third floor, let go, and free fall to the ground. Over the fence and out. Twenty seconds. It will have to be enough. If I run into a guard, well, he’ll be dead and I won’t.

He opened the door.

He waited. No alarm sounded.

His memory had been good. They hadn’t alarmed this door back then either. They imagined that no one could scale a sheer brick wall without the aid of a ladder. They were off by one on that assumption.

He shut the door behind him and moved down the stairs. The interior of the space outlined in his head from thirty-year-old memories, he made his way to the second floor and then out into the main corridor. He looked in the ceiling crevices for motion sensors but saw none. He looked for surveillance cameras but saw none of those either.

They had put all their marbles on the exterior security.

But that wasn’t all. No cameras inside meant that whoever operated this place wanted no record of what was going on in here.

It had been the same when Rogers had been here. Because the things that went on here, well, they were not exactly pretty. Or maybe even legal.

He moved down the main corridor and saw that the place had been gutted and rebuilt. Old wooden doors with a top half of frosted glass engraved with department names had been replaced with sleek automated sliding glass doors accessed by key card ports.

He couldn’t get into any of these rooms without a key card. And if he tried, he was certain an alarm would sound. But the glass had one weakness: He could see inside the rooms. In one space he saw workstations with computers and sophisticated freestanding equipment.

In another room was a metal framework that looked familiar to Rogers. It could be mounted on the exterior of something.

Or someone.

In another was a helmet with built-in goggles.

In yet another was a machine gun mounted on a metal platform with a seating area behind it. Next to the gun was a helmet with a surround that would cover the eyes and wires and cables coming out of the top of the helmet and leading to a control box attached to the wall.

Behind another glass door were enormous TV screens with grids and blocks of data running across them. They were evidently measuring some system that was currently running. Though the people didn’t work around the clock here, the computer systems did.

Another space was set up as a chemical lab with burners and test tubes and liquids running through pristine tubes. Set on work areas around the room were several iterations of what Rogers recognized as mass spectrometers along with some pieces of equipment that looked brand-new and that he didn’t recognize.

He came away with a firm conclusion.

They’re still at it here.

He looked down at his hands and then slid his sleeve up to look at the scars there. His whole body was a scar.

On the outside.

And on the inside. Maybe more on the inside.

I’m actually all scar tissue on the inside.

He left the second floor and went to the first, keeping well away from windows and doorways. There was a reception area near the front doors.

He had expected that.

And something else he expected was there.

Atalanta Group.

That was the name of the business that was housed here.

At first Rogers’s brain automatically saw the name as Atlanta, but then he recognized that wasn’t right.

Atalanta Group.

He had never heard of it.

But old companies faded and new ones took their place. And he had been gone from this world for a long time.

He checked his watch. He’d been in here a half hour.

He went back to the roof and peered over the edge. The guards were making their patrols. He waited until they had once more converged at the front before climbing back down the building after fixing the lock on the access door to hide any sign that he had breached it. He scaled the fence, landed on the other side, and made his way quickly back to his van.

He drove back to the motel and got there in twenty minutes. He went to his room, sat on the bed, and pulled out his phone. He put in the word “Atalanta.” It did not take long to get hits.

Atalanta was a mythological female warrior of Greek descent, the only woman on board Jason’s Argo and the lady who had killed the fearsome Calydonian Boar. She was the only female regularly listed among the greatest mythological warriors.

When he looked up “Atalanta Group at Fort Monroe, Virginia,” he got exactly nothing. There was an Atalanta Group, but it had to do with specialty food and it was nowhere near Fort Monroe.

Rogers sat back and thought about this.

Secretive. Perhaps to a paranoid degree.

Atalanta, a great female warrior? The only one who ran with the male dogs?

He dropped his phone, lay back on the bed, and closed his eyes.

His lifetime of bad luck might have just turned to pure gold.

It was about damn time, he thought.

Claire Jericho was apparently up to her old tricks.