The Book of Truths

Chapter 7

Where they whisk people off to is a place named Deep Six.

Not very subtle, but who said you had to be subtle? The facility was run by contractors who, interestingly enough, were all non-American. They were from countries that did not have extradition treaties with the United States. Besides their excellent pay, part of their contract guaranteed them a helicopter ride to an airport, from which they would be flown to a place where they could retire in style should the need arise.

Deep Six was part of a large facility in a part of the Pennsylvania countryside called Raven Rock. After the Russians exploded their first nuke in ’49 and the US no longer had a monopoly on blasting the hell out of another country, those in power in Washington decided they did not want to get blasted to hell (or heaven, depending on their optimism and beliefs).

Since Shangri-La, as it was nicknamed by President Roosevelt (Eisenhower changed the name to Camp David in honor of both his grandson and father), was located just over the Maryland border, someone suggested looking for a site near there. They found a mountain made of granite, Raven Rock, and started blasting and digging, and then blasting and digging some more to the tune of almost a million cubic yards, ultimately hollowing out a large part of the mountain.

Then they built office buildings inside. Because a government runs on bureaucrats and bureaucrats need offices. Or cubicles, depending on rank. There were also tunnels going hither and thither. Some say there’s a six-mile tunnel from Raven Rock to Camp David, but the government denies it.

It also denies there’s an Area 51.

One of those first tunnels used to end at a massive underground reservoir because man does not live on bread alone. Except as the facility grew, as many government facilities have a tendency to do (like weeds), there was a demand for more water. Another, bigger reservoir was built for potable water. And then another one for industrial water — cooling, waste, sewage, waterboarding, etc. The original reservoir developed a crack during some of the adjacent construction and all the water eventually leaked out, leaving a dark, damp, dank, disgusting cavern.

The perfect place to put a prison for prisoners whom the government didn’t want to admit it had and who would most likely never see the light of day. Plus, they had all that industrial water for the waterboarding nearby.

Primarily, it was a very secure place.

After his interrogation in Springfield, Wahid had been whisked back to Deep Six by a contingent of contractors via helicopter. They landed at the helipad on top of the peak and then were hustled into an elevator, dropped down into the bowels of the mountain, and taken along tunnels to a thick steel door that barred the way to Deep Six.

Those who worked in the other part of Raven Rock and caught glimpses of armed men dragging hooded subjects along the tunnels were smart enough not to stare or ask questions. What happened in Deep Six, stayed in Deep Six.

By the time they got Wahid back in his cell, he’d already infected one-third of the guards.

Colonel Sidney Albert Johnston sat in his office, deep inside DORKA, ignoring the blinking lights on the phone as he checked to make sure his 9mm pistol was loaded, then tucked it in his belt. He imagined this is what Robert E. Lee must have felt when his scouts told him Hooker’s Army of the Potomac was approaching Chancellorsville and had twice as many men. It was not a time for timid action. It was a time for audacity.

Perhaps his imagination was being a bit overly dramatic, but he was from the South, he was in a crisis, and he was in charge.

“Sir?” Upton intruded on Johnston’s martial thoughts and earned a steely-eyed glare.

Johnston picked up the slender file folder Upton had brought to his office: the After Action Report on the lab trials of Cherry Tree. “You don’t know dick about this thing your people invented, do you?”

“I told you we didn’t have time for—”

He didn’t wait for more, because he knew Upton was going to cover his ass. “You don’t know possible vectors, do you? How did Rhodes get Cherry Tree?”

“It can’t be airborne,” Upton said, “or you and I would have it.”

Johnston looked at the screen where a team was working on Rhodes wearing masks and gloves, sticking needles in both his arms. The clerk from the ice cream store was there too, but so far, he seemed all right.

“Then why are they wearing masks?” Johnston asked.

“Precaution,” Upton said. “We think he must have jabbed himself with the needle accidently and—”

“Bullshit,” Johnston snapped.

First, the stupid dog and pony show Upton had pulled, then the lie about the first test. He’d locked the lab down as soon as he got the contain call, and on the video monitors he could see white-coated scientists milling about in confusion and muted anger. Upton had arrived minutes ago with Rhodes in tow, but it hadn’t been handled right. You think scientists could handle a contain correctly?

But everything at the DORKA lab out in the Virginia countryside was focused on keeping things from getting out. Upton coming in with Rhodes had not been planned for and they’d bungled it because, in reality, they didn’t quite know what they were dealing with.

The scientists hated being told what to do by the government, but that didn’t stop them from cashing their government checks every month and using the top-notch facilities here at the innocently named Department of Research & Kinesthetic Application. He’d sensed some warped humor in the cover name when he was first assigned as the liaison, and he’d learned that they were doing nothing at all about kinesthetics (he’d had to look it up), which is what a cover name was supposed to do: misdirect.

He’d found the scientists to be the greatest bullshitters he’d ever run into, and he had twenty-three years in the army, which meant he’d often been neck-deep in it. When they weren’t flat-out covering their asses, they reverted to science-speak like word camouflage. The bigger and more remote the word (like kinesthetic), the bigger their shit-eating grin as they flashed that superior smile of a PhD in the lab talking to a civilian. Or even better, a dumb soldier.

Johnston was sitting ramrod straight in his chair, as taut as a plebe during meals at West Point, but he became even more rigid as a flash of Robert E. Lee inspiration connected synapses in his brain. It was very simple, the way Lee had split his army at Chancellorsville; Johnston had to split his own force. Turn the truth against the lie.

“How much Cherry Tree do you have left?” he asked Upton.

The scientist pulled the wooden case out of his lab coat pocket. “We’ve got three needles loaded. And there’s a supply in the vault.”

“We’ve got to know the vector,” Johnston said. He could see that two of the scientists working on Rhodes were arguing. The “patient” was babbling something, some childhood trauma he’d never even disclosed to his shrink.

“Shit,” Johnston muttered. He jumped out of his chair and left the office, Upton in tow. They entered the chamber where Rhodes was strapped to a table. The half-dozen geniuses who’d worked on Cherry Tree were clustered around the table.

“You fucked up,” Johnston said without preamble. They all spun about.

“My father cheated on my mother,” Rhodes was saying. “I saw him. In the garage one day, when I came home early. With my best friend’s mom.”

“Shut him up,” Johnston ordered and one of the white coats slapped a piece of tape over Rhodes’s mouth, which was another tick mark confirming what Johnston feared.

“You’re a dick,” the only woman in the room said to him, pulling down her mask, and that checked the last box on the list of his fears.

“You’re infected. You all are.”

They all stared at each other, and then began talking at once.

“Shut up!” Johnston screamed. “Do you have any idea of the clusterfuck you’ve initiated? The question is, how did you get infected? How did Rhodes get infected? And who the fuck else is infected? For once I want to hear the truth,” and even as he said it, he realized he was going to get exactly that, a classic catch-22 if there ever was one.

He held up two fingers. “One. Vector? How did you all get infected? Two. How do we stop it? Is there an antidote?” He extended another finger as a thought occurred to him. “Three. How far can it spread?”

“Ah, the questions three!” one of the scientists said with a giggle, which made them all start laughing. Johnston glanced at Upton, noting that he wasn’t joining in as the six white-coats babbled, in amazing sequence, with Monty Python snippets, several with falsetto voices.

“‘What is your name?’” the first asked, nudging the one next to him.

“‘What is your quest?’” asked the second, who passed it to the third.

“‘What is your favorite color?’”

Johnston was getting ready to pull his 9mm and quiet the room down as the fourth went:

“‘What is the capital of Assyria?’”

“No, no,” the female cried out. “‘What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?’”

At which point someone argued she had jumped over things.

Johnston fired a round into the ceiling, which a part of him knew destroyed the sterile integrity of the room, but he was convinced this wasn’t airborne. That stopped everyone for a moment, allowing Johnston to get a question in.

“How is this vectoring?” he demanded. “How did you people get infected?”

They all stared at the woman, who apparently was the vector person.

“How the hell should I know?” she said.

“Take a guess,” Johnston suggested.

“I ran a simulation while you guys were out showing off. We knew it wasn’t airborne so I wanted to check my parameters and—”

They couldn’t even stop the bullshit when they had to tell the truth, Johnston realized.

“What was different this time?”

The woman frowned. “Well, factoring in the differentials and the parameters from the original experiments to this one, the only difference was we weren’t wearing hazmat.”

Johnston closed his eyes briefly. “Why? Why did you test it again?”

“None of the rats grew another head, did they?” she asked. “According to Deep Six, the first prisoner we tested yesterday has recovered completely. And John,” she nodded at the guy next to her, “agreed to give it a shot, literally, pun intended, so we could get his first-person data.”

“You didn’t have authorization,” Johnston said, and they all giggled.

“We do lots of things here without authorization,” the woman said, “because you don’t have a fucking clue how to run a lab.”

“I liked you all better when you lied,” Johnston said.

“That’s because the truth sucks,” she said.

“How long does it last? Still four hours?”

One of the scientists began waving his hand, like he was in school. “I know. I know.”

“No, me!” Another was waving his hand. And then they all began talking at once and the best Johnston could extract from the babble was four hours still appeared to be the medium.

He fired again, a bit of plaster falling down and hitting him on top of the head.

Through their laughter he got in another question: “How come Rhodes is infected and not Upton or me? We were all in that room.”

“Direct contact,” Upton said. “The prisoner grabbed Rhodes’s arm. We didn’t touch him and he didn’t touch us.”

The woman was nodding. “Yepper. We all touched John.” She giggled. “But not like John wants to be touched, right, bad boy?”

“Do we have an antidote?”

“We barely have Cherry Tree,” Upton said. “And why worry about that when it simply wears off?”

The woman was running her hands over John and one of the other scientists was getting mad. Johnston expected a scientific brawl to break out any moment, which didn’t worry him much because they weren’t much of a physical threat. Maybe they’d take each other out and he’d have some peace.

“That’s why we experimented,” one of the scientists not interested in the woman said. That caused a pause in their focus and everyone started talking about the nature of an experiment and the exact definition.

“You guys make way too much money,” Johnston muttered.

That caught their attention for the moment.

“Sure we do,” the woman said. “We laugh about it all the time. We laugh about it and you and the government and all the waste. A lot.”

Johnston tapped his gun against his thigh. “You know why we pay you so much?”

Surprisingly the woman smiled. “So you don’t have to kill us.”

“Exactly,” Johnston said.

The woman frowned. “Are you going to have to kill us now?”

“I wish,” Johnston muttered. “How much contact did it take to vector?”

“Not as much as I wished.” The woman turned back to the men surrounding her. It was like watching a white-coated, fully clothed orgy as she ran her hands over her colleagues. They’d all been down here way too long.

Johnston closed his eyes and played back the scene in the interrogation room. Who’d touched who?

His eyes flashed open. “We’ve got to get ahold of Brennan. And the interrogators. This thing is out!”

He ran for the door and the one scientist not participating in the chaste orgy ran after Johnston and grabbed his hand just before he could make his escape. “‘Do you mean an African or European swallow?’” he said, then collapsed laughing, letting go.

Johnston stared at his hand for a moment, swallowed hard, then went out the door, locking it behind him, ignoring Upton’s protestations that he wasn’t infected.

Yet.

Johnston locked himself in his office. He picked up the special line — the one that he’d always known that if he had to use, his career was over — and dialed 666.