HETTA FOUND ME, BECAUSE SHE’D FOLLOWED ME; STUCK A GPS tracker in the car I’d taken from the pool, and, maintaining a discreet distance, shadowed me all the way from Camp David to Tresco.
Why? She shrugs. A little dose of post-Lefortz paranoia, maybe.
I tell her I know the feeling.
She was less than a quarter mile behind me when I was forced off the road. My abrupt halt had shown up on the tracker. But between there and the scene of the crash, she’d passed nothing.
What I saw was real, but I can’t dismiss her version: that there had been no red rig on the road – no vehicle at all, in fact.
We take a left out of the dispensary. It’s a clear night. The stars are out.
‘Byford sent me some more files,’ she says, as we head for the trail that’ll take us back to the lodge. ‘I thought you’d be interested to know that the lab found a match with those hair samples in the Armed Forces’ DNA ID database.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Karl Dempf. Age forty-four. Wounded twice. First a decade ago, in Afghanistan, when he was an Army captain. A communications specialist. Second in Benghazi. He had the misfortune to be in our consulate when it was attacked by militants. Now he’s a consultant with Triple Z Services. They’re based in Herndon, outside D.C.’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘You won’t have. They do a lot of sub-radar, security-related contract work. Byford’s looking into it. And Voss, too. The file she’s tracked down IDs him as Marine Raider Regiment. One of a fourteen-man Marine Special Operations Team that got ambushed on a covert attempt to take down some Taliban warlord. Whoever doctored Gapes’s papers conflated his story with Voss’s.’
‘Voss had no dependents?’
‘None. He was an orphan. And ugly with it.’
‘And Gapes? What do Christy’s files say about him?’
‘Everywhere the Activity went, the viewers went too, as part of the assault unit. This was the subset of Element known as Chronometer. Sometimes, the unit worked independently; at other times, with the Russians – it depended on whose sphere of influence they were in. But the part about the viewers remained top secret, special access, highly need-to-know, until the helicopter crash that saw three of them killed and Gapes so badly burned that for a whole year it was touch-and-go whether he’d make it.’
‘What about the Engineer?’
‘Nothing back yet.’
‘What’s taking them? Myth or reality, they must have something on him.’
‘I’m on it,’ she says.
Up ahead, an old iron streetlight marks a fork in the trail.
We veer to the right and start downhill. My ribs are beginning to hurt.
‘It took me a while to figure this part out,’ Hetta says, ‘but here’s the news, Colonel: you and I have had a whole lot of smoke blown up our asses. If you were into something as covert as Duke Gapes was, and you wanted to go off-radar, what would you do?’
‘Come on, Hetta, it’s too damn late for twenty questions.’ I move my hand to my ribs. ‘And stop calling me that.’
‘Calling you what?’
‘Colonel, for Christ’s sake.’
‘I elected to maintain some formality between us,’ she says. ‘Because I didn’t want things to become complicated.’
‘Do you have any idea how you sound when you talk like that?’ I laugh, then wish I hadn’t. I place my other hand on my ribs.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘Just some bruising.’ I look at her in the dim light. ‘You know what? Calling me by my first name and staying, just the two of us, in the President’s hideaway, doesn’t come under the heading of complicated. The world isn’t always the binary place you imagine it to be.’
‘Is that how I am?’
‘Is what how you are?’
‘Binary.’
‘I didn’t say that’s how you are. I said that’s how you see things.’
‘Do I?’
I could cut the air between us with a knife.
‘I’m a shutdown son of a bitch, Hetta. But none of us is perfect.’
We walk on. I look up. A plane, moving fast and high, tracks east against the star bed. I follow its winking lights for a moment or two.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Long day. I didn’t thank you for coming to my rescue either.’
‘No need.’
We walk on.
‘You were saying … About the smoke …’
‘It can wait.’
‘No, it can’t. Tell me.’
‘INSCOM,’ she says, ‘proposed two pathways to the Executive Branch when remote viewing was resurrected after 9/11.
‘One was for the Army to use it against what it called time-critical targets. This resulted in the quick and dirty recruitment of viewers and the coupling of RV to the Activity’s search-and-destroy mission for the perpetrators of 9/11, initially, and later for jihadists seeking to take their game to the next level: the acquisition of WMDs.
‘The other was the development of some rigor to allow them to get a better handle on the RV process. For all the years it had been an active program in the seventies and eighties, despite the involvement of the Stanford Research Institute, the science of it had remained a mystery. No one had had a clue how it worked. All they knew was that, somehow, it did.
‘The intel community hated the “psychics”, as they called them, because of the unwanted congressional attention they brought upon the whole intelligence community. That’s what had killed the program first time around.
‘This time, INSCOM knew that they had to keep it under wraps. So, when they persuaded the Bush administration to resurrect it, they also convinced it of the need for one hundred ten per cent secrecy. To achieve that, the administration used a presidential finding – a covert delivery mechanism for the President’s executive order to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Stop me if you already know this.’
She plows on before I can tell her I don’t. ‘Under a presidential finding you’re required to tell the Majority and Minority leaders and the chairs and ranking members of the oversight committees. Only, as with a lot of covert activity after 9/11, Bush’s people rather conveniently forgot. The only person on the Senate committee they did tell was its Republican chair. But three years later, the Minority Leader, Tod Abnarth, got to find out about it.’
I tell her Tod Abnarth had been the senator Reuben had worked for when he quit the Army and moved from Florida to Washington. He’d also been an early supporter of Thompson.
‘I know. It may be nothing. But good to check with your buddy, Mr Kantner, when we get back. Abnarth went ballistic and threatened to expose the whole program. Said there was no justification at all in classifying the science part of Chronometer.’
She stops.
I see two sentries up ahead, at an intersection a hundred meters before the lodge.
They recognize us, salute, and wave us on.
She continues when we’re out of earshot. ‘The covert action component was disguised within a $2.1 billion line item in the Department of Defense budget, which described Chronometer as “Discreet Monitoring Capabilities”, but the science investigation was suddenly in plain sight, if you knew what you were looking for.’
‘Congress funded science to do with this?’
‘Under the rubric of “consciousness research”. INSCOM, through the Army Research Lab, contracted with the Neuroscience Department of the Baltimore Central Institute of Technology for a bit of kit called a “Holographic Information Transfer System”. HITS was a prototype of some description. Helmet-based. You wore it.’
‘The marks on his head?’
‘Bingo.’
I see the lights of Aspen Lodge twinkling through the trees. ‘This isn’t blowing smoke, Hetta. In the world of covert ops, this is standard goddamn operating procedure.’
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Going AWOL is too.’
I’m lying in bed, in the dark, staring at shadows on the ceiling, trying to focus on what she’s told me, but all I see, all I can think about, is a stretch of single-lane country road swept by headlights.
It could be outside Thurmont, or it could be between Lakeland and the interstate. It doesn’t much matter – they both look the same to me. The point is, I now know.
It came to me in that moment people say they see their life flash before their eyes. As I’d yanked the wheel, I hadn’t seen a succession of images, I’d seen only one: Hope, beside me, yelling, screaming at me, as the truck bore down on us.
For all her serenity, Hope always did have a temper. It hardly ever surfaced, but it was there. As Pam had said, she was complicated.
This, though, was different. This was months and months of pent-up frustration and rage; and clinically underpinned by a label in the professional circles I moved in that was known as the ‘ripple effect’.
She throws the scan of our baby girl at me and grabs the wheel. I try to wrench it from her, but it’s too late. The truck is upon us. She holds it there, holds it steady. Her strength is phenomenal. Is this how passengers felt when the hijackers flew them into the Towers? I’m in a state known clinically as tonic immobility.
Our combined closing speed, according to the accident report, had been one hundred twelve miles per hour.
Both of us should have died.
And a big part of me did.