Darkness blanketed the CIA campus. The low headquarters building was lit just enough to keep Schweitzer from seeing the stars without engaging his magically powered vision, and he didn’t bother. Walking beside Hodges and Ghaznavi, he felt almost human. Sensory limitations were a part of that, and even if it was just for a few minutes, he wanted to preserve the illusion.
They went in through a back entrance, crossing a rubber mat emblazoned with the CIA’s crest, eagle’s head and compass rose. Bronze plaques adorned the wall, marching toward a row of stainless steel turnstiles that abutted a desk manned by a bored-looking guard. He didn’t bother to glance up as Ghaznavi badged through the turnstile, finally stirring as she opened a small gate, allowing Hodges and Schweitzer to enter. She held up her badge and he stiffened, waving her through. They turned right, meandering down a hallway with carpeted walls that undulated back on itself, waving back and forth as if it had been designed to deliberately confuse them. Schweitzer could hear the sound waves bending with each step, felt himself instinctively dialing out his hearing, pushing harder and harder to hear the guard desk, the low hum of computers in the hallway beyond.
The corridor emptied out into a junction. A metal door concealed a trash chute beside an elevator open and waiting for them. Ghaznavi didn’t speak until the doors were shut and it was humming upward. “I don’t understand why you want to come.”
For a moment, Schweitzer thought she had addressed the question to Hodges, but when he glanced up, the SAD Director was looking at him.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“On the raid on the Cell,” she said. “You fought like a mad dog to get out of there.”
Schweitzer shrugged. Ghaznavi’s gaze was piercing; she had the interrogator’s gift of making it seem as if she saw into your heart, that it was useless to lie to her. Fortunately for Schweitzer, he had the SEAL training to counter it. As far as Ghaznavi was concerned, Patrick was dead, and he wasn’t going to disabuse her of the notion. “They pissed me off.”
“Bullshit,” she said almost before Schweitzer had finished. “I didn’t get where I am in this organization by being gullible.”
“You also probably didn’t get there by being pushy,” Schweitzer said. “For now, all you need to know is that I want in on this mission.”
“You’re dead,” she said. “Why should you give a damn about what living people do?”
Schweitzer was stunned by the question and, worse, his inability to come up with a response. As the elevator doors chimed open, he turned to her, putting heat in his voice. “Revenge isn’t about the living. It’s about the dead. They killed my wife and son. I’m not going to buy a house or save for retirement now.” He gestured to the gray ruin of his body. “Making things right is all I have left.”
Ghaznavi stared at him for another moment before dropping her gaze, giving a satisfied grunt. She stepped out of the elevator, and Hodges and Schweitzer followed her down another corridor to a plain door with an enormous dial-faced lock over the handle. A green magnet reading OPEN was stuck to the surface beside a long oak tag card crowded with signatures. She slapped her badge against a black card reader beside the handle, and the door opened with a click.
The room inside was formal to a fault. The walls were covered with dark wooden panels, contrasting sharply with a sterile, unmanned secretarial desk. Furled flags stood in the corner below a dark flat-screen monitor. Two doors led off the suite, and Ghaznavi took the rightmost, entering into a larger room dominated by an L-shaped cherry wood desk covered with mementos of a storied career in government: mugs, miniature flags, plaques and commemorative plates, a model airplane, white with a blue stripe, tail markings conspicuously absent. The walls were nearly covered with certificates and degrees, photos of a young-looking Ghaznavi smiling with hard-eyed insurgents and teams of American operators. A huge triple-paneled print of Harriet Tubman dominated the room. She was leading the way down a rough-hewn tunnel, a group of terrified runaway slaves trailing behind her. Her eyes were resolutely forward, a candle held aloft to cut through the darkness. Below it was a wooden plaque, engraved letters stained gold. YOU SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH, it read, AND THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.
Ghaznavi made herself comfortable in a swivel chair, putting her feet on the desk and her hands behind her head. She slipped her heel out of one shoe, letting it dangle from a toe and jerking it in the direction of a small, round table surrounded by four chairs in the opposite corner.
Hodges pulled up a chair, and Schweitzer joined him. He had no need to sit, but it was a gesture in the direction of humanity, and he made it a rule never to pass those up.
“You ready to start planning?” Ghaznavi asked.
“No,” Hodges admitted, reaching into a bowl of nuts in the table’s center. “Where do we even start?”
“We start with a team,” she said. “We keep it small, we keep it to the best, and we need a lynchpin, a quarterback.”
“I thought that was you,” Schweitzer said.
“I’m the boss.” Ghaznavi pushed a button on a phone on her desk, spoke over the ringtones sounding through the speaker. “I have people for that.”
A voice answered; Schweitzer recognized it as the same one Hodges had spoken to on the plane. “Watch.”
“Andy, it’s Jala. I need Reeves.”
A moment’s intake of breath, long enough for Schweitzer to know that Ghaznavi didn’t make a habit out of calling the SAD watch floor. “Yes, ma’am. He’s home; did you want me to . . .”
“Yup. Tell him he has twenty minutes to get his ass to my office.”
“Ma’am, Mr. Reeves lives thirty minutes away.”
“Tell him to speed.”
“Yes, ma’am. Out.”
The line went dead and Ghaznavi stared at Schweitzer, only the slow rise and fall of her shoulders indicating she was alive.
“Rude to stare,” Schweitzer said.
“I’ll have to check the manual,” Ghaznavi answered, “but I’m pretty sure when you meet a sentient walking corpse brought in by a United States Senator and escaped from a program so secret that even I didn’t know about it, you get a pass.”
She glanced over at Hodges and cocked an eyebrow. “Khodaye, Don. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
“I’m fine,” Hodges assured her, but Schweitzer could hear the rapid beating of his heart, could smell the proteins building up in his blood. The Senator’s cheeks were pale, a light sheen of sweat showing beneath his immaculate hair. Too much stress. Too little sleep.
“There’s bourbon in the cabinet behind you,” she said. “How about you pour us both a drink?”
Hodges looked grateful, stood, and turned to the cabinet.
“What am I, chopped liver?” Schweitzer asked.
Hodges froze. “You’re . . . dead liver.”
Ghaznavi uncrossed her arms, set her feet on the floor, and leaned forward. “Do you even eat and drink, Jim?”
“Of course,” Schweitzer said, though the truth was that he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t tried since his death.
“I can smell the chemical composition of your blood,” Schweitzer said. “I can hear your heart beating. You think I can’t taste liquor?”
Hodges shrugged. “Rocks or neat?”
“A single cube, please,” Schweitzer said, “and better make it a double.”
Hodges poured and set the glasses down on the table. Ghaznavi joined them, lifted hers. “To secrets,” she said. “The darker, the better.”
Schweitzer lifted his glass, the feel of the crystal in his hand evoking a cascade of memory. The condensation on the surface. The chill of the ice cubes clattering against the rim, the dull sloshing of the liquid. Sarah had once bought him a bottle of Virginia Gentleman back when they’d still been dating. They’d sat in the bed of his truck and watched the boardwalk on Virginia Beach, the crowds moving by, smiling and laughing, shining in the darkness as if lit from within. Sarah had swiped a couple of her mother’s good crystal glasses and her ice bucket. He remembered the smoky burn of the liquid as it traveled down his throat, the fire it lit in his belly.
“Bottoms up,” he said, and tossed it back. His stretched features forced him to tilt his head back to keep the liquor from dribbling out of his mouth. It orbited the back of his throat before he forced his muscles to swallow, an old reflex rusty from lack of use. His dead taste buds reported the flavor in glorious detail he’d never known in life. But it was just that, a report, like his feeling of pain or fatigue, a thing distant, told by a third party.
He managed to keep the disappointment off his face. He might be dead, but he was a person, drinking with other people. He nodded to Ghaznavi. “Delicious, thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “My dad always used to give me shit about drinking. To this day, he looks down on me for it. Old fool doesn’t know what he’s missing.”
“Now what?” Hodges asked.
“Now we drink”—Ghaznavi raised her glass—“and we wait.”
They drank, and they waited, and the companionable silence was the most wonderful thing Schweitzer had known in a long, long time.
At last, a buzzer sounded. Ghaznavi returned to her desk and pushed a button on her phone. “Come!” she shouted to the door before taking her seat in the swivel chair again.
Schweitzer heard the dull thud of a footstep followed by a long, metal scrape, and a man limped into the room. His bright red hair was still sleep-tousled, longish, fading into his thick beard. He wore a dirty, faded ball cap with a subdued American flag, a flannel button-down shirt, and sweatpants that hung to his ankles. One foot wore a hiking boot, the kind of high-performance model operators always used instead of standard-issue. The other foot was missing. In its place was a long, J-shaped carbon-fiber blade. Schweitzer followed the outline of the prosthesis up the sweatpants and saw it terminated at the man’s knee.
The man’s eyes were still sleep-fogged but narrowed, flicking around the room, noting danger areas in the corners, looking at the occupants’ hands rather than their faces. Schweitzer could tell he was an operator, possessed of the same casual deadliness Schweitzer had worked so hard to cultivate. This must be Reeves.
“Came as quick as I could, ma’am.”
Ghaznavi smiled at him. “You’re late.”
“I know you said to speed, but I figured even if I tinned my way out of being pulled over, it would slow me down. Did forty-five the whole way.”
“Sound judgment. This is why I hired you. I’m sure you know Senator Hodges.”
“Heard of him, that’s for sure.” Reeves inclined his head. “Good to meet you, sir. I’m Ernest Reeves.”
Hodges nodded, waving a hand over the lees of his scotch.
Reeves’ eyes strayed to Schweitzer, who was still staring at his prosthetic leg. Did he still run ops like this? How had he driven here?
Reeves noted Schweitzer’s gaze and folded his arms across his chest. “Anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?”
The rush of embarrassment made Schweitzer feel more human, and he was grateful for that. He raised his head, his burning silver eyes gleaming from the shadows gathered beneath his cap. “I’ll have to check the manual, but I’m pretty sure when you’ve been killed and brought back from the dead, you get a pass.”
Ghaznavi snorted laughter, waving at Schweitzer. “Reeves, this is Jim Schweitzer.”
Reeves frowned. “The SEAL? Didn’t he get his ID burned?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“And they whacked him.”
“Also right,” Hodges said.
Reeves’ eyes narrowed, then widened, but only for a moment. They didn’t waste time on Schweitzer’s face, darting repeatedly to his hand, shoulders, and legs. Reeves was a professional. He knew he was in the presence of something he didn’t understand, but he stayed focused on the threat. Time enough for explanations later.
He followed Schweitzer’s gaze to his leg. “I guess dying didn’t teach you manners.”
“No . . . sorry,” Schweitzer said. “I just . . . I never met an operator who overcame something like that and stayed in the fight. Respect.”
Reeves seemed mollified. “CIA’s not the Army. You get a little more latitude. I don’t let it slow me down, anyway. Are you really dead?”
Schweitzer eased his hood back. “Yeah. Guess we’ve both overcome obstacles.”
Reeves had his game face on now, showed no reaction other than a slight tightening in his hands. “Please tell me this gives you superpowers.”
Schweitzer nodded. “Just like Superman, only without the pesky breathing.”
Reeves turned to Ghaznavi. “I assume this is why I’m here, ma’am? There has to be a read-on for this.”
Ghaznavi waved the thought away. “I’ll get with the security officer and have a code word assigned. For now, just keep your mouth shut. Well, except for your team.”
“There’s a team?” Reeves asked.
“I need you to assemble one. I was thinking a squad. Or two fire teams. Either way, you’re the lead, and he’s your second.”
“He is?” Reeves jerked his chin at Schweitzer.
“Well, it certainly isn’t me,” Hodges said.
“No offense,” Reeves said to Schweitzer. “Never worked with a dead guy before.”
“None taken,” Schweitzer said. “I’ve never been dead before.”
“So, what is this, ma’am?” Reeves turned back to Ghaznavi. “Magic?”
“That is exactly what it is,” Ghaznavi said.
“Yup,” Hodges said as Reeves’ eyes moved to him.
“Sorry you had to find out like this,” Schweitzer said. “Kind of sudden.”
“So, you’re not a robot, or like some super-fancy special effect?” Reeves asked.
“No,” Schweitzer said, “and please don’t cut me open to check. Your boss already tried that, and it doesn’t heal.”
“Ma’am, I have to ask,” Reeves said to Ghaznavi. “Is this some kind of practical joke? Am I being filmed?”
“Come on.” Ghaznavi thumped her fist on her desk. “Does that sound like the kind of thing I would do?”
“Respectfully, ma’am?” Reeves smiled. “Absolutely.”
Ghaznavi glanced quickly to Hodges, who smiled, then back to Reeves. “It’s not a practical joke. That is Jim Schweitzer, and he has been raised from the dead as part of an op that harnesses magic, which, as you have already deduced, is totally real.”
“’Kay.” Reeves chewed the inside of his cheek. “He reliable?”
“More reliable than a lot of living people,” Schweitzer answered for her. “At least I know what side I’m on.”
“What side is that?” asked Reeves.
“Same one as when I was in the Navy,” Schweitzer answered.
That seemed to satisfy Reeves, who nodded. “What’s the op?”
“The unit that . . . created Schweitzer has gone rogue,” Ghaznavi said. “They tried to push a button on Senator Hodges. Schweitzer saved him. We’ve got to shut the operation down immediately.”
Reeves continued working on the inside of his cheek, sucking in the corner of his moustache in the process. “I take it they won’t be cooperative.”
“Nope.”
“Where are they?” Reeves asked.
“Colchester.”
Reeves finally looked shocked. “Colchester, Virginia?”
“About a half-hour drive from this very office, not counting for traffic.”
“That’s . . .”
“About fifteen hundred people,” Ghaznavi said. “Goes up to around ten thousand if you count the commuting communities surrounding it, which you should.”
Hodges cocked an eyebrow and Ghaznavi shrugged. “In my line of work, you want to know your home turf.”
“You mind if I sit down, ma’am?” Reeves asked, already pulling up a chair.
“Want a drink?” Hodges asked, then filled a glass with ice before Reeves even answered.
Reeves cradled his head in his hands for a moment, then rubbed the back of his neck before looking up. “How quiet does this need to be?”
“Dead silent,” Ghaznavi said. “Not a word in the press. We can’t even have urban legends developing. Not a blade of grass stirred on a neighbor’s lawn.”
Reeves sighed. “You’re willing to throw some money at this?”
“You’ll have an open funding line. Keep receipts and be specific in your justifications.”
Reeves gratefully accepted the glass from Hodges and sipped at it thoughtfully. “How many enemy are we talking about?”
“No idea.”
“Not even a ballpark?”
“Nope, and because I know you’re going to ask, we’ve got no map, either. Just an eyewitness description of the facility.”
“Who’s the eyewitness?”
Schweitzer raised his remaining hand. “My memory’s pretty good.”
Reeves looked doubtful. “Ma’am, this is impossible. Even with an open line. If I had three years to plan and . . .”
“You’ve got three days. By now, they know that Hodges survived. They’ll be in the wind or worse before long. We can’t risk leaving this.”
“Christ. I hate going in blind,” Reeves said.
“You’re going in?” Schweitzer asked. “I thought you were the ops planner.”
“I lead from the front,” Reeves said. “You got a problem with that?”
“No,” Schweitzer said. “Not at all, I’m just . . .” Idiot. Just stop talking. But a part of him thrilled at the exquisitely human experience of putting his foot in his mouth. Reeves stared into his eyes, unfazed by the obvious magic in the burning silver.
“I’m sorry,” Schweitzer said. “I didn’t mean to underestimate you.”
Reeves tapped his prosthetic. “This is a carbon-fiber high-tension running blade. I probably move faster than you.”
“You’ve never seen him run.” Hodges laughed. “It’s pretty impressive.”
Reeves kept his eyes on Schweitzer. “You just shamble along behind me there, zombie. Besides”—he gestured at Schweitzer’s missing arm—“I’m not the only gimp in the room.”
“We’ll fix that,” Ghaznavi said, “but before we pick a munition, we need to figure out the terrain.”
Schweitzer wasn’t sure what he’d expected, an ops center with a holographic display maybe, anything other than the plain, run-down-looking conference room that lay beyond a hidden panel behind Ghaznavi’s desk. A single bathroom was its only other exit (“You don’t expect me to use the regular restrooms like a plebe, do you?” Ghaznavi asked him when she saw him glance at it), and the only unusual feature was a large central table surfaced with dry-erase board and cluttered with colored markers.
Ghaznavi seated herself behind a battered laptop and started typing. Reeves folded his arms across his chest and stared openly at Schweitzer. After a moment, Schweitzer returned it. “What?”
“You stared at me.”
“You going to ask me on a date?”
Reeves stroked his beard. “What’s it like, being dead?”
“People keep asking me this.”
“Well, it’s the kind of thing people want to know. What’s it like?”
“It sucks. Stay alive for as long as you can.”
Reeves laughed. “No, I mean. Is there a God? Did you meet him?”
“I already asked him all this,” Ghaznavi said, not looking up from her laptop.
“What’d he say?”
“He already told you. Being dead sucks.”
Reeves grunted, then opened his mouth to ask another question. The words died as Ghaznavi spun the laptop to face him, showing an overhead map of Colchester, Virginia. It was overlaid with satellite imagery, a neck of land jutting out into the blue-gray Potomac river, mostly blanketed with trees and uninhabited marshland but threaded through with worrying lines of roads indicating the presence of subdivisions, houses cheek by jowl. People.
Reeves was apparently thinking the same thing, because he sucked in his breath and began chewing on the inside of his cheek again. He sighed, snatched up a marker, and began copying the map outlines onto the table’s surface.
“We’ve got one thing going for us,” Hodges said, picking up a marker himself and marking a star on Reeves’ growing map. “The facility itself is in an office park off 242. It backs up to the wildlife refuge, and you’ve got the regional park right across the street.”
Reeves stared at the Senator. “Respectfully, sir, Gunston Hall is right there. That?” He tapped the laptop screen. “That is a church. That park is going to attract more people than you think. These houses here can’t be more than a klick away. To call this particular battlespace ‘unforgiving’ would be charitable.”
“Solutions, not problems,” Ghaznavi said. “Toxic spill? Some kind of animal-disease outbreak in the wildlife refuge? We could call a quarantine and clear out the whole area.”
Reeves shook his head. “Needs to be boring. News is going to be all over this as it is. Nothing unknown. Something people have seen before. How about Legionnaires’ disease? There’s been like two reported outbreaks of that in the past year. If it’s bad enough, we could call a quarantine. Say it’s in the water.”
Ghaznavi nodded. “That’d work.”
“You’re going to have to get some talking heads on the air. Private-sector people saying the government is overreacting.”
Ghaznavi was typing now, making notes in a corner of the screen. “I’ll contact the media team.”
“How current is this imagery?” Reeves pointed to Ghaznavi’s laptop.
“It’s open-source, so probably not very.”
“I’m going to need up-to-the-second.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ll need drone overflights. Saturation coverage. I need to see everything moving on the ground in a five-mile radius.”
“Done.”
“Nighttime too. Forward-looking infrared cameras.” He looked up at Hodges. “You said this is a cover facility, right? Office?”
“That’s right.” Hodges nodded.
“Okay, then it should be deserted at night. Heat signatures might help us suss out what we’re going up against. If we’re lucky, we might even get rotations.”
“I wouldn’t rely on that,” Schweitzer said.
“Why not?”
“Because the guards might not give off any body heat.”
Reeves was quiet for a moment. “You’re not the only dead guy?”
“Not by a long shot.”
Reeves stood up, sighed. “This just keeps getting better.”
Schweitzer shrugged. “The only easy day was yesterday.”
Reeves smiled at that. “I guess you better give me a rundown on your capabilities.”
“He can’t die,” Hodges answered, “but he can be destroyed if you chop him up fine enough. Super speed, super strength, super senses. Like a comic book superhero.”
Reeves grunted. “There’s a part of me who still feels like I’m being tricked here.”
“No trick,” Schweitzer said. “Everything he said is true.”
“How’d you lose the arm?” Reeves asked.
“Tried to block a hatchet with it. Hatchet won.”
“Can you shoot one-handed?”
“Better than you with two.”
“I was thinking of fitting him with a prosthetic,” Ghaznavi said.
“Flamethrower,” Schweitzer said. “The only way to beat things like me is to burn them or tear them apart.”
Ghaznavi shook her head. “I don’t think we can do that.”
“How about a chainsaw or a buzz saw?” Schweitzer asked. “I fought a . . . thing like me when I was on the run. It had one.”
“That, we should be able to do.”
“Really?” Schweitzer asked. “Cool.”
Reeves smiled, tapped his prosthetic leg. “Technology is a beautiful thing, man.”
“What else do you need?” Ghaznavi asked.
“Frank Cort, and I need both of us fully up to speed. What was this program, how does this . . . Magic, is it magic?”
“It’s magic,” Schweitzer said.
“Jesus. Magic. How does it work? I need to know as much about the layout as possible. How many bad guys? I mean, normal bad guys. Ones that can be killed. How many are . . . like you? How are they equipped?”
“You need a targeting package,” Schweitzer said.
Reeves cocked an eyebrow. “I forget you were a SEAL.”
“Then you also probably forgot that even dying doesn’t change that,” Schweitzer said. He stood, snatched up a marker, and moved to a clear portion of the table. “I’ll draw what I remember. You all need to catch some rack time? I don’t need to sleep, but I . . .” He remembered Sarah, bent at the waist, panting from racing to keep up with him as they fled through the Virginia woods. Patrick and I aren’t like you. We can’t keep going like this.
Ghaznavi looked from Hodges to Reeves. “I think I speak for all of us when I say that after the surprise meeting you has given me, I’m not going to sleep for a week.”
“All right,” Schweitzer said. “Let’s get to work.”