Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

 

WHEN THE ELEVATOR from the parking garage brought Ted Burnett up to the third floor of the Old Agency Building, he emerged from it the very picture of calm. He had spent a few moments downstairs composing himself, and nothing in his face, body, or gait gave any hint of the emotions that were churning inside him.

Room 333 was the office of the Deputy Director for Operations, but you’d never know it from looking at the door, which boasted no identification other than the number plate. None of the rooms at CIA headquarters have identifying information on their outer doors, with the exception of restrooms. If a visitor doesn’t know what room number he needs, then he’s shit out of luck—or would be, except every visitor to Langley is always accompanied by an armed escort who knows the function and occupant of every room in the building.

Like all the other rooms, Burnett’s office had an electronic keypad in place of a lock. He tapped in the six-digit access code, but was so distracted by his thoughts that he got it wrong. IMPROPER AUTHORIZATION the tiny screen informed him. ACCESS DENIED.

Burnett tapped in the code again, slowly and deliberately. If he got it wrong twice in a row, security would be alerted and Burnett, Deputy Director or no, would very quickly find himself staring at the business end of several large-caliber automatics in the hands of security personnel. Since he was in absolutely no mood for that kind of nonsense today, he got the access code right the second time, listened for the buzz, and entered his office. He took just a couple of steps inside then stopped, listening to the door close and lock behind him. He took the pause to make sure that the additional frustration caused by the stupid lock was not going to push his temper over the edge where someone could see it displayed. Burnett never showed his feelings in public—ever.

He walked on, giving his secretary a nod as he passed her desk. He didn’t ask if there were any messages. Something urgent would have prompted either a text message or a phone call. Anything less vital would be found in his email, his voicemail, or, rarely, a written note left on his desk.

Assistant Deputy Director Clyde Neale was waiting in Burnett’s outer office, thus unknowingly saving himself from the royal ass-reaming that Burnett would have delivered in private had Neale been late.

Burnett opened the door to his private office and jerked his head toward Neale, ordering him to follow. Inside, Neale closed the door behind him and waited to see what particular bug was up the boss’s ass this time.

At 5’9” and 142 pounds soaking wet, Clyde Neale looked as if he would have trouble contending successfully with a large paper bag. But appearances can, of course, be deceiving. Neale was a twenty-year devotee of Muay Thai, perhaps the most vicious of all martial arts. Two years earlier, he had been confronted by a couple of knife-wielding muggers in the parking lot of a ‘gentlemen’s club’ he’d been visiting on one of his rare nights off. In the files of the DC police, the case was still open, officially listed as ‘double homicide, probably gang-related.’

“He knows,” Burnett snarled. “The motherfucker knows.”

It was unclear to Neale as to who the motherfucker in question might be, or what he might know, but experience had taught him that when he was in a rage, Burnett needed to vent for a while before any productive discussion could take place. Neale settled back in one of the comfortable visitor’s chairs and concentrated on maintaining his poker face. When Burnett was in one of these moods, any facial expression on an onlooker could be misinterpreted as amusement or some other inappropriate sentiment, driving the already enraged Burnett to the point of apoplexy.

Burnett was behind his desk now, bent forward with his palms flat on the old-fashioned blotter. “Fucking Leffingwell has it from some unnamed but irreproachable source that somebody around here is developing a ‘forbidden weapon.’ What exactly such a weapon might be, our esteemed but spineless Chief Executive either doesn’t know or won’t say. But he’s concerned about it, you betcha. And he’s got me and Stewart and even fucking Hinton on the lookout for anything around here that might smell, you know, ‘forbidden,’ and now Hinton is telling us to look for whistleblowers who’ll turn in their bosses, their colleagues—hell, even their fucking mothers, in return for immunity from prosecution and the promise of some as-yet-unnamed reward. Well, let’s you and me be clear on one thing, my friend—if I turn up anybody on this project who looks like he’s even dreaming about spilling his guts, the motherfucker won’t have any guts left to spill, by the time I get done cutting him open, yanking them out a foot at a time, and making him chow down on ’em.”

Neale sat impassively and listened. He knew the tirade would go on for a while, and it did. But finally Burnett wound down and flopped into his leather desk chair, breathing heavily. He might have run a couple of miles or just finished having sex with a movie star—although the expression on his face would seem to make the second possibility a long shot.

Once his respiration had returned to something like normal, Burnett got up and walked to a sideboard where he kept a small but well-stocked bar. After pouring himself a double shot of eighteen-year old Glenfiddich, he looked over his shoulder at Neale. “You want anything?”

This was no more than a courtesy, since he knew that Neale didn’t drink. But it was a welcome sign that Burnett had returned to a semblance of sanity and restraint.

Once the DDO was back behind his desk and had taken his first sip of the stuff he sometimes called “liquid Heaven,” Neale spoke for the first time since entering the room.

“So the President knows something, or thinks he does.”

“Yeah, him and his ‘forbidden weapons,’” Burnett said, and made a rude sound. “He doesn’t have much, or you and I and a few other people would already be behind bars.”

“I’m not so sure,” Neale said. “There aren’t any federal statutes, or local ones, for that matter, which cover the conjuring of demons.”

“Maybe not, but I’m sure that wily old bastard Hinton would find something to charge us with. But the fact that Leffingwell knows anything at all, or even suspects anything, is bad fucking news. We’ve got a leak, somewhere—there’s no other explanation.”

Neale shrugged his thin shoulders. “Not much of a leak, though—otherwise he wouldn’t be just talking about—what did he call them? Forbidden weapons?”

“He may have a little more than that,” Burnett said. “I was thinking about it on the ride over here. I wouldn’t have thought that a guy like our President could be convinced that demons really exist—not in the sense that you and I know they exist. But in the car Hinton mentioned some guy named Morris, who sounds like he might be a player in this kind of game.”

“What’s Morris got to do with Leffingwell?”

“I don’t know, but there’s some kind of connection. Morris was apparently in federal prison last year, awaiting trial on a long list of charges, when Leffingwell wrote him a Presidential ‘Get out of jail free’ card.”

“Did he now?” Neale brought a small notebook out of his jacket pocket and wrote something in it. “I think we’d better find out a bit more about Mister Morris.”

With a slight smile Burnett said, “I can’t believe you still write stuff down on paper. Why don’t you get yourself one of those tablets?”

“If necessary, a piece of paper can be burned, flushed, or swallowed—all of which is more than can be said for one of your tablets,” Neale said. “You were saying that Leffingwell may know more than he’s letting on?”

“Yeah, I think he just might. I mean, let’s say that Leffingwell’s been told that somebody in the Agency is messing around with demons, and he actually believes it. He can hardly say so, can he? Not in a meeting with high-level people in government. They’d think he was insane—as it is now, Hinton isn’t sure the guy isn’t nuts.”

“That’s a good point. Leffingwell has to preserve his credibility, doesn’t he?”

“Exactly. If the President says ‘forbidden weapons,’ he sounds kind of weird. But if he starts talking about people summoning demons, then he’s fucking certifiable.”

“At least he sounds that way to those who don’t know what we know.”

“Which is most people,” Burnett said. “And a damn good thing, too. But for now, we need to find out who tipped Leffingwell off that something hinky is going down.”

“How do you want to handle it?”

Burnett sat back in his chair, the rich leather creaking in response to the weight shift. “It must have happened the day before yesterday. Hinton says he did a security briefing at 9:00 a.m., and that Leffingwell was his normal, dull self.”

“And it’s about 7:30 that night when you get the summons to the meeting you just left.”

“Uh-huh. Something happened between 9:00 in the morning and 7:30 at night, two days ago. Leffingwell either had a meeting, or got a phone call, or received a message, either electronically or by snail mail.”

“Fortunately,” said Neale, “every damn thing the President does is written down somewhere. Visitors are logged in. All phone calls are logged, both incoming and outgoing. But the mail is going to be tougher. The President’s email is restricted access, unless you’ve got a subpoena.”

“Subpoena? We don’t need no stinkin’ subpoena,” Burnett said, in an atrocious attempt at a Spanish accent.

Neale, who had seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre a few times himself, got the joke and laughed politely. He was glad that Burnett’s mood seemed to be improving. Corny humor was a small price to pay, in his opinion.

“Right,” Neale said. “No subpoena—we can hack his email.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, either.”

“Snail mail is gonna be harder, though. Incoming mail is logged, but not the contents—there’s no written record of exactly what he gets.”

“We’ll worry about that if all the others crap out,” Burnett said. “Somehow I think it would take more than a letter to persuade our esteemed President to believe in the existence of demonic power.”

“I bet he’ll believe it once the Caliphate is turned to cinders by infernal fire,” Neale said.

“By then, it’ll be too late—and we’ll be national heroes, anyway.”

“If it works.”

“It has to work,” Burnett said. “It has to.”