Chapter Thirty-Eight

 

 

ASHLEY RETURNED TO the lobby of Libby’s building about an hour after she’d left. She looked cheerful and refreshed, as if she’d spent all afternoon being pampered at a spa.

She glanced around the lobby. “I expected to find a group of your fellow residents down here fuming, Libby,” she said.

“A few did come in,” Libby told her, “but I used a little magic to persuade them that they had some urgent shopping to do before dinner.”

“Very nice,” Ashley said. “Well, shall we all go upstairs? It’s quite safe now.”

Back in Libby’s living room, Ashley told them what she’d learned on the roof of the building across the street.

“Only one of them, the leader, was CIA. The other two were rent-a-thug types who work for anybody with the money to hire them—CIA, DIA, one of the Mafia families, a Columbian drug cartel—it’s all the same to them. Or, rather, it was.”

“What about the leader?” Fenton asked. “What’s his name?”

“Zack Prichard.”

Fenton looked at his partner. “Ring a bell?” Colleen just shook her head.

“You sure that was his real name, and not a cover ID?” Fenton said to Ashley.

“Oh, yes, I’m quite certain that Zack told me the absolute truth about everything I asked him.”

“‘Told,’ past tense?” Morris said.

“Yes,” Ashley said. “I’m afraid that Zack has passed on, along with his two associates. But I’m sure they’ll all make a lot of nice friends in Hell.”

“What else did you get from him besides his name?” Morris asked.

“One thing I learned was that he got his marching orders from somebody named Clyde Neale, who is apparently the Assistant Deputy Director for Operations down there in Langley.”

“Clyde Neale,” Fenton said. “Yeah I know that little bastard.”

Libby looked at him. “Anything you’d care to share, Dale?”

“Ah, it’s a lot of stuff, over the years. Let’s just say Neale and I have a history, none of it good. And I’ll tell you something else—if Clyde Neale is in on this, you can bet his boss, Ted Burnett, is in it too, right up to his neck. Neale doesn’t so much as take a shit without Burnett’s knowledge and permission.”

“So, if Neale is Assistant Deputy Director,” Peters said, “then his boss is Deputy Director for Operations?”

“That’s the guy,” Fenton said.

“Sounds like somebody who swings a lot of weight at the Agency,” Morris said.

“Oh, yeah,” Fenton said. “He’s either a Number Two or Number Three guy, depending on how you figure it. I’m betting that Burnett sees himself as Number Two, if not Number One-and-a-Half.”

“He wants what’s-his-name’s job?” Libby said. “The Director?”

“Gus Hinton, that’s the guy,” Fenton said. “Thing about Burnett is, he doesn’t just want to be Director—he sometimes thinks he is the Director.”

“Things are starting to fall into place,” Libby said. “Assuming we’re willing to make a few minor leaps of faith, that is. We know the what—summoning demons and binding them, somehow. We know the why—to use them as weapons against the Caliphate. We know the who—Deputy Director Burnett, and his minions. We think we know the when—if our hunch about Halloween is right. What we don’t know is where.”

“I may be able to help with that,” Ashley said. They all turned to look at her. “My friend Zack said he wasn’t supposed to know about this, but had a night out with a friend of his from the Agency a couple of months ago. Zack says the friend had a bit too much to drink and mentioned that he’d been spending time supervising the movement of a lot of odd-looking equipment down to Fairfax, Virginia. When Zack mentioned it to the man at work a week later, he became very upset , Zack said. Denied ever saying such a thing, and said if Zack ever repeated it, he would have Zack up on charges, whatever that means.”

“What it means,” Fenton said, “is that the guy realized he’d let a pretty big kitty out of the bag, and he didn’t want it wandering around where anybody else could see it.”

Colleen looked at Ashley. “Zack volunteered this information?”

“Oh, yes—we became quite chummy there, near the end. He was ever so eager to please me. The right combination of fear, pain, and lust can render most men quite cooperative.”

Morris was muttering, “Fairfax, Virginia. Fairfax, Virginia—now where the fuck did I… Jesus Christ!”

Morris went quickly to the Pacilio file that they had copied at the National Archives. It had been sitting on Libby’s coffee table so that the others could examine it later. He started flipping through pages fast, obviously looking for something. Finally, he stopped. “That’s what I thought. Back in ’02, when those scientists accidentally opened the gateway to Hell? The lab where they carried out the experiment was in Fairfax, Virginia.”

Libby reached over and patted him on the shoulder. “Nice work, cowboy,” she said. “We may just have figured out our ‘where.’”

“Yeah,” Morris said. “Now what the hell do we do with it?”