The Dragon Factory (13 page)

“Might help.”

Collins almost laughed. “Christ.”

“Denniger will give me a heads-up if things start happening at Walter Reed. If it looks like this is totally played out, then you can call the AG. It’s the best way, Bill. If you move too soon you look weak, if you let the President slap you down you look criminal, but if you save the day in the eleventh hour you’re a goddamn hero.”

“And if we snag MindReader in the meantime?”

“Then you’ll very quietly become the richest Vice President in history.” Sunderland mopped his smiling face. “Either way, you can’t lose.”

“Christ, don’t say that,” Collins snapped. “. . . You’ll jinx me.”

Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, Maryland

Saturday, August 28, 10:41
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 97 hours, 27 minutes

The car pulled to the curb and I bent down to peer through the passenger window at the man behind the wheel.

Dr. Rudy Sanchez grinned nervously at me. “Hey, sailor, new in town?”

“Hilarious,” I said as I climbed in.

Rudy is shorter and rounder than me and usually drives a roomy Cadillac DTS, but now I was crammed into a twenty-year-old Geo Prizm with no legroom.

“What the hell’s this?”

“Mr. Church told me to be nondescript, so I borrowed it from my secretary, Kittie. I told her I had an emergency and that my car was in the shop. I gave her cab fare home.”

The car was a patchwork of dusty gold and primer gray. The interior
smelled of cigarettes. A pine-tree-shaped deodorizer hung in total defeat from the rearview mirror.

“Jeez, Rude, you gotta pay that gal better. My grandmother wouldn’t drive this.”

“Your grandmother’s dead.”

“And she still wouldn’t drive anything this crappy.”

“It’s a good car, and it’s nondescript as ordered. Besides, being a prima donna isn’t becoming to a fugitive.”

“Shut up and drive,” I grumbled.

He said something inappropriate in gutter Spanish as he went up the ramp to I-83. Rudy seemed to know where he was going. For the first few minutes he said nothing, but even with the air-conditioning at full blast he was still perspiring.

“How’d you get roped into playing chauffeur?”

“I wasn’t at the Warehouse when all this started happening. El Jefe called and said to come and pick you up.”

“How much do you know?”

“Enough to scare me half to death.” A minute later he said, “I hate politicians.”

There was nothing to argue with, so we kept driving.

Later he said, “I can’t believe I’m aiding and abetting someone wanted by the National Security Agency. I can’t believe that someone is my best friend. And I can’t believe that the Vice President of the United States of America would trump up charges just to further his own political aims.” Half a mile later he added, “No, I can believe that . . . I just hate that it’s true.”

“Not happy about it myself. Of course, the charges aren’t entirely groundless, Rude.”

Rudy breathed in and out through his nose. “I hate that, too. I mean . . . we both believe that Church is a good guy, maybe even
the
good guy. If there is anyone with the strength of will and the solidity of moral compass to not misuse something like MindReader, then it’s him. I’m not sure I’d be able to resist the temptation. That said, how screwed up is our world that it takes blackmailing the President and members of
Congress to allow us to do our jobs, considering that our jobs involve stopping terrorists of the most extreme kind. Tell me, Joe, how does that sound like a sane world?”

“You’re the shrink, brother; you tell me.”

“If I could figure out the logic behind the way the political mind thinks, I’d write a bestseller and spend the next two years on the talk show circuit.”

“Beats driving fugitives around in a hooptie.”

“Most things do. So . . . how are you, Cowboy?”

“Not happy about the way things are spinning. And worried about Big Bob.”

“Can we call the hospital to check on him?”

“We shouldn’t. He’s registered under a false name so the NSA can’t find him. Church is fielding the info about him. He’ll update us.”

Rudy’s knuckles were white where he gripped the wheel and every few blocks he cut a look my way.

Before he could ask, I said, “Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, I’m feeling it. Big Bob. The NSA. I’m feeling it.”

“It’s okay to show it, to let it out.”

I nodded. “In the right place and at the right time.”

“Which isn’t now?”

“No.”

“Even with me?”

“Rude,” I said, “you’re my best friend and you’re my shrink, so you get a lot of leeway most folks don’t get. You can ask me anything, and probably eventually I’ll tell you everything. But not right now.”

“You’ve had a lot of stress today, Cowboy. Are you the best person to make that call?”

I nodded. “When the soldier comes home from the war the shrinks call all the shots. They poke and prod and ask and ponder to separate the soldier from the stress of combat, to free him from the thunder of the battlefield.”

“Ah,” he said, his eyebrows arching, “but we’re still
on
the battlefield.”

“Yep.”

“You believe that we’re in the middle of something.”

“Yep.”

“Something bigger than the NSA? This Russian thing, whatever it is.”

“Whatever it is, yes,” I said.

“So. Now’s not the time to debrief.”

“Right.”

He nodded. Rudy is the best of companions. He knows when to stop harping on a point, and he knows how to give space, even in the cramped confines of a compact car. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

We took the first exit off the JFX and headed west and north on a number of seemingly random roads, but then twenty minutes later Rudy pulled onto a rural road and drove a crooked mile to an upscale small private airfield. He made a bunch of turns until finally pulling to a stop fifty feet from a sleek late-model Learjet.

The stairs were down and the pilot sat on the top step reading
Forbes
and sipping Starbucks out of a paper cup. As we parked he folded the magazine and came down the steps to meet us.

“Captain Ledger?” he said, offering his hand. “Marty Hanler.”

I smiled. “Marty Hanler . . . the writer?”

“Yep.”

Rudy whistled. Hanler’s espionage thrillers always hit the number one spot on the bestseller lists. Four of them had been made into movies. Matt Damon was in the last one and I had the DVD at home.

“You going with us?” I asked.

“Be more efficient that way,” he said. “I’m flying this bird.”

Rudy blinked.

Hanler was amused by our reactions. “A buddy of mine called me and said you needed a lift.”

“A ‘buddy’?” I asked.

“Yeah. Your boss, the Deacon.”

“He’s . . . your ‘buddy’?”

Hanler was in his mid-sixties, with receding gray hair and a deep-water
tan. Bright blue eyes and great teeth. He winked. “I didn’t always write books, fellas.”

“Ah,” I said. His handshake had been rock hard and he had that
look
that I’ve seen in other old pros. The “been there, done that, buried them” sort of look.

“Come on,” he said. “The Deacon asked me to fly you to Denver.”

“Good luck, Joe,” Rudy said, and I turned in surprise.

“Wait . . . you’re not coming with me?”

He shook his head. “Church wants me local so that I can help the staff deal with everything that’s going on.”

“And who’s going to help
you
with this crap?”

“My good friend Jose Cuervo.”

“Ah,” I said. We shook hands. “In the meantime, stay low and stay loose.”

“And you watch your back, Cowboy.”

“Always do.”

Hanler said, “When you fellas are done spooning maybe we can get this bird in the air.”

I shot him the bird and he grinned. Three minutes later we were in the air heading west to Denver.

MacNeil-Gunderson Water-Bottling Plant, Asheville, North Carolina

Two weeks ago

Hester Nichols was a nervous woman. For twenty years she had overseen production of bottled water at the big plant in the mountains near Asheville. She was there when MacNeil bought the plant from the bankrupt soda company that had owned it since the fifties, and she was there when the Gunderson Group bought a half interest in it during the spring-water boom of the nineties. When she was promoted from line supervisor to production manager she had suffered through three FDA inspections, two audits, and a transport union strike. Each of those
were stressful, but they were also part of the job, and she weathered the storms one after the other.

Now she was actually scared.

It wasn’t just the unsmiling faces of the quality control advisors from Gunderson who hovered over employees at every step of the bottling process. It wasn’t even the fear that the IRS would somehow discover the new offshore account that Otto Wirths had set up for her.

What worried Hester was that she didn’t know what was in the water.

Otto told her that it was safe. But he had a weird little smile on his scarred face, and that smile haunted Hester, day and night.

She stood on the metal catwalk, fingers curled tightly around the pipe rail, and looked down at the production floor.

MacNeil-Gunderson owned three plants. Two in North Carolina and one in Vermont. This one was the largest—a massive facility that had the second-highest bottled water output in the South—and Hester oversaw the bottling and shipping of twelve hundred bottles per minute. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was just a drop in the bucket of the 170 billion liters of water the industry bottled worldwide, but it was a high-profit business.

Her plant did not bother with spring water but went for the more lucrative purified-water market. Hester had overseen the installation of top-of-the-line reverse osmosis water purification systems and the equipment for enhancing taste and controlling odor through activated carbon. The water was sterilized by ozone and then run through remineralization equipment before flowing like liquid gold into plastic bottles. The plant was fully automated, with only a skeleton crew of mechanics and quality-control technicians on hand. It was much easier to slip things past a small crew, and in the current economy few employees risked making any kind of fuss. Except for shipping, MacNeil-Gunderson was a nonunion shop, and that helped, too.

Before Otto had walked up to her in the parking lot of a Quick Chek four months ago, Hester’s main concern was playing spin doctor for press questions about the source of the water. A Charlotte newspaper had broken the story that purified bottling plants used water from any
source, including tap water, seawater, brackish water, river water, polluted well water, and even wastewater streams. The paper emphasized that and glossed over the fact that purification was the key. And the water was actually pure. Or at least as pure as the FDA required.

Until Otto Wirths.

Wirths had offered Hester an absurd amount of money. The kind of money that made her knees weak, that actually took her breath away. More money than Hester could make in twenty years as a manager. Wirths showed her credentials that proved that he was CEO of the Gunderson Group. He could have fired her, but he never even threatened that. Instead he offered her money, and that was enough to buy her cooperation. And maybe her soul. Hester wasn’t sure. He only wanted two things from her: to allow him to provide the quality-control specialists for the plant and to make sure she paid no attention to whatever additives they chose to add to the water.

“It won’t affect the taste or smell,” Wirths had said; then he gave her a sly wink. “But . . . don’t drink it, my dear.”

When Hester had hesitated, Otto Wirth added another zero to the money he offered. Hester nearly collapsed.

She wrestled with her conscience for nearly a full minute.

That was at the beginning of May and now it was near the end of August. Seven hundred and twenty thousand bottles an hour. One million, seven hundred and twenty thousand, eight hundred bottles a day. For four months.

What was in the bottles? The question nagged at her every day, and every day the money in that offshore account seemed smaller; every day she wondered if she had sold her soul for too small an amount.

Her fingers were so tight on the pipe rail that her knuckles were white. She stared down at the production floor as the thunder of the machinery beat at her like fists.

What was in those bottles?

Dear God
, she thought,
what is in that water?

Near Barawa, Somalia

8 days ago (Friday, August 17)