Firebolt Page 5

  “Are you putting me in charge of counterintelligence? Then let me interrogate Maria Guttierez.”

  “When the Ja Lama has questioned her you will get a report on all of his findings.”

  Great. A detailed report on what it felt like to stare into the eyes of Maria Guttierez while muttering Mongolian Buddhist mantras. That should be helpful.

  “What am I in charge of?”

  “Questioning everybody, everyone except the armed security down here. I’ll handle them.”

  “Including everyone upstairs?” I asked.

  “Upstairs and downstairs. Conduct interviews and discover suspects, like a witch-finder feeling for the devil’s mark. Find me a witch, Gavin.”

  “You mean a spy.”

  “The difference in this case is immaterial. If you do not find one, I will be forced to conclude that the Ja Lama was right about you.”

  “And what then?”

  My voice was hostile, because I had no intention of letting him bully me. Not even if he had all the power and I had none.

  “Then the Ja Lama would have to question you. And believe me, Gavin, that’s nothing you want.”

  Chapter 13

  It isn’t easy to brood properly when you have no windows. Believe me, I’ve tried. Back when I had a real apartment like a normal person, I used to stare out my window at the street while I listened to music. I listened to fairly normal music back then too, stuff I found on Pandora mostly. Every once in a long while, I would break out my old punk albums in a sad act of nostalgia. But the basic principle remained the same: put on some music, pour a drink, stare out at the street through the Venetian blinds. That’s proper brooding.

  My time in Hennington had introduced me to stranger genres, including dark ambient, ritual ambient, and doom jazz. It wasn’t really my thing, but it was good for brooding. And it had made me curious about finding new music, which had led me to all those Russian metal punk hip hop bands like Siberian Meat Grinder and Moscow Death Brigade. Right now I was listening to Mater Suspiria Vision, a Witch House band. Occult and horror themed House music would seem to be ideal for brooding, but it just wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. No windows to stare out of, just the concrete walls of my room in the bunker.

  Without a window, the electronic beats and spooky catch phrases of Witch House just drifted into background noise while I sat on the edge of my bed and drank Grey Goose from the bottle. My mind was still fixated on my work, specifically on my search for spies. This wasn’t just a job, it was more like a test – and my life depended on it, if I interpreted what Father had said correctly. Yet I didn’t really want to find a spy, because whoever I found would probably be killed and quite possibly in some horrible way.

  On top of that, they would probably be from the underground cell. Those people had arguably saved my life, back in DC on that terrible day when my partner Duffy was killed by Jackie Cole. These people could be considered terrorists from an FBI perspective, but that didn’t seem to matter much considering that they hated Father and all his works. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

  I had spent about eight hours that day conducting interviews, putting everyone who worked for the Quod Corporation under the hot lights to see if they cracked. I had a long list of people to go through, and I was nowhere near being done.

  Only fragments of all those conversations stood out in my memory. Most of the people we had working downstairs were as strange as the music I was listening to right now – some almost silent, some gregarious, some irritated and combative, some nervous and fidgety, but all strange. They were all geniuses after all, people who thought in terms of logarithms and algorithms and Boolean logic. The idea that anything other than their personal project was important enough to even worry about was foreign to most of them.

  One woman told me she didn’t know what a spy was, she didn’t have time to read Tom Clancy novels. One guy almost got himself in some deep, dark water by playing along, jokily pretending he actually was the spy just because he thought it sounded cool and didn’t realize there might be consequences. Luckily for him, I saw what he was doing and got tough enough to really scare him, at which point the denials and protests of innocence became both panicky and convincing. The others knew what we were talking about and understood why we needed to find the spy, but still resented being interrupted. It made for slow going, which didn’t help either of us.

  The interview with Kumar was a bit of a break, but I had to play it relatively formal. I was afraid I might have scared the poor guy. He knew a lot about satellites, more than anyone else for a thousand miles probably. What he didn’t know about my work would fill a ten-volume encyclopedia set, so the fact that I had to even ask him these questions must have felt like a betrayal of our friendship.

  “How are you doing, Kumar?”

  “Okay. Okay.”

  “You know I have to ask you some questions, right?”

  “Sure, Gavin. Sure.”

  He was like that character in Goodfellas who says everything twice. I wished he would stop.

  “Have you ever had any contact with enemies of the Quod Corporation?”

  “Enemies? What enemies?”

  “That’s not important. Have you ever had any such contacts?”

  “No. No!”

  The whole thing was depressing, so I decided to go back to my room when my work day was over and put on some music to match my mood. Now, listening to Mater Suspiria Vision’s “A Giant Snake That Eats Itself,” I was trying to brood and not succeeding. So I opened up my laptop and checked our schedule, to find out where we would be next week. And what did I see? Vitalius Kohl had a new engagement, a crowdfunding rally at a hotel in Washington DC only six days from now.

  “At last,” I said, switching over immediately to my social media page. I posted a comment or two on other people’s posts, former colleagues in Hennington who never liked me in the first place. Vitalius knew I did this and found it amusing, because the comments were always passive aggressive. For example, I went on John Grimassi’s page and posted a link to the meteorological website Weather Underground, along with the words “Found ‘em for you!” and a little smiley face. John had played a minor role in the search for the Weather Underground fugitives back in the ‘70s, and was always insisting the FBI had never caught them all. Within seconds he wrote back: “Fuck you, Holder.” Sweet guy.

  Having had my fun, I made a single post of my own: Do you know what FBI really stands for? Fuck Bourgeois Intellectuals. Or maybe Fridays Bring Income. Or Fried Bohemian Intestines. Fuck the FBI and everyone who works for it. That’s right, guys! I’m drunk-posting again! - GH

  No one “liked” my post. No one LOL’d. But it was all okay. I didn’t even feel the need to brood anymore, because I was starting to get somewhere.

  Chapter 14

  Six days and dozens of interviews later, we were in DC. I have to admit, it hit me pretty hard when I finally saw the place. A disorienting combination of sadness and anxiety, regretful memories, vague fears. As I walked through the airport hallways, I remembered Duffy, giving me grief about some minor flaw of mine on our way back from Chicago. I don’t even remember what we were doing in Chicago, but I remember his words: “You’ll be the death of me, Holder.”

  How right he was. He didn’t know it at the time and neither did I, but I would eventually and quite literally be the death of him. I hid Father’s protégé Jackie Cole in my own apartment, protecting her from her enemies in Ultima Thule and from the FBI at the same time. She was only working me, and by the time I figured that out it was too late. She took the money and ran, shooting Duffy when he tried to stop her. I survived, and got carted off to Hennington while they debated whether to just fire me or also prosecute me.

  While they were busy figuring it out, I tried to use the FBI’s resources to look for Father. Back then I didn’t even know his real name, although I thought it might be Virgil Strabo. While I was looking for him, he came to me, pretending to be a profe
ssor at the University named Andrew Mann. The result of that disastrous failure was the Hennington Incident, the worst bioterror attack in American history. When all that was over, the FBI no longer wondered what to do with me. They knew for sure.

  “You look thoughtful, Gavin,” said Jesse Spindrift. “Almost worried.”

  “Keeping the boss safe is a big job,” I pointed out. “Try to stay focused.”

  My phone beeped at me on the way to the hotel, informing me that someone had commented on my Facebook post with a “Gavin, you jerk! :)”. A young woman calling herself Ericka Android, with a ring through her nose and bright blue hair. Not that she actually looked like that. The Internet lies.

  “Don’t tell me you’re young enough to be obsessed with social media,” said Vitalius.

  “Do you have any idea how many people as old as you are using social media?”

  “Lèse-majesté, Gavin. Lèse-majesté.”

  “So this is a fundraiser?” I asked him, changing the subject.

  “The beginning of a campaign. I’ve put a lot of my own funds into the Quod Corporation, but I can’t do it all. To achieve some of the things we would love to achieve, we must raise more money.”

  “And the Ja Lama is speaking too.”

  “He is speaking first. The perfect introduction to the principles of the Quod Corporation.”

  “Of course. A Mongolian monk is clearly the best person to explain your flying car project.”

  “To explain the principles of Quantum Buddhism, yes.”

  I considered asking what Quantum Buddhism was, but I decided that I didn’t really want to know. He’d tell me all about it soon enough, whenever he got into one of his get-drunk-and-talk-to-Gavin moods.

  The phone beeped again, just as I was getting my team into position – a few people near the stage, a few near the Ja Lama, a few near Vitalius and a few in the crowd. I told Jesse Spindrift that I’d be floating, checking in on a lot of different things. He stared at me, but he couldn’t seem to think of the right reply for the occasion so I just wandered off. I checked my phone, and it was another Facebook comment. A guy named Ernie Armstrong, asking me to drop in to a Mexican place called The Mission since I was in town. I checked the location, and wasn’t surprised to find it right around the corner.

  “Hey, Barbara,” I said. She stopped and turned, her face completely neutral. The professional mask.

  “I need to check on a lead, something that might lead us to the people we’re looking for. I’ll be less than an hour.”

  “So Spindrift’s in charge, boss?”

  “Spindrift’s in charge.”

  She nodded silently, although I thought I noticed a raised eyebrow. If I saw it at all, it was subtle. She turned away and walked off, and I slipped out through the lobby and went around the corner. I had to do this fast, because if Vitalius noticed I was missing, it could be a problem. A problem with the Ja Lama staring deeply into my soul, whatever that meant exactly. I saw the sign out front, “The Mission” in bright lights above the patio. I headed straight inside, looking around in every direction.

  The place was sharp, with brick walls and a white fireplace complete with a pair of bull horns. I didn’t see who I was looking for so I went back outside, where she was sitting there shaking her head at me. Not a man named Ernie Armstrong, and not a blue-haired punk girl named Ericka Android. A middle-aged woman, unamused and quietly intimidating. She had a margarita in front of her, but she hadn’t touched it.

  “You’re not very good at this, Gavin,” said Emily Alvin. My old boss from the FBI.

  My current boss, actually.

  Chapter 15

  Not respected. Not suspected. That’s what I was thinking all those months ago, when I walked into the office in Hennington, Minnesota where Emily Alvin was waiting and found out what the FBI really thought about me.

  The look on her face was noticeably colder then, a look of disgust contained behind a mask of professionalism. Emily Alvin was no one to trifle with. Back in the Cold War, she’d uncovered a mole in the FBI singlehandedly. Now her job was to hang me, and the only question was whether she would also draw and quarter me.

  “Gavin,” she had said back then. “Please sit down.”

  “I take it this is going to be a long conversation then.”

  “You were expecting something shorter?”

  “How long does it take to fire a man?”

  “You deserve to be fired,” she said. “You deserve to be prosecuted. I’ve been looking into your actions in the Ultima Thule case for some time now, and the closer I look, the worse it gets. Let’s review. First you and Jim Duffy messed up that stakeout, resulting in the death of Robert Hitchcock and Jeffrey Schroeder.”

  I started to say something – the death of Bobby Bullet was not our fault, exactly – but she held up a hand to silence me.

  “Then you messed up the interrogation of Eugene Huhn, lost a fax that would have identified the suspects earlier, and got into a gunfight with members of Ultima Thule in your own neighborhood.”

  I tried to speak again, because technically they couldn’t prove I was even in that gunfight, but fair is fair. She held her finger up this time and just kept going.

  “You seem to have known something about the whereabouts of Kerry Kohl, aka Jackie Cole, and to have kept that knowledge to yourself instead of sharing it with your superiors. I can’t prove that part, but if I ever can you will definitely go down for it. Whether this has any connection to Kerry Kohl’s own involvement in the murder of a man named Michael Croop a number of years ago has not yet been established. It seems highly probable, because a band you were associated with was performing at the same venue on the same night. Yes, Gavin, we know about that now.”

  I didn’t want to say anything anymore. I hadn’t killed Mike Croop, but Emily was right that Jackie had. And she was right that I had known about it, although not at first. For many years I thought I had killed him myself.

  “You were attacked in your own home by a hit team sent by Ultima Thule, but you somehow succeeded in killing Derrick Oliver and Jim Marino. It isn’t clear why they attacked you, but it might have been a revenge thing for Schroeder and Huhn. You then violated policy and raided the headquarters of Ultima Thule with neither permission nor adequate backup, resulting directly in the death of your partner Jim Duffy and the escape of Kerry Kohl. That’s why we sent you here to Hennington – if you had made any attempt at all to reach out to her, or she to you, we would have concluded that the two of you were in league with each other and you’d be in handcuffs right now. But sending you to Hennington was a mistake, Gavin, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “Do me the courtesy, Gavin. I’m not stupid. Ultima Thule found you here, which implies to me that you have some kind of personal history with them. And now we’re facing an unprecedented disaster. A series of truly outlandish ritual murders, municipal corruption, a machine gun attack on the county fairgrounds, multiple dead bodies including the mayor, and a bioterror attack involving Ebola.”

  I could have quibbled with a few of the points here. For one thing, it wasn’t a machine gun at the county fairground, it was a submachine gun. I knew that for a fact, because I was the one using it at the time, trying to wipe out Ultima Thule and kill Father. Also, I had personally prevented the Ebola attack from being much worse by besieging the compound where are all the infected people were staying. Under the circumstances, putting the attack in the minus column didn’t quite seem fair. But I couldn’t really say any of that, because I had killed a lot of people. It didn’t really matter that they were terrible people, because I hadn’t been following any kind of official mandate at the time. It was simply a private war. Admitting to their deaths would be admitting to murder.

  “So here we are,” she said. “You deserve to be fired, and you will be fired – for public consumption. The FBI will publicly describe you as a dangerous incompetent, and blame you for most of what went wro
ng here in Hennington.”

  “Okay,” I said, having expected no less. I assumed she was about to add that they were going to charge me with something. She had said I deserved to be prosecuted, after all.

  “As I said, it’s for public consumption. You aren’t actually going to be fired, Gavin.”

  “What… what?!” I asked, unable to conceive of any scenario where I would not be fired for all this. I should probably get the electric chair when it came right down to it.

  “The FBI has concluded that Vitalius Kohl, the man you know as Andrew Mann or Father, is a dangerous domestic terrorist threat. But Kohl’s brother is a US Senator, and the political climate won’t allow us to pursue Kohl openly without sufficient evidence. Evidence we just might have by now if you had pursued an actual investigation, instead of trying to handle this like the Hatfields and McCoys.”

  The Hatfields and McCoys did not have Thompson submachine guns, but I let that slide along with all the other things.

  “So what do you want from me?” I asked.

  “Accept the humiliation, accept the blame for the Hennington Incident. Then approach Vitalius Kohl, tell him you want to work for him to get back at the Bureau for what they did to your career. Go deep undercover. Take down Father once and for all – but do it for us this time. Do it the right way.”

  Now here we were, many miles and many moons from that conversation in the Hennington residential agency. Emily Alvin was sitting across from me, watching me silently from the top of a margarita glass. It was time to talk.

  Chapter 16

  “How’s David Zinn?” I asked. The waiter came over, and Emily said, “get him a Grey Goose.” The waiter left. I hadn’t realized she knew that about me.