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  “Check,” Harris said with a nod.

  As Legend watched the final tasks being taken care of, he wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or disappointed. On the one hand, he’d caught General Kane’s hot potato and hadn’t gotten burned. If things kept on this path, they’d open the box tomorrow, identify the object as some sort of benign ancient artifact he could turn over to a museum, and be done with the entire business. On the other hand, a part of him had been hoping that the object the two soldiers from the Tenth Mountain had found was a legitimate technological anomaly to add to his collection of treasured acquisitions.

  “Hey, Harris,” Legend called. “What does the object look like? Can you describe it to me?”

  “It’s a perfect sphere, approximately the size of a basketball.”

  “It’s metal?”

  “Didn’t look like any metal I’ve seen before. You know what it reminded me of, Major? A giant soap bubble—because it was sorta reflective and transparent at the same time.”

  “How much does it weigh?”

  Harris laughed at this.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “To put it in the box, we had to lift the box up to it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sergeant Pitcher brought it back to base wrapped in a blanket and stuffed in his pack. When he and Corporal Wayne unwrapped it, it floated in midair.”

  “That information was not in the General’s report. Are you fucking with me, Harris?”

  “Do I look like someone who fucks around, Major?” Harris said with an expression carved from stone.

  “No. No, you do not.”

  Harris shook his head and blew air through his teeth. “The General saw that thing floating and it spooked him. He told us to pack it up, lock it down, and get it the fuck off his base.”

  “Did you or any of your men interact with the object?”

  “No. Pitcher and Wayne got it in the box. Me and my guys were safety observers, if you catch my drift,” Harris said, tapping his assault rifle.

  “Anybody else have a seizure like Pitcher and Wayne?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else you can tell me that might be pertinent?”

  Harris rubbed his beard and said, “Actually, yeah. I don’t know how relevant this is, but those Tenth Mountain boys are odd ducks. I mean, aside from the seizures and all.”

  “In what way?”

  “That Wayne is a jittery motherfucker. The dude can’t sit still. The whole fucking flight over he’s up—pacing and rambling on and on about computers and the internet. He dips like a fiend too. I swear the brother musta gone through four cans of Kodiak.”

  “What about Pitcher? Was his behavior the same as Wayne’s before the seizure?”

  “Nah, he was almost the opposite. Sat real still most of the flight, but hardly blinking and almost like he was looking right through you.”

  Legend nodded. “All right, I’m going to go talk to Wayne and see what he has to say. Let me know when the convoy is loaded and ready to go.”

  “Roger that,” Harris said and went to join his teammate, who was removing the tie-down straps from the steel crate.

  Legend turned and walked over to where Fischer was collecting blood samples from Corporal Wayne and the still-incoherent Sergeant Pitcher.

  As he approached the group, he pondered over the new information the operator Harris had just shared with him. Apparently Kane had withheld important details about the object, and he couldn’t help but wonder what else the good General was keeping from him.

  DAY TWO

  Is it the Devil or is it me,

  working, working, so diligently?

  My mind a clockwork of gears and springs,

  my voice of two a chorus sings.

  We wait in concert for her return,

  So glorious, so glorious, to watch the world burn.

  —Willie Barnes

  CHAPTER 10

  0423 Local Time

  Arlington, Virginia

  Malcolm Madden was an insomniac.

  By choice.

  He was also an atheist.

  By Hobson’s choice.

  Eliminate the solace of a theological afterlife and unconsciousness becomes a terrifying state of existence. Asleep, Malcolm Madden was no different from any other human being, his intellect, creativity, and passion all neutered. His education, experience, and capacity for observation nullified. For Malcolm, being asleep was akin to being dead. The act of falling asleep felt like suicide committed ritualistically night after night after night.

  Empirical evidence bolstered his somniphobia. Asleep, he ceased to exist. He had no self-awareness, no directed cogitation, no sense of time, and no willful access to his memories. His boss, Cyril Singleton, thought his somniphobia was just another one of his eccentricities. As did everyone else. But Cyril mollycoddled him—out of pity, he suspected, for they had never been intimate. She was ten years his senior; maybe she felt some misplaced maternal or sororal obligation for him. She’d once told him he was like a puppy stranded in the middle of a busy highway in desperate need of rescue. She had even tried to help him transcend his insomnia by making him a care package replete with chamomile tea, a book on meditation and relaxation, melatonin tablets, and incense candles. He hated tea, candles, and meditation, but he tried them all out of respect for her thoughtfulness.

  The melatonin tablets he threw in the trash.

  When he finally confided in Cyril the reason behind his insomnia, she had responded like any proper scientist should—with data and counterarguments. She argued vehemently that sleep was not analogous to death but rather that sleep was an altered state of consciousness. An unconscious brain and a sleeping brain exhibit very different EEG patterns, she said. When he poo-pooed her EEG data as irrelevant to the crux of his concern, she turned immediately to her fallback argument: dreams.

  “Do you dream when you sleep?” she asked him.

  “Yes, of course,” he replied.

  “Do you remember your dreams?”

  “Sometimes?”

  “There you have it,” she declared with a girlish grin. “Dead people don’t dream. So stop this nonsense, and try to enjoy a good night’s sleep with sweet dreams.”

  He’d wanted to kiss her for that, but instead, he’d bid her good night and worked in the lab from dusk until dawn on some urgent deliverable, which now he could not remember. Intimacy was fleeting, and another moment like that with her had not come since.

  Cyril was not a beautiful woman.

  But he was in love with her.

  Someday he would tell her so.

  His doorbell rang, startling him and causing him to spill lukewarm coffee on his lap. He cursed and blotted the coffee from the crotch of his sweatpants with a wad of Kleenex, which was a bad idea because it instantly shredded into soggy, brown, little shards. Why is it that tissues are good at wiping up snot but little else? He wiped the soggy, brown remnants off his pants, then padded to his apartment door in his bare feet. He looked through the security peephole, and his heart skipped a beat.

  Oh shit.

  He fumbled with the dead bolt and then opened the door only a few inches. Through the gap he said, “It’s three o’clock in the morning, Dean.”

  Dean Ninemeyer stared at him. “We’re both insomniacs, so who cares? Let me in.”

  “I’m a little busy right now.”

  Ninemeyer glanced at the wet stain on the crotch of Malcolm’s sweatpants and smirked. “I can see that.”

  Malcolm sighed. “I’m serious; now is not a good time.”

  Ninemeyer’s smile morphed from mocking to humorless. “A little bird tells me something big is brewing.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re a terrible liar, Malcolm. You always have been. Let me in so we can talk about this.”

  “I don’t work for you,” Malcolm said, mustering his courage.

  “We have an arrangement, you an
d me, or have you forgotten? Now, either you let me in, or I’m going to let myself in.”

  Malcolm could tell from the other man’s face that the statement was a cold fact, not idle gamesmanship.

  “Okay,” he said, defeated, and closed the door enough to unfasten the chain lock and then reopened it.

  Ninemeyer pushed the door open and swept into the apartment like a cold breeze. He was wearing his standard uniform: a black suit with a white, starched shirt, open at the collar with no tie. His onyx-black hair was parted and swept back with gel in a Cary Grant–esque conservative throwback to the 1950s greaser style. Ninemeyer stood three inches taller than Malcolm, had a lean frame and a perfectly flat stomach. His features were hard and chiseled, like the skin on his face had been stretched over a skull carved from granite. The thick-rimmed, black-framed eyeglasses he wore stood in great contrast to his pale-gray eyes—eyes that were always analyzing, calculating, and judging everything around him.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place,” he said, scanning around the disheveled apartment. “You’ve really put all that cash to good use.”

  Malcolm scratched his ear. “If your plan was to woo me with flattery, you’re doing a dismal job.”

  “My father always told me I’d make a terrible businessman,” Ninemeyer said. “He was the one who convinced me to work for the government.”

  “You don’t work for the government. You work for governments.”

  “Semantics.” Ninemeyer took a seat on the sofa and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees, to look at the container holding Malcolm’s recently acquired Brazilian carpenter ants. “Aren’t you a little old for ant farms?”

  “Those ants are infected with a parasitic fungus that infiltrates their brains and kills them. I wouldn’t get too close if I were you, or you might wind up with an uninvited guest in your head.”

  Ninemeyer scooted away from the sample container, and Malcolm fought the urge to revel in his little victory. “Just tell me why you’re here, Dean,” he said, already exasperated with the conversation.

  “I want to know what the Army found buried in that cave in Afghanistan.”

  Malcolm shook his head. “How do you do it? Seriously, how? The project is one day old, classified TS/SCI with less than twenty people read in, and somehow you already know about it.”

  Ninemeyer smiled coolly. “I have friends in low and high places.”

  Still standing, Malcolm crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve got nothing to report at the moment.”

  “Bullshit.” The spy wagged a finger. “I hear it’s unusual tech. There’s even a rumor that it could be extraterrestrial in origin.”

  Malcolm cocked an eyebrow at him. “Are you intoxicated, Dean?”

  Ninemeyer stared at him. “Do I look intoxicated, Malcolm?”

  “No,” Malcolm said, rubbing the back of his neck.

  “I know you’re on the scientific capture team tasked to examine the technology. I followed you to the airport. I watched the C-17 taxi into Hangar 306, and I watched them shut the door. I watched a three-vehicle convoy depart, and I followed it to Westfield Dynamics. Don’t look so surprised; I know all about DARPA’s secret skunkworks. I assume they took it to the BRIG?”

  Malcolm nodded, and his stomach turned to acid. The bastard was gloating and bullying him at the same time. How was it that Ninemeyer already knew as much about the project as he did? This was unfortunate because the more Ninemeyer knew, the less wiggle room Malcolm had to negotiate.

  “What took so long in Hangar 306?” Ninemeyer continued.

  “They were screening it for CBRN threats.”

  “Makes sense,” Ninemeyer said with a sniff. “Who did they send off in that ambulance? Did somebody get hurt?”

  “You don’t miss much, do you?”

  “No . . . tell me.”

  “Two Army grunts, a Sergeant Pitcher and a Corporal, oh God, what was his name . . . Wayne. Corporal Wayne.”

  “Why’d they take them away in an ambulance? Were they injured by the object?”

  “Pitcher and Wayne were the ones who found it. Pitcher had a grand mal seizure on the flight over. He was in a weird, prolonged postictal state when I saw him.”

  “What about Wayne?”

  “I don’t think so, but he didn’t look well. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’d taken methamphetamine during the flight. Very jittery.”

  “When are they going to open the box?”

  Malcolm checked his watch. “In four hours, give or take.”

  Ninemeyer nodded, this information apparently pleasing him. “Good. I want a full accounting of what you find.”

  Malcolm took a deep breath and contemplated the coiled viper on his sofa. He’d known Ninemeyer for three years, but he still wasn’t sure what the man’s job was or whom he really worked for. On their first meeting, Ninemeyer had shown him identification that said he was the Director of Acquisitions for a company called Helios Enterprises, but Malcolm had long since figured out this was a fiction. His job at Helios Enterprises, and undoubtedly his name itself, was but one of many legends the man used. But like every lie, this legend was built on a keystone of truth, for Ninemeyer was in the business of acquisitions—the acquisition of government secrets.

  It had all started innocently enough, with Ninemeyer offering to pay for Malcolm’s consulting services on the side. The requests Ninemeyer made were simplistic and beneath a man of Malcolm’s capabilities, but the hourly billing rate that Ninemeyer offered was ten times what Malcolm was making at DARPA. Ten times! So he took the work as it came, and the extra cash allowed him to rent a nicer apartment and start paying down the mountain of student-loan debt he’d been chipping away at since his twenties. But over time his benefactor had gotten lazy and stopped whitewashing all the source materials in fastidious detail. When that happened, Malcolm realized he wasn’t helping Helios engineers; he was helping the Chinese, the Russians, and the Koreans. He was doing the heavy lifting for other scientists incapable of doing the work themselves. Upon recognizing this, he also recognized that what he was doing constituted treason.

  “I can’t, Dean. Not this time,” he said. “It’s compartmentalized top secret.”

  “You’re not in control of this partnership,” Ninemeyer said, getting to his feet. “You don’t tell me no.”

  “The circle is too small. If I leak, they’ll know it was me.”

  The spy approached him with a smile, then snapped a hand out, grabbed Malcolm by the scrotum, and squeezed. “What that big, beautiful brain of yours does not seem to understand is that I can burn you anytime I choose. You’ve sold state secrets; you’ve collaborated with the enemy. You’re a traitor, Malcolm Madden, and I have the documentation to prove it.”

  “If I go down,” Malcolm squealed, the pain in his gonads making him feel ill, “you go down.”

  “72301 Meadow Brook Court, apartment 32A,” his torturer said, squeezing harder.

  “What?” he whimpered, his brain not processing the non sequitur.

  “You don’t recognize the address?” Ninemeyer taunted. “Of course not. Your precious Cyril has never invited you to her place. But I know where she lives. I know the code to her smart lock is one-eight-two-two. I know that she keeps her underwear in the second drawer of her dresser.” The corners of the spy’s mouth curled into a vulpine grin, and he inhaled deeply through his nose, almost as if . . .

  “If you touch one hair on her head,” Malcolm growled, “I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Ninemeyer said, giving Malcolm’s nuts a crushing squeeze.

  Malcolm buckled at the waist and moaned. His entire abdomen burned with pain, and he felt like he needed to vomit.

  After an agonizing beat, Ninemeyer released his grip. “That’s what I thought. Let this be a reminder, Malcolm, that I have you by the balls. I can get to you and your precious Cyril anytime I want. You work for me. Never forget that.”

  Malcolm nodded, unable to speak.
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  “I want a daily accounting of what you learn about the object,” Ninemeyer commanded, towering over him. “In addition, I want a list of key personnel on the project, and when the time comes, I’m going to want access to the facility.”

  “Fine, fine,” Malcolm coughed. “Whatever you want.”

  “Good, that’s better,” Ninemeyer said and turned toward the door. “Don’t worry; I’ll let myself out.”

  After Ninemeyer was gone, it took Malcolm several minutes to recuperate. When he could finally stand up straight, he walked to the kitchen and fetched himself a glass of water. He drank half of it in one long gulp. He’d never seen Ninemeyer like that before—so aggressive and dangerous. A terrifying thought occurred to him, one that made him want to crawl into a hole and disappear. What if Dean Ninemeyer was more than a spy? What if he was a killer? The Mafia employed people like Ninemeyer, and so did governments. Men with the authority to make deals, collect payments, and clean up their own messes.

  I’m such a fool, he thought. I made a deal with the devil, and now the devil wants his due.

  He walked back to the sofa and sat in front of his sample of Camponotus rufipes. He watched the infected ants wandering around in the enclosure behaving like normal ants. How long they persisted as carriers before the zombification took place was a topic of debate. Some entomologists and parasitologists suggested that the fungus remained dormant inside the ant until the temperature, humidity, distance from the colony, and even barometric pressure (as an indicator of altitude in the jungle) were conducive to optimal spore release. Only once all the criteria were met for the fungus to achieve its objective would the fungus activate and take control of its host.

  Malcolm collapsed back against the sofa.

  What the hell am I supposed to do now?

  CHAPTER 11

  0757 Local Time

  Westfield Dynamics (DARPA Front Company)

  Culpeper, Virginia

  The energy in the control room was electric. Legend could feel it, and from the looks on people’s faces, they could feel it too. All the key players from last night had reassembled, everyone early, everyone prepared.