“I thought you retired in the eighties,” I said to Stuart.
Stuart stared out the window, annoyed by so many pointless words floating through the air. You learn nothing from a spook by watching his eyes, but this time he wanted me to see how he felt: impatient. “Ben, this is not for you. You should have smelled it early on and jumped clear.”
Rob looked around like a neck-jerking pigeon at the rest of us in the big old Crown Victoria. “I wasn’t nearly paranoid enough, was I?”
The car slid into a loading zone across the street from a large, gray, stone-fronted cube, wet with steady drizzle.
“Here we are,” Norton announced. He reached under the dash and handed Stuart something I could not see. I was pretty sure it was a gun.
The lower floors had no windows and the entrance doors had been boarded over, with boards nailed over the boards. Graffiti covered it at ground level, protecting the building with an air of disuse like a fence made of spray paint.
“Prime real estate,” Stuart said. “Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Stuart, why are you here, and what do you know?”
“I’ll tell it straight, Ben, for old time’s sake,” Stuart said.
Norton gave him a disapproving glance, then lifted his hands, so be it. “Nobody will believe it, of course,” Norton said. “It’s crazy shit. Like Area 51.”
“Retirement sucks,” Stuart said. He lifted the pistol into our view. A SIG-Sauer, I couldn’t tell the model number, but it was dark and shiny, strictly new-millennium government issue. “After the end of the Cold War, the best of the old guard were called back to put the whole espionage thing on a new footing. Industrial, corporate.”
“They didn’t ask me,” I said.
“Right,” Stuart said.
“We’re fried,” Rob said, and held up his hands like a bad guy giving up to the sheriff.
“Shut up,” Stuart told him. “You’re responsible for a lot of hard work coming to grief.”
I put a hand on Rob’s arm: maintain.
“I worked Silk in the late fifties and early sixties, as a youngster,” Stuart said. “I heard things in the briefings you wouldn’t believe. OSS and MI6 had tracked them intermittently through the forties. Nobody knows the real history of the war. But that was before my time. I do know that Silk started cooperating with us in the late forties. They saw the approach of Stalin’s final madness, and, over three years, they dismantled their operations in the Soviet Union, sabotaged their stockpiles and labs, and disassociated themselves from the next generation of biowar researchers. It was all very ingenious. Essentially, to the Russians after Stalin, Silk became a bunch of crackpot has-beens, on a par with Lysenko.
“In 1953, when I was still a kid, we were ordered to help them find a safe zone in the United States. They had peculiar needs. So we outbid some drug companies and bought Anthrax Central before it was finished.” He pointed to the gray cube across the street. “We handed it over to Silk in exchange for certain activities in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and China. Political sculpture, it was called. I took over the day-to-day operations in 1961. It was a funny relationship. Half the time, they didn’t do what we wanted them to. I always thought they were working other streets, maybe financial, in Europe or in China, even in Russia again, but that was outside our scope. The Agency told me to let it go, so I let it go. Hands off, don’t provoke them, those were our prime instructions.”
“You were afraid,” Rob said.
“You bet your ass we were afraid. The more I knew, the less I slept nights. I’m pretty sure they called the shots from the very beginning. Nobody knew who they were running—in the State Department, the FBI, the military. The Oval Office. Even the Agency. Whenever we tried to authorize countermeasures, we were squelched at a very high level. In 1970, I was assigned elsewhere. Silk went offshore, to the Bahamas, and stopped its activities. I had a long and easier career and retired. The Soviet Union fell apart. Happy days. Then I got word I was needed again. Surprise, Silk had actually come to us with a proposal. They wanted a new and safer haven in a changing world. Someone decided that American industry could benefit from what Silk knew. Contracts were drawn up. I helped make sure the secrets were kept, even when some folks were eager to tell all. That was when I was ordered to discredit Banning.”
Stuart leaned his head to one side and massaged his neck. “They worked out a deal—not me, personally, you understand. It was a good deal, as far as it went. Now it’s falling apart, and it looks like Dr. Cousins here is responsible.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” Rob said. He grabbed his door handle, discovered what I already knew, then pounded the armrest and slumped back in his seat. He focused on Stuart. “You helped them go after AY3000 and me, too?” Rob took on the look of someone realizing he has been gut shot. “Have you gone after my brother?”
Stuart shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t want to know. But it’s obvious you’ve pissed off someone who should never have been pissed off. And that makes a lot more work for the rest of us.”
“This stinks, Stuart,” I said. “What if you just let us walk away? The Tom-Tom club knows.”
Stuart looked peeved. “You wanted to come here, Ben. We brought you here. We’ve done everything you asked, right?” The rain on the side window drew sliding beads of shadow over his face. “Nobody in the Tom-Tom will believe you. You were never the brightest member. You were a grunt in the bush, Ben.”
It was an old slur. What do you get from a grunt in the bush? A pile of shit.
“Fuck you,” I said to Stuart. To Norton, “You too.”
Stuart let me see that his eyes could go cold if he wanted them to. “The dead don’t fuck. They are beyond fucking and being fucked with. I don’t know what they’re going to tell you. Believe me. But I suggest you listen close. It may be your only way out of this mess. You, too, Dr. Cousins. You sure look like hell.”
The car pulled around to a broad alley behind the building. Norton squeezed out and opened my door. He, too, held a pistol, another SIG-Sauer. Stuart opened Rob’s door.
Guttering streams fell in a thin curtain from the parapet at the top of the square gray mass. A big steel door covered with graffiti—eyeballs, grasping hands with thick splintered fingernails, thorn crowns on bleeding heads—opened to receive us.
“I thought it was shut down,” Rob said. I could see the last of his starch going. “We were going to break in and get some samples.”
“Don’t say we didn’t warn you,” Stuart said.
Two earnest, tired-looking young men with short hair, wearing wrinkled business suits that had been sweated in for hours, stepped out of the shadows inside the door and stood at parade rest, waiting.
The building’s breath smelled dry and warm and clean.
The young agents greeted Stuart and Norton. Stuart whispered something to the one on the left. Norton walked right on through.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Rob entered Anthrax Central. I followed, looking for places to duck, pull things down, get some confusion going. There wasn’t much. We walked over a concrete floor. The concrete walls had been painted gray and red, and a raised loading platform crossed the rear. Big glass tanks filled with murky water stood along one side of the platform. It could have been a receiving area for a big metropolitan aquarium, but the tanks didn’t seem to have any fish, just lumpy shadows like coral and pipes going in and out at the top.
Two boys and two girls, late teens, dressed in denim overalls, supple as sea lions and alert as terriers, emerged from the shadows between the water tanks. They squatted on the edge of the platform as if waiting for a rock concert to begin.
“We stay here until the caretaker arrives,” Norton said.
“I wouldn’t go any farther without an escort for all the sin in Singapore,” Stuart said, and winked at me as if we were still buddies.
