Jenny Plague-Bringer

Chapter Twenty-Two



Ward, his assistants Avery and Buchanan, and Tommy hitched a ride on a military plane hauling crates of supplies bound for U.S. Army installations in Schweinfurt, Germany. From there, they rode north in a helicopter, toward the research center in the Harz mountains.

“There it is.” Ward pointed down through the window. “What do you say, Tommy?”

Tommy looked, and Ward could have laughed as his face fell. The old base didn’t look like much—a few sunken concrete pillboxes and rattling ventilation wells in a weedy yard enclosed by a high brick wall and rusty coils of wire.

“What are we doing out here?” Tommy asked.

“Just what I told you, testing and training.”

“At the town dump?” Tommy asked.

“It doesn’t look interesting at all, does it?” Ward asked. “Certainly not worth a second look if you happen to notice it by airplane or satellite. Just old World War II ruins surrounded by chainlink, with signs warning about hazardous conditions inside, just in case any hikers or campers stumble their way up here. We’re in the middle of a national park, so nobody lives nearby.”

The helicopter dropped them down inside the brick wall, onto a helipad painted to blend with the dirt and weeds around it. Ward instructed the pilot to refuel immediately, and then he led Tommy away from the helicopter and toward one of the old concrete buildings.

Inside, the floor was cracked and full of dead weeds and scattered trash. A small, sleek structure of black steel, obviously much more recent, stood in the center of the room, with a pair of sunken double doors like an elevator. Ward stepped up to the circular lens beside it and let the security system scan his retina. There was loud thunk, and then the steel doors slid apart.

“After you.” Ward nodded at Tommy.

Tommy stepped forward. Inside the doors, a long escalator, activated by their arrival, flowed silently down a steep tunnel made of old concrete reinforced with bright steel ribs. Bars of fluorescent lights hung at evenly spaced intervals all the way down.

“What’s down there?” Tommy asked him.

“Your future,” Ward replied.

Tommy lifted his overstuffed duffel bag and stepped onto the escalator. It took them down, down, down...

“What is this place?” Tommy asked.

“A research base. Originally built by the Nazis before World War II, for the Yggdrasil Project...which, as far as we can tell, was about finding and breeding humans with ‘supernormal’ abilities, to create a race of super-soldiers.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” Tommy asked him.

“We’re not interested in breeding projects, only national defense,” Ward said. “This base fell into Soviet hands after the war, and they did God knows what with it until the 1980s, when they realized they were losing Germany, cleared the place out, and sealed it up. The modern German government has no use for it—they were going to demolish it, but now it’s under lease to the U.S. government. My agency, specifically.”

They reached the bottom of the escalator and stepped into a wide corridor with gleaming white tiles on the floor and walls. When Ward had first scouted the location, the walls had been either concrete or raw rock from the natural cave system. It had looked like an underground bunker, but with the new walls, floors, and lighting, it now felt more like a proper research center.

“How big is this place?” Tommy asked, clearly impressed.

“Several levels deep,” Ward said. “It had everything we could wish for—dormitories, huge reinforced laboratory bays, an independent supply of mountain spring water, ventilation, hydroelectric power from a couple of nearby waterfalls. German engineering. You have to hand it to the Nazis, they really knew what they were doing sometimes.”

Tommy snorted laughter and smirked.

“Here’s our observation deck.” Black double doors opened automatically at Ward’s approach. They entered a wide, dimly lit corridor lined with clear windows, which looked down into high-ceilinged concrete laboratories, some of them just bare bones with just fluorescent lights and huge steel sinks, others jammed with chemical testing or medical equipment. One had an MRI machine. The workday had ended, so the observation deck and the labs below were deserted.

A digital workstation sat in front of each window, allowing observers to monitor the lab from above. A long table with more workstations ran along the center of the corridor. Little square flags hung here and there, depicting the “union” of fifty white stars on a blue field from an American flag. As an agency with no official existence, ASTRIA had no official insignia or seal, either, but it had used the starry blue as its unofficial symbol since the 1950’s.

“This looks really familiar to me,” Tommy said. “Like I’ve been here before.”

“That’s because you made the right choice,” Ward said. “You belong here. This is where we’ll use the latest technology to unravel just how your power works, and how it can best be applied to national defense. It’s quiet now, so let’s go to your new room.”

Ward led him through more tunnels, toward the dormitory area for test subjects. Along the way, they passed a pair of security officers in black uniforms ribbed with light body armor. Their uniforms were blank, with no insignia, badges, or other designs to indicate what organization employed these men. Like all the security staff at the base, they were not soldiers, but specialists from Hale Security Group, a Virginia-based multinational that provided operatives under contract to the Defense and State Departments, the CIA, and other sensitive agencies, and they did similar work for an assortment of other national governments, including the UK and Saudi Arabia. These men were former Special Forces or intelligence agents from across the Western world, highly trained killers who knew how to keep a secret.

Because they were mercenaries and not soldiers, they did not salute Ward, but simply nodded their heads in recognition.

Ward opened the double doors to the short dormitory hall for male test subjects. Tommy gaped as he stepped into the first room, the largest on the hall.

“This seems familiar, too,” Tommy said. “It’s weird. You ever get the hairs on the back of your neck standing up?”

Ward had felt that same cold tingle of recognition before—when he’d first toured the facility when scouting locations for a research center. He’d known immediately that this was the place he wanted.

“It can happen,” Ward said. “You’ll see we’ve modernized, got you a flat screen TV with satellite feed. Climate control panel. At the end of the hall, you’ll find the common room and the bathrooms. You’ve got the place to yourself for now.”

Tommy sank slowly onto the bed, looking dazed.

“The scientists might come here to meet you,” Ward told him. “If not, you can go to the mess hall for dinner.” Ward gave him directions through the underground complex.

“Are you leaving?” Tommy asked.

“I’ll have to jump back to America to deal with a certain situation,” Ward said. “But I’ll be returning soon. Very soon, if things go well. Are you all right here?”

Tommy nodded, but made no move to unpack his duffel bag. The kid seemed out of it, but he had tonight to rest.

Ward left the dormitory hall, followed by Buchanan and Avery.

“You think he’ll work out?” Avery asked.

Ward ignored the question. “Buchanan, didn’t we see transactions between Barrett Capital and Hale Security Group?”

“A few, sir. It looked like standard private-sector work, risk assessment for investments in India and East Asia.”

“Of course, it looked like nothing interesting. Hale isn’t run by idiots. But didn’t those transactions begin around the time Seth Barrett disappeared?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“Tell me, Buchanan, if you were some rich guy, and you wanted to hide yourself...or hide your son...from the United States government, would Hale be a good company to hire?”

“Of course, sir,” Buchanan replied.

“Those rats!” Avery said.

Ward considered it. He’d automatically seen Hale as part of “his” team because he’d staffed up the research center with their security officers. He’d had Buchanan check into the payments from the Barretts, of course, but the story had sounded normal at the time. It hadn’t occurred to him that his own security people could be hiding the targets for whom he was searching.

Ward slowly smiled. Hale had a multimillion-dollar contract with his agency, ASTRIA. He had plenty of influence with them, and he could even threaten to have their security clearance revoked if they didn’t play ball. That would cost them most of their revenue, destroying the company. Their piddling payments from Barrett Capital were nothing compared to their government contracts.

Also, Ward felt like he had the current Hale CEO, Edward Cordell, in his pocket. He’d shaken hands with the man on many occasions, and so he knew all about Eddie’s twenty-two-year-old mistress and the Manhattan apartment he rented for her. He also knew that Eddie hid things from his wife by keeping the apartment on a Hale corporate account, lightly embezzling from the company to protect his secret. Ward would have almost no trouble getting him to cooperate and tell him where to find Seth Barrett and Jenny Morton.

There was only one remaining obstacle, and it was time to square that away.


Senator Junius Mayfield woke in his hospital bed on the fifth floor of a private hospital in Maryland to find a ghostly apparition staring in through his window. His heartbeat kicked up until he realized it was just a barn owl perched in the tree limb outside, its dark eyes and ghost-white face turned toward Junius, watching him. The owl’s stare was unsettling, and he would have liked to yell at it and chase it off, but he couldn’t even get out of bed.

“Go on, fly on, leave me be,” Junius said, but it sounded like “Ooh ah, faya, lemma buh.” His voice came out as a whisper, barely audible above the beeping of his heart monitor.

The owl, clearly not intimidated, stayed where it was, staring into his window.

The left half of Junius’ body was frozen solid, and the right half moved as slowly as a stiff old mule in the dead of winter. His staff had done their best to keep the full extent of the stroke damage from the news media and the public, but his prolonged absence from the Senate floor spoke volumes about his true condition. Already, his enemies back in Tennessee were pushing for a special election to replace him.

Junius thought about calling in the nurse and getting her to close the blinds so the owl couldn’t stare at him, but it seemed like a pathetic request. Instead, he clawed his right hand toward the side of the bed, thinking he would find the TV remote and discover what kind of programming the Golf Channel offered at three in the morning. Probably the women’s tour, he thought.

His hand couldn’t find the remote, so he turned his head, and then he saw the three men in his room, all of them wearing dark suits and lab coats, but they weren’t any doctors he knew. The one in the lead was the oldest, his sandy-red hair going gray and cropped close. One of the two younger men held Junius’ remote, smirking at him. Without it, Junius couldn’t summon help.

Junius didn’t recognize any of them. He flipped through his mental catalog of enemies, trying to figure out just who would bother having him killed when he was already down for the count. He couldn’t think of anyone. Junius had the sort of enemies who relished the chance to give a speech at his funeral, where they could damn him with faint praise. On reflection, Junius wasn’t sure he deserved much more than faint praise, anyway.

“Senator Mayfield,” the oldest man said. “I’m General Ward Kilpatrick. I’m looking for your niece’s son.”

Junius tried to snarl at them, but he had very little control over his face. So it was about that. Junius had hoped he would die before the Seth ordeal raised its head again. I told Iris not to marry into that Barrett family, he thought. Told her they were trouble.

Junius had known the first Jonathan Seth Barrett briefly, a lifetime ago. The man had a heart like black smoke, and in his prime, they said he could charm the horns off the devil. Barrett had started out as a small-town banker and landowner, but managed to work himself up into a minor player on Wall Street and a titan of Southern industry. Fortunately for the world, the South wasn’t all that industrious, or Jonathan Seth Barrett could have been the next J.P. Morgan. Instead, Barrett had eventually shriveled up and faded away, going crazy inside his big house with all his money.

The sound of Ward’s voice brought Junius’ wandering mind back to the present.

“...can do this quick and easy or quick and painful, Senator,” Ward was saying. “Where are Seth Barrett and Jennifer Morton?”

“Don’t know,” Junius said. Doh nuh.

“I find that hard to believe, Senator,” Ward said. “Did you not help to hide them? Did you not help the White House to bury the entire situation?”

Junius didn’t speak, but he felt relieved. He didn’t personally know where Seth was, that hadn’t been part of the arrangements. Only one or two people inside Hale Security Group knew the answer to that one.

“Senator, I’m afraid we’ll need the answer immediately,” Ward said.

“What do you want with him?” Junius asked, and it sounded like Wah ooh ooh ah wah heh?

“You’re not making much sense, Senator. But that’s all right. Just think about your grandnephew for me.” Ward grabbed Junius’ right hand. Junius tried to pull away, but he had no strength in his arm. All he could do was make his hand tremble like a frightened mouse.

Junius found himself thinking of the arrangements they’d made with Hale. Jenny and Seth would live in a location known to almost nobody, but the family was assured it would be quite pleasant there. A tropical island, maybe.

“You really don’t know.” Ward dropped his hand back onto the bed. “But Hale Security knows, don’t they? And it just happens that Eddie Cordell is a friend of mine, so I’ll go ask him where to find Seth. Good night, Senator.” Ward started for the door.

Junius kept his face as stoic as a poker player’s. He didn’t want to signal that the man was on the right trail, although he was. Junius retreated into silence, usually the best move when you didn’t know the score. He didn’t know who this man was, what agency he represented, or what his intentions might be toward Seth. Junius would need to make some phone calls after Ward left.

Ward halted and turned back to him. “Oh, Senator, there is just one more little problem. Eddie Cordell might continue protecting Seth out of fear of crossing you, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee. We’ve been waiting for you to die, Senator, but you’re taking too damned long. Avery?”

One of the younger men, the one not holding Junius’ remote control, drew a small sheath from his inner coat pocket and slid out a syringe filled with clear liquid. He approached the bag of fluids hanging over Junius’ bed, which fed right into Junius’ arm.

Junius squirmed weakly, but he was helpless to stop the man. He tried shouting with as much power as his lungs and vocal cords could manage, but that wasn’t much.

“Please, Senator, consider dying with some dignity,” Ward said, while Avery injected the poison into Junius’ fluid line. “You’ll feel some pain, but if I were you, with your history of sin and corruption, right now I’d mostly be worried about the devil waiting for me on the other side. Good night, Senator.”

Junius felt a cold burning in his heart as the three men left. He reached for the remote, now dangling from its wall cable, and managed to catch in his arthritic fingers. He dragged it up onto the hospital bed with him, and he lay a finger on the red EMERGENCY button. Before he could press it, his heart stopped and his eyes glazed over.

Outside, the barn owl took flight.