Then, he slithered apart. The two sides of his body simply slipped off the blond man’s raised arm, fell off to the side, like a snakeskin, and splashed onto the floor. All that remained was the glimmering brain in the blond man’s outstretched right hand, the brain stem and spine dangling down, luminous, blinking, as though alive with charged lightning bolts. For a moment it gleamed with electric delight. Then, the light sputtered and faded.
When it had grown dark, the blond man tossed the brain and spine to the ground. He turned and looked over at me, a smile on his lips.
But, by then, I was already long gone.
CHAPTER 51
Decker couldn’t see a damned thing. He was wearing some sort of hood that smelled of seared plastic. He could barely breathe, let alone see. It had been this way since their capture in Boston. McCullough and his team had handcuffed Lulu and him, slipped these insufferable hoods over their heads, and then stuffed them both in a van before spiriting them away toward the airport.
Well, that last part was a guess. Decker wasn’t one hundred percent certain about their destination. But, it was an educated guess. One minute they’d been driving through the tunnel toward Logan, and the next someone had rolled up his sleeve and injected something into his arm.
He had woken up here, in this room. He wasn’t sure where he was. Some kind of utility room, judging from the humming of nearby machinery. Not to mention the iconic odor of heating oil. And what was that other smell, coffee? He had no idea how long he’d been out.
“Lulu?” he said. “Lulu, are you there?” Decker tested his bonds. His hands were handcuffed behind him. “Lulu!”
“What is it?” she answered. Her voice was groggy and weak. “John? John, is that you? Where are we?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied.
“That bastard, Chen Yuan,” Lulu said with disgust. “I shouldn’t have trusted him. But I thought, with enough money… I’m sorry, John. This is all my fault. We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t—”
“Forget it.”
“My grandmother always tells me, ‘The son of a cat still hunts mice!’ I should have known better.”
“Are you kidding me? That’s a Spanish proverb,” said Decker. “El hijo de la gata ratones mata.”
“My grandmother is a collector of proverbs,” said Lulu. “She doesn’t particularly care where they come from. As long as they’re true.”
Just then, Decker heard the scrape of a bolt, the creak of a door and someone entered the room. No, three sets of footsteps — three people. Leather on concrete. And one of them was Ted Hellard. Decker recognized him from the squeak of his shoe!
Someone approached Decker and plucked the hood from his head.
For a moment, the world was a flash of bright light.
He’d been right. They were inside some kind of utility room or loading bay. There was a garage door at one end and a raised concrete platform with a railing at the other.
Lulu, also hooded, was sitting just a few yards away, next to a work bench covered with various pieces of machinery. Lathes and drills and what looked like a table saw. That’s when Decker noticed numbers and letters stenciled on the wall at the far end of the platform, immediately above another steel door. He’d seen the same font and color convention before.
At Fort Meade, the NSA headquarters in Maryland.
Decker felt a flood of relief. This was not some off-the-grid, black ops hideaway where his captors could behave with impunity. There was only so much they could do to them here.
A man walked up to Lulu and removed her hood too. She looked terrified.
After a moment, the man turned and faced Decker. He was obviously a soldier, from his posture and build, and yet he wasn’t wearing a uniform — just a khaki outfit such as one might find on a merchant marine but with no discerning insignia. That was odd. A small Hispanic man with a buzz cut.
Decker tried to turn around in his chair so that he could see the other two men in the room but he couldn’t quite swivel about. “I know you’re there, Hellard,” he said.
Rex McCullough swept into view. “John,” he said, nodding.
It was as if he were passing his friend in the hallway on the way to the cafeteria back at the Center. “Rex,” he replied.
Decker looked over at Lulu. He gave her a smile and was cheered by the fact that she managed to scowl back in response. At least she no longer looked terrified. But Decker was puzzled that they had chosen to interrogate them together, instead of separating the prisoners, which would have been standard procedure.
He looked back at McCullough. Rex had sat down on a stool only a few yards away. “OK,” he began. “Because of our friendship, I want you to tell me your side of the story, John. I’ve already heard everyone else’s. FBI. CIA. NSA. Everyone’s got an opinion. I don’t. I think, after all you’ve been through, after all you and I have been through together, you deserve your day in court. Well, this is it. Shoot. From what I hear, you may never get another chance.”
Decker smiled. “That wasn’t bad,” he said, after a moment. “If my hands weren’t handcuffed behind me, so help me, I might even clap a little, Rex. ‘After all you’ve been through, after all you and I have been through together… ’ Classic. And yet, only a few hours ago, I was a traitor to my nation, the beneficiary of a forty million dollar bribe. That’s quite the turnaround, Rex.” Decker laughed. “Don’t waste your breath. As it turns out, I don’t have any issues telling you my story. And I mean it when I say, my story. Leave Lulu out of this. I only dragged her along as protection. She has nothing to do with this.”
“How sweet,” the Hispanic man with the buzz cut replied, moving closer to Lulu. “He likes her.” He waved his hand along the top of her spiky black hair.
“I mean it, Rex,” Decker added. “If you want me to cooperate, if you want to know what I know, let her go. She doesn’t know anything anyway.”
Rex shrugged. “I’m afraid that’s out of my hands, John. She killed a number of agents recently deputized by the Bureau.”
“Who? Those gang-bangers in Boston? They shot at us first.”
“Until an inquiry can clear her…” His voice trailed off. “Look, John. You don’t have much time to come clean. With everything else that’s going on right now, all of these unexplained incidents.”
“What incidents?”
McCullough looked at the figure standing behind Decker.
“You might as well come out where I can see you,” said Decker. “I know that it’s you, Hellard. You may be wearing fancy English walking shoes but they squeak like a pair of department store specials.”
Hellard came out from behind Decker. He walked over and stood by McCullough. “Don’t get cute, Decker,” he said. “You’re already in enough trouble as is.”
“No, really. I want to know,” Decker said. “What incidents? You mean like major cyber security breaches? Malfunctions of weapons systems? Penetration tests?”
“What do you know about it?” asked McCullough. “We’ve had reports of American submarines firing on each other near the pole, NATO tanks targeting other NATO tanks in Afghanistan, Israel’s Iron Dome intentionally missing rockets from Gaza. The Secretary of Defense is calling it a possible cyber Pearl Harbor. If you know anything, John, now’s the time.”
Decker took a deep breath. He looked at McCullough and Hellard. He glanced over at the Hispanic man with the buzz cut standing by Lulu. Here goes nothing, he thought. He took another deep breath and he told them.