He’d ordered his people to blend in with the locals, so all of them, like him, wore rural clothes — faded blue jeans, red-and-black-checked flannel shirts, long underwear, and Timberland boots. One green eye sat a fraction lower than the other. His goatee was white on gray and reddened his thin lips. He was the only one permitted to wear facial hair, or to wear a watch, the only one allowed to move in a clockwise manner across campus, and now he carefully carried the tray along shoveled paths, past foot-high snow and beneath a blanket of North American stars and past small wooden buildings that would look, to any spy satellite above tonight, like a normal “barn” and “chicken house” and “stable” and “fruit cellar.”
At one time they had been those things, housing nothing worse than canned peaches or whinnying geldings or masses of docile poultry.
But they were not those things anymore.
Now the old stable was a barracks.
The moon was a bright sickle shape over the forest surrounding the ninety-acre compound, with its trout pond, long paved driveway, cornfield and apple orchard, and two-story warehouses, stocked with food, guns, and explosives. The January breeze brought the smells of fresh snow and pine smoke, barn mulch and winter mist and farm animals: goats, chickens, guard dogs, llamas.
His goal was the old Quaker era—1755—meeting house, on a two-acre lot that had been added onto the original purchase of the property by the Defense Department. It was a one-story building, bricked over, 1950s style, new slate roof, stovepipe chimney, and lights blazing inside. He saw, silhouetted in a large ground-floor window, a single delighted face watching him approach. Then more faces. Happy ones. Black and white, coffee colored and Asian.
Men. Women. Some as young as nineteen. Some as old as seventy-four. No children allowed in the meeting house. No pets allowed. No smoking. No alcohol, except on holidays.
Someone in there shouted, “Here he comes!”
They sang to Harlan, “He’s here! He’s here! He’s here!”
“Mr. Maas?” interrupted a voice behind him before he could enter. He whirled. Nobody had been there a moment before. Orrin Sykes stood there now, bundled against the cold, an M4 over his shoulder.
Harlan halted on the steps, breath catching, but Sykes’s eyes were properly respectful, semiaverted, and even slightly cast down. Sykes had done well in Florida. Maas had not realized the force inside the man when he’d first arrived. Sykes’s quietness came across as shy anonymity. His ordinary looks gave no hint of the extraordinary violence inside, and the intelligence enabling him to carry it out. He could not be intimidated by anything except his own priorities. Sykes decided what he feared, and he had put Maas’s displeasure at the top of his list.
Sykes, in fact, was the most dangerous human that Maas had ever met. He was in charge of security tonight.
The way he moved, if Sykes had been a sound, Harlan thought, he’d be a whisper. Respectful, though. Hair cut short to the skull, prescribed length, shirt tucked in the required way, right tail over left, to cover genitals. Orrin smelled of sheepskin coat, lube oil, freshly laundered jeans, and Juicy Fruit gum, which he chewed incessantly when on guard.
Maas assumed his benevolent face. “Of course. Ask anything anytime, Orrin.”
“Have we heard from Africa?”
Maas needed all his willpower to suppress the flood of rage that seized him.
“Of course! I was just on the red line and we’re good.”
Sykes looked relieved.
“I never doubted, sir. I mean, Harlan.”
“Ah, but you did doubt, just a little, eh?”
Sykes reddened. “I need to work on that.”
Harlan patted the man’s shoulder. It was like touching granite. “Everyone has a past, Orrin. The point is to learn from it. Everyone has doubts. But we use them and don’t let them slow us down. You have a gift. You are valuable. There’s a reason you have your skills.”
“Thank you.”
“So don’t worry because there’s absolutely nothing to be concerned about tonight, unless,” he said, allowing his eyes to rove the skies, and woods outside the fence, and razor wire, “we get a few you-know-who’s out there. They’re always looking for us.”
Orrin straightened. “I have seven men on the wire, and the dogs.”
“Intruder could look like a neighbor. Lost tourist.”
“Like the two who claimed to be hikers last month. But after a while,” Orrin said, showing something different in his eyes, “they told the truth.”
“Orrin, we’re on the cusp here, so incredibly close. Days maybe. And once it takes off, well…”
Tears of emotion appeared in Orrin’s eyes.
“Seems like a dream, Harlan.”
“I’ll need you to go out again. To Washington.”
“An honor, sir.”
“Didn’t I ask you not to call me that?”
“You saved my life, Harlan.”
“Thank yourself, Orrin, not me.”
Harlan Maas walked down the center aisle in the old Quaker meeting house, past the gauntlet of smiling faces — living ones atop people sitting on benches — and less happy visages frozen in the hodgepodge of real paintings and framed magazine cutouts on the walls, some original work as old as five hundred years, other art a month old. The paint cracked and thick. Why, that top-left piece, the full-face visage of the sick man from the Greek island of Calidon, had to be worth half a million. The art magazine shot of Rembrandt’s man in a turban was worth a penny, it was just a page, but it made the point all the same.
An art thief would clean up here, if he ever got in, and managed to get out.
“Any word from Africa, Harlan?”
“We’re good to go, folks!”
Many faces in the illustrations seemed modern and recognizable, yet the bodies were clad in medieval clothes. No zippers. No buttons. The visages might be the same ones you’d see in the vegetable aisle at Walmart. Same DNA. Others were twisted and tortured. Men with beaks. Women with the heads of chickens. A walled village, burning. Lurid stuff, especially in the plain setting of a Quaker meeting house.
But they went to the heart of the project, as did the red phone by the window, the red phones in every building on campus, the damn need to get news from Africa tonight.
In this very room, Quaker settlers had gathered before the American Revolution to talk and share and pray, and now, Maas realized, the old spirit would infuse new work. All around him as he stepped down the aisle, he felt adoration and hope, welling love, trust, and warm delight.
“Oh, my friends! My family!” he cried, passing the silver plate, offering the syringes, watching eager fingers pluck and choose and hold up amber fluid to the light.