“Moss?” she murmured.
“That’s weird,” said Rig. “I didn’t see any moss there yesterday.”
He was right, but Marguerite didn’t say so. The cracks and the vegetation were new. It was odd-looking, too. She’d seen all kinds of plant life in the various sites where her career had taken her. Weeds, fungi, molds, and thousands of other forms, but none exactly like this. In truth, this moss looked more like sea anemones, and when she touched it with her gloved fingertip the bulbous ends recoiled.
Marguerite snatched her hand back.
“Holy shit, Doc,” gasped Rig, his voice jumping an octave in alarm. “Did that stuff just move?”
She cleared her throat and forced herself to sound calm. “Yes. Some plants are touch reactive.”
“Yeah, sure, a Venus flytrap maybe, but… crap, Doc… moss? That’s freaky stuff right there.”
Yes, it is, she thought. Then she caught a brief glimpse of something inside the lichen. No, past it, deeper inside the cleft. She took a small but powerful penlight from her pocket and directed the beam inside.
She froze, staring, not believing what she was seeing. Sweat burst from her pores and ran down into her eyes, and her mouth, despite the humidity in the cave, went completely dry.
“Rig…,” she said very carefully, “go get Dr. Svoboda. Valen, too.”
“What is it? What did you see?”
“Get them,” she said. “Right now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Church finally called twenty minutes shy of me actually climbing the goddamn wall. I’d long since said a tipsy goodnight to Top and Bunny, and was stretched out on a lumpy bed in one of the guest rooms used for visiting staff. I was uncomfortable, angry, drunk, confused, and scared in equal amounts. Ghost was hogging most of the square footage of the mattress. When my cell phone rang with the Darth Vader ring tone I’d set for calls from Church, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
I punched the button. “What do we know?”
“Not enough,” said Church calmly. “Auntie is on her way to D.C. and will begin pushing at her network first thing in the morning. From what she’s been able to determine through phone calls, though, if there is something official in the works against you, no one outside of the Oval Office seems to know what it is.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, feet flat on the cold, polished concrete floor. “Well… shit. Do we have any guesses at least?”
“None that will make you happy, I’m afraid. There’s been some talk about rescinding the DMS charter—”
I snorted. “Haven’t they tried that like a dozen times?”
“Seven times,” corrected Church. “However, Captain, I can’t impress upon you enough that things are not ‘politics as usual’ in Washington, and they haven’t been for some time. The old checks and balances are crumbling in what has become an increasingly obvious smash-and-grab phase. Trust, as a concept, is broken, and there is a lot of career anxiety because we’ve moved so far away from a merit-based hierarchy in the important departments.”
“Was it ever an actual meritocracy?” I asked sourly.
“More than you might think. At least in the critical departments concerned with intelligence and national security.”
“Not now, though,” I suggested.
“Not now,” he agreed. “Positions of power are being given out as payment for favors more than I’ve ever seen, and I have been involved in American politics for a very long time.”
“Yeah, exactly how long?” I asked.
Church didn’t take the bait. He never does. “It is entirely possible, according to Linden Brierley, that the arrest order was given as a test.”
“To test what?”
“Us,” he said. “Me. Brierley seems to think that this may have been done to see how I would react. To see how much power the DMS actually has.”
Ghost shifted around and laid his head on my thigh in a “pet me now” move. I scratched his head and his eyes immediately began to drift shut. “Why play that game?” I asked.
“You know the rumors, Captain,” said Church. “People think I have dirt on every power player, from junior senators all the way to the president. The knowledge that MindReader exists has fueled those beliefs, which is why there is such a mania to keep certain kinds of knowledge off of the Net, out of e-mails, and out of computer files.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, “guess I kind of believe that, too.”
Church sighed, sounding unutterably weary. “Captain, if I was a master blackmailer, could anyone have betrayed us like they have?”
I said nothing and stared up at the uninformative wall across from the narrow bed. There was a framed painting of bulrushes along a riverbank. Pretty enough, in a bland and boring kind of way.
“It may surprise you,” he said, “but I am not a sorcerer, nor am I omniscient. I’m a shooter turned upper management who is trying very hard to keep this country and this planet from burning down. Manipulating the government through blackmail would require far more time than I can spare from actually fighting the kinds of threats that come our way every day.”
“Ah,” I said, feeling a bit like an immature ass. “But what do we do if POTUS rescinds our charter? Or changes it? Or suddenly decides that we’re all criminals or traitors or whatever? What then? Do we let them put black bags over our heads and waltz us off to some black site? Do we go into open rebellion?”
“None of those choices is acceptable,” said Church.
“Then why not dig up dirt on these ass-clowns? Why not tear the whole thing down and…”
I trailed off because I heard what I was saying. Church knew that I’d gotten there, too. He was silent, waiting.
“No,” I said at last. “I get it. Tear it down and we leave ourselves temporarily vulnerable. We’d be a big, tough gazelle with a limp. There are too many predators just waiting for that moment when we stumble.”
“And if that happens…?” he asked gently.
“The rest of the predators are free to take the whole herd.”
We sat in silence for a few moments.
“So,” I said, “now what? How do we respond to the arrest thing? Top and I kicked the shit out of a bunch of Secret Service agents—”
“—and no paperwork has been filed on it,” said Church. “There are no witnesses and no official report. Brierley’s people inside the Secret Service believe the pickup was ordered on a whim or as a test, but it was illegal. It was an attempt to make us do something actionable.”
“Which I did.”
“Not in a way useful to them. They needed you to resist and possibly cause some injuries while also being taken into custody. That latter part was the way they could reverse-engineer justification for the actual pickup. Without having you in custody, they had no play left, and now Aunt Sallie has spread the word to enough people that there’s no way for them to fabricate a plausible chain of cause and effect that works for them. It’s a fumble, and too many people know it. It’s likely you would have gone to a black interrogation site and either been held as leverage over me, or been worked over until you gave them something they could use.”