Spooky snapped, “This is not normal job. Maybe pay a lot, maybe pay nothing. I don’t call you as a favor to you, I call you because you are family and supposed to be trusted. If you can keep your mouth closed. Do not shame me in front of my commander and his comrade.” He might speak English pretty well, but his heart was still in the mountains of Vietnam, and his diction tended to fall apart under stress.
It occurred to Daniel that his dad and Spooky would get along famously.
Vinny dropped his eyes, the rebelliousness of youth warring with his family, his inherited culture and the force of Tran’s personality. The latter bunch won, and he nodded his agreement. “Okay, okay. What do I need to do?”
Tran pointed at Zeke. “You do what he tell you to. He your boss now.”
Zeke nodded, said to Vinny, “We need to research someone – who she was, who she is, where she works, where she might be now, everything. And we can’t be noticed. There’s big mojo against us, maybe even NSA, so it has to be very clean and light. You up for that?”
“Duh. Nothin’ to it.”
Daniel noticed they had already set up some kind of satellite antenna and a control box up in the barn loft, aimed at the roof. Looking closer, he saw the ceiling seemed different above it.
“Plastic insert, invisible to the satellite signal,” said Zeke, following Daniel’s gaze.
A cable trailed from the setup down to the floor nearby. The two Nguyens quickly set up a couple of tables and started breaking out computers and mysterious electronic boxes from the Pelican cases in the back of the Toyota.
By the time Zeke and Daniel were done showering and cooking breakfast, the electronic setup was done. They carried the food out to the barn and everyone ate while Vinny started on his hacking and cracking. Daniel wrote down everything he knew and could think of that would help, which was little enough. He kept himself busy by breaking out his own laptop and doing some general searches – the police blotters near where he lived, anything on his street, Trey’s name, and innocuous things like that. He got nothing, so after an hour or so he went back to the cabin to help Zeke with some home repairs, make-work while the wiz kid did his thing.
By lunchtime Vinny had a preliminary outline. “All right, here’s the gist. Is this your girl?” He showed Daniel a picture of Elise, with longer hair.
“Yeah, that’s her.”
“Okay, Elise Wallis is straight up until about five years ago, when she gets diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She gets treatment, goes into remission, finishes her Masters in microbiology at Texas A&M, gets hired by the CDC – Centers for Disease Control. Cancer comes back with a vengeance after about two years just as she’s finishing up her PhD, at which point she goes on disability and into aggressive treatment, which fails this time. So she’s in hospice, and a month later, she gets hired.” Vinny had a smug look as he spun around in his chair.
“Hired by who? Not the Agency, or you wouldn’t have that look on your face.”
“Nope,” he grinned. “By a little company called Integrated National Strategies, Inc. get it? INS Inc., in-synch! Like the old boy band.” He laughed uproariously and spun again, until Spooky stopped the chair with his foot and a hard look.
“All right. It’s indistinguishable from about a hundred little consulting companies that usually hover around the big defense contractors looking for scraps, usually because they have some Federal set-aside. Except this company isn’t a set-aside, and they have never subcontracted with a big company. In fact, I can’t find who pays them, but they seem to have about fifteen employees…most of whom have worked in the black world before.”
“Huh,” said Zeke. “So Elise isn’t working directly for the Agency…but indirectly…”
“Right,” answered Vinny. “These guys got ‘Separate Cell’ and ‘Plausible Deniability’ written all over them. There’s probably only one guy in the company that really knows what’s going on and reports to their masters. The rest just do what the nice people that are paying them gobs of money tell them to.”
Daniel said, “That means when she said ‘company,’ she meant a real company, not ‘Company,’ not Agency. That means we actually don’t even know who they are working for. Could be anyone in the black world – could be any government agency, could be a corporation, a rich individual…could be one canny operator that got ahold of this treatment, and is trying to develop it or market it or whatever…Vinny, what kind of people do they have working for them?”
“Umm…if you can believe their online resumes, six bureaucratic types and six personal security specialists. Those are your door-kickers and shooters. All of those have military or law enforcement backgrounds…Special Forces, Ranger, Airborne, Force Recon, sniper…Texas Ranger…if the dossiers are real, a bunch of badasses.” He tossed a pile of stapled papers down on the table. “Figured you’d want to see these.”
“Anyone named Jenkins?” Daniel asked.
“Yeah,” he picked one of the packets up. “Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Fourth, listed as a program manager. Yale grad, BA business, MBA, Skull and Bones, recruited by these guys straight out of school. Old money, family has investments and concerns up in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Lumber, shipping, some other stuff. Probably being groomed for bigger and better things.” Vinny looked smug.
“Ah. That’s not good.” If he had to kill someone, Daniel thought, why did he have to have a rich and powerful family?
Vinny shrugged, looked down for a moment. In fact, unless Daniel missed his guess, Vinny was holding something out on them, savoring the drama and triumph.
Daniel looked at Spooky, raised an eyebrow.
He got it, shifted his stance that conveyed impatience to his nephew.
“Okay, here’s the kicker,” Vinny continued hurriedly. “The other two employees are scientists as well. So we got a microbiologist – Elise Wallis – a virologist, and an epidemiologist.”
“Only three. Ah’m only a po country doctah,” Daniel put on his best hick accent, “but that sounds like they were working on the XH. And that narrows it down to some kind of germ. A virus, or other disease pathogen. And I’d have a tough time believing that a team of just three people could come up with something like this, though stranger things have happened.”
Spooky spoke up. “Then they did not make it. They study it. Experiment. Decode. Perhaps replicate. Try to fix it, to get rid of the problems.”
Daniel nodded.
“Where are they located?” asked Zeke.
“They have a Norfolk, Virginia office address.”
Daniel felt a surge of relief, and he could see that Zeke had gotten it too. “That means we’re not going up against a well-funded, well-supported Agency effort. It’s something off to the side, something maybe they don’t even know about. Just a couple people probably, maybe only one, and like all bureaucracies, they have been slow to realize what they got. And maybe INS, Inc. hasn’t seen fit to tell them. Maybe their top guy – who’s the CEO?”
“Raphe K. Durgan. Medical doctor, biologist. Formerly of the USDA, at Plum Island Animal Disease Center.”
“And the Department of Homeland Security took over the island in 2003, with the USDA becoming a tenant,” Zeke chimed in.
“How’d you know that?” Daniel asked, surprised.
Zeke grinned. “You get all over in spec ops.”
Daniel shrugged. “Okay, smart guy. So he’s working on disease, maybe some black projects there, because you know the USDA ain’t the only people doing biological work on the island. Not with Homeland Security running the show. He gets recruited because he has the clearances and has worked on stuff, maybe anthrax or weaponized smallpox or something we’ve never heard of. He gets put in charge of the research effort in this little company because somebody doesn’t want it in the regular system. The heavies are there to keep control of things. Must be the same thugs I saw at the Iron Saddle.”