The R.E.M. Project_A Thriller Read online

  “It is not the best situation. But like Claire said, is there any other way?”

  Neither could think of any, which meant Claire and Fenton were calling the shots. It also meant their chances of surviving to September were about one in a million. The way the two had explained it was simple: contact Kovic, agree to meet him at the Skyline facility, then use their own technology against them to shed light on Asteria and the CIA’s wrongdoings on a regional scale. Easy peasy, right?

  Not so much. It was a long car ride; plenty of time for Donny to think of a dozen ways it could go wrong, with Dawa adding twice as many to the list. Kovic could shoot Claire on sight. Or maybe he’d find one more outlier too invaluable to dispose of, and opt to keep her detained for the rest of her life instead.

  Even if she made it to the facility in one piece (odds few gamblers would ever have placed a bet on), the entire plan hinged on Donny’s ability to control a dream in the same way he had to locate Fenton Reed. But dreams were about as predictable as the weather, and Donny had never had to perform under pressure before.

  And a direct confrontation? Forget about it. This was a top-secret CIA black site, complete with state-of-the-art security, heavily armed guards, and a handful of spooks who’d love to see every outlier either in a high-security prison or six feet under.

  If the plan was going to work through to the end, Claire was going to have to give Kovic something, anything. That’s where Fenton’s files came in. Those would at least get her in the front door, post her buy-in. But staying in the game long enough, while relying on everyone else to work their magic, laid most of the risk at Claire’s feet.

  And that’s one thing that made Dawa uncomfortable. Every element of their plan revolved around the ability to influence minds from afar—something Dawa had never been a believer in to begin with. Sure, the fact that Donny knew he was carrying Fenton’s jump drive after returning from the teenager’s old apartment gave him the creeps, but it wouldn’t have been the first time a sheer coincidence played out in Donny’s favor.

  It also could have been one of the showman’s countless magic tricks. After all, Donny had a knack for showmanship and misdirection. Look over here while I do something over there. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Only this time, the man behind the curtain had accurately predicted that Fenton would be in Savannah.

  Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes, Dawa’s colleagues would say when a case had been cracked against all odds. But Claire and Fenton both had confidence in Ford, enough so to persuade Dawa to reluctantly go along with a seemingly impractical plan. He just hoped he wasn’t being misled.

  He slowed the car and hit his blinker, turning off the winding two-lane and into the parking lot of the Little Bear Motel located in the township of Lydia, Virginia, just five miles south of the entrance to Skyline Drive. Off the beaten path and lying in the eastern shadows of the Appalachians, it would be the perfect staging area for the operation that was to come.

  The passengers in the back felt the car stop as the therapeutic roar of the highway faded, rousing their senses. They carefully opened their eyes, squinting and stretching and dazed, like kids lost in an amusement park.

  “This the place?” Paul asked.

  “Yeah,” Donny said. He looked around and noticed the parking lot was almost empty with the exception of a single car. He thought that was a good thing. “We should be able to stage everything from here.” He started to open his door, but Dawa advised against it.

  “You are still a wanted man, Donald. Let me check us in first, make sure the coast is clear.” Dawa got out of the car and walked into the motel office while Donny stayed put. The rest of the passengers piled out and stretched their legs, casing the parking lot of the vintage motel and checking their surroundings.

  The tan-colored building looked like it had been there since the 60s. It appeared to have ten rooms, maybe twelve, and backed into a steep mountainside scattered with resilient pines hanging on to whatever soil they could cling to in the erosion-riddled hills. A hip roof and dark shingles lay atop the long rectangular stretch of block construction, each room marked by a fire-engine-red door and the kind of old metal-frame jalousie windows lined with parallel panes of glass that could be tilted open from the inside (a feature that must have been a lifesaver for non-smoking wives shacked up with their pack-a-day husbands back in the day).

  The motel was old—and quiet. Paul listened hard for people or cars or other signs of intelligent life, but heard little more than the occasional songbird along with a few squirrels scurrying around the trashcan in front of the motel office. Not another soul in sight.

  After a few minutes in the office, Dawa walked out dangling a pair of old room keys. He handed one to Claire, and kept the other to himself.

  “Room 11 . . .” It was Claire’s old cell number at the Costa Rica facility, a number that would never set well with the journalist again.

  Casually, Claire asked, “Which room’d you get?”

  “10. Right next door,” Dawa said.

  “Wanna trade?”

  “Sure. If you would like.” They exchanged keys while the rest wondered what was up. Except for Paul. He knew.

  “All right, then,” Dawa said. “Let’s go ahead and get everything set up in my room.” He turned to Fenton. “How soon can we tell if Kovic received Claire’s message?”

  “Ten minutes, tops,” he said as he scratched the back of his nappy red head.

  “And if there is no response?” Dawa asked.

  Claire said, “He’ll respond.”

  Paul asked Fenton, “You’re sure they can’t find us here?”

  “Yeah, man, I know how to cover my tracks.”

  Claire said, “I’ve used virtual private networks to communicate with anonymous sources before, but I don’t have too much confidence in them anymore.”

  Fenton confirmed her suspicions. “VPNs are only as trustworthy as the company providing the service. Even the VPNs that are adamantly opposed to government oversight still have insiders feeding the feds log data. Not throughout every agency, of course. I mean, you’re probably safe from local and state officials and maybe even some federal agencies, but when it comes to the CIA, NSA—”

  “I think it is time to focus on the task at hand,” Dawa said, cutting the talkative teen off short. Everyone agreed and they all went to Dawa’s room, motioning to Donny that the coast was clear.

  Inside the small room with the single queen-sized bed they began laying out everything they needed to get started. Paul found a corner chair, grabbed the folder with Fenton’s documents and began thumbing through them, moving the relevant documents to the top of the stack. Fenton unpacked his equipment, plugged in his laptop, and set up shop on the small desk next to the television in front of the bed.

  Claire emptied the go bag she had kept beneath one of the floorboards at Aguilar’s San José mansion: a backpack full of emergency supplies saved for when the shit hit the fan. Passports. Cash. Two Glock 9mm handguns, six preloaded clips, and two more boxes of centerfires to spare. She popped in a clip, chambered a round, then set the gun aside with the same casual demeanor as a woman putting on makeup.

  Fenton stopped what he was doing and watched Claire work, then looked at Paul wide-eyed, silently mouthing, “HOLY SHIT.” Paul’s eyes drifted up to casually concur that holy shit was indeed right, then returned to the documents.

  Dawa spread a map of the Shenandoah National Park out on the bed. The facility was located near the center of the 200,000-acre park adjacent to Skyline Drive: the two-lane road running north to south atop the Appalachian ridgeline that effectively split the park in half. Problem was, they weren’t exactly sure where. The CIA had a tendency of going out of their way to keep black sites hidden, and the clandestine cabin in the woods wasn’t on any map or directory or list of Top Ten Places to See in the Virginia Mountains.

  Paul sifted through Fenton’s incriminatory stack of documents and found the satellite image
of Skyline’s cabin decoy taken shortly after construction, then laid the image to the side of Dawa’s map to compare the surrounding landscape. It was apples to oranges: different scales, dissimilar foliage, with both images taken years apart from one another. The photos had little in common, but Paul knew there would be geological features that would take decades, even centuries to change. He looked for those, and pointed to a uniquely twisted valley running perpendicular to the two-lane.

  “Looks like the same valley in both images.”

  Dawa leaned over the bed for a closer view and thought for a moment. “Hmmm. It is close.” His head swiveled from the map to the satellite image and then back again, carefully comparing the two. Finally, “Yes. I think it is a match, Paul.” He motioned for Claire. “What do you think?”

  She stepped over and quickly she knew. “That’s the same valley, all right. Any way to tell how far the facility is from the main road?”

  Paul said, “Not exactly, but it can’t be more than a mile or two.”

  “Just a walk in the woods,” Claire said. She turned to Fenton. “Anything from Kovic?”

  “Checking it now,” he said, plugging away on his laptop. A few keystrokes and he had the preliminary barriers in place to comfortably check Claire’s throwaway email account without getting pinched. Everyone had worked on the email before leaving Savannah, fine-tuning the short-and-sweet message to Kovic while making sure no detail was left out:

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: Alive, need to meet ASAP

  TO: [email protected]

  Kovic,

  It’s Claire Connor. Escaped strike in Costa Rica; back in the U.S. I know about Skyline, location, Project THEIA, the Asteria connection… everything. I have emails to backup claims (see attachments). Must meet at Skyline facility alone. The sooner, the better.

  It was enough to get the point across: they were coming to Skyline, whether the CIA liked it or not. It was also sure to take Kovic completely off guard, considering the destruction of the facility in Costa Rica had likely put his mind at ease that every loose end south of the border had been taken care of.

  They also knew they were taking a huge chance contacting Kovic, especially when a thousand things could go wrong. Kovic could set up a military perimeter surrounding the facility, denying them access to Skyline and shipping them off to a secret prison somewhere to rot away in a cell; they could be shot on-sight; or he might not reply at all while renewing the search for the original outliers and effectively forcing them all back into hiding. (Out of all the possibilities, that seemed like the worst one of all.)

  Once Fenton was in, they had their answer.

  “We’ve got something,” he said, and the rest of the gang circled around the computer:

  FROM: [email protected]

  SUBJECT: RE: Alive, need to meet ASAP

  TO: [email protected]

  Claire,

  Glad you’re alive. CR mission was compromised. Out of my hands. Meet me at the cabin in the woods to discuss. I’ll be waiting.

  I’ll be waiting. Short, simple, and ominous. Everyone in the room felt the weight of the message and its implications deep in their chests.

  This was it—the plan was a go. Dawa would make the twenty-minute drive into the heart of the Shenandoah National Park to drop off Paul and Claire. That’s where the two would split up. From there, the team would rely on the pitchman and his adolescent accomplice back at the motel to penetrate the facility using a combination of Donny’s newly-acquired skills and Fenton’s tried-and-true digital acumen. Once Claire was inside, the operation would hinge on whether or not the rest of the team could come through at precisely the right time. If one link in the chain was broken, the entire plan would be a wash.

  It was far from ideal—in fact, it was an epic long shot. If the plan worked, the wicked little partnership between Asteria Pharmaceuticals and the CIA would be exposed. Everyone could go home. Everyone would have their lives back.

  But if they failed, the consequences would be dire.

  ***

  “What’s wrong, dear?” Ronald Linklatter’s wife asked him over Saturday morning brunch at one of D.C.’s finest restaurants. He tapped his fork on his plate, staring off into the distance with a discernible unwillingness to respond.

  “Ronald? Honey?” She leaned across her muffin and oatmeal, trying to get his attention. But Ronald’s mind was still a million miles away. Concerned, “Okay, now you’re starting to scare me.” She reached over and slapped his shoulder, and he returned to Earth.

  Startled, “Yes! What is it, dear?”

  “Did you not hear a word I just said?”

  Ronald was still trying to figure out what had just happened. Where his mind had just returned from. And why his wife looked like she had just seen a ghost. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, honey.” He shook the cobwebs from his head and stabbed at his eggs. “Let’s just get back to breakfast, shall we?”

  His wife was clearly rattled, and wondered for a moment if Ronald was having a mini-stroke. That’s what her mother had called them anyway, right before the big one had sent her up to the spirit in the sky a week before her 80th birthday. She was worried, for certain, but didn’t know what else to say. She watched Ronald scarfing down his eggs and bacon as if he hadn’t missed a beat, then slowly returned to her own meal, sipping her coffee while wondering if she should make Ronald a doctor’s appointment.

  Ronald kept on eating like nothing had happened. But something had happened. Something had gotten in; a thought; an obsession; a neural pathway firing on all cylinders that wouldn’t let up, couldn’t let up until the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration took action.

  He downed his coffee, stood up, and told his wife he had to get back to the office.

  There was a drug on the market that warranted his attention. A drug that could be a danger to the general public. To national security. To the future of the entire world.

  A drug that had to go.

  Chapter 30:

  A Walk in the Woods

  The winding two-lane known as Skyline Drive was cracked and aging, with bleached-gray asphalt and faded yellow-and-white lines that would have made nighttime navigation challenging, to say the least. Fortunately, it was the middle of a sunny Saturday afternoon when Dawa, Paul, and Claire loaded up the car and took off up the road for what could be the last time they all saw one another alive.

  The drive was quiet in the beginning—and eerily peaceful. The road clung to the side of the steep mountain, white oaks covering the surrounding hills, their leafy limbs hanging over the road and casting a flickering patchwork of sunlight and shadows through the windows and onto the laps and faces of the outliers heading toward an uncertain fate. Every now and then the woods would open up to views of the Appalachians that stretched for miles, rolling pastures dotted with the occasional evergreen standing all alone in the middle of fields separated from the road by Depression-Era short walls constructed of river rock and mortar. The views were beautiful, and in their own little way, each person riding in the car that day thought that if this was their time to go, the scenery sure could’ve been a whole lot worse.

  Dawa drove the car while Claire rode in the passenger seat, Paul in the back. Their bodies might have been buckled into a northbound sedan, but their minds were wandering far from the Virginia mountains. Dawa was lost in the hypnotic curves of a long and solitary road; Claire beat herself up by replaying every decision and judgement call she’d made leading up to Aguilar’s death; and Paul wondered if he’d ever have a chance to see his wife and son again. She had long ditched her cell phone (part of the cost of living off the grid), and now she wasn’t answering at the monastery. A few unanswered calls convinced Paul that Dawa should call his friend, but his phone kept going straight to voicemail.

  Paul broke the silence and scooted over to the middle of the backseat, leaned forward, and asked Dawa, “Can I see your phone again?”

>   “Yes. Of course.” He reached inside his jacket and passed the phone to the back.

  Paul sat back in his seat and checked the service. One bar. Of course there’s only one bar. He cursed his luck, only to watch the one-bar icon change over to NO SERVICE. “Unbelievable,” he said.

  Dawa spoke to him through the rearview and asked, “What is the matter?”

  “The phone. We’re now officially out of service.”

  “Bound to happen sooner or later,” Claire said, still staring out the window. “Not much demand for cell towers and Wi-Fi in the middle of a national forest.”

  “I am sure Michelle and Aaron are fine,” Dawa said. “You spoke to her yesterday, correct?”

  “Yeah,” Paul said, “but my mind wasn’t in it. This operation, this plan . . . Guess the magnitude of this whole thing is just starting to set in.”

  Claire turned around to face Paul. “We’ll be fine, Paul. So will your family. You need to trust me on this one.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about, Claire, or even Fenton. It’s Donny. Think about it: you’re going to be alone with Kovic and his cronies half a mile under a mountaintop, well-protected from any kind of electromagnetic interference. Can we really count on that guy to come through at precisely the right moment?”

  Dawa answered first. “Donald’s problem has never been incompetency. He has always had a gifted mind; it is what made him millions. But, like so many others tempted by their own talents, he strayed from the path of enlightenment, trying to feed the insatiable appetite of more. Fortunately, Donald saw his way back. He wandered out of the wilderness and found the path again.” His eyes met Paul’s in the mirror. “Once Donald gets his mind on something, he is unstoppable. Have faith, Paul.”

  “You know, you’ve made it pretty clear you don’t believe in any of this mind-control stuff,” Paul said, “and now you’re telling me to have faith in Donny’s ability to do just that. See the irony here?”