The R.E.M. Project_A Thriller Read online

  “I do.”

  “Then how can you sit there and tell me to have faith?”

  Dawa paused, then said, “I will be the first to admit, I have had my doubts about some of Donald’s claims. Claire’s and yours, too, for that matter. But, there is a Buddhist concept, Śraddhã, that teaches us to have confidence in others, as well as confidence in our own convictions. Sometimes, Paul, you just have to surrender to the universe and hope everything works out for the best.”

  The winding road straightened at the top of the ridgeline where the trees thinned and all the cracks and crannies of the surrounding landscape could be seen without a troop of bark-covered columns to block them. Claire looked down the grassy hillside to the east where a low-cut pasture dipped into a thick tree line.

  “There,” she said, referring back to the map in her lap. “That’s the valley.” She looked at Dawa, then turned to Paul. “It’s time.”

  They both nodded and grabbed their backpacks while Dawa slowed the car. A dense patch of tall oaks created an arborous tunnel up ahead, darkened by a thick canopy that refused to let the sunlight through—and hidden from the view of satellites overhead. It was the perfect place to drop off the passengers.

  “Remember to act quickly,” Dawa said. “There could be a dozen eyes glued to monitors and watching the area from above.”

  The car rolled into the shadows and the doors opened. Dawa slowed to a crawl and wished them both luck. They returned the platitude, then hit the ground running. As soon as Dawa confirmed the two made it out safely, he floored it. In seconds, the car was gone and all was quiet in the woods again.

  “Just like old times,” Paul said.

  “Yeah. But this time, I expect you to stick this one out.”

  Paul looked down to the solitary woods toward the valley. A sea of green lay like a blanket atop the wooded hollows and rolling hills, with shadows of clouds for patchwork. Then he turned to look toward the top of the mountain. Just the sight of the steep grade stretching a half a mile toward the tower at the top made his knees weak. He tightened his pack, then asked, “So you going to be okay down there?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ll be fine. Just make sure you get your ass up there before Fenton’s bedtime.”

  The two grinned nervously, then held their arms out to synchronize their wristwatches. Paul said, “17:00 hours. And not a second late.” Claire nodded to confirm. “Don’t keep me waiting.” Then Paul took off uphill.

  Claire watched for a moment as Paul ascended upward toward the tower, pulling at saplings and using them for hiking poles to assist him on the slow climb up a steep and rocky grade. Soon he was out of sight, lost behind a veil of tall oaks and intertwining branches.

  She threw her pack over her shoulder and started downhill toward the valley, looking for any trails or markers or signs that could point her to the facility. Of course, Claire didn’t expect anything too obvious. CIA black sites didn’t exactly advertise in the yellow pages or post up road signs saying SECRET GOVERNMENT FACILITY: 2 MILES AHEAD.

  Not far into the tree line, a rustle in the trees ahead caught Claire’s attention. She looked up to see a constable of ravens hopping from branch to branch, battling for limb space high in the forest canopy. It was startling, for sure, but nothing that would have sent her running for the hills.

  Paul, on the other hand, would have shit his pants. She knew how easily this mission could go south; how she might not make it to sunset; how a bullet could come whizzing by at any second to take her away for good. The difference between she and Paul was the fact that Claire had come to terms with her mortality long ago, while Paul still had plenty to live for. It wasn’t a death wish—that would have involved fantasy and indifference and all the things Claire didn’t need in her life. But you didn’t take the kinds of assignments and go through all the shit she’d been through without a sobering acceptance that one day it would all be over, you’d be dead, and you probably wouldn’t even see it coming.

  Twigs snapped and leaves crunched under her feet as she shuffled down the hillside. Halfway down, Claire stopped and saw a trail barely visible through the trees on the other side of the hollow. She whispered to herself, “An old logging trail. But we don’t log in national parks . . .” She checked the map. The faux entrance to Skyline was past a huge dogleg in the valley about a mile from the main road. She looked up. Dogleg left. Getting close now.

  Suddenly, a noise, steady and foreign. A truck, maybe a Jeep. Distant, but getting closer. She knelt behind a wide tree trunk and peered around, watching and waiting. Soon the source of the noise came into view as an antique CJ7 rolled down the old logging trail, swaying and rocking on the uneven path on its way down into the valley.

  CIA, thought Claire. Has to be. With a little luck, following the dusty trail of a CJ7 down that logging trail would lead her straight to Kovic.

  ***

  “I still don’t understand this whole ‘lucid dreaming’ business,” Fenton said, munching on a Baby Ruth he’d picked up from the vending machine in the motel lobby. “I mean, I believe it, I just don’t understand it.”

  Donny lay on the hotel bed, hands crossed over his chest, rehearsing his new ritual. “You don’t have to understand it, kid. You just have to shut the hell up and follow the plan.”

  “Just explain your end to me one more time, before we get started. I don’t want to screw the pooch or anything.”

  Donny huffed, then said, “Okay, kid. One more time. It goes like this: I’m going to lie here and perform a meditation ritual that’s going to help me dream lucidly, which means I’ll know I’m in a dream. Once that happens, I can pretty much do what I want. The trick is to keep the mind from wandering to places it doesn’t need to go.”

  “That’s why you’re surrounded by all this shit on the bed?” Fenton asked, referring to the photos and documents surrounding Donny. It was a montage of everything in Fenton’s files related to Project THEIA, particularly information related to everyone thought to be inside the facility and working on the project.

  “Yeah, that’s why. It’s also why I need you to play the Kovic recording while I’m repeating the mantra. He’ll be closest to Claire during the event, making him our number-one priority.”

  Fenton ignored him, still uncomfortably fixated on the shrine surrounding Donny on the bed. “So when you lucid-dreamed your way to River Street, were you, like, surrounded by a bunch of pictures of me? Cause if so, man, that’s creepy as fuck.”

  “Just get the damn recording,” Ford said.

  Fenton grabbed Claire’s burner phone and clicked through a long list of recordings. VARGAS 1. VARGAS 2. FREEMAN 1. FORD 23. Damn, she must’ve recorded everything. Finally, he got to the Kovic call. He set the phone on the nightstand, the play button at the ready.

  “I think we’re all set,” Fenton said.

  “Good. Now let’s just hope you can uphold your end of the bargain.”

  Fenton referred to Ford’s makeshift shrine. “Um, shouldn’t be a problem, dude.” He took a seat at the desk and flipped open his laptop, a two-way radio lay next to a half-empty can of Red Bull on the corner. “I just hope he makes it to the tower without breaking his neck.”

  The idea to hijack the facility’s broadcast transmitter tower had come to Fenton in a gas station in South Carolina just moments after he had been hit with the memory of the River Street meeting with Donny Ford. Paul had told him in Savannah that the drug was like an amplifier, juicing up already-oscillating brainwaves and broadcasting them like radio stations broadcast music and talk shows and those annoying advertising jingles that were near impossible to get out of a person’s head. It didn’t happen every time, but the longer an outlier had been taking Ocula, the higher the chance they would eventually transmit one of these amplified dreams from their minds to the minds of unsuspecting victims. And just like a radio station, the further away an outlier was from the subject of their dreams, the less of a chance their influence would make an impression.

  T
hat’s where Skyline came in. By incorporating a high-voltage transmitter towering one-hundred feet above the highest peak in the region, the CIA could effectively take the brainwaves of Ocula-induced outliers and broadcast them across a hundred-mile radius (the signals naturally traveled even further than the guaranteed effective range, but at a diminished capacity, waning out over the next fifty or so miles).

  Fenton knew if they could access the communications building next to the transmitter on top of Skyline Mountain, they could reverse the poles, so to speak, and transmit their own message deep into the mountain, all the way into the facility some two-thousand feet below—the kind of message he now knew Donny Ford could deliver by using the power of lucid dreaming.

  It was the best way in, and the best way to beat the CIA at their own game—all thanks to the principles behind electromagnetic radiation. It came from X-rays and sunrays and microwaves, and was even a byproduct of naturally occurring neurological activity like brainwaves. But, brainwaves—without the help of Ocula—occurred at an extremely low oscillation. Typical brainwaves (outliers excluded) were a mild form of this type of oscillating energy. But in its worst forms, electromagnetic radiation could happen at frequencies so high that it damaged electrical equipment like computers, cellphones . . . even batteries.

  No way the facility wasn’t protected from the kind of electromagnetic radiation that came with an EMP or dirty bomb or any other type of nuclear attack. Getting to Kovic and the rest of the employees at the facility through traditional channels would be impossible.

  But using their own tower against them was not.

  “So I guess we just sit here and wait for Paul to contact us?”

  “Yes, Reed. We wait.”

  Chapter 31:

  Arrival

  Stephen Cline swung the half-door open, hinges creaking as he stepped out of the 70’s model Jeep and into the packed leaves in front of the cabin in the woods. His boots kicked up a cloud of pollen and dust that rose up past his dark slacks to a starched white button-up—hardly an effective way to blend in with the locals.

  By contrast, Kovic was no stranger to rural Virginia. He sat on the front porch in worn jeans and a black Aerosmith T-shirt (Back in the Saddle Tour, 1984) and worked a noisy rocking chair, one leg propped on the other, all his attention focused on the half-eaten piece of beef jerky in his hand. Cline walked up and stopped just short of the porch, the Atlanta station chief waiting for some acknowledgement from his subordinate that the boss had arrived. But, Kovic didn’t look up—he still had half a bag of beef jerky to kill.

  “You going to say anything, Kovic? Or you just going to sit there drooling over that jerky like a teenager at a strip club?”

  “Thought you were heading back to Atlanta . . .”

  “Yeah, about that,” Cline said, thumbs in his belt, “I wasn’t quite convinced you were on board with the mission during our meeting with Lancaster. So, figured I would drive up here. Make sure everything was running smoothly. Only a couple hours from D.C. anyway.” He walked up on the porch, looked at the door, then back to Kovic. “Why aren’t you inside?”

  “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “An asset,” Kovic said. He finally looked up, smacking on the salty snack. “An asset Lancaster told you to handle—not to get killed.”

  Puzzled, “Not quite sure where you’re going with this, Colin—”

  “So you wouldn’t know anything about a premature airstrike in Costa Rica this week?”

  “Who said it was premature?”

  “SHE’S ALIVE, CHIEF!”

  Cline gave Kovic a pass. It would be his only one. “Listen, Colin. I know you’re upset, but a judgment call had to be made.”

  “Judgment call?”

  “We caught wind of an American getting picked up in the restricted zone east of Bajos del Toro through one of our backchannels, said she was with a Costa Rican. Someone with money. We couldn’t risk more intel about the CIA’s ongoing involvement in Ocula getting leaked. So, we had to clean it up.”

  “Clean it up?” Kovic rose from the rocker. “One little hiccup in an operation, and your backup plan is to clean it up?”

  “I really don’t like your tone, Colin.”

  “Then you’re really not going to like the report I plan on turning into Lancaster when this shit’s all over.”

  Cline stepped into Colin and shoved his index finger into his sternum. He had a good four inches on him. “Listen, son. I think you’re forgetting your place. Everything I do, every judgement call, every impossibly difficult decision is in the interest of national security. This job isn’t about one American citizen, or two, or two thousand for that matter. It’s about the greater good. The nation as a whole. What’s best for the American people—all 340 million of them.” He stepped back and gave Kovic some space. “If you can’t handle that, then I think you chose the wrong line of work.”

  “The line of work I chose didn’t involve killing off assets—especially Americans.”

  “Yeah, son. It did. The ability to make the tough calls is crucial to keeping the rest of the country safe and free to watch football and talk shows and all the other shit that makes them feel good enough to hang on for just a little bit longer so they can drag their asses into work the next day. If we didn’t do what we do, society would fall apart long before you’d ever get your paperwork filed. But go on, Colin. File your little report if it makes you feel any better.”

  Cline could sense the disgust in Kovic’s eyes, but he chose to ignore it. There was too much work to do. He looked around and surveyed the site. He was glad he’d come. The last five minutes with Kovic had only reaffirmed his decision. The Kovic who had had no problem rounding up outliers and stuffing them away in Guantanamo had become a crusader, an idealist; someone who believed he could serve his country without ever having to get his hands dirty. Ignorant stance.

  Admittedly, Cline was a little depressed. Kovic had been a levelheaded field agent in the past. This new agent—the sanctimonious foot soldier—was wearing on the station chief’s patience.

  “Connor’s on her way here?” Cline asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She coming alone?”

  “Didn’t say.”

  “When did she make contact?”

  “Late last night. Email.”

  “How much does she know?” Cline asked.

  “Everything. She’s got an entire dossier on the CIA’s connection to Asteria, the Costa Rican facility, Skyline. Everything.”

  “Jesus,” Cline said, sighing and shaking his head. “What does she want?”

  “Just said that she knows about Skyline, and she wants to meet here. She was adamant about that.”

  “Think she’s planning something?”

  Kovic laughed sarcastically. “After we dumped a half-dozen hellfire missiles on that place the moment she arrived? No, chief. I don’t think she’s planning anything at all.” He stepped over to the NO SOLICITING sign by the door, lifted it up, and pressed the hidden button. The rustic board-and-batten door covering a steel-door entrance slid into the doorjamb, the mechanical whirl of the gears moving it startling a few birds dancing in the leaves nearby.

  Kovic gestured toward the door. “After you.”

  “What, you don’t want any company?”

  “Probably be best if you were inside with the others”—he looked out into the big woods—“we certainly don’t want to spook her, now do we?”

  That was something Cline could actually agree on. Plus, he was tired of dealing with Kovic’s insubordination. “Okay then, Colin,” he said, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. “I’ll leave you to it. Too fucking hot out here anyway. Just make sure whatever you do, you get her inside.” He paused and looked around the woods, then asked, “You’ve got spotters, don’t you?”

  Kovic pointed in no particular direction. “Cameras should be enough. I’m not too worried about it.”

  Doubtfully
, Cline nodded. Risky leaving a single field agent alone to bring in a wily asset, he figured, but then again, there was plenty of firepower inside should something go amiss. “All right, then. We’ll be watching.” He stepped up to the keypad, punched in the code, and stepped inside. The doors closed, and once again Kovic was left alone to his rocking chair and beef jerky.

  The bag crinkled as Kovic’s hands searched for one more piece. Empty. Son of a bitch. He tossed the bag and sat back in the rocker, hands on the armrest, searching the woods for signs of life. Plenty of birds and squirrels and butterflies, but no Connor.

  It was getting quiet again, and Kovic was getting that uncomfortable tingling feeling that twisted between his ears and crawled across his scalp when his mind was about to start racing out of control. It had happened earlier, before Cline showed up, but Kovic had written it off as a lack of sleep combined with an abundance of nerves.

  Now it was happening again.

  He stood up and paced the porch, walking off emotions long-thought to have been killed off after years spent honing his mind for the betterment of the CIA. Guilt. Remorse. Fear. Uncertainty. All the neurological responses that might have served some great purpose in the Stone Age—but did little to help a CIA field agent make the tough calls that got the job done in the twenty-first century—were beginning to infect him like a plague.

  Kovic looked down at his hands, palms up, trembling and sweating, fingertips hot and flushed. He hadn’t seen his hands tremble in decades (not since asking homecoming queen Valerie Foster to the senior prom). Each breath was more labored than the last, as if some invisible boa constrictor had taken a hold, twisting and tightening around its prey with each breath until there wasn’t any breath left at all.

  “What is happening to me?” he said aloud, then stopped himself from saying any more. Cameras and microphones surrounded the facility. In all likelihood, several people were inside listening, watching. The realization shut Colin up, but did nothing to deter the voice in his head.