Monster (Gone 7)

Well, they’ll see a lot more of me when I’m unemployed, Peaks thought. He was not overly worried about finding another job; he’d made lots of contacts during his time with HSTF-66—there was a man who ran a security company, and a woman who was vice president of a major pharmaceutical, who had both tried to recruit him at various times. But what kind of jobs would those be? Organizing security details for spoiled rock stars and self-important billionaires? Or running the in-house security for some big pharma outpost?

Maybe I’ll just watch TV and stay drunk for a week. Or a month. Or whatever.

He grabbed his bag, kissed his wife on the cheek, stopped by each of his two daughters’ rooms to tell them he was heading out of town, and then he was taken by staff car and helicopter to Travis Air Force Base. There he was ushered aboard one of HSTF-66’s small fleet of passenger jets, popped an Ambien, and slept till Andrews Air Force Base, where he was picked up by a Pentagon staff car.

His appointment was for nine a.m., which was not a good sign since it was neither a breakfast nor a lunch meeting. Nine a.m., early, no doubt so that Undersecretary of Defense Letitia Pope could get the distasteful part of her day over with early.

Somewhat to Peaks’s surprise, Pope did not keep him cooling his heels in her outer office. He was shown in promptly at nine.

The undersecretary had a pleasant office in the E-ring of the Pentagon, the outer ring where VIPs got windows looking out over parking lots. Peaks glanced at her ego wall: pictures of Letitia Pope with the secretary of defense, the president, the ex-president, the king of Jordan, various NATO counterparts, and of course, her degree from Princeton.

Pope was middle-aged, with bottle-blond hair formed into a hair-sprayed helmet. She wore a tweed business suit that gave her a vaguely corporate air.

“Tom, how are you?” Pope asked, extending her hand. “How was your flight?”

“Fine, fine,” he lied, and took the seat she indicated on the couch in a small sitting area. Coffee was carried in on a silver tray by an enlisted man.

“Well, Tom,” Pope said, sounding regretful, “things are not going well.”

“Ma’am, we’ve had some difficulties,” he acknowledged.

Pope raised a skeptical eyebrow at his mild choice of words.

“But our core research is going well,” Peaks added, “very well, despite—”

“Despite a destroyed airliner and a destroyed Golden Gate Bridge.”

“As I said: difficulties.”

“And nine dead at the Ranch.”

Peaks nodded. He was not surprised by the negativity. He had excuses, reasons, explanations, but the Pentagon had never been a big fan of explanations for failure.

Pope looked at him searchingly, as if making up her mind about him. “Give me the short overview on the research.”

Peaks nodded again. “Yes, ma’am. Well, as you know, we are working on several solutions concurrently. Broadly there are three avenues: robots, cyborgs, and biologicals. The robot technology is performing nominally in tests. The cyborgs show great promise, though we are having technical issues with the head-to-computer interface. And we have proof of concept with the biological approach, though we did lose Carl and—”

“—And your most hopeful biological test subject refused to cooperate and escaped, doing, what, ten million dollars in damage? And at least one other escaped at the same time. Have you located them?”

“Not yet,” Peaks sa

id stiffly. “We, um, can’t really use law enforcement assets to their fullest, since of necessity this would be a shoot-on-sight situation. Cops don’t do shoot-on-sight. But California Highway Patrol has a BOLO out for her, and once they or one of our surveillance assets locates her, we have a go-team in a high state of readiness.”

The door opened behind Peaks, and Pope stood for the secretary of defense herself, Janet Oberlin. Oberlin lacked Pope’s minimal approachability. She was gray, hatchet-faced, chilly, and, in Peaks’s view, not up to the job, like most people in this government.

“Madam Secretary,” he said, and offered her his hand. She looked at him, then at the hand, which she considered for a long moment before shaking.

“Go ahead, Ms. Pope,” SecDef Oberlin said. “Don’t let me interrupt.” She sat equidistant from Peaks and Pope in the larger of the two armchairs.

“I was just saying that we have a rapid-response go-team ready to deploy as soon as we locate Dekka Talent and Aristotle Adamo.”

“And what about ASO-Three? The Iowa rock?”

Peaks shrugged. “We know who had it, and we have a BOLO out for that girl as well—Shade Darby, her name is. And we are preparing to move her father, Professor Martin Darby, to the Ranch.”

“You’re grabbing a Northwestern University professor?” Oberlin demanded, and too late Peaks recalled that she was a graduate of that college.

“For use if we can’t . . . can’t reason . . . with his daughter.”