"No, but I summarized your debriefs. Nebraska and the Caribbean, and I read your Wisconsin and Great Lakes material. Call me a fan. Let's go to an interview room. We can sit."
"New digs," Valentine said as they passed through a different set of doors under the balcony at the back of the foyer.
"We hid our low-level archives here when we got the order to bug out. Seemed easier to move Mohammed to the mountain afterward. No one's complaining. Central air, if you can believe it."
"I thought that was a legend outside the hospitals and Mountain Home."
"We've been blessed. That's what it seemed like at first, anyway."
A young woman pushed a cart down the hall. "Interview A, Tess," Zhin called.
They turned a corner and she opened a door to a room that had been subdivided by half-glass walls. Valentine saw two people speaking to a hairy-faced man with the look of a frontiersman, though even with hard ears he couldn't make out any words through the glass. She led him to a warren of enclosed cubicles.
They circumvented most of them and went to a smaller office at the back, where she turned on a light.
"The chairs in this one are better. It's got its own sugar and such for coffee, too. Have to wait on Tess with your files. Anything to drink? Coffee? We have sage tea, courtesy of your Texas friends."
"Water would be good," Valentine said, spotting a cooler.
"Cups are up top. We don't have the kind that go in the little dispenser anymore."
Valentine got his drink and sat down at the bare table. Zhin settled herself opposite him.
"They decided you're worth guarding, it seems."
"We've come up in the world. Curse of being right."
"How's that?"
"A couple of our guys picked up on some strange dealmaking with the Texas-Kansas-Oklahoma Kurians. Solon hiring himself an army-but you know all about that. We figured we were going to get hit, and hard. Southern Command figured they were going to clean out the Grogs up and down the Missouri-Solon sent out a bunch of false intelligence indicating that. We ended up being right."
"But nobody listened," Valentine said.
"We were always outside the whole command structure. We'd give an opinion on this or that. What might work to pierce Reaper cloaks. Is there a way to disrupt the signal between a Kurian and his Reapers. What kind of ailments kill 'em. But since Solon's bid we've got to issue regular reports, assessments, and they're even starting to filter who we talk to and where we go so we don't lose 'assets.'"
"I met one of the filters at the security desk. Seems a reasonable precaution."
The young woman with the cart knocked and entered, pushing a collapsed binder with Valentine's name and some sort of catalog number printed on the outside. Be interesting to take a look at the supplemental notes in that file, Valentine thought. Pens, notepaper, and storage bags and jars littered the cart.
"Tess Sooyan, David Valentine," Zhin said, by way of introduction.
The young woman hid behind her hair and glasses. She sat down in the corner with a pad, leaving the table to Valentine and her superior.
"Used to be if someone saw a weird track or bone they'd bring it to us, and we'd hand out little rewards and so on, even if it was just another Grog skull. But the, oh, what do you want to call them, shifty types-border trash-they avoid us now. All the barbed wire and uniforms scare them away."
"Speaking of shifty . . . I've got a confession. I'm here under false pretenses. I didn't need a follow-up to my last debrief."
Zhin leaned back in her chair. "Oh?"
Tacitly invited to explain, Valentine extracted Post's note. "A friend of mine got this . . . I'm guessing it's from one of your people. He's looking for his wife."
"Probably one of the kids," Zhin said, showing the note to her assistant. "Still in school or fresh out of it, they start here running down public queries. They shouldn't be sending out copies of documents, though. Or passing on opinions."
"That might be Peter Arnham's writing," Tess said at a level just loud enough for Valentine to hear it. "He's on the Missing/Displaced network."
"Can you look into it?" Valentine asked. "My friend's a good man. Badly wounded outside Dallas. He's going to have to put his life back together after all this. It would help if he knew one way or the other."
Zhin put the message in her leather folio. "I'll get a group going on it.