Jenny Plague-Bringer(25)
“Thank you, Dr. Reynard,” he said, adjusting his tie. “I suppose that was as helpful as you could be. Should you get the urge to tell anyone about my small, unimportant visit, I’ll remind you that you falsified your reports on this matter and helped a mass murderer escape. We’ll be monitoring your communications to ensure you remember to keep quiet. A little added service from me.” He winked as he opened the door. “Have a pleasant evening, Dr. Reynard.”
Heather remained sitting on the floor while she watched him leave, her skin crawling with horror. She barely understood what had just happened, but she felt painfully violated.
When he walked out into the hall, Heather crawled across the carpet, slammed the door, and turned the lock. She leaned against the door and tried to get herself together. It was a long time before she felt safe leaving her office and walking to the parking deck.
Chapter Nine
In Fallen Oak, the front gate to the Barrett House property was secured by lengths of chain and padlocks. Ward’s assistants, Buchanan and Avery, made short work of them with bolt-cutters, and then pushed open the heavy steel gate doors, which were flanked by very old stone lions.
Ward walked along the brick driveway, followed by the two younger men. Beyond a few ancient, mossy oaks near the front of the drive, the place looked like a wasteland. A huge amount of earth had been scorched black, any trees or grass long gone. In the year since Homeland Security had razed the place, spindly purple and pink flowers had colonized the vast burn scar.
The house itself was nothing but rubble, but from the few blackened hunks of brick wall that remained, Ward could see it had been an impressive structure at one time.
“They worked it over pretty good,” Ward said, kicking a cracked piece of the driveway. “Didn’t leave much for us to find, did they?”
“Sir,” Avery said, “As far as we can tell, the boy’s parents are at their house in Saint Augustine.”
“I know,” Ward told him. “The bad news is that his mother’s name is Iris Mayfield Barrett, the niece of Senator Junius Mayfield, who sits on the Armed Services Committee. That could get tricky. Good news is the senator just recently had a stroke and he’s in critical condition. If the old bastard would hurry up and die, we’d have less to worry about.”
“Should I put in a call?” Avery asked.
“Avery...” Ward sighed and shook his head. Buchanan had half a brain, but Ward just regarded Avery as extra muscle. “I will never tell you to make a call like that about a person like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re going to focus on softer targets for now,” Ward told them. “The Morton girl’s father, and any other witnesses who might have something useful. I don’t think we’ll find much here...” Ward looked at a distant brick structure on a low hill, back behind where the house had stood. “What is that?”
“Looks like a walled garden, sir,” Buchanan said, squinting his eyes.
“It’s the only thing standing. Might as well check it out. We’re not going to find anything in this rubble.” Ward led the way around the foundation of the house and on through the torched remains of what might have been an orchard or a stand of decorative trees. Large slabs of dark gray granite led up the hill to a tall wrought-iron gate, which stood wide open. They had to step high, as if the stairs were meant for larger beings than humans. They reminded Ward of old megalithic structures he’d seen on the History Channel, where some moron was always claiming Stonehenge was built by aliens.
If extraterrestrials were visiting the planet, Ward’s agency would have known about it. The Anomalous Strategic Threat Research and Intelligence Agency (ASTRIA) was not known to the public. Their mission, dating back to the Eisenhower administration, had generally been to focus on “unknown unknowns,” in the words of a more recent Secretary of Defense. Originally founded in response to reports that the Soviet union was investigating the use of psychics for intelligence-gathering and other strategic purposes, ASTRIA had looked into matters ranging from the supernatural to the extraterrestrial...almost never finding anything of importance to national security. Almost.
They walked through the open gate. Inside, there tall blocks of dark granite, arranged in rows, many of them inscribed with names but not dates. Each row had a generation of people named JONATHAN SETH BARRETT, followed by a Roman numeral. The most recent date that had been carved belong to the boy for whom they were searching: JONATHAN SETH BARRETT IV. It had a birth year, but no death year. Next to it was CARTER MAYFIELD BARRETT, born a few years before Seth, dead at the age of fourteen.