Monster Nation(70)

He protested a few times that they should really talk in private first but the Civilian just smiled. Clark played along'he needed the man. He needed the authorization to put together the last two pieces of the puzzle. He needed satellite time.

And he needed to find the blonde girl. She would have information that he crucially needed. She would be the answer he sought. She had to be.

They moved quickly through the maze of the dilapidated office building, weaving through rows of cubicles and passing through two steel fire doors. Finally they arrived at a corner office in the third floor of the building. A keycard reader had been installed hastily next to the door, the plaster underneath broken and crumbling. The Civilian swiped a card through the slot and they stepped inside.

An aged woman in an immaculate business suit rose from behind a desk and hurried toward them. Her face was so slack and bloodless that Clark reached for the sidearm that he'd left in Florence.

'I'm not dead yet, Captain,' the woman said, her mouth an unmoving slot in the middle of her face.

'Botox,' the Civilian whispered behind his hand.

'This is not a town that respects wrinkles, not anymore. Special Agent Purslane Dunnstreet,' she said, and took Clark's hand. Her skin felt as dry as paper. 'Welcome,' she said, waving one skeletally thin arm expansively, 'to the War Room.'

Clark looked around at the office, a cluttered room maybe fifteen feet by fifteen feet. Paper in every conceivable form filled the room, stacks of it on the carpet, rolled sheets like scrolls stuck into actual pigeonholes, bound volumes squeezed into overloaded metal shelving units. One wall was lined with dozens of old grey enamel filing cabinets. A row of laser printers sat on the floor by the window, wired to a beige desktop computer. Page after page rattled through their mechanisms, filling the air with the smell of baking toner, more paper being created by the second.

'Agent Dunnstreet, meet Bannerman Clark, my favorite metrosexual. Clark, Purslane here is an old spy, one of the original Cold Warriors. I've never met anyone who hates Communists more.'

'Jesus has taught me,' Dunnstreet said, her frozen eyes piercing the Civilian, 'to hate the sin, not the sinner. Communism is a perversion, a sick compulsion of thwarted self-hatred. Communists are persons, and as persons they can be re-educated, re-oriented, brought back into the flock. Most of them. The fact that this country is longitudinally trending Republican should demonstrate that much.'

'Yeah' anyway' she's been back here since the sixties. She was, what, NSA originally? She was funded all through the Reagan years and then got funded down under Clinton. Except nobody bothered to check if she was still here. She came in day after day, her very existence so heavily classified the Dems didn't have a chance of rooting her out, and kept up her lonely vigil. After 9/11 she surfaced again, or at least she chose to remind certain well-placed individuals that she was still here. Her particular field of expertise appealed to the DHS and she was rolled up under Ridge and friends' now we've reached a kind of tipping point and she has become one of the most important people on the planet.'

Clark frowned. 'I'm sorry, but I don't understand. What exactly do you do?'

Dunnstreet folded her arms across her narrow chest. 'I deal in abstracts, Captain, intangibles that I keep in a ledger book and next to them I copy down numbers, as I may. I'm a hypotheticals modeler, a what-if specialist. For the last forty years I have been positing one terrible scenario after another, and plotting ways to deal with them should they ever arise. In specific I have been imagining a land war fought on the territory of the United States. This is Warlock Green, my masterwork.' She gestured at the printers humming under the window. 'These are the operational parameters and legal instruments necessary to win such a war. It is a fail-protected strategy that I stand behind one hundred per cent.'

The Civilian beamed. 'Warlock Green is a protocol for the end of the world.'





Monster Nation





Chapter Eleven


GONE TO BIRMINGHAM 'SAFE ZONE', JIM PETERS AND THREE BOYS. WON'T BE BACK'HELP YOURSELF IF YOU NEED IT, LEAVE IT FOR SOMEONE ELSE IF YOU DON'T [Handwritten note taped to an abandoned car in Jasper, AL, 4/10/05]

'I touched his face with these fingers. His skin like beaten copper. His eyes were terrible to look upon. The water that had frozen me and kept me from the worm, for two thousands of years'th-there never was a thing so cold as those eyes.' Even as he relived the memory Nilla could see the religious awe that gripped Mael Mag Och and twisted his spine rigid. His face was the blank mask of the trance state, his eyes wild under their beetling brows. 'He wore a mantle so fine, so soft to the touch that it lifted as the cold water stirred around me. Teuagh, he was, the Father of Clans. The judge of men. And he was angered. 'Gheibh gach n''' he told me. Everything must die. Lass, do you believe me, that I saw him, that we spoke?'