CIA Headquarters — Briefing Room 4, Langley, Virginia | August 9, 2011 | 08:00
The helmet-cam footage lasted forty-seven seconds from the point of gas release to static.
It played on the main briefing room screen in front of twelve people who had clearances appropriate to knowing that a Tier-1 operation had concluded in a way that required after-action assessment. The gas. The mutations. Alen's firing. The impact. The door. The white of the blizzard and then the signal dropout that happened when the camera hit the ravine wall.
Hunnigan stood at the back of the room with both hands pressed flat against the briefing table behind her. She watched the footage the way you watched something you needed to see clearly and were fighting every available instinct to look away from. Her face was controlled with the specific effort of a professional who had learned that showing your reactions in rooms like this was a form of vulnerability, and who was currently expending most of her available resources on not showing anything.
She watched the static.
She had received his off-book message four hours before the operation. The channel they had built for exactly this kind of communication — routed through infrastructure that did not touch any system Simmons had access to. The message had been sparse, which was his way when he was operating under time constraint:
Simmons knows I found the Neo-Umbrella thread. This operation is the response. I am going in anyway because the alternative is to surface now with incomplete data. I need you to watch what happens and not accept the official version of it. Whatever the record says — I need you to not believe it.
She had read it twice and had spent the following four hours constructing three different contingency search frameworks for a potential post-operation investigation, because that was what she was able to do, and doing it had prevented her from doing the other thing, which was not an option while she had work.
Now the screen showed static, and she was doing everything she could with the work.
At the podium, Derek Simmons delivered his statement.
He was, she noted, extraordinary at this. Not extraordinary in the way of a man performing grief he did not feel — he was extraordinary in the way of a man who had the capacity to feel the appropriate emotion at the appropriate moment and deploy it with complete fidelity. The sorrow in his voice was specific, the kind that lands as real because it contains the right amount of restraint. He spoke about sacrifice. He spoke about operational risks inherent to the work. He spoke about the sample that had been lost with the team, and about the threat it had represented, and about what it meant to serve at the level this team had served.
He was saying:
everyone on this operation is dead, the sample is gone, and there is nothing further to investigate.
He was saying it in the language of memorial, which was how you made sure nobody looked too closely at what the investigation would find if it looked.
Hunnigan kept her face still.
She thought: he is a man who has done this before. Many times. This language is fluent. He knows exactly which words produce which responses in which audience. He is very good at this. He has had a long time to get very good at this.
She thought:
I didn't see a body. The helmet-cam shows a fall into a ravine in a Siberian blizzard, but it does not show a body. The signal dropout is not confirmation. The signal dropout is a camera that stopped transmitting.
She thought about December 2010, when she had read telemetry that a Tyrant-class BOW had not been able to explain. She thought about what she knew about Progenitor-level biological resilience and what the medical literature said about environmental survival in extreme cold when the cellular repair mechanisms operating in the subject's bloodstream were not standard human cellular repair mechanisms.
She thought about the message:
whatever the record says — I need you to not believe it.
"Dismissed," Simmons said.
The room emptied. Hunnigan stayed. She was often the last person to leave rooms because she had found, over twelve years, that rooms told you things when everyone else had gone.
Simmons gathered his materials with the ease of a man concluding a meeting that had gone exactly as he intended. He moved toward the door. He passed her without acknowledging her presence, because she was support infrastructure and support infrastructure was not something that required his acknowledgment.
He left.
Hunnigan stood in the empty room and looked at the screen, which was showing the Agency seal as a screensaver now, and thought about a safe house in Bucharest in December 2010 when she had looked at a man through a camera and said:
whatever else you are, Alen, you are a person.
She made a decision.
She was not going to open a mourning file for Alen Richard. She was not going to treat the signal dropout as a body. She was not going to let the record become the truth simply because the record was the easiest available version of events.
She was going to search. Through every channel she had — the official ones, the off-book ones, the ones that Simmons didn't know existed because she had built them in the margins of the programs she was supposed to be supporting and had never shown them to anyone.
She was going to find him, or find what had happened to him, and she was going to use what she found.
"You're not dead," she said. The room was empty and she said it anyway, because saying it made it a statement rather than a hope. "I didn't see a body. You are not dead, Alen."
She turned and walked out of Briefing Room 4 and went to her office and began.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Chapter Thirty-Five to follow — The Long Sleep