unleashed a virus which temporarily crashed the FBI's San Jose field office network and contaminated all outgoing e-mail with a Tourette virus, which randomly spikes all messages with obscenities and sundry blasphemous phrases."
Storch might have nodded once.
"Sounds like your employee, doesn't it?"
No response.
"Well, in other news, I went to see your father recently. He's still in solitary confinement, too, at Norwalk. You know that he's been writing a history of the universe, or something of that sort? Well, five months ago, he put it to the torch. No one knows how he started the fire, but he managed to destroy it and half of the ward. The chronicle numbered over seventy thousand pages, nearly five hundred pounds of paper, seven years of uninterrupted work. Since then, he's been locked up and heavily medicated, because he can't break out of the manic compulsion to begin another chronicle. In his more lucid moments, he's been writing it on the walls of his cell, and he explained it to me in excruciating detail before he was put back under sedation. He promises it will be twice as long as the other, which he now believes was erroneous. It begins with your birth, Sgt. Storch. I didn't tell him that you were in any kind of trouble. The doctors say a shock that great could trigger another breakdown."
Cundieffe might've been telling him about his own father, in Japanese. He had expected to have dug out some emotional reaction by now, some sign that a light was still on behind those flat, unblinking eyes. He probed every ghost of a motion for signs of contempt, anguish, rage, menace, fatigue or despair, but the face of the prisoner was mummified, painted on.
"Sgt. Storch, I'm getting a little tired of the sound of my own voice, here. None of this information will exonerate you in the eyes of the United States government because of your participation in the Radiant Dawn massacre and your fatal attack on FBI Agent Robert Niles on the night of your arrest. You are going to die today, while the people who brought you into this, against your will, I suspect, are safely ensconced somewhere in South America, plotting another attack on American soil. Those men out there are hoping you'll make some pitiful deathbed mea culpa and give up the Mission's foreign headquarters and in-country operatives and maybe tell them why you did it. And I don't even know why I'm the one talking to you, because just before I got here, I think I figured it out."
Storch's ears might have twitched, his brow might've contracted a millimeter or two.
"Shortly after you jumped—or were pushed—out of that helicopter over Liberty Salvage in Baker on the night of the Tenth, you and seven Delta Force commandos were irradiated by a light from the sky, which several accounts dismissed as an astronomical phenomenon or the spotlight of a previously unaccounted-for helicopter on the scene. Then the bomb went off in the Mission HQ."
Storch definitely shivered once, as if his skin had just shrunk a size.
"Within ten days, all seven soldiers were dead. Autopsies revealed a particularly rare variety of cancer tumor spread throughout their bodies. They're called teratomas, Sgt. Storch. They differ from garden-variety tumors in that they normally only manifest in germline cells, and the malignant mass attempts to differentiate into the distinct features of an independent organism. The features are only vestigial, certainly not viable, but more like an incomplete Siamese twin, if I may use a phrase out of political fashion. Or, in this particular case, several twins."
He turned over yet another photograph. A man's body on a steel examination table in a Naval hospital morgue. The body lay skewed at an awkward angle because there was no stretching it out. A tumor the size of a bowling ball warped the arc of the spine just above the hips and several more of greater or lesser size bloomed up and down the torso, great cables of protoplasm stretching from one tumor to the
Storch might have nodded once.
"Sounds like your employee, doesn't it?"
No response.
"Well, in other news, I went to see your father recently. He's still in solitary confinement, too, at Norwalk. You know that he's been writing a history of the universe, or something of that sort? Well, five months ago, he put it to the torch. No one knows how he started the fire, but he managed to destroy it and half of the ward. The chronicle numbered over seventy thousand pages, nearly five hundred pounds of paper, seven years of uninterrupted work. Since then, he's been locked up and heavily medicated, because he can't break out of the manic compulsion to begin another chronicle. In his more lucid moments, he's been writing it on the walls of his cell, and he explained it to me in excruciating detail before he was put back under sedation. He promises it will be twice as long as the other, which he now believes was erroneous. It begins with your birth, Sgt. Storch. I didn't tell him that you were in any kind of trouble. The doctors say a shock that great could trigger another breakdown."
Cundieffe might've been telling him about his own father, in Japanese. He had expected to have dug out some emotional reaction by now, some sign that a light was still on behind those flat, unblinking eyes. He probed every ghost of a motion for signs of contempt, anguish, rage, menace, fatigue or despair, but the face of the prisoner was mummified, painted on.
"Sgt. Storch, I'm getting a little tired of the sound of my own voice, here. None of this information will exonerate you in the eyes of the United States government because of your participation in the Radiant Dawn massacre and your fatal attack on FBI Agent Robert Niles on the night of your arrest. You are going to die today, while the people who brought you into this, against your will, I suspect, are safely ensconced somewhere in South America, plotting another attack on American soil. Those men out there are hoping you'll make some pitiful deathbed mea culpa and give up the Mission's foreign headquarters and in-country operatives and maybe tell them why you did it. And I don't even know why I'm the one talking to you, because just before I got here, I think I figured it out."
Storch's ears might have twitched, his brow might've contracted a millimeter or two.
"Shortly after you jumped—or were pushed—out of that helicopter over Liberty Salvage in Baker on the night of the Tenth, you and seven Delta Force commandos were irradiated by a light from the sky, which several accounts dismissed as an astronomical phenomenon or the spotlight of a previously unaccounted-for helicopter on the scene. Then the bomb went off in the Mission HQ."
Storch definitely shivered once, as if his skin had just shrunk a size.
"Within ten days, all seven soldiers were dead. Autopsies revealed a particularly rare variety of cancer tumor spread throughout their bodies. They're called teratomas, Sgt. Storch. They differ from garden-variety tumors in that they normally only manifest in germline cells, and the malignant mass attempts to differentiate into the distinct features of an independent organism. The features are only vestigial, certainly not viable, but more like an incomplete Siamese twin, if I may use a phrase out of political fashion. Or, in this particular case, several twins."
He turned over yet another photograph. A man's body on a steel examination table in a Naval hospital morgue. The body lay skewed at an awkward angle because there was no stretching it out. A tumor the size of a bowling ball warped the arc of the spine just above the hips and several more of greater or lesser size bloomed up and down the torso, great cables of protoplasm stretching from one tumor to the
Similar Books
