Текст книги "Black Wolf"

Автор книги: Dale Brown

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“Who would have believed an airplane could fly by remote control twenty years ago?” Breanna asked.

“I would believe it.”

“That’s because you were working on the project. Science fiction becomes reality pretty quickly these days. Ready or not.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

“Does Danny know?” asked Zen. “Is he involved in the mission?”

“I’m not discussing operational details with you. I can’t.”

“Come on, Bree. Danny’s our friend. Stoner was a friend of his, too.”

“Mark saved my life,” blurted Breanna. “Don’t tell me about friends.”

“You didn’t tell Danny, did you?” said Zen calmly. “He doesn’t know.”

“Jeff, I’m sorry I said anything.” She sighed. “I will tell him if it’s important. When it’s important.”

God, she screamed at herself inside. Why did you say that?

“You have to tell him, Bree.” Zen wheeled around to look into her face. “You have to.”

“You just said it was science fiction. He probably won’t believe it either.”

“But you do.”

“Yes. I do.”

“You have evidence?”

They had what they thought was a partial DNA match, if the computer records were right. But they might not be. And there were other explanations—long shots, but maybe no more implausible than this.

Still, she was convinced.

“You don’t know what the situation is.”

“If what you’re saying is true, which I don’t know that I believe,” added Zen, “but let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it is. Let’s say it is Mark Stoner, somehow, resurrected from the grave or hospital bed, whatever. Then that’s his friend who’s hunting him down. Who’s probably going to kill him.” Zen rolled his wheelchair close to her. “Is that why Whiplash is involved? So Danny can see if it really is Stoner?”

“Jeff—”

“That’s why you sent him. Because you think Stoner will recognize him, and hesitate. Or come over to our side. Somehow.”

It was part of what they were thinking, at least at the beginning. But then new evidence had seemed to contradict the conclusion that it was Stoner. Breanna had decided not to tell Danny—it would only confuse and complicate the issue. When the time was right, when they had more evidence, then she would tell him about the possible DNA match, and the rest of the theories. For now, the job was simple—find out who these people were.

Whiplash was the best group for the job, with or without the old Dreamland connection.

“You have to tell him,” Zen said.

“I thought you didn’t believe it.”

“But you do,” he answered. “You have to be honest with him.”

“Don’t tell me what I have to do. You don’t know what the pressures are.”

“What does this have to do with pressure, Bree? This has to do with basic honesty.”

“Honesty? Honesty? What the hell are you talking about, honesty? You lie to people all the time.”

“I don’t lie.”

“You’re a politician. Tell me you don’t lie.”

It was the worst fight they’d had in years. The only fight they’d had in years. There’d been disagreements, debates maybe, but nothing approaching this. This was a nuclear explosion, a blowout so severe it left them both trembling.

Maybe it had been a long time coming. Maybe they were just due. Maybe at its heart, the fight had little to do with Mark Stoner and Danny and who should know what.

Maybe at its heart, Breanna was worried about him and didn’t want to lose him. And he…

He wasn’t sure what he was worried about. He knew he was angry, over a lot of things, none of which had anything to do with his wife, not really.

Losing his legs most of all. Even now, even after all these years without them. He wanted them. He wanted them so badly he would trade anything for them.

Not his daughter. Not his wife, not even tonight in his anger. But anything else.

Zen stayed in the living room while Breanna went to the bedroom. He went into the kitchen and got himself a beer, then sipped it slowly, thinking back to his days at Dreamland.

He didn’t believe it could possibly be true. It wasn’t the question of whether Stoner had survived. He’d seen worse crashes—hell, his own for starters.

But to be rebuilt?

Science fiction bullshit.

The phrase was familiar. Zen looked down at his legs, trying to place it.

Oh yeah, he thought, remembering. It was what the Air Force secretary had said the day he arrived at Dreamland to review the Flighthawk project.

The day of his accident, when one of the Flighthawks cut too close to his tail.

The Air Force secretary had said it with a smile on his face, laughing, really, shaking his hand before the flight.

Science fiction bullshit, that just happened to be true.

SUPERMEN

14

Kiev, Ukraine

“Why Moldova?” Danny asked.

“I have no idea if it means anything,” Nuri told him as they debriefed the break-in over the secure sat phone. “He was looking at a lot of sites there. We’ll have a better idea in the morning, when MY-PID finishes churning through all the data. I just thought it was a little unusual. Moldova is not exactly the garden spot of the world. It’s not on the beaten path, that’s for sure.”

“It’s not,” agreed Danny.

“The guy loves porn,” continued Nuri. “And he’s an animal—he started screwing on the couch while I was there. I swear, I was ten feet away. Maybe closer. If they’d seen me, they probably would have asked me to join in.”

Nuri’s mention of Moldova brought back painful memories for Danny. A decade and a half before, Dreamland Whiplash had run an operation in neighboring Romania, helping rout guerrillas who were trying to disrupt a pipeline project. In the process, they’d helped rescue the country from a coup.

But they’d lost a key member of the team and a friend, CIA officer Mark Stoner. Danny could still remember getting the news.

They talked for a while more, about whether Flash should stay with Nuri or come to Kiev, about how many more people they’d need, about when to contact the local authorities.

Danny couldn’t focus on any of it. He kept thinking about Stoner.

He’d lost a lot of friends in the early part of his career, in Bosnia, and then with Dreamland. Later on in the Gulf and Afghanistan. It had been a luxury the last few years, not having to worry about forming friendships that could end all too suddenly.

“I’ll talk to you after we get the info dump,” said Nuri. “Figure out the next move then. In the meantime, I’m going to bed. You good?”

“Good.”

“You OK, Colonel?”

“I’m here,” answered Danny.

“Maybe you ought to get some rest, too,” said Nuri. “You sound a little tired.”

Danny glanced at his watch. It was five in the morning; no way was he getting back to sleep.

“I’m good,” he told Nuri. “Talk to you soon.”

15

Washington, D.C.

Breanna overslept, and by the time she woke, Zen had already left to take Teri to school and then go to work.

Her body felt raw from the fight, as if it had been physical. She took a shower, feeling drained of blood, even trembling a little. Coffee helped get her awake, but it only reinforced the jitteriness. She left for work without checking the news or looking at her version of the morning briefing. Her BlackBerry had a dozen messages, but none were from Zen, so she didn’t bother opening them.

Breanna generally split her days between the Pentagon and Room 4. Today she was scheduled to spend her time at the Pentagon, where, among other things, she was supposed to make sure arrangements for the Tigershark demonstration test flight were set. But she headed to the CIA campus instead, anxious for an in-depth update on the operation.

And considering, in the back of her mind, what to tell Danny about the Wolves.

To her great surprise, she found Reid in the bunker. Not only did he spend the bulk of his time in his office in the main building, he was famously known as a late riser, often grumbling about meetings that began before 10:00 A.M.

“Extra strong this morning,” Breanna told the automated coffee unit. “Very strong.”

“You saw the e-mail?” Reid asked her as the coffee began to brew.

“No. I just had an instinct that something was up.”

Reid was an old-school CIA hand, both figuratively and literally. Sometimes it seemed to Breanna that he had been with the Agency back when it was the OSS.

“MY-PID has arranged all of the data from the mobster’s computer,” said Reid. “There’s one possible lead through a bank account. And some interesting connections. Most of the information on the drives pertains to his business interests. The FBI will be interested. And there’s plenty more for the Italian antimafia commission.”

“Let’s have a look.”

“Here.”

Reid turned to the wall, then told the computer to display the data summary. Several windows of information appeared, long lists of files arranged in treelike fashion. A window on the left showed correspondence between Moreno and other members of his organization, translating them from Italian as well as decrypting them. They indicated that he was having some conflicts with upper level associates, or fellow mob bosses. There was personal animosity and friction as well. Based on what Nuri had observed, that was more than understandable.

The profile the information drew was of a man whose empire was slipping away from him. If they were in America, the authorities might even attempt to pressure him and get him to turn against the rest of the mob. But the Italians didn’t work that way.

“He does seem to be losing his grip,” said Reid. “Which is perhaps another reason he didn’t use his own people for the strike in Berlin. In any event, the matter that concerns us is here, a pair of transactions that switched money from a Naples bank to Egypt, then to Russia.”

“Does that say three million dollars?” asked Breanna.

“They don’t come cheap,” said Reid. “But he can afford it.”

“Have you traced the accounts?”

“They were opened and closed the same day. The Russian bank has a branch in Moldova.”

“Hmmm.”

“I thought you’d find that interesting. I have a list of transactions on the day the money hit the Russian account. We have five different accounts where we think the money went, but the transfers aren’t recorded as transfers. Someone withdrew the money, in theory as cash, then placed it into these accounts. If that happened. Most likely it was only on paper. And we’re guessing at the match-ups, because the amounts don’t match exactly. There’s about ten thousand dollars missing.”

“Pocket money.”

“Maybe. Or just diddling with the numbers to throw off programs designed to look for suspicious transactions.”

“But it was done in Moldova?”

“Likely. Again, this could all be manipulated,” admitted Reid. “The records. I don’t trust the Russian banking system. It’s always been full of holes.”

“Where is the bank?”

“In the capital, Chisinau. It has some dealings with other Russian banks in Tighina. Tighina is a provincial capital, near the area under dispute with Russia. Good-sized city, at least for Moldova. Those banks are pretty small and don’t seem to have been involved. There’s a big dispute between that region and the rest of Moldova; no other banks deal with them—or with the Russians.”

“Other links?”

“Already looking for them.”

“I have to tell Danny.”

“That would make sense. There are a few other loose ends. The FBI agent Nuri took with him wants to use some of the information we developed on Moreno for her own case against him.”

Breanna nodded. They had been counting on the FBI to do just that. Anyone watching would think that Moreno, not the Wolves, was the focus of the investigation.

“Nuri also found this information. Oddly.”

A list of websites relating to Moldova came up.

“Was he planning to go there?”

“That might be a possibility,” said Reid. “They’re all recent—just the other day. After the murder.”

“Trying to see where his money went?”

Reid shrugged.

“Maybe he’s dissatisfied with the job,” he said. “Or maybe he’s looking to provide a bonus.”

“Was the break-in discovered?”

“Apparently not. Nuri had to drug a dog, but he covered that up. In any event, the mobster has been using the computer quite prolifically since he got up a few hours ago.”

“Since we’re in their system, maybe we can watch and see what happens,” said Breanna.

“We think more and more alike with each passing day,” said Reid.

“Scary.”

“Very.”

Breanna sat at her desk staring at an old photo of Mark Stoner for nearly a half hour before putting the call in to Danny.

Part of her hoped he wouldn’t pick up; she wanted to put off talking to him for as long as possible. The other part wanted to get past this as quickly as possible.

Danny answered on the first ring.

“Can you talk?” she asked.

“I’m at the hotel,” he told her. “It’s fine.”

“We have more information on the Wolves.” She heard her voice crack. “And I have—there’s something I didn’t give you earlier. Because—for a couple of reasons.”

“All right.”

Breanna took a deep breath.

“We think that the people involved with the Wolves have been altered—enhanced is the better word,” she said, correcting herself. She remembered her conversation with Zen the night before, how he had initially dismissed it all as science fiction nonsense. “It sounds incredible, but we think they’re the result of experiments—that their bodies have been genetically altered, with drugs and in some cases biomechanical devices.”

“They’re supermen?” said Danny.

“That would be an exaggeration. The sorts of enhancements we’re talking about, we think, would increase lung capacity, say, metabolic recovery rates. Strength might be increased through implants, bone replacements, or the exoskeleton devices, the things that you were involved in testing—”

“You mean the wing?” said Danny.

“Exactly.”

Dreamland had helped develop a device that allowed soldiers to literally fly across the battlefield. Called by various names—Rocketman was more popular than Wing, which was the Whiplash nickname—the gear was used by special operations troops for select missions. The research involved in constructing it had found a much wider application, affecting everything from parachutes to the jacks that helped ordies load bombs and missiles onto aircraft. A civilian company had used the technology to create one-man cranes and lifts, which it planned to introduce to the market in a few months.

“The truth is, we don’t have a lot of details,” continued Breanna. “We’re making guesses based on some eyewitness accounts which, as you know, aren’t always credible. But we have a video showing one of the Wolves moving with incredible speed while another puts his fist through the side of a car.”

“Wow.”

“The video is very sketchy. It’s some sort of laboratory piece. Very low resolution.”

“Not a sales brochure, huh?”

“Danny, this is serious. The sources are sensitive. Highest code word.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s something else. Something that affects us both.”

Breanna paused. Danny didn’t say anything, and the silence immediately struck her.

Does he know what I’m going to say? Has he somehow intuited it?

“I think—there’s some evidence,” she started, losing her steam, “that—one of the Wolves may be Mark Stoner.”

Danny still didn’t say anything.

“The– There’s a visual similarity in the video. I noticed it right away,” Breanna continued. “It’s eerie, if it’s a coincidence. It may be a coincidence. But…”

The phone line was so silent, Breanna almost wondered if she had lost the connection. But the computer would have told her if that was the case.

“The… there is other evidence,” she said. “I don’t know—it’s not conclusive, but here’s what it is. The killer on the assassination in China was drinking from a Coke bottle immediately before the murder. The Chinese gathered it and got a sample from it. They have saliva, and some drugs—he wasn’t drinking cola, it was some sort of maintenance drink we think, it had enzymes and amphetamine in it. In any event, the Chinese analysis of the DNA material has something like a seventy-three percent chance of matching Mark’s.”

The percentage had to do with the original sampling technique used in recording Stoner’s DNA in the 1990s, as well as the quality of the material the Chinese had collected and the process they used to analyze it. Breanna told Danny about the doubts some of the scientists had mentioned, and the arguments that placing an actual number on the odds of a direct match were difficult and misleading.

“Do you think it’s him?” asked Danny when she finished.

“I don’t know. I simply don’t know.”

“Wow.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. I—I wasn’t—I’m not sure that it’s him.”

“It’s all right Bree. I understand.”

She could have kissed him right then. She would have, if he were there. He was taking the news a lot better than she had when she first heard about the possibility of Stoner being alive.

“The Moldova connection,” Danny prompted. “What do you make of that?”

“That may be important,” she said. “I mean—it is where Mark was shot down. On the other hand, it could be a coincidence. It is a good place if you’re looking to have some quiet banking transactions.”

“I think I ought to look into it.”

“So do I.”

16

Approaching Chisinau, Moldova

Danny Freah stared out the window of the Fokker 50–100 as the aircraft approached the airport at Chisinau. While Moldova shared a border with Ukraine and in some ways had a similar history, relations between the two countries were cool. Moldovans seemed to resent Ukrainians almost as much as they resented Russians. The flight he had taken was the only scheduled daily flight between the two countries. Even so, the aircraft was only half full, and its age indicated that the line wasn’t particularly profitable.

Danny tightened his seat belt for the landing. After so many years in military jets, the smooth, unhurried descent felt almost like a car ride. He waited as the plane left the runway for the taxi strip, then got up and grabbed his things as soon as he could see the small terminal in the window. He was the first one off, practically running for the open terminal door.

Relax, he told himself. Slow down. Nothing was going to be gained by haste.

The white-haired customs agent who checked his passport was impressed that he was an American. His English, though heavily accented, was very good.

“You’re here on business?” said the man.

“I have some appointments,” Danny told him.

“This is very good—you will like Moldova. A very good climate for making money. I studied in U.S. of A. myself.”

“Really?” said Danny.

“Nineteen seventy,” said the man proudly. “Amherst. But I returned. We always return to our home.”

“True.”

“A good place for business,” said the man, handing his passport back.

“Maybe you should open a business yourself,” suggested Danny.

“Too much to do,” said the man. He looked down at the floor, as if lamenting decisions he had made long ago. But then he immediately brightened. “Good luck to you.”

“Thanks,” said Danny.

Danny’s ostensible goal in Moldova was to visit the Russian bank branch in Chisinau, where he would plant some bugs and attempt to gather more information about accounts associated with the Wolves. But he also intended to check out the crash site. And to do that, he had to head north to Balti. He decided he’d get that out of the way first; not only was MY-PID still pulling together information on possible connections to the account, but Nuri and Flash were due to arrive in the morning; they could bug the banks as easily as he could.

Balti was something he preferred doing on his own.

His flight to Balti in the north, barely eighty miles by air, was in a brightly painted former Russian army helicopter. To get in, he and his fellow passenger had to squeeze past the copilot’s seat, buckling themselves into the tandem seats in the cabin. The engines whined ferociously as they took off, and the noise hardly abated as they flew, the cabin vibrating in sync with the three-bladed prop above.

The Balti International City Airport had a long runway, but was used so rarely there were no car rental or other amenities there. The terminal building was deserted and locked, and the grass around the infield of the airstrip overgrown.

Danny had arranged for a driver and car to take him to the bus station, where a small car rental shop promised to rent him a car. But the driver wasn’t there when he got off the plane. He called the company twice and got no answer; after a half hour he decided he had no choice but walk into town, a six or seven mile hike. He took his bag and started down the long concrete access road.

Weeds grew through the expansion cracks. Danny pulled his earphones from his pocket and connected to MY-PID, asking the computer if there were any other taxis in town.

There weren’t.

“There is a bus route along the highway to the airport,” advised the computer. “The next run is in three hours.”

“I can walk there in that time.”

Just then, a small red Renault came charging off the highway down the access ramp. Danny stopped, hoping it was the taxi. But it sped past.

Gotta be for me, thought Danny. He stood waiting. Five minutes passed. Ten. Finally, he started walking again.

He’d just reached the highway when the car sped up behind him, braking hard and just barely missing him though he was well off the road. A short, skinny man not far out of his teens leaned across the front seat and rolled down the window.

“You American, yes?”

“That’s right,” said Danny.

“I am your ride.”

“Where have you been?” Danny asked.

“Trouble,” said the driver, sliding back behind the wheel.

Danny opened the door, pushed up the seat and put his bag in the back. Then he got in next to the driver, who grabbed the gearshift and ground his way toward the highway. “This your first day?” Danny asked.

“Oh no—I drive since fourteen.”

“You’re older than that now, huh?”

“Twenty-two. Legal.” The driver grinned at him. “You like my English?”

“Better than my Moldovan,” said Danny. He could, of course, use the MY-PID to translate for him if he wanted.

“I learn Internet. School, too.”

“Great.”

The highway was straight and there were no other cars—a good thing, because not only did the driver keep his foot pressed to the gas, he treated the lane markings as if they were purely theoretical.

“So—you need bus?” said the driver.

“I have to rent a car.”

“Car?”

“Like Hertz,” said Danny. “Eurocar?”

The driver seemed confused.

“I’m picking up a car,” said Danny.

“No.”

“No?”

“When are you renting car?”

“Today. I made the reservation myself.”

“No car.”

“How do you know?”

“My name is Joe,” said the driver. He held out his hand. As he did, the car veered slightly but decidedly toward the shoulder.

Danny shook hands quickly. “The road,” he said, pointing.

The driver pulled them back toward the center of the pavement. He explained that his family owned the city’s largest gas station, which doubled as its largest, and only, car rental facility. And their two cars had been rented out three days before. Neither was due back for a week.

“You only have two cars?” Danny asked.

“Official, five,” said the driver. One had been wrecked months before and never repaired; the other two were waiting for repair parts.

“I have fix,” said the driver.

“You can fix one of the cars?”

“No—I drive.”

“I have a better idea,” said Danny, grabbing the dashboard as the driver turned off the highway, wheels screeching. “I’ll rent this car.”

“It’s my sister’s car,” said Joe.

“If she lends it to you, I’m sure she’ll rent it to me.”

“But then what will we have for a taxi?”

“Do you do that much taxi business?”

“We are the largest taxi service in all Balti.”

“Then missing one car isn’t going to be that big a deal.”

“We have only two,” said Joe. “One crashed, and two cannot get parts.”

“A hundred bucks for the day,” said Danny.

“One thousand. But we give you lunch, too. Biggest restaurant in Balti.”

Danny worked the price down to seven hundred dollars, with lunch and breakfast in the morning, assuming he was still in town. Joe also promised to give him a ride to the airport, no charge.

Whatever family member was cooking did a much better job at the stove than Joe did behind the wheel. Under other circumstances, Danny might even have stayed for dessert. But he had a lot to do before dark.

Besides the possible DNA match, there was circumstantial evidence of a link between the area where Stoner had crashed and Russian experiments with various physical “enhancements.”

The Soviet Union had run a sports clinic in a small town two miles away during the 1970s and early 1980s. The clinic had specialized in a number of techniques for athletic enhancement, including training in special aerobic chambers and rigorously supervised diets.

It hadn’t been secret—there were several stories about it in the Western media. It closed quietly sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s, never officially linked to the controversies then swirling about steroids and various stimulant use, but it wasn’t much of a stretch to make a connection. Anyone looking back would conclude that while those techniques were never mentioned in the press coverage, they were surely being practiced there as well.

It was rumored to be the site of other experiments as well. MY-PID located an article in Le Monde published in 1987 about the site that stated there were a number of rumors that the plant was aiming at producing “super athletes” and was investigating “genetic techniques.” They weren’t detailed in the story, but the hints were tantalizing enough for Danny, who asked MY-PID if it could track down the writer.

He’d recently retired from the French newspaper. When Danny, driving in the car, called the number MY-PID had discovered, the man answered on the second ring. Danny told him he was working on a book about old Olympic stars and had come across the article.

A white lie compounded by exaggeration, but harmless all around.

Flattered to be contacted, the former reporter told Danny what he could remember of the trip to the facility, describing what looked to him like a horse farm that had been “gussied up” with a pair of massive gyms in the old barns. He’d seen perhaps fifty athletes altogether, and interviewed a dozen. All spoke in glowing terms of the various methods that were used.

“A lot of emphasis on mental techniques,” said the man, whose English was heavily accented but fluent. “Positive thinking, we called it at the time. Of course, now we know they were probably just using many steroids. It was part of the culture of deception. So many athletes ended up doing this. My report was in the very beginning of the time.”

“Do you remember when it closed?”

“I wouldn’t know. We were invited—it was while the Eastern Europeans were winning all those medals, you understand. People thought the success was something to do with the mind. A fantasy.”

“So they did it with drugs?”

“Steroids, certainly. Now I realize what I should have looked for. They claimed they took a vitamin regime. Of course. And positive thinking. Well, you believe what you want to believe, as you Americans would say.”

MY-PID couldn’t locate any records showing whether the facility was operating when the helicopter went down in 1998, though the Frenchman’s account made it seem likely that it had. As of now, satellite reconnaissance appeared to show that it had been abandoned.

Danny decided to check for himself.

He followed the computer’s directions, taking a slight detour from the highway that led to the crash site. Dotted with small farms and houses built two or three centuries before, the countryside seemed almost idyllic, more a backdrop for a movie than an actual place.

A small village sat two miles from the complex. Dominated by a small church that hugged the road, it was home to less than two hundred people. Aside from the church, its central business section held only a pair of buildings; between them they had five shops: a bakery, tobacco shop, small grocery, clothing store, and a store that sold odds and ends.

A few local residents stood outside the tobacconist, watching Danny as he passed. He smiled and waved, and was surprised to see them wave back.

A mile and a half out of town, he turned to the right to head toward the facility. An abandoned house stood above the intersection, its siding long gone and its boards a weathered gray. A horse stood in a rolling pasture on the left, quietly eating unmowed grass as Danny passed.

The double fence that surrounded the place during its heyday was mostly intact, though weeds twined themselves through the links. The gates were pushed back, still held in place by large chains, now rusted beyond use.

Danny drove up the hill into the complex, feeling as if he was being watched.

He was: a large hawk sat serenely on the cornice of the main building at the head of the driveway, its head nestled close to its chest. Its unblinking eyes followed him as he got out of the car and walked across the small parking lot to the building. The Le Monde story fresh in his mind, he walked to the large gym building on the right. This was a steel structure, more warehouse than traditional gym. It had large barnlike doors on the two sides facing the rest of the complex. Both were locked, as was a smaller steel door at the side.

Danny walked back along the building, looking for the other gym, which according to the story, sat catty-corner behind the first.

It had been razed, replaced by an empty field. There were no traces of it.

A set of old dormitory buildings sat at the very rear of the site. Danny went to the closest one. The door gave way as he put his hand on the latch.

He stepped into a small vestibule. There were posters on the wall, faded but still hanging perfectly in place. The words were in Russian. He activated the video camera on the MY-PID control unit and had the machine translate them for him:“Train well!Your attitude is your ally!Think, then perform!Whatever you dream, you will live.”

The vestibule opened into a corridor on the left; an open staircase was on the right. Danny walked down the corridor slowly. Small rooms lined the hallway. Some had doors, some not; all were open. There were no furnishings in any of the rooms, nothing in them but dust, a few old shades, and in one, rolled rug liners. The place had a musty smell, the scent of abandonment.

Upstairs it was the same. He went into one of the rooms and looked out the windows. He couldn’t quite imagine what it would have been like—a hundred jocks and their trainers, always running, working out, practicing their various sports.