Текст книги "Black Rain"

Автор книги: Graham Brown

Соавторы: Graham Brown
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

CHAPTER 21

That night, a wailing call echoed across the clearing, a human voice, rising and falling in a wavering chant. It was a hollow and haunting sound. And one Pik Verhoven had been expecting.

Danielle turned to her left where Verhoven sat, his coffee mug on hold in front of his mouth. He’d told her earlier that something would happen, he’d told her it would happen tonight. Movement in the trees had given it away. Voorloopers, he said: scouts.

In the hours since, he and his men had made a sweep into the trees looking for the natives, hoping to chase them off. They’d found only footprints, strange gouges in the trees—like some kind of territorial markings—and tracks with only two claws. Nearby, they’d found the remnants of two animals, butchered horribly, covered in mud and the same open blisters they’d seen on the body in the river. “More warnings,” he’d told her.

In response, Danielle had chosen not to sleep. She ran a battery of tests on the ring of motion sensors they’d placed around the clearing and made sure the laptop on which their inputs displayed was close at hand.

For his part Verhoven had positioned his men at various points in the clearing and had brought one of the German shepherds to sit beside him at the table. As the eerie chanting wafted through the air, the canine stiffened and put itself between Verhoven and the source of the call.

Danielle watched as Verhoven patted the dog proudly and glanced her way. She turned back to the laptop. The motion sensors had yet to register an alarm.

When a wailing cry drifted in on the night air, Verhoven put his mug down and grabbed a walkie-talkie. “What do you see?”

“Nothing out here,” came one reply.

“Clear on this side,” came a second report.

“Well, open your damn eyes,” he said, “because you’re missing something.”

Danielle had heard enough. “I’m waking the camp.”

There was no need. Stirred by the chanting, the other members of the team were already in motion, peering out of their tents or making their way to spots beside the fire, near her and Verhoven.

Polaski was one of the first to reach her. “What is that?”

“Sounds like a cat in heat,” Devers said.

The porters gathered together. McCarter and Susan arrived by the fire with Hawker right behind them.

Danielle stepped nearer to Devers. “Is that the Chollokwan?”

He did not reply immediately, seeming startled by the echoing voice.

“Of course it is,” Verhoven replied.

She wanted confirmation. “Come on, yes or no?”

“I think it is,” Devers said. “It sounds like their language but …”

As Devers strained to listen, Hawker stepped past, taking a seat on a wooden crate. “Time to see if this plan of yours works.”

The plan was simple: they’d create a secure area at the center of the camp in case of attack. The area was ringed with smoke canisters and a group of tripods holding metal halide flood lamps, like those used in the Olympic stadiums.

If they faced a daylight raid, the smoke canisters would pump out thick volumes of dark smoke, obscuring the group in seconds from any onrushing attackers. But the smoke would not interfere with the infrared scopes attached to Verhoven’s rifles and they could fire at will from this hidden spot.

If the attack came at night, like the one that seemed imminent, the floodlights would do the same thing, blinding anyone and anything that came at them, while the NRI team disappeared into the dark void at the center, firing out of it if necessary.

Danielle scanned the clearing. For now they were alone.

“Anything on the screen?” Verhoven asked.

Danielle looked at the laptop. “Not yet,” she said. “They must be too far out.”

“I see them now,” said one of Verhoven’s men over the radio. “A few in the trees to the south.”

As he spoke, the laptop began to beep softly. Targets popped up on the screen: little red dots on a field of gray, some to the south and a few more on the west side.

Verhoven picked up his radio. “Fall back. No need getting all strung out if we’re going to have ourselves a tussle.”

Verhoven calmly unslung the rifle on his shoulder. “It’s going to be an interesting night,” he said. He sounded more aggravated than concerned, like a man being forced to perform a chore he’d put off far too long.

Danielle looked his way. “We’d better get out the extra rifles,” she said.

Verhoven tossed a key to one of the porters. “Move quick, now.”

The rifles were in a long crate near Verhoven’s tent, but as a precaution the box was locked. It would take the man a minute to reach it and retrieve the rifles inside.

As he dashed off, the voices came around again, louder this time, a chant of several joined together. “This isn’t good,” Polaski said. “I really don’t see how this can be good.”

“What are they saying?” Danielle asked.

“It’s hard to tell,” Devers said. The voices rose, then fell away, then rose again. “It’s almost a song of some kind, not really a—”

A second native voice interrupted Devers, breaking in over the top of the chorus with a shout from the western edge. It was quickly answered by one from the east and then one from the north and finally the south.

Danielle turned in each direction, looking for the source of the cries even as they died away, replaced once again by the low, rhythmic chanting.

Polaski mumbled something unintelligible at this latest development and McCarter put his hand on Susan’s shoulder, glancing around.

“What do they want?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Civilians in danger, exactly the situation Danielle had hoped to avoid. She turned to Devers. “What the hell are they saying?”

“It’s hard to make out.”

“Come on,” she snapped. “You’re useless right now.”

“It’s not that easy,” Devers insisted. “Their language isn’t like ours, it’s not completely linear.” He strained to hear. “They’re calling on the spirits,” he said. “Asking them to wipe the forest clean of the plague and infestation that we’ve brought to it. Or maybe we are the plague and infestation. Either way, we seem to be the problem.”

Verhoven laughed. “Of course we are.” He racked the slide on his rifle and stepped forward. “Well, they’d better bring more than spirits if they want to get rid of us.”

As the wave of chanting grew again, Danielle had the distinct impression of a situation spinning out of control. She was afraid the Chollokwan would attack en masse, and almost as afraid that Verhoven wanted them to, just to prove what he could do.

She glanced at Hawker. He seemed unconcerned, almost amused. He shook his head calmly, his eyes suggesting there wouldn’t be trouble, that it was all bravado, just Verhoven and the natives puffing themselves up in some kind of pissing contest.

She turned back to the trees, hoping he was right, and just then, the chanting stopped.

As the silence lingered she turned to Devers. “Now what?”

He shook his head.

A moment later Verhoven’s men rejoined the group and he directed them to cover the points on the compass with the expedition’s members gathered between them.

Danielle feared that four armed men would not be enough. She stared into the darkness searching for the burly porter who’d gone to get the extra rifles. She couldn’t see him and she wondered what could be taking him so long. “Should we hit the lights?”

“Not yet,” Verhoven said.

New shouts issued from the trees as the gathering of red dots on the computer screen grew and the chirping alarm continued unabated.

“Look out!” Polaski shouted.

Everyone ducked as an object trailing flames hurtled through the dark sky toward them. It fell short, bouncing and skipping oddly across the ground, some type of bololike device burning at both ends. The dry grasses lit around it, just as more flames arced into the sky.

“Everybody down,” Verhoven said.

The trails of fire swung through the air in strange wobbling paths, two balls of flame orbiting each other on a piece of twine. They crashed and sparked. Ten, then twenty, then more, one after another in bunches, hailing down from all directions.

Susan began kicking sand toward the licks of fire that came closest. McCarter joined her, but the thin weedy grasses quickly burned to embers and there was no real danger.

Just then, the porter returned, awkwardly carrying four rifles and a box of loaded clips.

Verhoven grabbed them.

“Pass them out,” Danielle ordered. The chanting voices around them had taken on a different sound, darker and more ominous, curling around the clearing as one voice after another repeated a single word.

From the look on his face, Devers recognized the word, but this time he didn’t translate it. That was a bad sign.

Danielle checked the computer screen—there were targets all around them, too many to count. She turned to Devers.

“White Faces,” he said, catching her glare.

“What does it mean?”

“The White Face is a spirit. The ghost. The bringer of death.”

Before long, the shouting voices began to seem like a roll call. One after another the Chollokwan were announcing themselves. Bellowing at the top of their lungs, working themselves into a frenzy. Danielle guessed their number in the fifties, and then the seventies, and then more.

Beside her, Hawker stood up. He stepped forward to where Verhoven was about to hand over the last rifle. “Better give that one to me,” he said.

Verhoven held back for a second and then slapped the rifle into Hawker’s outstretched hand.

Danielle gazed at Hawker once again, but this time she found no comfort in his eyes. They were cold and grim. He was amused no more.

One of Verhoven’s men spoke. “There’s a hell of a lot of them out there. A hundred at least, maybe more.”

Verhoven disagreed. He glanced at the screen and its multiple flashing dots. “Less by far. Certainly less than they want us to believe.” He glared at the man.

“Maybe,” Devers said, “but this sounds like a war party, these guys consider themselves the spirits of death. They cover themselves in white paint and they go out on raids. They believe the paint makes them invincible like the White Face, the one they consider already dead. They believe it protects them, because if they’re already dead then they can’t be killed.”

As if in response to what Devers had said, the voices stopped cold. Danielle looked around: no one had charged yet. The bolos still burned where they’d fallen and thin wisps of smoke drifted across the camp. But the air was still.

Danielle saw the movement on the screen and looked up. She saw a shape in the tree line, silhouetted by small fires. In seconds, a dozen or more were burning, blazing up into the trees, with new fires being lit all along the perimeter. The end result was like a fuse running slowly around the edge of the clearing, tracking along the trees in a clockwise motion, down to the south and up along the east.

The undergrowth crackled and burned as the fires merged and the flames tracked up the eastern perimeter. With the naked eye, she could see the silhouette of runners with torches in their hands, sprinting past the fires, the flames trailing out behind them. Before long, the clearing was encircled in a rapidly growing conflagration.

“My God, they’re going to burn us,” Polaski whispered.

Hawker tried to calm him. “There’s nothing to burn in here.”

Danielle took a breath. That was true. The clearing was barren of any major source of fuel, but smoke was another problem. The fires surrounding them were oily and the smoke hung thick and heavily. It quickly became difficult to breathe. With one eye on the perimeter, she broke into the first-aid kit, pulling out a stack of thin paper respirators. With only a half dozen, she gave one each to Susan, Polaski, McCarter and the porters.

One of Verhoven’s men dropped his night-vision goggles. “We’re blind now. They’ve made the scopes useless.”

“They don’t know that,” Hawker said.

Aside from Verhoven and Hawker, everyone had become jumpy. She sensed it even in herself. She needed information and turned to Devers. “Come on. What the hell do they want?”

“I don’t think they want anything,” Devers said.

“What do you mean?”

“They just keep repeating the same words over and over again. Fire for fire, fire for the plague.” He shouted to be heard above the crackling flames now surrounding them. “They’re either telling us something or telling themselves. Winding each other up.”

In places, the merging tongues of flame had reached an inferno stage, climbing up into the trees, creating their own wind, spinning in wicked little vortexes like whirling genies unleashed from their bottles.

“That’s it,” Danielle said. She glanced at Verhoven.

“Turn on the damn lights and hit them with a few flares. We’re not waiting anymore.”

Verhoven smiled and pressed the switch. The lights blazed instantly and the generator cranked to life. A blinding glare reflected back at them as the swirls of white and gray smoke lit up like a fog of overlapping ghosts. In truth, the visibility got worse.

Verhoven pressed another key and began firing flares from the canisters pre-positioned in the forest. Two flares went off to the north and then two more in the west; he fired more in the south and the east, flares from canisters that were behind the Chollokwan warriors.

Danielle hoped the sound of the flares launching would startle the natives. And as she looked to the computer screen, she saw holes in the Chollokwan lines where groups of them backed off, but they weren’t leaving en masse, and in a moment the lines began to reform. She turned back to Verhoven, eyes burning from the smoke. “Now what?”

Verhoven was silent for a moment; he turned to one of his men and then looked past him to Hawker. “What do you think? Are they coming in?”

Hawker shook his head. He pointed the rifle toward the towering fires around the edge of the clearing. “If they come in now, they’re silhouettes against the flames; a good way to die, even if you are a White Face.”

Verhoven turned back to Danielle. “You see, they know better. We watch for now. But they’re not coming in. Not tonight.”

Danielle sighed, more convinced because Hawker and Verhoven had actually agreed. “So this is a warning, then. I suppose we won’t get another.”

Devers coughed. “They’re not known for giving one in the first place.”

For the rest of the night, the group watched the flames burn in the circle around them. Occasionally there were new waves of chanting, especially when the higher branches burst into flame, but at no point did the Chollokwan attempt to enter the clearing. As dawn approached, they drifted back into the forest and disappeared.

The jungle around the clearing continued to burn. But though the forest was dry by Amazonian standards, it wasn’t the type of parched brush that lent itself to an inferno. The flames could not reach the critical temperature required to become self-sustaining, especially as it reached the wetter foliage back from the clearing’s edge.

With the cool mists of the dawning hours, the fires began to die. The layer of ash and smoke thinned throughout the morning, and by late afternoon all that remained were the smoldering hunks of burnt and blackened trees and the trepidation of what the next encounter might hold.

CHAPTER 22

A bitterly cold morning arrived in Washington, D.C., a morning of cloudless blue skies and plumes of steam on the horizon. The glaring sun lingered, low and bright, but for all its piercing brilliance, it remained a harsh and distant companion, a mere candle on the mantel of the world.

No warmth could be felt on this day, not in the sunlight or in the air. To Stuart Gibbs it seemed appropriate for a day on which the NRI was burying one of its own.

Gibbs had stood in the frigid air, giving the eulogy, keeping it short for the sake of those who had gathered. He’d offered his personal condolences and then moved respectfully away, watching as others stepped forward to console the widow of Matthew Blundin.

He watched as they spoke to her, hugged her and held her hand. He guessed at their words—kind words, no doubt, words of sorrow for her loss and praise for the job her husband had always done. No one would mention that he’d been found on the wrong side of town, shot and robbed on a street known for its drug dealers and prostitutes. No one would ask if his penchant for alcohol or late nights had led to their separation and pending divorce, or if either vice might have had a hand in his demise. They would think these things of course, but such thoughts would not be spoken, for death was not only the great equalizer but also the great eraser of misdeeds. In its wake, Blundin’s errors and habits would be forgotten, his wit and wisdom raised into legend.

Gibbs watched the procession, feeling uneasy and distracted, the rolled-up newspaper in his gloved hand crushed subconsciously in a tightening grip. There was trouble everywhere for him, the team in the rainforest had been attacked by natives, the computer system had been hijacked and made to hack into itself—and his security chief, the one man Gibbs could have trusted to find the culprit, was now dead and buried.

A pang of remorse stabbed at Gibbs. The man deserved better.

To most of those attending, the security chief’s death marked a small footnote in their own particular stories. Even the soon-to-be ex-Mrs. Blundin would move on, as she had already begun to. But for Stuart Gibbs and the NRI, the event was a massive occurrence—existence changing, in scale—and Gibbs couldn’t shake the thought of changed destiny any easier than he could ward off the chilled winter air.

Before long, the crowd began to thin. Soon, even Blundin’s widow and her party turned to go, moving slowly up the path toward the parking lot.

Gibbs lingered for twenty minutes, standing alone, thinking about Blundin, the rainforest project and the various scenarios that now presented themselves. Only as the bitter air began to seep through his coat did he move toward the parking lot himself.

By the time he arrived, his car was alone. But as he reached for his key, another vehicle turned in toward him, a silver Mercedes with tinted windows.

He eyed the car, waiting for it to pass. But it stopped beside him and the rear window descended smoothly into the door.

“Stuart Gibbs?”

Gibbs hesitated. He couldn’t see much inside the car, but there was no reason to deny who he was. “What can I do for you?”

A man with thick, gray hair and wearing a muted, charcoal-colored suit leaned toward the open window. “I noticed your tire was flat,” he said. “I thought you might need a lift.”

Gibbs glanced at the tire. The right rear was indeed flat, though it was a brand-new Michelin and had been fine when he drove in. “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll have someone come out.”

“We need to talk,” the man insisted. “I was at the funeral today with Senator Metzger from the Oversight Committee. I have some information about Mr. Blundin’s death that I think you should be aware of.”

“What kind of information?”

“The type that can’t be given to the police until it’s properly sifted and filtered.”

Gibbs stared.

“It’s extremely time sensitive,” the man said, “so if you don’t want to listen I’ll have to deliver it to the good senator instead.”

Gibbs stared at the man in the car. He looked familiar, but whether Gibbs had seen him earlier at the funeral or knew him from somewhere else, he couldn’t be sure. “Who are you?”

The door opened, and the man in the gray suit slid to the other side. “My name is Kaufman,” he said. “My company is one of your charter members.”

Of course. Kaufman was the head of Futrex, one of the NRI’s charter affiliates. And one of the companies Blundin had been investigating.

Without a word Gibbs climbed into the car. It began to move and the tinted rear window rose smoothly back into place.

He looked around. Aside from Kaufman there was only a driver.

“Quite a shame about a man like that,” Kaufman said.

“Blundin was one of my best people,” Gibbs explained. “And a good friend as well. But he had his own issues. I guess they caught up with him.”

Kaufman nodded somberly. “They always seem to.”

The tone in Kaufman’s voice bothered Gibbs; it seemed smug and condescending. “It would be of great satisfaction to me if we could catch the person who did this. Even if it’s just some punk off the street.”

“Not likely to be some punk off the street,” Kaufman replied. “Not when the man was killed because of your Brazil project.”

Gibbs froze. Even Senator Metzger didn’t know about the Brazil project. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“You have a group of operatives working in the Amazon at this very moment. They’re down there—somewhere—without the knowledge or consent of the American Consulate or the Brazilian government. Care to tell me why?”

“We have people in fifty countries,” Gibbs replied, fighting to maintain his composure. “I don’t keep track of them all. As far as the consulate and the Brazilian government are concerned, I’m sure you’re mistaken. But more importantly, what does this have to do with Matt’s death?”

“It’s simple,” the man replied. “He was killed because of what he knew. He was investigating your data loss, making certain people nervous. But then, you know that, don’t you?”

Gibbs glared at the man beside him, his sense of restraint failing. The man was vile. “Whatever the hell you’re getting at, say it.”

Kaufman exhaled. “Let’s start with the project,” he said. “Your people are down there looking for the ruins of an ancient Mayan city. A city that may be the source of some very special items. Items that create power, all but unlimited power.”

The man stared into Gibbs’ eyes and then continued. “Eight weeks ago, you lost another party attempting the very same thing. In fact, you’re still wondering what happened to them at this point. Another answer I can give you, if you care to listen.”

“You’re the son of a bitch who hacked us,” Gibbs said.

“We ran a program with your Research Division’s permission,” Kaufman said, proudly. “Something to do with weather simulation, I think. Seems to have caused a little storm on your end, though.”

Gibbs glared at the man. Just as Blundin had predicted, the chink in the armor of Research Division had cost them. “It makes sense,” he said angrily. “A big tech company like yours would have the expertise. My question is, why? Do you have any idea what kind of hell you’re about to bring on yourself?”

Kaufman leaned back, showing little concern at Gibbs’ aggressiveness. “Under different circumstances,” Kaufman said, “you might be right. But not here. Not now. I’m offering you a way out. The best—and last—chance you’ll ever get to put this thing behind you.”

“The NRI doesn’t need your help.”

“Not the Institute, my friend, you. It’s my intention to help you.”

“Help me do what?”

“To survive, for one thing,” Kaufman said. “It took me a while to figure it out. But it’s become apparent to me that you’ve run this thing privately. You’ve used NRI assets and proxies, but it’s your operation.”

Only at this moment did Gibbs feel the true weight of his actions. They hammered him in rapid succession; decisions made, steps taken to hide his tracks, lines crossed from which there was no going back.

Kaufman appeared impressed. “I have to admit—that’s a bold play. But it puts you in a bad position now that you’ve run into problems. The simple recovery you planned for has become tangled up with all kinds of issues and delays. You’re running out of money, or close to it. You’re just about out of time too, because people are starting to ask questions—questions you can’t answer.”

Gibbs’ jaw was clenched. He tried to relax.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky,” Kaufman said, offering him a line. “Maybe you’ll find what you’re after and disappear with it before the walls come crashing down. But then what? You can’t take it back to the NRI—or any other American organization, for that matter. Not only will they wonder where it came from but they’ll want to know what the hell you’re doing with it in the first place.

“Develop it yourself, then? With what? You can’t possibly have the resources to make a play like that or you wouldn’t have tapped the NRI accounts to begin with. So you have to sell it. The only question is: to whom?”

Gibbs remained silent, his proverbial right.

“National governments are your best bet, but which ones?” Kaufman said. “You can’t turn it over to your own; we’ve already established that. So where do you go? The Japanese? Sure. Why not? They import virtually all of their energy, they’re technologically advanced and they spend millions on this kind of research every year. But in your world they’re your chief rival, the economic equivalent of the Russians in the Cold War, and while you may be a thief, you’re not a traitor. So the EU, the Russians and the Chinese are probably out as well, at least until you’ve exhausted all the other options. And that leaves mostly the destroyers.”

“The destroyers?”

Kaufman elaborated. “Those who stand to profit most, if this revolution never comes to pass: the nuclear industry, big oil, the OPEC countries.”

Kaufman’s tone became pragmatic. “If I were you, the nuclear industry would be my first choice, although they’re not exactly a monolithic group. They might even use it one day, when their trillion dollars of capital investments run out of useful life. But more than likely they’d prefer to keep building big, expensive, dirty power plants, instead of small, cheap, clean ones—there’s more responsibility to it, more prestige and of course, more money. They’d pay you handsomely for it, though. So would big oil, OPEC and the Seven Sisters, or what’s left of them. They’d bury you in petrodollars to keep this thing on the shelf, or they might bury you for real—maybe both. At the very least it’s something you’d have to worry about for the rest of your life, because as long as you live, they have exposure.” He paused, looking Gibbs in the eye. “A terrible thing,” he said, “to live with exposure.”

Gibbs listened to Kaufman’s line of reasoning with a strange sense of déjà vu. He’d run through the same process a hundred times in his own mind. He had a plan, and it involved his disappearance, something his CIA background would assist him in, but there would always be danger. He counted on being able to handle it. “Why tell me all this?” he asked, bitterly. “In other words—what the hell is your point?”

Kaufman obliged him at last. “Because what you hoped to find out there—what we both hope to find out there—is the beginning of a revolution, one that will render the industrial and computer revolutions mere blips on the time line.

“The industrial revolution improved the lives of twenty percent of the world’s population, mostly those in Europe and North America. In other areas, it condemned vast swaths of previously happy people to lives of abject misery. Virtual slaves who toil in the ground for natural resources while their own lands are left polluted and spoiled.

“The information revolution has done the same thing on a smaller scale. The lives of twenty percent are improved, while others are rendered jobless, destitute and excess to society’s needs. Poor countries fall into the information divide and their populations lag ever further behind as they squander all their measly income just trying to keep the lights on.”

“I’m not really in this for the poor,” Gibbs said.

Kaufman sat back. “So sell it to the destroyers, then. The world will go on just as it has: pumping oil, shoveling coal and piling up nuclear waste by the ton. The wars will go on. We’ll have more debacles like Iraq. Iran will be next, and the whole Arabian peninsula when the House of Saud collapses. America will bankrupt itself fighting wars in the desert while Europe and Asia watch and reap the rewards. The poverty and pollution of the oil age will go on, and you’ll spend the rest of your days wondering just when that stray bullet will find you.”

Gibbs took his eyes off Kaufman, glancing out the window at the world flying past. Too quickly, he thought, much like the conversation he found himself trapped into. It left him dizzy, unbalanced—a terrible feeling for a man unused to anything but complete control. “You paint a rosy picture of my future,” he said.

“That’s just one possible future,” Kaufman explained. “On the other hand you can look at this meeting for what it is—your way out. You can turn this find over to me and see it brought to its full potential. I have billions set aside to develop this technology, and access to billions more if I need it. I have armies of engineers, powerful friends on Capitol Hill and in the military. And I have time, a luxury you no longer possess.”

Kaufman leaned toward him. “What lies out there is the key to equalizing things, to resetting the vast imbalance between the first and third worlds, to stabilizing what has become a dangerously unstable world.”

“My God,” Gibbs said. “You’re some kind of crusader. You intend to give this away?”

“No,” Kaufman said. “I intend to build a fortune with it. One that will make Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett look like welfare cases. And once I’ve done that I’ll build power plants all over the world. I’ll provide cheaper energy than anyone could have dreamed of—cheaper than coal and oil, cheaper than solar or wind or even hydrothermal power and with none of the environmental drawbacks. In twenty years I’ll control all the electrical power generated in the Western Hemisphere, and even though I will sell it cheap, I’ll produce it for almost nothing. With the profits and influence, I’ll light up the world of the poor. And when the whole planet has equal access to such power, a sense of equilibrium will come to this place that has never existed. No longer will there be three have nots for every one who has.”

As Kaufman spoke, Gibbs wondered just where the man’s greed and nobility intersected, or if he was lying or simply mad. A combination of all four, he decided. “You’re insane, you realize that.”

The charcoal-haired CEO’s eyebrows went up. “Insane is embezzling from your own agency. It’s hiring a group of burned-out mercenaries to search a river bed and following up their disappearance with a group of civilians who will likely meet the same fate. Insane is your place in the world, my friend, not mine.”