Suddenly Chaucer thought about Tempest. He wondered what she was doing with her son, Tyler, right now. Probably at Disneyland Paris. He hoped she wasn’t parked outside Ludvine Roche’s home.

  Guerra glanced at Jefferson, confirming some understanding they had previously established. She said, “It’s an honor to meet you. I’ve trained a bit in interrogation myself. Your—rewriting of the texts of the profession has been enlightening to say the least.”

  Chaucer noticed she softened her “s” sound at the end of sentences, and her consonants were crisp and short. He decided. Cuban for certain. He cut short the introductions. “What are we looking at?”

  Jefferson spoke first, “The boat or the job? Let’s get to both, in that order. The boat is simple. This is the Baltimore. Decommissioned in 2000, along with thirty-six of her sister ships. Funny thing, decommissioning a sub. So much of this boat’s makeup is exotic materials, it makes scrapping them a real nightmare. In the last 25 years, only eleven of thirty-seven have actually been scrapped. Biggest backlog in the US armed forces.”

  Chaucer said, “That’s a lot of tonnage, just sitting around.”

  Jefferson smiled an easy smile. “We thought so too. So during a hectic administration change some years back, orders came in to speed up the scrapping process. Of course, those who wrote the orders had no idea the difficulty of carrying them out, but this is the military. SOP, right? The organization I represent? We thought repurposing even a single boat for a clandestine service could be a tremendous benefit. And with the chaos around the ramp-up, we arranged for a bit of—bureaucratic jujitsu. Turns out, Kitsap sent the Baltimore to Norfolk to be scrapped. Norfolk had their hands full and sent it back to Kitsap. And, well, we arranged for Kitsap to have records showing Norfolk scrapped the Baltimore, and for Norfolk to have records showing Kitsap scrapped her.”

  Chaucer thought to himself, how many poor bastards discovered that discrepancy only to get slapped down for no reason? He simply said, “Somebody had to notice.”

  Jefferson nodded, “Somebody. But not many somebodies. Nearly everybody was elated to be finally making some headway in the backlog. And when we refitted her for this new duty, everything we pulled? Well, we made sure the naval scrapyards had that stuff front and center. Proof enough. I don’t think anyone’s inquired about the Baltimore in five years now.”

  Chaucer had no idea who these people were, but he did know two things: 1. They were definitely some kind of US outfit, and 2. They were smarter than the average bear.

  CHAPTER 5

  “How about we discuss the interrogation?”

  Jefferson visibly deferred to Guerra. She said, “This way.”

  As Guerra brought Chaucer into the blind, he saw another intelligence officer waiting there. “Malcolm Chaucer, Gerrold McNair.”

  McNair was, charitably, the heaviest intelligence officer Chaucer had ever seen. Which wasn’t to say very heavy. This field had certain physical expectations, and it was clear from a second’s glance that McNair didn’t give a shit about any of them.

  McNair smiled at Chaucer and threw him a friendly wave. “Hey, how are ya.”

  McNair had orange hair, blue eyes, and terrible skin. But he made up for all that in disposition. He was, without a doubt, the cheeriest person Chaucer had ever met at a black site.

  Jefferson continued the introductions. “McNair is what the Brits would call a boffin.”

  Chaucer laughed. It was the perfect term. He meant McNair was a tech guy—electronic intelligence, not human intelligence. One look at McNair and that seemed to check out just fine.

  Jefferson continued. “McNair’s the one who found the discrepancy. Guerra’s the case officer who ran this all down and put together the pieces. She’s the one who tied it to Jackson Reynolds.”

  Suddenly, Chaucer wasn’t looking at McNair, Jefferson, or Guerra. He was staring through the mirrored glass at the man in the box: Jackson Reynolds.

  Jackson Reynolds was light-skinned, African American, early thirties, fit, neither tall nor short. But above all, Jackson Reynolds was nervous. Scared to death, in fact.

  Chaucer noted his energy, and it surprised him just a little.

  Chaucer asked, “What exactly did you find, McNair?”

  “A tick. Real nasty one. You know, you guys were lucky I was around. CIA didn’t know about it. DIA didn’t know about it. Hell, even NSA didn’t know about it.”

  Jefferson cut him off. “McNair, we get the idea.”

  McNair chewed his gum and continued,. “You know what a tick is, Mr. Chaucer?”

  Chaucer shook his head.

  McNair shrugged. “Not surprising. It’s a new thing. Distributed microcode, embedded oh so carefully in a completely normal program. The idea is this: most viruses are packets. Out of millions of lines of code, there are these twenty lines in a row that do something the program wasn’t supposed to do. That’s your normal bug. The tick is different. The tick burrows. It hitches a ride. The tick has the same twenty lines of code—well, not the same, it’s way more sophisticated—but it hides one line of code in this subroutine over here, and the next one way over there, a third one in billing⁠—”

  Jefferson’s shoulders slumped. “McNair, get on with it.”

  “The tick hides real good, and the tick stays real quiet, and then when nobody’s looking, the tick sucks your blood and sends it where you don’t want it going.”

  Chaucer understood the concept. “And you found it?”

  McNair leaned back in his chair, threading his fingers behind his head in triumph. “That I did. That I did.”

  Chaucer asked, “And this guy, Jackson Reynolds?”

  Guerra said, “I could tell you he works at a DARPA SAP Site, but that wouldn’t impress upon you what Jackson Reynolds does.”

  Chaucer knew SAP Sites well. The acronym stood for Special Access Program. Journalists referred to most SAP sites as Skunk Works, and the name stuck. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d interrogated someone who worked in one.

  Jefferson continued. “Jackson Reynolds worked at the highest clearance level on a top-security project in DARPA. But that doesn’t quite cover it. This project? It was Jackson’s baby. It’s a solar power breakthrough. Absolutely revolutionary.”

  Chaucer replied, “No offense—but I don’t need to know this in order to do my job. And this is codeword clearance miles above where I am. So why the hell are you guys telling me all this?”

  Guerra and McNair laughed.

  Jefferson explained, “You will find we’re a very different kind of outfit than anyone you’ve worked for previously.”

  Chaucer noticed what Jefferson was saying. “Oh. So I work for you now?”

  Guerra replied, “Well, you are on his boat.”

  Chaucer stared at Guerra for a long moment—cocksure, teasing, taunting even. Against his better judgment, Chaucer liked this one.

  But she had let something else slip. *His* boat.

  All this time, Chaucer thought Jefferson was running some kind of side outfit—an espionage unit that could sidestep bureaucracy, and likely one that had unique permissions. He thought this boat was on loan to Jefferson’s outfit. But that wasn’t the case. No. A Los Angeles–class sub was their own private base of operations and black site?

  This was so many orders of magnitude beyond what Chaucer thought Jefferson was talking about that he couldn’t quite grasp it. Which gave him a newfound respect for Jefferson. Chaucer’s reads of people were rarely ever this far off.

  Chaucer had one more question. “How do you know it was him?”

  Guerra shrugged. “The tick came from his office. His lab. We watched. Carefully. Waiting for him to make any definitive move. And eventually, he did. Timestamps did the rest. It was him. Several of the code insertions happened when the only person in that lab was him.”

  Chaucer continued staring at the terrified Jackson Reynolds, putting together his interrogation strategy as he did so.

  “Okay. I’m going in.”

  Four hours later, Chaucer knew everything there was to know about Jackson Reynolds—save one thing.

  He didn’t know that Jackson Reynolds had betrayed his country.

  In fact, Chaucer was growing sure he hadn’t.

  Chaucer hadn’t tortured the man. He had inflicted no pain on him whatsoever. Most interrogations never did. That’s because the adage was true from Chaucer’s vast experience: you do catch more bees with honey. No, building rapport was often the key that unlocked every human’s secret vault.

  Four hours in, Chaucer was the best friend Jackson Reynolds had ever had. Chaucer ended the session by telling him he was thirsty and offering to get Jackson a drink as well.

  It was an offer Jackson gratefully accepted.

  Chaucer returned to the blind and stood inside the door for a long moment before he spoke.

  “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  McNair, Guerra, and Jefferson exchanged glances. They didn’t know what they were expecting, but they were not expecting this.

  Guerra said, “Chaucer, he did it.”

  Chaucer replied, “That man in there? He doesn’t know he did it.”

  “Impossible,” said Guerra.

  Chaucer rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “How sure are you of that?”

  Jefferson shrugged and stated matter-of-factly, “The sky is blue. Water is wet. That sure.”

  Chaucer stared back out at Jackson, trying to put the puzzle together.

  “Guerra, did you interrogate him in any way before I came in?”

  Guerra shook her head. “I know your protocols, Chaucer. I wouldn’t violate them.”

  Chaucer said, “He was too scared. His early responses were too erratic. You know that old cop trick where you leave the suspect in the room long enough? If he lets his guard down, it’s because he did it. The innocent man? He has no idea what’s going on. And the fear of the unknown—the mind going all sorts of places that this could go? That equates to total terror. That guard is never coming down.”

  Chaucer pointed at the glass. “That man is exhibiting exactly that kind of terror.”

  Jefferson thought about it for a long moment. “You’ve been fooled before.”

  Now Chaucer was getting angry. He shot back, “Once. By an agent they had trained for weeks to do specifically that. And they had her drugged to the gills to hide her responses. This guy is stone-cold sober. He is more than an open book. He is ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill.’ And everything about him is saying he knows nothing.”

  Jefferson stared Chaucer down. “Then you’re going to have to get serious with him.”

  Chaucer looked back at Jackson.

  He didn’t want to do it.

  But he knew Jefferson was right.

  Chaucer said, “Something about this is all kinds of wrong.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Chaucer went in for round two. He asked Jefferson, “What kind of security did this guy’s division have?”

  Jefferson replied, “The best. State-of-the-art. Why do you think we have you here? This guy beat an unbeatable system.”

  “No system is unbeatable.”

  “So it would seem,” said Jefferson. “We need to know how he beat it. He went through psychological profiles—multilayered, multi-leveled polys.”

  Chaucer scoffed at the very word polygraph, but he knew what Jefferson was talking about. One poly and you’ve got nothing. But several polygraphs? Taken over time, with detailed, in-depth comparisons made from each session? Yeah. Chaucer could see why Jefferson was worried. Not a lot of places where that level of personal intrusion makes sense, but when it was necessary, no infiltrator should be able to survive that.

  Chaucer looked at his subject through the window and was consumed by one thought: They’ve got the wrong guy.

  He was about to find out.

  Chaucer entered the room briskly. Like everything he did in here, it was by design. The message was simple: the time for empathy was over.

  His subject sensed it. “Mister, mister, you can hook me up to any machine you want. I want you to know I’m not hiding anything. I don’t know what you think I did, but I swear I didn’t do it.”

  Chaucer nodded. “Of course, the problem in situations like these is that what you’ve said is exactly what both the innocent man and the guilty man would say. We’re going to have to probe deeper.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Chaucer pulled a wrapped bundle of cloth out of his pocket and slowly unfurled it on the table in front of his subject. Inside, in a hundred different individual sleeves, were what first appeared to be toothpicks. But when Chaucer drew one out, it became clear that these were needles. Acupuncture needles.

  These were not some disposable kind either. The ends of these needles each had tiny Asian characters on them.

  Chaucer wasn’t a superstitious man. A needle was a needle as far as he was concerned. In fact, he had this needle set for just two reasons. One, it seemed to be more effective at creating a psychological condition of fear and dread that was useful to him. And two, nostalgia.

  For a moment, Chaucer slipped back into what Tempest now referred to as Chaucer 2.0. A damaged—broken, really—wind-up toy, just trying to survive a level of PTSD that was unthinkable. Every time he looked at the needles, a bit of Chaucer 2.0 would come back.

  In the recent past, the appearance of Chaucer 2.0 would have been seen as a setback at best, an existential threat at most. But Chaucer 3.0, the current Chaucer, knew volumes about psychology. He knew he had experienced a remarkable recovery, but whether it would last was an open question. The key was integration. Chaucers 1, 2, and 3 living in harmony. None of them shutting the others out.

  His subject stared at the needles. They were having the desired effect. “What are you going to do with those?”

  “Probe for answers,” said Chaucer.

  He pulled out the first two needles and moved around behind the man. He squirmed and twisted, trying to get a look at what Chaucer was going to do, but the bonds securing him to the chair did not give him any room to move.

  Chaucer counted vertebrae and felt the man’s breathing, waiting for that one perfect moment.

  With a quick jab, he inserted the first needle.

  Suddenly, his subject froze.

  This was precisely the intended effect—paralysis. It was useful both for the insertion of other needles and for inducing the sensation of helplessness.

  All Chaucer had to do was play his part.

  “I’d like you to try to move. Move in any way you can. Toes, fingers, neck, eyes. If you can move any part of your body, I will release you and end this session.”

  Chaucer knew that what he was asking was an impossibility. But he wanted his subject to know it.

  “Good. Good. I’ve paralyzed your central nervous system. If I were to pull the needle out, you would instantly be back at full function. However, if I drive this needle in another half inch—well, you’ll never walk again.”

  “I’m now going to tweak it so that you can speak. And when you speak, speak only the truth.”

  Chaucer spun the needle in his hand, withdrawing it a sixteenth of an inch.

  Suddenly, the subject was crying. He wasn’t saying words, per se, but he was conveying emotion. Total, stark terror.

  Chaucer thought to himself, Come on. Give me something. I don’t like this any better than you do.

  An hour later, Chaucer inserted the sixth needle into his subject’s back. The subject was bathed in sweat and breathing rapidly. Even though he wasn’t physically harmed, his endorphins were swarming his brain, putting him in a state of complete and utter panic.

  Usually, this was not a state Chaucer ever put subjects into. This was the state in which lies are born. This was the reason enhanced interrogation over the last two decades was an utter failure.

  The human mind is incredibly flexible. It has the ability to create, edit, and recreate memories and experiences at will—and utterly believe them to be true. In the state of abject panic that Chaucer’s subject was in, that creative faculty was in overdrive.

  But his subject was giving him nothing. Not a single marker to suggest in any way that he was a spy.

  Chaucer knew deep down that either he would get something here, or he would pull the plug. Chaucer had done his job. This guy was innocent. He just had to push him to the breaking point to be absolutely sure.

  And then the breaking point came.

  Chaucer twisted the needle, moving it an eighth of an inch further in, hitting that point where the mammalian mind shut off completely and the lizard brain, with all of its fears and terrors, consumed him.

  He cried out in agony—and then suddenly froze.

  No—not froze.

  Twitched.

  At first, it happened so quickly Chaucer didn’t really believe he had seen it, but then it happened again. A violent, whole-body spasm.

  It was something Chaucer had never seen before, and Chaucer was deeply under the illusion that he had seen everything in rooms like these.

  Chaucer asked, “Jackson? Jackson?”

  Another twitch.

  Then the subject turned to look at Chaucer. And Chaucer flinched.

  The eyes that stared at Chaucer differed completely from those of Jackson Reynolds’. His facial features—alien.

  Chaucer had the sensation that he was looking at a completely different person.

  The subject spoke. “Who the fuck is Jackson?”

  CHAPTER 7

  Chaucer noted that his voice—his whole manner of speech—had changed, and he went with it.

  “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. Who are you?”

  “Jones. Harold R. Lieutenant. If you want my serial number, I’ll give it to you, but that’s all you’re ever gonna get from me, pal.”

  Chaucer took an involuntary step back. Whatever was happening, he had never seen anything like it. This wasn’t somebody play-acting. A dozen different micro-expressions had suddenly changed. The tells Chaucer used to tell right from wrong had suddenly reset, and Chaucer was looking at a new creation, entirely alien to the subject he had been interrogating for hours.