Дэвид Балдаччи - The Sixth Man

“No one followed us to your place,” said Michelle.

“No one you could see ,” said Paul, and she took another sip of tea.

“Meaning what exactly?” said Sean.

Paul looked around. “Not here. Let’s take this discussion somewhere else.”

They paid the bill and climbed into Michelle’s truck. Paul looked around the interior. “Have you swept this for bugs?”

Michelle, Sean, and Megan stared at her.

“Bugs?” said Michelle. “No, we haven’t.”

Paul slipped a device out of her bag and turned it on. She passed it around the interior of the vehicle and then studied the readout on the small electronic screen.

“Okay, we’re good to go.” She put the device away and sat back to find the others still staring at her.

“Care to start explaining?” said Sean.

Paul shrugged. “Self-evident, don’t you think?”

“What is?”

“What we’re up against here.”

“And what exactly is that?” asked Michelle.

“Everybody,” replied Paul.

“Can we start from page one?” said Sean. “I think we all need that right now.”

“My brother is not simply an IRS agent with six bodies in his barn.”

“Yeah, we’d gotten that far by ourselves,” said Michelle.

“So what exactly is your brother?” asked Sean.

“I’m not convinced you all are ready for the answer.”

“I think we’re ready for the answers,” said Sean. “In fact, we’re so ready that I don’t think I’m going to let you out of this vehicle until you tell us.”

Before any of them could react, Paul had placed a knife against Megan’s right carotid. “That would be an unfortunate action on your part, Mr. King, it really would be.”

“Put that away,” said Sean. “You don’t have to go there.”

Paul put the knife away and patted Megan on the arm. “Sorry I had to do that.”

The young woman looked like she might throw up her breakfast.

“Just take deep breaths and the shock nausea will pass right on by,” Paul added kindly.

“Why did you do that?” asked Sean.

“Ground rules have to be set. My loyalties do not lie with any of you, at least not completely.”

“Where do they lie?” asked Michelle.

“Mainly with my poor brother, who’s rotting at Cutter’s Rock.”

“Mainly?” said Sean. “Which means there’s something else. Or someone else?”

“In my business there is always something else, Mr. King.”

“And that business being what? Intelligence?”

She looked out the car window and said nothing.

“Okay,” said Sean. “I’m done trying to work with you. Get out. We’ll move on our own without you. But if we find something out that hurts your brother, so be it. The chips fall where they will.”

“In many significant ways my brother is American intelligence.”

Sean shook his head. “That’s impossible. The field is way too large.”

“Your intuition is endearing. But the fact is the American intelligence system was broken. Too many cooks in the kitchen such that no one really knew anything. With the E-Program that weakness was rectified.”

“E-Program?” said Michelle. “Does the E stand for eidetic ?”

Paul smiled. “The E actually stands for Ecclesiastes .”

“As in the Bible?” said Sean.

“A book of the Hebrew Bible, yes.”

“What’s the connection?” asked Michelle.

“One underlying philosophy in Ecclesiastes is that the individual can find truth by using his powers of observation and reason instead of blindly following tradition. You acquire wisdom and focus that wisdom to figure out the world on your own. It was a radical concept back then, but it really fits the E-Program concept well.”

“So your brother is this guy?” asked Sean. “The analyst?”

“There are six people in the United States classified as ‘super-users.’ By federal law they’re supposed to know everything. But they had no special mental gifts. They’d stick a retired admiral in a room with nary a pen or piece of paper and then run past him all this intelligence for eight hours until he either passed out or wet himself. It met the letter of the law that super-users be kept up-to-date on things, but it hardly passed the spirit of that law.”

“Why is that so important?” asked Sean.

“We are in an information-overloaded society. Most people receive more information from just their smartphones in a week than their grandparents received in their entire lives. On the government and, most critically, the military end, it gets a lot trickier. From PFC cubicle warriors staring at hundreds of TV screens at top secret installations to four-stars muddling over their handhelds at the Pentagon. From a first-year clandestine analyst at Langley staring at a zillion satellite images to the national security advisor trying to make sense of reports stacked ceiling high on his desk, they’re all trying to take in more than is humanly possible. Do you know why air force pilots call their data screens ‘drool buckets’? There’s so much information on there they almost turn into zombies staring at it. You can train people to use technology better or focus more effectively, but you can’t upgrade someone’s neurological capacity. You have what you were born with.”

“And that’s where this E-Program came in?” asked Michelle.

“My brother is the latest in a short line of peculiar geniuses that have sought to fill that role. He is the ultimate multitasker who also has perfect attention to detail. His neurological pipe is immense. He can see it all and make sense of it.”

“And who exactly is behind the E-Program?” asked Sean. “The government?”

“Somewhat.”

“That’s all you can tell us?”

“For now.”

“And who do you work for?”

“I don’t work for anyone. I work with certain others. Of my choosing.”

Sean said, “Isn’t it a coincidence that your brother is working in intelligence too?”

“No coincidence about it. I encouraged Eddie to work in the field. I thought it would be a challenge for him, and I also thought he would be a terrific asset.”

She opened the car door.

“Wait,” exclaimed Sean. “You can’t leave now.”

“I’ll be in touch. For now, just do your best to stay alive. It will become harder as time goes by.”

“One last question,” said Sean.

Paul paused at the door.

Sean said, “Is your brother innocent like you said you believed? Or did he kill those people?”

At first Sean didn’t think she was going to answer the question.

“I stand by what I said, but at the end of the day only Eddie can definitively answer that.”

“If he did kill those people, his life is over. He won’t be going back to this E-Program.”

“In some ways my brother’s life was over a long time ago, Mr. King.”

PETER BUNTING SAT DOWN at the head of the table and looked around at the faces staring back at him. He was surrounded not by policy wonks who lived in the world of the hypothetical but by people who were deadly serious about national threats. Bunting both admired and feared these folks. He admired them for their public service. He feared them because he knew they routinely ordered the killing of other humans without losing a minute’s sleep over it.

This particular briefing, while perfunctory, was being handled by Bunting because of the high level of people present and also because of the extenuating circumstances, chief of which was Edgar Roy’s current situation. He didn’t send in the lackeys when he had a Cabinet secretary, various directors of intelligence, and four-stars seated at a table with china coffee cups in front of them. They expected him, and they were paying a lot of taxpayer money for the privilege.