Steve Martini - Guardian of Lies

Harry looks toward the camera mounted on a pole near the fence behind us. “That’s a big lens. First thing I noticed.”

“What’s that?”

“No magnolia leaves on the ground around it.”

“Maybe Pike has a good gardener,” I tell him.

Harry nibbles on his upper lip for a second, then shades his eyes with one hand. “No, that’s not it. You have to have a tree before you get leaves,” says Harry. “You see any magnolia trees out there?”

Harry is a bit of an amateur arborist. He knows more about trees than I do, which may not be saying much.

“Take my word for it, you don’t,” he says. “If the wind blew that magnolia leaf over that lens, it flew in on the jet stream from another county.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“As sure as I am that that leaf came by car. I’m getting a bad feeling,” says Harry, “the kind that sends little tingling pulses through what’s left of the hair on the back of my neck.”

“Why is that?”

“Our friend who jumped the fence and came this way, he seems abnormally inclined toward rearranging the things of nature,” says Harry. “And for some reason that scares the hell out of me.”

The request for services came from across the country, about as far from Virginia as you could get without going to Hawaii or Alaska. But it wasn’t this that made it peculiar. Herrington Labs fielded work on a daily basis from customers all over the globe.

The company had been in business doing special photo development, enhancement, and analysis, for more than sixty years. It had facilities in three states, all of them on the eastern seaboard.

For the first thirty years of its existence, the company’s bread and butter were government contracts, mostly with the military, the Department of Defense, space, and various intelligence agencies. Aerial and early space photography and their development and analysis were among Herrington’s specialties. Much of its work was classified. It hired large numbers of former military photo analysts and darkroom technicians in its labs. Company executives wined, dined, and maintained tight rapport with officials in the Pentagon.

At the time the name Herrington Labs, to those who recognized it, was nearly synonymous with the federal government. There were people, including some in the press, who believed that Herrington was owned by the government in the same way that Air America was owned by the CIA.

In the early seventies things began to change. The secrets of digital photographic enhancement, the kind that allowed pictures from other planets to be shot back to Earth and clarified in brilliant colors and sharp contrasts, was like the discovery of fire. It had potential for highly classified military applications. Powerful forces in government did not believe this was something to be shared with commercial vendors. The thought that much of this technology would find its way onto store shelves around the world in little more than a decade never entered their minds. They were too busy building government computer labs and other facilities in a futile effort to corral it.

As a result Herrington found itself under pressure to market its services to corporations, businesses, and the few well-heeled individuals who could afford them. By the mid-nineties, the swing away from Uncle Sam to the private sector was complete, so that rarely did the company see an RFP, a request for proposal, from any government agency. Herrington was doing fine, but its orientation had changed.

It was for this reason that the request that arrived by e-mail from California stood out. An analyst named Orville Honeycutt recognized the manner in which the request was fashioned. It was something he had not seen in decades, not since before the end of the Vietnam War. He guessed that this was the reason the assignment had finally been sent to him for processing, that and the fact that it was crap. It rattled around in one of the company’s servers for nearly three weeks while other staffers dodged it. In-house e-mail threads showed that four other analysts had sidestepped the job, saying they were too busy.

Honeycutt was one of the last company dinosaurs, sixty-two and a former military orphan hired out of army photo intelligence in the late sixties. He was now literally counting his days until retirement. As a short-timer, he got all the crap.

To top it off, the odious smell of paint was driving them all crazy. The painting contractor had been at it for two weeks. He was doing all of the offices and common areas. He may have been painting at night, but the smell lingered all day.

Some of the staff were getting outwardly hostile because of the mess, plastic drop cloths and sheeting over their desks in the morning, and paint dust everywhere. But mostly it was the smell. They were even leaving windows open to air the place out at night, in violation of company security.

Honeycutt tried to put it out of his mind and checked the directory of customer accounts on his computer, looking for Emerson Pike’s name or the name of his company, Pike’s Peak, which was on the signature of his e-mail along with his address. He needed to find an account number for billing before he could start the job. There was none. Emerson Pike was not a regular customer.

Honeycutt shot him a quick e-mail telling him to go on the company’s website and either fill out the form setting up an account, or else provide credit card information for the billing. The job would not be started until one or the other was completed.

But Honeycutt’s curiosity was piqued by some of the terminology used in Pike’s original e-mail that accompanied the digital images. These referred to techniques of enhancement that were applicable to older film technology. They were largely obsolete, but in their day were commonly used for intelligence work, most of it highly classified. This caused Honeycutt to wonder who Emerson Pike was, so he included a two-line postscript asking if Pike was associated with military or civilian intelligence and if so, what agency, as this might expedite the matter.

After hitting the Send button, he snapped open the attached images and assembled them into the company’s holding software for processing. This way he could examine all of the images simultaneously on the large flat monitor on his desk. There were seven photographs in all, one of which was a botched attempt at enlargement that was disclosed in the original e-mail. The shots looked to be ordinary, outdoor pictures of a small group on some kind of outing.

The pictures did not have the secret look of photos taken by a body-worn or hidden camera, no long angles or a single stationary viewpoint. Whoever took them was moving around and appeared to be mingling with the group. But the men in the shots weren’t smiling for the camera or posing. In fact, they didn’t seem to notice at all that the pictures were being taken. From the various gestures, hand and arm movements, and changes in body attitude captured in the still shots, Honeycutt guessed they were engaged in animated conversation.

The group consisted of six men in all, though only four of them appeared in focus in two of the shots. They were standing in a clearing, and what appeared to be a small structure, probably a house, was in the background of one of the pictures. There was a heavy wooden table with a few chairs around it in the distance, closer to the structure. The setting was forested. In two of the pictures, Honeycutt could see that in the background there was a deep valley with mountainous terrain on the other side, off in the distance. The wispy vapor of clouds rose from the canopy across the valley.

Only one of the figures appeared in all seven shots. It was an old man. Honeycutt couldn’t tell how old, but definitely up in years. The fact that each frame seemed to be centered on the old man led Honeycutt to conclude that whoever took the pictures had some special interest in him.