Eden Plague - Latest Edition by David VanDyke Page B

anything, everyone hated them and no one forgot.
    He’d rather be an operator any day.
    He fidgeted until dinnertime, but a lot less than he would have. He could tell Zeke was a bit awkward around him, acting like he might pop or break or grow another head at any time. He tried to cover it, but Daniel could tell. At the same time he was sure Zeke very much wanted to find out what they needed to know. Desperately wanted to cure Ricky, if it could be done. Probably had other plans, as well. Zeke was a thinker, more than he was, and Daniel never thought of himself as a dumb jock. A smart jock at least, if not a geek like Vinny. But Vinny was too young to think more than one or two steps ahead. Zeke was deep. Dummies don’t get to be senior officers in Special Forces.
    They had venison for dinner, along with powdered mashed potatoes, boiled peas, bread and butter. It smelled heavenly. Spooky had brought a deer in, a little buck scrawny from winter, but he cooked up fine. Daniel had no idea if it was deer season or even legal. He laughed to himself.
My conscience has worse things to beat me up about right now than a deer out of season.
    Over dinner, Vinny laid it out. “INS’s office is in Norfolk, but a few phone calls and some pretexting found out that only two people work there. One office, a front desk, a conference room and a closet. Most of the employees live in Onancock.”
    Daniel looked blankly at him. In fact, they all did. He waited for someone to make a vulgar joke about such a funny name.
    “It’s a little town up on the peninsula north of Norfolk. Here.” He spun around a map he had printed off, showed them.
    “Why there?” Daniel asked.
    He smiled, kitty-cream. “I’ll show you. Look over here.” He pointed to the west, off the inner coast of the peninsula, at an island about ten miles off shore from the town of Onancock. There wasn’t even a name printed, but he’d handwritten “WATTS.”
    “Watts?”
    ”Watts Island. Uninhabited for about a hundred years. The INS company bought it from the State of Virginia five years ago for two point five million dollars. Way overpaid for three acres of usable land and a bunch of wet rocks, but the state didn’t ask too many questions. For that price they got an easement to build a facility and do ‘environmental research.’ Here’s imagery.” He laid down three overhead photos of the little island, with good commercial resolution.
    He’d marked the facility with a red circle. It looked like a big all-steel building, with two smaller ones of similar design, one at each end offset, with a parking lot between the three. In it was a lone white jeeplike vehicle. The buildings made a kind of ‘C’ shape with the open end to the east. There was a short paved road leading from the parking lot to a pier with a boathouse on the east shore.
    On the west side of the complex there was a white ‘H’ in the middle of a cleared circle, the universal symbol for a helicopter landing pad. No helo showed on the photo and there didn’t seem to be a hangar. The only other distinguishing features were some sort of utility installations inside a fence next to the building, probably a pair of generators and what looked like a large and a small satellite dish.
    “That’s where they are. I’d bet my next paycheck on it.”
    “No deal,” said Zeke. “You make more than I do, and you’re probably right. Great work, Vinny.”
    Daniel said so too. Even Spooky looked pleased, which wasn’t something people saw very often.
    “So here’s this thing,” Daniel said musingly, “maybe the greatest discovery since fire and the wheel, and it’s all pretty much out in the open to be found.”
    “That’s actually the best way to hide something anymore,” said Vinny. “Buried in a mass of innocuous data. I had to dig for this stuff. Without the idea that they had something valuable, they would be just another consulting company among hundreds, sucking down the government