The President's Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth Page A

aircraft to covert military units, all wrapped up in what insiders called “the black world.” Zach figured that a pretty good chunk of that money was spent on rent in Chantilly alone.
    Chantilly was filled with corporations that existed mostly in theory, anonymous blocks of generically named tenants—Excelsior Transport LLC, Tech Solutions Ltd., Performance Design Inc.—in the office parks located near Dulles Airport. If the CIA ever decided to relocate, there would be a lot of vacancies to fill.
    Zach and his new colleagues parked their sharp black Humvees near one of these buildings, which looked exactly like its neighbors. A man was still putting the finishing touches on the new name on the glass door: BBC CONSULTING.
    “Don’t I rate a spot in the name?” Zach asked.
    “Just pretend one of the B’s stands for Barrows,” Bell told him.
    The offices were new, but plain: white-box workstations at every desk, freshly assembled from kits. Hewitt and Reynolds took up guard positions at the door. Zach and the others gathered in a conference room that had a table still covered in plastic wrap.
    Bell tore it away with one hand, stuffing it into a nearby wastebasket.
    “It’s show-and-tell time,” she said. “You share what you know, we’ll do the same.”
    “Why don’t you go first?” Zach said.
    Bell rolled her eyes. “If it makes you feel better,” she said.
    She gave him an expanded version of the basic facts they’d heard from Prador. A prisoner transport, sent from A/A facilities, had been routed to a group of Somali pirates. Whatever was actually inside was a mystery, but about an hour after it arrived, the Snakeheads began attacking the yacht in the gulf. That’s when Cade stepped in.
    “How did you track the shipment?”
    “We keep a comprehensive database,” Bell said.
    “What’s in it?”
    She shook her head. “Classified. We’re not about to let you look at proprietary information.”
    “That’s not a very cooperative attitude.”
    “We’ll search the database. We’ll relay what we find to you. Those are the terms. And before you go running off to tattle, Mr. Prador already agreed to them.”
    Thanks ever so much, Will, Zach thought. He thought about arguing, but it would be a waste of time. He’d have to rely on Bell and the others to get the info he’d need.
    “All right. Then you tell me: where was it supposed to be from? What was the fake info on the records?”
    “Routine transfer from Egypt,” Bell said. “Pretainees on their way to another interrogation facility in Ukraine.”
    “Pretainees?”
    “We’re not allowed to call them prisoners, since they haven’t been charged,” Bell said. “And they’re no longer ‘detainees,’ either. ‘Enemy combatant’ is a big no-no. So there’s a new classification, called ‘indefinite preventive detention.’ Those are the pretainees.”
    Zach grimaced. “It’s amazing we haven’t won the War on Terror already.”
    Bell flushed a little. “If all you can do is make jokes—”
    Zach wasn’t done. “Who had access to this prisoner transport?”
    “We don’t know,” Bell said.
    “Where did it originate?”
    “We don’t know.”
    “Who was in charge of the prisoners?”
    “We don’t—”
    “Right. You don’t know much, do you?”
    “Hey, genius, we’re a covert operation,” Book snapped. “You know what that means? It means we don’t keep a lot of paperwork around.”
    Bell nodded. “He’s got a point.”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Zach said. “It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. I never get tired of people telling me how important their job is as an excuse for screwing it up.”
    Candle and Book looked ready to explode, but Bell beat them to it. “You done with your little spasm of moral outrage? Because we don’t have time for you to prove how spotless your conscience is. We need to focus on how our system got infiltrated by the Company. We need to figure out how they got