Son of Tesla

SON OF TESLA: Chapter 38

VICKERS WATCHED THE COMMITTEE proceedings like a caged animal. After fuming away from the Fairfield Inn in Maryland, he and Brodham had taken a chopper to Langley and found a welcoming party standing at the edge of the helipad.

Brodham spent the entire flight spouting his wild theories to him. The man actually believed that Nikola Tesla was still living in another dimension. He related his dream – what else could it be? –' to Vickers with the crazed eyes of a farmer telling local police about the flying saucers stealing his sheep. The alien planet. Fire and ice. An army poised to strike like a nest of spiders. His hair was uncombed and mussed (was that part of a leaf clinging to the nape of his neck?), his eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, and he hadn't worn a tie since the roadside incident with the Blue. The Koschei, Vickers corrected himself sarcastically. And now Brodham wanted to take off for some place in Colorado. A hunch, he called it. Something about Nikola Tesla's old lab. He was coming unglued.

By the time the chopper descended from the clouds to land on the roof of the CIA building, Vickers had been ready to stick Brodham in a straitjacket and have him committed.

But then they'd found half a dozen armed agents waiting for them, and within five minutes they were in cuffs and sequestered away in a small briefing room on the third floor of the Langley headquarters.

And so the inquisition had begun.

John Riddle, Deputy Director of the CIA, circled the room slowly, hands clasped behind his back. The furnishings consisted of a single long, polished wooden table at the center of the room. A dozen chairs grouped around it. At the head of the room, a large, blue flag emblazoned with the CIA seal hung from the wall. If that flag could talk, Vickers thought, it would bury the whole agency under a pile of excrement three miles deep. This was the room where secrets lived. The back room. The one you never wanted to visit in cuffs.

And it was here that Alex Vickers and Bill Brodham, veteran agents, had been led from the helipad, silver cuffs clinking with every step. They now sat side by side at the foot of the table, hands resting on the table – they'd been cuffed in the front, not the back; a small courtesy given their status, Vickers knew – while a panel of grim-faced agency executives watched them in a semi-circle at the far end of the table. And presiding, John Riddle, clearly frustrated at having been called to deal with a dispute involving his own men.

"...and now a charge of assault!" Riddle was mid-rant. He paused to swear. It seemed to be his way of breathing. "Tell me how two field operatives as distinguished as yourselves could put the agency in this kind of hot water."

"In our def-" Vickers began. Riddle cut him off.

"It was a rhetorical question, Vickers," he snapped. "General Samil is out for blood, and I'm here to see that he gets it. Brad, you know as well as I do that Army interference is rarely welcome here..." A lumpy, balding man seated at the table nodded. "...but we can't exactly shrug off a flagrant attack on a commanding officer from one of our own men. There will be times in the future when we're forced to rely on Army assistance, and if there's one thing I know about those assholes, it's that they never forget."

John Riddle's thin, severe face clenched under his frameless eyeglasses. His jaw worked up and down, as if he were grinding his teeth. Vickers had never seen him so angry, and frequent displays of anger were like religious observance to the man.

"It was my fault," Brodham stepped into the pause. "I instigated it. Agent Vickers was simply backing me up as he's been trained. The fault is mine."

Vickers was hardly surprised. Good ol' Bill, taking the fall again. The man's brain was a train running on a straight and narrow track. Cargo: virtue and stupidity.