The Things We Bury - Part 1: In Anticipation of the End of the World [Completed]

Chapter 1: Project LARS (Part 2 of 6)

"Not building, retrofitting. We've obtained a decommissioned DOD bunker in the desert outside of Phoenix. It had been used for securing high profile assets. But it's been a nightmare getting everything organized with such a tight schedule."

Why was Grierson telling him this? It had to be classified.

When the Philadelphia field office loaned him out, he was told that Project LARS was under a need-to-know restriction. The information on the project had only been doled out to him with each assignment. They still hadn't even told him what LARS stood for. The only information he had was that after a rampage in a suburban community, the person known as LARS had been captured and quarantined as a biohazard.

Yet here Grierson was spilling the beans about a top secret containment facility that would only be completed after he was back on regular duty.

Games within games. That's what Owsley always said. His old commander and mentor had taught him that's how things worked. Everyone lied. Everyone manipulated. Everyone would try and play you. The best defense was to wrap your lies within lies and play games within games.

He took a hard look at Grierson: the rheumy eyes, the sweat-stained collar, razor nick by the left ear - healing for two, maybe three days. No, he wasn't sharp enough to be trying to play Maxwell. He'd spent too much of his time behind a desk and had gotten old and soft.

He was a conceited oaf that got off sharing his wisdom and his problems with underlings, people who couldn't talk back or walk away. Maxwell concluded Grierson was simply too busy pontificating to pay attention to what came out of his mouth.

Grierson made an all-encompassing wave. "Pain in the ass, from beginning to end. I'd love to see Peterbilt's face if he actually did get LARS."

Did Grierson mean the project or the prisoner? What was wrong with the person coded LARS anyway? How does someone become a biohazard? Was he responsible for the attacks on Bluebell Crescent or the result of them? Maxwell was far too prudent to ask those questions. That kind of inquisitiveness led to unmarked graves. Not to mention that after some of the extremely strange things he'd seen since coming on board at the DTAA, he knew that if they didn't want you to know something, they were probably doing you a favor.

Grierson thumbed the file with all of Maxwell's status updates. "I didn't have a chance to read your entire report. What happened on the media front?"

"Standard. I gave the mainstream press the official line about the coyote attack and backed it up with autopsy evidence and the redacted reports from Animal Control. Then I fed a story about javelinas that had mutated by runoff from a chemical plant to several conspiracy bloggers."

It was the old one-two: when you have a cover story that doesn't hold much water, create a preposterous counter-story. Muddies everything, and real reporters stick with the official line because they don't want to seem like nutcases.

"What the hell is a Half-a-Lina?"

"Javelina. A wild, desert pig."

"Good god! Are there really such things?" Fear frosted the edges of his disgust. What was he picturing? Was it anything like the doctored photos of that four hundred pound boar with horns, which Maxwell had leaked?

"Yes, but they're actually pretty harmless." They were ugly as hell but not known to attack people.

Grierson seemed to forget about what they were talking about as he continued to sift through the folders on his desk. He opened one on top of a stack on the left-hand side of the desk and said, "Ah, I have your next assignment for you." He pushed the whole pile towards Maxwell.

He picked them up and thumbed through them. Each one contained a bio sheet stapled to assessment reports from various agencies.

"So you want me to kill them." Maxwell knew full well that they would never assign twenty— No. Eighteen wet jobs to a single operative in one shot, but he was curious to see Grierson's reaction.

The Sector Chief leaned back in his chair seemingly considering the question like he might go either way on it. "No." His jowls quivered, while he shook off Maxwell's suggestion. "No, nothing like that. I want you to recruit them."