Grierson slammed down the receiver and sighed, releasing a lifetime of disappointment and frustration into the atmosphere of the stale office. He stared at the phone, as though waiting for it to launch some new attack on his spirit. After a small eternity, he raised his slumped head. He seemed surprised to see Maxwell Wiley sitting across the desk from him, even though they had shaken hands less than five minutes before.
Maxwell smiled. His manner was calm and relaxed. He did a good job of hiding his anxiety at the thought of the mountain pressing down on top of them.
"I'll be happy when we're out of this shit hole." It was the first words Grierson had spoken to him.
Maxwell broadened his smile to give the impression of agreement. He always found it difficult to fake the expressions his face wanted to perform naturally, but he kept control over his features. He would be just as happy as the Sector Chief to be done with the underground base, probably more so. The very thought of meeting Grierson down here filled him with dread. Each second of the trip from McCarran International to the desolate salt flats was spent anxiously anticipating that crushing feeling of claustrophobia, which would collapse on top of him once he arrived.
"I don't know how many times I have to have the same argument with Peterbilt." Grierson rubbed his forehead. The weary gesture was an invitation for Maxwell to ask about it.
"Does the Colonel not like you using up his office space?"
"He wants LARS." Grierson leaned back in his swivel chair, looking less dejected. Complaining appeared to be beneficial to his mood. "The bastard doesn't seem to understand, I can't turn a U.S. citizen over to him, even if I wanted to."
"A little too Earthbound for his purview, I guess." Maxwell threw out the little quip just to keep his boss talking.
With a faint chuckle, he said, "A little, yes."
Maxwell grinned at his own joke, hiding his amusement that Grierson had slipped and revealed that whatever LARS was, it was terrestrial after all.
"Hell, I'd be thrilled for the Air Force to take over this mess." As Grierson made this little confession, the small laugh that had been barely there disappeared without a trace lost in the man's gloomy jowls.
"All of this crap." He pointed to a paper in the center of his blotter and then started poking at the file folders scattered across the desk. "Witness suppression, media relations, crime scene clean up, appeasing local and State law enforcement, building estimates, rezoning permits..."
When he was done, he groaned and put his head in his hands. If Maxwell didn't know better, he would have thought the old man was putting on theatrics for his benefit. But in the week he'd known him, Grierson had proved to be ridiculously melodramatic.
Maxwell felt no sympathy since it had been him, who had been assigned to take care of those problems, while Grierson's role consisted mainly of moving files from one side of his desk to the other. He had dealt with almost all of those complications, but this was the first time he had heard anything about construction. "Are we building something?"
"Our own facility. The project has been given a budget and the go ahead. We plan to be out of here by May First."
"The First?" That was two weeks away. It didn't make sense. If they were keeping LARS down in the bowels of Groom Lake, he had to be a serious threat. How could they slap together a new facility so quickly and have it be anywhere near secure?
"Are we going to be able to build it that fast?" Maxwell used we even though he'd be long gone by May. It was better to be inclusive to make Grierson comfortable with him.
"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."