Daemon

throngs of people. Mosely imagined the hopeful faces. His son’s among them.

Chapter 42:// Building Twenty-Nine
    Alameda Naval Air Station was a relic of the Cold War – mute testimony to the power of unrestrained government spending. A sprawling military base across the bay from downtown San Francisco, the station squatted on a billion dollars’ worth of real estate. Alameda’s aging collection of military barracks, hangars, docks, administrative buildings, power plants, landing strips, theaters, warehouses, and the occasional R&D oddity rose from a desert of concrete and asphalt covering the northern half of the island. You’d need a jackhammer just to plant geraniums there.
    The base was decommissioned in the 1990s, and the city of Oakland had debated for years what to do with the place. A short ferry ride from downtown, it was theoretically a developer’s dream. High-end condominiums, retail, and entertainment plazas crowded dozens of proposal blueprints, moldering in file cabinets while the city wrestled with soil toxicity and asbestos studies – the remnants of decades of military activities that knew no regulation or restriction.
    The base sat largely unchanged – except for the odd film production company or construction firm renting out space in hangar buildings. Where once navy jets were retrofitted, now graphic artists with nose rings sat beneath lofty concrete-reinforced ceilings. The runways stretched unused except by model car and airplane enthusiasts. Close by stood the retired aircraft carrier USS
Hood
and a flotilla of mothballed navy transport vessels. It was as if the sailors and pilots just disappeared one day, leaving everything behind.
    Jon Ross gazed out across the tarmac, imagining what thisplace must have been like forty years ago at the height of the Cold War. When America was the enemy.
    He shielded his eyes against the sun and tracked the progress of an unmarked Bell Jet Ranger helicopter coming in low over the distant hangars. It headed toward him – and toward Building Twenty-Nine.
    Building Twenty-Nine sat on the far end of a runway apron, on a strip of landfill jutting out into the bay. There wasn’t anything around it for a quarter mile in every direction – just flat concrete, marshland, and open water. The building itself was windowless, long, and narrow. A blockhouse of high-density concrete. It looked like it was built to survive a direct hit by a five-hundred-pound bomb – which it was.
    The helicopter descended, lifting up its nose as it crossed a razor-wire fence backed by concrete highway dividers blocking the entrance to the peninsula. Rent-a-cop security guards patrolled the perimeter, which was liberally marked with biohazard signs reading
Danger: Radon Contamination
.
    The chopper continued for a few hundred yards, then set down on a weed-tufted stretch of concrete within a hundred feet of Ross.
    Agent Roy Merritt stepped out. He wore an off-the-rack suit, bad tie flapping in the wind. His burn scars were still apparent on his face and neck, even at this distance. He nodded to the pilot as he pulled two cases from the rear seats – one a small ice chest marked with a red medical cross, the other a featureless black, hard-sided case. Merritt walked briskly to the edge of the chopper wash and let a grin crease his usually stern face as he saw Ross. The chopper rose into the air behind him and banked away over the bay, leaving them in comparative silence.
    Merritt nodded to Ross. ‘What’s with the escort?’
    ‘You tell me.’ Ross turned to regard the four heavily armed men standing next to him. They wore combat uniforms printedwith a new camouflage pattern, one designed to blend in with the background of society: black Kevlar helmets and matching body armor stamped with the friendly, white corporate logo of Korr Security International. Automatic weapons were slung over their shoulders. They stood silently by, as though they didn’t exist.
    ‘Let’s just say I’m closely monitored.’ Ross turned back to Merritt and smiled. ‘It’s good to see you, Roy.’ He offered to take the hard-sided black case.
    ‘Thanks.’ Merritt passed it to him, and then they shook hands. ‘I heard that you cut a deal with Washington. They treating you well?’
    ‘We’ve had some procedural disagreements. Apparently amnesty is a synonym for “prisoner” in the government dictionary.’
    Merritt frowned. ‘I know people in Washington. I’ll see what I can