Sedona Conspiracy

CHAPTER TWO ^REACTIONS

The helicopter came in at tree level and dropped towards a concrete pad surrounded by green lawn. Twin rotors synchronized and pitched for stealth, the black polymer fuselage landed gently without lights. Darkness came early in the Catalina Mountains of Arizona, and a single window was dimly illuminated in the sprawling silhouette of the ranch house. The figure of a man was standing there, looking outside.

Gilbert Norton came down three steps from the craft, briefcase in hand, and was met by two men who nodded a silent greeting and escorted him shoulder-to-shoulder to the front door of the main house. One of two guards there, dressed casually in jeans and woolen shirts, opened the door and Gilbert left his escorts behind. Inside, the foyer was in gloom; Gil passed four men who watched silently from chairs and a sofa, and walked directly to the line of small night-lights leading down a long hallway to a closed door. He knocked four times, paused briefly, and opened the door.

Log walls and a high, beamed ceiling glowed in the light from a hissing fire in the great stone fireplace. Two leather sofas, a chair and a massive oak desk were the furnishings, and two walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling. A man sat behind the desk. He smiled.

“Good to see you, Gil. Have a good trip?”

“I did, Mister President. Thank you. Because of your encouraging phone call the report arrived on time. I have it here.” Gil patted his briefcase with one hand.

“Good. Well, do sit down, and take off that overcoat.”

Gil took off his coat and draped it over a sofa before sitting down in a leather chair in front of the desk. The heat on the back of his neck felt like it was coming from a blast furnace. He was immediately thirsty, but said nothing. He took a thin folder from his briefcase and pushed it across the desk to his host.

The President of the United States opened the folder and began reading. Gil watched stoically, rigid in his chair. Sweat was running down the back of his neck, and his mouth was powder dry. Suddenly the President looked up at him.

“Sorry, Gil. Got the fire too hot tonight. There’s a bar just right of the fireplace. Why don’t you fix both of us a scotch with plenty of ice? We need to talk this thing through leisurely.”

“Yes, Mister President.”

“It’s not a breach of protocol to call me Arthur in this room, Gil.”

Gil smiled. “I realize that, Mister President. It’s a matter of respect, sir.”

Arthur Evans shook his head. “Just for that you can pour yourself a triple. Me too. One page into this, and I’m already irritated.”

Gil went to the bar and made their drinks while his President read. When he returned with the drinks he found Evans frowning at the open file in front of him.

“It gets worse and worse. Now the Green Party is pissed at us. That makes it unanimous. The Reds and the Blues have opposed cooperation from the get-go. Nothing they do surprises me, but I’ve never heard such strong language from the Greens. We can’t let their military be involved, Gil. It’s an open invitation to anarchy.”

“I realize that, sir. I see it as a security issue, and some sloppy leadership. There’s pressure for quick results, and testing has not been either safe or secure. There was another civilian sighting last week. The fringe folks are on to it, and it’ll be on the web any day. Security is a shambles, sir, and our colleagues are only pointing this out.”

“But they’re asking for a change of command, Gil, and I’m not going to authorize it. We have too many insiders as it is. NSA should be putting pressure on Davis to tighten security, not me. Officially I don’t know anything about this operation, remember?”

“Yes, sir. We have a man in place, but Davis has the authority and is pushing hard. The Pentagon is pleased with that, and has not been sympathetic to my complaints.”

“Bradley and his OSS mentality again,” said the President. “I’ll give him a personal call in the morning. This operation will be secure, or the leadership moves to Langley.”

“I appreciate that, Mister President. I think we’re better trained to run operations this deep, anyway, but we’re always ready to give advice if the military is willing to listen to us. There’s another concern, sir, if you’ll read further.”

Arthur Evans scowled at him, but read on rapidly, riffling pages. He raised an eyebrow, tapped the file with a finger. “So, when did these little ‘accidents’ begin?”

“Two months ago, maybe earlier. Little things at first: parts missing, inventory errors, some backup disks mysteriously erased. Lately it’s more serious: mislabeled fuel lines, weld breaks in a sodium loop, and then a broken cable nearly lost a lift pod for us in the main bay. It’s more than circumstance, sir. I think it’s planned, and so do our allies. the Reds in particular have denied any efforts to block technology transfer, even though they’ve vocally opposed it. The Blues say they won’t dignify such an insulting accusation with an answer.”

“Personal opinion, Gil,” said Evans.

“I think one or both groups are lying, sir, though I can’t see them working together on something like this. It could also be a few people in their ranks. I think the incidents are planned, and project Shooting Star is in danger. We can’t afford delays of any length, and if the Greens feel their interests are threatened our window of opportunity could be closed in an instant. Even your good will won’t be able to prevent it, Mister President.”

“There was a time when I could talk to them,” said Evans.

“That was when you had my job, sir, before the senate years and the presidency. These aren’t the same people you were dealing with then. You’re a stranger to them.”

“That’s why I have people like you around me, Gil. I can squeeze the Pentagon to tighten base security, but these other things take a different kind of fix. I see a lot of finger pointing in this report. This has to stop. We need to restore the Greens’ confidence and excise the bad guys if there’s active sabotage going on. Give me some ideas on how to do it.” Evans steepled his fingers in front of his face, awaiting an immediate answer from the man he had trained two decades before in a previous life.

“I want to send in a new field operative, sir. He’s very deep in our structure, one of five men who’ve worked indirectly with the Greens in East Europe. Our people know him as an outstanding data analyst, but he’s killed for us on two occasions. I want to send him into the base as a support analyst to speed up tech-transfer, but his parallel mission will be to find out who our enemies are in Shooting Star and to neutralize them.”

“You think one man can do this?”

“It’s pretty much a closed shop, sir. Any more than one new person could be suspicious. And the man I’m considering is a lone wolf at his best.”

“You don’t need my authorization, Gil. Do what you think is necessary, but get us that technology, the plane, the generator, the whole package intact. I don’t have to tell you how much we need it.”

“I understand, Mister President. My operative will be on his way by tomorrow evening. I’m seeing him in the morning.”

Evans smiled, and downed the last half of his drink in a gulp. “Anything I can do, Gil. Keep me in the loop.”

“I will, sir.”

“I miss it, you know. The challenges, action, even the fear. But I was a lot younger, then.”

“I know the feeling, sir. All I fly now is a desk, but I have good people to do the work and I try to stay out of their way. A good man once taught me that.”

Evans smiled again. “Finnish that scotch, then, and join me for a sandwich and coffee before you have to leave. It’s been a while, Gil. I want to hear all about those grandkids.”

They retired to a dining room with a long oaken table lit by candles, and a military chef served them slices of rye bread and a plate heaped with pastrami. They talked until midnight, renewing a friendship going back three decades, a common heritage going back to childhood in the desert country of the southwest. And when the helicopter lifted off, Gil looked outside, saw the silhouette of his president and friend standing behind the dimly lit window, and he contemplated the loneliness of great power.

The helicopter sped him to the base where he would don pressure suit and helmet for the Mach 4 flight back to Langley. Gil only glanced at the bright stars in a clear Arizona sky, then took the file of Eric Price out of his briefcase and began to read. It was a thick file, full of a rich history of both brilliance and violence, the history of a complex man with multiple personalities living together under an uneasy truce.

Gil needed all of those personalities to work together this time. He searched for a way to encourage it. By the time he got back to Langley, he actually thought he’d found the answer.

The ceiling of the cavern was a hundred feet above the red-rock floor, and two cranes moved along hanging tracks there, preparing to move cargo. The port wall itself was now darkened and transparent, and the lights behind it flickered like distant stars. It was already cold, and the men waiting in front of the wall hugged thick parkas to stay warm.

The cranes were dropping their great hooks toward the floor when a baffled door screeched upwards in a far wall of the cavern, and an electric switch engine pushed two flat cars inside on another set of tracks to receive cargo. As they came to a stop, the port wall suddenly turned green, then blue with flashes of red, and rolled upwards like another great door. Behind it was pitch-blackness, then sudden movement. Packing crates eight feet wide and equally high came out of the darkness, each carried on a hydraulic lifter operated by a single man. The men awaiting their arrival rushed to attach webbing and lift-eyes to each crate, and the cranes dutifully moved each across the cavern to the receiving flatcars. There were ten crates, and in twenty minutes they were loaded and the switch engine backed slowly out of the cavern with its precious cargo, the door closing behind it. Ten men pushed the hydraulic lifters back into the darkness, the port wall shimmered green, and was transparent again.

Nobody noticed that eleven men had come in with the lifters.

The cranes moved back into their resting positions in the corners of the cavern, the operators descending in one-man elevators in clear plastic tubes and joining the rest of the receiving crew. A military flatbed truck came to get them and drove them out of the cavern along an open tunnel curving out of sight near the train tracks.

High above the floor, a long window looked out onto the port wall. Figures moved there. The lights in the cavern went out, leaving only the star-like flickers of blue behind the port. The light behind the window went out. Silence descended on the cavern, and remained there for several minutes.

Suddenly, a red light bloomed by the port wall. The light was carried by a man who went straight to one of the elevators, and lifted himself to the control cabin of a crane. An electric engine whirred, and the crane’s great lifting hook was lowered to the floor. The man descended from the cab, went to the hook. A second light flared, this one white and hot, and the man played it over the crane’s lifting cable at a single spot for only a few seconds. He ascended the elevator again, and the crane’s hook was lifted back to its resting position. The electric engine ceased to whir. Again there was only the red light as the man came down the elevator and went back to stand at the port wall. The red light flicked out. Blackness and silence returned to the cavern, but not for long.

The port wall suddenly shimmered green, and then blue and red as it soundlessly rolled upwards. The silhouette of the man was briefly visible before the port closed again, and the man was gone.

The cavern was empty again.