The Grays

FIFTEEN

LAUREN WATCHED THE COLONEL AS he moved back and forth, back and forth. She’d never seen him like this, all of his rigorous professionalism gone, his eyes flickering from place to place like an animal looking for escape from a cage.

“Where’s Andy? Andy is supposed to meet us here.”

“Andy is gone.”

“And you don’t know where, of course.”

“No, sir, I had no idea he would leave.”

“You know your problem, Lauren? You’re naïve. Relentlessly damned naïve!”

“I—sir, I did everything I could. I only backed out of there because I had no choice.”

“You didn’t think to detain Andy?”

“Of course not! Why in the world would I do that?”

“You don’t have the whole picture, I grant you that. With all his years in the hole, working with you empaths, Andy knew a little more than you do.”

“Has he, uh, what has he done?”

“Run, you damned fool!”

“Don’t you take that tone with me.”

He gave her a look that made her step away from him. He’d never been a pleasant man to work with, but he seemed violent now, and she did not like this, she did not like it at all.

They were standing in his smoke-stained office. The fire department had saved the house, but the facility below was a total loss.

“I want to know the truth of this thing, Lauren, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t think I’m getting it from you.”

That made heat rise in her cheeks. She did not like her own professionalism challenged. “My report is correct in every detail.”

“Don’t you understand what happened, even yet?”

“Of course I do. There was a grass fire, it spread to the air intake, and flammables in the air dryers ignited. That’s the official verdict and it’s also the truth.”

“Then where’s Adam?”

“Excuse me?”

“You do understand that there were no remains.”

“Well it was incinerated, then. He was, I mean. All they pulled out of there was ash, anyway. Black, sodden ash, I saw it.”

“It’s been gone through and there are no remains!”

“He burned! Burned!” And she was crying. Thinking of him. “He had a beautiful mind, you know. Incredibly beautiful.”

“The skeleton is made of a metal that’s quite indestructible. But we did not find that skeleton down there, and the rubble was sifted through screens. It was very carefully gone through, Lauren, so I think you must be lying to me.”

“You’re beneath contempt, you know that?”

He backhanded her. The blow came unexpectedly, a flash in her right eye. For a moment, she was too stunned to understand what had hit her. Then she did understand and a torrent of pure rage filled her. “That’s a violation,” she said, trying to force the anger out of her voice, “and I’m going to put you up on charges for it.”

She realized that he was laughing in her face, then that he was withdrawing a pistol from underneath his tunic. She was very quick of mind, which is one of the reasons that she was effective with Adam, and that quickness enabled her now to recall the rumors that people could get into lethal trouble in these deep black programs. Within perhaps three seconds of the weapon appearing—in fact, before he even had it fully out, she had turned and left the room.

Leaping down the stairs, she brought all of her considerable athleticism to bear. She hit the floor, staggered—and heard a gigantic roar. She knew what it was a shot. He was trying to kill her. She dashed across the hall as a second shot crashed into the wall beside the door. It was close, she could feel the heat of it on her cheek. He was a damned good shot, getting that close from that far away with a .45.

She got the door open and another shot rang out. She ran down the sidewalk and out into the middle of the street. She had to get this out in public, that was her only hope, and keep enough distance between them to make a hit a matter of luck. Fifty feet, at least. Closer and he would not miss.

She ran down the middle of the street, zigzagging and not making the mistake of looking back. Damn this neighborhood, it was too damn quiet! Just one car, please, just one damn car—but there were none.

Maybe not all of Dad’s nightmares had been about the grays, maybe he had also feared this sort of thing happening to him one day.

Then, as she rounded the corner, a lovely Mustang with two coeds in it appeared. “Help!” She stood in front of them waving her arms. “Help! I need the police! Help me!”

As they swerved around her, she yelled into the car, “Help me!”

They did not help her and she ran on. Almost immediately, she heard the growling of a powerful engine and the whine of tires. He was turning the corner.

She raced down the driveway of one of the large homes and threw herself down behind the garbage cans beside its garage. Hiding there, barely breathing, she heard a car stop. It was him, it had to be.

She dared not look, dared not move, found herself hardly able to breathe. She had never been this scared, never remotely. She could almost literally feel the sensation of the gun pointing at her.

She heard footsteps on the driveway, soft, quick… and then a loud click and some muttered words. A woman was there. Her remote control hadn’t worked.

She brought her car into the garage and the door began closing.

Lauren sobbed, stood up, started toward the house—and in that moment Wilkes’s Phaeton came snarling up the driveway.

She turned and ran, crashing past the garbage cans and down the side of the house, across the expansive backyard where an elderly man struggled with a broken gate. “Call the police,” she shouted as she darted into the alley.

Behind her, she heard Wilkes snap, “Official business,” to the old man. Curse him, the bastard was in uniform, too. She would get no help.

She moved to the end of the alley, darted across the street and into the next alley. She pressed herself back into a tangle of bare bushes, hoping that he would miss her.

A moment later, she saw him come out of the other alley. The gun was now concealed. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving. He looked up and down the street, then toward this alley. He stared a long time at the big shrub. He was looking right at her, but apparently couldn’t see her.

Then he took out the gun. He went down on one knee and braced it toward the shrub. She got ready to run. He snapped the barrel—and she froze. She bared her teeth, fighting the urge to break cover like a terrified pheasant. You did not need to do what he’d just done to cock a .45 automatic. Therefore, he’d done it for effect, to frighten her into moving. He was guessing.

Finally, he stuffed the gun under his jacket and began hurrying away.

A moment later, she heard his car start. She moved deeper into the alley and crouched down behind the edge of a shed. She could not be seen from the street at all. She called Ted on her cell.

“Hey, bad girl.”

“Teddy, love, listen to me and listen close. Never go back to my apartment. Never, at all, for anything.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“Okay, Ted, I know how this sounds. But you’ll be in terrible danger if you go back there. Don’t even come in the neighborhood.”

“Lauren?”

“I’m not ditching you, I’m warning you. There’s terrible danger, Ted. It has to do with my work, and I am extremely serious. If you go back there, you will be tortured and you will be killed. You just forget it, you forget me, you go on with your life.”

She broke down, then, so badly that she held the cell phone away from her ear and gritted her teeth to keep from sobbing.

“Lauren, what’s going on?”

She forced back the tears. “Where are you now? No—don’t tell me! I shouldn’t have asked, not on this phone. Look, you can help us both. Go to the Air Police. Tell them that Colonel Wilkes threatened us with a gun. Both of us!”

“He didn’t.”

“He did, he threatened me, he shot at me.”

“Jesus!”

But the Air Police weren’t going to be able to help. They couldn’t reach into a black program like hers. He would end up confronting all kinds of questions he couldn’t answer, and probably confronting Wilkes into the bargain. “No, I’m not thinking straight. Don’t go near the Air Police. Move back on base and just go about your business. You’ll be left alone.”

“Lauren, I love you.”

“Oh, Ted, no you don’t. You were going to, but it hasn’t happened yet because I ditch guys before it does happen, and stuff like this is the damn reason. You obey me on this. You trust me and you obey me.”

Silence.

“Ted, promise!”

“You can’t tell me a thing, can you?”

“Not one thing.” She closed her cell phone, leaned against the wall of the shed for a moment, then continued on.

She went down the alley to the next street and crossed it quickly. She continued this process, going down one alley and then the next, until she arrived on North Meridian at the edge of University Park. She went into a Starbucks and moved about looking at the coffee machines and CDs, staying well away from the front of the store.

She thought that Colonel Wilkes might well have license to kill her as a security risk. In fact, he would never have pulled his gun if he hadn’t known for certain that he would get away with it.

She remembered, suddenly, a story Andy had told her. At the time, it had seemed like so much scuttlebutt, the kind of thing that went down over beers. Now she knew that the tale of the code experts who were lobotomized on retirement, as lurid as it was, had been a veiled warning.

Andy was gone because he’d understood the situation they were in the instant he found out what had happened. He was running, probably even had an escape plan all worked out for himself.

She had no such plan, and zero confidence that she could survive very long at all in this situation. She had no operational training at all. Beyond the basic attack-and-defense maneuvers and gun skills she’d learned at Lackland, she was not capable.

If she had Adam, though, things would be different. If she brought Adam back, instead of being a liability, she’d become an asset again.

If Adam wasn’t dead, and Wilkes had been certain that he wasn’t, then where was he? Given how fast he could move and his ability to make himself so hard to see, he must have escaped without her seeing him go. Left her behind to die.

No, not Adam. He was always ten moves ahead. He’d have known that she would escape on her own. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted her to, or hadn’t cared.

Nobody had ever told her much of anything about the way the grays functioned, whether they had bases or satellites or even exactly what they were, for that matter. So how would she go about finding somebody that weird, who had all these special powers and abilities?

She could try remote viewing for him, but that only worked if you were completely calm, and anyway, she wasn’t much good at it. All she was good at was making pictures for Adam and seeing the ones he sent her.

She couldn’t reach him that way, either, because that only worked from a few feet away. Oh, she could sense things about Adam from a distance—sort of intuit them, but there was no mind connection over distance that she’d ever experienced.

So where did that leave her? She couldn’t very well go looking behind houses and in trash cans. There was no point at all trying to find Adam. Adam was lost to her.

She was at a loss, getting so frantic that tears were forming in her eyes. This feeling of being trapped was just hideous and it was panicking her and making it hard for her to think clearly.

She decided that there was only one real option open to her. She had to go in. She had to go straight to Wright-Pat and actually file a complaint against Wilkes. She was within her rights, the man had shot at her. If she was a liability, fine. The more public she became, the safer she’d be from the shot in the night.

When she saw a bus pull past and stop at the corner, she hurried out of the store and got on it. It would go downtown, she was fairly sure. “I need to get to the Greyhound station,” she told the driver.

“First stop on Illinois, walk two blocks, you’ll see the sign.”

“Thank you.” She took one of the seats in the very last row, because there were no windows beside it. She sat wondering what she might do, where she might go. She thought carefully.

She knew that there were other aspects to the operation. Somebody watched for violations of the agreement with the grays about who they could involve themselves with. But who? She had no idea and no way of finding out.

Again, though, she might find out more at Wright-Pat. Officially, she was stationed there, on detail to the facility. Given that the facility was now inoperable, she couldn’t be said to be violating any orders if she returned to base. In fact, that was likely her legal requirement.

She saw that they were passing her condo. She looked up toward her windows, thinking that all her stuff was there and maybe she would never see it again, or her cute little car that was still parked at the facility or any of her old life, not Ted or any of her friends.

As she looked away, she felt a sudden shudder go through her body. And she was in the apartment. Vivid. Real. Her bed still unmade, yesterday’s skirt on the floor of the bedroom, a flat beer open on the kitchen counter. All of it, just as it was.

Then she was back in the bus.

She knew it immediately: Adam was there, Adam was in her apartment! She jumped up. “Let me off! Let me off the bus!” She hurried forward. “Driver, you have to stop!”

“Express to downtown,” he said.

Idiot! She thought fast. They were a quarter of a mile away, the place was likely to be watched, she should not risk this. But it was her best shot, she was sure of it. “If you don’t stop this bus, I’ll throw up on your head!” She leaned over him and started gagging.

The bus was stopped and the door was open and she was running back up the street toward the condo. She was insane to be risking this, of course, but Adam was there, he must be, he had to be. That was Adam’s mind broadcasting to hers, it was totally and completely unmistakable.

As she ran, she looked for Mike’s Phaeton but didn’t spot it. Maybe she’d outrun him.

No, don’t be a fool, assume only the worst. You didn’t need operational training to understand that.

She went into the cleaners next door. “Hi, Mr. Simmons,” she said.

“Hey, Lauren—”

She ducked behind the counter and headed to the back of the establishment.

“Lauren?”

“Hey, Mrs. Fink,” she said to the seamstress as she passed her sewing station and went out the back door.

She ran up the alley and then took the stairs down to the trash room, and opened the steel outer door with her passkey, which fit all the building’s outside locks. Going through into the basement, she hurried past Jake Silver, their handyman.

“Miss Glass!”

“Hey there, Jake, taking the back way today.” She went to the elevators and pressed the button.

“You ain’t supposed to come through there. That’s not a door, Miss Glass.”

The elevator opened and she got in without responding to him. She started to punch seven, thought better of it, and took the car to the top floor, nine. The corridor was silent, the air smelling faintly of cooking. She went down to the fire stairs and took them two flights.

Her own corridor was just as quiet. She formed a thought—Adam’s face, with a feeling of question attached to it.

Instantly, there came back another thought—an image of her own face. It wasn’t Adam’s usual signature, but it was certainly an image from him, she could tell by how it felt when it appeared, bursting out into her mind like a television picture.

She opened the door and went into her flat. She stood in the doorway with the door still open behind her. From many, many questions she had put to Adam, she knew that whoever she really worked for was attempting to understand and use the process of communication by mind. They had even had her test the range, which was about a quarter of a mile, and could pass through anything except a certain type of electrical field, which was used at times to isolate Adam in the cage.

She looked toward her bedroom. Everything was as she had seen it in the bus, every detail. In the back of her mind, she had been worrying that this was some kind of trick on Mike’s part to draw her here, so now she closed the door and double-locked it—as if that would keep him out for more than a few seconds—and moved deeper into the apartment.

She’d never been with Adam outside of the cage and on one level she was fascinated to find out what this would be like. Hunching her shoulders to express an atmosphere of question, she moved into the center of the living room. With a faint click that made her gasp, the heat turned on. “Hello,” she said. “Adam?” Simultaneously, she projected an image of his face—well, not really his face, because she’d hardly ever actually seen it except in glimpses, but a sort of generic face, long and thin, with big, black eyes.

There was a sound behind her. She turned, but there was nothing there. “Please don’t hide,” she said. “I need you, now.”

Another noise came, behind her again. She turned, and for a moment could not understand what she was seeing. There were two small creatures, each about four feet tall, standing near the broad picture window that crossed the front wall of the big living room. She was appalled at how insectlike they looked, shocked by the gleaming eyes, the expressionless faces, the gracile forms. Insectoid children.

As she stepped forward they turned into two great vultures, black, their red and terrible eyes glaring, their huge beaks open, their wings spread in warning.

A scream pealed out of her, totally involuntary, and she jumped away—only to feel something leap on her back. It held her arms down with an iron grip, its legs pressed against her hips. She could hear it breathing, an absolutely regular sound, like some sort of machine.

Frantically, she projected an image of herself on her knees, then went down as best she could. She made an image of herself as a little girl.

The two vultures postured, screaming, their wings spread wide.

She projected an image of a beautiful garden, then of she and Adam sitting together, then of Adam with his head in her lap—imaginary, of course, she’d never seen him so close.

One of the grays before her became itself again. The other turned into an enormous hooded cobra, coiled against the wall, its head raised a good four feet off the floor, the hood extended, its tongue licking the air.

Then the one that had grabbed her disappeared.

As she had at first with Adam, she sat down, closed her eyes, and cleared her mind. She brought a long-ago trip to the seaside to mind, the blue waves, the smell of suntan oil, the seagulls crying. “It’s okay,” she said, “I know you’re scared. I’m scared, too. But Adam is my friend. I love Adam.” She opened her hands on her knees. “I want to help you.”

The cobra swayed. The other gray stared at her. The one behind her slid its long hands around her neck.

She made an image of Adam again, then of the ruined facility, then of Wilkes shooting at her, then of her running through along an alley. She fired these off fast, one after another.

The cobra struck at her—and was suddenly a gray again, hanging in midair before her. She fought to quell her terror. The gray disappeared, but not completely. The three of them were racing around her, moving so fast through the air that they were blurs.

She got an image of Adam running, then rising into the sky in a shaft of shimmering light.

In return, she made an image of Adam in the light, then of herself in a coffin. She imagined Mike Wilkes closing the coffin with a bang.

Then she said, “Take me with you,” and imagined herself in a shaft of light, going up.

The blurring movement stopped. The condo suddenly seemed empty. Then she saw, in her mind’s eye, Mike’s Phaeton pulling up down front. He was here.

He was coming—but they were helping her! She blanked her mind as completely as she could.

Immediately, she saw a satellite photo of a small community, a big light in a field behind it. Then an image of a little boy, not the one Adam had shown her, but another child, and Adam was standing behind him. Then Adam stepped forward and went into the child. For a moment, they were superimposed on one another, then the child threw his head back and got this look on his face of ecstasy… or was he screaming? When he was quiet again, his eyes were like two headlights, with fire glowing out of them.

The vision was replaced by another one of Mike, this time in the lobby waiting for the elevator.

She made an image of him blowing her brains out, which caused something to happen, a feeling of movement, in fact, of rushing.

When she opened her eyes, the world was a blur. Then she saw the city wheeling below her, then the sky, its hard winter-blue glowing, then she heard a great, crashing noise and a building rushed up toward her.

She stopped, there were water noises—and a man was sitting in front of her. He stared up at her, his eyes bulging. “WHAT IN HELL?”

She wasn’t in her apartment, she was in a men’s room, in a closed stall, face to face with a guy sitting on a toilet. She stared down at him. He covered his midriff with his hands.

“Get out of here,” he rasped. “Get out!”

“Sorry, uh, sorry, I took a wrong turn.”

She opened the stall and left the men’s room as fast as she could. Behind him, she heard him yell, “What the fuck? The fuck! Hey!”

She was in the Greyhound station. Thank you, she said in her mind, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

She hurried to the ticket window, bought a ticket for $25.50 cash and immediately got on the waiting bus, which was due to leave in four minutes. The windows were tinted, which was good. There were already a number of other passengers, so she felt at least somewhat safe—as long as the guy in the men’s room wasn’t going to Dayton, that is.

They had rescued her, those weird, fierce little beings, the only grays she’d ever even glimpsed except Adam. They had been waiting for her there in order to save her.

It was just awesome. Beings from another world were involved with her and they wanted her safe, and now she really began to feel better, because they were not about to be thwarted by Mike Wilkes.

They had taken her in one of their vehicles, they must have. It had seemed—well, like flying, and it had been so damn wonderful because it had saved her life, and she began to laugh and cry at the same time.

When she opened her eyes an old man was right in her face. “How’d you do that?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You got in my damn toilet.”

She thought quickly. There were other passengers around. “Sir, please.”

“No, she come in my toilet. Outta nowhere! She come in my toilet.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said.

The driver came back. “Sir, you’ll need to take a seat or get off the bus.”

“I was sittin’ there mindin’ my own business and all of a sudden, wham! How’d you do that?”

The grays obviously did not know the difference between ladies’ and men’s rooms. They’d dropped her in a place from which she could emerge without suspicion. Except, it had been the wrong one.

The driver got the old guy seated toward the front, and warned him against returning to the back of the bus. He’d just have to live with what he’d seen.

As the bus started off, Lauren leaned back and closed her eyes, her whole body filling with a delicious relief. “You helped me,” she whispered, “thank you for helping me.”

An old lady smiled at her. “He helps me, too,” she said. “Jesus helps us all, isn’t it wonderful?”

“Wonderful,” she said, “really, really wonderful.”

She had a couple hundred dollars in her wallet, so she would not leave a paper trail. As far as her apartment and possessions were concerned, until this situation was brought under control, she was not going near them again.

If Mike had the backing of the Air Force, then she couldn’t escape anyway, could she, no matter what she did? So this was the best course of action. She would surface at Wright-Pat and hope his powers were limited.

The bus was running a bit early, so she found herself presenting her regular Air Force ID at one of the guard stations of the gigantic base before eight in the evening. She was directed to the Wright-Patterson Inn, where she obtained a room. Rather than waste time and take risk, she at once called the Law Enforcement Unit and reported Colonel Michael Wilkes’s assault with intent to kill on her person. She stated her location and that she was slightly injured due to a blow to the face.

She then went to the unit and filled out a complaint against Wilkes, getting more and more furious at him as she did so. The man had shot at a fellow officer. If she could manage it, she would see him in that secret Air Force detention facility he was always talking so much about, where they kept all the crooks with high-level clearances. Sonofabitch.

One thing at least: she would no longer be working for him, because his operation was over. No more Adam, no more detail. Great, as far as she was concerned. She’d had it with the whole mess. Let her get back into procurement, anything but this.

But they’d told her, three years ago, that there was no exit.

An Air Police captain came over to her. He was carrying her complaint form. “You’re Colonel Lauren Glass?”

“Yes.”

“Lady, Colonel Glass is a KIA.”

“A KIA?”

“She died yesterday in a facility fire in another city, and I want to know what this is supposed to be about.”

Her heart missed a beat. KIA? If he got that to stick, she was outside the context of the whole military infrastructure. No chance of getting him up on charges, no ability to use Air Force facilities or appeal for protection.

“Ma’am, I’m gonna need to ID you.”

Did she have her credentials? Yes! She fumbled her wallet out of her purse, handed the card to him. “Excuse me,” he said, taking it.

She made images of herself with a gun to her head, of herself lying in a coffin, but the grays did not respond. It was the range issue, again. Did they even know where she was?

She heard a car stop outside the guard station. She went to the front and looked out the window. An awful coldness crept into her gut as Colonel Robert Langford’s tall form got out and headed her way.

Him! She had to run. She whirled. The desk officer was watching her, his eyes narrow. Behind him was another door. She strode across the room, passing the sergeant’s counter.

“That’s off-limits, Colonel,” he said.

She broke into a run and got out the door. Where to go now? Ted’s apartment was on base, but it was a good mile away. She took off down a sidewalk, heading toward a big hangar. At least there would be people around. At least when they got her, there would be someone to remember.

Then she saw a general’s jet sitting on the tarmac, its engines turning over. The stairs were down, and two officers were talking at their base. The plane was either landing or taking off.

She took a chance and went over to it. “This isn’t General Martin’s plane, is it?” she asked.

“General Cerner.”

“Finally!” As she went aboard, they barely glanced at her, then returned to their conversation.

There were three officers in the plane, a full-bird colonel, a major, and the general. “Sir,” she said saluting, “Colonel Glass. I need an urgent hitch to D.C. It’s classified, sir, national security.”

He looked up from his seat. “I’m reading a lotta levels of bullshit in what you just said, lady.”

“Sir, it’s extremely urgent.”

“Who’s your commanding officer?”

“Sir, I’m not at liberty to tell you that, but I can commandeer this aircraft.”

“Don’t give me that kind of guff. I’ve been in this Air Force a while, girlie. But what the hell, fellas, who wouldn’t want to take boobs like these to thirty-thousand feet?”

She swallowed her outrage, managed to construct a seductive smile.

Then she noticed something. He wasn’t looking at her. In fact, his eyes were practically glazed over with fear.

She turned—and there stood Colonel Langford with a pistol in his hand. “We’ll take care of this,” he said.

“Be my guest,” the general replied.

“What in hell is going on?” the major asked.

“A prisoner is being taken into custody,” Langford snarled. “Come on, Miss Jacobs.” He glanced past her. “She’s not even Air Force. She’s pulled this hitch trick for the last time.”

“My name is Lauren Glass,” she said as he marched her out of the cabin. “I am a colonel and I’ve been listed as a KIA. I am alive, General, remember that when you read her obit, Colonel Lauren Glass is alive!”

“Don’t even think about running,” Langford said when they reached the tarmac. “I’ll have the Air Police on your tail in a matter of seconds.”

She walked ahead of him.

“You’re a problem,” he said, “a very serious problem.”

She felt the gun in her back. So the stories were true. Black ops had their own special way of solving problems, and Lauren Glass, as the colonel had just said, was a problem. She thought, with a curious sort of detachment, that she had reached her last hours of life. It was a sickening, trapped moment, and yet oddly peaceful.

She had avoided marriage, and now she regretted that. She’d never felt a child in her belly, nor the pain of giving birth. She regretted that, too. It was so very odd, this feeling. Not awful at all. The end of all responsibility, the end of the need to run.

Too bad the grays couldn’t help her now. She tried sending images of her with Langford’s gun in her face, but nothing came back. Too far away.

She wondered if he would kill her here at Wright-Pat, or take her somewhere else. Maybe it was even an official killing. Probably it was. So there’d be some stark room somewhere, and a steel coffin waiting. “I’m ready,” she said. If he was planning to move her, maybe there would be a chance to escape. She might feel oddly peaceful, but if she could get away, she sure as hell would.

“It’s going to be easy, then?”

“What choice do I have? You’ve got me.”

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

SIXTEEN

THE MOMENT HE HAD REALIZED that he’d lost not only Adam, but also the two handlers, Mike had raced back to Washington. There was only one way to fire somebody in an organization this secret. Nobody was retired. You were either actively involved in the Trust or you were dead… and Mike understood and agreed completely. You could not risk even a rumor getting out that mankind was on a death watch, or that there was an organization that planned to save only a precious few, or that any part of the U.S. government was involved with aliens, not when there were such dire threats associated with revealing the secret of their presence.

Mike explained to Charles Gunn how Andy and Lauren had gotten away.

“That was damn stupid.”

“I don’t think—”

“Andy moved fast, you couldn’t help that. But we’ll pull him in. The empath is another matter, Mike. You were stupid to shoot, but an asshole to miss.”

“Charles—”

“Shut up, I’m thinking.”

“Charles, the gray is at large.”

His eyes fixed on Mike’s face. His lips opened, then he closed them. He suddenly grabbed a pen and a pad of paper and started writing.

“Charles?”

The writing became scratching, then trenching, then he rose up like a tower and ripped the pad to bits. He rushed around the desk and loomed over Mike. “Goddamn you.”

“Charles—”

“Goddamn you!” He paced, then. “I have to think.”

“Do me, Charlie. Get it over with.”

“Boy, that would be a pleasant way to spend an hour or so, you stupid piece of shit. I’ve defended you, but you are fucking incompetent. You and that fancy house of yours, your theft that I’ve ignored all these years. Not to mention those special passes to the shelters that you’ve given your crook friends.”

That would wreck him, to withdraw those bribes that were also such superb blackmail. His every defense industry contact would turn against him. He’d be a ruined man. “Charles, those people—some of them are essential—”

“The hell they are. They’re gone. History. And so are you, Mike. There’s no way you’re getting anywhere near one of the shelters. When this planet’s environment collapses, you’re gonna be in the wind. You live with that, now. You live with that.”

By which Charles actually meant that he had just allowed Mike to live. He had expected to die in this room, right now.

Charles asked, “Do you think Glass could be hiding Adam?”

“I went to her apartment first thing. No sign of anyone there. I think Adam’s been recalled. The moment they realized that we were aware of the child, they pulled the plug.”

“Because you asked the wrong question.” Charles dropped down behind his desk. “They’ve got us in check, here.”

“They always have us in check.”

“We have to locate this child.”

“It’s in Wilton.”

“You know that?”

“Crew said they were signaling him. So he could play his role.”

“We’ve got to scorch the earth, then. Langford, Glass, Simpson, Crew—they’ve all got to be done. But first, find and kill that child.”

“We have this Oak Road group with a grand total of six residents under the age of eighteen, so that’s our target. But we can’t approach them directly or we get the grays on us like a bunch of infuriated hornets. The key is to identify the right child without getting so close to him that the grays become aware of us.”

“We have the children’s test scores? IQ tests?”

“Unfortunately, the school they all attend doesn’t do IQ tests. Too elitist or too P.C. or some damn thing. They’re all bright kids. Professors’ children.”

“What about the public schools in the area?”

“Their gifted and talented programs have a hundred and sixty kids in them. Highest IQ is 160. We don’t know how smart the grays want their poster boy, so they’re a possibility that needs checking.”

“Let me ask you this, then. Do you have a plan?”

“I think the child will reveal himself to us.”

“How?”

“He’s got to be spectacularly bright. A freak, like.”

“What if he’s ordinary? We have only that tape to tell us he’s going to be some kind of a genius. Maybe Crew and Simpson knew you were listening. Maybe the tape is a lie.”

“Then we’re already defeated, Charles.”

“Do you think that?”

“I think they’re going to be mighty careful and mighty ferocious. Look what’s riding on him—their whole species. And ours.”

Charles shrugged. “Don’t tell me you’re disloyal, too.”

“I’ve been to India, I’ve been to Vietnam, I’ve see the brainless, gobbling hordes of human filth out there. No, I believe in what we’re doing with every cell in my body, Charles. This little band we call the Trust, is the most noble, the most courageous, and the most important organization in human history.”

Charles gave him a twinkle of a smile. “You know what Stalin did when his little commissars were too eloquent in their praise? He had them shot.”

“Then do it, Charles! Get it over with!”

“I can’t, Goddamn your soul. You know that I’ve been defending you from Henry Vorona for years. Ever since CIA saddled me with him, in fact. If I tell the others just how royally you’ve fucked things up, I’m gonna end up sitting on a vote of no confidence, and guess who’s gonna join you in hell? No, Mike, I’d like to see you good and dead, I have to admit that, but I damn well can’t, because the bullet that goes through your head goes through mine, too.”

“Charles, I’m going to fix this.”

“You’d better, because you are talking about the entire human species being enslaved, Mike. Because that is what this is about. Somewhere out there, they’re coming. And they will do this. They will do this, Mike. Just remember one thing, we have to get that child before they change him, because if we don’t, God only knows what kind of abilities and powers he’s going to have.”

“I need people. I need backup.”

“You can’t have a damn soul!”

“Charles—”

“I can give you equipment and I can give you money, but not people. The second I do that, Vorona finds out and both of our throats get cut.”

Mike had assumed that he’d have a trained team of experts. But he could see Charles’s point all too clearly. Unless he fixed this, and did it quietly, they were both dead men.

“What’s your plan, Mike? I want to know your exact plan.”

“Forget Adam, forget Glass, Langford, all of them. Go for the kid now, fast, next twenty-four hours. Then worry about everything else. Use the TR to get me into Wilton with absolutely no chance of detection.”

“The grays will know you’re there.”

“Not right away. Remember, I’ve seen this mind-reading business up close for years. Distance is a big issue. They’re not going to find me until I’m physically near the kid. But that’s the one place I’ll never be.”

“You’re a sniper or what?”

“There will be no direct approach to him whatsoever. But he will be killed, Charles. Coming from me, I know it’s not worth much to you, but I do guarantee it.”

To his credit, Charles made no comment, but the expression on his face eloquently communicated his contempt for what he undoubtedly regarded as outrageous braggadocio on the part of a proven incompetent. “You know how to access the TR?”

“Yes, sir. You’ll recall that I set up the security.”

Charles turned around in his chair. The Capitol glowed in the distance, the Washington Monument beyond. “What do you think this’ll be like in a thousand years, Mike?”

“In a thousand years? If we succeed, it’ll be the holy city, the center of heaven.”

Charles said nothing more, and Mike took that as a signal to leave, for which he was very damned grateful.

He had a good plan, and if he acted quickly enough, he thought there was a reasonable chance that it would work. The important thing was to push all consequences out of his mind. His life being at stake was bad enough, but looking at the larger picture was enough to freeze a man’s soul.

As he drove to National Airport, he called his personal travel agency and booked the next civilian flight he could, which was Delta to Atlanta. He parked in long-term parking, then went to the ticket counter and got his ticket. He bought a newspaper and went to the gate to wait until the agent arrived. He did nothing out of the ordinary.

When the agent appeared, he checked in and selected his seat.

Having set up this false trail, he then left the airport and hailed a cab, which he took to a small office building a short distance from his house. He descended into the garage, took out some keys, and started another car. This one was a Buick from the mid-eighties, nondescript compared to the Mercedes he kept here in Washington.

He drove to the Beltway, then took 95 up to Baltimore, exiting onto 695 toward Owings Mills. An hour and a half after he left the garage, he was exiting onto Painters’ Mills Road. As he drove up Caves Road, he entered a more isolated area. He turned off onto an unmarked road and soon came to what appeared to be a construction zone. From here, the road appeared to be impassable. He took a right, and it turned out that what looked like brush was something quite different. The car moved through the brush and trees as if they weren’t there—which, indeed, they weren’t. This was a state-of-the-art holographic projection, one of the most advanced camouflage devices in the Pentagon’s arsenal. The design had come from Adam. It was deployed sparingly, out of fear that the press would get wind of it. If the origin of any of these technologies was discovered, the whole deception would become unglued.

The result of this was that certain select areas of military technology were stunningly ahead of public understanding. To accomplish his purpose, he would use an array of that technology.

Central to his plan was a device that lay in a large underground hangar in these woods. Its development had taken forty years. It had cost perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars, paid for by misuse of the gigantic criminal enterprise known officially as the “black budget” which was really a cover for making select people rich at the expense of the American taxpayer, by using national security to conceal the theft.

The TR, or Triangular Aircraft, officially designated TR-A1, had also cost the lives of scientists who had come to a fatal eureka moment. When they realized that they were working on alien technology, they became too dangerous to be allowed to live. Test pilots had died, too, perfecting its capabilities, as had engineers who had suffered mercury poisoning in the fabrication of its extraordinarily toxic power plant.

The reason for the extreme secrecy was twofold. Not only did they have to protect this device from the public, they had to protect it from the grays. They had gotten every kind of lie from Adam and Bob, most of them infinitely subtle, and as a result had gone down a thousand blind alleys and consumed literally vast wealth, indeed, so much wealth that every American citizen, for the past fifty years, had worked a fourth of his life in support of the development of technologies he wasn’t even allowed to know existed, let alone gain any benefit from.

He came to a certain spot in the narrow roadway where the radio, which he had tuned to an unused frequency, suddenly began to make a faint, high-pitched sound. He stopped the car, got out, pulled back a stone that lay at the roadside, and pressed his hand against a silver disk that had been concealed beneath it. A moment later, the small hill before him opened. He drove the car in.

Inside, it was absolutely dark and silent. The only light came from a single red bulb, glowing softly. As Mike strode toward it, the outlines of an enormous object became visible immediately above his head. It was a triangle, totally black, measuring hundreds of feet on a side.

Its power plant involved the rotation of a ring of a coherent mercury plasma at extremely high speed, reducing the overall weight of the craft by 40 percent. The rest of the weight reduction was accomplished with a very old technology. The triangle had to be as large as it was because, for the rest of its lift, it relied on helium. It contained the most sophisticated surveillance and camouflage technology known, but it was not much faster than an old-fashioned dirigible.

Years ago, it had become obvious from Eamon Glass’s talks with Adam and the stories told by Mr. Crew, that mankind had lost a very sophisticated civilization to a ferocious war that was fought some time around fifteen thousand years ago. The combination of the use of devastating weaponry and the rise in sea levels that had taken place when the last ice age ended twelve thousand years ago, had first pulverized and then drowned this civilization.

It lived on only in myth, most notably in the Vedas of ancient India. But there was almost enough information there, in the descriptions of Vimina aircraft, to reproduce the power plants of the distant past. Careful questioning of Adam and Bob had filled in the missing pieces of information.

Large though they were, the TRs, of which there were ten on the books and two off, were no more difficult to fly than a small general aviation aircraft.

As Mike continued toward the faint red light, his head was just a few inches from the lower surface of the craft. The light marked the entrance, a simple hatch that was slid open by hand.

He withdrew the ladder, which gave a bit under his weight as he climbed aboard. He took the long tunnel to the flight deck, pulling himself along on a stretcher as the crew had in the old B-36 bomber.

This flight deck, though, was very different from what a bomber pilot from the fifties might have seen. It wasn’t even meant to be flown by a pilot, but rather flown in by a reconnaissance expert. The plane all but piloted itself.

Mike used a penlight to find the code panel, and input the thirty-three-digit code that activated the craft. A moment later, its amber control panel came to life. The basic aircraft instruments were there, of course, airspeed, bank and turn, altitude. There were others though, that were not so familiar. Most of these involved the craft’s extraordinary surveillance capabilities.

Mike keyed Wilton, Kentucky, into the autopilot. He pressed the three buttons that activated the plasma. Behind him, there was a distinct “pop,” the loudest sound the device would ever make. The altimeter began to wind up—but not far. It was a very unusual sort of altimeter, because it could measure anything from thousands of feet to inches. The plane’s operational altitude was, essentially, ground level. Unlike a cruise missile, it did not rely on comparing a picture of the terrain it was crossing to its memory. Instead, it had the intelligence and the instruments it needed to examine the terrain it was crossing, and adjust its altitude accordingly.

He watched the altimeter rise to 60 meters, then felt a slight shudder as the ship’s propulsion system, which used the Earth’s magnetic field, slowly began to impel it forward. It took ten minutes for him to reach top speed.

The craft sought out forests and mountains, only rarely slipping across a town, and never a city. From ten feet away, it made no sound at all.

The flight from Owings Mills to Wilton covered 433 kilometers and took just over two hours. As Mike flew, he prepared instrument after instrument, most of them gained from his own hard work managing the empaths, extracting bits and pieces of information from his grays.

Sound, in the craft, was as carefully managed as all other emissions. Even switches had been carefully damped so that pressing a button made nary a click. The fans that controlled the craft’s altitude were entirely silent, designed so that the air they emitted was always exactly the same temperature as the air they took in. Just as it had no sound signature, and at night essentially no visual signature, it also had no heat signature and no radar signature. Even the pilot’s body heat was dissipated by being used in production of electricity.

The TR could fail; if the mercury plasma malfunctioned, the craft would be incinerated inside of a second. During development it had happened many times. There was never anything left, only ash drifting in the sky. In 1980 in Texas, some civilians had been close-up witnesses to one of these failures. One of them got cancer and filed a suit against the U.S. government, but the judge was prevailed upon and the case went nowhere. The civilian died soon thereafter, thankfully.

He flew on. When he was within thirty miles of Wilton, he flipped another switch, and something happened that would have awed anyone who had not expected it.

This was a technology that they had developed by analyzing the stories of a close-encounter witness called Travis Walton, whom they had also discredited in every possible way, making a national joke out of him so that the public would never be convinced by his tale.

Why the grays had taken him on a ride was not clear. But they had, and on that ride, they had made their ship disappear around him, so that he appeared to be floating in the stars. Such a capability would be extremely useful for a reconnaissance craft, and Eamon had gradually obtained from Bob knowledge of how to design materials that would change their opacity by the simple application of heat. He pressed a button and was rewarded with the apparent complete disappearance of everything around him except the control panel itself. He floated now over the broad hills of eastern Kentucky, a man alone in the night sky.

The ship was on a course that would take it directly over Oak Road. He had only to watch the world slipping by fifty feet beneath his feet. He saw horses running in the moonlight, he passed over an elegant farmhouse and barns, so close that he felt as if he could have reached down and touched a weathervane. He smelled nothing of the night air and felt nothing of the cold, because the temperature within the ship was carefully controlled. There was a heat signature, of course, but it was no greater than that of the breath of a swooping owl.

The ship’s voice said in his earphone, “Two minutes.”

He turned on the camouflage. This drained electrical power, but also provided an additional level of protection from notice from above and below. It consisted of thousands of tiny light-emitting diodes served by cameras on the upper and lower surfaces of the ship. From below, an observer would see the night sky under which the ship was passing. From above, the image that was projected was of the ground.

“One minute.”

He saw light ahead, winking in among the trees. Soon a small neighborhood of tract houses appeared. He stopped the ship. Now he activated the infrared sensors, trained them on the first house in the tiny development. Two adults, one registering 98.6, the other 97.9. An infant, registering 99.1.

The ship was so low that it was buffeted by gas fumes coming out of the furnace chimney. He “opened” the house by activating the whole array of surveillance instruments.

An ultrasensitive receiver read the electroencephalograms of the occupants, and provided a readout of their state, whether awake or asleep, and a level-of-awareness index. One adult was fully awake. One adult was registering mostly Alpha. Dozing, according to the computer’s interpretation. The infant was profoundly asleep.

It seemed to him that he was not likely to be dealing with an infant, because this child would surely need to be at least fairly mature by 2012.

He went to the next house. In it, he saw two adults. Deeper in the structure was another person, perhaps a small adult, perhaps an older child. The two adults were physically motionless but their minds were alert. He deployed the microphone system. He heard a familiar voice, and for a moment was shocked. How could he know somebody in that house? Who would it be?

Then he realized that it was Grissom. They were watching CSI.

In the basement, there was another sound, a continuous noise identified as a small electric motor. Could it be a shaver? No, it was moving over too broad an area. He visualized the movement and immediately had his answer. The person in the basement was using a model train set. Therefore, it was not a small adult, but a child.

He moved to the other two houses, then, gathering the structural plans into the computer, identifying approximate ages and sexes of the occupants.

When he was finished, he had all the humans and all the animals. He then found the open space behind the houses that the grays had used on their revealing foray. He dropped down into it. He wanted to step on the actual ground, but he must not leave the ship unless necessary. It had been designed to allow the occupant to reconnoiter on the ground, and was intelligent enough to protect itself, even for extended periods, but still, no chances were to be taken unless they were essential.

He increased altitude to a thousand feet, then went online again. Using Expedia, he found motels in Wilton. He input the address of the local Days Inn and was carried there.

He then observed the local terrain for heights. It turned out that the top of a grain elevator was the highest point in the area. He flew until he found it, an enormous structure in the center of the small community.

He went close. There, on one of the silos, was where he would place his antenna. Nearby, he saw a field. He dropped down.

Putting the ship’s remote into his pocket, he slid back along the access tunnel and climbed out. The ship would find a hiding place on its own. It would not go to altitude, but rather would hide just above the surface somewhere, probably back in the hills that surrounded the town. When he looked up, even though he knew that it was there, and not but a few feet overhead, he could not see it.

As it departed, he felt the brief wash of one of its altitude control fans.

He crossed the field, then walked into the lobby of the Days Inn.

“Hey,” he said to the sleepy clerk, “got a room?”

“Yes, sir,” the young man said, coming out of the tiny office where he had been watching TV. Mike had a dozen false identities to choose from. He checked in under the name of Harold A. Hill, salesman. It was one of his favorites, because nobody ever wants to talk to a salesman.

He went through the lobby and crossed a bleak courtyard to his room. He entered it, turned on the light, and used the bathroom. Naked now, he slipped into the bed.

Tomorrow morning, he would scout the town for a Radio Shack. To complete his mission, he needed a few commonly available items. He lay down and closed his eyes. He was deeply tired. Deeply, deeply tired. Curse Lauren and Andy, who were both out there in the wind doing God knew what. The grays were on the warpath and extremely dangerous.

He wished he was a damn fool salesman.