by Dudley Lynch
I sought to help her keep things light. “And I bet you finally wore them down. The Marines are coming to Flagler.”
“Fat chance. I don’t think I could have gotten their attention if I’d gone to D.C. with Gideon’s Trumpet.”
I don’t think she noticed how close I came to choking. A sudden coughing spell and a fist raised to cover my mouth bought me sufficient cover. I glanced at her for what I feared had been a couple of seconds too long, but she had gotten up to pour me a glass of water.
I concluded that her comment had probably been one of total innocence. She wasn’t likely to know that Gideon’s Trumpet was the code name for the secret informant coming to Flagler.
Coming to Flagler?
Horse pucky. It appeared he was already here.
Chapter 53
I’d not managed to take a swallow of the morning’s first mason jar of iced tea when my phone rang. First caller of the day.
The owner of the brisk, confident voice on the other end of the line said he was collecting donations for the Overwatch Group. “Prithee, good sire, can we meet?”
I told the president’s guy I’d need thirty minutes. Gave him the name of the street and told him how to find it. Instructed him to proceed west until he came to the BewaretheJunkyardDogs Company’s abandoned salvage yard. The gate would look like it was locked, but it wasn’t. He should flip the rusty padlock open. Remove it from the chain. Pull the chain through the gate. Let himself in. Close the gate behind him. Replace the chain and lock. And continue to the shabby old tin shack in the far back corner.
I’d be joining him soon.
He’d ended our conversation with a comment as zany as the one that had started it. “My foot’s already in the stirrup and the cows are in the corn, Herr Maestro.”
* * *
It took me only twenty minutes to grab my hat, bolt out the door, effect a brisker pace to my car than usual, and speed off to BewaretheJunkyardDogs Company’s vacated salvage yard. I’d not been expecting the president’s man to call during the day. After all, most of the original Deep Throat’s meetings with the Washington Post guys had been late at night. The faster we got our encounter over, the less we’d have to endure the heat in the old shack.
Meanwhile, my mind wouldn’t give it a rest. It kept trying to find a picture, any person, any memory that would stand in for the individual I’d talked to on the phone.
My mind settled on an image from an old movie I’d watched on one of the streaming services a few weeks back. One made in the ’50s. Danny Kaye had played a court jester. Most of the time, he’d been decked out in a motley-colored fool’s hat with three droopy points, each with a bell at the end.
I’d found one snippet of dialogue in the movie so ridiculous, I was going to be repeating it to myself forever. Especially in light of what had happened at Professor Huntgardner’s house. “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle; the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true!”
He was already there. Sitting on a crate by a window. Looking nothing like Danny Kaye. Or a court jester. Or, for that matter, like an emissary from the president of the United States. He looked like someone who had defeated the best efforts of central casting to supply an actor who looked like, well, anything but a secret operative. No wonder Angie had been intrigued by him.
There was his size.
When he stood, my first thought was that he was taller than most starting point guards in the NBA. Plus three inches. That extra height was courtesy of the towering, swept-back expanse of blondish-gray hair that dared you to guess at his age. Anywhere between fifty and sixty-five, I was guessing.
Then there were his duds.
A print-splashed vintage ’90s-style yellow Hawaiian shirt. Asparagus green cargo pants. And a pair of brown pseudo–work boots that zipped up the back.
He had a hand extended. “Heeeelllloooo! The code word, I believe, is Gideon’s Trumpet. If that doesn’t work for you, you can tikka masala and shove it up your ashram.”
He laughed so loud that the rickety little shed shook.
Chapter 54
“You’re probably wondering about the clothes.”
If he was going to be this abrupt, he might not need any warning that our conversation had to be a short one. “Well, yes. And why you’re here.”
“Never been to Texas before. Didn’t know quite how to dress. Heard it’s hot out here.” He fingered the collar on the ridiculous shirt. “Something cool, eh? And, it’s a rough-and-ready place.” He stuck his hands in the side pockets of his cargo pants and pulled his pants legs wider. “And” — he pointed toward his cognac-colored shoe gear — “everybody wears boots.”
I couldn’t tell if he was pulling my leg, so I settled on politeness. “Very nice.”
My reply didn’t seem to matter to him. He was moving on. “What do you know about UFOs?”
I thought he was about to make me the butt of a joke. “You’re about to tell me you brought one of those too, right? Because we’re used to things out here that go boo in the night.”
My sarcasm earned me a rebuke. “Sheriff, you need to consider all this consequential, or I’ve made this trip for nothing.”
He looked as serious as a funeral, so I decided to humor him. I assured him that all I knew about UFOs is what I heard on the news. “Never seen one myself.”
“The president wants you to understand something about the Sturm und Drang you’ve been experiencing in Abbot County all these years.”
“And what would that be?”
“That it’s all been a seventy-plus-years-long battle over what to believe about UFOs and extraterrestrial creatures. Aliens.”
“In Flagler?”
“Well, think about it. President Fletcher says Flagler has been one of the strangest places on Earth since the Truman administration.”
“What happened during the Truman administration?”
“Among other things, Roswell.”
What my legs did next surprised both of us. They flung me to my feet and back-pedaled me to the far wall of the ramshackle little building. When I leaned against it, I realized that if I wasn’t careful, I’d break through it. “You’ve come all the way from Washington, D.C., to talk about the —”
“Right. The Roswell UFO crash and the little people they found with the wreckage.”
“And how is Flagler involved in all this?”
“That’s what twelve presidents of the United States . . . no, make that thirteen now . . . have been trying to figure out. And they’re not the only ones.”
“Who else?”
“Well, the British, the Germans, the French, the Russians, the Scandinavian countries, the Belgians, the Brazilians. And, in their time, the old Soviet Union and the eastern bloc communist countries. Not that I’ve named everybody.”
I debated whether to keep standing, but my knees didn’t feel that trustworthy, so I went back to my crate. The instant I sat down, Mr. Gideon’s Trumpet stood up.
Too quickly. He collided with the corrugated tin roof. The impact knocked one of its sheets loose. It stayed attached on one end. The rest of it came back down. Catawampused.
“And both your father and your grandfather — how do you say it in Texas? — almost busted a gusset trying to figure it out.”
“What a fatuous gasbag you are.” The retort was out of my mouth before the thought was well formed in my brain. I was being treated like a schoolboy. Not a very bright one, either.
The serious-as-a-funeral face was back. “I’m not explaining this well.”
“Either that, or I’m not in the mood for fairy tales.”
He glanced at the hole in the roof. “Do I take you through events step by step? Or do I start with a simple statement about why President Fletcher has sent me here?” He seemed to be speaking to himself.
I held up two
fingers. The second idea sounded like it would get us out of the shed’s suffocating heat sooner. Tell me what matters to Flagler now.
That’s when he told me point-blank that the U.S. government had lied to the American people about the Roswell incident — and was still lying about it. The Roswell crash hadn’t involved a weather balloon as the military claimed. It had, indeed, involved an extraterrestrial craft. A UFO. One carrying ETs. Aliens.
The people closest to the Roswell events had been right that momentous July week in 1947. One live alien and several aliens’ bodies had been recovered at the main crash scene on a ranch northwest of town. They had been spirited away to an Ohio air base, never to be seen in public again. The lies had begun then and had never stopped.
But not everything found at the crash site had been recovered by the troops sent to scoop up the wreckage. A strange piece of debris had taken a roundabout route and ended up in the hands of a young Thaddeus Huntgardner. He claimed to have brought it to Flagler when he left for college and hidden it somewhere.
The current president of the United States believed the same thing his twelve predecessors had believed. At least, those who had known much about it. That this bizarre object from outer space might be the most prized artifact in our corner of the universe.
I couldn’t hold my incredulity in any longer. I had questions. The first one turned out to be both hydra-headed and bitchy.
“What,” I started off, “is so important about this so-called object? For that matter, what is it? Part of the UFO itself? Something it had been carrying? Or had it been inside an Extraterrestrial Parcel Service package addressed to the Honorable Thaddeus “Thad” Johans Schreck Huntgardner, Planet Earth?”
Gideon’s Trumpet again looked vexed. I had an immediate regret. And a realization. He was finding this difficult, and not treating him and his explanations with rapt seriousness might be a mistake. “I’m sorry . . . this object — what does it look like?”
“Good question. If it’s real, it may not have been debris. It may have been cargo — something the UFO was carrying. Or something else entirely. But the rumors in Roswell said it was like nothing you or I have ever seen before. Like nothing anyone who saw it had ever seen.”
“It’s metal?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. Yes, probably. But nothing like any of our metals on Earth. The rumor in Roswell was that you could crumple the stuff up into a ball, then lay it down and watch it straighten itself out without any help. Erase every crease, so that it’s completely flat and smooth again. And that they’d tried to damage it. Hit it with hammers. Couldn’t make a dent in it. Not a mark.”
This time, I couldn’t hide my skepticism. “And that’s it — a weird piece of metal? This is what has turned my backwoods county into a zoo of warring factions? One that powerful people in half the world have been watching obsessively for seventy-plus years?”
This time, my conversation partner’s pained look didn’t last as long. “No, it’s apparently more than a weird piece of metal. The bigger mystery, or so they said, is what happens to the psyche of the person looking at the fragment or whatever it is. Oh, and one other thing. Supposedly, something exotic keeps happening to its color. One moment, it’s black, and the next it’s something else.”
“But you say all this is only a rumor?”
“Just what a few people claimed. I’m not aware of any real evidence.”
“So, what’s the excitement about?”
“It’s Huntgardner’s doing, really. What he says he was told by people in Roswell after the UFO incident.”
“And what did the good people of New Mexico tell him?”
“That the alien who survived promised that some of its exoplanet buddies would come for the object on the seventy-fifth anniversary of their landing in Roswell. And when they did, they’d share new knowledge of how the universe works, shed light on a bunch of scientific mysteries, and tell us how wars and conflicts can be avoided. The kinds of things that would shake up everything from religion to politics and governments to science and cosmology.”
“So, what is Huntgardner supposed to have done with the fragment?”
He fingered his shirt collar, tugging it open to let more air in. “Isn’t that the question?”
Chapter 55
I told him I had my own questions. He needed to keep his answers brief or we were both going to die from heat stroke in the BewaretheJunkyardDogs Company’s stifling old tin shack. He agreed that he would.
I asked him if the president knew why ten physicists had been slain in or around Professor Huntgardner’s house.
He offered a half-shrug. “The president assumes it had something to do with the fragment, but he isn’t sure. His greatest fear is that the killing isn’t over. That’s why he dispatched me to tell you what he knows.”
I asked if the president had any recent evidence that any of the story I’d been listening to was, in fact, real. Not really, he said.
He said evidence of UFOs and alien contacts had been hidden with great success from all thirteen presidents since Roswell. But with the purported new visitation date getting closer, the leaks were growing. One tantalizing claim was about a supposed late-night meeting between President Eisenhower and ET leaders at California’s Edwards Air Force Base on February 20, 1954.
I asked how the president was getting his information about what had been happening in Flagler. He wasn’t at liberty to say.
I asked if he knew if Professor Huntgardner was alive and, if so, where he was. No idea, he said.
I asked if the federal government had sent any other secret agents to Flagler. Didn’t know, but I should assume that it had. And that one or more of them might still be here.
I asked what they would be like. He said he could only guess. But he’d expect them to try to fit themselves into the local fabric. Set up a business, maybe. Get to know as many of the town’s and county’s leaders as possible. Take on appearances that made them look like they were anything but what they were.
I asked if he knew anything about a secret torture and incarceration chamber in Flagler. That earned me an incredulous look — followed by a quick shake of the head.
His next comment made it clear that he was getting to the heart of his message from the president. “You need to have a chat with a couple of people.”
“People who know what this is about, I trust.”
“Better than that. The people who are causing most of your problems, I think.”
“Like murdering people in remote old brick houses?”
“Or setting themselves up to be murdered, not sure which. President Fletcher isn’t either. But he didn’t want to stand by and leave you unaware of what some folks in the highest reaches of the U.S. intelligence community have been telling him.”
This was when he told me the names of the two secret religious societies long in conflict in Flagler over Thaddeus Huntgardner’s mysterious fragment. And the names of the persons believed to be in charge.
I didn’t bother to tell him that this information was not news to me. I let him explain how, with Professor Huntgardner suffering from dementia, the Unus Mundus Masters was commanded by Dr. Judson T. Mayes II. And Dr. Malachi Jepp Rawls was still calling the shots for the Society of Ezekiel’s Wheel, as he had for many years. Incidentally, he had founded it.
Gideon’s Trumpet said both individuals kept secrets about their groups better than Madame Defarge. So he shared rule number one of the American intelligence community. If you can’t get your targets to talk about themselves, get their enemies to talk about them.
I thanked him for coming. Asked him to express my appreciation to President Fletcher for his concern. Encouraged him to provide me with any new information. And asked him to leave Flagler.
“Now. ‘Chop, chop,’ as you’d probably put it. Book a seat on the next flight out. Don’t talk to anyone you don�
�t have to before you depart. Keep to yourself on the plane at least as far as Dallas/Fort Worth. And report only to the president when you get back to Washington. Don’t be offended, but I don’t need another drama-maker in Abbot County’s deadly Circus Maximus.”
My guest shot to his feet and headed out the door without a single glance back. But he did fling one further bit of advice over his shoulder. “Beware of Karmageddon and goat meat tacos when you’re herding doggies to Dodge City.”
Given what else had been happening in Flagler, that sounded like good advice.
I watched Gideon’s Trumpet stride all the way to the gate, fit his large frame into his boxy lime-green rental car, and back it up in fits and starts, missing the neighboring brickyard’s towering wooden fence by mere inches.
I stared at the space his car had vacated for a couple of minutes. Went back inside the shack and eased the loose roofing slat into place as best I could. Pulled the noisy, decrepit door shut as tight as it would go. And beat my own path to the fence, the street, and my parked patrol cruiser at a pace more suitable for a man walking a poky old dog.
Not at all what you’d expect from a guy who needed to be acting like Frank Hamer chasing Bonnie and Clyde.
I was buying time. And trying to decide what to do with the anger stinging my chest like heartburn from bad chili.
I had been hoping for more answers from the unexpected visitor from Washington, D.C. Hoping that he would be a frontal system helping to clear the skies of some of Flagler’s more mystifying skulduggeries.
Hadn’t happened.
Rather than the air-clearing insights I’d hoped for, Gideon’s Trumpet had lobbed one new puzzling revelation after another at my shell-shocked sensibilities. In his wake, Abbot County’s revolving door of bombshell developments was whirling faster than ever. And most of it still made less sense than kamikaze pilots wearing crash helmets.