The Shimmer

by David Morrell

  “The shouting stopped. My father knocked again, and a shotgun blast from inside tore the door in half. It pretty much tore my father in half, also. I doubt he lived long enough to feel himself hit the ground.”

  Page leaned forward in his chair.

  “When my father didn’t report back in a half hour, a deputy drove over to the house, where he found my dad spread out on the ground. After the deputy threw up, he managed to control himself long enough to radio for an ambulance. At that time, there weren’t any other local police officers. The deputy’s only option was to contact the Highway Patrol, but they said they couldn’t get there for another half hour, so the deputy sucked up his nerve, drew his gun, and went into the house.

  “The wife was on the living room floor with her head shot off. Blood was everywhere. The deputy went into the kitchen. No one was there. He went into the master bedroom. No one. He went into a smaller bedroom-the boy’s-and the window was open. The father must have heard the boy leaping out. What the searchers found the next morning made clear that the father chased his son across the road and into a field. Why did he act that way, do you suppose?”

  Page inhaled slowly. “A man like that blames his family for making him unhappy. Everything’s their fault, and they need to be punished.”

  “You’ve been taking psychology courses?”

  “Increases my pay grade.”

  Costigan looked beyond Page, as if remembering the night he’d learned that his father had been shotgunned to death. His eyes refocused.

  “What you say makes sense. But here’s another explanation. Some people are wired wrong. It’s their nature to cause pain. They’re so dark inside that maybe the only word to describe them is ‘evil.’”

  “Yes, I’ve met people like that,” Page said. “Too many.”

  “The next morning, the searchers found the boy’s corpse in weeds a half mile from the house. The father was lying next to him. After he’d killed his son, he’d put the shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Coyotes had gotten to them by the time the bodies were found.”

  Page tasted a familiar sourness in his mouth. He was reminded of the car that had been hit by the drunk driver, of the five children and the woman inside, killed instantly. He thought of the drug dealer who’d shot his friend Bobby, just two days earlier.

  “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Not a day goes by that I don’t remember him. I’ll never be the man he was. But he wasn’t perfect, and what happened that night proved it. He shouldn’t have let it happen. What’s the most dangerous situation any police officer faces?”

  “Family arguments.”

  “Exactly. Because they’re so emotional and unpredictable. After my father knocked, he should have stepped to the side, away from the door and the windows. Or better yet, he should have stayed by his car and used his bullhorn to order the husband to step outside. If the guy had come out with a shotgun, at least my father would have had a chance to defend himself. It didn’t need to happen the way it did. But my father had a weak spot. He couldn’t stand bullies.” Costigan looked directly at Page. “Especially when they picked on women.”

  “Okay,” Page said. “I get the point. But I told you, my wife and I aren’t arguing. This isn’t a domestic dispute.”

  “So you say. But until I’m sure you’re not a threat to her, you won’t see her without me standing next to you.”

  13

  Although the sun was descending toward the horizon, its rays seemed unusually bright. In the passenger seat of the police car, Page put on his sunglasses. He pulled out his cell phone and called Margaret to let her know that Tori was okay and that he was on his way to see her. He promised to have Tori call but wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep that promise.

  As they drove through Rostov, he glanced out the window at a muffler shop and a barbecue restaurant called the Rib Palace. Ahead, at the edge of town, a sign announced, TRAIL’S END MOTEL. A row of plain, single-story units formed a U, with the office in the middle.

  “Your wife’s in number 11,” Costigan told him as the car crunched across the gravel parking lot, raising a cloud of dust.

  But when they got to number 11, the parking space was empty.

  Page felt hollow as he stepped from the cruiser. The drapes were closed, and he couldn’t see past them to tell if there was luggage inside.

  They walked across the gravel, pushed open a screen door with a loud squeak, and entered the office, which had a soft-drink machine and a small television in a corner. On the screen, a reporter was announcing sports scores.

  “Jake,” the police chief said to a gangly young clerk behind the counter, “the lady in unit 11. Did she check out?”

  “Nope. Paid for the rest of the week. I saw her car go past twenty minutes ago.”

  Costigan nodded, then gestured toward Page. “Better save a room for this gentleman.”

  “No need,” Page said, annoyed. “I’ll stay with my wife.”

  “As long as it’s her idea, but in case it isn’t, Jake, save him a room.”

  The screen door squeaked again when Costigan opened it. Out- side, turning from the sunset, he debated for a moment. “She’s got a long night ahead of her.”

  Whatever that means, Page thought. “You said your deputy found her early in the morning. What was she doing until then?”

  “That’s something you need to see for yourself.”

  “Chief, I’m getting tired of this.”

  Costigan didn’t seem to hear him. “Maybe she went to get some- thing to eat. Let’s try the Rib Palace.”

  They drove back to the restaurant, but Tori’s SUV wasn’t in the parking lot. Most of the clientele seemed to drive pickup trucks, Page noted. At the chief’s insistence, they went inside. Tori wasn’t among the early-evening crowd.

  “Fred,” Costigan said to an aproned man behind a counter, “did a red-haired woman come in here about twenty minutes ago and buy some take-out food?”

  “Sure did. A turkey-and-cheese sandwich, plus iced tea. Don’t get much call for turkey. She’s lucky we had some.”

  “You might want to stock some more of it. I have a hunch she’ll be back. Give us a couple of burgers and fries to go.” Costigan looked at Page. “You’re not a vegetarian, I hope.”

  Page just stared at him. “Burgers are fine,” he said. “I’m buying.”

  The stuffed paper bag had a grease stain on one side. He carried it out to the police car. They got in and drove east. Patchy brown grass stretched in every direction. Cattle grazed in the dimming sunset.

  On the right, they came to a barbed-wire fence beyond which lay the rusted ruins of collapsed metal buildings. Signs hung at regular intervals along the fence.

  PROPERTY OF U.S. MILITARY

  DANGER

  HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS

  UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE

  “That used to be a military training airfield,” Costigan explained. “Back in the ’40s.”

  “I saw it when I flew in. I wondered what happened to it.”

  “They shut it down in 1945. Just left it. It’s been falling apart ever since.”

  A short distance ahead, past what looked like a historical marker of some sort, Page saw a low wooden structure. It had a flat roof and resembled a roadside stand where vegetables might be sold. But in this case, the section that faced the road was closed, and the open side was directed toward a fence and the grassland that lay beyond. Try as he might, Page couldn’t figure out what it was for.

  Tori’s blue Saturn was parked next to it.

  “Yeah, she got here early,” Costigan said.

  They pulled off the road and stopped behind the Saturn. The wooden structure had a sidewall that prevented Page from seeing if Tori was inside. At the same time, it prevented Tori from seeing the police car.

  “I guess she figured waiting here was better than waiting in her motel room,” Costigan said.

  “This is the observation platform you mentioned?”


  “Yeah, where my deputy found her.”

  Page reached to open the cruiser’s door.

  “Wait,” Costigan said. “It won’t be long now. The sun’s almost down. As soon as it gets dark, you’ll understand.”

  Page stared at him. “Why should I…”

  “You’ve indulged me this far. Is ten minutes longer going to make a difference?”

  “What’s so damned important about the sun going down?”

  “Eat your burger before it gets cold. I promise you, this’ll be a long night.”

  14

  Earl Halloway sat in the air-conditioned control room, scanning the numerous monitors that showed closed-circuit images of the area around the observatory. Taggard sat next to him, chewing on a candy bar. The setting sun cast an orange tint over the array of dishes that towered aboveground. In a while, as darkness settled, the images would become green, indicating that the heat-sensing capability of the cameras had become active. Animals or people would show clearly as a glow, although at the moment not a single cow or even a rabbit was visible out there.

  Halloway picked up the sports magazine that Taggard had been reading. Every minute or so, he glanced up at the monitors. Nothing was happening outside. Nothing ever happened outside, which of course was a good thing, especially compared to the ambushes and roadside bombs he’d dodged in Iraq. But God almighty, this assignment was boring.

  Down the hall, Halloway heard a door close.

  “I’ll be right back,” he told his partner.

  Taggard nodded, taking another bite.

  Halloway left the control room and walked along the hall to the door that he’d heard being closed. He knew which door it was be- cause each night it was always the same door, the one marked DATA ANALYSIS.

  During the day, Gordon leaves the door open, but at night he always closes it, he thought. Why? What’s he hiding?

  A renewed wave of boredom made Halloway reach for the handle, then open the door. The room was filled with the subtle hum of all the electronic devices that occupied the walls-and the even subtler vibration that he sensed everywhere in the facility and that interfered with his sleep enough to make him always feel on the verge of a headache.

  Gordon wore a headset over his hairless scalp. Sitting at a desk that was turned away from the door, he studied rows of numbers accumulating on a computer screen.

  When Halloway stepped closer, Gordon sensed the movement and looked in his direction. Surprised, he took off the earphones and pushed his glasses higher on his nose.

  “Didn’t I lock the door? I meant to lock the door.”

  “Just checking to see that everything’s okay.”

  “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?” Gordon asked defensively.

  “That’s what they pay me to find out.”

  Halloway heard a noise coming from the headphones that Gordon had set on the table. It was faint compared to when it had come through the speakers during the afternoon. Even so, he could tell that it sounded quite different now, no longer a persistent crackle but a series of wavering tones pitched at various levels, some rising while others descended, many of them occurring in high and low unison.

  They had a subtle, sensual quiver. Their languid, arousing rhythm made him step forward.

  “Sounds like music,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but you need to get out of here,” Gordon responded. “I have work to do.”

  Halloway held up his hands. “Sure. Sorry to disturb you, Gordon. Like I said, I was just checking.”

  As he stepped back, the noises from the earphones changed again, sounding definitely like music. But it was unlike any music he had ever heard.

  As a teenager, he’d dreamed about becoming a rock star. He’d had a garage band and still played an electric guitar damned well. He knew about major and minor keys and four-four and three-four beat patterns. But this music didn’t have any key he’d ever heard, and it sure didn’t have any beat pattern that he recognized. Faint as it was, the music floated and dipped, glided and sank. The notes merged and separated in a rhythm that was almost like the way he breathed if he were on R & R, lying on a beach in Mexico, enjoying the salt smell of the air, absorbing the warmth of the sun.

  “I don’t know what that is, but it’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard.”

  Gordon took off his glasses, and to Halloway’s surprise, he didn’t protest again. Instead, when he spoke, it seemed as if he felt relieved to do so, to share his discovery with someone.

  “It is beautiful,” he said.

  “Why didn’t we hear it this afternoon?” Halloway asked.

  “I have no idea. Whatever this is, it happens only after the sun goes down.”

  “And you hear that every night?”

  “No. Not like that. Until two nights ago, it was always faint and fuzzy, sort of hovering behind the static. I needed to do a lot of electronic filtering to get a sense of what it sounded like.”

  “What happened two nights ago?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. But all of a sudden, that’s what I started hearing.”

  “I can’t hear it very well,” Halloway said. “Why don’t you turn on the speakers?”

  Gordon hesitated, evidently concerned that doing so would violate his orders. But then he shrugged as if to say, What the hell; I can’t keep this to myself any longer, and flicked a switch.

  Instantly the floating, gliding, sailing music filled the room, making Halloway feel as if he were standing on a cushion of air. The instruments-whatever they were-had a synthesizer quality that made them impossible to identify. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but the wave-like tones seemed to drift into his ears like the arousing whisper of a woman pressed against him.

  “My God, that’s beautiful,” he repeated. “What’s causing it?”

  “We’ve been trying to figure that out since this place was built.” Gordon paused, then added, “And apparently a lot longer than that.”

  Those last words were cryptic, but before Halloway could ask about them, Taggard appeared in the doorway.

  “What kind of radio station is that? I’ve never heard anything like it. Is it on the Internet? How do I download that music?”

  “If you tried to record it, somebody would have to shoot you,” Gordon said.

  Taggard looked surprised.

  “That’s not a joke,” Gordon told him.

  Halloway barely paid attention to what they were saying. He felt the music drifting around him and then inside him, becoming part of him. The cushion of air on which he seemed to float became even softer. At the same time, the headache he’d been struggling with finally emerged from the hole where he’d managed to suppress it, like something that had festered until it couldn’t be denied.

  The pain was beautiful.

  15

  The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, known as

  INSCOM, is one of the few branches of the U.S. military that is also a branch of a civilian organization, specifically the National Security Agency, the world’s largest electronic intelligence-gathering service. Although INSCOM maintains several bases, the one affiliated with the NSA is located at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the NSA is headquartered.

  From his office window, Col. Warren Raleigh could see a mile away to the NSA’s headquarters, a tall complex of buildings topped by a vast array of antennae and microwave dishes. Two massive black structures dominated the group. During the day, their shiny dark windows reflected the five thousand cars that sat in the sprawling parking lots that surrounded them.

  Raleigh thought that the reflection was appropriate. While the NSA’s occupants could see out, no one could see in. And the clandestine nature of the agency was represented in another way-although the buildings were huge, there were even more acres of space concealed underground.

  His own office was located in a three-story building designed to look bland and unimposing. A metal plaque next to the entrance read, ENVIRONMENTAL WIND AND SOLAR
DEVELOPMENT FACILITY, suggesting that the work inside was devoted to finding cheap, renewable sources of energy for the government and the military. In actuality, the plaque was one of Raleigh’s jokes. The idea that the government and the military would be interested in cost-cutting or ecological is- sues was laughable. To him, the E, W, and S of Environmental Wind and Solar actually stood for Experimental Weapons Strategy.

  Many of the projects under development in the building were only tangentially related to the NSA’s task of gathering intelligence via electronic means, but some-such as the efforts to create lethal rays derived from the microwave beams that transmitted cell-phone messages-were logical extensions of the NSA’s tools. So were the experiments to develop communications satellites capable of firing laser beams toward enemy positions.

  But when it came to hispersonal choice of weapons, as far as Raleigh was concerned, nothing equaled the feel of a firearm. The second of the building’s five underground levels featured an extensive gun range, part of which was a so-called shooting house with a maze designed to look like corridors and rooms in an ordinary apartment complex or office building. Along each corridor and within each room, potential threats lurked unseen. As life-sized targets popped up unexpectedly, the objective was to identify them correctly and eliminate armed opponents without injuring innocent bystanders. And the goal was to do so in the shortest possible time, usually no more than two minutes.

  On this Thursday in early June, at 9 in the evening, Raleigh was prepared to beat his own record.

  “With your permission, Colonel.”

  “Do your job, Sergeant Lockhart.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lockhart, a bull of a man, shook Raleigh violently, then spun him.

  “You can do better than that, Sergeant!”