The man didn’t respond. At first Page worried that he had died, but then he saw that the man’s eyes were open, unblinking, staring at something that might have been far away, or else locked in his mind.
Page reached over and gripped Tori’s hand. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“We’re alive,” she answered. “Can’t get much better than that.”
The siren blared closer, red and blue lights flashing in the dark.
80
Anita woke periodically in the night, gradually recovering from the effects of the anesthetic. This time, when she opened her eyes, sun- light drifted between slats in blinds, revealing the hospital bed she lay on. Her left arm was in a cast, the weight of which added to the deep pain in her arm.
“The bullet did a lot of damage to the bones in your arm,” a voice next to her said with effort, “but they were able to save it.”
Anita looked to her left and found someone in the room’s other bed. She recognized the voice-it was Brent’s-but she couldn’t see his face, which was covered with bandages.
“I told you I’d be here when you woke up,” he said, his voice muffled. “I’m a man of my word.”
Anita frowned. “What happened to you?”
“I chased that story until it caught me.”
Still groggy from the drugs she’d been given, Anita said, “I don’t understand.”
“I got too close to it.” Brent’s voice dropped. “I got burned by it.”
“Burned?”
“I don’t think I’ll be going to Atlanta. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be coanchoring with Sharon anymore, either. But given what the story cost us, I can guarantee that you and I will get that Emmy.”
Anita tried to sit up. She was desperate to make sense out of what he was saying.
“You were burned?”
“The doctors aren’t sure how bad the scars will be. They talked about skin grafts and specialists. If I’m lucky, I might be able to do some investigative reporting as long as my face is in shadows when I’m on camera.”
Anita couldn’t speak for a moment.
“Lo siento.”
“Since I’m probably going to be in El Paso for quite a while, I guess I’d better start learning Spanish. What did you just tell me?”
“I’m truly sorry.”
“Thank you. We made a good team.”
“We’re still a good team,” Anita said.
“All the same, I think you’d better start looking for another partner.”
“Do you like Mexican food?”
“I don’t know what that’s got to do with anything, but the truth is, I tried the stuff once and hated it.”
“That’s because you didn’t eat in the right place. You haven’t tasted anything till you dig into my mother’s chicken enchiladas.”
81
“A massive electrical storm?” Costigan leaned back behind his desk. Although he wore his uniform and gunbelt, he still had the bandage around his head. It made him look vulnerable.
“A huge cell of dry lightning. That’s what the feds say happened,” Medrano told him. “All kinds of government types got involved, particularly the FBI and the National Science Foundation. The NSF runs the observatory. Or used to. The facility blew up last night.”
“From dry lightning.” Costigan looked confused. “Is that even possible? Could something like that disable the power systems in a couple of hundred vehicles? Not to mention several helicopters and a Cessna?”
“Whether or not it’s possible isn’t the point. That’s the official explanation for what happened, and with all the television cameras disabled last night, we don’t have pictures to prove otherwise.”
“What about the satellite that exploded? Half the southern United States saw it.”
“Space debris blew it apart. What looked like sparks was the wreckage burning as it entered the atmosphere. The fact that it happened at the same time as the dry lightning is entirely coincidental. There’s no way the government’ll admit that it was experimenting with a weapon that uses electromagnetic energy.”
Church bells rang across the street, announcing the start of the Sunday service.
“A weapon?” Costigan frowned. “You think that’s what was going on?”
“I was there, and I promise you that what I saw wasn’t dry lightning. I can think of only one thing that stops engines and generators and everything else that depends on electricity or magnets. You know anything about astronomy?”
“Enough to tell the difference between it and astrology.”
“Ever since I was a kid and saw my first comet, I’ve had a telescope,” Medrano said. “I subscribed to Astronomy magazine for as long as I can remember. Black holes, supernovas, spiral nebulae. They’re all pretty sexy. But solar storms are my personal favorite. I don’t dare look at the sun through a telescope, of course. I need to rely on films taken by special cameras in observatories. Solar storms give off flares that look like the flicking end of a giant whip. They can get as hot as a hundred million degrees. They radiate the electromagnetic energy of ten million atomic bombs.”
Costigan listened intently.
“They tend to run in eleven-year cycles,” Medrano continued. “From almost no activity to spectacular eruptions. At their peak, the electromagnetic waves have so much strength that when they reach Earth they can knock satellites out of orbit, shut down power plants, and turn television broadcasts into static. The Northern Lights are caused by them. What I saw last night looked like a combination of the two: Northern Lights and solar flares.”
“Solar flares. An awful long way from the sun.”
“I’m not saying they were solar flares. I’m just saying that’s what they looked like. An electromagnetic burst from somewhere on the ground would explain a lot of what happened last night.”
“But what caused it?”
“That’s another way of asking what the lights are. Here’s a theory. The Earth’s core is hotter than the surface of the sun.” Medrano shrugged. “Maybe there are fault lines around here that allow electro- magnetic waves to find their way to the surface.”
Costigan thought about it. “As good an explanation as swamp gas, quartz crystals, radioactive gas, and temperature inversions, I suppose.”
“Well, whatever’s going on, I won’t let this get any worse,” Medrano said. “Most visitors have had enough and are going home on their own. But just to make sure, as of tonight we’re blocking the road. Anybody who wants to drive in that direction will need to take a long detour. The viewing area, the portable toilets, the roadside plaque, the concrete barriers, the parking lot-everything’s being removed. That place will look like just another section of a field by the time we’re finished. Meanwhile, the feds are cleaning up the mess at the observatory and the airbase. We’ll probably never know what went on there. They won’t let us in. And we’ll never officially know what happened at White Sands last night, either.”
“White Sands?” Costigan asked. “The missile range?”
“Yeah, it’s all over the news, and the conspiracy theorists are having a field day. Some kind of ray hit a target at White Sands-a mockup of a town. I think we can guess where the ray came from. Apparently it destroyed the mockup town, blew apart the monitoring station, and obliterated a half-dozen other buildings five miles away, not to mention taking out the electricity for the entire base, including the batteries in their vehicles. The ray was too visible for them to deny it happened. Reports are that twenty military technicians were killed. Civilians watching the night sky from Alamogordo claim they saw a blinding light. The Army attributes all this to a massive explosion at a munitions depot. The explosion was caused by dry lightning, they said.”
“That dry lightning sure gets around.” Costigan’s features were suddenly creased with exhaustion.
“Are you okay?” Medrano asked.
Across the street, the church bells kept ringing.
“Maybe I’ll stroll over there later,” Cos
tigan said. “It’s been a while.”
The police dispatcher knocked on the open door. “Mr. and Mrs. Page are here to see you.”
“Show them in.”
When Page and Tori stepped into the doorway, Costigan smiled. “It’s good to see you, even if you do look a little sunburned.”
“So does Captain Medrano,” Tori said.
“Seems we’re in the land of the midnight sun,” Medrano replied. “We discussed your phone call. You’re right that we’re going to need you here to fill in some of the gaps. But at the moment we have plenty of other details to take care of. So if you can get back here in ten days, that’ll be fine. Mrs. Page, you mentioned that you’re going to have surgery Tuesday morning in San Antonio. Will ten days give you enough time to feel strong enough to travel?”
“We’ll see,” Tori said.
“We can always set up a video conference call, if necessary. I hope it isn’t anything serious.”
Page and Tori didn’t reply.
82
The Falcon 2000 jet took off from the airbase at Fort Bliss and started its four-hour flight toward Glen Burnie Airport near Fort Meade, Maryland. It was piloted by Army Intelligence personnel, who were also affiliated with the NSA. Its passengers were a medical team and Colonel Raleigh.
The colonel stared straight ahead, his eyes blinking occasionally, but otherwise making no movement.
“How long has he been like this?” someone asked.
Because Raleigh was catatonic and couldn’t turn his head, he wasn’t able to identify the speaker.
“Apparently since twenty-two hundred hours last night,” someone replied. That man, too, was out of Raleigh’s line of sight.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“The best I can say right now is trauma-induced paralysis. I don’t know if it has a physical cause, a psychological one, or both. He’ll need to be tested.”
“Considering the mess we found in that underground facility, I’m not surprised he freaked out.”
“Not a very scientific term, but yeah, basically that’s what happened. He freaked out.”
“Do you think he can hear us?”
“I have no idea. His ears were bleeding. There might have been permanent hearing loss. Or else the shock of what happened might have put him in a state of psychological disassociation.”
“Yeah, but the thing is, what did happen? The cameras down there stopped working. The digital recordings were all wiped. All we’ve got are the bodies. Except for the men who were shot, those other poor bastards bled to death before we got to them.”
“Unless the colonel starts communicating, we might never know.”
Incapable of movement, Raleigh kept staring straight ahead.
The hiss of the jet engines gradually changed to the drone of a propeller and a piston-driven motor. The interior of the Falcon dissolved, giving him a back-seat view of a biplane skimming above a dark field while stars glistened.
He wore goggles and a scarf, one end of which fluttered behind him. He worked the controls and drifted toward the horizon.
Ahead, colors shimmered, beckoning.
83
The waiting room had plastic chairs linked together. A television was bolted to an upper corner of the room, tuned to the Home and Gar- den channel. At the entrance, a hospital volunteer sat at a desk and wrote down the names of people who came in, letting them know that coffee, tea, and water were available on the table behind her.
Page sat next to Tori’s mother. After a while, their tension kept them from making small talk. Page flipped through a two-month-old issue of Time, then looked at the television, where a woman wearing gloves and holding a trowel gave viewers a tour of her flower garden.
“How long do you suppose it’ll take?” Margaret asked, looking pale.
“I guess it depends on what they find and how much needs to be removed.”
“My poor baby,” Tori’s mother said.
A woman wearing a surgical gown and bonnet walked into the waiting room. She scanned it, saw the two of them, and came over. Her expression was difficult to read.
It’s far too soon, Page thought. Something’s gone wrong.
The woman sat next to them. “There’s been a mistake.”
“Oh, dear God,” Margaret said.
“Maybe Tori’s films and records got confused with someone else’s,” the surgeon continued. “Or maybe there was something wrong with the equipment when the tests were given.”
Page sat forward. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”
“Your wife doesn’t have cancer.”
“What?”
“There’s no trace of it.”
Page felt off balance.
“A mistake?”
“That’s the only way I can explain it. Her mammogram and CAT scan both show a sizable mass that might have spread to the chest wall.”
Tori never told me it was that serious, Page thought.
“But that mass definitely isn’t there now,” the surgeon said. “On occasion, tumors go into remission, but they don’t just vanish in a week. Somehow the equipment must have malfunctioned, or your wife was given someone else’s results. We’re working to find out what happened.”
“My wife’s going to be all right?” Page managed to ask.
“She should be fine, and I can tell you for certain that she doesn’t have breast cancer.”
Tori’s mother wept.
84
Page had his own theory.
Equipment hadn’t malfunctioned. Records hadn’t been mislabeled. Test results hadn’t been misrouted.
Back in Rostov, while he’d been buying a fresh shirt and jeans in a clothing store, he’d heard a customer ask a clerk about the lights.
“My wife has diabetes,” the customer had said. “We heard this place makes miracles happen, like at Lourdes. If she sees the lights, she’ll be cured.”
At the time, Page had thought, Cured? Wouldn’t that be nice?
And now it had happened.
Tori had been cured. They returned to Rostov for the further questioning and to sign their statements. By then Costigan no longer had the bandage around his skull, and his short gray hair revealed a scar along the side of his head.
“Haven’t seen any sign of the lights since everything happened,” Costigan told them. “Captain Medrano and I drove Harriett Ward out there. If anybody can be depended upon to see the lights, it’s her. She says they’re gone. What’s the phrase she used? ‘In remission.’”
“Yes,” Tori said. “In remission.”
Page took her home to Santa Fe-but it didn’t seem like home any longer. She said she kept thinking of Rostov, dreaming about the lights, and Page was dreaming about them now, too.
The insurance payment for the crashed Cessna helped him buy a thirty-year-old replacement. A year later, Page and Tori flew back to Rostov. They rented a car and drove to Costigan’s office, where the police chief was coughing from what he said was a bad summer cold, although Page had a strong idea about the true source of this ex- smoker’s cough.
“We’re thinking about moving here,” Page said. “Any chance you have a job open?”
“A deputy’s pay isn’t much.”
“But the cost of living here isn’t much, either, and I can earn some extra cash as a mechanic at the airport.”
Costigan cleared his throat. “Truth is, there might be an opening for my job.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Tori said, looking closely at him.
“Don’t be,” he said with a smile. “I learned a long time ago, nothing lasts forever. But I’m not ready to go yet, so for the time being, the deputy’s job is yours if you want it.”
“I do,” Page said.
“And we’ve got so many artists moving here from Austin, Santa Fe, and Sedona, the real estate market’s picking up,” Costigan told Tori. “I don’t suppose it’ll surprise you that there’s something about the colors here that attracts them. I think you cou
ld earn a living.”
“I’d like to try,” she responded. “One thing I know-we won’t be lonely here. We made some good friends.”
“You did indeed.” Six months later, Page became the police chief. After Costigan’s funeral, he and Tori drove out to where they guessed the viewing area had been. Medrano had meant what he’d said-once everything was removed, the place looked like just another section of a field.
They arrived at sunset, got out of the car, and watched the horizon. As the darkness settled, they saw the headlights from cars approaching from Mexico. They saw a shooting star. They saw a hint of a shimmer beyond the Badlands.
“You think that’s the start of the lights coming back?” Page asked.
“It might be,” Tori answered. “Harriet says they have cycles, weak and strong. Maybe she’s right. But I guess I really don’t need to see them. Even back in town, I canfeel them. That’s enough.”
“More than enough,” Page agreed. “They match what people bring to them. If you need something to believe in, they’ll inspire you, but if you built a wall around yourself, you won’t be able to see them. If you’re angry, they’ll make you angrier. If you want to turn them into a weapon, they’ll use that weapon against you and make you realize just how terrifying a weapon can be.”
“Plus, if you hope hard enough for a miracle,” Tori said, “they can make one happen.”
The headlights of a car approached. It pulled up next to their car, and a man rolled down a window.
“Hey, isn’t this where those weird lights used to show up?”
“Lights? Don’t know anything about them,” Page said. “We’re just admiring the stars.”
“Probably a lot of bunk anyhow.”
“So we hear,” Tori said.
The car drove on, its taillights fading into the darkness.
“Want to head back?” Page asked.
“I’m ready. If that shimmer out there is in fact the lights, we’ve probably seen enough.”
In the car, Page hesitated before turning the ignition key.
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