And also breaking a fundamental policy of the United States of America, which was to keep their secret until and if something could be said to the public other than, “We know they’re here, we know that they come into your bedrooms and kidnap you in the night, but we don’t know why and we are helpless to stop them. And yes, some of you disappear, and some of you die.”
He stared at the image, watching the figures move, trying to form some sort of a rational explanation of what might be happening.
Rob spent too much time in the Mountain, or so he’d been told by practically everybody who worked with him. Because the grays operated at night and tracking their movements was his duty, over the years he’d gradually become a night person.
Mike Wilkes had negotiated a treaty with the grays, using the interface between Bob and Adam and Eamon Glass. The agreement was that they would limit their abductions in number and region. In return, the United States had guaranteed to protect their secrecy.
It was Rob’s job to keep track of the abductions, and, in the most extreme cases of treaty violation, to put up a show of force.
This was not to be done lightly. The grays would not stand to be fired upon. That had been tried back in the forties, and the reply had been horrifying. The grays had caused six hundred plane crashes in the year 1947. Shortly thereafter, President Truman had ordered that they were not to be interfered with in any way. Nobody cared to challenge the grays, but now was one of those dreadful moments when something had to be done.
Early on, there had been a fear that the Soviets would find out how the collective minds of the grays worked, and announce to the world something like, “We have seen the future and it is Communist.” However, nobody except the United States Air Force possessed a gray. Therefore the rest of the world—including the remaining U.S. military, the intelligence community, and the government—was at best minimally informed. Within the Air Force, fewer than twenty people knew about this project.
He put his hand on the phone. There was nobody else in the world who could make this decision, or even offer advice. If he was wrong, there was just no way to tell what the grays would do.
Could he bring about the end of the world when he picked up that phone?
He lifted the receiver, punched in some numbers. “Jimmy, Rob. Do you have my glowboy coordinates?”
“Yes, sir. It’s been ground bound for a while, sir.”
“I need a scramble out of Alfred moving on it instamente.”
“Yes, sir!”
He paused, then. Took a deep breath. “God be with us,” he said into the phone. His next step was to inform Wilkes of what was happening, and that required setting up a listening device on the call. Mr. Crew expected all contacts with Wilkes to be logged, recorded, and sent to him.
Personally, Rob was convinced that Crew was right to be suspicious of Wilkes. He believed that the man was using the empaths to discover new technologies, and selling them to the private sector. Also, Wilkes’s pathological hatred of the grays was inappropriate. He believed that they were bent on invasion. They scared him and that’s why he hated them. But hate does not win wars, knowledge does, and that’s what Wilkes’s empath unit was supposed to be gaining from the one remaining gray in captivity. But damned little useful information came out of the new empath.
Rob did not understand the grays but he didn’t hate them. In fact, he found them incredibly interesting. They’d been here for fifty years and they hadn’t invaded yet, so that didn’t seem to be a very real concern. What they did to people was weird, but you didn’t see folks disappearing or being injured, at least not physically. Obviously, though, whatever the grays were doing to the people they abducted was damned important to them. Otherwise, there would not be threats. They were taking something from us, no question of that, but in the way a farmer takes milk, not meat.
The information flow, Rob believed, was being shunted to Wilkes’s real buddies, the quiet companies who fed off the United States’ one-hundred-and-twenty-billion-dollar annual black budget. In Rob’s opinion, there was a pipeline that led, through Wilkes, from Adam right back to the industry. It would certainly explain why an Oklahoma orphan boy, who had nothing to live on but his soldier’s pay, called a multimillion-dollar house in Georgetown home . . . and why an officer whose work was in a hole two hundred feet below Indianapolis, Indiana, even needed a presence inside the Beltway.
“Mike, it’s Rob. Sorry about the late hour, but I have a situation. There’s a glowboy on the ground near Wilton, Kentucky. I know, it’s very odd and very disturbing. What’s even more of a concern is that there are civilians in the field around him. He’s got his plasma deployed and he’s ready to run, but he ain’t running. There have gotta be video cameras down there, all kinds of trouble. I’m doing a scramble, I’ve got to get that guy out of there. Do you think you could get Glass in the hole with Adam? Let’s reassure him that it’s just a friendly warning that they might spill their own secret. And let’s please find out what we can about what in sam hill they’re up to.”
He waited until he heard Wilkes’s grunt of assent. The good colonel did not like to be dictated to, which is why Rob did just that whenever he had a chance.
ALFRED AIR FORCE BASE WAS a training facility. It was still up and running largely because Kentucky’s senior senator was a member of the Armed Services Committee and powerful enough to hold onto his bases.
Whatever, Rob was damned relieved that the place was still operational. He widened the image on the overhead satellite, punched a couple of keys, and saw a white outline of the base superimposed over its location. The base was barely thirty miles from the unfolding incident.
IN THE FIELD IN KENTUCKY, they were standing in helpless amazement, watching the object. Nancy Jeffers had gone home, because she and her husband had no wish to leave their baby alone with something like this taking place. Katelyn and Conner were also gone, and Dan was just as glad. A child had no business out here, and he thought that Kelton was letting his boys get way too close with that camera of theirs.
Without warning, a clap of thunder hit. Dan cried out, they all did. Chris Jeffers covered his head with his hands. Dan saw a double star wheeling in the sky. Then he heard the shriek of a jet and realized that what he was looking at were afterburners. “It’s the Air Force!” he shouted.
Its underside glowing in the light being given off by the object, the fighter howled past so low that a hot stench of burning jet fuel washed over them.
The object turned purple. It moved, wobbling, above the ground.
The voice in the thing cried out, “Help me, help me, oh God, no! NO NO NO!”
The light rose into the sky. It hung there, still wobbling slightly. The jet’s glowing afterburners turned and started back.
“Stop it! Stop that!” came the voice. Then more screaming. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Oh aaaaaa . . .”
Maggie Warner screamed with her, crying into the agony of it.
In that instant, the object rose a hundred feet or so, then shot off to the north literally like a bullet. It went faster than Dan had ever seen anything go.
The jet passed over again, its engines screaming. It turned and followed the object. They watched the afterburners creep away into the sky.
Into the silence that followed, Chris said, “God help her.”
“That was a UFO,” young Jimbo Kelton announced.
Maggie asked, “Was that a UFO?”
“Dear heaven,” Harley Warner said, “I think so.”
Dan was looking at a small shadow in the field standing where the glow had been. “Folks,” he said, “uh, I don’t think we’re alone here.”
But when he shone his flashlight toward it, there was nothing there.
SIX
LAUREN GLASS WAS ENJOYING TEDDY Blaine’s lovemaking, powerful and persistent from this sweet, rough guy. As a fellow Air Force officer, he was carefully disinterested in Lauren’s classified work, and that made this particular affair very fun and very easy. As long
as she was involved in heavily classified work, Lauren’s plan was to keep the lovers moving through her life. Nobody deep, because it made it too hard to keep her secrets.
When Colonel Wilkes called her, she tried to ignore it. She pushed the chiming out of her mind, concentrated on the warmth under the covers, and the fabulous young man who was loving her.
The warble became a whine.
“Oh, Lauren,” Teddy whispered, sinking down onto her, burying his face in her neck, kissing her now gently, pressing his prickled cheek against her soft one.
“My love,” she said, and thought that she really did kind of mean it. Which meant—should she ditch him on the never-get-too-close theory?
The whine became a wail.
He jerked like he’d been stuck with a pin. “I don’t believe this.”
“My cert’s up,” she said, referring to the security certification system on her computer, which started automatically when she began receiving a classified message.
But why was he after her now, at—what—jeez, it was 3 A.M. She’d been in the cage for six hours yesterday waiting without result for Adam to at least take a breath, and she was most certainly not ready to return to his dark, claustrophobic hole.
Throwing off the covers, she went over and typed her password. Code came up, four lines, which she sight read. “They’ve got a virus,” she muttered, striving not to reveal to him her true horror. The message communicated extreme urgency. Something was wrong. Real wrong.
“Let somebody else fix it.”
“I have to go,” she said, going to her closet and starting to dress.
“Miss Indispensable.”
“Unfortunately.” Zipping her jeans, she went over and kissed him. “I’ll be back, love,” she said.
He drew her toward the bed. Briefly, she sat down. They kissed. She looked into his eyes. She sighed. “You know the rules.” And she realized how much she hated what she did—how deeply, profoundly twisted it felt . . . but she loved the perks, and, quite frankly, she was also sort of okay with Adam. The facility was a hole, but at the bottom of that hole was a most extraordinary being.
The thought that Adam might not be well crossed her mind. That made her hurry even more. She threw on a sky-blue cashmere sweater and her black jacket. After a perfunctory brush of her hair, she strode across her large living room and out the door.
She did not look back toward Ted. When she returned, he might well be gone. Fine, she’d rustle up another roll in the hay, maybe a civilian this time.
She had a lot for a girl of twenty-six. But she did a lot. As far as anybody knew, there was only one person on this earth who could do what she did. No doubt there were others, but how to find them? The Air Force had never been able to succeed at that, which was fine by her, since it meant that she could name her price, which had been promotion to full colonel. So now Mike’s orders were requests . . . but this was one she would certainly meet.
In the elevator, she turned her mind to her work. What could be wrong? She wished the elevator would go faster. She arrived in the condo’s garage, strode to her car, and sped off to the facility. It wasn’t far. She couldn’t live far from Adam.
She turned two corners onto Hamilton, and made her way down the tree-shaded street to the old house.
Wilkes met her at the door, which was unusual in the extreme. “A glow-boy kiped a newbie in the forbidden zone and there were civilian witnesses,” he said all in one breath. “I want you to query Adam on it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s so extremely unusual, obviously.”
“You understand, they don’t have the concept of treaty. They don’t know what that is. And they futz with newbies all the time. You just don’t see them do it, because they stay in the approved zones.”
“You know this?”
“What if I told you that they’re a rambunctious, fun-loving bunch of extremely brilliant but weird people? How would that sit?”
“First, they are not people. Second, they are not only extremely brilliant, they are extremely sinister and they have no emotions.”
“Adam showed grief when Dad got killed.”
“He was faking it.”
“Plus, he—I don’t know how to put it, it’s not human emotion, not at all, but he does care about me.”
“You’re projecting. End of story. Now, let’s go down. We have work to do.” As they waited for the elevator, he added, “We have a scramble running on the glowboy, incidentally.”
“Oh, great, how do I explain that?”
“Communicate that it’s a friendly warning. The civilians are liable to have cameras. There could be a security breach that’s beyond our control.”
“Wunderbar.” She was annoyed when Wilkes got into the elevator with her. She did not like him around when she and Adam were together.
A few moments later, the doors opened onto the control room and, beyond it, the huge door that sealed Adam’s space.
As Lauren stripped, Andy began opening a fresh prep kit. She dropped her sweater to the floor and rubbed her temples. “So I need to find out why this triad is off-station?”
Lauren threw off her clothes in front of both men. Let them see. She was proud of what she was.
“Lauren, I need concrete information from you on this.”
She let Andy cover her body with the emollients that would protect every inch of her skin. Over the years, she’d gotten drier and drier from the zero-humidity conditions in the cage. At twenty-six she had the skin of a forty-year-old. She caked her face in Vaseline.
Andy’s hands felt only clinical to her, but she was aware that she did not feel clinical to him. She knew because of the way he would turn away when he was finished, his cheeks burning, poor guy.
She pulled on her orange coverall, zipped it, and wrapped the neck shield tightly. Andy fitted her cap. Then she rolled her heavy latex gloves onto her hands.
She faced the steel door.
Andy pushed up the sleeve of her coverall and injected her. “Sorry,” he said, as always. He kissed her then, very quickly, on the place he’d just pricked.
She opened the door, stepped into the airlock, and waited. The inner door hissed and slid aside.
She entered her secret heaven and hell, the world of love and terror that she shared with Adam.
SEVEN
AS A SOCIAL SCIENTIST, KATELYN Callaghan understood the impulse to congregate after a tragedy, which was why the Jefferses had returned, baby in carrier, and now sat before the Callaghan fireplace. The Keltons had rushed home to study their video, the Warners to keep their excited kids from doing anything rash.
Hell’s gate had opened for somebody tonight, and now there must be congregation—the ancient holy act that was intended by deepest human instinct to declaim the persistence of life.
Chris and Nancy sat with straight backs, methodically sipping wine. Six-month-old Jillie slept in her carrier between them, her little mouth open, her pacifier in her hand.
Katelyn wanted only to go downstairs to Conner. As irrational as it probably was, she was nevertheless experiencing an urge to guard him, and this urge was growing by the minute.
Nervously, she paced in front of the fireplace, drinking rather than sipping. She feared that Conner might go back out there on his own. That was why the Warners were staying home, to keep Paulie in. Conner could easily leave via the door that led from his basement room under the deck, and out into the yard.
She stepped onto the deck and looked out across the yard. No movement. Total silence.
It had seemed like half the campus police department, the entire volunteer fire department, County Emergency Services, and the state police had come.
None of the official types had seen the light, but the Air Force jet had still been maneuvering around when they came, at least. Police Chief Dunst had called Alfred AFB, only to be told that there were no fighters in the air at that time. No planes at all, in fact. He’d closed his cell phone in disgust. “Guess th
at was a privately owned F-15 on afterburners,” he’d muttered.
The emergency crews had combed the field with infrared detectors. It had all been very impressive, but it would have been more impressive if they had found something resembling human remains, or even a shard of debris of some sort.
“Well,” Nancy said at last, “what do we think?”
“We think some damned kids are in big trouble. I mean, I saw the Air Force out there,” Katelyn said.
“Dan. Danny Dan.” Chris laughed silently.
“No, Chris,” Nancy said.
“No? With regard to what?”
“With regard to the fact that you think it was a flying saucer.”
“With an abductee aboard, yes, I do think that.”
Now it was Nancy’s turn to drink deep. She glared at her husband. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“It’s true, though.”
“Maybe and maybe not, but I do know one thing, we’re here because of this UFO stuff! Shunted off into this backwater with barely enough of a salary to raise our baby—and it’s because you side with the trailer trash instead of your fellow physicists. Excuse me, folks. Family stuff.”
“No, it’s true,” Dan said, “everybody here is a failure somewhere else.”
“They’re real, they’re here, and my colleagues are wrong. If that video—”
“Don’t you dare go on TV about this, Chris. Don’t you dare!”
Chris raised his hands defensively. “Be it far from me, unless—”
“Unless nothing! No more, Chris. I have gone from CalTech to U. Mass to this because of your damn UFOs. Below here, we are looking at the junior-college pit.”
“I reserve judgement until I have seen the video. If it’s as good as I think it’s going to be, it might just get us back to CalTech.”
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