by Edward Lee
“I’ll give you something else, too,” Sanders added. “Something more than the money.”
“Yeah? What?”
“What you want more than anything.” Sanders voice seemed tonorous suddenly, weighty with promise. “You have any idea how many restricted documents I’ve seen in my career?”
Garrett paused in contemplation. Probably…a lot.
“Did you know that John F. Kennedy okay’d the murder of the President of South Vietnam as well as six in-progress assassination operations against Castro after Bay of Pigs? Did you know that MK-ULTRA program is still going on? Did you know that the CIA has been flying twenty billion dollar’s worth of cocaine into Mena Airport in Nell, Arkansas, every year since the mid-’70s, and that four successive presidents have authorized it for black-funding?”
Garrett stared.
“In 1995, Boris Yeltsin secretly sold three nuclear-powered submarines to the Iraqis; in 1996 we sunk all three of them with an orbiting rail-gun that no one knows about. And here’s on for ya, Garrett. The Aurora spy plane exists—we have five of them at a secret base fifty miles northwest of Delta, Utah. But they’re not really even spy planes; they’re long-range stealth bombers that can fly 15,000 miles without refueling, and we’ve also got nuclear ram-jets that max out at Mach 7. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Garrett. Get it?”
Garrett felt smothered by the impact of Sanders’ words. “What is it—exactly—that you’re saying?”
Veins beat at Sanders’ temples when he yelled, “Half of the stuff you conspiracy assholes have been writing about is true!”
Sanders shout seemed to echo as if in a cavern. “And you’ve got proof?”
“I’ve got a safe-deposit box in a George Town bank full of proof,” Sanders answered. “What of you think a guy like me does to protect himself? Over the years of my career, whenever I’ve had the opportunity to copy a restricted document, what do you think I did?”
“Copied it,” Garrett said.
“That’s right. And by now I’ve got a stack of the things. I’ll give them to you—and money—if you let me go. The next article you write will headline every newspaper in the world. You’d be the king of the hill. You’ll go down in history as the guy who busted it all open.”
Garrett felt lost in his thoughts. Sanders was verifying his life’s work, and the truth behind it.
That truth needed to be revealed.
Sanders’ face grew more intense. “And this Nellis business? You think this Nellis crash is all there is?”
“No, I don’t. I think there are dozens of authentic instances of extraterrestrial contact on this planet,” Garrett replied.
“Not dozens, pal. Try hundreds. Roswell was real, and so was Kingman and Kecksburg. The first time the U.S. military officially recovered a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle was in Glenrock, Wyoming, in 1919. I’ve got copies of the field photographs and the recovery docs, even the official report to the president and the secretary of war. There’s stuff that you can’t even imagine. And I’ll give it to ya, with money.” Sanders eyed him severely. “Think about it, pal. Everything you’ve ever wanted—in your whole life—I’ll give you. But you gotta agree to the deal.”
Garrett stood flabbergasted; already he was dreaming. The money was nothing, but the data? And it made perfect sense that someone in Sanders’ position, for all these years, would have seen so much, and it made just as much sense that he would’ve duplicated some of it, as a safeguard to himself.
The words echoed back in Garrett’s head: Half of the stuff you conspiracy assholes have been writing about is true…
This was Garrett’s own chance, wasn’t it?
But—
There was one thing that this sudden rush of greed had caused him to forget.
The kid… The kid’s going to die unless I find him…
Garrett pushed it all away, regained his senses. He had no idea where Depot 12 was, and neither did Sanders.
“Maybe Danny’s father knows where the depot is,” he suggested.
Sanders’ face drew into a web of creases. “What is wrong with you. Forget the depot! Forget the damn kid! You can’t save him anyway! The stuff I’ll give you will make you famous!”
“Shut up,” Garrett said. “There’s no deal. The only thing you’d give me is a garrote.”
“I’m serious, man!” Sanders nearly bellowed. “I swear!”
“Shut up, Garrett repeated, though he was fidgeting a bit. “Where’d you tie up General Vander and his wife?”
“Oh, for God’s sake! We don’t have time for this bullshit!”
Garrett stiffened his stance, aimed the pistol at Sanders’ forehead. “Which room? Vander might know how to get to the depot, and I’m not gonna sit back and let some little kid fry because of a pipe dream. Tell me which room Danny’s father is in…or I’ll blow you away right here.”
Sanders’ posture and verve seemed to deflate, a popped raft. “I told you, I knocked him and his wife out with amobarbital.”
“Then we’ll wake ’em up!” Garrett barked. “Where are they?”
Sanders shrugged and pointed. “Master bedroom. Right in there.”
Garrett moved for the door but then caught his wits. “You,” he said. “Lead the way. I can’t believe I almost turned my back on a trained assassin.”
Sanders winked at him. “And it’s probably a good thing you didn’t.”
Sanders walked to the other end of the upstairs hall, Garret following. Ubel had said that no one knew the depot’s location but certainly there was a chance that General Vander, the post’s commander, might know or at least have some inkling. Garrett’s heart pumped up a few beats in the meager hope.
“In here,” Sanders said, and opened the door at the end of the hall. Garrett glanced past Sanders, into the lit bedroom. Just a normal middle-class bedroom, nice drapes, nice decor. And Sanders had indeed done as he’d said: he’d tied General and Mrs. Vander up quite securely.
But it wasn’t like they were going anywhere.
Garrett’s belly flinched at the sight. The plush beige bedspread was half red with blood. Long streaks of more blood drooled down the back wall in long thin lines of scarlet going brown.
Oh, no, Garrett thought. Holy shit…. And then he was one spasm short of throwing up.
General Vander lay stiff as a sprawled scarecrow, the center of his t-shirt an explosion of blood. What looked like a broken-off wooden chair leg had been driven into his chest, nailing him to the bed.
Mrs. Vander had fared ever worse. Her body lay decapitated beside her husband, and her pale head stared back at Garrett, propped up neatly on a bedpost.
“Go ahead,” Sanders said. “Ask General Vander if he know where Depot 12 is.”
Finally, Garrett’s face turned up, and he growled, “You evil murderous piece of shit motherfuck—”
Sanders sprang forward, falling onto Garrett like brick wall collapsing, his “move” finally made, and Sanders had expertly made it at just the proper moment as Garrett was trying to filter his revulsion. Sanders had Garret’s throat in one hand—instantly squeezing off the air supply—and the other hand on the gun, which he twisted out of Garrett’s hand as effortlessly as taking a rattle away from a baby. Suddenly, all of Sanders’ hard frame and toned muscles seemed to lay atop Garrett as if to flatten him. The hand snapped off his throat; Garrett shrieked in air.
Then Lynn’s gun was pressed hard to Garrett’s forehead.
Sanders’ steely eyes glared down, and his voice flow like some black fluid. “If I wasn’t in a hurry, I’d take you down slow. I’d do a real job on you—an all-nighter—like I did to all them VC gook teenagers in the Central Sector. I’d cut off a piece at a time and cauterize each wound with a blow torch. I’d flame your face half off like I did to those SDECE schmucks in the French Congo, and I’d pull your cock off with a pair of vise-grips. Then I stick lock needles into your kidneys and liver. Real slow.” Sanders smiled ever so faintly. “Consider yourself fortunate tha
t I’m in a hurry.”
“Go ahead and shoot me, dickhead,” Garrett croaked. “And by the way, your mother give lousy head. What do you think?”
Sanders’ face reddened, tightening. The barrel of Lynn’s gun pressed harder against Garrett’s forehead as his finger tightened against the trigger.
And tightened—
And tightened—
“What’s the matter, Ally McBeal?” Garrett asked. “Big strong tough-guy killer like you isn’t strong enough to squeeze that measly little trigger?”
Sanders’ grit his teeth, and his finger whitened from the forces it was exerting against the trigger.
He couldn’t fire the gun.
“What the fuck did you—”
“I told you downstairs, I knew you’d make a move on me,” Garrett said, grinning up. “So when we were coming up the steps, I took the clip out of the gun. Even a dick-for-brains ex-Army moron like you knows that a semi-automatic pistol won’t fire with the clip removed even when there’s a round in the chamber.”
Appalled, Sanders leaned up and gaped at the pistol’s butt. The ammo clip was gone.
“Now look down, at the approximate location of your navel,” Garrett said.
Sanders, very slowly, did so. And saw his own pistol, which Garrett had taken off him earlier, firmly clenched now in Garrett’s hand. The small-caliber barrel was half an inch away from Sanders’ belly.
“Good job, punk. I’m impressed.”
“And isn’t it a bummer that a guy like you, who’s killed hundred of people, is gona buy the farm from a non-hacking liberal skinny milquetoast computer-geek tabloid writer like me?” Garrett posed.
Sanders chuckled right down into his face. “You ain’t got the nuts to kill me.”
BAM!
Sanders howled as the first round popped into his abdomen. He rolled over, and—
BAM!
Garrett put the second round between Sanders’ eyes.
“Say what?” Garrett asked the corpse when he got up off the floor and dusted himself off. “I don’t have the what?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Past midnight now. The warped moon hung low, as if sitting atop the treeline, a sickly dark-yellow glow. The air—still warm and sticky even at this time of night—seemed to throb back and forth in its faint yet somehow deafening chorus of crickets. peepers, and nightbirds.
Danny Vander’s sneakered feet took him over another low, weedy hill. The mon followed him along the trees. The harsh Maryland summer had brought a lengthy drought, browning the post’s vast grasslands, sucking life from plants and flowers. The parched weeds crunched beneath each of Danny’s steps. Several times, owls hooted at him from high trees, and every so often, he felt a creepy, silent whir above his head: bats.
By now, as he marched on, Danny thought he must be going crazy. Why else would he be seeing a psychiatrist? Why else would he feel like everything around him was breaking up into hundreds of pieces like a pop bottle dropped on the pavement? Between his anguish at home during the day, and the Stickmen at night, sometimes Danny wished he could just die.
Steady tears kept his cheeks wet. What had happened just a little while ago seemed like a terrible nightmare. But this nightmare, he knew, was real.
That terrible man who’d come into the house….
And what he’d done to Danny’s parents while the man had made him watch…
He…cut off…Mom’s…
Danny gagged, squeezed his eyes shut, and stopped for a moment. He pushed it all out of his mind, forced himself not to think about it, not to remember it. He had to pretend that it didn’t exist.
My Mom and Dad are dead…
It took a little while—to push it all away. But he knew it was the Stickmen helping him.
And they had helped him, hadn’t they?
Well, sort of.
They’d helped him get away.
Yeah, he thought, but only so I can help them.
He didn’t understand, and he guess he never would. And for some reason, he knew he wasn’t supposed to. He knew that he couldn’t, he couldn’t understand. It was like what his parents had told him about God, that time just a little while ago when they’d all been in the living room watching the news channel about the big earthquake in some place on the other side of the world called Turkey. Thousands and thousands of people had died, all in one night, and Danny didn’t understand, so he’d asked “How could God let that happen?”
His Mom and Dad had both looked at each other funny, but then his mother had said, “He didn’t let it happen, Danny. It just happened because—”
“The devil owns the title deed to this world, son,” his father had cut in, drinking beer like he almost always did at night. “It’s been that way since Eve bit the apple, since mankind said no to paradise.”
Danny did get it, and his mother didn’t look too happy with Dad’s explanation. “God’s much bigger than us, honey,” she said. “He’s a lot smarter than us, and there are a lot of things about his plan for us that we simply can’t understand because we aren’t able to.”
Danny still didn’t get it…but he guessed this must be pretty much the same thing. He didn’t understand why all of this was happening because humans couldn’t understand it. They weren’t smart enough. But God understood because He was smarter.
So were the Stickmen, Danny figured.
After the man had killed his parents and handcuffed Danny’s wrist to the bed, he’d gone back downstairs.
That’s when the Stickmen had come back into his head and told him how to get away.
The glove…
Danny always kept it in his back pocket, just like the Stickmen had told him.
He continued walking, carrying the big case along with him. He knew where he was supposed to go now—the Stickmen had told him that too, just a little while ago.
Danny felt like a doll being pulled apart four different ways. But he just kept walking. He just kept moving on, to the place he knew…but didn’t.
This…this must be it, he thought. His skin started to prickle, and he heard a drone in his head. It was the way that the Stickmen talked to him when they couldn’t be close enough to actually see him or put the weird shape-like words in his head.
The prickling, the drone.
At least, after tonight, there’d be no more headaches. The Stickmen promised him that.
He stood in a clearing now, just slight dip against the belt of trees along the rising hills. The moonlight drenched the entire area in its creepy yellow light. Danny set the big case down, then lowered himself to his knees. He began sweeping the leaves away with his hands, moving brush off the dry ground. It took him a while; there was almost an inch of soil beneath the leaves, and he had to dig through that, too. Several earthworms came up between his fingers but he flung them aside. He knew this was the right place.
He just didn’t know what the place was.
He smoothed his hands around some more—it began to hurt, scuffing against his skin—but then after only a few more seconds, he felt it.
Something underneath.
Underneath the leaves and branches and dirt.
Here…
It felt perfectly flat and cool, like metal. Then he felt something else: a Square bump, like a box about half the size of a video tape like the kind they rented sometimes at Blockbuster.
When he brushed off all the dirt, he could see it in the moonlight: the small box.
It was a lock.
The lock had sort of a lid on top, and Danny simply flicked a little switch on the side, then the lid popped open, to reveal ten buttons that reminded of the buttons on a telephone. It was a combination lock, and the buttons were the combination.
Danny didn’t know what the right buttons to push were—but he didn’t really care.
It didn’t really matter, did it?
He firmly gasped the body of the lock with his gloved hand, and pulled.
The lock broke open with a loud snap!
And then the cool flat surface beneath the dirt began to rise, and that’s when Danny figured out what this was.
A great big trapdoor—in the ground.
The face of the door itself was about the size of his bed mattress. When he lifted the door up all the way to standing height, he effortlessly flung it back. Its hinges screeched a little, then the doors fell back flat against the ground with a muffled swoosh, then a thud.
It was a square black hole that he was looking at now. Then, very slowly, a light came on, faint at first then gaining in strength, until Danny could see its detail. The light was red, mounted on the side of a metal wall inside the hole, like a backup light on a submarine.
Now he could see inside of the hole, he could see what was there:
A gridded metal ramp.
Danny stood there for a time, wrapped up in the warm summer air and the swarming nightsounds. The owl hooted again, and deeper in the woods, he could hear the quick rustles of an animal, squirrels probably, or a fox.
Even though he was only eight years old, Danny felt a sudden and very complex notion of loss. Just being able to stand in some grove in the middle of the night was something he’d taken for granted. There was an astonishing beauty in the world that he’d never really noticed until now, until just this precise moment. The humid, sweeping night, the calls of crickets and peepers, the hush-like sound of an errant breeze straying through the woods.
It was all exponentially and indescribably beautiful.
And for that same handful of isolated moments, Danny felt like a grownup, thinking such things, becoming aware of how beautiful the world was.
And understanding that he’d never see any of that beauty ever again.
It’s almost time, he realized.
It was time to go down, down into the hole.
Danny picked up the ADM and began to walk down the red-lit ramp.
««—»»
The kid’s gonna die, the thought pounded into Garrett’s head. It was a peculiar impact of emotion. Kid’s shouldn’t die, but they did every day. Across the globe millions of kids died every month, from starvation, disease, remnant anti-personnel mines, and the mindless wars of men. Garrett didn’t even know Danny Vander, had never met him…but that didn’t matter at all. He was just another kid.