The larger Gray watched the rescue of the keeper, the slave of its home world, and this time it let the growl escape its lips. Again it turned and watched as the man started his long struggle down the mountainside. The yellow eyes narrowed as it followed the retreating form. Again the nails scraped against the rock and left long scratches.
The Gray stood and limped toward the small opening in the mountain valley. It started tracking not only one, but two enemies of its kind.
TWELVE
Event Center, Nellis AFB, Nevada
July 8, 0850 Hours
Jack had been up since 0400 this morning going over his security staff files. His new department wasn’t in as bad a shape as he’d originally thought. He had some real good men on assignment here. Sergeant Mendenhall had top scores in all his field evaluations. Jack figured with his record, the young man should be targeted for officer candidate school. He closed the file on Mendenhall and took a swallow of coffee. The cafeteria was just now filling up with personnel from all of the departments. He watched as a familiar face walked in yawning. As their eyes met, Sarah McIntire smiled and gave Collins a small wave of her hand. Jack nodded and went back to his files.
He placed Mendenhall’s file aside in a group that included that of Everett and five others who would eventually compose his initial discovery team if the crash site was found. Across from that file was another larger grouping of paperwork that included lists of the equipment they would need to receive from logistics. He had been most impressed with the equipment the Group had buried deep beneath the sands, such as weapons and night-vision gear. His predecessor had been serious enough to at least know what was needed for field operations. Right now Collins was only guessing at what would be needed for this mission. But he did know that this site would have to be secured first at all costs. He took another sip of coffee and watched as Sarah McIntire turned to him as she took her coffee toward the door. He looked away quickly when she noticed him and smiled again.
Collins walked into the computer center cleaned and in a fresh blue jumpsuit after his post-breakfast mile in the athletic center. Alice had called and left a message for him to meet her there.
He stood and watched the buzz of activity. The whole time he had been studying his personnel files, his mind had been here, wondering how the search for the saucer was progressing. Technicians in white, static-free coats were at consoles, and others were walking around with printouts. Large flat-paneled screens lined the walls, while smaller ones were mounted at every workstation. The largest high-definition screen was located in the middle of the white plastic wall and was filled with a color map of the western United States, and as he watched, a computer-generated line started sectioning the various points into a grid. A small dotted line ran up from Panama through Mexico and then split off into several lines as it crossed the border into New Mexico. The major noticed that where the dotted lines entered the state, they had been changed to small question marks instead of dashes by some imaginative technician. On other screens he saw raw data and real-time images of desert locations that were obviously bouncing via satellites to ground stations. Niles was sitting at one of the technician desks and staring at the large screen as if he were hypnotized.
“Jesus, Dr. Compton had to pull a lot of strings and dish out favors from now until next century to get that many KH-1 Is on this,” Everett said, coming in after Collins.
“He did. The NSA is screaming bloody murder at the use of their bird,” Pete Golding, the Computer Center director, said. He was standing nearby, tapping at a set of computer keys.
Collins looked from Golding to the wall projections. “Nothing on the crash site?”
“No.” Golding seemed irritated as he looked back at the two military men and then removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Damn thing isn’t where we thought it would be according to the track we initially calculated.”
“Maybe it didn’t go down at all,” Carl said.
Golding just gave the navy man a sour look, then abruptly turned and walked away.
“Forgive Pete, he and Niles are a little tired and on edge this morning,” Alice said.
“You look chipper,” Collins said.
“Old people don’t require the sleep you young ones do.”
“It looks like Dr. Compton and Mr. Golding need to take five and get some shut-eye,” Everett remarked.
Alice tilted her head for a moment watching Niles, knowing he had been shocked by the file the senator had given him to read. She turned and eyed the two men standing next to her. “He needs to be right here. You gentlemen better get used to the idea that we’re basically on a war footing here. Never before has the center been placed on total lockdown and all departments deployed for one specific Event. Our need to find that crash site is paramount, absolutely paramount.”
“Where is the senator this morning?” Collins asked.
She smiled. “He’s sleeping, personal assistant ordered rest.” She winked at the men, then walked over toward the middle of the room and looked closer at one of the satellite images for a moment, then shook her head and stepped back. “He may bellow and bark at the rest of us, but at least he still knows who is smarter. But I’m afraid both he and the president are taking tremendous heat from the Joint Chiefs about this incident. Everyone who’s aware of our existence thinks we’re way over our heads, and I’m afraid all the old agency enemies are coming out of the woodwork on this one.”
They stood there for a moment, not knowing what else to say, then Niles started raising his voice about something.
“This is why I called you both,” she said as Niles took a printout from one of the techs. “This doesn’t look good.”
Niles was calming when he noticed Alice, Jack, and Carl on the walkway above the desk area, and he hurriedly moved up the stairs to the three carrying the printout and handed it to Alice.
“See what you can do with this, will you?” He saw the blank expressions on Everett’s and Collins’s faces and tried to quickly explain while Alice read his findings. “That son of a bitch Reese was on the new system yesterday and observed the saucer attack in real time. Europa, our newest and most powerful computing system, says he made a damn copy of it!” Niles grimaced and snatched his glasses off, then looked at the faces before him. “Reese is missing! He didn’t report for work this morning. Jack, he has to be found and found fast, there’s no telling what he’s up to.” Then Niles abruptly turned and placed his glasses back on and irately called out to one of the computer team about scanning a search area too fast, then he turned back to face Collins. “I mean it, Jack, this is no good. It’s against all our rules here in the computer center,” he called out as he turned away and went back to the main floor to continue his search for the saucer.
Alice watched him go and shook her head. Then she again scanned the paper she held. She removed her glasses and looked at the two men in front of her, thinking for a moment.
She quickly walked to an empty workstation and seated herself in the large swivel chair, then opened a drawer, rummaged through it for a moment, then closed it. She repeated this with the other drawers until she found what she was looking for. The two officers exchanged a questioning glance as they watched.
Finally she looked up and smiled. “Reese may be working for a very dangerous enemy.”
“He’s on the senator’s watch list, along with almost everyone with a clearance to the computer center,” Everett said.
“I take it it’s unusual for him to miss work like this?” Jack asked.
Alice thought a moment while staring at the darkened computer monitor on the missing man’s desk. “Not in and of itself, no, but like everyone here, he does have his quarters inside the complex. The computer system would have notified him of an Event alert, so he hasn’t checked his messages if he’s off base, as per his orders.” She wheeled around in her chair. “He’s gone bad. Niles is right. He has to be found.”
“What can we do?” Jack asked.
Alice turned back to the blank computer screen and tapped a few commands into the keyboard and the monitor lit up. At the same time she reached behind her chair without looking, offering to Collins the paper that Compton had given her earlier.
Collins took the offered printout. It was columns of military times and what looked like computer commands.
“That is a printout of the last few commands that were asked of this station. SOP for someone who doesn’t show up for work, then signed off base and didn’t return. We automatically check their computer for what its last commands had been.”
Collins handed the paper to Everett, and he too looked it over.
“There,” Alice said, straightening up. “All phone lines are monitored and recorded in this facility. It seems Mr. Reese used his security clearance and his position in the computer center to shut down the monitoring devices for a bank of phones in The Ark. He tried to cover his tracks, but doing that with someone like Niles and Pete Golding is a foolish thing. It took both of them all of three minutes to get through the firewall Reese had set up on this hard drive. Now, according to this”—she gestured at the screen—“there were only two calls made from the complex at the time the bartender noticed him inside the club. One was to a home inside Las Vegas City limits that we checked on already, made by a sergeant to a woman he met at Lake Mead. The other call went to a home in Vidalia, California.” Alice picked up the phone and punched a few numbers and then waited. “Send the sergeant in, please,” she said, and hung up. “I had Staff Sergeant Bateman in the security center run a few things for me using your network into the Europa XP-7, the new Cray system Niles was just speaking of.”
As they waited, the comp center doors slid open with a hiss and the sergeant was allowed in. He saw Alice and walked up to the small group. He stood at attention when he came to a stop and noticed Everett and Collins.
“Normally I would have gone through you of course, Jack, but as I said, you don’t even know your department’s capabilities yet, and this was rather important and urgent. I believe the sergeant and Europa have given you a starting point in your search for Reese, but listen to how it was found in case you find a flaw in the pattern.”
Collins just nodded, and then looked from Alice to the sergeant.
“This is what we have so far, ma’am,” the sergeant said, holding a file out to Alice.
“Just give us a verbal report. If I look at one more scrap of paper this morning…”
The sergeant nodded and looked at Jack. “What we did was run the two numbers through NSA. They were both dead ends as no calls were actually made to those phones from Nevada. This was confirmed by AT&T, Sprint, and the actual residents of those homes. Thus we were left with a dead end. Our friend had managed somehow to scramble the hard lines leading out of the club and the transmission to the phone company’s Comsat. We were stuck until we examined the security monitors from The Ark.” The sergeant handed the major a cased computer disc. “We came up with this thanks to Dr. Cummings in Photo-Recon.”
Jack took the disc and handed it to Alice, who inserted it into the hard drive at Reese’s station. Alice used the touch feature the system was set up with, and her finger touched the header Sur. Ark. Reese., meaning surveillance at The Ark on Robert Reese. Immediately a video started that showed Reese walking to one of the pay phones. They watched as he slid a card into the side of the black instrument, then dialed a series of numbers. He then hung up and walked out of the bar. It even framed the bartender inquiring something of him as he exited.
“What in the hell did we just see?” Carl asked.
The sergeant just nodded his head at the video. “The doc fixed this up for us.”
On the screen the same video started, then suddenly stopped. The screen started flashing the frames forward one frame at a time, at the same instant the picture was computer-enhanced to zoom in on the keypad on the face of the pay telephone as Reese’s fingers jerked over the metal numbers.
“We washed this through Europa and asked the computer what numbers Reese could have been dialing.” The sergeant pointed to the screen as a full-framed picture of Robert Reese appeared as he just stepped up to the phone. The frame froze and a computer-generated tracking grid covered the man’s entire body. “Now here, Europa started her measurements. We at first thought the new system had misunderstood the command, but we were in for a surprise, at least I was.”
As they watched, green numbers started appearing in rapid succession along Reese’s body and changed as he moved and leaned forward into the small kiosk that the phones were tucked away in. The grid stayed fluid and conformed to his body as he moved, changing the computer’s calculated measurements. As he started dialing, another grid, this one red, appeared over the keypad his fingers had just started to touch. More numbers appeared, small arrows going this way and that across the numbered pad and Reese’s fingers.
“Doc Cummings explained what was happening. He said that Europa started by taking the video measurements of Reese himself, height, estimated arm length, and so on. Then it measured the height of the phone kiosk from blueprints of the complex, and the height of the keypad in relevant terms to Reese’s measurements. As he punched numbers, the computer really went to work, running the constant figures his movements caused in minute increments.”
Again they watched as the numbers were now changing at a rapid pace, so fast they couldn’t keep up with the calculations. When Reese stopped punching numbers, the calculations stopped. Then a window opened and on the display over a hundred phone numbers appeared. Some had the same area codes, but most looked as if they were random.
“Europa narrowed the phone numbers Reese could have called down to a hundred and fourteen just through the measurements taken of his movements in relative distance to the phone height and distance from his body and the minute distance his fingers moved over the numbered buttons on the phone’s keypad.”
“That’s still a lot of numbers, Sergeant,” Everett said. He looked at Jack and saw he was smiling. The major must have known what was coming.
“What did Europa use to cross-reference these numbers?” Jack asked.
“That’s good, Major. Yes, she did cross-reference.”
As they watched the screen, the monitor tinted green. They could see the tape as it played again and Reese once more stood before the phone. This time the computer enhanced the keypad in the green light that engulfed the scene and expanded the picture to where only the keypad and Reese’s fingers were visible. When Reese was done, several of the metal numbers were glowing a light red. As the three watched, the computer-enhanced glow started to fade, but not before a series of six phone numbers popped into another window that had opened on the monitor’s screen.
“The computer picked up the oil smudges from Reese’s finger on the pads,” the sergeant said. “The light in the club provided the difference in the sheen off the metal, some after they were just punched, leaving a different shine on the numeric pads from the oil. Thus the oil on the pads was not dried like the others, so they produced a different reflection in the club’s lighting, and the computer deduced it had been these numbers just depressed.”
“But there are too many numbers for an actual phone number,” Everett stated.
“That was the easy part. Europa took the first set of one hundred and fourteen phone numbers from the measurements and cross-referenced them with the second set of six from the optical scan, and she boiled it down to two phone possibilities. Then she noted that some numbers may have been pushed twice, and maybe even three times. Thus you see too many numbers for actual private numbers. Then she boiled the numbers down to two by processing the remaining numbers as some were eliminated as not being actual, according to the national database of phone books, and now we have two, and they are both local. The first was Kindercare, a small preschool out on Flamingo Boulevard, in Vegas. The other is a strip club called the Ivory Coast Lounge. I think you know which one my bet would be on,” the sergeant said.
&
nbsp; “Amazing,” Jack said, looking from the screen to the young sergeant. “That’s good work. Thank you, Sergeant.”
Everett just looked at the young enlisted man and smiled as the sergeant turned and left the computer center. He turned to look at Jack, but he was watching Alice as she started for the door herself.
Alice waited for the men to catch up in the long circular hallway.
“Okay, we need to know first his condition, then find out if Reese passed along anything about the Event,” Jack said.
Alice looked Jack over closely. “We take it very seriously when our people come up missing. We take it extremely seriously when it’s on the heels of what happened yesterday. I don’t like the look of this, and neither does Niles.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I took the liberty of alerting Gate Two. If you would go see Gunny Campos, he’ll have your identification and sidearms. Go get Reese and bring him back to us. And fast.”
THIRTEEN
Event Center, Gate Two, Gold City Pawnshop, Las Vegas
1000 Hours
It was close to ten in the morning when Collins and Everett hurriedly stepped from the elevator into the pawnshop. Jack looked around and thought how the world had changed for him since he’d stepped into this very shop yesterday. It seemed it had been months and not just a single revolution of the clock since he had been in this dingy and dusty store.
Event: A Novel Page 17