“You are able to speak English to me. To the others?”
“Most are from my homeland. The others, no. We speak through example.”
“Your homeland. Where is that?”
“Some questions I do not answer.”
“Because...?”
“Because I encourage all of us here to live in the present. We have a great calling. Miracle births!”
Paige hid her frustration at Velma’s ignorance, smiled in return, accepted another dripping plate, and rubbed it dry.
Miracle births. Just past lunch, the evidence of those births was hard to ignore. The curtain to the far end of the ward was open, showing cribs and beds and babies in various stages of content and discontent. Women moved slowly in the area, tending to the crying babies.
Paige debated – only briefly – trying to explain to Velma how easily a doctor could implant any womb with a fertilized egg. Hammond, or whatever the psycho’s name was, had virtually told her that’s what happened here. The raptured shine in Velma’s eyes, however, warned Paige of the uselessness of such an attempt. Obviously uneducated, Velma would have difficulty understanding the concept, and more important, wanted to believe in miracles. By speaking against those miracles, Paige feared she might cut off her only source of conversation. It was a significant fear, for Paige had tried English without success with every other of the couple dozen women in the ward.
“Tell me more about the miracles,” Paige said.
Velma paused in thought. When she lifted another plate from the sink, she had her answer ready. “If one could explain miracles, then how could they be considered as such?”
True enough, Paige thought with a trace of irony; true enough. She tried another tact.
“Do all the women here conceive?”
“Most. To be barren brings great sadness.”
“Sadness?”
Velma lifted a soapy hand from the water and pointed at the baby ward. “Look at their joy. Instead of meaningless empty days here, each woman has a purpose. Her child. And all of us k now that the barren ones eventually depart.”
“To where?”
Velma shrugged. “In the morning, we awake and they are gone.”
“You have no desire to know?” Paige found herself adopting the formal language structure, falling into the strangely enjoyable lilting rhythm of Velma’s speech pattern.
“Life is simple here,” Velma said. “We ask no questions. We live for the joy of bringing life into the world. We face no famine, no disease, no warfare. Life is good.”
“I see no children,” Paige said. “Many babies, but no children.”
Her statement was true. Their conversation had been punctuated frequently by the loud cries of babies, and the low hum of mothers singing. But no child was beyond toddler stage.
“When the time is right, the child is raised elsewhere, much like the prophet Samuel was given away by his mother. For the child was a gift, and we have no hold upon the gift.”
Velma studied Paige’s face.
“It is not anger you should feel at this,” Velma said. “Many here have had the joy of raising three or four babies over the years. And while we carry the child, our time is not idle, for we assist the others with their babies. Much like in a village.”
Three or four babies? Paige struggled to understand what it meant. What had Hammond told her at her bedside the day before? These women were brought in from Third World countries. In other words, each woman was a baby factory, held contented in this prison by ignorance and the bribe of peaceful life.
Paige hesitated as she struggled for a delicate way to phrase her question. “Velma, do you find it strange that the babies share little of their mothers’ nature...”?
“You mean that each child is clearly white, when the mother is not?”
Paige nodded. Perhaps here, she could venture to explain egg implanting.
“It is strange,” Velma said after some thought. “However, it clearly shows the no man could have planted the seed for the child.”
Paige said nothing to this. She couldn’t get the single thought from her head. Baby factory.
“You must pray you conceive as well,” Velma was saying, handing Paige another wet dish to be dried. “And once that happens, all of us will pray that you carry it to full term. And once carried to full term, we will pray you bring forth the child alive.”
Velma made the sign of the cross, uncaring of the soapy water that spilled onto her apron and the floor.
Paige must have gaped.
Velma dropped her voice to a conspiratorial level. “It is I, you see, who assists in the births. And I must warn you to seek holiness as you carry your child. For sometimes the mother is punished by the birth of a child that carries her sins.”
“Yes?” Paige said. Velma had stopped, her face inscrutable.
“That is all I wish to say,” Velma said. “You have no need to know the horrors I have seen.”
Velma looked over Paige’s shoulder. “We appear to be blessed with fortune. Another arrives.”
Paige followed Velma’s gaze. Fifty paces away from where she stood at the sink, the single door to the ward had opened. A man almost as big as the doorway pushed a stretcher into the ward.
Paige barely glanced at the stretcher. Across the distance, she was riveted not by the size of the man, but by the waxy scar that covered half of his face. Something about the stony way he moved gave her a chill of fear.
She only had a few seconds to observe him. He lifted his hands – one hand heavily bandaged – and turned and shut the door behind him.
Velma was already walking to the stretcher.
Paige followed.
When Paige reached the stretcher at Velma’s side, she saw a woman who could not have arrived from a Third World country. Another Caucasian, brunette, lying face up and strapped in place, with smeared mascara and smudged lipstick, sure signals of non-refugee status.
The woman’s eyes were open, blinking with fright at the sudden appearance of two new strangers.
Velma began to unstrap the woman.
“Where am I?” she pleaded.
“You are in the Room of Joy,” Velma said. “When it is you have a return of good spirits, I will tell you more.”
***
With the kid engrossed in the colored images that splashed across the screen of the motel television, Slater went back to the network and typed in the key word for internet. Here, he wouldn’t be looking for conversation but information, using the “gopher” system to sort through millions of documents spread through thousands of mainframe computers across the world. The system had been developed at the University of Minnesota, where the campus mascot was the Golden Gopher, one of the bizarre twists that computer hacks loved: The system was used to “go fer” information.
Slater started at the main menu and followed into subsystems. It took him half an hour to find an archive with background information, an op-ed piece from the Washington Post already a few years old, relating to the accident years earlier.
He pulled the article up on the screen, an introduction to a special information section that examined the status and dangers of American nuclear weapons storage in the aftermath of the end of the cold war.
***
[indent next 6 paragraphs]
Epilogue to Near Disaster – The trucks, a long snaking convoy of supertankers led by the flashing lights of police escort, had arrived in San Ysidro, New Mexico (see insert map) barely hours ahead of national headlines – Nuclear Leak Threatens Mountain Residents. Earlier, the trucks had roared in the darkness across the desert flats west of the mountains at 80 miles per hour, a speed easy to maintain unloaded with the powerful diesel engines pounding full rpms. The truck drivers acknowledged the resident populations of San Ysidro and remaining towns along Highway 4 only by slowing to 50 miles per hour as they passed through, a rumbling 18-wheel speed that still shook the buildings nearest the pavement. Ahead of them was the arduous climb into the Jemez
Mountains of northwestern New Mexico and the contaminated soil of stored nuclear warheads gone bad.
At the missile site waited excavating equipment and mining conveyer belts to lift with military precision the First of tons of poisoned earth into huge tanker canisters that had been manufactured to carry petroleum, not this radiation-soaked soil from the depths of the earth.
The trucks did not leave in a convoy. Instead, each rolled away as soon as it was full and sealed, to pass through guarded barricades now in place at the main intersections at the east and west ends of Highway 4, barricades that also blocked access from Los Alamos, the closest major center.
Each truck continued out of the mountains, back along the desert flats to the center of a former nuclear testing site, where the super tanker canisters were abandoned to armed guards who had little appreciation of the irony of these fourth-generation nuclear weapons returned by proxy to their spawning grounds.
When, 73 days later, the trucks finished rumbling day and night along Highway 4, nearly 2,000 of these canisters filled 50 orderly and tightly pressed rows, presenting to the sun each morning a sea of shiny beetle; backs of silver.
And the military, having deemed the evacuated base near the summit of Redondo Peak safe, continue to guard the damaged site again in relative obscurity.
[space, end indent]
After reading the article three times, Slater thought through its implications. He shifted at the cheap desk to pencil a list of reasons he should actually believe the entire situation was real.
His shorthand notes told him that he’d found three kids, he’d listened to a translator confirm they spoke Latin and that they’d escaped from some sort of institutional facility, he’d been the target of a kidnapping attempt, had seen the kidnapper here in Los Alamos, and had followed the kidnapper to an obscure military base hidden miles deep in the mountains.
Add to that one other factor. The same base had been evacuated, and under high-security conditions, tons upon tons of dirt were removed. Enough dirt to leave room for an underground institute?
What had he just learned about the base from the military hacks? No one was hurt, Ell. Base is essentially closed. Skeleton staff to guard it for security purposes. And you hardly hear about the base now. I don’t know anybody who knows anybody who works there.
Worse, and too convincing to Slater, was the topography map. A straight line from the military base to his house in Seven Springs showed the path the kids might have taken through the mountains to appear in the headlights of his truck.
Last, Slater recalled Austad’s information from a genetics professor. Only human mothers can nurture human embryos. You’d have to have a place to engage in large-scale experimenting in humans. No way could you have a place that big, involving that many people, and expect it to remain secret. Human nature dictates someone would eventually talk about it. And where would anyone find the funding? Something that big would take major money. You can’t keep major money secret either.
Now it appeared Slater had found a real-life location for the secret. And who better to hide big money than the military?
Slater stared at his scrawled writing. He still couldn’t trust himself to accept the wild conclusions he drew from what his five senses had plainly delivered to him during the past week. He wondered if this was how someone sitting in a plane going down felt – the overwhelming disbelief that it was actually happening. Slater faced an added factor. What if there was another, much more rational explanation for all of this and he was making himself the biggest fool in the world by plunging ahead? Like diving into a lake to save a drowning victim only to discover he was interrupting the filming of a movie scene. Except this situation was much bigger, much more frightening.
Slater shook his head at his dithering.
“Hey, kid,” he said, “speak English, will you. Tell me I’ve got a hyperactive imagination.”
Unfortunately, the kid only smiled after looking up briefly from the television set. And that quick glance showed Slater too clearly the tattooed number on the boy’s forehead.
And Paige Stephens was still missing. He’d called Suzanne in Florida a half-dozen times already; she’d hadn’t yet heard from Paige and was considering calling the police to report Paige as a missing person.
Add to all of this that Paige, too, had confirmed the strangeness of the situation with vague references to an Institute. Slater could not deny to himself the significance of a web of events that stretched as far as Florida.
He sighed.
All right, so he’d admit that by some ironic twist of God’s humor it was him, Slater Ellis, thrown into the middle of all of this. As if God were pulling him from the whale’s belly and telling him he could no longer hide from life. Couldn’t he have been thrown into something much simpler? Why him, a regular guy? Why not some 007 agent trained in five languages, seven strains of marital arts, explosives, lock picking, end computer espionage?
That’s who it would take, Slater told himself sourly. James Bond. Because normal guys just didn’t bust into highly secret military bases and mop up all the evil thugs.
If this project was sanctioned by the military, didn’t it somewhere, somehow, need government approval? Wouldn’t it then be Slater breaking the law, making him the evil thug? Besides, who was Slater to be the one to declare human genetics experiments as beyond any government law?
It didn’t take Slater long to realize he was looking for an excuse to bail out. But government project or not, the kidnapping attempt and his missing friends put this in a new realm. And didn’t we-the-people have a right to know and decide what the government should allow at the edges of the new frontier of genetics technology?
Despite the realization, Slater winced at the thought of being a noble white knight riding forth to protect and save. He disliked left-wing journalists who self-righteously peddled their opinions under the same armored guise.
Slater stared at the depressing brown wave patterns on the depressing orange curtains of the motel room.
He had to do something. No way could he salvage any self-respect if he walked away from this.
But what could he do?
Time was the key element. Slater couldn’t go to local authorities for help to expose a military project. Not in Los Alamos, the government town that had produced the first A-bomb in total secrecy. Not when, with his own eyes, Slater had seen the sheriff of Los Alamos meet with the kidnapper from Santa Monica. Going to the police for help was a laughable idea.
A]!1 right. Say, instead, Slater ran to the media, despite how much a high profile would cost him on a personal level. Say a major whistle-blowing scandal actually developed, that the military and government don’t pull strings to hush it. Say Slater doesn’t end up dead or kidnapped himself. That was the most success Slater could hope for, and successful or not, too much time would pass. The people inside would be able to move the boys and Austad and Paige – as they surely would to hide any evidence of wrongdoing. Once moved elsewhere, if not outright killed, how much chance would Slater have of Finding them?
The alternative was to lone wolf it, make sure Austad and Paige and the boys were safe, then let Austad or Paige do the whistle-blowing act, keeping away from any floodlights of public scrutiny himself. Maybe at the same time, he’d leave behind a diary, maybe send copies to some newspapers in case he didn’t get back out again.
Slater shook his head in disgust at the sense of melodrama he was creating.
Still, he shifted back to his computer to write a brief report he’d send to a friend in case anything happened to him. The kid was happy to be mesmerized by all the new information delivered via television, giving Slater time to write everything he could recall. Tonight he’d take the kid into the hills to look at the base. If the kid reacted like he’d been there, it would be proof Slater could not ignore, much as he might want to.
***
Del’s throat burned. The bile of rage. Or the pressure of the noose. It didn’t matter to his situa
tion. The spooksville freak was behind him, with his undamaged right hand holding a long aluminum pole, as if carrying a flag at a 45 degree angle. Instead of unfurled cloth, however, the end of the pole held thin steel wire, an effective choke chain looped around Del’s neck. As the freak pushed the pole, Del was forced to stumble down the well-lit hallway, barely able to draw breath because of the pressure. All the freak had to do was lift the pole a degree higher, and the steel wire would cut through the skin of Del’s neck.
No way could Del make a rush on his captor either. Del had awoken helpless. Iron clasps around each wrist were connected by two feet of plastic-sheathed steel cord. His feet had been hobbled in the same manner. Another steel cord connected the wire of his hobbled hands to the wire of his hobbled feet. It gave him just enough freedom to shuffle, stooped to the point of pain as he tried to keep sufficient slack in the wire between his hands and feet.
They reached an elevator midway down the hall.
“This will be delicate, as inside the elevator I won’t be able to maintain my pressure on your choke wire,” the spooksville freak said. His whispered voice sounded like someone had a noose around his throat instead. “You might be tempted to do something foolish, like ram me into the wall. Please don’t. It takes very little effort to pull a trigger, and I’d prefer to avoid an awkward mess.”
Del stepped inside the elevator.
The threat of a gun had not been empty. The freak screwed the barrel into his kidneys with such enthusiasm that Del almost wished for the return of the noose’s pressure.
They rode downward in silence. The man’s breathing sounded as harsh as the ventilation fan. When the elevator door opened again, he pushed Del forward. Zwaan kept tight pressure on the noose as he went through the routine of the retina-sensor check and keypad entry code for the vault door to give them entry to the halls of the sixth floor.
When the vault door closed behind them, Zwaan commanded Del ahead and to the left, reinforcing the order with a jerk of the steel noose.
Del stumbled left.
“I hope you appreciate my ingenuity,” Zwaan said. “I saw this method used on stubborn horses – rope though, not piano wire – and I hoped some day I’d have a chance to test its effectiveness for myself.”
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