by Steven James
“Oh. Right.”
I performed a show at Nellis AFB right near Vegas, and Groom Lake reminds me of it.
Landing strips, yes. Aircraft hangars, yes. Administration and research buildings, yes, all of that.
The base is extensive, and I’m not too excited about the idea of driving around looking for the right hangar, especially in the waning sunlight. I don’t expect that we’re going to find any placards with a “You are here!” arrow on them, so I’m glad Xav spoke with Fred earlier about the base layout. I trust he’ll be able to direct me.
There are a few military vehicles, some civilian cars, and other white pickups around, but there’s not a lot of traffic on the roads, and having never been here before, I’m not sure if that’s normal or just a result of being here on a Sunday evening.
Now that we’re on the base itself there doesn’t appear to be as much of a security presence.
Which actually does make sense. Just like in airports after you pass through the TSA checkpoints: if you make it that far everyone assumes you’re not a threat.
Xavier points. “Turn left up ahead.”
“Fred’s going to meet us there?”
“Last I heard, yeah.”
The intersection, just like all the ones we’ve come to so far on the base, has no road signs.
“You’re sure this is the way?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure.”
“It should be a building with a green door. I’m not certain if it’ll be labeled or not.”
“A green door? That’s all you have?”
“Green Door Tour. It goes back to Vietnam. They would mark the color of the door by the level of security clearance.”
“And a green door was a high one?”
“The highest one.”
We make two more turns and then come to a building with a Cammo dude truck parked out front.
A simple sign by the side of the structure reads: A-13.
As we pull up beside the other truck, I get a good look at the front of the building.
It has a green door.
Building A-13
Fred exits the other truck and hurries toward us. “You two are late.”
“That last security checkpoint slowed us down,” I explain.
“Well, this is as far as I go. We aren’t allowed in any of the actual research buildings.”
“But do you know what goes on in there?”
He’s slow to answer. “I did some asking around. See that hangar over there?”
It was attached to the far end of the building. There was no way to miss it. “Yes.”
“They’re doing work on drones. That’s all I know. Something with autonomously flown drones. Only a skeleton crew of people assigned to the project.”
He scans the area. “I don’t see any other vehicles around, so that’s a good sign, but it’s possible there are still some people inside. Personnel get dropped off, picked up around here all the time. From what I hear there’s a test scheduled for later tonight. I’m not sure when people will start to arrive.”
“Okay,” Xavier tells him. “Thanks for your help. We’ll be careful.”
“I really don’t think you should go in there.” There’s more than a little uneasiness in Fred’s voice. “It’s a miracle you’ve made it this far. I think you oughtta get out of here, go back home.”
“We’re here to see what all this has to do with the murder of our friend,” I remind him. “And we’re not turning around until we have some answers.”
He bites his lip, looks around nervously, then leads us to the building and pulls out a security-coded swipe card.
“I managed to get this, but I need it back in thirty minutes. Got it? If I don’t return it, we’re all going down.”
“That doesn’t give us a lot of time,” Xavier says. “Are you sure you can’t—”
“Positive. Get in there, get what you need, and get out. But before you do anything, you need to move your truck.” He points to a nearby maintenance building. “Park it behind there.”
We hide the pickup, and when we return, he swipes the security card and points to the keypad. “Type in the code Fionna pulled up. That should get you in. From there, you’re on your own.”
I check the papers she gave us, punch in the number, the light beside the keypad turns green, and there’s a click as the front door unlocks.
Fred hands me the card. “Thirty minutes.”
“6:45. Gotcha.”
“I’ll meet you behind the maintenance building where you parked your truck. Don’t be late.”
Xavier thanks him one more time. We tell him goodbye, he leaves, and Xavier and I step inside Building A-13.
I close the door behind us.
A lobby. Beige. Spartan furniture. Lit by stark fluorescents overhead. Concrete block walls. The air in the building smells stale and musty. The AC is blasting through a vent right above our heads.
No one is here.
“What if we do meet someone?” Xavier asks me quietly. “How are we gonna explain what we’re doing in here?”
That sign on the edge of the property warning about the use of deadly force pops to mind.
“I’m working on that.” I pull out my phone.
“We checked on that earlier,” Xav reminds me. “Remember? Only a couple bars.”
“They have to communicate with each other somehow. And there were no landlines leading to this building.”
“How do you know?”
“I was looking for them.”
“Buried wires?”
I show him my phone. “Maybe. But I’ve got good reception here. It looks like they must have a cell tower here on this side of the base.”
“That’ll be good if we need to call for help.” Then he adds reflectively, “Except most everyone around here would rather shoot us or arrest us.”
“Thanks for that reminder there.”
“No problem.”
Hallways branch off from both sides. “So, split up or stick together?” I ask.
“Splitting up might save us time, but I vote we stick together.”
“I’m good with that.” I gesture toward the hallway on the right. “Let’s start over here.”
“And what exactly are we looking for again?”
“We need to find out what the research that’s going on in this building has to do with Emilio’s death.”
Calista stood in the honeymoon suite staring at Jeremy Turnisen. Unconscious, gagged, legs still bound to the chair, hands drooped limply on his lap.
He was breathing weakly.
Derek had sewed the man’s wrists together, piercing all the way through them with the needle and heavy suture thread before tugging it tight and wrapping it around several times, then tying it off.
Jeremy was missing three fingers, all severed cleanly from his left hand by one of the knives on the desk. The gruesome sewed-up incisions on his stomach and face defied description.
He was helpless. Vulnerable.
Just like Thad after they paralyzed him.
Just like you in the mornings when Derek has his way with you.
He betrayed you.
Drugged you.
Took advantage of you.
Derek wanted information from this man, but he hadn’t been able to get it, even after spending the majority of the day interrogating him.
If that’s what you want to call it.
Calista had no idea how long she might have before Derek decided to return to the room. Maybe he would finish eating, maybe he was already on his way up.
Through the open bathroom door she saw the drugs he’d used on Jeremy last night lying on the counter. They’re probably the same ones he uses on you.
Anger sliced through her. What had he said earlier? That they usually put someone out for at least six or seven hours?
How much time did he spend with you in the mornings after he drugged you?
Despite herself she felt a chill.<
br />
She picked up one of the knives and approached the man in front of her.
There was a ton of blood on the plastic sheet, so she kicked off her shoes before stepping onto it.
The knife was brutally sharp. She already knew that from watching Derek work.
Derek.
The man who drugged her.
Just like he drugged this guy.
A squirm of disgust ran through her.
She remembered that first time she killed someone, the time when it was a mistake, when her friend was coming at her and she swiped that blade toward her stomach and it ended up cutting her open. It was disgusting. Disturbing. Messy.
No plastic sheet that time.
She watched Jeremy breathe, the gentle, somewhat uneven, rise and fall of his chest.
How much pain would he be in if he were awake?
Calista leaned forward.
If she did this, things would never be the same between her and Derek again.
They’re already different.
Yes, yes they were.
And it was his fault, not hers.
If she did this, she might never get what she wanted, might never get the treatments he’d promised her.
But right now she wanted to punish Derek, the man who’d called her his courtesan and then treated her like his whore—punish him by not letting him find out what he’d been trying so hard all day to discover.
He’d taken advantage of her, and he admitted it right to her face and showed no remorse.
No. Of course not. She’d never seen him show remorse over anything.
Well, that was about to change.
She placed the blade carefully against the man’s right wrist.
Steadied it.
Pressed down.
Drew it back sharply.
And cut through the black thread that was binding his wrists together.
All we find down the first hallway is a series of a dozen sparsely furnished, crypt-like classrooms. The chairs and tables all look left over from the fifties. If this is a top-secret research facility, the government was obviously pouring its resources into something other than creating high-tech, twenty-first-century classrooms.
Chalkboards in two of the rooms contain indecipherable formulas. I take photos of them with my cell. Trying to figure them out might be a good school project for Lonnie.
Satisfied there’s nothing more here for us to see, we venture back to the lobby to explore the other half of the building.
Apart from the humming rattle of the overtaxed air conditioner, everything is quiet and still.
If they are doing top-secret drone research here, then where are the computer labs? The control centers? This can’t be the right place.
The other hallway has a number of classrooms similar to the ones we found earlier, but it also has a door at the end that requires us to swipe the security card again.
I pass the card through the reader, the door opens, and we get our first glimpse into the hangar attached to the back of Building A-13.
Descent
The hangar is dark, but the hallway light that seeps in from behind us is enough for me to see what’s in here.
Three drones sit before us, sleek, stealthy, menacing. They almost look like living creatures lined up, ready and waiting here in their lair.
It’s eerie.
I’ve seen drones before in movies, of course, and on the news, and they look stark and intimidating, but when you see them in person they’re even more impressive.
Xavier walks over as if in a trance and reaches out to touch the one closest to us, but I grab his arm and hold him back. “What if they’re wired like car alarms? That would not be a good thing.”
“Yeah,” he mutters, then points at two narrow missiles hanging from the bottom of it. “This puppy is armed.”
I gaze around the hangar.
All of them are.
Suddenly, I really do not want to be here.
Glancing at my watch I see that we’ve already used up six of our precious minutes. Twenty-four left before we need to return the security pass card to Fred.
“You’re the expert on Groom Lake. Any idea where we go from here?”
Xavier’s eyes are still on the dimly lit drone. “No one’s really an expert except the people who actually work here. But, from what I’ve read, most of the high-level research takes place underground. Bombproof command centers, that sort of thing. I say we look for an elevator.”
In the faint light I study the wall of the building. It looks like there’s a set of sliding doors at the far end near an exit door to the runway.
He’s following my gaze. “You think that’s it?”
I tap my phone’s screen to use it as a flashlight. “Only one way to find out.”
Calista was not able to wake up Jeremy Turnisen.
She realized she’d better hurry if she was really going to let him go free because Derek might be returning to the room any minute.
Or he might just be sitting down there taking his good old time enjoying his steak. Just remembering what it was like when he had his way with you.
Yeah, she could picture him doing that alright.
Either way, if she was going to free Jeremy she needed to wake him up.
“Hey.” She slapped his face. “Jeremy, open your eyes.”
His only reply was a soft groan.
She slapped him again, harder, and blood began to ooze out of one of the wounds Derek had given him and then sewed back up again.
Jeremy didn’t awaken.
She cut the duct tape from his legs and wondered if she should just stop there, just take off, just leave the guy on his own to see if he could get away.
No.
He’d never make it out of the hotel.
And what message would that give Derek? That she was just acting out and cut him free but didn’t have the guts or the brains to see things all the way through?
Okay, but how to get him out of the room?
She dead-bolted the door while she debated what to do.
Yes.
It’s an elevator.
Next to it is a glass door that leads outside, and about a hundred feet beyond the tarmac I can see the outline of the maintenance building we hid the truck behind.
Before stepping onto the elevator, I feel my cell phone vibrate and find a text from Charlene that she’s going to pick up some of Emilio’s notebooks that were found at the Arête.
Hmm.
Notebooks are good.
Notebooks might just mean answers.
Pocketing my phone, I swipe the key card, the elevator doors glide open, and Xavier and I step inside.
There’s only one button. Xavier presses it. “Well, here we go.”
The doors close and we descend into the earth.
When Jesús Garcia’s cell rang, he thought maybe it was his people calling back about the two phone traces that he’d put into play, but it was not.
“Sir, we made it through the USB drive, but it’s empty.”
“What do you mean, it’s empty?”
“I mean, someone set this up so it would erase the files if you got past the security measures.”
“So recover them.”
“We can’t. The files are gone.”
“They’re not gone. They’re—”
“I’m afraid they are, sir.”
“Keep working on it.”
A pause. “Yes, sir.”
Garcia laid the phone down slowly.
The USB drive was a dead end.
Really? Was it really?
Well, if so, Colonel Byrne had better come through with the engineer or else that drone was not going to get delivered.
And if that was the case, there were definitely going to be consequences.
Fionna was in her minivan with her children en route to the Arête when her phone buzzed with a notification.
Charlene had mentioned that she had another errand to run later, so she’d driven sep
arately, and now, not wanting to check her texts while driving, Fionna asked Lonnie, who was in the front passenger seat, to read it for her.
“It says the files were deleted.”
Ah.
So, the blackmailer’s people had finally managed to get through the security codes she’d put on the USB drive.
Now they had nothing.
But they also knew they had nothing.
She had Lonnie text Jevin, Xavier, and Charlene to update them. It might just affect the trajectory of things for the rest of the night.
The elevator stops and the doors slide open.
At last it looks like we’ve reached the high-tech area of the base.
The overheads are off, but sporadic emergency lights allow us to see well enough to make out at least some of what lies in the expansive room.
Work stations, extensive computer servers, filing cabinets. Off to the left, an area with drone parts, even what look like EEG helmets attached to elaborate virtual reality computer modules and looming high-def screens.
“What now?” Xav asks.
“We see if we can find anything that might have to do with Emilio.”
Derek Byrne was still at the table when he got the call from Jesús Garcia. “How is it going with the engineer?” Garcia asked.
“I assure you things are still on schedule.”
“Remember I told you that I would notify you if I learned anything about Antioch and Banks that might be of interest to you.”
“Yes.”
“They used their body doubles to slip away from my men. I found Banks. His signal cut off just a couple minutes ago, but you aren’t going to believe where he is.”
“Where’s that?”
“Groom Lake.”
A pause. “Really.”
“Yes. And Antioch is at the Arête. How did Banks get access to the base?”
“He must have gotten the drive from Agcaoili before he was killed,” Derek said reflectively. “That does explain a few things. What do we know about Banks and Antioch? Are they more than just co-workers?”
“I’ll have my people check into that. You take care of the engineer. Make him give you the information. I’ll take care of Banks and Antioch.”
“How?”
“I have a few ideas.”