“What’s my name,” demanded Justine in a dead voice.
“Your name! What, you crazy! I’m just mindin’ my own business, havin’ a drink, watching the sea ... I don’t know you, man!”
Justine rose. The anger and the fear were still there, but his control was back, confronted by the realization that this was just some derelict bum, overlaid by his imagination. Justine staunched an urge to kick the man hard in the side.
“Lee’ me alone...” said the man. “I got friends ... I’ll call the fuckin’ cops.” The man’s words were slurred with drink.
Justine pulled out a roll of bills from his pocket. He peeled off a ten and let it flutter down to the wretched figure on the sand. “Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
The man grabbed the bill, got to his feet, then vomited into the sand. As Justine walked away, the bum’s curses followed him.
He knew now what he had to do. There was one person who could help him, the woman who’d straightened him out before, the CIA shrink who’d diagnosed his biochemical imbalances and prescribed the medicine that kept him straight. Cunningham. She was back on the base in Iowa now, and all he had to do was call her, let her know some of his pistons were misfiring, and then get out there, quick, for a tune-up.
Yeah, thought Justine, trudging off the sand and onto concrete, nervously avoiding the deep shadows of the shabby buildings where other imagined phantoms might lurk. That was the ticket. Cunningham would bail him out. Maybe he just needed a new prescription. A dash more thorazine or a touch more zinc. Cunningham would do a quick computer analysis, mix together the right drugs, and voila! Woodrow Justine would be right as rain.
But as he negotiated Venice back past the snoozing bars, the still Penny Lane record shop, and the garish signs of the health juice-shop, a fear, unvoiced and barely thought, sat like a horned lizard in the pool of his consciousness. Justine had thought long and hard about his visit to that bent soul last Saturday night, thought about the car in the driveway, the garb the man wore the night he had shot at Scarborough. Although Woodrow Justine was no intellectual, he was an alert man who kept his ears open. These past two years, working on the Project, he had absorbed a great deal of fact and lore that had sprung up around the phenomena of UFOs. The whole affair was becoming nothing less than a new American mythology. And an oft-repeated story, a kind of underpinning to the sightings of flying saucers hovering and scooting about beneath the stars, concerned men—men with strange eyes, perhaps vaguely oriental; men who would arrive in black Cadillacs or black Pontiacs; men who would often interview those who had seen the saucers, and just as often harass them. Men who came at dusk with the long shadows, wearing clothing of all black.
A twitch of this notion caused Justine’s entire body to shudder just as he reached Grand Avenue.
A grey cat leaped out of the shadows, ran across the road, hiding under a Toyota Celica, colorless beneath the moon and street lamps. The twitch-shudder of fear became a tremble and a shaking in Justine, causing him to stop and forcibly halt his line of thought.
Goddamnit! He knew the truth behind the whole fucking UFO business! He knew the facts, the hard cold data that underlay the CIA operation to which he was attached. For these past three years, it had provided him with such a source of power, such a feeling of superiority over the gullible fools who had bought the pseudoscientific nonsense dished out by the crackpots and swallowed by the credulous. This peripheral business was just folklore! The equivalent of ghost stories told around the campfire. They were just ridiculous nonsense ... vague, unfocused snatches of paranoia.
He straightened and used every ounce of control in his sinews to make him continue walking home. If he brought up these thoughts to Central, they wouldn’t modify his drug prescription—they’d just lock him up and throw away the key!
Still, once in the open, his thoughts continued, nagging and leering and laughing at him.
What if they did exist, these modem spectres of tall saucer-tales. What if they existed—and what if they were out to get him!
Justine swallowed down the thought like regurgitated bile, but still it sat in him, grinning poisonously in the back of his mind.
Out to get him ... out for vengeance!
The Men in Black.
Chapter 18
On the Tuesday morning following his confrontation with Colonel Walter Dolan, Scarborough rose early, packed some luggage, got in his Mercedes, and drove to Dulles International Airport. He parked in one of the satellite lots, not knowing how long he’d be away, and loathe to pay the premium prices for closer parking. He caught an 8:30 Eastern flight to Chicago O’Hare, where he caught the connection to the Iowa City Airport.
Waiting for him in the terminal, wearing his epauletted hunting jacket, jeans, a red-checked flannel shirt, a Met’s baseball cap, and a huge grin, was Captain Eric MacKenzie.
“Ev!” he cried, waving his hands wildly. “Ev, buddy! Am I glad to see you!”
The big, red-cheeked man caught up Scarborough in a bear-hug. People stopped, looked, and pointed at this amusing sight of two mature men acting like long-lost lovers, and Scarborough found it all slightly embarrassing. “Mac, uh, it’s not like I was lost at sea or anything,” he said, after getting a noseful of MacKenzie’s Old Spice aftershave.
MacKenzie’s expression turned suddenly mournful. “My friend, I’m just trying to show you how bad I feel about the way I acted the other night.”
“Mac, we already talked about that yesterday. We were both out of line. I’m sorry, you’re sorry—apologies accepted all around. And look ... here I am in Iowa, on the great UFO mystery hunt. No need for the histrionics.”
MacKenzie stepped away, but swung a big hand around to slap Scarborough on the back, a blow that almost put the scientist onto the floor. “That’s right. Heck, if you can’t yell at a friend, who can you yell at?”
Recovering his balance, Scarborough said, “You ever think of getting in the ring with Mike Tyson, Mac? You’ve got a pretty powerful right there.”
“Thanks, Ev. What say we go get your luggage, and head out for the old homestead?”
They got Scarborough’s bags. Mac insisted on carrying the Jordache luggage, and Scarborough did not object. The big man hefted the bags easily out into the parking lot, where he threw them in the back of a red Ford Bronco, complete with a gun rack and dried blood in the back.
“Deer,” explained Mac apologetically, “Needs a comprehensive cleaning. With the old lady gone, not everything gets scrubbed up as well as it used to. Take warning, Ev. Serious bachelor condition back at the ponderosa.”
Scarborough strapped his seat belt on. “Hop Sing’s on vacation?”
Mac gunned the engine and the four-wheeled vehicle jerked toward the exit. Mac smiled over at Scarborough. “Nope. Ran off with Hoss and Little Joe. Always thought those three were into weird sexual perversions.”
The big man paid his parking bill, then wheeled onto the highway toward his house on the outskirts of town.
Iowa City was a college town, and a quite nice one at that. The university was the shining jewel of a state famous for its high rate of literacy—one of the best schools in the nation. After he’d left the air force, Mac had decided that he’d get a Master’s Degree. He chose the U. of I. because of its famous writing program, and because of its access to open territory and fresh air—prerequisites for an outdoorsman like Eric MacKenzie. Privately, Scarborough had doubted that his friend would last out such literary boot camp, but he’d been proved wrong. MacKenzie had immediately scoped out the territory, found the kind of counseling he needed, and worked damn hard. He received a great deal of help, for example, from Professor David Morrell—who advanced soon to fame for creation of the Rambo character made famous by Sylvester Stallone. Before long, Mac could turn out quite serviceable prose. Even before he’d graduated, he’d sold his first men’s adventure book: The Eagle’s Claw. Morrell had helped him find an agent, and the agent found him instant work in the burgeoni
ng field of guns—‘n’—guts action-adventures. “Blue-collar blood-porn,” Scarborough called it, but secretly he read absolutely every word that his friend wrote, astonished at the clumsiness of the prose, as well as the energy and vitality and fun it contained. At first, Scarborough had tried to encourage Mac to set his sights higher, but the man was having far too much fun pounding out his fifteen pages a day to think about reforming. Mac liked Iowa, and he liked the university, so he and his wife had settled nearby in a large house. He taught the occasional undergraduate course, chased the occasional undergraduate skirt, hunted in the Midwest fields and woods, and fished the freshwater streams. And he was a happy man—and even happier when his wife left him, unchaining him from a roller-coaster marriage.
Scarborough had to admit, Iowa City and its environs were very pleasant. As they rolled along toward Mac’s home, Scarborough again admired the Hawkeye State’s wealth of fields. The most fertile state in the Union, 95 percent of its land was farmable. This was Grant Wood territory, the home of American Gothic, the simple, clean lines of farm houses and barns rising up from the gently rolling or flat land, like natural growths of the green and brown land, not architecture.
Mac and Scarborough chatted affably as the Bronco ate up the twenty or so miles to Mac’s house, making small talk before they had to tackle the larger task before them.
“I’m just tickled pink you’re going to go down to Kansas, too, and check up on Diane,” said Mac, downshifting and turning off the highway, driving onto a dirt road upgrade toward wooded hills. “She’s a good girl. She may have a few screws loose—“
“But they’re quality screws, right, Mac?”
“You betcha.”
The Bronco rumbled up a hill, then turned onto a private road, rattling over a loose gravel driveway.
“Well, she’s part mine, so I guess I’m responsible.” Scarborough sighed heavily, “I’ve just got a dreadful feeling about it, that’s all.”
Mac pulled up in front of a two-car garage so filled with junk and gadgets that there was no room for a car. He stopped the Bronco beside the house, a large two-story brick affair covered with ivy and surrounded by hedges and gardens and rich green grass—all Iowa rarities, but specifically introduced by Mac, who liked green overgrowth.
“Don’t you worry your little pointed head,” said Mac, getting out and going to the back to collect the bags. “We’ll call the little darling later. Shit, you’re helping me with this file business—maybe I’ll take you down to Kansas myself, help you dig up the facts.”
“Thanks, Mac,” said Scarborough. “We’ll see what happens.”
Eric MacKenzie’s house was not exactly a wreck. It was clean enough, thought Scarborough, just disheveled. Clothing lay strewn all over the early American furniture. Books and magazines were propped precariously on the dining room table and the TV. Packages and cans of food lay all over the place.
However, there were no dirty dishes in the sink, the bathroom was clean enough and smelled of Comet cleanser. And Mac’s study, which he devoted to his sports, fairly sparkled with wax and polish. The guns and fishing rods were stacked neatly, the bookcases ordered, the trophies on the mantle-piece bright and dusted.
“Not bad, Mac,” said Scarborough after depositing his bags in one of the guest rooms. “Better than when I was here last year.”
“Yeah! I guess it is. But say, it’s about lunchtime. How about a sandwich and a brew, and then we can dig into the dirt.”
Mac made sandwiches that would cause Dagwood to drool, so Scarborough, who’d refused the plane snack, readily agreed. Old MacKenzie couldn’t fry an egg, but he could make a mean sandwich. The jolly man first set a big bottle of Grolsch beer in front of Scarborough, then pulled out several Tupperware containers from the fridge, along with a section of bread and a tray of condiments.
“Any particular combination you favor today, Ev?” The burly man waved a hand over a deli’s worth of supplies. Fresh-cut ham and lebanon bologna, tongue and roast beef, turkey, chicken, mortadella, salami, summer sausage ... And the cheeses! There must have been twenty kinds to choose from, and not just Midwestern bland stuff, but European camembert and brie, English stilton and cheddar—and real Swiss cheese.
“I think I’ll just take the chef’s special.”
“You got it. We got some fresh rolls this morning. Man, since you were here last year, they opened a wonderful place in Iowa City. Combination bakery and deli. One-stop shopping for old MacKenzie! Rye rolls, with caraway seeds. How’s that sound, Ev?”
Scarborough just drank his Grolsch and smiled.
“You got it! Listen, you ever try Bermuda onion on a sandwich? I’ve been reading this Lawrence Sanders guy. He’s got a hero in the ‘Deadly Sin’ books after my own heart. Makes some nice sandwiches, and then eats ‘em over the sink. Can you imagine? How’s he gonna read and eat, over a sink?” The stack of magazines and books on the table testified to MacKenzie’s own solitary eating habits. “Anyway, this guy, Captain Edward X. Deleney—he likes to put Bermuda onions on his sandwiches. It’s pretty good. You wanna slice?”
Scarborough agreed, and watched as his friend built him a truly magnificent sandwich of sliced Danish ham, Swiss cheese, some pepperoni, a smear of braunswieger, a touch of caviar, a feathering of alfalfa sprouts, a slice of Bermuda and a generous ladling of imported Dijon mustard.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forgot the tomatoes yesterday.”
“Curses. I guess I just can’t eat it then, Mac.”
Mac sliced it in half and presented it to his friend on clean china. “Choke it down, bud.”
He got himself a Grolsch and then made himself a similar sandwich. “So, old Ironpants won’t cop to stealing your files, huh?” he said finally, after half the big stuffed roll had been wolfed.
“He probably didn’t do it. Who’s to say? Good sandwich.”
“Thanks.” Mac thoughtfully munched on his for a couple of moments. “So I can’t figure it,” he said, dripping green-and-brown flecks of sprouts and mustard onto his plate. “Why would Dolan and the air force change the facts we turned in—and then want to destroy the evidence of the truth?”
Ev put down his sandwich. “Whoa. Just a minute—I definitely think something odd is going on, but I’m not ready to go whole hog and buy the conspiracy theory like some silly UFOol. You seem all ready to jump on that bandwagon.”
“Scarborough! What you want them to do, kick you in the head with a fifty megaton bomb? Wake up! We worked for a corrupt government! Old Dolan’s ‘bout as straight as a Confederate three-dollar bill. Now, I don’t know what’s going on, but I do wanna find out!”
Scarborough shook his head. He pushed his sandwich away. He wasn’t hungry anymore. “No, I really can’t buy that. That gives the air force too much credit for intelligence.” He leaned forward toward his friend. A burp brought up the taste of pepperoni to his mouth. He covered his mouth and excused himself. “What started off all the secrecy with Dulles’s CIA and the Air Force was legitimate concern, in the late forties and early fifties that the UFO sightings were caused by the Russians. That’s why everything was classified—and continued to be. I’ve read the documents. Those old Geezers knew they’d be starting up some paranoia, but you gotta also remember, those guys weren’t stupid either, they were veterans of the biggest war of this century. They were in a new world, filled with new technology and strange fears, and so they had to be careful. Who knows, the way the military and government works, all this business with the files might just be following some kind of obscure rules or codes. Names were mentioned that shouldn’t have been mentioned. There are reasons for top-secret and classified materials, you know. I’ll give you an example. You know that Stanton Friedman guy, right?”
“Sure, the UFO investigator who’s the physicist.”
“Now, I like Stanton, although we’ve locked horns a few times. I hear that he’s trooping around the UFO conferences with a copy of a government document about UFOs he dug out, tha
nks to the Freedom of Information Act. He holds it up and says, ‘Take a look at these pages and tell me that the CIA isn’t covering something up.’ Then he shows a document that’s largely blotted out with black magic marker. And looks smug and pronounced Q.E.D!”
“Sounds pretty damning to me!”
“Mac! Mac! Fools jump in! Can’t you see this is the kind of jump-to-conclusions thinking that has spawned the whole UFO lore! You know as well as I do about the codes on these documents. Just because something is blacked out doesn’t mean that it’s covering up a record of President Truman playing Parcheezi with beings from Betelgeuse! There could be records of an agent’s dealings that could be deleted because he officially did not work for the CIA then! Or because he was using a secret kind of ballpoint pen! That whole business in the 70s, with the disclosures of those documents that went through court? Did you see the stuff the CIA wanted to keep out, due to their classified nature? Weird stuff, harmless stuff, odd stuff. You read it, and you say, why did they care? I’ll tell you—because the whole thing’s a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are far stranger than flying saucers.”
Mac shrugged. “Too true. But how does that explain your missing files, to say nothing of the discrepancies?”
“The colonel could be right. I might have misplaced them. They could have also been stolen, true—but that doesn’t mean that it was because of some cover-up. See what I mean? Let’s not jump in too far. This could all be explained.”
“I don’t understand. If you think that, then why did you blow your stack at Dolan? Why’d you come out here?”
“I demand accuracy, Mac. I demand facts. Facts are the soul of any religion I serve. Facts are the basis of my existence. Facts are the rocks I kick, like Dr. Johnson when the illusory nature of reality was presented to him. ‘Thus I refute thee,’ he said, and thus I refute the believers. But if my facts are wrong, I need to straighten them out. Just because facts need to be straightened out, just because ‘old Ironpants’ Dolan is not being cooperative, and maybe just because there are things they don’t want me to know, does not mean that the saucers have landed!”
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 23