“Now let me get this straight, Ev. You’re saying that someone in the military, or perhaps in the government, purposely altered Blue Book, and is now killing people to keep certain facts suppressed. That’s a pretty wild accusation, my boy!”
“Who else knew what we were doing, Dolan?!”
“I made a report of it—God, a dozen officials and administrators here, I guess.”
“Can you ask your secretary to give me a list of names, then?”
“No. I did the informational transference myself,” said Dolan.
“Your—I’m sorry, Colonel. I find it hard to believe that you’d Xerox and address the interdepartmental mail on your own. That’s just not your style. You’re holding back on me, Walter. What’s going on?”
“I’ll make a full study of it,” said the colonel, sitting up straight and acting officious. “In the meantime, because of the clear danger involved, I am going to cease your official involvement in the case, Ev. We’ll of course call upon you to consult on the matter, and you will be paid your usual fees for such ... “
“What the hell!”
“Lieutenant Manning, I shall expect a full report from you next Monday morning. You may use local Air Force facilities and accommodations in the meantime. After that, you will be relieved of your duties in this matter. You may return to your previous post.”
Lieutenant Marsha Manning looked stunned. She did not respond, just looked to Scarborough.
The scientist stood up and leaned on the desk, glaring at the colonel. “I wanted to give you the chance to explain, Dolan. It looks to me as though you’ve explained quite a bit! I’ll just have to take this to a higher court. Won’t your superiors be interested in knowing that you’ve played a part—big or small, I don’t know—in defrauding not only the public, but the law? I smell a court-martial here, Colonel, and I’m going to enjoy it!”
Dolan stood as well, veins standing out at his neck, wagging a thick forefinger at Scarborough. “I’ll not be talked to in that manner, man! I’m a full colonel with forty-five years of service to my country!” He stopped and flapped his jaw a moment, seemingly unable to speak. “Are you calling me a traitor?”
“I don’t know what you are, Colonel. But you’re not telling the truth. And I’m beginning to get the feeling that this has been the situation for a long time between you and me.”
“Ev! How could you say such a thing?” But the laconic, good-ol’-boy-Chuck-Yeager phrasing was leached from the colonel’s words.
“Quite simple, Walter. I open my mouth and enunciate the truth! So, are you going to tell me what the hell is going on? Or do I march out of here and pound on the appropriate door?”
A look of pure fear suddenly invaded Colonel Dolan’s eyes. “Scarborough,” he barely whispered. “Just leave it alone. We’re both out of our depth here.” He looked away, growing pale, as though he were about to vomit.
“You set us up, you bastard!” shouted Scarborough, a dark film growing in his vision as the anger began to grow more fiercely inside of him. He leaped around the desk, and hovered over the colonel threateningly. “How long has this been going on, Dolan? Since 1965 when I was hired?” The implications were so astounding, that Scarborough didn’t dare to consider them. He let himself go in his fury, if only to keep himself whole. He grabbed two fistfuls of military cloth and shook the colonel.
“Ev!” said Lieutenant Manning. “Stop it!”
The violence seemed to rally Dolan, shaking him out of whatever funk he’d fallen into.’ His eyes came alive again, aware and awake. “Get your hands off me! What are you talking about? You’re making absurd allegations, Scarborough!”
“You can’t get off the hook this time, bastard.” Scarborough lifted the older man from his chair forcibly and slapped him hard across the face. “You’re responsible for Mac’s death, aren’t you—directly or indirectly—you’re responsible!”
Dolan reached out for his intercom. “Help! Corporal. Get me help!”
Scarborough could only see the dying face of his best friend before him. He pulled the colonel away from the intercom and hurled him across the room. Dolan staggered, struck a table with a potted azalea, and fell onto the floor. The plant teetered on the edge of the table a moment, and then fell, cracking on the floor and splattering Dolan with dirt.
“Degenerate!” cried Scarborough. He put a knee against the colonel’s chest and pinned him to the floor. “You had him killed, didn’t you? And if I had been there, I would have been killed.” Scarborough punched the man hard in his soft, round gut.
Lieutenant Manning ran to the pair and tried to pull Scarborough off. “Ev! Ev, don’t do this.”
The haze lifted partially, and Scarborough was suddenly aware of Dolan looking up with an expression of pain and pure terror in his wrinkle-wreathed eyes. Scarborough rose, shaking off the insane anger that had so abruptly and uncharacteristically filled him—astonished and numb at his lack of control.
As Dolan was picking himself up from the floor, the Colonel’s secretary walked in. “Colonel, I heard—”
“Would you please order up some MPs, my dear?” Dolan said, recovering. “We have a little discipline problem here.”
“That won’t be necessary. I’m under control now,” said Scarborough. But the secretary was already gone.
The terror and upset that the anger staved off suddenly rose up in Scarborough like a flood. He collapsed in his chair, weary and shaken. “He was my best friend,” he muttered. “And my role for you, my place in science, was my life. And now you’re telling me it’s a sham!”
“Nonsense!” said the colonel, brushing himself off. “You’re having mental problems, it’s clear, Scarborough. Just hold yourself steady awhile. Get yourself together, man.”
“No, Colonel, I’m going to find out why my friend was killed! I’m going to find out why the government keeps secret bases on farms in the Midwest. I’m going to tear off these goddamn blinders you’ve put on me, and I’m going to uncover the truth—even if it destroys all that I’ve built up, all that I’ve mouthed in the past.”
“You’re insane, Scarborough!” whispered Dolan harshly.
Two privates with MP bands rushed in.
Colonel Dolan pointed at Scarborough. “I want this man taken away and incarcerated at Fort Meyer, immediately!”
The two burly men immediately grabbed Scarborough’s arms
and yanked him out of the chair.
“Wait a minute, you can’t do this to me!” said Scarborough.
“He’s right!” said Lieutenant Manning. “He’s a civilian!”
“He’s been in the employ of the United States Air Force for many years,” said the colonel with a smug look of satisfaction. “He signed the appropriate forms that turn over disciplinary matters to us!” Dolan went up to Scarborough. “Cool off tonight, Ev. Think about your position. I’ll deal with you tomorrow.”
As Colonel Dolan turned to deal with Lieutenant Manning, a stunned Everett Scarborough was dragged away by the military police.
Chapter 31
Lieutenant Marsha Manning went to one of the Pentagon’s commissaries, where she drank three cups of coffee, and thought the hardest she ever had in her entire life.
The drab decor, and the dour-looking people who milled through the dim, table-filled room which was lined with Macke food machines and faded photographs and smelled of cheap floor wax, only served as a reminder to Marsha about how frustrated and trapped she felt in her position in the military. She sipped the bitter coffee and stared bleakly into nothingness. She could have gotten out last year. Instead, she’d re-enlisted. It wasn’t the mere ten years to go before a nice pension—she just didn’t know where else she could go. She stayed in the Air Force more because of momentum than anything else—and of course, because the traumatic breakup with Phillip had left her a walking basket-case for close to a year.
The trouble was, the military was like a mutant family. They fed you, clothed and trained you, gave you
a warm place to relieve yourselves, sure—but it was more than that: all your recreation tended to be on base, under control. All your exposure to life was laced with their brain drugs of commitment for “the Life,” from Officers Club, to softball teams, to commissary-cheap tampons. And to keep you from getting too attached to anyone locale, they kept moving you around the country, around the planet. Two years at Andrews in Maryland, two years at Vandenberg in California, two in Japan, two in Frankfurt, Germany. ...
Follow orders. Yes, sir; no, sir: the binary system of that computer of the ages, the soldier. She’d turned into a robot, she realized; dead in the head, free from choices.
Until she’d met Everett Scarborough.
Somehow, he’d made her feel tingly. She had a new, valuable friend ... and he made her feel very special. Last night, today, they had gotten on so well. In conversation, in silence, in sharing a meal. They meshed, they sparked, he could make her furious, he could make her feel like a Madonna, a Venus ... like Albert Einstein. In just over two days! And there was the promise of something more between them ... something that had been denied last night so that it could grow and be richer for the future ... And now, she was drinking black coffee at the commissary, assignment over, Scarborough put away.
A kind of aloofness engulfed her as she thought the whole thing out step-by-step. She had absolutely no idea whether MacKenzie’s theories were correct. Certainly, it seemed that the man had bumbled into something nasty. But the way Colonel Dolan had acted ... what he had done, throwing Scarborough into a military detainment-cell. She’d never heard of such a thing, though she supposed that there must be some kind of precedent. A colonel just didn’t go about taking civilian law into his own—The laws. The rules.
Of course! Marsha could have kicked herself. There was something that she could do for Ev. Rules were written down, even military laws. And where else would they be, if not in the middle of the goddamn Pentagon!
She chucked the rest of her third cup of coffee into the trash bin, and hurried to find the Pentagon library.
It took her awhile, but she found it, an obscure section of the civilian codes in some thick tome of military law, hidden deep in the stacks of the reference section of the library.
She dug through her purse, found some change, and Xeroxed the relevant passage proving her case—Air Force colonels simply could not jail civilians. At least not in this kind of white-collar situation. Any disciplinary action of this sort had to be coordinated with the local civilian authorities. When the machine had finished flashing, and she was satisfied that the copy was legible, she returned the book to its shelf, and checked the time.
5:40.
It was her hope that she would catch Dolan in his office, confront him with this matter, and have Scarborough released. Surely, Colonel Dolan, in his anger at Scarborough’s roughness, had overreacted, and would see the error of his ways.
It was ten before six when she reached the colonel’s office.
The front office was empty. The secretary had apparently left for the evening. But the colonel’s door was closed. Maybe he was still there. High-ranking officers tended to linger until six or seven, relieving their workload, doing paperwork maybe.
She walked toward the door, clutching the Xerox copy in one hand, raising the other to knock at the door.
But she caught herself in midstride. She heard voices in the room. She paused a moment, and she listened.
“...out!” One man was saying. “We’re getting in over our heads, and I don’t like the operational procedures that I see you exhibit!” She recognized Colonel Walter Dolan’s voice, heavy with upset and anxiety.
“Look, Dolan! You can’t! You’re up to your bald scalp! You were here years before I took over Enforcement, and look how ineffective the programs were. The Publishers were not pleased. That’s why they got new Editors!”
“I don’t like it ... Cold-blooded murder. I’ve had my fill of it, I tell you!”
“Dolan, how many times do I have to tell you ... Justine said it was an accident! He didn’t mean to kill MacKenzie. But you’ve got to agree, he’s done his job. No more phantom files to haunt our nights!” The man’s voice, a civilized tenor, chuckled ruefully.
“I don’t care. I’m out of it.”
“Dolan, you know that’s impossible! You’ve been with Blue Book from the beginning! Now, I realize that you didn’t start White Book, and God knows you’ve avoided Black Book ... But you’ve got a responsibility to your country, to the Publishers ... And most of all, to me. We can’t afford to lose you. We’re so close! Look, you’re almost at retirement age. Hang on a little while longer, drop out gracefully. Otherwise, I’m afraid the Publishers will want harsh action taken.”
“You mean ... kill me!”
“I never said such a thing, Dolan.”
“Okay, okay. I understand.” Dolan’s voice was petulant, but accepting. “Damn! And it was working ... Lieutenant Manning was doing just fine! I’d planted all the right information in the computers. They would have been misled! And Justine had to go and pull this one! He’s a maniac!”
“A useful maniac.”
“But what about Scarborough?”
“Every man has his price. You certainly do!”
“You don’t know Everett Scarborough. He’d die first.”
There was a pause. “Well, Colonel, the Editors will take that into consideration.”
Manning stood there, unable to move, understanding the conversation just enough to be horrified. White Book, Black Book—were these legitimate government programs? Or were they as covert as North, Poindexter, and Reagan’s Iranscam? She had to linger and find out as much as she could.
“Okay, okay. But please, after tomorrow, I’m just a coordinator. An interface here.”
“That will be more than sufficient. I’m sure the Publishers will see that Everett Scarborough is of no further use to the Cause. We had hoped to use him for a long time, worked hard to keep him bamboozled, but of course we did not foresee these events.” Another rueful chuckle. “He certainly isn’t going to be able to so blithely brush off accusations of government cover-ups now, is he?”
“What’s the news on his daughter?”
“She’s still managed to stay out of our grasp. But we’ve managed to pry the information from her boyfriend. We know where she’ll probably be, and we’ll be there as well. My goodness, the time has just flown. And I have a dinner engagement with the Attorney General.”
Steps coming this way? They would catch her! There was no hope of running out of the door into the hall—they’d see the door closing, and they’d know that someone had been there, listening to this damning conversation.
But where could she hide?
Her eyes swept the office. The only possibility was the desk. Quickly and silently, she strode to it, moved the chair, and ducked beneath just as she heard the click of the door. She
squeezed underneath the desk as far as she could, trying to control any telltale rasp of breathing.
“Thank you for coming, Richards. I had to tell you about this. And I’m waiting here for an important dispatch, so I couldn’t leave for our usual meeting place. I feel a little better.”
“Don’t worry. Everything’s under control. I personally will deal with our man in the brig first thing tomorrow morning. Good evening. We’ll talk again soon.”
Steps echoed down the hallway. The front door closed. Marsha watched as the black, spit-polished shoes of Colonel Dolan clicked back toward his office.
The shoes suddenly stopped.
Dolan stood still for a moment—then the toes about-faced. And the shoes began walking her way!
He’s found me! she thought. He knows I’m here! She had to bite her tongue to keep from screaming with alarm.
The shoes stopped in front of the desk. She heard hands rummaging through some papers on top of the desk. There was a grunt of satisfaction and a crinkle of bond, then the shoes swung around again, and walked back to the op
en door of the other office. The door closed.
Manning heaved a sigh of relief. She waited for a moment more, quickly crawled out from under the desk, and as quietly as she could, left the office.
She knew what she had to do, now. And she had to do it quickly, before it was too late to do any good.
Chapter 32
Diane Scarborough pounded on the motel door marked 134.
“Come on, Camden! Open up, man! I know you’re in there! I see the light, your car is parked below.”
No answer. Diane looked around on the open second-level, but saw no other signs of activity. The sun was low on the horizon, causing the automobiles in the tarmac parking-lot to cast deep shadows. Cars whooshed by on the highway in the eternal drone of modern transportation.
“Camden, I’ve got the story of the century for you!”
“Go ‘way!” The voice was slurred. The goof was drunk. Shit!
“Camden, let me in, or by God, I’m going to call your publisher and let him know what is slipping between your fingers!”
A pause. She heard the uncertain skitter of steps, and a hard whump on the door as Camden overshot his mark. The knob turned, and the door opened. Diane smelled him before she actually saw him; whiskey exhaled from the doorway like pickled halitosis. A disheveled blot against a single lamp’s light hung before her, weaving. “Don’ do it. Please. You call my boss, my ass is cooked.”
She pushed past him, and he closed the door and swung around squinting at her uncertainly. She went to the table, where a number of whiskey bottles stood. She picked an empty one up. “Jake! How long have you been in here?”
“Since ... last night,” he said, leaning against the door, struggling to keep his eyes opened. “This happens sometimes. Reilly disappearin’ ... MacKenzie murdered.” A shudder visibly went through him. “God. Jus’ too much. Went out for a drink las’ night. Went a little overboard. Yeah.”
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 34