Even though my eyes were shut, I knew the second that Paul had come to stand next to me.
I asked, “Do you feel it?”
A silence, during which I sensed him watching the water as well, breathing the air, clean and untainted by factories or six lanes of rush-hour traffic. “This may sound crazy — but I think I do.”
I opened my eyes and blinked against the dazzling diamond-bright flashes of sunlight on the water. Then I turned to Paul. “I’m ready for the next stage.”
“And what is that?”
With a smile, I replied, “I don’t know — I just know I can handle it. We, actually.”
His hazel eyes were almost pure green in the reflection of the cottonwoods’ leaves. “You sound a lot more confident than I am. There’s still a helicopter circling up there.”
“I know.” What I didn’t know was how much time we had. But I wanted to use what little breathing space we did have for something useful. “Did they question you? The hybrids?”
“No. They’re not much for talk. But there was someone else — some kind of agent, I guess. Human. He was inquisitive enough.” A muscle tightened in Paul’s jaw, and he glanced away from me, over toward the stream.
That sounded ominous. So there really were humans in league with the aliens. Some part of me had wanted to deny that such a thing could be true, but Paul had been there, had seen it for himself.
I opened my mouth to reply, then paused, still adjusting to the heightened awareness the surroundings seemed to have brought out in me. Another presence, a friendly one, had entered the parking lot. “He’s here.”
“He who?”
“Magellan.”
And I turned and made my way back to the parking lot. Kiki and Adam had left the van and now stood next to a tall gray-haired man who had just gotten out of a shiny silver Mercedes station wagon. He turned toward Paul and me as we approached.
“This is my cargo?” he asked.
Kiki said, “Dr. Oliver, Persephone, this is Matt Forrest. He’s going to get you out of here.”
Matt Forrest extended a hand, and Paul shook it. “Thanks for the rescue, Mr. Forrest.”
“Call me Matt,” he replied, in the Texas drawl I recognized from the CB exchange just a short while earlier. “Happy to oblige. But we’d best get going — don’t want to keep our friends in the sky waiting too long.” He had keen blue eyes bracketed by deep lines, the eyes of a man who’d spent a good deal of his life looking into the distance. He addressed Kiki next. “You know what to do.”
“Yeah.” She turned to Paul and me. “You can trust Matt. I just wish — I just wish I could go, too. And Dr. Oliver — ”
“Paul.”
“Paul.” To my surprise, she flushed a little and said, “Well, Kara and I would have loved to have you come to the shop. We — ”
“Hey,” I said. “We’re not going away forever. Besides,” I added, “my car’s still in your shop’s parking lot. Keep an eye on it for me, could you?”
Her eyes sparkled. “Absolutely!”
Adam said, “We should probably go, Kiki.”
“Right. I know.” She gave an awkward little wave, then headed back toward the van.
“We’ll give them a minute,” Matt Forrest said. “Want to make sure that helicopter goes with them.”
I didn’t like the sound of that very much. “What, we’re just going to let them be decoys?”
“You didn’t seem to have much of a problem letting those other two men do the same thing,” Paul pointed out.
“I know, but Kiki and Adam are just kids — ”
“They’ll be all right,” Matt said. “Kiki’s got a good head on her shoulders. Besides, all she’s going to do is drive the van back to the store. The MIBs know that Kara and Kiki are always out poking around. They’ll decide they were following the van for no good reason.”
“You hope,” I returned, although truthfully, I didn’t get any negative sensations from contemplating Kiki and Adam going back to the store. Surely if that were a terrible idea, it would have felt wrong to me.
“I know.” He lifted his head and watched the shimmering leaves of the cottonwoods overhead. “They’re gone. Time for us to get going just in case they decide to circle back.”
Since I couldn’t really argue with that, I just nodded. It made more sense for Paul to ride shotgun, since he was definitely the taller of the two of us, so he got in the front seat while I climbed into the back behind him. I wondered if we were going to be heading straight out of town, and which route Matt planned to take. Incredibly, I was starting to feel hungry. Or maybe it wasn’t so incredible; I’d been running around like a madwoman, and it had been almost seven hours since breakfast.
Then again, I knew I could go a lot longer than seven hours without food if I had to, and of course the important thing was to get out of town and back to Los Angeles. Now that I had Paul back, I knew we had to complete our unfinished business there.
Matt started the Mercedes and moved out of the parking lot, then turned down the same road Kiki had used to get us here. At the next intersection, though, he turned left, heading south and west. I didn’t recognize any of the streets he was taking. From what I could tell, he was purposely using side streets through residential areas, keeping off the main drag. Eventually, though, he turned onto a larger street I saw was called Airport Road, and began climbing higher.
“So where exactly are we going?” I inquired.
“Airport,” he replied. “Safest way to get you out of here is fly you out. They’ll be watching the roads.”
“Your plane?” Paul asked.
“Yep. I do a bit of ferry service when the need arises. Can you reach in the glovebox there, get out the placard for me?”
I watched as Paul opened the glove compartment and extracted a piece of card stock, which Matt took from him and deposited on the dashboard near the driver’s-side corner of the windshield.
To my surprise, there were pedestrians suddenly all around us, moving from a parking lot higher up the bluff down to a promontory on the west side of the mesa, where a scenic overlook was located.
I must have made a questioning sound, because Matt said, “Everybody comes here. Say there’s a vortex. Don’t know about that, but the views are pretty incredible. Too bad we’ll miss sunset, but them’s the breaks, I guess.”
Vortex. That would explain the rapidly building sense of pressure deep within my breast, as if something contained inside me wanted to burst out. It was a very different energy from what I had felt by the creek, but no less powerful for all that. I’d read about the vortexes, of course, but reading was far different from experiencing. At the moment it seemed as if I had absorbed enough power to take on a squad of hybrids single-handed — not that I really wanted to try.
“Where’re we going?” Matt asked.
I made a surprised sound, and he grinned.
“We try to say as little as possible over open channels. Now, I can’t fly you to Paris — ’less you’re going to Paris, Texas — but I should be able to get you where you’re going. But I got to gas up first. So how far are we going?”
“Los Angeles,” Paul said promptly, eliciting another one of those grins.
“That’s easy enough. Whereabouts?”
I thought furiously. Santa Monica was the closest general aviation airport to where I lived…not that I was planning to go home any time soon. There was also Van Nuys, but I didn’t know the area very well, and somehow I sensed it was important that I be closer to L.A than stuck out in the middle of the San Fernando Valley.
“Santa Monica Airport,” I told him.
“Nice airport. Convenient, too, because we’ve got some helpers in Venice who can come and get you sorted after you land.”
Paul raised an eyebrow. “Helpers?”
“We’ve got quite the network. But I suppose they’ll explain more to you when we get to Los Angeles. Go on up to slip 22A — I need to get a few things out of the car.”
“Piper Seneca,” Paul said, and ran an admiring hand under the belly of the aircraft.
“You fly?” I asked.
“No. Always wanted to learn, but there never seemed to be enough time. Or money.”
He spoke unself-consciously, with just the smallest of self-deprecating shrugs. I hadn’t expected that; there were very few men of my acquaintance who would openly admit to not being exactly flush in the pocketbook.
“And it’ll get us to Santa Monica?”
“Definitely. Take maybe four hours if he’s being conservative. It’s a good plane.”
“Glad you approve,” came Matt Forrest’s voice. He patted the underside of the Seneca. “We need to fill up, but it won’t take too long. I just figured you all might as well get aboard, since the fueling station’s on the other side of the mesa.”
It was a little awkward to climb up into the passenger compartment, but Paul gave me a boost. Inside, the cabin was decorated in soothing tones of blue. I settled myself into one of the seats directly behind the cockpit, and Paul sat down next to me.
I started a little as Matt revved the engines.
“You ever been up in one of these things?” Paul asked.
“No. I went on a hot air balloon ride once.”
To that he just grinned and shook his head.
The engines were louder than I had expected, even though all we were doing was taxiing across the tarmac over to the fuel depot. Once there, Matt climbed out and entered some negotiations with the attendant on duty, who picked up the nozzle for the pump and began to fill the plane’s gas tanks. I guess full service wasn’t completely dead.
Fascinating as that exchange was, I couldn’t help looking through the window and scanning in every direction, eyes straining for any sign of the MIBs, as Kiki & Co. so affectionately called them. I didn’t see anything suspicious, though — just a series of light aircraft lining up for takeoff and then ascending into the achingly blue skies. From up here, you could see all of the valley, with the red rocks thrusting skyward everywhere you looked.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Paul asked, and I turned back toward him.
“I’m surprised you’d say so.”
He lifted his shoulders, then ran a contemplative hand along the bruise on his jaw. “Just because I wasn’t given the courtesy tour doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate beauty when I see it. Funny…I always heard people talk about how stunning Sedona was, but I never had the chance to make it out here. I know it wouldn’t be smart to stick around and sightsee, but…”
“Something in you doesn’t want to leave,” I finished, and he nodded, looking a little startled. “I feel the same way. Well, maybe after we kick the aliens’ asses we can come back here for a spa weekend.”
A flash of white teeth. Thank God the hybrids or MIBs or whomever had given him that impressive shiner hadn’t seen fit to knock out a few of his teeth while they were at it. “Deal.”
Matt returned then, and climbed into the cockpit. “We’re ready to go. Once we’re in the air, I’ll make a few calls.”
“You’ve got a phone in this thing?”
He gestured toward a clunky-looking device he’d just dropped on the front seat next to him. “Satellite phone. Very difficult to trace. Not that they’d even know who they’re supposed to be looking for.”
With that he began taxiing the little plane down toward the runway, taking its place in the queue behind some kind of sleek private jet. With one of those we could have been back in Los Angeles in half the time, but I wasn’t about to look a gift plane trip in the mouth.
And then it was our turn, and the Seneca glided smoothly down the tarmac, pointed south, and we lifted into the air. Sedona fell away beneath us, red rock formations and dark evergreens and the slow winding curve of Oak Creek resolving themselves into a serene landscape. The town had seemed far more populated when I was down in it; from up here I could see how little space the developed areas actually occupied.
The dark shape of a helicopter appeared off to our left, and I let out a little yelp. Paul leaned past me and squinted out the round porthole window. His hand closed around mine.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Look closer.”
It was my turn to squint. I saw letters on the side of the helicopter, letters that resolved themselves into the words Arizona Helicopter Adventures.
“Okay, now I feel like an ass.”
“Don’t. I think it’s all right to be a little on edge after having a bunch of guys in a helicopter trying to shoot you up.”
I was silent for a few seconds. “Do you really think Kara and everyone will be okay? That helicopter — ”
His fingers tightened around mine, and he stared out the window as if considering his words before replying. “We have to hope they are. Matt doesn’t seem too worried, so that’s something. And it’s clever of them to be so visible. If you’re a fixture in the community, there’s a far greater chance that someone’s going to notice when you go missing.
Even though I still wasn’t totally reassured, I knew there wasn’t much else we could do at the moment. Besides, we had our own business to deal with.
I said, “Paul, I’m so sorry I left you at Lampson Labs. I didn’t know what else to do — ”
He cut me off. “Don’t. You did the right thing. I would’ve loved some video of you hitting that one commando upside the head with your purse, though. That was the stuff of legends.” His smile faded. “I was just glad you were able to get away.”
“Weren’t — weren’t you scared?”
“Of course I was scared.” One corner of his mouth lifted, ever so slightly. “I’m an astrophysicist and lecturer, not James Bond. I didn’t know what those men were going to do to me. And after seeing what happened to Raymond…” He let the words trail off.
A shiver passed through me. Raymond Lampson, while not exactly the sweetest guy on the planet, definitely hadn’t deserved to be suborned by an alien intelligence. “It could have been a lot worse,” I said.
“Exactly. As it was, well, I struggled a little — who wouldn’t — but one guy hit me in the jaw with the butt of his gun, and another got me in the eye…just before they dropped a bag over my head and threw me in the back of one of their Hummers. Then they moved out — bringing me here to Sedona, although of course at the time I didn’t know where we were going. It’s hard to keep track of time when you’re stuffed in the trunk of a Hummer with your head in a bag.”
“I would imagine.”
“Once I was at the base, they started asking questions — how I knew you, what Alex Hathaway had told you, but I wouldn’t say much. I didn’t have a serial number to give them, since I’m not in the service, but I think I did rattle off the ISBN for my last book.”
I laughed then. “Wonder what they made of that.”
“They weren’t amused. I could tell they were holding back, though. I’m not an expert, but it could’ve been a lot rougher than it was. I got the impression they were waiting for something…or someone.”
Another of those little shivers trickled down my back, although this one didn’t have anything to do with the presence of hybrids. “Good thing we got there when we did.”
“That’s for sure.” He paused, then watched me carefully. “How did you know where I was?”
I gave a nervous little laugh. “What, you still don’t believe in my psychic powers?”
“I didn’t say that. But still…this wasn’t exactly like tracking down somebody’s lost dog.”
No, it wasn’t. At first I didn’t say anything, but only watched the sere desert landscape passing far beneath us, obscured from time to time by a passing cloud. “I had a feeling. No, it was m
ore than that. A compulsion. Something drawing me eastward. I didn’t even know where I was going until I saw the road sign for Sedona. The rest…just sort of fell into place. I was told I would have help, and I did.”
Those keen hazel eyes missed very little. “The absent Otto put in an appearance?”
“Well, I wouldn’t really call it an appearance, since he never materialized, but he did show up to give some timely advice. For all his faults, he’s never steered me wrong. I had to trust him — and the universe — and follow my gut.”
“That explains how you got here. But how did you get past all those guards?”
That was a question I didn’t really have an answer for, since I still couldn’t entirely explain it to myself. I knew I had done something to make those walkie-talkies come to life with false commands, but I wasn’t sure exactly how I had done it. And Paul, for all his credulity when it came to aliens and conspiracies, would probably have a hard time swallowing the fact that somewhere along the way I’d picked up a Jedi mind trick or two.
“Luck of the Irish,” I told him.
“I thought you said you were Greek.”
“Half.”
He stared at me for a moment, apparently nonplussed, and suddenly let out a chuckle, right before he leaned in and planted another one of those unexpected but entirely welcome kisses on my mouth. A quick one, with a shift of his gaze toward the cabin where Matt Forrest was sitting, but still, it was enough to send a rush of heat through me, right down to my toes.
“Guess you can tell me later,” Paul said, with a weight of significance in his tone.
Later…when we’re alone.
I hoped we’d have a chance to have that private conversation once we got to Santa Monica. Or maybe “conversation” was the wrong word for it.
* * *
ROUGHLY THREE HOURS LATER, we landed at Santa Monica Airport. By then the sun had almost set, and thin trails of fog were drifting in off the ocean. When we alighted, the air seemed far too damp and heavy, laden with salt. Odd that it would seem that way to me, since I’d been breathing in L.A.’s sea breezes for the last fifteen years, ever since I left Claremont to attend UCLA.
sedona files - books one to three Page 18