The Grays

by Strieber, Whitley

  PART FOUR

  THE HANGED MAN

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! For the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  —MATTHEW ARNOLD

  “Dover Beach”

  ELEVEN

  MIKE WILKES WATCHED AS, ONE by one, the members of the Trust filed slowly through a large white device that was set into the doorway to the conference room on the second floor of his Georgetown home.

  As each trustee stood waiting in what was essentially a magnetic-resonance-imaging system reconfigured and retuned to detect very small metallic objects, Mike watched a whole-body image come into focus on a flat-panel display located beside the entrance.

  “Come in, Charles,” he said to their chairman, Charles Gunn.

  “I’m wiped every morning at home,” Charles said. “I had one pulled out of my damn neck last week.”

  “Uh-oh, hold it, Richard.” The display showed a bright spot deep in the brain of Richard Forbes, the Trust’s security chief. “They got one in your damn temporal lobe, buddy.”

  “Is it deep?”

  “Oh, yeah. You’re gonna need a neurosurgeon, big time.”

  “Well, guys, I’m out of this for the duration, then. I’ll see you after my lobotomy.”

  There was nervous laughter. Brain implants were rare. They required an abduction, while an object that went in under the skin could be placed while the host was wide awake. All it would do would be to cause some pain, but there would be no wound, certainly no scar. The grays were, among other things, masters of atomic structure. They could walk through walls if they wished, and they could certainly deposit an implant under the skin without surgery. The terrifying thing about a brain implant was that it could be used for subtle mind control, detectable only by someone with profound understanding.

  “They anticipated this meeting,” Charles said.

  “Yeah, they know damn well we’d want our security guy in a meeting called because of a security issue,” Henry Vorona added as he came through.

  Then Ted Cassius had one under his scalp. These were nasties, too, because that close to the brain, they could be used not only for monitoring, but for a degree of mind control as well.

  “How long have you had this, Ted?”

  “I got a splitting headache two days ago. Jesus, I should have known.”

  “We need to assume that you’re both under mind control and we have to get your asses out of here fast.” He opened his cell phone. “I’m calling for a Secret Service escort for both of you guys to Walter Reed. If you go under your own steam, you just might change your minds, as you know.”

  “Thank you.”

  Nobody else, thankfully, was implanted, and Mike finally was able to take his customary place at the conference table, second from the head on the left. Charles Gunn was head of table. Normally, he would not be at a meeting of the security-operations committee, but Mike had specifically requested his attendance.

  Henry Vorona shuffled some papers as the Three Blind Mice took their places, three sour and mutually indistinguishable liaison officers from the main corporate groups that accepted delivery of the technologies and processes that evolved out of the liaison with Adam. They were Todd Able, Alex Starnes, and Timothy Greenfield, all in their forties, all looking like undertakers. It was their corporate dollars that funded the survival program. Creating the database of people who would be sheltered was costly, and monitoring their movements even more so. But those things were nothing compared to the cost of the underground shelters themselves, a hundred at half a billion dollars each, hidden around the world.

  “Let’s get going,” Charles said. “I’ve brought a little patents-and-processes business to deal with first. Where are we with the plasmonics device?”

  Mike was confused by that question. The invisibility fabric was deep in the pipeline. “Uh, do we need more from Adam? Because I wasn’t aware—”

  Tim Greenfield said, “We have a report, Mike. It’s on its way to you.”

  “Then there’s a problem, Timmy?”

  Tim Greenfield’s pate flushed. “It doesn’t work.”

  “Well, that is a problem.” The concept was a material that would reduce light scatterback to zero, thus rendering an object effectively impossible to see. They knew that the grays used invisibility cloaking in their abductions, in addition to their peculiar physical ability to lock movement with the slightest flickering of the eye, so their victim could not see them.

  Adam and Bob had been queried on the cloaking, in the tiny bits and pieces necessary to extract information from them, for fifteen years. They had a ten-billion-dollar check riding on the success of the process.

  “There’s a compositional issue. Chemical. We need a real formula. What they’ve given us is not real.”

  So the grays had lied again. All of those years of work, those hundreds and hundreds of tiny, seemingly innocuous questions had led down another blind alley.

  Not that they didn’t have successes. “How are we doing with the electrostatic anti-friction shield?” Mike asked Todd Able, who was team leader on that project. He knew the answer better than Todd did, but he wanted to remind everybody that his work with Bob and Adam had resulted in its share of successes.

  “It’s deploying and we’re looking at a ninety-seven percent decrease in friction across angular surfaces. If we could mine gravitite, we could fabricate non-aerodynamic spherical vehicles and we’d be looking at the same zero-friction profile we see in the grays’ craft. All we’d be missing is their engine.”

  “The coherent mercury plasma can’t be made more efficient,” Henry Vorona said. “We’re getting everything we can out of it.”

  Mike knew that well. Using a combination of research into ancient Vedic texts about the technology of Earth’s previous civilization and questions to Adam, they had evolved a device that rotated a mercury plasma inside a powerful magnetic field, that reduced the weight of the craft that carried it by 40 percent. Simply knowing that the Vedic references to aircraft and weapons referred to actual devices had enabled scientists to proceed much more quickly.

  “So what about gravitite? Progress?” Charles asked in his peculiarly cheerful voice, so improbable in a man who looked like the director of his own funeral.

  “We know what it is and where it is, but extracting it is another matter,” Mike said. He looked toward Henry Vorona, who was a substantial shareholder in a dozen companies that were feeding off the grays’ technology. One of those companies, Photonic Research, had been mining for years in the same seams of iron in the southern Catskills that the grays used, pulling iron out of shafts directly adjacent to theirs, but failing to extract more than a few molecules of gravitite.

  Henry said, “We’re not going to be saving the human race with gravitite. We can pull up the iron and cut it up atom by atom, but we find one atom of gravitite for every three hundred billion atoms of iron. The grays must have a more efficient process, otherwise they would have used up every bit of iron on the planet to get a handful of gravity-negative product.”

  Charles now rested his eyes on Mike. “Colonel, if you’d like to go on to this security matter now.”

  Mike told himself that he wasn’t frightened, but he was, he felt like a schoolboy about to get a thrashing. “We have a potential crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.”

  “Adam’s not sick?”

  Bob had been invaded by common household molds. This was why they kept Adam in an ultra-dry, ultra-clean environment. They were all terrified of losing their only captive gray. “Not that, thank the Lord, but something might be unfolding that co
uld be bad for us.”

  Henry Vorona sighed. He was not a patient man and Mike could see an explosion building. He hurried on. “Basically, we’ve obtained information about a very unusual operation on the part of the grays. Spectacularly threatening, I am sorry to say. What happened initially was that the triad that works Pennsylvania and up into Canada, came out of their boundaries and did an abduction in a college town in Kentucky.”

  “Okay,” Todd said, “I’ll bite.”

  “The grays have devised a way to communicate with mankind. To teach us how to save ourselves. They’ve been working on it for probably a couple of thousand years. And now, gentlemen, they are going to spring it on us. Of course, we save ourselves not for us, but for them. Mankind survives, but as a genetic milk carton for them. Slaves.”

  That brought total silence. These men had counted on the coming catastrophe to free their carefully selected fragment of humankind from the grays. None of them liked the idea of the disaster that they knew was coming. But they feared this slavery more. If six billion were alive in 2012, they would all be enslaved. If only a million were left alive by then, they would be left alone. So, at least, went the theory.

  “So, get on with it,” Henry Vorona snapped.

  “Okay,” Mike continued, “we’ve known for some time, based on the abduction pattern we’ve observed over five decades, that the grays are especially interested in children.”

  “Because they’re small, easy to control, and emotionally rich,” Henry said. “Easy to feed on,” he added in a tone electric with contempt. Every man here shared one truth: he despised the grays.

  “That does not explain the ‘why,’ which has always been our problem. The grays can outthink us. They’re always ten moves ahead.”

  Henry slammed his briefcase, which had been open on the table. “That’s it then. Let’s all go home. Follow Forrestal out the damn window.”

  “I’m too old to jump out a window,” Charles said. “Mike, you finish this. What’s your problem and what do you need from us?”

  “Well, wait,” Tim said, “what about the scalar weapons program? We’re going to have eighty of those birds up by 2012. We’ll be able to induce the destruction of most of the species ourselves.” He sighed. “God help us, I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “You think they’ll sit back and let us kill their cattle?”

  “They haven’t touched the scalar prototype.”

  “Because its only one small weapon,” Charles said. “It doesn’t have the potential to affect their plans.”

  Mike continued. “The grays are doing something very inventive. What they’ve apparently done is to breed a child so intelligent that he can process and use the contents of their knowledge.”

  Vorona shook his head.

  “You have a problem, Henry?”

  “They’ve been preparing this from the beginning, then?”

  “I found out about it early this morning.”

  “Mike, we’ve known about them for fifty damn years, and you found out today?”

  “Look, let’s not argue about me.”

  “I want to argue about you! This is not good enough!”

  “Hold off!”

  “You hold off! And you listen. Because this is urgent. Our whole damn program is in jeopardy. The freedom of the human species!”

  “Because somebody didn’t do their job,” Alex murmured.

  “Hold off, all of you,” Charles said softly. “Go on, Mike.”

  “My expectation is that they’re going to install something in him that links him to their collective.”

  “An implant does not a demon make.”

  “In this case, it does. This child’s intelligence will enable him to use vastly more information than an average human being can.”

  Silence fell. He watched each face as each man explored the implications of this.

  “Gentlemen,” Mike said, “if this child survives, mankind survives. When the grays show up in 2012, dinner is served.”

  “Now,” Tim Greenfield asked in his soft Georgia drawl, “we are absolutely sure that their coming is bad for us?”

  “You cannot seriously entertain a question where we can’t know the answer until it’s too late. Good or bad, we can’t take the risk!”

  “Why not approach the child, get him on our side?” Todd asked.

  “When we approach him, we approach the grays,” Mike said acidly.

  “So, do the child, Mike,” Charles said. “Shouldn’t be hard, not for a pro like you.”

  “I might remind all of you that every life I took because of this damned thing, I took under orders.”

  “I repeat, do the child.”

  “Which is why I’m here.”

  Charles slammed his hand down on the table. “You don’t need our permission! For God’s sake, Mike, this meeting is a waste of time. Do the damned child!”

  “Charles, Goddamnit, will you please give me a chance to talk!”

  Charles glared at him.

  Mike continued. “My problem is that the grays are not alone in protecting this child. They have the help of some people within our own organization who appear to have come under mind control.” He took his iPod out of his briefcase, plugged in its tiny speaker, and played for them the conversation that had taken place on Lost Angel Road.

  “It’s pitiful,” Henry said. “Those are good men, all of them.”

  “The hard part is,” Mike said, “I can see where their choice is coming from. There’s a lot of life going to be lost doing it our way. A lot of life.”

  “You’ve made no headway finding this child, I presume.”

  “No, Henry, I have a description, obtained from Adam this morning. And I will undoubtedly find a child who fits it on Oak Road. And kill the wrong child.”

  Todd said, “Unless they’ve given you a description of the right child in hope that you’ll assume that it must be the wrong one.”

  “Kill all the children,” Henry said. “And what in the world are we going to do with Lewis and Rob and Dr. Simpson?”

  “Tell you what,” Tim Greenfield said, “let’s suck them up in the terrorist thing and ship them to Saudi Arabia. That’ll do it.”

  “It will also bring in the CIA, AFOSI, and the FBI, not to mention the Saudis. We need a plane crash, an auto accident, a fatal robbery attempt, a nice heart attack, stuff like that,” Charles said. “Take a year doing them. There’s no hurry.” He looked toward Mike. “The sort of thing you’re expert at.”

  “The child is our urgent problem, and please let me repeat: the grays are protecting him—”

  “—and so are our friends from Lost Angel Road, don’t forget that, Mike.”

  Tim said, “Gentlemen—excuse me, Charles, but I think you’re panicking, here. We have years to deal with this child, and—”

  “We do not have years,” Mike said. “Please get rid of that misconception.”

  “I’m sorry, Mike, but we have until 2012.”

  “WE DO NOT! GODDAMNIT! Let me tell you how this will work. The second they possess that kid or parasitize him or however you’d like to describe it, he is going to become invulnerable.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I have spent the last fifteen years of my career sparring with Bob and Adam, and I am warning you, if we let that kid go even a day, we’re done. They win. We will not be able to do a single thing to him. He will always outwit us. Good Christ, he’s going to be smarter than they are.”

  Alex said, “Let’s put a nuke on the damn town. Pick up the phone and call the president.”

  “I can’t imagine him agreeing to that,” Charles said. “In any case, we need to keep this in-house if at all possible.”

  “Which gets me to my next question,” Henry Vorona said. “Mike, you have a big rep. Given that you’ve been sitting at the bottom of a hole for fifteen years, may I know why we should believe you’re qualified to go operational again?”

  Charles said, “Henry, you surprise me.
Mike is my choice and that ought to be enough. But if it’s not, let me lay things out. Mike didn’t always spend his days licking the heinies of those damn gray bastards down in that hole. He did a lot of hard, sad, wet work in the early days.”

  “Okay, I get it.”

  “No! You’re questioning my authority, Henry. You’ve done it before and you’ll do it again. That’s fine. You want to run the show. Very ambitious. Maybe, if they vote me out and vote you in, you’ll do okay.” He looked around the table. “Do we want a vote of confidence? Gentlemen?”

  No hand was raised.

  He went on. “Suffice to say that Mike here had the unfortunate need, back some years ago, to become a master of untraceable murder. He’s got quite a number of notches in his little cap pistol, am I right, Mike?”

  “I’ve done a few,” he muttered.

  “Using everything from a chemical that induces cancer to a mind-control technique that makes people kill themselves. And he’s never even come close to being caught.”

  Vorona smiled at Mike. “Then I’m relieved,” the CIA representative said. “We can count on you.”

  Todd spoke up. “Obviously, the nuclear option isn’t available to us, but I think Alex’s concept is a good one. We could do a training accident, say, compliments of Alfred AFB, which is out there in Kentucky, if I’m not mistaken. Blow away the neighborhood with a stray incendiary, say.”

  “ ‘Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.’ ” Wilkes paused. “But, of course,” he added, “Herod missed. If we just do that one little cluster of houses, we might miss, too.”

  “However we do it, we have to do it now,” Vorona said.

  “Gentlemen,” Charles said, “I think we’ve heard enough. Mike, we need to find this child. Would it help if you had a TR?”