“Don’t forget we love you, too. You have any trouble getting over?”
Sami shrugged and changed his mind about the coffee, filling a cup from the thermos on the table.
“I just told them the story I told you and the guys at poker,” Sami said. “It’s easy when you don’t have to make anything up.”
“How about Rainbow?” DeLuca asked. “What’s the line on her daughter?”
“Rainbow’s a sweet woman,” Sami said. “I like her. What you see is exactly what you get. It’s kind of refreshing, after all the bullshit Carolyn put me through. Whatever. Rainbow literally couldn’t hurt a fly. She stepped on a ladybug yesterday and I thought she was going to commit suicide over it. Her ex-husband treated her pretty bad, and the way she grew up, this is like the first place where she’s really felt loved and accepted. Other than by her daughter.”
“You were trying to tell me something at the lecture,” DeLuca said. “Rainbow was trying to convince me everything was all right. Why was that?”
“I think she was trying to convince herself,” Sami said, pausing as if he was considering what he would say next carefully, or as if he felt uncomfortable continuing. “The best I can tell, Ruby may have been abducted.”
“Did the kidnappers ask for ransom?” DeLuca said. “Whatever it is, I’m sure we have enough in the discretionary fund to pay it, and if we don’t, I can call Captain Martin. What? What’s with the look on your face?”
“I don’t mean that kind of abduction,” Sami said. “I mean she was taken. In a ship. And then they brought her back, but she was so shook up about it that they have her somewhere to debrief her. They told Rain she could see her daughter soon, but they didn’t say when.”
“Just so we’re clear here,” DeLuca said, “when you say taken by a ship, are you talking about a UFO?”
Sami looked at him. DeLuca was surprised. Sami was one of the gruffest, most cynical people he’d ever met—DeLuca knew his friend would not become so emotional unless something serious was on his mind.
“It’s really not easy to talk about some of this shit, you know,” Sami said. “I’m here to help you in any way that I can, David, but it would be nice to think you could be here for me a little bit. I don’t think that’s asking for too much.”
“Jesus, Sami, that goes without saying,” DeLuca said. “Just take your time. I’ll listen to whatever you have to say.”
“It was hard enough, telling you guys at the poker table what I saw that night,” Sami said. “I mean, I knew you were going to give me shit about it, but I thought somebody was going to be maybe the least bit curious. Something really phenomenal happens to you, that’s never happened before, you expect a little more from your friends.”
“It’s not a very sensitive group,” DeLuca said of his weekly poker game. “I think everybody felt maybe a little threatened by what you were saying. Like maybe we were losing you, so giving you shit was everybody’s way of pulling you back toward us.”
DeLuca saw Peggy Romano out the window, walking toward the pool in her bathrobe with a towel over her arm. She waved to them. Sami sipped his coffee.
“What you told us was that the… thing you saw… hung above the road for about a minute and then took off,” DeLuca said. “Was there more to it than that?”
“Yeah, there was,” Sami said. “These guys with the Anguilo crew were driving around in tanker trucks, dumping toxic waste on the dirt roads up south of Monadnock. I had to hang pretty far back because of how empty the roads were, but I had some NVGs to drive with my lights off if I had to. So I see him hit his brakes, and I come up in the dark, and I see him pulled over, he opens his valves, he gets back in and drives away, so I gotta stop and get a sample from the ditch first, and then I can pop him. And if he gets away, it’s okay because I got the license for the truck. So I’m alone in the woods, with my engine off, and it’s really quiet, until I hear this humming sound, and then all of a sudden, I see this bright light, and I look up and there’s a ship right over my head. And… they take me up…”
His voice was shaking, and he had to struggle to slow his breathing.
“It’s all right, Sami,” DeLuca said. “You take your time.”
Sami wiped the corners of his eyes with the folded paper towel DeLuca had given him to use as a coaster.
“This whole deal has been a bit overwhelming for me, I gotta tell ya, David. For the longest time, I thought I was just crazy, and then I thought maybe I wasn’t, but either way, nobody would ever understand. I never heard of this Hilton Jaynes guy until the other night, and I never met anybody else who went through what I did until I met Rainbow and the others. Not all of ’em but a lot of ’em. I can’t really tell you why, but it was a big part of what drove Carolyn and me apart, me knowing something I couldn’t talk to her about. I tried once and she wouldn’t hear it.”
“It must be quite a relief, knowing you’re not alone,” DeLuca said.
“Oh, God,” Sami said, looking as if he was going to cry again. “Yeah. It’s quite a relief.” He took a deep breath and sat up straight in his chair.
“So what happened?” DeLuca asked. “In the ship?”
“Just the usual stuff you hear about,” Sami said. “I know you’re going to think this is nuts, but what they told me was that they were breeding a better race to take over, once we fuck our planet up to where nobody can live here anymore, which they said was about a hundred years off, on the outside, and maybe twenty years on the inside. The way we’re polluting everything.”
“And you’d know,” DeLuca said, “given how you just saw a guy dumping by the side of the road.”
“Yeah,” Sami said. “Exactly.”
“Was that how they put it?” DeLuca asked. “Did they use the phrase, ‘fuck up our planet’? I’m not doubting you, I’m just curious.”
“That’s how they put it,” Sami said. “It seemed kind of funny, at the time. You don’t expect extraterrestrials to curse. I didn’t see anybody because it was too bright, but I heard the voices. Like, inside my head, I heard them. So they did the probes and they took some sperm and then they sent me back. And my memory was like, wow, was that real or did I fall asleep and dream it? Because it was sort of halfway between something you know for real and something you only think you know for real. So I wrote everything down in the car, before I started to lose it. I mean, it was so real, but it was also so strange that you think it can’t be real.”
“So you think Ruby was taken, you said? But she’s back?”
“I was able to star-six-nine Malcolm Percy’s personal phone after Rainbow talked to him and he told her everything was all right, and he’d called his sister in San Antonio, Alexandra, so I had your brother-in-law Tom at Homeland Security pull her recent purchases and whatever—all of a sudden, three days after Ruby disappears, she’s buying American Girl dolls and Lucky Charm cereal and renting Hilary Duff videos. Antonionus won’t tell Rain anything, but I got the address, so we’re driving there tomorrow. I gotta ask you, David—do you believe me? Be honest.”
“I don’t know what I believe,” DeLuca said, though that wasn’t quite true. “I know we all have a things-that-can’t-be-explained category. I thought what Hilton Jaynes said was really interesting, and I know you wouldn’t lie to me, so yeah, I believe you.”
“Okay,” Sami said. “I should get back. If you’re gone too long, they send a tractor beam after you. I’m kidding.”
“I know,” DeLuca said.
“Just so you know,” Sami said, “I can deal with this on my own. I only told you because it’s relevant to the investigation. Otherwise, I’m fine, keeping it to myself.”
DeLuca knew what Sami was trying to tell him.
“Just so you know,” DeLuca said, “this whole conversation is classified, so nobody is going to know except you and me.”
“Walter knows,” Sami said. “You can talk about it with him if you need to. I told him back when it happened. He never said anything, did he?”
“Not a word,” DeLuca said.
“I didn’t think he would,” Sami said. “Do you think maybe Cheryl Escavedo was abducted?”
“Right now I’m thinking she was killed,” DeLuca said. “That’s the way I’m going with this.”
“You said the tracks stopped in the middle of nowhere,” Sami said. “That’s consistent with an abduction.”
“I know,” DeLuca said. “I’m not rejecting the idea of abduction out of hand. I just think there were more reasons why somebody would want to kill her than there were reasons why somebody would want to abduct her. All the usual crap we had to deal with when we worked homicide.”
“Maybe they wanted it to look like an abduction?”
“Or maybe they wanted to lead us toward a conclusion that no one else would believe, as a way of dead-ending us,” DeLuca said.
“Anyway,” Sami said, “I’ll let you know what we find out when we’re in San Antonio.”
When DeLuca opened his e-mail, two messages were of interest. The first was from his son, Scott.
Hey Pops. Hope you’re using sunscreen. It snowed again here today.
By the way, I cleaned up your disk and defragmented your hard drive for you—this thing was running dog slow.
Anyway, to answer your question, sorry, but we had nothing in the sky at three minutes after midnight, a thumb from Orion’s buckle towards five o’clock, or a fist, or an arm, or anywhere close to that. We had a KH-11 in that area about an hour later—are you sure of the time? Maybe you forgot to reset your watch. But even then, there’s no reason why you’d see it and then not see it. My best guess is that you saw some sort of commercial airplane, but I don’t have that data. Maybe Albuquerque air traffic control or Kirtland would have records. Or maybe it was somebody else’s bird, though I tracked all the satellites we know about and came up with zilch there also. Sorry I can’t be of more help.
Coincidentally, I got some news that we lost a Predator over El Paso (approx) just after the drug lord’s helicopter went down, though, of course, that part wasn’t in the papers. I was curious so I logged into IMINT and saw that there was a third helicopter, so I asked about it and a buddy over at SIGINT said one of our milsats picked up a ping from a transponder on the third helicopter, definitely government issue but not coded to any particular carrier, ten seconds before the other two choppers were targeted. Is that interesting? FYI.
Mom says hello. She says to tell you the desert getaway vacation is sounding better and better but she needs a few days’ notice if you still want to do that. A week. She just yelled that to me from the living room. Let me know what else I can do.
Scott
He immediately called Wes Vogel and asked him if he’d managed to get any agents aboard Sergelin’s helicopter, or if perhaps Galiano Diega had somehow managed to attach a GPS transponder to the aircraft. Vogel said no, not to his knowledge, anyway. DeLuca thanked him, then sent Captain Martin an e-mail asking him to poll all the other relevant intelligence agencies ASAP and find out if the CIA or anybody else had an agent on the Russian’s Twinstar.
The other message he’d received was from Walter Ford, an e-mail containing a list of General Koenig’s classmates from prep school. DeLuca recognized three names. One was a famous movie actor. Another was a congressman from California, a representative from the San Diego district named Richard Benson. The third name was that of Malcolm S. Percy. In a postscript, Ford added that the building lost in the earthquake in Beijing was the home of Shijingshan Entertainment, a business that was in the middle of an international intellectual properties lawsuit.
DeLuca wrote a quick e-mail to Dan Sykes, who was due to return some time that afternoon:
Dan,
Here’s a quick one for you, when you have time. Koenig, Brother Antonionus (aka Malcolm Percy) and Rep. Richard Benson (R. Cal.) all went to prep school together. I’m guessing your dad and Benson must be tight. Do you know him? Would you call Benson and chat him up about Koenig/Percy/Decatur Academy? Was there a relationship, etc. Also, what’s the relationship between Benson and Fowler? Just connecting the dots. No picture yet. It would help if the dots were numbered, wouldn’t it?
David
He drove to the University of New Mexico campus after being told by the department secretary who’d answered the phone that Dr. Burgess would be finished teaching at two o’clock. He walked discreetly behind her as a student, an earnest young fellow with a crewcut, followed her from class, pestering her with questions all the way to her office door. When DeLuca knocked, she opened it quickly and said, exasperatedly, “What? Oh. It’s you.”
“Your student left,” DeLuca said. “The coast is clear. I thought you said students avoided you during office hours.”
“Come on in,” Burgess said, smiling and rolling her eyes. “These aren’t my office hours. It’s the goddamn GI Bill. These guys get out of the service and come to school for free, and they’re the best students I have because they’re so disciplined and motivated, but they won’t leave me alone. I had one follow me all the way to my car.”
“Isn’t that what the GI Bill was supposed to be for?” DeLuca said.
“It is,” she agreed. “I just need time to catch my breath once in a while. What can I do for you?”
She was dressed in a white turtleneck sweater and a denim skirt that fell just to the top of the knee-high suede boots she was wearing. She had, DeLuca thought, an interesting way of getting more attractive each time he saw her, not that it meant anything to him—just an observation.
“I read the papers you gave me,” he said. “I was hoping we could talk about them a little bit.”
“All right,” she said, “but I didn’t get a chance to eat before class and I’m starving. Do you eat pizza?”
“I’m Italian,” DeLuca said. “I eat pizza.”
She walked him to a place called Dinardo’s, off-campus but full of students eating slices and pecking away on their laptops or reading books while they ate. DeLuca and Burgess got a booth by the window. Outside, across the street, a group of protesters marched carrying signs saying, US TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ and STOP THE OCCUPATION. After they ordered, Burgess asked him what he thought of the protesters.
“They remind me of myself,” he said. “I marched against Vietnam. I was really young and the war was practically over, but I guess I felt a small sense of accomplishment when it ended. Actually, not when it ended—when Nixon resigned. Which was sort of the same thing, in my mind.”
“You marched against the war but you enlisted anyway?”
“Later,” he said. “It’s a long story.”
“What about now?” she said. “What about the signs?”
“Do I think the Army should get out?” he said. “Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, Doctor…”
“Penny,” she said.
“Penny,” he agreed. “And I’m David. I was saying, don’t get me wrong about one thing—I have a lot of good friends in the Army and they’re good men who do the toughest job on earth extremely well. My only problem is that the Army is really good at one thing, and that’s blowing stuff up, but after you conquer a country, you don’t want the Army anymore. War’s a mess and it’s a bitch to straighten everything out afterward, and I know because that’s exactly what I was doing over there, but it just seems to me that once we kicked Saddam out, we didn’t know what to do next. It seemed like every time I helped rebuild a school or get a hospital’s generator restarted, some insurgent would blow up a car and then the Army would come in and level the building. And how else do you respond? Maybe I don’t know how you win hearts and minds, but I don’t think you do it by blowing stuff up. The Army fights fire with fire. I think you fight fire with water. I think maybe if we had a civil reconstruction corps that was as well trained and equipped as the Fourth Army and maybe with as many numbers to do the job, we could avoid what we’ve got now. But what do I know.”
“You were there,” she said. “You know more than I do.” She gestured o
ut the window. “And more than they do. I have wondered if farming out the reconstruction jobs to the lowest bidders was such a good idea.”
“Halliburton was the lowest bidder?” DeLuca said. “That’s news to me.”
“You wanted to talk about my work?” she said.
“Mostly I want to ask a whole lot of stupid questions,” he said. “Just to clear some things up in my head.” He’d meant to talk with her even before his conversation with Sami, but the talk with Sami had added a few new dimensions to his line of inquiry. “I promise I won’t follow you to your car.”
“You, I’d welcome,” she said. “Ask away.”
“Well,” he said, “from what I understand, this probe you’re developing to detect life on Mars is sort of like an electronic sniffer. Is that a fair categorization? I say that because when I was in Iraq, actually, we had recon teams with sniffers to look for biologicals and chemical agents—my understanding of how they worked was that they collect the chemical elements in the air, all the spores and bacteria and viral particles, and then they break them down into their molecular parts and give each molecular building block an electrical charge so that it can be read, and then they compare that signature against the ones stored in the onboard computer. And from reading your paper, it sounded to me like the probe you’re building is something more sophisticated but similar. Is that right?”
She smiled.
“You’re very perceptive,” she said. “My husband told me ten years ago that I should have patented the work I did on that. Yes, the sniffers you used in Iraq were more or less developed from work a number of us started as graduate students, actually. I never expected my work would ever have a defense application…”
“Given that it could save millions of lives some day,” DeLuca said, “I think you should be pleased. But that’s essentially what you’re sending to Mars?”
“Essentially,” she said. “Although after we compare the particles we find to what we already know, we’re going to have to compare them to what we don’t already know, because life there may not fit the definitions we have of life here. The program is going to have to be adaptable.”
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