Burgess nodded, asking, “How are you going to get through?”
“That’s a very good question. All we can do is try, right? Hey, cave robber,” Truitt said to Marvin Yutahay. “Mind if I borrow your snorkel?”
“Not a problem,” Marvin said, handing it to him. “Just don’t get your germs on it.”
It took Truitt half an hour to rig a line of bolts on the far wall, tying a rope taut between them for the others to walk on, looping the rope back around parallel, six feet higher, to serve as a hand line, both leading to the edge of the waterfall. Standing on the base rope, he reached his arms into the flow in an attempt to hammer in a piton to hold on to. His first three attempts failed. Finally he managed to set the first bolt, the water pounding against his chest and face as he worked. He emerged from the stream to catch his breath, exhausted from the effort. When he regained his strength, he began tying knots in the anchor rope.
“Once I’m through,” he shouted above the roar, “I’ll lower the snorkel to the next person. Leave your packs and the last person can tie them on. Watch out for the roof because that’s where you could get snagged, and getting snagged is going to be fatal. Pull yourself hand over hand on the knotted rope and tie off with this one and I’ll pull you up from above. There’s a good foothold here,” he said, reaching into the stream with his hand. “The second person is going to be the hardest—after that we’ll have two people pulling. It should be someone small.”
“I’ll go second,” MacKenzie said. “I hate waiting for men to finish in the shower.”
DeLuca took Truitt aside for a moment.
“Needless to say,” DeLuca said, keeping his voice down, “the Army appreciates what you’ve done. Am I to understand that on the other side of this is the passage that leads to Sinkhole?”
Truitt nodded.
“Then you might want to bear in mind,” DeLuca said, “the possibility exists that someone armed may be waiting for you on the other side.”
Truitt stared at him.
“I just thought you should know.” DeLuca said.
Truitt readied himself, spending a few minutes taking deep breaths to charge his lungs with oxygen. He gave the others two thumbs up, checked his gear one last time, took a final deep breath through the snorkel, and dived headfirst into the stream, disappearing from the waist up. They watched his legs as he dug for the foothold, and then he found it, and then he was gone.
DeLuca stared at the water as it poured from the rock, glancing occasionally at his watch. Truitt had said he could hold his breath for five minutes. DeLuca imagined that was probably sitting still in a chair, not fighting vigorously to make his way upstream like some sort of subterranean salmon. The snorkel gave him a few extra minutes at best.
They watched, waiting.
Suddenly, they saw him again as the stream ejected him into the void.
Burgess screamed as Truitt fell, tumbling head over heels in the tumbling water.
Then the rope Truitt was fastened to drew taut and stopped his fall. He bounced once, until the water falling on him beat him back, pounding him against the rock face parallel to his drop line. Quickly, Sykes and Vasquez moved to grab the rope and pull Truitt up. A minute later, the caver was lying on the ledge next to the others. It took some time before he could speak.
“I’m aborting,” DeLuca said. “We can’t do it. It’s all right. As soon as you’re good, we’ll head back.”
Truitt shook his head.
“That was just to set the second bolt,” he said, struggling to sit up, propping himself with one arm. “Now we’re good. Whoever’s next, give me three tugs to tell me you’re coming and I’ll start to pull. I’m going to pull as hard and as fast as I can because there’s no turning back once you commit. I’ll give you three tugs first to tell you I’m ready.”
He prepared himself with deep breathing, then disappeared back into the flow. A minute later, the knotted rope came back, followed by the towrope with the snorkel attached to it. MacKenzie traversed the pit and readied herself, tying onto the towrope and grabbing the knotted rope with both hands. DeLuca gave her two thumbs up. She felt three tugs on the towrope. Then she gave three tugs and dived into the stream. DeLuca watched as her head and shoulders disappeared, then her torso, then her legs. A few minutes later, the towrope returned with the snorkel attached. Sykes went next, followed by Yutahay, then Vasquez. It got easier and easier with more people pulling on the other end. DeLuca told Burgess he believed in ladies first. When she was gone, he had a fleeting thought—what if, for some reason, the rope didn’t reappear? What if they left him there? A stupid but human thought. There was no reason to think they would. Horses didn’t like being alone. Deep down, humans didn’t either.
Then the rope appeared. He tied on and went through.
They followed the stream above for a quarter mile, climbing a series of waterfalls, until they branched off to the right. They chimneyed up a fissure and emerged only to squeeze through the narrowest constriction so far, but by now, DeLuca felt like an old pro. They came to a grotto on the far side where, at the top opposite, DeLuca saw a faint light shining through a slit in the rock. When he climbed up and stuck his head through the slit, Truitt next to him, he saw that they’d reached the elevator shaft, the rungs of a service ladder fixed to the rails opposite and eight heavy steel cables running down into a darkness lit every fifty feet by yellow light bulbs in wire cages for as far as the eye could see. Seeing something man-made seemed strange, but also strangely comforting.
Truitt was looking at his watch.
“Forty-two hours and twenty minutes,” he said. “I thought we were making good time.”
“We’ll pay you for the full forty-eight,” DeLuca said.
“I’ll jump across and tie a line,” Truitt said. “You tell the others.”
They climbed down the service ladder in single file, with DeLuca leading the way and the civilians bringing up the rear, descending an endless series of rungs until they saw a square of light at the bottom. A hundred feet up, DeLuca stopped to take an M-12 machine pistol equipped with a silencer from his pack, as much firepower as he could pack in the smallest amount of space. The others broke out their weapons as well. He stepped softly onto the roof of the elevator and listened.
He heard nothing.
He pried the trapdoor in the elevator ceiling open slowly without making a sound.
The elevator was empty.
He dropped in, then gestured for Sykes, MacKenzie, and Vasquez to follow. When Sykes took a charge of C4 explosives from his pack to blow the door, DeLuca shook his head and pointed to the “Open Doors” button.
He gestured to Truitt, Yutahay, and Burgess to wait in the elevator, then pressed the button.
The doors opened onto a long empty corridor. The team fanned out, guns ready, carefully searching the rooms that lined the corridor, four on the right side and three on the left, but they found only empty offices and empty desks.
The doors at the end of the corridor led to a second set of doors, marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” On DeLuca’s signal, they kicked their way in, Sykes and Vasquez crisscrossing low while DeLuca aimed high.
The control room was empty.
For a moment, DeLuca saw a large screen showing a map of the globe with satellite orbits represented by green lines, but when an intruder alert sounded, the screen automatically went dark.
They searched the entire compound, but it was empty. Whoever was using the computers in the complex had been doing so from a remote location. When they searched the hard drives of the mainframe, they were, to no one’s surprise, blank.
“Fool me twice,” Vasquez finally said.
“Where is everybody?” Yutahay asked.
“We don’t know,” DeLuca said. “They were supposed to be here.”
They took the elevator to the top. When the door opened, they pushed through a second door at the end of the hall and found themselves in the Carlsbad Caverns underground cafeteria, staring
at a rack of Coke and candy machines. DeLuca squinted at the bright fluorescent lights. They took a second elevator to the surface. The sun was just rising in the east. He was glad to see it. A nondescript van full of soldiers waited by the entrance to the gift shop. The leader introduced himself as Captain Jones, adding that General LeDoux had sent him to assist. DeLuca told him his team could head on down, but that they weren’t going to find anything.
“Where to now?” Sykes asked DeLuca as a dozen soldiers scrambled from the van.
“Back to square one, I guess,” he said. “Personally, I intend to see a woman about some oxygen bottles.”
But when they got back to Albuquerque, the Ms. Kitty was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
SAMI HAD PUT RAINBOW AND RUBY IN A CAB and paid the driver for the round-trip fare to Seattle, where Rainbow still owned a home, even though she’d planned to sell it and give the proceeds to Brother Antonionus. She’d decided to go home after Sami played her a tape he’d made surreptitiously, interviewing Brother Antonionus. Sami had informed him he was going to have to arrest him, unless Antonionus was willing to make a deal. He played the recording for DeLuca when he got back, using the speakers on his laptop, which he set up on the bed in his motel room.
“Why should I make a deal with you?” Antonionus said. “I should have you arrested for lying to us about who you were.”
“Undercover officers do that all the time,” Sami had explained. “You can’t have me arrested.”
“And just what is it I’ve done?” Antonionus asked. “Is it legal now for the government to persecute its citizens for their beliefs?”
“We’re not arresting you for your beliefs,” Sami said. “We’re not even arresting you for scamming people out of their belongings, though I’m not sure how legal that is. We’re arresting you for aiding and abetting the act of treason. That’s a pretty serious offense, Malcolm.”
There was a long silence on the tape.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, sounding scared. “I’m not aiding or abetting anyone.”
“You’re aiding and abetting your old friend Tom Koenig,” Sami said. “Your old prep school chum.”
There was an even longer pause.
“And just how do you think I’ve been aiding and abetting?” Antonionus said. “Just what is it I’ve been doing that’s so illegal?”
“Disinformation,” Sami said. “There’s nothing new about disinformation, Malcolm. Hitler was great at it. You want to run a program putting radios in people’s teeth, the best way to hide it might be to have some well-known wacko who no one believes go on television and say, ‘The government is putting radios in people’s teeth.’ You wanna test-fly Stealth bombers in secret, you have some discredited wacko saying, ‘The Air Force is flying invisible airplanes…’ See what I’m saying?”
“That’s crazy.”
“That may be, but you’re not. You’ve known what you’ve been doing all along. And if, in the meantime, you can get people to give you all their money and mow your lawn for you, all the better.”
“There’s nothing illegal about asking people to give you their money,” Antonionus said. “If they’re stupid enough to say yes, that’s their problem.”
“Or asking them to believe in UFOs?”
“I’ve never asked anybody to believe in UFOs,” Antonionus said. “Every single moron who comes here is a believer before they ever see me. I just channel their beliefs into more creative venues.”
“And more lucrative for you?”
“As I said, it’s not illegal,” Antonionus said. “Some people give a tenth of everything they make to the Church because they think it will get them into heaven. Can you prove that any of them are in heaven? Can you prove they’re not? If it’s not wrong to take a tenth, why would it be wrong to take it all? I’m the beneficiary of some very generous friends.”
“Generous or gullible?”
“Why can’t you be both?” he asked.
“If we checked your phone records, would we find any telephone calls between you and Tom Koenig? Because we can pull your call logs. There’s no problem there.”
“You couldn’t carry Tom Koenig’s jock strap,” Antonionus said.
“Wouldn’t care to try,” Sami said. “You know he’s going to be arrested for the murder of Cheryl Escavedo, don’t you? The fact that you were on the scene to tell everybody it was a UFO makes you an accomplice to murder. It does bother me that you let a little girl watch it. That doesn’t bother you?”
“She’ll get over it,” Antonionus said. “She’s just a kid. You can’t prove a thing.”
“I don’t have to prove anything to arrest you,” Sami said. “We don’t even have to bring you to trial if we don’t want to. Maybe you’d like to see Cuba? Of course, so would the prisoners at Guantanamo—they’ve been sitting in the sun with bags over their heads for three years. Does that appeal to you, Malcolm?”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can if you don’t help me.”
Silence.
“What is it you want me to do?”
“I want you to tell me about Tom Koenig. I want you to go public about working for the government to mask their satellite programs all these years. If you’re lucky, you can get a book deal and be on Oprah. I want you to help us get Koenig.”
“I’m hardly part of his inner circle,” Antonionus said, sounding hurt. “He’s never so much as asked me over to his house. I think he’s ashamed to admit he knows me. That’s not right, is it?”
“That’s not right at all. Why did Cheryl Escavedo contact you?”
“Cheryl Escavedo never contacted me,” Antonionus said. “I left a message saying I was returning her call, but she never called. That was planted for you to find.”
“Can you talk about the Key Club?”
“What’s a Key Club?”
“At Decatur Academy. You and Koenig and Hilton Jaynes and Daniel Berman. And others, I assume. You’ve forgotten?”
Silence.
“You can’t talk about that?”
Silence.
“Who are you afraid of? Koenig? Carter Bowen?”
“I’ll talk to you,” Antonionus said in a hushed tone. “Not here. You have to give me time. I’ll have to get my things in order. I have a chain of businesses I have to protect. I want it on the record that I came in voluntarily. Afterward you’ll have to take care of me. I’m not even sure the witness protection program is safe enough.”
“We can do that,” Sami told him.
Sami shut the recording off.
“I told him he could come in on his own. I don’t make him as a flight risk—he needs us too much to take off.”
“You played this for Rainbow?”
“Uh huh,” Sami said. “I had to. I couldn’t keep it from her. There’s nothing on it that’s classified. Is there? Should I not have done that?”
“No, no, that’s okay,” DeLuca said. “How’d she take it?”
“She took it hard,” Sami said.
“She blame you?”
“I guess so,” Sami said. “I’m not sure we were meant for each other anyway. I’m a crusty old bastard from Boston. She could do better. You know what they say—if you love something, let it go, and if it comes back to you… cuff it.”
“You okay?”
“I’m all right,” Sami said. “I’m good. I’ll get over it.”
DeLuca stared at the laptop.
“How did you tape the conversation?”
“I had my cell phone on in my shirt pocket,” Sami said. “I dialed in to Peg Romano and she recorded it from the RV.”
“Was that your idea or hers?”
“Hers,” Sami said. “Why? Is that a problem?”
“It is for Malcolm Percy,” DeLuca said. “Romano was playing for the other side. When did she take off?”
“She said she needed to have the transmission serviced,” Sami said. “She left this morning.”
DeLuca c
alled his friend Mike O’Leary at the FBI and put out an APB on the motor home and did the same on the military side through Captain Martin in LeDoux’s office, but he held out little hope. As difficult as it might be to hide a forty-foot silver motor home, he knew Peggy Romano would have prepared a way to cover her escape well in advance. He suspected the RV was either inside a semi-tractor trailer on a highway somewhere or in the belly of a C-130 under a false bill of lading.
When he called the Brethren of the Light, he was told that Brother Antonionus was unavailable. When he stopped by the Albuquerque police department, he learned that Malcolm Percy’s car had been in a car accident, killing the driver and sole occupant of the car. When DeLuca pressed for details, flashing his B’s and C’s and identifying himself as a member of Army counterintelligence, he was told that the body had been burned beyond recognition, the white Rolls-Royce he was driving in having crashed into a bridge abutment on Interstate 25, but the odd thing was that although the car was demolished, the gas tank was intact—the fire had started in the driver’s compartment before the collision itself. Forensics was testing for accelerants inside the vehicle.
“It’s like the guy spontaneously combusted,” the sergeant said. “Like you read about in those magazines.”
“Yeah,” DeLuca said, “but you can’t believe everything you read in magazines.”
Before returning to the motel, he stopped by the Japanese tea garden at the park by the river, pausing first at a mall to make some purchases at a cell phone store. Using a new phone, the account opened under a false name, he called his son, Scott, in Kirkuk and asked Scottie to lock on to his GPS signal and tell him, again, how far it was to the point on the river. It took his son a minute. Again, Scott told him it was fourteen hundred feet, off by exactly one hundred yards.
“The mobile ops center we’ve been using…”
“The Ms. Kitty?” Scott asked.
“Yeah,” DeLuca said. “Do you still have the access numbers we used the first time we linked with you?”
“I think so,” Scott said.
“Do you think you could shut it down?”
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