The Sacrifice Area

by Peter Idone

  Logan knew the next part of the story Ziegler shared, about Glass not taking to the father’s strategic-metals business and sharing the spoils after he died. What Logan didn’t know, and what Natalie failed to mention specifically, was how much he walked away with: forty-five million dollars was his cut after the sale. Despite the money, Glass was somewhat listless and bored. Before his father’s death and the money, Glass had managed to secure a position with a private intelligence and security firm, Vine Incorporated. Vine was eventually bought by Del-Con Technologies and subsequently morphed and expanded into RTMC. Glass hadn’t remained long with the outfit after the sale, but he did garner some relationships in the field—all those former military and government intelligence people working in the private sector. He was always fascinated by UFOs and was always attempting to steer the department he worked in at Vine toward operations in this direction, should something of interest come along. Glass wanted to create either a whole department or eventually his own private UFO intelligence-gathering apparatus that would incorporate every aspect of the field. Vine wasn’t interested, which made it easy to let go of Glass for financial reasons after the sale. He was laid off with a number of other employees, so it didn’t appear too obvious that Del-Con had rid itself of a nut.

  The ironic thing was that Turner and the Tacticals had been plagued by issues of a paranormal nature over at Pine Haven. It couldn’t be proved, but there was a strong assumption that Glass was on the Response Team payroll as a consultant when he arrived in Essex or soon after. Glass did come to Essex with the desire to research the Pine Haven Project and the accident; it was soon before the transition from Air Force security to Tactical Response Team. Either way, Glass could have been hired to get a fix on the lay of the land before word got out that the estate acreage was destined for temporary burial of low-level radioactive waste. Ziegler was inclined to believe that Glass was instrumental in co-opting the local antinuclear storage group before it effectively got off the ground.

  “What I’ve been told was that Glass arrived well before the Response Team takeover at Pine Haven, with the sole purpose of doing an investigation and writing a book,” Logan reminded Ziegler. “He’s been living here for over a year. What about Natalie Schneider, his research assistant? What part did she play in all this? I couldn’t convince her that Glass had cooked up the idea of penetrating the exclusion zone as an exercise to test Pine Haven security. That he presented the idea to Turner.”

  “You will have to explain more on that detail, Mr. Logan. As for the woman, either she was a dupe, or her interests and concerns were very selective as regards to her employer. She may have deceived herself on purpose and turned a blind eye.”

  “And Glass’s seclusion and paranoia? He refused to leave the house for weeks on end. Where did all that come from?”

  Ziegler hadn’t a ready answer, other than to refer back to Glass’s mental health problems. Firstly, there was Glass who dabbled in UFO and paranormal subjects and tried to invent himself as an investigator, a Web-based journalist with connections deep within the intelligence community and government circles. Yes, he did run a website for a short time that could be described as amateurish at best. There was the Army intelligence analyst who never rose above the rank of second lieutenant—not quite the intel officer and psyops specialist he liked to palm himself off as. And there was the same Chris Glass who—at least a certain portion of his psyche—really wanted to get to the bottom of the Pine Haven mystery, despite some of the disinformation stories he helped to concoct and spread under a pseudonym on the Internet. Glass had been running a multifold narrative, and it had finally caught up with him. He didn’t know which true self to believe in, so decided it would be better to remain at home, hunkered down, so that enemies, real or imagined, could not harm him.

  Logan gave a synopsis of the Pine Haven file that ended up on the darknet and how Glass was interrogated by Air Force OSI, was forced to shut down his website, and was suspected of participating in the creation of the file.

  Ziegler wasn’t impressed. “The DoD, NSA, and the Air Force were extremely motivated in shutting down that particular darknet community. Too much sensitive information was passed around, and UFO conspiracies were the very least of their concerns. The latest generation of stealth technology, directed energy weapons, and stories about the ‘Vampire Ship,’ which I think is fictional, were the primary targets of their investigation. As for Glass, he could have been a dupe or a willing participant in the OSI operation. The authorities had successfully truncated that community and identified many of the participants, some of whom belonged to the scientific community and had direct links with a number of projects. Anything found on the Net concerning Pine Haven is folklore. That’s my take on it. Utilizing remote viewers to spy on aliens, abductees as baited hooks, interdimensional portals created through technology and magic…I mean, come on really. It’s all diversionary. Launch the curious, the easily manipulated, and the mentally unbalanced into the wrong orbit. Anything to keep them far away from the truth. Personally, I think whatever the Air Force was working on was probably hideous in nature. I think it was a very unique form of weapons research employing augmented powers of the human mind to arm and deploy psychic killers. But I have no actual proof of this. I can only extrapolate from what I have read and discussions with colleagues in the field of journalism that cover military and scientific matters. But by the same token, I am not about to jump into the mix and make wild claims in a public forum. There are no concrete facts. There was some veracity to the Pine Haven file. The names of Havermeyer and Plante, their backgrounds, could be sourced, but the majority of it was invention. The file was a piece of bait to round up contributors and uncover sources. Its true authors are anyone’s guess. Maybe Glass himself.”

  Finally the conversation got around to Logan’s infiltration of the exclusion zone. Before he said another word, he exacted an oath from Ziegler that anything he heard would not wind up in print or on the Net. “This is all off the record. My business with the Response Team isn’t over yet. In fact, it has yet to begin.”

  Ziegler nodded his assurance. Logan gave a scaled-down version of the events, leaving out Creech’s involvement; he referred only to an employee on-site who was helping Natalie with her research and the layout of the exclusion zone. Logan also left out Frenchy Durant’s involvement. Regarding those two individuals, Logan remained vague, and no amount of prodding by Ziegler would get him to yield their names. Mostly the incursion onto Pine Haven property was a lot of traipsing around the woods in the dark and the rain; he described seeing an Ouroboros and the strange noises and green lights that caused them so much fear. He described the video monitor transmission in the pump house basement and that Natalie presumed the figure onscreen was the physicist Siebert. To hear Ziegler tell it, that wasn’t his real name, but it was the only name Natalie had.

  Neither Henry nor the Essex Reporter publisher knew what to make of any of it. Although sounding farfetched, Logan could only relate what he had actually seen, not make any judgment about its significance or who was behind it. He then gave a rundown of events leading up to the killing of the K-9 security dog, but was stopped from relating his experience with the chimera that had brought him to that point.

  “That’s quite all right,” Ziegler said. “Henry explained the unfortunate events about your pet.” Ziegler looked and sounded unconvinced.

  Finally, Logan revealed the time he spent with Colonel Turner. Something told Logan not to bring up the truth therapy and that it had been used on him. That was the kind of topic, Logan was sure, Ziegler would break his promise to reveal. All he said was that Turner effectively got the truth out of him and that drugs were probably involved. After that, Turner said he knew about Natalie and Glass and how their incursion was all an exercise to test the security glitches on the old estate grounds.

  Henry asked for more specific details about the ongoing burial site, but Logan could only describe the little he saw during th
e last couple of minutes before his capture. Logan admitted that the radioactive waste was not on their agenda, at least not paramount. Natalie had taken several photos, but they hadn’t gone equipped with Geiger counters or dosimeters. The risks they took would have yielded far more useful results if they had. Primarily, their little expedition focused on possible paranormal activity and recovering the Iron Mountain laptop if it was still at the pump house.

  At the end of Logan’s spiel, Ziegler scoffed at what he had just heard. “A fool’s errand. There you were, two young people embarking on a treacherous pursuit of a fabrication manufactured in the paranoid mind of a pathological liar in search of the truth. Glass has absolutely no credentials to recommend him.”

  The remark irritated Logan, but he said nothing. He didn’t consider himself a fool, and if Ziegler had seen the chimera, the dog-man, and had his dog brutally killed and its remains stolen in the middle of the night, then he would think very differently. If the publisher of the Essex Reporter had seen the things he had, Logan thought, if he lived in the Station and had the full weight of financial uncertainty, crisis, hanging over his head like a broadsword, then maybe he would have embarked on a similar “fool’s errand.” But he kept silent about the old man’s disdainful comment. It didn’t matter.

  One thoughtful thing Ziegler did was give Logan the name and phone number of a lawyer. “He’s a local fellow, concerned about what has been occurring here in Essex of late. Be candid. Don’t hold anything back, as I believe you have done with us. You will want to get yourself out way ahead of this situation, of both Glass and Turner, and this fellow will help you do just that.” Logan took the scrap of paper Ziegler had written on, the lawyer’s name and phone number. “Glass never broke into Pine Haven. He could fabricate a story and lay blame solely on you and Ms. Schneider. Essentially, Glass has done nothing.” It was a thought that had crossed Logan’s mind.

  Henry Bock wondered aloud what would eventually occur in Essex; the security and surveillance apparatus already in place would only grow exponentially over time. CCTV monitors had begun to sprout up along the roads surrounding the exclusion zone and beyond, expanding the perimeter, and even within parts of the state forest that hadn’t been put under a closure order. The tentacles of Response Team Management and Control were spreading at an alarming rate. All the images would be fed into a central terminal at company headquarters, the tower on-site, and a quick response squad of Tacticals could be deployed to any situation that appeared even remotely suspicious. The radiation levels buried on the estate property would never be released or allowed to be independently verified outside of a government bureaucracy. Radiation levels would be what the NRC or the Department of Energy said they were. It seemed to him, Henry said, that the acceptable limits of radiation exposure sanctified by the government expanded, heightened—in levels of REMs, grays, or sieverts—after every major nuclear event. Depending on the size of the latest release, the index for human safety increased over the previous one. If worse came to worst, there were always bone-marrow transplants or the genetically engineered equivalent. “Not to worry,” Henry said sarcastically.

  “You wonder what will become of Essex,” Ziegler said in an almost pontificating tone. “It has gone the way of the rest of the world, referred to now, popularly, as the Dislocation. We are no longer the same government— or human being, for that matter—that left the last century and entered the twenty-first. My God, almost two decades, and what a terrible footing this new century has got itself on. Two thousand and one became the dividing line, a demarcation point when everything changed…changed utterly…to paraphrase Yeats. I have often thought over the years what place has an almost-quaint eighteenth-century political philosophy, no matter how revolutionary intellectually and socially, what place does it hold for this brave new era we find ourselves in? As a country, a people, we are regarded as an enormous herd that needs to be corralled. If there is anything that comprises a middle class, it is solely represented by the police/military/intelligence complex. I should probably list government employees as well, but exclude the politicians. They are too wealthy an entity. Rule by the rich for the rich. Plutocracy. As for the rest of us, we can’t look toward protection by these entities, but only control. Protection is reserved for the corporate and government elites. We citizens have to make do by our own devices as best we can. Most unfortunate of all, I have come to realize, is that the majority of us are fine with it. We are so financially strapped, so cowed by uncertainty and intellectual impoverishment, that we have grown accustomed to the intrinsically hostile nature of our surroundings. A force field of inertia has been cleverly put in place that saps our will, our discretion, any attempt to change our predicament. There are some who try but are co-opted or made into criminals by cleverly controlling media conglomerates. My last and greatest hope for a changed world, an open, democratic, planetary civilization, where the rights of humans and all living things inhabiting the biosphere would be honored, was back in nineteen eighty-nine when the Berlin Wall fell. One of the great watersheds of history. The dissolution of the Cold War. But as usual, our government played games. We were on top of the pile for a short time, and then by Nine-Eleven, a thoroughly different paradigm was in store for us and the world. On a lot of different levels. Nations have devolved into the likes of corrupt medieval principalities. The rule of law is decided by the most powerful. Sadly, the reigning political and economic philosophies have been influenced for far too many decades by Leo Strauss and that fascist harpy Ayn Rand. Some places, towns and cities may thrive, at least temporarily, but not Essex. A different kind of wall has been erected here. Some places will eventually wither and die, and I’m afraid Essex will be one.”

  25

  Midafternoon on the Saturday before New Year’s Eve, Logan received a surprise visitor. Turner showed up at the front door. “I was in the neighborhood and wondered how you were getting along.”

  What surprised Logan most was the amount of time it had taken the “colonel” to make an appearance in his life. “Something tells me you haven’t come to spread holiday cheer.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I am for some.”

  “Have you come to arrest me? Over these past couple of weeks, I almost forgot about you guys.”

  “What a shame. We haven’t forgotten you. Actually, I haven’t come to place you under arrest. My jurisdiction doesn’t extend that far. Federal agents or the local police would have to do that, and as you can see, I’ve come alone. Can we not stand here on your front stoop? It’s terribly cold.”

  The sun was shining, but the temperature hovered at fifteen degrees. Logan ushered the security chief into the den where, appearing quite at home, he took a seat on the sofa. He removed a balled handkerchief from his overcoat pocket and wiped his runny nose. “There are a few loose ends I want to clear up. Establish a timeline. Haven’t spoken to Glass or Ms. Schneider recently, have you?” He returned the hanky to his pocket.

  Logan wasn’t about to be cordial and offer the man anything, tea or coffee. He sat down on the Barca-lounger across from him. “No, I haven’t, but you would know if I had. I haven’t had any contact with them. I’ve been keeping strictly to myself.”

  “Have you now? That’s wise. So then you haven’t heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “Glass has been shot. He and Ms. Schneider had a disagreement. Some kind of domestic dispute, I assume, and she shot him.”

  Logan didn’t know if he exhibited any outward sign of anxiousness, but the news rattled him. “Is he dead?” Natalie had said she wanted to be rid of Glass eventually. He thought she meant a breakup of sorts, a going-theirseparate-ways sort of thing. He never would have thought she would choose such an extreme method.

  “Fortunately for Glass, no. She shot him with his own weapon. He was winged but has managed to survive. Apparently she made an appearance at the house they were renting shortly after your Pine Haven excursion. I don’t know what they were arguing about.”


  “When did all this happen?”

  Turner smiled. “December first, I think. Sometime that weekend at the beginning of the month. She was hiding out there, in her own house, with Glass, squirming, waiting for the hammer to fall, for my people to show up. They never did, but the strain, I think, sent her over the edge. I don’t think the girl really knew or understood the man she was living with over these past number of years. She’s very young and unstable, I think. But a lot of young people these days are.”

  “Have you spoken to Glass since?”

  “When he was in hospital, but only for a short time. He has very good legal talent. He’s not pressing charges against Ms. Schneider, although the local authorities have their own notions of attempted murder. I haven’t been able to see the girl, either. She’s at county lockup. Solitary. Suicide watch. Very distraught. I have a feeling I might never get an opportunity to debrief her. If she pleads out, she could do no more than two years, no matter how Glass feels about it. I don’t know if she will be worth talking to after a couple of years in a detention camp. In the greater scheme of things, the affair may not hold any interest by then.”

  “Well, I can’t help you. Like I said, I haven’t seen her or Glass. You said something about a timeline?”

  “I was getting to that, yes. We are trying to establish your whereabouts on the night of November twenty-eighth. The evening of the big snowstorm. Can you tell me what you were doing then? Where you were?”

  “Plowing snow most likely. It’s all I’ve been doing to make some money. If this weather keeps up, I just might make it through the winter, financially. That’s of course if I’m not formally charged and fined.”

  “There is always that possibility. At the very least, the charges for trespassing and property destruction.”