by Terry James
“Very perceptive, Dr. Lansing,” the man said, leading them through the room, toward its center.
The middle of the gigantic chamber was open floor, completely encircled by the many computer control boards. A carousel-like drop-ceiling housed monitors above them while they stood directly at the center of the room.
“Don’t be alarmed. We will descend now. There will be only a slight bump,” the man said, manipulating a remote device he held in his right hand.
The platform circle on which they stood lurched with a slight jerk, then began a slow descent, just as the agent had promised.
After a light bump at its stopping point below, the man stepped from the circle and said, “This way.”
They negotiated several hallways and smaller control rooms, the black ops man stopping at another large door, inserting a card that caused the door to slide into the wall recess, allowing passage through the opening.
“Please be seated,” he said, gesturing toward large, comfortable-appearing chairs that were two of several such chairs and sofa-type seating that graced the room’s plush décor.
“I’ll leave you for now,” he said. “Someone will be with you in just a minute.”
Mark stood while Lori sat in one of the chairs.
He looked at their surroundings while he spoke. “One thing for sure, this place should be bunker-buster-proof.”
“Just wonder why it’s not military in nature, Mark. The NORAD is supposed to be all defense,” Lori said, sitting forward on the chair, fiddling with a small handbag she brought with her.
“Black ops, anything goes, here, honey. We both know it’s got to be weird, whatever it is. We’ve been there, done that,” he said.
“They’ve got our daughter. That’s all I know,” she said. “Oh, Mark, is it the same thing all over again? They’ve got our girl…”
Mark put his arm around her and knelt on one knee beside her. He kissed her cheek and hugged her. “The Lord is going to protect us and Morgan, Sweetheart…no matter what’s going on here.”
She said nothing, while blowing her nose with a tissue taken from the bag. She spoke after she had gathered her emotions.
“But, she doesn’t know the Lord, Mark. Those things… they…they can do what they want without that protection…”
“Listen, hon. We didn’t have that protection when we went through those things.” He made Lori look into his eyes.
“But, the Lord is full of grace and mercy, remember? Remember?” he repeated, forcing her to acknowledge his words.
Lori said nothing but nodded.
“He will show us what to do. We know Clark is safe. And so will our little girl be… soon.”
The wall in front of them slid apart and Mark stood, as did Lori.
“Please come in,” the pretty, young woman said with a smile. “My name is April Warmath, and I will take you to Mr. Jenkins, director of some of our projects.”
Mental alarms went off upon hearing the name. This was the girl Clark had named as being with him when he blacked out. They glanced at each other, but said nothing, following their escort while she made pleasant chit-chat as they moved down more hallways and through other rooms.
“How’s the weather on the surface? It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get out,” April said.
She wasn’t lying, too much, Lori thought, noting her fair ivory skin. She didn’t look like she had had sunlight for months. Except to take her son to the danger point…
“Okay,” April said, before either of them could answer the question about the weather. She inserted a half-plastic, half-metal key card into a slot against a wall. “Let’s see if it works this time. I’ve been having trouble with this card. Guess it’s time for a new one.”
It opened the sliding door, and they passed through into yet another of the highly advanced control rooms.
“Mr. Jenkins,” she said, looking in the direction of a wall full of monitors, at the center of which sat a high-backed swivel chair. The chair turned to reveal George Jenkins, whose tight-lipped smile greeted them as he stood and offered his right hand to Mark, then to Lori.
“Mr. Lansing, Mrs. Lansing,” he said, the grin showing teeth now. “May I call you Mark and Lori? My name is George Jenkins.”
They said nothing, returning the greeting with solemn expressions. Their daughter had been hidden from them and they were not happy.
Jenkins’ countenance dissolved to a serious expression, recognizing they would not be influenced by his façade of conviviality.
“We’ve come to see our daughter, Mr. Jenkins,” Mark said.
“Yes. May we please talk to her…now?” Lori’s tone was business-like, bordering on stern.
“All in good time. She is well. You will see. Nothing to be alarmed about…”
“Mr. Jenkins. We are her parents. You expect us to not be concerned when our daughter has been …hidden away from us?”
“We’ve not hidden her. She has been helping her country with some…things.
“Yes, Mr. Jenkins. We once did that. And, we know that you know all about our past, the …things… we were asked to do for our country.”
Lori’s voice was, she feared, quivering. But it expressed her anger in a calm tone. “Now, what do you want of us…”
“Yes, Mr. Jenkins. Cut to the chase. We aren’t stupid. We’re familiar with the way you guys operate,” Mark said. “We want our daughter. We know we aren’t here by accident. The thing with the airplane, taking only us, not the others, for interrogation, and now bringing us here. As I said, we aren’t stupid, Mr. Director. What is expected of us to get back our daughter?”
Jenkins said nothing for several seconds, walking from the chair and pacing with his head down in thought, his thumb and fingers kneading his lower lip and chin.
“That’s good, Mark. That’s good. You know that we wouldn’t have asked you here unless it was most important. You are among a very few --outside of those with the proper clearances-- to be allowed this far into the security circle of this operation,” he said, the tight-lipped, pseudo-pleasantness returning when he looked into Mark’s eyes, then into those of Lori.
“We will just cut to the chase, to use the well-worn phrase.”
He looked to April Warmath, who walked back into the room when Jenkins pressed a button on a console.
“Miss Warmath, please prepare our…guests for the lab visit,” he said, then turned and walked through a split that developed in a wall to his right.
The rustic façade of the hotel 200-feet ahead gave the appearance of a Swiss chalet, while Clark walked with Kristi, holding Jeddy’s leash in his right hand. He switched the leash’s leather loop to his left hand and reached to take the girl’s hand with his right.
“Do you mind?” he asked, looking at her.
Kristi glanced at him, and squeezed his hand, then looked again at the rottweiler, who walked at a slower pace in front of them than he preferred. He stopped to sniff one area of turf that was clear, the snow having melted in the increasing warmth of the day.
“Are you really up to going with them?” Her question brought a moment’s reflection about things as they were.
His mother and father were somewhere in the areas that hid secrets some clandestine types would kill to protect. His sister hadn’t been heard from, and they had made no apparent effort to contact her family. He didn’t remember –exactly-- what had happened to him after he drank the hot chocolate with April Warmath. But, Nigel said that something--a Bigfoot?--nearly killed him. The things he, himself, saw while in the complex. The top secret matters of the RAPTURE technologies. They intended him to be found dead on the mountain slope. He almost complied with their wishes.
“I’ve got to. My sister is being held. Mom and Dad--I don’t know their status. And, I want to know more about all these things, about why they left me out there to…die, maybe.”
“Then I’m going, too,” Kristi said, her tone firm, not open to argument.
“Tha
t’s cool.”
She stopped, and looked at him, her eyes wide with amazed delight. “You mean that?!”
“Of course, I do. You’re in great shape--And, I DO mean great shape. And, I don’t want to be without you.” Clark let his last few words drift into soft affirmation that he really meant them.
They didn’t speak for awhile, starting to walk again, slowly following Jeddy, each momentarily lost in the magic that had just happened between them.
Susie Banyon looked down from the third floor of the hotel, a smile crossing her face.
“What are you looking so pleased about?” her husband said, walking to the window.
“Look at those kids. Isn’t that a picture of young love?”
Christopher looked past her to see Clark and Kristi, hand in hand, sauntering behind the rottweiler toward the hotel.
“Well, we are still like that,” Christopher said, taking Susie’s hand, and bending to kiss her cheek.
“I know. But, isn’t that a picture?”
From a half-block away, and in another hotel room window, a big man held powerful binoculars to his eyes, watching Clark and Kristi walk away from him. He pulled the glasses from his face after a few more seconds of watching, then talked into a cell phone.
“It’s him. No doubt about it. What you want us to do?” he said, putting the field glasses to his eyes again, watching the two and the dog walk from his sight and into the hotel.
Lori emerged from the decontamination chamber, walking in a quick stride to her impatient husband. He turned from looking through a wide, rectangular window that gave view of things going on within the laboratory they, apparently, he thought, were about to enter.
He felt relief, seeing Lori. She looked none the worse for wear. He knew she had been through the same procedure they had inflicted on him. If hers was any more stringent than that to which he had just been subjected, it didn’t show on her.
“Well, here I am, Babe. Sorry to subject you to your best girl with absolutely no make-up. But, what you see is what you get.”
She stood in a gleaming white jumpsuit, her hair, still the color of sunlight, with only the slightest hint of gray, he thought, pulled back and banded.
“You are more beautiful, not less,” Mark said, looking into the bright blue eyes her nearly six decades of life had not dimmed.
She joined him in peering into the lab chamber, seeing the many lab-coated scientists going about their business, surgical-type masks covering their noses and mouths.
“What kind of lab is it?”
“Something biological. There’s no doubt in my mind,” she said, seeing in the set-up things that could be in place for only one ultimate purpose. “It’s a gestation lab of some sort. At what level of life, I don’t know. Maybe microbial maybe higher forms, I won’t know until I get a closer look.”
“And, so you shall,” a short, bald man approached them from the decontamination chamber they, themselves, had left not many minutes before.
“I am Hans Sheivold,” the man in the lab coat said in an accent neither Mark nor Lori could make out.
“You will please pardon my not shaking hands,” he said. “That would defeat our purpose with the decontamination unit,” he said, gesturing with an open-palmed wave toward the decontamination chamber.
“Of course,” Lori said with a nod. She understood the protocols of trying to maintain as pristine a lab as possible –especially where attempts of such things as fertilization and gestation projects were concerned. Such had been the primary nature of the Taos complex and of several other lab situations in which she had been involved during the following years.
The special knowledge she held only heightened her anxiety. What were they doing to Morgan? What did all of this have to do with those things in 1967? About those things going even back farther in time to Mark’s father’s disappearance from the Cessna, her own father’s being forced into clandestine activities, after he reported the disappearance? And, what did this have to do with her and Mark’s own involvement with the same other-worldly inhabitors of the bowels of the Taos facility?
Although she asked none of the questions aloud, the scientist knew she had them. “You will know what is necessary for you to know in a very short time, Dr. Lansing,” Sheivold said. “Your procedural attire is right here, in these sealed lockers.”
He walked to one wall and pressed a button, causing the wall to split apart, and a row of stainless steel-looking lockers to emerge and protrude into the room.
“I’m sure things have not changed that much, Dr. Lansing. We still suit up two legs at a time.” The scientist laughed heartily at his own attempt at the joke while opening the lockers with a flick of a button at the side of one of the locker’s handles.
“Voila!” Sheivold exclaimed when the door whirred open. “And, yours reacts the same, Mr. Lansing,” he said, urging Mark toward his locker with an open hand gesture.
The back wall of the walk-in lockers of chrome-like metal had armholes. Lori knew the routine. Mark watched.
“This is how it’s done, Mark,” Lori said. “I’ll help you when I’m finished.”
The scientist looked into the lab through the window, then at an electronic clipboard, whose number pad he manipulated between glances at the activity in the chamber beyond the glass.
Lori slowly thrust her arms deeply into the holes while standing upon the foot pads that constituted the centermost part of the locker’s floor. White material appeared to surround, then wrap itself around Lori, who remained calm until the procedure was completed. She stepped backwards from inside the locker and reached with her gauze-like gloves that surrounded her hands. She snapped a white plastic fastener at her right side, then at her left, and the white, germ-free suit was complete in its fit to her body.
Less than 10 minutes later, Mark and Lori walked through an elevator-like door that hissed and popped when it opened and closed, breaking, then reinflating its vacuum seal.
They both wore, like all others in the lab, white surgical masks. Lori knew the masks were much more than ordinary such contrivances. “These masks are the latest, Dr. Lansing–or do you prefer your degreed name of Morgan?”
“Lansing,” Lori said, surprised that the man had delved to that extent into her background. She stepped ahead of Mark, but behind the stocky Sheivold while he led them further into the room. The others seemed oblivious to the three, going about their duties of monitoring various computer-generated numbers.
Sheivold spoke as they moved deeper into the vast chamber. “The mask actually tracks down and destroys each bacterial microbe that we might be harboring, then it filters the air and returns the cleansed air to our respiratory systems. This level of purity has never been attained before; thus, the reason why we don’t have to have the old head-and-body coverings –with self-contained life support mechanisms-- that made us look like men on the moon, deep sea divers, or something.”
The scientist slid the card-key into a slot when they reached an elevator. They descended for 10 seconds, and exited into a scantily lit area, which, when Mark’s and Lori’s eyes adjusted appeared to be an unfinished cave-chamber, the walls looking to be of mountain stone.
Hans Sheivold walked to the rock-face wall 15-feet from the elevator door. Mark and Lori stood amazed when the man stuck the card into a slot they hadn’t seen in the surface and the massive rock split. They followed him through the schism, the rift closing once they entered an area that presented an even more astonishing sight. They stood looking down a gun barrel-like tunnel, whose rounded surface had a continuous panel of lights at its topmost section. The amber-hued light appeared to be a laser stream that narrowed until it vanished in perspective.
“Dr. Lansing, Mr. Lansing,” this is our transport to the truly wonderful marvels of the complex,” Sheivold said, leading them up three steps onto the platform to a gleaming metallic vehicle with plush seats. The vehicle, sitting atop a monorail that ran the length of the tunnel as far as the eye could see,
was encased by rounded, transparent, glass-like material that fit the tunnel’s contour.
“Fasten your belts, please,” the scientist said, doing so to his own seat harness, where he sat. “It’s about a 20-minute ride.”
Chapter 19
Jeddy strained on the leash while Clark fought to hold him back. The canine was in a hurry to get to the patch of vegetation just behind the hotel.
“Guess he’s held it about as long as he can,” Clark said, laughing, then breaking into a faster walk to let the dog get to where he wanted to go.
“Yeah. I’ve felt like that before,” Kristi laughed, her long legs, accustomed to carrying her through her afternoon runs, easily achieving the increased pace.
Jeddy marked first one tree trunk, then another, before settling into sniffing out the area and enjoying the grass, now dead due to the onset of winter.
The shadows of the late afternoon covered the wooded area. Above the tree line of mostly conifers, the high mountain spires glistened magnificently in the late afternoon sky. The deep blues and purples, mingled with the whites, grays and glinting reds and oranges, while the sun rays swiftly passed the Rocky Mountain peaks.
Kristi took it all in. She had seen nothing like it in her 26 years, and she breathed in the Colorado essence, sensing it for all it was worth. She loved Manhattan and its mountainous skyscrapers, but she never wanted to leave this beautiful place, she considered, glancing over and slightly upward at Clark. She didn’t want to ever leave his side, either, she thought while they followed Jeddy, who, himself, seemed to drink in as much of the ambience as was possible.
“I thought Cassie and David were going to join us,” Clark said, giving the rottweiler his head while he poked his black and brown muzzle beneath an evergreen bush. The dog jerked his head out, shook it, and sneezed before moving farther along.
“Bless you!” Kristi said with a laugh.