The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

  “New Jersey.”

  Rick remembered his obit saying he died in Toms River.

  “Right. Here’s where it gets really interesting.” Rick could see Pickens warming to his tale now. “All the rocketeers were shipped out to Fort Bliss in Texas, the White Sands proving grounds, those sorts of places. But not Osterhagen. The army kept him here in the East, right on the edge of the Jersey Pine Barrens. Dug him a huge lab-slash-bunker fifty feet under Lakehurst Naval Air Station.”

  6

  QUEENS

  “Don’t care what you say,” Ruthie said, “you got the best power. Girl, I can’t tell you how many times I just want to disappear.”

  Shadows were lengthening as she walked along with the new girl who could turn invisible. Her name was Anulka but she told Ruth to call her Annie. Ellis—the white pool-ball guy nobody liked—was walking about twenty feet ahead with Iggy. The four of them had gone over to Van Dam to this food cart with the most dee-damn-licious gyros on this Earth. Ruth made the trip whenever she could. Didn’t know for sure what was in them, but as usual she was retasting that cucumber yogurt sauce again and again as they were walking back. Which wasn’t a bad thing, since she liked the flavor.

  “Hey, you know you got your own way to disappear,” Annie said. “Any time you want.”

  “Yeah. And wind up somewheres else totally naked.”

  “Yeah, well, I can see how that’s a problem. How far can you go?”

  “Don’t know. Don’t do it much because of the naked thing.”

  “Well, you could flash to the middle of a desert. No one there to see you. Then you could jump right back. Man, I’d love to be able to do that.”

  “The naked part don’t bother you?”

  Annie shrugged. “A little maybe.”

  That’s ’cause she got a nice bod, Ruth thought. Who knows? Maybe she liked to show it off. I’m two of her and built like a Gummi Bear.

  “Well, I ain’t never been to a desert. And I can only jump someplace I already been, someplace I can picture in my head before I jump. No, girl, I much rather be invisible and sit in a room and listen to what people say about me.”

  Annie laughed. “What if they ain’t talking about you at all?”

  “Well, they’ll be talking about somebody. Everybody always talking about somebody.”

  “How long you been with these people?” Annie said.

  “’Bout six weeks.”

  “And they’re straight? I mean, I been here one night and it seems too good to be true, you know?”

  Ruth nodded. “I know. But Mister Stahlman’s an all-right guy. He do everything he say he will. He opened a bank account for me with two thousand, got me a debit card, and every week there’s another two thousand added.”

  “How you know it’s added?”

  “I just go to an ATM and I check the line that say Current Balance. And every week I got another two thou. First time in my life I got money, and it’s all mine.”

  Annie was shaking her head. “Like I said: too good to be true.”

  “Believe it, girl.” Ruth glanced up ahead at Ellis and Iggy, yakking away as they walked. “Why don’t you turn invisible and see what they talking about? Bet it’s about me.”

  “Why you?” Annie said.

  “I think that ugly white boy’s making a play for my pretty girl.”

  Annie’s eyebrows shot up. “Your—you and her a thing?”

  “Yeah, well, sorta.” Not like it was any secret or nothing.

  Iggy been staying over her place. Only one bed, so they been sleeping together.

  Up ahead—behind Iggy and Ugly—two men got out of a van and started taping a paper with cut-out letters against the sliding door. They put on those little white masks like doctors wear in surgery and pulled out cans of spray paint.

  “What they up to?” Annie said.

  “Looks like they gonna paint a sign on the side. Let’s see what it say.”

  She and Annie had just stopped to watch when the two guys spun and sprayed them in the face with their paint cans. Only it wasn’t paint and it smelled funny and suddenly everything was blurry and Ruth panicked and tried to picture her room back at the warehouse but instead of jumping she was falling …

  7

  MANHATTAN

  “Lakehurst?” Rick said. “They weren’t keeping the bunker much of a secret then, were they?”

  Pickens frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’ve been there. Wanted to see where the Hindenburg blew up.” He didn’t mention that he’d also visited Hangar One where they’d laid out all the burnt bodies from the crash. Supposedly haunted. “Lots of people work on that base and lots more live around it—I mean tons. Burying a bunker fifty feet down must have attracted a helluva lot of attention.”

  “Not back in 1946 when they broke ground. Dug up the woods at the northern corner of the base and finished in less than a year. You say you visited? Well, then you probably drove along a nice two-lane blacktop called 571. The files on your little drive there have aerial pictures of the excavation and you’ll see that no one but an occasional Piney lived out there in ’46. And Route 571 was an unpaved county road that hadn’t even been assigned a number yet.”

  “Still, had to take a lot of workers to make it happen.”

  “Of course. Most of whom are either dead or doddering now. We’re talking more than seventy years ago.”

  Rick supposed he had a point. The people currently working at the base—they now called it Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, or something equally unwieldy—liked to talk about the weird sounds and lights people witnessed in and around the supposedly haunted Hangar One, but not a peep about the deserted bunker somewhere below their feet. They didn’t seem to have any idea it existed.

  Pickens said, “The blueprints show it had only one way in through a junkyard elevator, and two ways out—the junkyard and an emergency stairway straight up from the bunker to a camouflaged trapdoor in the woods. Apparently DoD wanted to keep the Lange-Tür Project very secret.”

  “But you’ve no idea what they were researching?”

  He shook his head. “Not a clue. Classified up the ass.”

  Rick was thinking they hadn’t been testing rocket engines—you don’t burn rocket fuel underground. The only kind of research you bury fifty feet down is something potentially dangerous or, at the very least, risky. They’d buried it on an air base in the Jersey sticks—well, what was considered the sticks back when they buried it. Lange-Tür … Long Door … what the hell did that mean?

  “If I had to draw conclusions,” Pickens was saying, “I’d guess that whatever they were looking for or whatever was supposed to happen … didn’t. At least not for a decade. But in 1957, ten years after it started, Lange-Tür received a big bump in funding that lasted into the late eighties and then tapered off as the money was diverted to something called Project Synapse.”

  “ ‘Synapse’? That’s a brain thing, isn’t it?”

  Rick immediately flashed on the odd pattern Montero had found in the nadaný brain waves.

  “DoD project names are deliberately misleading. You know what they called their secret bombing runs into Cambodia during Nam? ‘Operation Menu.’ Go figure. One thing I did learn was that your boy Osterhagen remained attached to Fort Dix and Lakehurst in one vague capacity or another until he died of lung cancer in ’95. What was he doing from ’57 to ’95? No record. But he was being paid by Synapse.”

  “So what’s Project Synapse?”

  “Don’t know and happy to leave it at that. Did a few probes, ran into locked doors, and backed off. It reeks of black funding and I don’t want the Pentagon sending the DIA my way. Especially after reading that paper on the suicides.”

  “What suicides?”

  “People who transferred out of Lange-Tür after ’57.”

  Rick’s years with the Company had taught him never to take the suicide of a government employee at face value.

  “Real suicides, o
r the arranged kind?”

  “Apparently real. The study was commissioned by DoD itself. Seems there was genuine alarm over the number of former Lange-Tür folks offing themselves—genuinely offing themselves. The study never came up with a reason, although the notes they left behind often mentioned a void in their lives and indicated severe depression.”

  Rick held up the thumb drive. “That’s on here too?”

  “Yeah. Classified like everything else there.” Pickens’s sudden smile had a nasty twist to it. “I also included something that might be of personal interest to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “A link to something called ‘the Düsseldorf massacre.’ ”

  Rick froze. “What?”

  “Yeah. Would have loved to read it but the link goes nowhere except a 404 page.”

  “But how—?” Rick began but Pickens cut him off.

  “That’s your abridged version. The rest is on the drive—including the Düsseldorf link. See for yourself. Good day, Mister Hayden.”

  Feeling blindsided, Rick exited the car and started back up the ramp toward the pre-theater horde.

  Düsseldorf?

  8

  QUEENS

  Iggy … Ellis had always thought of it as a guy’s name. This Russian kid in his old neighborhood had been named Ignat. Everyone called him Iggy. But this Iggy walking next to him now was no guy. Not with that bod. She had a sweet bubble butt—not J-Lo class, but a nice one. He’d always had a weakness for spic chics.

  Had to be careful about that spic thing. What did they like to be called now? Hispanics? Latinas? He knew what he called Iggy: hot. Even if she was supposedly a lez.

  Ellis wasn’t so sure about that. Yeah, she was rooming with fat Ruthie, but Iggy didn’t seem all that much into her. Despite what anyone said—like they’re born that way and all that—he couldn’t get over the feeling that a lezzie just hadn’t met the right man yet.

  But he was taking it slow with Iggy, just strolling along, yakking about small stuff, nothing heavy. Let her get comfortable with him before he moved in on her. And truth was, he kind of liked her—really liked her. Even if she turned out to be total lez, he wouldn’t mind hanging with her.

  “So, like you really don’t know if you’ve got a talent like the rest of us?” he said.

  She shrugged. “If I do, I haven’t found it yet. I’m thinking Marie might have made a mistake. They say she hasn’t been wrong yet but …”

  “But there’s always a first time, right?”

  “Right.”

  He was running out of small talk. They’d talked about the gyros and fast food in general, about the weather and … what else was there? Usually he had good patter, ran his mouth at the card table. But now the silence was lengthening and …

  I’m tapped out, empty.

  “You’re so quiet,” Iggy said. “What you thinking?”

  “I’m wondering if you’re a lezzie or not.”

  She laughed. “You’re what?”

  Shit! Why the fuck had he said that?

  “Hey, I didn’t mean—I mean, you and Ruthie—”

  “Hey, I am what I am and Ruthie—” She glanced back. “Hey! Where’d they go?”

  Ellis stopped and looked. The sidewalk behind them was empty except for these two guys in painter’s masks spraying a panel truck.

  “They playing games with us?” he said.

  Iggy started walking back. “There’s no place for them to hide.”

  He followed her. “Those two don’t need no place to hide. Annie coulda turned invisible and Ruthie coulda done her teleport thing. Unless they ducked into a doorway.”

  When they came abreast of the truck he stopped by the painters.

  “’Scuse me, guys. Did you see—?”

  The nearer guy whirled and sprayed something in his face while the second spun toward Iggy and sprayed her as well.

  The world got foggy around the edges. He was dimly aware of the side panel sliding open to reveal Ruthie and Annie asleep on the floor. Then the fog closed in …

  9

  THE BRONX

  “Doctor Jacobi was absolutely wonderful,” said Fabricia Alvarado.

  Tanisha had arranged for Laura to meet her in her Bronx apartment where she babysat her grandson. Laura had introduced herself as a doctor and stayed with Stahlman’s line about plans to open clinics similar to Modern Motherhood’s.

  “How long were you with her?” Laura said.

  They sat in her kitchen while her grandson napped in a Pack ’n Play in the front room. The kitchen was bedizened with incomprehensible drawings—little more than scribbles, really—as if they were Picassos. Crayons littered the floor. Laura remembered that stage with Marissa.

  “From the day the clinic opened till the day it closed.” She shook her head. “That was a sad day, let me tell you.”

  “I’m sure it was. I understand it happened very suddenly.”

  Fabricia snapped her fingers. “Like that. Tuesday I had a job, Wednesday I was unemployed.”

  “And no explanation?”

  “It was that foundation—I forget its name.”

  “The Horace B. Gilmartin Foundation,” Laura said.

  A sham foundation fronting a sham director.

  “That’s the one. Pulled the plug on us without so much as a by-your-leave. But they gave us each a month’s severance.”

  “I understand you had a lower than average infant mortality rate,” Laura said, zeroing in on the real reason for her visit.

  A proud smile. “Yes, we did.”

  “Do you think it was the vitamin injections?”

  “Could be. Doctor Jacobi was very insistent that every mother get one on every visit.”

  “Any idea what was in them?”

  Fabricia shrugged. “Just B-complex and C, that’s all.”

  Laura doubted very much that was all.

  “Do you remember the label? We might be interested in following Doctor Jacobi’s lead in this if those injections lowered the mortality rate.”

  “The label?” she said, reaching across the table and grabbing a crayon box. “See for yourself.”

  Laura took the box and quickly realized it was a compartmentalized ampoule container, with thirty-six chambers inside arranged like a honeycomb.

  “I used to bring them home for my daughter’s pens and pencils. Now the next generation gets them.”

  Laura could barely make out the worn label on the side.

  Complete Organic

  Multivitamin Injection

  There followed what looked like a typical multivitamin list. The print was rubbed and faded. She thought she could make out “D.C.” but couldn’t be sure. Laura pulled out her phone and took a photo. Maybe someone back at the warehouse could work some magic and make it more legible.

  “Did you use any other brand of vitamins?”

  “Oh, no,” Fabricia said with an emphatic shake of her head. “We administered one ampoule per mother per month, and only the Complete Organic brand. Doctor Jacobi was very specific about that.”

  I’ll bet she was, Laura thought.

  10

  QUEENS

  The sun was sinking behind the Manhattan skyline as Rick stepped off the 7 train at the Rawson Street stop. He speed-dialed Laura’s number as he trotted down the steps to Queens Boulevard. He hadn’t wanted to discuss anything from the Pickens meeting while within earshot of his fellow passengers on the train.

  “I’m ba-ack,” he said when she answered. “Where are you?”

  “In my car on my way back from the Bronx.”

  “The Bronx?”

  “Remember? To talk to that former nurse at the Bed-Stuy clinic. Tell me you’ve solved our mystery so I don’t have to track down Doctor Jacobi’s ‘vitamin’ injections.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, no solution, I’m afraid. Not even close, in fact. Just more puzzle pieces with no idea where they fit.”

  And now Düsseldorf was in the mix. But he wasn’t going to get
into that with her yet—not until he’d opened the thumb drive and investigated the link himself.

  “Damn.”

  “But I do have an avenue of pursuit. Osterhagen was connected to something called Project Synapse or something like that.”

  “ ‘Something like that’?”

  “I know ‘Synapse’ is part of the name.”

  “Well, synapse goes with brains, and the nadaný have altered brains. How do we learn more?”

  “That will prove a challenge, I’m afraid. My contact thinks Pentagon black funding was involved. If we can connect Synapse to the foundation that funded the clinics, we’ll have a start.”

  “Maybe Hari—?”

  “We’ve probably said too much on the phone already, even though it’s beginning to sound like fiction. I’m talking a mysterious German scientist and an underground bunker and major weirdness. It’s all on a thumb drive we can open and discuss with Stahlman when you get back.”

  “Deal. Beat you there.”

  “Never happen.”

  As he clicked off the call he spotted a familiar figure strolling under the trestle.

  “Marie?” She turned and smiled when she recognized him. He remembered she lived nearby in Sunnyside. “Heading home?”

  She shrugged. “Not much for me to do at the warehouse lately, and I work tonight.”

  “You usually walk?”

  “When the weather’s nice, otherwise I Uber it.”

  “So that’s a verb now?”

  Another smile. “I guess so.”

  He was about to say goodbye—the warehouse was the other way—when he saw a guy and a gal in their thirties trying to push a stalled panel truck over a low curb into one of the under-trestle parking areas. They weren’t getting far.

  “Need a hand?” Rick said.

  The gal looked relieved. “I was just about to ask. Thanks.”

  Marie followed along.

  “I got this,” he said.

  She put on a thick Ukrainian accent and said, “You think I am veak but I am strrrong divchyna.”