The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

  Did he dare?

  He kicked off his shoes. The concrete floor felt cold through his socks as he slipped into the hallway and padded after them. If granny spotted him, he’d have to ad-lib. Maybe he could bluff his way through—he was wearing security coveralls, after all. If that failed, he’d have to resort to muscling his way in. One way or another, though, he was going to see what was going down beyond those doors.

  Granny pulled a card from her lab coat pocket, swiped it, and the red light turned green. With a soft buzz from the lock, the door popped loose. Granny pulled it open, let Iggy go first, then followed her through.

  Sliding his feet to keep them from pounding, Rick raced forward and caught the edge of the door just before it closed. He froze there, waiting to see if he’d been spotted or, if not, to give Iggy and granny time to move away from the door. The question was, how long to wait?

  The grinding of the double doors at the other end of the hallway starting to open decided for him.

  Who the hell is that?

  He ducked through and eased the door shut. The ceiling was higher here, fading into the dimness above. A jutting bank of dead electronics blocked his view of the right side of the room but what he did see was rack after rack of electronic equipment of all shapes and sizes and ages. Could have been a History of Post-War Electronics exhibit. Well, the place opened in 1947.

  He peered back through the thick glass of the door’s little window and suppressed a groan as he saw a security man guiding a very visible Annie down the hall. Her hands were behind her so he gathered she was cuffed.

  Damn! How had they caught her? Obviously something had gone wrong, but what?

  A squeal from Iggy somewhere around the corner to his right. Pain? Fright? Surprise? He turned and started toward it. He rounded the bank of dead electronics and saw Iggy standing with granny just a few feet ahead. They were staring at a ten-foot cubical chamber against the rear wall, with three sides of heavy-duty glass, easily three inches thick, set in a frame of thick, riveted steel.

  And inside …

  Rick slid to a stop as the breath clogged in his throat and his knees went rubbery.

  No … couldn’t be … not possible …

  He’d seen this before, or something very much like it. Years ago. And it had haunted his dreams ever since …

  18

  “Sir?” The voice seemed to come from far away. “Excuse me, sir?”

  Greve lifted his head and for a heartbeat or two wasn’t sure where he was. Then he remembered: the conference room. He’d come in here with printouts of all the data they’d acquired on the nadaný they were hosting. He’d wanted space to spread out the papers, but apparently he’d dozed off before he’d got much done.

  He blinked and saw one of the security men standing in the doorway.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  He pulled a frightened-looking Anulka M’Bala into the room. “We found her up top, trying to get away. And she was invisible!”

  “ ‘Up top’?”

  “She took the elevator up, sir.” He looked nervous.

  Greve shot to his feet. “What? How did she even reach the elevator?”

  “She used a swipe card, sir.”

  “Where’d she get that?”

  “Um, it belongs to Watts, sir.”

  “Who the hell is Watts?”

  “He has downstairs duty tonight, sir—along with Woolley.”

  Greve felt his teeth clenching. “All right then, where is this Watts? And this Woolley?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I just got down here and saw the light coming from the doorway, so I figured—”

  Greve glared at the girl. “And where’s your collar?”

  She looked away and said nothing.

  “She wasn’t wearing a collar when we found her.”

  Wait a minute …

  “How did you find her if she was invisible?”

  “The thermal imager spotted her.”

  “Really.” That was good to know. “Good work. What’s your name?”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s Jon. By the way, she had a phone but didn’t have time to use it.”

  That was a relief.

  “Where’d she get a phone? Belonged to your friend Watts as well, I assume?”

  “No. That was Woolley’s.”

  Greve pounded on the table. “Where are these two, damn it?”

  “I-I’ll check the security office, sir.”

  “You do that. And meanwhile I’ll return Ms. M’Bala to her room.” He came around the table and gripped Anulka’s arm as Jon released her. “Come with me,” he said, guiding her into the hallway.

  “Let go!” she cried, trying to pull away. But he held her firm.

  “How did you get out of that collar? And how did you get out of your room after I locked you in?”

  Her only response was a sullen expression.

  He found the door to room eighteen unlocked—naturally—and pushed her in ahead of him. He spotted the open collar on the floor and inspected it. The lock had been forced open and looked broken.

  Damn!

  “Don’t try to tell me you did this,” he said. “Who forced this lock?”

  More sullen silence.

  “Sir!” Jon again, standing in the doorway.

  “What now?”

  “Woolley’s out cold. I can’t wake him up!”

  Drunk or …?

  “What about his partner?”

  “Watts isn’t there!”

  Suddenly all became clear.

  “Check next door—room seventeen. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Greve removed Anulka’s cuffs and hurried to the door, locking it behind him. She might be able to turn invisible but that didn’t allow her to walk through walls.

  Jon was unlocking the door to seventeen as Greve stepped up beside him. He preceded Greve into the room where a man in his underwear lay on the gurney formerly occupied by Rick Hayden.

  “Watts!”

  And, just as Greve had expected, no sign of Hayden.

  Jon was shaking him, calling his name.

  “He won’t be much use for a while,” Greve said as the man began to stir. “You wouldn’t happen to be armed, would you?”

  Jon hesitated, then reached inside his coverall and withdrew a semiautomatic. “Sorry, sir. In all the excitement I forgot to leave it up top.”

  Greve’s longtime rule had been no weapons in the bunker.

  “We’ll make an exception this time. Start a room-to-room search. We’re looking for a big, dark-haired fellow. Don’t shoot unless you have to, but whatever you do, don’t let him get away. I’ll start at the other end and we’ll meet in the middle.”

  “Do you want my weapon, sir?” Jon said.

  “I have my own.” Greve ignored the guard’s surprised look. He kept a pistol in his desk. He’d made the rule, so he could break it whenever he wished. “And by ‘search’ I don’t mean peek in and move on. I want a thorough search. That means in the closet, in the bathroom, even under the bed—thorough. Some of the rooms will be occupied. Do not let that deter you. Understand?”

  Jon nodded. “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Then get started.”

  As Jon moved off, Greve headed for his office and his weapon. He didn’t care if Garrick Somers—or his reincarnation, Rick Hayden—left here alive or dead, but should it be the latter, he wanted to talk to him first.

  19

  Leaning back against the bank of dead, decrepit electronics, Rick fought to keep his knees from giving out as he blinked at the apparition behind the glass. The sight of it had triggered a powerful visceral reaction, like a pile driver to the gut.

  He watched its size fluctuate from six to ten feet across; sometimes it looked fusiform and sometimes like a disk and everything and anything between, never assuming quite the same shape twice. Its vaguely purple, shimmering outline writhed in constant motion, stretching, rippling, contorting into countless configurations—an animated Mandel
brot set—while its center remained black beyond any black imaginable … like a hole in the fabric of reality, revealing the nothingness that lay beyond perception.

  Nothing could look like that, nothing should look like that. It radiated wrongness … wrong, wrong, wrong.

  And yet it looked familiar … he’d seen something like it before … in Düsseldorf. The thing that had wandered through the inferno of the Düsseldorf farmhouse was here.

  He released a shuddering breath. The older woman must have heard him because she turned and started at the sight of him.

  “How did you get in here?”

  His mouth felt dry. Keeping his eyes on the thing, he pushed off the electronics bank and forced a swallow.

  “Sneaked in behind you.”

  Iggy turned then and smiled. “Hey, Rick. Come to rescue me?”

  “Probably could use a little rescuing myself. Who else from the gang is here?”

  “Ruthie came and went but I don’t know about anyone else.”

  He turned to granny. “Did you grab Doctor Fanning?”

  Granny shook her head. “No. We don’t need her.”

  Relief banished the residual shock. Laura was safe back in Queens. Knowing that lifted a tremendous burden and freed up his options.

  “Besides Iggy,” granny continued, “we have Anulka and Ellis. As already mentioned, we had Ruth but …”

  Iggy grinned. “But she went poof!”

  “And we have you, of course,” granny said to Rick. “But I don’t know if ‘have’ is quite accurate. You arrived unconscious and handcuffed. Now … who released you?”

  “It’s complicated.” He pointed to the thing behind the glass. “What … how …?”

  A hint of a smile twisted granny’s lips. “It’s complicated.”

  Right then he decided he liked her. And maybe he should stop calling her “granny.”

  “I’m pretty sure you know my name. What’s yours?”

  “Maureen LaVelle.”

  “You can call her Moe,” Iggy said. “She’s also somebody called Emily Jacobi.”

  Rick hadn’t been ready for that. “The doctor who ran the Modern Motherhood Clinics?”

  She bowed. “One and the same. And you’re Rick Hayden.”

  “Actually it’s Garrick Somers but I go by Rick Hayden these days.”

  Now why the hell had he told her that? He never mentioned Garrick Somers—to anyone.

  “A new name? Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Just then a thin, cranky-faced old duffer with wild white hair shooting in all directions hustled into view from the right.

  “Here now!” he cried, clutching the lapels of his wrinkled lab coat and looking authoritative. His voice carried a hint of a Texas drawl. “Neither of you is authorized to be in here!”

  Rick couldn’t help saying, “Doctor Brown. I’d recognize you anywhere.”

  That stopped him in his tracks. “What?”

  “Looking for Marty McFly, I presume?”

  The old man turned to Moe. “What on Earth is this man talking about?”

  Her tone teetered on the edge of a laugh. “It’s complicated, Doctor Stonington. But I think we can consider them invited guests.”

  “Who invited them?”

  “Agent Greve.”

  “Oh, well, in that case …”

  Agent Greve … since the bunker was a DoD operation …

  “This Agent Greve is DIA, I assume?”

  “Yes,” Moe said. “You’ll meet him soon enough … and probably wish you hadn’t.”

  Rick craned his neck to where this Stonington guy had come from and saw a well-lit area hosting three desks laden with monitors. All in all, the rear section formed a wide, high-ceilinged rectangle with the glass-walled chamber and its occupant set against the back wall. His gaze was irresistibly drawn back to the thing in that chamber. It simultaneously fascinated, repulsed, and unsettled him.

  “Can we go back to my original question?” he said, pointing again. “What is that, and how did it get here? And yes, I’m sure it’s complicated, but I need to know.”

  “Not only complicated,” she said, “but highly classified.”

  Time to show off what he knew—and maybe imply that he knew even more. “Look, I already know about Maximilian Osterhagen and I know this place was built to house the Lange-Tür Project, so you don’t exactly have to start with the Book of Genesis for me.”

  Although he wished she would.

  Her wide-eyed expression—Stonington’s too—was evidence that the name-dropping had blindsided her.

  “How …?”

  “Research,” he said. “But my research never even hinted at that.”

  “That’s because the Anomaly is even more classified than Lange-Tür itself.”

  “ ‘The Anomaly’ … and you call it that because …?”

  Stonington answered for her. “Because it breaks all the known rules of science and because even now, after more than sixty years of puzzling over it, we still haven’t the slightest idea what the fuck it is. Oops.” He bowed to Iggy. “My apologies, young lady.”

  “No worry,” she said with a charming smile. “I think I’ve heard the word once or twice before.”

  “ ‘More than sixty years’ …” Rick said. “Since the fifties?”

  Moe nodded. “The Anomaly appeared in 1957—not at all what the Lange-Tür researchers were looking for.”

  “What’s Lange-Tür?” Iggy said.

  Rick pricked up his ears while trying to look like this was old news. He desperately wanted to know.

  “I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version,” Moe said.

  Iggy frowned. “What’s Reader’s Digest?”

  Moe laughed. “Oh, dear! It means the abridged—the shortened version. Here goes: After World War II, the U.S. government began gathering up as many German rocket scientists as they could find. They called it Operation Paperclip. Even though he wasn’t working on rockets, a German physicist named Maximilian Osterhagen was hauled in with the rest.”

  Iggy laughed. “Some name! And I thought ‘Igdalia’ was bad.”

  “Well, anyway, Doctor Max—as he was known—was working on a project he called Lange-Tür, which translates to ‘Long Door.’ He had developed a theoretical basis for a way to move objects—inanimate and, hopefully, living things as well—instantaneously over long distances.”

  “Really?” Rick said. “Teleportation?”

  “Not at all. Teleportation is where an object is broken down in one spot and reconstituted in another.” She focused on Iggy. “If you’ve ever seen the ‘beam-me-up’ technology on Star Trek, that’s teleportation. But that’s not what Doctor Max was trying to do. He had a theoretical basis for creating a portal—sort of a door in the air—to compress distance between two points which would allow something or someone to step through the opening on one end and step out onto another locus anywhere on Earth.”

  “Okay, then,” Rick said. “A wormhole?”

  Pulled that one out of the air. He’d seen it mentioned in SF films like Stargate but never understood the concept.

  “Again, not at all,” Moe said. “Lange-Tür involves another branch of physics entirely, one that I don’t pretend to understand. I do know it employs a high-energy modification of the Casimir effect to—”

  “Doctor LaVelle!” Stonington said. “Whence the logorrhea? This is all classified! These two have no clearance to even hear the words Lange-Tür, let alone the details of the process!”

  Moe looked troubled. “You’re right, you’re right. But it also seems right to tell them.” She put her hand on Iggy’s shoulder. “Especially this one. After all, she’s … involved.”

  Stonington grunted and said, “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you—or try to stop you.”

  “Noted.” She glanced at Rick. “Where was I?”

  “Not a wormhole.”

  “Right-right-right. The physics is esoteric and I’m a biologist, s
o I can’t explain it anyway. And in the end the details aren’t all that important. The main thing is that the Department of Defense wanted this technology very badly, and it’s easy enough to see why. The potential military uses are obvious and enormous.”

  “Hell, yeah,” Rick said. “Move personnel and matériel to the Middle East or Asia or anywhere else just by driving through a doorway? Total game changer.”

  “Right. Except they couldn’t get it to work. Ten years of trying without a lick of success. After a decade of failures they were on the verge of shutting Lange-Tür down because funding was being siphoned off by projects like MKUltra. That was when—as I’ve been told—Osterhagen made some last-ditch modification. They did another run and …”—she pointed to the Anomaly—“this showed up.”

  Rick stared at the thing. “And then you what … built that big fish tank around it?”

  “I didn’t build anything. The Anomaly arrived on April 29, 1957—the same day I was born.” She shook her head. “Kind of a strange coincidence, don’t you think? We both arrived on Earth the same day.”

  He stared at her. Yeah, strange, but … “I don’t believe in coincidences. So who decided to build the tank?”

  “As I understand it, they had that chamber from the get-go: steel-reinforced ballistic glass three inches thick. They were flying blind. First off, they didn’t know if it was even possible to open a portal, but if they ever did, they had no idea where it would be. It could open at the bottom of the ocean or in the heart of a volcano. So they built the chamber as a precaution against a hostile environment. I’m sure they never expected anything like the Anomaly.”

  Keeping his gaze fixed on the shimmering miscreation, Rick sidled over to where Stonington stood on Iggy’s far side. Close up he looked at least ten years older than Moe.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about any of this, but can I ask how long you’ve been here?”

  He gave Rick a suspicious look. “A damn sight longer than anyone else alive.”

  “Stoney virtually lives here,” Moe said. “The Anomaly has taken over his life.”

  “You said ‘anyone else alive.’ You referring to all the suicides of folks who used to work here?”