The Void Protocol

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Tell them the truth. Annie, tell them you were kidnapped and brought here, and the rest of you came looking for her.”

  Moe shook her head. “That’s not going to fly—at least not very far.”

  “Yeah, it’s a short-term story. Let’s hope Stahlman’s connections can straighten out the rest for them and the Pentagon can go to bat for you.”

  “What about you two?” Marie said.

  Rick did not want to deal with officialdom. He never knew when his Hayden identity might collapse. But Laura …

  “Take Laura with you and—”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I came this far. Where you go, I go. Team, remember?”

  Yeah, he remembered. And he knew that tone.

  He waved Cyrus and the others off. “Get going, and tell everyone to stay away.”

  He turned to Laura and found her gazing up at the treetops. “Where’d they go?”

  “What?”

  “The pine lights.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind. Tell you later.”

  He pointed toward the faint glow pinking the sky. “Could that be dawn?”

  “Seems about right.”

  “Gee, how time flies …”

  “When you’re having fun? You think this was fun?”

  “Not a bit. But dawn means east is that way and it looks like east will take us away from the bunker and away from the po-po. So let’s go.”

  Rick led the way, plowing through the bushes and the brush. They hadn’t gone very far when a helicopter zoomed overhead.

  “Probably on its way to check out the light,” he said. “I hope the pilots are smart enough to keep clear.”

  “You think it’s dangerous?”

  “It burned through steel-reinforced concrete and fifty feet of packed earth so, yeah, I think it’s—”

  Then the ground shook hard enough to knock both of them to their knees.

  “It’s happening,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The bunker’s gonna collapse. Or worse. Maybe it’s gonna implode. Or get sucked into the Anomaly.” He started walking back. “Wait here.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I need to see.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  Yeah, probably.

  He kept walking. He had no rational reason for this, but after what he’d been put through in the last twelve hours—and all the years leading up to it—he needed to see this end. Call it closure, call it whatever, but Greve’s copies of the Black Book were down there, and so was whatever remained of the man responsible for the Düsseldorf atrocity that had haunted his life for years, as well as the thing that had appeared at the Düsseldorf conflagration to sup on the human pain and misery there. Maybe he could lay all this to rest at last.

  The silhouettes of the pines around the beam began to tilt toward it. That could only mean the bunker’s ceiling and supports had given way and were collapsing. The beam itself began to wobble, swinging in wide arcs. Rick saw the lights of the chopper hovering nearby and sent a mental message to the pilot to get the hell away from here.

  The chopper began to turn, but too late. One of those swinging arcs brought the beam in contact with its blades, neatly slicing off the ends as they rotated through it, and that was all she wrote.

  The chopper lost altitude and dropped into the pines on the far side of the depression, the remnants of its blades shearing off treetops and branches as it crashed among the trunks. It never hit ground, but ended suspended in the trees. Rick saw the pilot and copilot scramble down to safety.

  Rick stopped thirty feet from the escape hatch and crouched to watch the crazy gyrations of the beam, making flaming kindling of the surrounding trees leaning over it. He started as someone crouched beside him. Laura. Should have known.

  “It’s dangerous here.”

  “Didn’t stop you,” she said, the light show reflecting in her eyes.

  “It’s personal for me.”

  “Well, then, that makes it personal for me too.”

  No sooner had he slipped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her against him than the beam disappeared like someone had flipped a switch. One instant wreaking havoc with its surroundings, the next—gone, leaving burning pine trees as the only evidence of its existence.

  Movement to his right in the flickering light caught his eye: Moe, standing and staring at the sunken earth. And Marie next to her. Rick thought he understood Moe’s presence.

  “Couldn’t stay away?”

  She shook her head. “Tried, but no.”

  Marie gave a wan smile. “Same here. Cyrus and Annie took off in the ambulance with Tanisha. There wasn’t room for me, so …”

  Maureen said, “Down there was where it all started—the stuff that took control of my life.” She cleared her throat. “Let me rephrase that: The stuff that I allowed to take over my life.” A single sob escaped her. “God, I’ve got a lot to answer for.”

  Yeah, she did, but he couldn’t see her as evil. She seemed to care for the nadaný—genuinely care. Greve, on the other hand …

  “Iggy,” Marie said, “she’s still down there. And Ellis.”

  “Stoney too,” Moe said.

  Rick noted that Greve’s name was conspicuous by its absence.

  “And then again, maybe not,” he said. “If the Anomaly got them first, they could be anywhere in the universe … or in another universe … or nowhere at all.”

  Laura stared up at him. “You really believe that?”

  “It looked like it had become some sort of black hole, with lasers shooting out each pole.”

  “More likely particle beams,” Moe said. “That’s why the chopper went down.”

  “There’ll be a crowd here any minute,” Rick said. “We’d better move on. Laura and I are gonna cut through the woods and—”

  “I just remembered my car’s back by the scrap yard,” Laura said. “Someone’s going to trace it and come looking for me eventually. Why not deal with it now? We can say we were driving by, saw the light, and went to investigate. Who can say otherwise? My E-ZPass records will confirm I was on the parkway not too long ago.”

  Not Rick’s first choice, but Laura was still registered as an assistant medical examiner with the state of New York—a truly solid citizen. Yeah, it might work.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.” He turned to Marie. “You said Cy and Annie are with Tanisha?”

  She frowned. “I think so.”

  She sounded strange. “ ‘Think’?”

  “I’m not sensing them.”

  Oh, crap. “Could something have happened to them?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked truly baffled. “I don’t sense them or any nadaný—anywhere.”

  That wasn’t good—not good at all.

  42

  “Well, so much for taking it slow and easy,” Laura said, snuggling against Rick in the motel bed.

  A sliver of sunlight slipped between the edges of the closed curtains. Dimly visible were the scattered clothing on the floor and the uninspired seascapes on the walls.

  “I held off as long as I could,” he said.

  She laughed. “Not that. Us. My grand plan.”

  “Which was …?”

  “Returning to square one. You know how we were kind of awkward with each other after Orkney. I figured we’d be back to awkward after the way I made things so difficult for us.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “I certainly did. So I thought we could go back to those first dinners and become comfortable with each other again before …”

  “Before what?”

  “Before this!”

  “You mean sex?”

  “Yes! We’re basking in afterglow in a no-tell motel in Toms River in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. How decadent is that?”

  “Decadent?”

  “I don’t know about in your life, but in my prosaic, Little League–mom world, that’s decadent.”

  He grinned. “I guess
we got comfortable with each other again ahead of schedule.”

  “I guess we did.”

  And Laura couldn’t be happier.

  They’d returned to the Quonset hut to find first-responder chaos—state cops, town cops, sheriff’s deputies, multiple volunteer fire companies, and a security contingent from the Naval Air Station—all strobe-lit in blue, white, and red. Laura, Rick, Marie, and Maureen made it to her car but were blocked from driving away. Stahlman—bless him—arrived with a couple of fast-talking suits who Laura later learned were lawyers. After everyone was identified to the sundry authorities’ satisfaction, and names and contact information were recorded, they were allowed to leave.

  Stahlman and company continued on to Community Medical Center to check on Tanisha. Marie went along with them because she asked to, Maureen because Stahlman wanted to talk to her.

  Which left Laura and Rick on their own. Both admitted they were exhausted and that some shut-eye would be wise before traveling back to New York. They stopped at the first motel they found on Route 37 with the intention of getting two rooms. At the registration desk they’d looked at each other and Laura said, “Who are we kidding?”

  They got one.

  And they still hadn’t slept.

  Rick rose onto one elbow and looked at her. “Are we back on track?”

  “We are. We most certainly are. I’ve decided I love you.”

  His eyebrows rose. “ ‘Decided’?”

  “Let me rephrase.” She seemed to be doing a lot of rephrasing lately. “I’ve decided it’s okay for me to admit that—even without Iggy around.”

  A troubled look passed over Rick’s face. She thought she knew why.

  “Yeah,” she said, remembering Iggy’s childlike glee when Ruthie teleported and left her blush floating in the air. “Poor Iggy. Such a sweet kid. Of all people …”

  “Yeah. The truth. No one can know the truth.”

  His face remained troubled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Iggy aside, you feel happy and you still don’t think you deserve that. Am I right?”

  He had to get over this.

  “It’s not that cut-and-dried.”

  “It will never be.” She kissed him on the cheek. “I can’t make the past disappear, but I’ve figured out a way to deal with it: You’re a soldier home from a war. You had to do things over there—”

  “Like play God?”

  “We don’t need to get into specifics here. Let’s just say things you’ll never be called on to do here. So, the past is over there, and the present and future are right here. That past hasn’t gone away. It’s just in perspective.” She poked his bare chest. “But you’ve got to do something about it too. It’s been a cloud over you.”

  He pursed his lips a moment, then said, “Dealing with Greve allowed me to put a human face on Düsseldorf. And somehow—not sure why—that’s allowed me to stuff the whole thing into a mental box. And I’m locking that box in a room. So like you said, it’s not gone, but it’s no longer on display either.”

  “Then why this troubled look that seems stuck on your face?”

  “It’s just … just that our little piece of the future is starting to look pretty good.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  He gave her a wry smile. “Have you ever known me to trust the future?”

  “I think you have to start making exceptions. Start with the near future … the very near future.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like we have this room until tomorrow.”

  “Well, okay. Can I trust we’ll find a way to not waste it?”

  “There you go.”

  Laura slipped her arms around him and felt a sudden lightness of being, like an enormous weight had been lifted from her. This was going to work. This time things were going to work out.

  Tuesday

  1

  QUEENS

  Laura’s heart went out to the surviving nadaný as she watched them take their seats in a circle. Even Tanisha, fresh from the hospital with her bandaged stump, had shown up for the impromptu memorial service for Iggy and Ellis. Those who wanted to speak had said their piece, offering what memories they had and their wishes that things had turned out differently. Ruthie broke down about Iggy too many times to finish.

  Then it came time for Luis to confirm what Laura had feared when Marie could detect no nadaný anywhere, and what all the nadaný already knew. Laura, Rick, and Stahlman stood to the side while he moved to the center, his ever-present iPad clutched against his chest, and turned in a slow circle as he spoke.

  “I’ve checked and double-checked all of you and there’s no doubt: Your zeta waves are gone.”

  Annie sobbed openly. She was taking it the hardest. Iggy had been her first friend among the nadaný, and now this: Invisibility had been part of her everyday life for years—a way of life for her.

  “How’d this happen?” Leo said. Normally he’d be floating a few inches above his chair, just because he could. Now his butt was parked like everyone else’s. “You go to bed special and you wake up ordinary.”

  “Yeah,” Ruthie said. “Freaks one day, dweebs the next.”

  Laura was struck by the two contrasting self-images. Leo had been working hard to develop his talent, while Ruthie, in many ways, had wanted to hide from it.

  “I think I can help there,” Rick said from outside the circle. “But it’s a long story.”

  The nadaný were unanimous about wanting to hear it, so Rick stepped into the middle and pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket.

  “Need my notes,” he said. “I’m starting at Genesis.”

  Laura, Rick, Stahlman, and Maureen had spent hours last night piecing Maureen’s recollections together with the information from the CIA thumb drive to collate a coherent timeline.

  So Rick started not with Genesis but with World War II, the Kohnstein, and the Lange-Tür theories, moved through the construction of the bunker in 1947, the arrival of the Anomaly in 1957, the discovery of melis in 1984, and the opening of the Modern Motherhood Clinics in the 1990s.

  “Okay, that’s how we became nadaný,” Cyrus said. “But now we’re not. What happened?”

  “That’s where the guesswork comes in,” Rick said. “We’ve talked to all of you and not one of you remembers being able to use their gift after dawn yesterday. The Anomaly disappeared just before dawn yesterday. Coincidence? We don’t think so. We think the Anomaly’s presence on Earth or in this dimension or whatever the case may be—we’ll probably never know where it came from or where it went—somehow fueled your gifts. When some of you were brought into proximity with it, your gifts were amplified. And when it left, your gifts powered down.”

  “ ‘Powered down’?” Cyrus said, balling a piece of paper in his fist, then opening to show how it remained in his palm. “It’s gone!”

  “Now, we don’t know that,” Luis said. He’d backed away but now moved again to the center, which Rick seemed all too happy to yield. “It might just be dormant.”

  “Bullshit!” Leo said.

  Luis shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. You can get mad and walk away, but that won’t get you an answer.”

  “What will get us answers?”

  “Stay and work with Luis,” Stahlman said, moving into the circle. “I’m offering the same terms and accommodations as before. Who knows? Doctor Montero might be able to discover something. And if he can’t, if it should turn out to be a total waste of time, at least you’ll be well compensated for that time.”

  When everyone started talking at once, Rick took Laura’s arm and led her back to Stahlman’s office, where Maureen waited. Not knowing how the others would react, she’d elected to audit the meeting out of sight.

  “That went pretty well,” she said.

  Laura didn’t know how to feel about Maureen. So many conflicts. Although nothing like Laura’s mother, Maureen was the same age. Her graying, maternal look made it hard for
Laura to believe what she’d done. And she couldn’t help but hate what she’d done—experimenting with unborn children would remain forever unforgiveable in Laura’s book. But then, one on one, she’d found the woman smart, sincere, and … likable. Not without a moral compass, either. How had she gone wrong?

  Laura faced her. “You’re the biologist. You think there’s any chance they can get their gifts back?”

  “Truth?” Maureen hesitated, then shook her head. “No. Or at least I doubt it very much. Melis had a definite impact on their genes—changes we might be able to identify. But identifying them won’t be enough, I’m afraid. The Anomaly’s presence or influence seemed to be necessary to activate them.”

  “Maybe that influence can be duplicated or mimicked,” Rick said.

  She smiled. “That’s just what I’m hoping to do.”

  “You?” Laura said.

  “Mister Stahlman has asked me to help, not just with the nadaný but with other potential manifestations of melis.”

  That jolted Laura. “ ‘Potential’? You don’t mean …?”

  “Who, me? No way. I did what I did and you know what I did, and that was it. I wish I hadn’t, but it’s done and I can’t go back. I can be useful going forward, though.”

  “I’ve wanted to ask you that,” Laura said. “How did you come to do what you did?”

  Maureen leaned back against Stahlman’s desk. “I wish I knew. All I can say is I got lost in the project. I started out doing pure research—learning its properties and such. I was never supposed to get involved in testing it on animals except for toxicity.”

  “But you went beyond that.” Way beyond.

  “Not because I wanted to.”

  “They forced you?” Rick said.

  “Yes. At first. Then I got into it. Melis was my baby—I named it, after all. And then, after the Pentagon allowed me to see where it came from, I … I don’t know. It was like I’d been admitted to a cult—a select group who knew this strange and wonderful and terrible secret. I never thought it could happen to me, but you can become so immersed in something, in a subculture—and as much as I didn’t like Greve, he and I and the others at Lange-Tür formed our own private echo chamber where melis ruled. After a while, all that mattered was finding out what it could do—or what we could make it do.” She shook her head. “Total loss of perspective.”