Vanishing Point: A Warner & Lopez prequel novel

by Dean Crawford

  Ethan felt his skin crawl as he realized that Shilo and his fellow cult members were somewhat better informed than he had at first assumed.

  ‘Yes,’ Shilo said, seeing Ethan’s realization. ‘We do have the Internet and the news here. Wonderful, what hydro–electric turbines can do with the endless flow of the Mississippi. We’re linked up, and these tunnels you see were once reserve powder stores for Fort Defiance during the Civil War. We simply moved in and made them our own. Now, they’re used for something far more important.’

  Shilo stepped down from his makeshift throne and reached out with one long arm, grasping Ethan’s shoulder with a powerful hand.

  ‘You see, the bail–runner known as Ethan Warner is soon to die after being confronted by a brave Illinois farmer, after trying to break and enter his home.’

  Ethan tested the bindings around his wrists, could feel a small amount of movement, but he knew it wasn’t enough to break free easily and quickly. He needed the cover of darkness once more.

  ‘Keep him restrained,’ Shilo ordered the gunmen, ‘and this side of the border, I don’t want the FBI getting involved. We’ll see tonight if he’s willing to understand what we’re doing here, and why.’

  Ethan felt his armed captors grab him from behind, but as he was led away he saw a teenage boy watching him from one of the tunnels. Although he had not laid eyes on him before, he recognized the set of the shoulders, the eyes, the hair color, and he knew that he’d found Ben Trent.

  ***

  XVII

  ‘You’re kidding me?’

  Lopez sat in her Corvette near Fort Defiance and listened to her cell phone as the Kankakee Sheriff’s Department filled her in on the ruling. The Sheriff that she’d spoken to in the parking lot, whose name was Jonas McBride, seemed far less accommodating than he had the previous day.

  ‘Kankakee Court House has ruled Ethan Warner as a flight risk and that he be returned to jail immediately. He hasn’t shown up here at the Court House so he’s in violation of his bail conditions. We’re assembling a team right now and we have good evidence that he headed south, maybe for a town called Cairo. You know anything about that, Miss Lopez?’

  ‘It’s got some pyramids, hasn’t it?’

  ‘This isn’t the time for games, ma’am. If you know where Ethan Warner is then you need to tell us about it right now. Harboring a fugitive could land you inside a jail cell too.’

  ‘Ethan’s not a fugitive, he got jammed up in this by someone else. You guys ever bother looking at the evidence?’

  ‘The courts make the judgements,’ the sheriff replied. ‘I’m not asking you to betray the guy, I’m asking you to do your job. Jeez, if you know where he is then you pick up the bail.’

  For a moment, time stood still for Lopez as she sat in the car. Quite how things had ended up this way she couldn’t fathom, but she was now being asked to pursue the bail bond on her own partner.

  ‘It’s five thousand bucks to bring him in,’ McBride added, probably fishing for her to do the Sheriff’s Department’s work for them.

  ‘I can do the math,’ Lopez shot back. ‘I don’t know why he’s run south but there must be a reason for it. He’s onto something, something that can prove his innocence and he can’t do that if he’s stuck behind bars.’

  ‘He could be getting you to take care of that instead of making himself the subject of a manhunt.’

  ‘He’s a hands–on kind of guy.’

  The sheriff sighed down the line.

  ‘Fine, have it your way. Sheriff’s department will be deployed within a couple hours and Cairo PD will be alerted to both Ethan’s and your own presence. If you don’t bring your boy in before then, that’s your problem. I want him off the streets.’

  The line went dead. Lopez set the cell back into its holder and rubbed her temples.

  ‘He’s in the middle of it now,’ Henley said.

  ‘More than he knows,’ Lopez agreed. ‘I gotta get in front of this before something else goes wrong.’

  ‘Could anything else go wrong?’ Henley asked.

  ‘Oh yeah, believe me, whenever Ethan and I are working together, there’s always something else that can go wrong…’

  Lopez broke off as she glanced in her mirror and saw a plain white van parked maybe a hundred yards behind them. The windows were tinted black, and there were no markings. Although it was a fair way out she could not see anything that identified it as government – even the plates appeared to be stock Illinois. But it was the same make and model as the other vans she’d seen since coming down here to Cairo.

  ‘What?’ Henley asked.

  Lopez didn’t reply as she started the engine and pulled away from the sidewalk, watching in her mirror. Ten seconds later the white van eased out and began following. Lopez smiled, swung the wheel and hit the gas. The Corvette’s engine growled as the car spun around and Henley let out a howl of surprise as the tires squealed on the asphalt and a cloud of gray smoke billowed from beneath the vehicle.

  Lopez gunned the engine as she swung out of the turn and accelerated head–on toward the white van. She saw it swerve to one side as the shocked driver attempted an awkward about–face, but she had left him no time to escape. Lopez screeched the Corvette to a halt right in front of the van and leaped out almost before the car had stopped moving.

  The tinted windows prevented an easy line of sight into the vehicle but Lopez dashed to the driver’s side window as the van tried to back up onto the sidewalk to turn and escape. Officer Henley got out of her Corvette with one hand on his side arm. Lopez reached out and yanked the van’s door open in time to see a panicked face gun the gas pedal. She glimpsed military fatigues and an earpiece, a side–arm and heavy black boots. Lopez held up her cell phone with the other hand and snapped a single shot before the van screeched away from them.

  ‘Who the hell was that?’ Henley asked as the van shot off down the road.

  Lopez took another shot of the license plate before the van was out of range.

  ‘Military,’ she replied. ‘No insignia, nothing to identify which unit they’re from, but they’re armed and they’ve been watching me since I showed up here.’

  ‘You think they’re after you?’ Henley asked.

  Lopez shook her head. ‘No, I think they were here already like you said, and they’ve decided to keep an eye on what I’m doing.’

  She checked her cell phone and saw a pretty decent shot of the driver. Young, early–thirties at most, buzz–cut black hair, just the kind of recruits out of the Marines or Army that a black budget unit would be looking for.

  Henley peered at the image. ‘I don’t recognize the face,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think we’re meant to. These will be foot soldiers, to be neither seen nor heard. I’ve read about these guys who show up as guards on sensitive military installations like Area 51 or tail UFO witnesses. What I don’t get is why they would tail witnesses instead of the UFOs they sighted unless…’

  For a moment she was silent as her brain turned over. It was as though something was on the tip of her tongue, a revelation that was staring her in the face and yet just beyond her grasp.

  ‘What is it?’

  Lopez frowned.

  ‘I don’t know, it just bothers me. These guys show up at UFO hotspots, but they don’t watch the actual UFOs, or at least they don’t seem to. You ever noticed that? What purpose would there be in following the witnesses, or those who are investigating things down here? If the government wanted to figure out what these things were, they’d follow the UFOs themselves wouldn’t they?’

  ‘I guess,’ Henley agreed cautiously.

  Lopez leaned against the Corvette, the van and its occupants forgotten now.

  ‘This cult set up here, but before 1973 there was no reason to suspect this place as some kind of UFO hotspot, right?’

  Again, Henley shrugged. ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘But they chose here after the Piedmont events you described. So, they set
up a commune or whatever they call it, start praying to rocks and lights in the sky or whatever…’ Lopez pushed off the vehicle. ‘What if they’re recruiting people who have witnessed UFOs?’

  Henley peered at her. ‘Where are you going with this?’

  Lopez paced up and down, thinking furiously.

  ‘The government follows people who witness UFOs, the cult recruit people who see them. What if there’s some kind of connection between the two? What if the government is investigating the phenomenon, but for some reason they think that it’s the people themselves who are of greater importance in solving the mystery?’

  ‘How would that work?’ Henley asked.

  ‘Damned if I know,’ Lopez replied. ‘But it’s the only connection I can make. Maybe some people are more prone to seeing these things than others, just like some people seem more prone to witnessing paranormal phenomena? I know my mom back home was always seeing hearing things and she wasn’t losing her marbles, she was just sensitive is all. I don’t have the same gift, but maybe some people do and that makes them more likely to witness UFO sightings. That would give the government a motive to follow anyone who reported sightings for a while, see if it happened again. They could then gather direct information, data, evidence, everything.’

  Henley folded his arms.

  ‘I don’t know, it seems kind of out there. There is one guy though, lives out near Future City. He used to report a lot of stuff to the PD; lights, unusual aircraft activity, that kind of thing. He swore the local cult had tried to recruit him but he always resisted, wrote them off as nut jobs.’

  Lopez smiled. ‘Nut jobs, I like that. You got any idea where I can find him?’

  ‘Sure, but the guy’s gotta be like eighty by now, and we don’t hear from him so much. You wanna go take a look?’

  Lopez reached for the Corvette’s door by way of a reply, and moments later they were driving north out of Cairo toward Future City.

  ***

  XVIII

  Future City

  ‘I don’t want no part of it!’

  Lopez stood on one side of a low wicker fence that surrounded a tiny one–storey on the edge of town, tucked into a leafy glade that bordered Cairo to the south. On the other side of the fence was an old man with a cane and a thick white beard so dense she couldn’t see the shirt beneath it.

  ‘I tol’ ‘em all before now, to get gone an’ outta my life!’

  ‘We know that,’ Lopez said. ‘We’re not here recruiting, we’re here to figure out why so many people have gone missing into the damned crazy cult.’

  Arnie Nimitz was a barrel–chested, stocky man who had once probably been a force to reckon with, a man proud to bear a famous name and with a temperament to match. Even now he stood four–square before them, unafraid and defiant.

  ‘They’re trouble, all of ‘em, don’t know what they’re doin’!’

  ‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Henley agreed, ‘to bring them down. They’re hiding out there and we think they’re responsible for a murder up in Kankakee. We just want to know what you know, and why they kept trying to recruit you into their cult.’

  ‘Power, money, greed, all the usual human failin’s. Why, I oughta head down there to the towbar right now and kick their sorry asses myself!’

  Arnie swung the cane and almost swiped Lopez’s head with it. She ducked and stepped back gracefully, as much amused as annoyed.

  ‘You mind if we talk without the cane?’

  Arnie glanced at her as though about to launch a neutron–bomb of retorts, then he realized what he had done and his rage withered as swiftly as the sunlight was fading out toward the west.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ he offered with a shrug, ‘although there’s not much I can tell you about what they’re up to these days. Everything changed once the government started showin’ up around here.’

  Lopez and Henley exchanged a glance as they were led up the path by Arnie, to a low porch where an aged rocking chair sat. Arnie lowered himself into it with an exhalation of relief, then rested his hands on his cane as he looked up at Lopez.

  ‘Now, what brings a pretty lady like you to my door?’

  ‘The cult,’ Lopez reminded him. ‘We know they’re a problem but there haven’t been any official complaints except up in Kankakee.’

  ‘That far?’ Arnie murmured. ‘They must be havin’ a hard time finding folks these days.’

  ‘Cairo’s a ghost town,’ Lopez replied. ‘They’re having to go farther afield to pick up prospects, and one of those members ended up dying in Kankakee, shot through the head. My partner got jammed up for it but he couldn’t have committed the crime. We think the cult is behind it, and that the mayor and chief of police know something about it but can’t or won’t say.’

  ‘Sounds about right,’ Arnie replied. ‘Mayor’s office in Cairo comes with conditions you don’t hear about elsewhere. Extra pay to look away, some folks call it.’

  ‘You said that the government got involved down here,’ Lopez said, keenly aware of the sun now setting behind the trees nearby. ‘I’ve been followed by white vans since I got here. You know who they are?’

  ‘Who they are? No. Who they work for, yes,’ Arnie replied. ‘They’re the same folks who are behind the concealing of every major UFO incident in the past sixty years. Funded by our country’s black budget, which is just a name to hide things government doesn’t want Congress poking about in too much. Drawn from the military, need–to–know basis, with nobody seeing the whole picture but for a few folks at the top of the chain whom I figure aren’t government at all, but more likely a group known as Majestic Twelve.’

  ‘I’ve heard of them,’ Lopez replied, ‘mostly rumours, conspiracies, that sort of thing.’

  ‘They’re real,’ Arnie replied without force, ‘one of many powerful lobbying groups composed of wealthy benefactors keen to steer society in a direction that suits themselves and their profits. They weild enough power to decide how mankind advances, evolves even, and will stop at nothing to ensure that the status quo remains, regardless of how unfair and unjust it is to the majority of hard–working folk in this country and others. It’s why I got out of the aerospace industry.’

  ‘That’s how you know about all this?’ Henley asked.

  ‘I worked for NASA in my youth,’ Arnie replied, ‘spent fourteen years of my career there. It’s a good agency, an honest agency, but it’s been corrupted over the years by the military industrial complex, who needed NASA’s ability to launch craft into orbit to attain military supremacy in space as well as on Earth. NASA doesn’t have much choice in the matter, but we, the workers, do. I chose to leave rather than continue the lies and deceptions NASA was being forced to spew to the public about what it did and didn’t know about life elsewhere in the universe.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Lopez urged. ‘My partner’s life hangs in the balance and he’s out here somewhere with no support and half the county Sheriff’s department chasing his ass. This could go south for him real quick.’

  Arnie looked at her for a moment, and then seemed somehow satisfied. He nodded.

  ‘The cult was formed by a low–level NASA employee named Shilo Devilgne. Seems he stumbled into a meeting or some part of NASA and learned some of the high–level stuff that we know: alien craft recovered from crash sites, materials not of this earth, that kind of thing. He was one of the ones who left NASA, supposedly in protest, but instead he came down here and started his cult. I told him it was too dangerous but he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘Too dangerous,’ Henley echoed, ‘you mean like with the government following him about?’

  ‘No!’ Arnie snapped. ‘Operations like Majestic Twelve were delighted at what he had done.’

  ‘I’m confused,’ Lopez admitted. ‘You said they would be willing to kill, pretty much, to sit on what they know, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ Arnie agreed, ‘but it’s tough to recruit folks to perform hazardous operations. Having someone on the outside
willing to do it for you, who can be snuffed out in an instant if needs be, is the perfect solution to an age–old problem: how to conduct dangerous and possibly illegal experiments on US soil without coming under suspicion yourself? The answer is to let cults and other radical groups do it for you, then monitor the results.’

  ***

  XIX

  ‘You’re saying that the government are sanctioning this cult?’ Henley asked.

  ‘They have been from the very beginning,’ Arnie replied. ‘They’ve known about it for decades, but there is a complicit agreement that the cult remains unmolested by government and law enforcement interference as long as they maintain a low profile and continue to perform their experiments.’

  Lopez felt that there was something in the way Arnie said the word experiments that sent a shiver down her spine.

  ‘What is it that they’re doing down there?’ she asked him.

  Arnie took a break, staring at his hands on the cane before him for a few moments before he replied.

  ‘Back in the days of the space race, when men were first reaching orbit, there were numerous recordings of astronauts and cosmonauts identifying spacecraft accompanying them in orbit. Little was said, and usually NASA cuts off the public feed the moment such things are discussed or seen on video – these days they actually run their “live” feed a few seconds behind real–time so that if anything is seen it can be conveniently removed or cut off before anyone says anything they shouldn’t. The thing was, NASA scientists noticed a pattern in who saw what. It turned out that some astronauts were more likely to see other spacecraft than others.’

  ‘Okay,’ Henley said, ‘so maybe they were more imaginative or something?’

  Arnie smiled.

  ‘You haven’t met many astronauts,’ he said. ‘They’re less prone to imagining phenomena than most of us and more prone to analyzing what they see, it’s a part of their training. Thing is, the pattern remained. It took NASA’s psychologists a while to realize that the astronauts weren’t suffering from hallucinations or psychosis. The truth was that some were naturally attuned to seeing craft outside the window.’