THE LIGHT WE LOST: a gripping thriller

by Valera Titov

  A cool time in Chile

  Time was ticking by so fast for Glory Falcon. Before she knew where she was, Glory was strapped into her seat on a US military jet which was winging its way from San Francisco to the Chilean capital of Santiago.

  The 12 hour 21 minutes of flying time seemed like a drag to her and the stop-over in the country’s capital took another hour before the plane was airborne, again as it made it covered another 668 miles in a northern direction to get to the Atacama Desert.

  Dressed in a red blouse and jeans, Glory was all ready for an adventure that men usually went on. If she only knew what Adam was doing. While she was portraying a bit of a tom boy look to survive in the desert, Adam was wearing her dress, shoes and make up to throw the FBI agents off track.

  The military plane that was being used could basically land on any flat surface, be it an airstrip or not. It seemed like the trip was going to last forever, when eventually the plane started to descend.

  One of the FBI men looked out of the nearest window.

  “I hope that this is a landing and not an out-of-fuel situation,” he joked.

  Humor was hard to come by among the FBI men, but the agent, in his mid-twenties, seemed to have said the right thing at the right time to break the ice mood that existed inside the aircraft cabin.

  Glory’s biggest regret was that she wasn’t allowed to bring the artefact with her. The US President seemed to buy into her knowledge on most matters, but he couldn’t approve her request for the artefact to be transported with the team on the plane to Chile.

  She had made up her mind to work with the US government based on the fact that if she held back or provided false information and Adam was killed or injured on the mission, she would never forgive herself.

  The 12-strong US delegation was taken in four Range Rovers through to the main building which was home to the Very Large Telescope.

  A young receptionist greeted the group and ushered them to a small reception area and then went off to call someone who would be able to assist the visitors.

  She returned with another woman of medium height who looked to be in her mid-forties.

  “Signore, this is dama Elena Hayek,” said the receptionist to the FBI team leader, Matt Michaels, who was put on the trip because he was fluent in Spanish.

  One by one, Matt introduced his delegation to the lady.

  Elena greeted everyone with a smile, but froze when Matt introduced her to Glory, who knew exactly why.

  This was the woman whom Glory had spoken to over the phone a few months earlier when she wanted to speak to Professor Goic about Project X. Glory remembered the woman as being the Professor’s right hand person and how distraught she had been over the phone, when she explained how the Professor and his car had gone over the edge of the cliff.

  The Professor was known to be a slow driver and highly unlikely to have gone around the mountain bend at speed before disappearing over the edge.

  While the lady did not want to say so in as many words, Glory sensed that the Professor’s death may have been linked to foul play.

  Since then Glory has learnt that the Professor could well have been blinded by a sharp light that worked from Planet X on to the artefacts and then on to the unsuspecting person. This was pretty similar to what Glory had experienced when the sharp light struck her down in the University of Chicago laboratory and then again at Prom Night.

  The Professor’s former assistant looked extremely shaken when she shook hands with Glory.

  “We spoke over phone, yes? I am pleased to meet you,” she said in her best English.

  Glory smiled. She could see that the woman had been through a lot and losing her mentor in a faraway place like t-he Paranal Mountains, could not have been easy.

  The lady led the US delegation up a staircase and into a large laboratory-like room which was home to five different types of telescopes.

  The lady points at a row of chairs at a long table and requested her guests to be seated.

  “Gentlemen and lady, I understand that you would like to make use of our telescopes in order to try and pin down the exact location of some important artefacts,” began Elena.

  “That is correct, Ma’am,” said Matt Michaels as he realized that the woman was managing quite well in English language.

  “The Professor and I worked hard on this side of the project prior to his passing and let me just say that our discoveries were also met with some strange happenings around this area,” continued Elena.

  Some of the FBI men looked at each other as they wondered what type of strange happenings could take place this far away from normal civilization.

  Elena carried on.

  “There are a few ghost stories that people take about here.”

  FBI Agent Phil Rawson burst out laughing.

  “Ghost stories, please. You aren’t going to tell me that intelligent scientists like yourselves believe in that stuff?”

  Elena wiped her right hand over her face.

  “Except for the Professor and myself, no other staff wanted to come near this place after 18h00,” she said.

  “The Professor and I were very close. We worked together for a long time.”

  Being a female, Glory could sense the situation out better than her male counterparts could. She sensed that the Professor and Elena had been romantically involved, but life experienced had made the planetology graduate more streetwise.

  The Professor, by all accounts, had been much older than his assistant. Was it true love at play or did Elena had an ulterior motive? Which team was she playing for with regards to the discovery of the artefacts?

  Matt Michaels checked his mobile phone more out of routine than because he was expecting a call. He looked down and saw a missed call but the number of the caller wasn’t visible.

  “Signore Matt, the mobile phone signal out here is pretty poor on a good day,” said Elena.

  “You really are on the outskirts of the human race out here.”

  Matt was pretty confident that if head office needed to get hold of him, they would via the aircraft communications system.

  “Ms Elena, you were about to tell us some ghost stories,” prompted Phil Rawson.

  “Yes, Signore,” she said.

  “Do you know the story about Gabriel Garcia?”

  The FBI men looked at each other. The name didn’t ring a bell to any of them.

  “Who was he, Ma’am?” asked Matt.

  “Signore, Gabriel Garcia was the richest man ever in Colombia,” she began.

  Phil couldn’t resist to ask: “How did he make his money?”

  The other FBI men giggled. It was well known that if you made big bucks in Colombia it was probably generated via the drug trade.

  “Gabriel made his money through horse racing, but you know how it goes… when you climb the ladder, you create enemies too.”

  “So what happened to good, old Gabriel?” asked Phil with a wink to his colleagues?”

  “One day when Gabriel was alone at his mansion about forty miles south from here, he was visited by some book keepers. They had been convinced that Gabriel’s horses were going to win, and they did.”

  Änd…?” Phil spurred her on.

  “Well, the local police found Gabriel’s head in a different room to the rest of his body,” explained Elena.

  “So how does this link in with the solar system or Planet X?” asked Phil.

  “Later tonight when the sun has set, I will show you,” replied Elena.

  “One of the smaller planets that will be then visible, looks just like the head of a horse. It is affectionately known as Planet Gabriel.”

  The FBI men did their best to hide a laugh.

  “Some staff members who have worked late at night in this building in the past, have heard horse noises and also horse hooves on the tiled corridor here,” said Elena.

  Phil looked at Matt.

  Neither believed in ghosts and Phil was moments away from asking Elena if the staff in
the building consumed large amounts of alcohol after hours or not. He was convinced that the Gabriel Garcia story was someone’s imagination rather than fact. However, he did not know the local territory and thought best to settle in for a few days, just in-case some strange experiences did actually happen to him.

  Phil cleared his throat.

  “Ms Elena, do you have any more exciting ghost stories to tell?” asked Phil in jest.

  “Well, there is the one about Uncle Sergio,” she said.

  “He used to be a cleaner in this building for many years, until his fatal accident.”

  Matt couldn’t resist asking.

  “What accident?”

  “We always tell our staff not to stay along here at night,” began Elana.

  “There is a great fear among our less experienced staff that if you spot the ‘Black Hole’ through the telescope, you just may disappear in it. Uncle Sergio always dreamt of looking through the telescope, but because they are very expensive, we try and avoid un-skilled persons making use of them when the experienced staff are not around.”

  “I can only believe that Uncle Sergio looked through the telescope one night and disappeared down the Black Hole because he has never been seen since,” concluded Elena.

  “Ït is a sad story.’”

  Matt gulped not out of sadness over the disappearance of Uncle Sergio but more because of the stories that he had been made to listen too. It was almost like these scientists had developed worlds of their own. Perhaps it happens if one spends too much time staring down a telescope into absolute darkness.

  “Thanks for those stories, Ms Elena,” said Matt.

  “I think we need to let Ms Falcon get to work. We need to find the whereabouts of the artefacts in Colombia as we have a ground team waiting to survey the area which will be identified from this side.”

  Elena sighed.

  “I must warn you, it is not as easy as you think,” she said.

  “It may take days, weeks or months for the area to be identified.”

  This time Phil gulped. He was a tough FBI agent but this place was starting to freak him out. Not the thought about ghosts, but he really didn’t want to stay here any longer than what was required.

  “There is plenty of coffee, tea, milk and sugar in the lobby outside so the rest of you guys can make yourself comfortable while Ms Glory works. As I say, the process might not be a short one.”

  Matt nodded to Glory as if to tell her to get cracking with her task.

  Phil joined Matt and the rest of the FBI agents outside the laboratory as they took turns making jokes at the expense of Elena.

  “I am not sure if the lift goes to the top floor with that one,” Phil said, as he held his ribs which were aching from laughter.

  “It seems like the lights are on but nobody is home,” giggled Agent Paul Wilkinson.

  “It’s like she is one sandwich short of a full picnic basket,” chipped in Agent George Knutsen.

  Inside the laboratory, Glory set to work. She was also looking forward to finishing the task as soon as possible. The longer she left Adam out there in dangerous territory, the more chance that something could go wrong.

  All this time, Planet X’s chance of destroying the human race was increasing. Would Adam and Glory be able to save the human race from the killer radiation?

  Glory put her hand on her chest and felt her heart beating louder than she could ever remember.

  Tick, tick, tick… Time waits for no man!

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Stalker

  Adam Kennedy dressed up as Glory Falcon woke up as the small plane began its decent for landing in Leticia.

  He wiped his eyes and something made him look to his left where a man in his late twenties was looking at him. Adam felt uncomfortable as he wasn’t sure if the man found him to be beautiful with Glory’s lipstick and make up on, or whether his false identity had been cracked.

  He looked straight in front of him and ordered another cola soft drink from the waitress who brought it to him on a small tray, as the usual trolley refreshment service was now suspended due to landing procedures.

  Once he had embarked from the aircraft, Adam realized that he needed to empty his bladder after consuming several soft drink beverages during the flights from San Francisco to Leticia.

  He was about to walk into the men’s bathroom wearing Glory’s yellow summer dress, when an airport worker tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Dama,” said the worker, who pointed towards the ladies’ a bit further down the passage.

  Adam blushed slightly in realizing his mistake and headed off into the ladies’ room, which was quite full.

  He waited in a queue before finally getting his chance to enter a toilet cubicle. In running his hands over his face, he was coming to terms with the harsh realities of how life was turning out for him. After relieving himself from a standing up position, he flushed the toilet, straightened the dress and headed out to wash his hands.

  As he left the bathroom area at the airport, his gut-feel told him that he was being followed. In turning around, he could spot any likely candidate at first, and headed straight out the main door to the taxi area.

  Again he looked back, but saw nobody. Either his follower was being very discreet or his mind was playing tricks on him.

  Adam waved at a taxi driver who was standing at the exit area and the man was happy to receive such a beautiful new client. He helped Adam with his luggage and then opened the door courteously to help the young lady’ to climb into the car.

  “A donde?” asked the driver, as he requested the destination from his passenger.

  Adam was not fluent in Spanish so he showed the driver a note that he had kept safely inside the seam of the dress. He could hardly keep the artefact location address in his wallet or rucksack in-case of being robbed along the way.

  “Si, Signore, aproximadamente 20 millas,” replied the driver, in indicating that the destination was twenty miles away from the airport.

  The yellow taxi cab headed off at great speed which concerned the passenger. After all, the Colombian roads were the best in the world and he hadn’t come all this way in search of the other artefacts to perish in a road accident.

  The driver of the yellow taxi cab kept glancing in the vehicle’s rearview mirror.

  This caused Adam to become nervous too.

  Ëstamos siendo seguido (we are being followed),” said the driver, who immediately put his foot flat on the accelerator of the vehicle to such an extent that Adam flew across the back seat of the car and had to hang on to the front passenger seat for dear life.

  So Adam’s gut-feel had not been wrong after all. He had attracted a stalker of some sorts – either someone who fancied him in a yellow summer dress or the more likely outcome was someone who thought that he had the original artefact in his possession.

  Adam looked out of the rear window and saw a grey Isuzu vehicle in hot pursuit of the taxi cab that he was travelling in.

  “Mantente baja, no sabemos si estas personas tienen armas de fuego (stay low, we don’t know if these people have guns),” said the taxi driver of the yellow cab to Adam.

  Adam obeyed the instruction but had noticed that the road was alongside a hill. If one of these vehicles went over the edge, it would be years before anyone found it as the drop down to the bottom seemed to be a substantial one.

  Then a loud noise was heard coming from the grey Isuzu. Adam cringed. Was his taxi driver right? Had someone inside the chasing Isuzu opened fire on the yellow cab?

  Adam peeked out of the window and saw that the chasing vehicle had stopped after one of its tyres had given up the ghost.

  “Detener (stop)!” commanded Adam in a women’s voice and the taxi driver put his foot hard on the brake pedal with the impact flinging his passenger hard against the front seat.

  Adam saw a man climb out of the grey Isuzu and draw a hand gun and take aim at the yellow cab. Then a loud hooting sound was heard and before t
he shooter could fire his pistol, a large freight truck had come up behind him. The man turned but it was too late and the huge vehicle demolished him, with his body flung to the side of the road.

  It was clear from the impact between the truck and the man that he had absolutely no chance of survival.

  The driver of the grey Isuzu ran towards the yellow cab with his hands in the air. He seemed to be an innocent party who had been asked by the armed man to chase down the yellow cab which Adam was travelling in.

  “Por favor no me dispares (please don’t shoot me)!” shouted the driver of the Isuzu vehicle.

  He entered into a brief conversation with Adam’s cab driver and then turned to where the ‘lady’ in the yellow dress had been standing.

  By this time Adam had made his way down the road to where the body of the deceased man lay. Adam checked for some form of identification of the man and it didn’t take long for him to realize that he had now entered into something much deeper than he ever could have imagined.

  Adam’s eyes surveyed the man’s identification card.

  Alexi Volkov – Bratva – Boyevik, he read.

  Adam wiped his brow and pulled his wig straight.

  He knew that the ‘Bratva’ was a Russian network of organized crime groups, while ‘Boyevik’ meant ‘warrior’ in the form of men who were ordered to recruit new men to the group and handle the real dirty work.

  At least Adam knew that Alexi Volkov wasn’t chasing after him to get a supper date.

  Adam knew that he couldn’t stereotype his thoughts. Just because the Bratva were after the artefacts too, that didn’t mean that the Russian government planned on outsmarting their US counterparts. There was no reason yet to accuse the Kremlin of foul play against the Carmichael administration.

  The Kremlin administration could well be just as anxious to bring the Bratva to book as many other law enforcement agencies across the globe, including the US’ very own FBI.

  Adam tucked the deceased man’s identity card into the seam of his dress which also held the exact location where the artefacts were being hidden, and returned to the yellow cab. He nodded towards the two vehicle drivers and climbed back inside through the rear right hand side door.