“Then do it, Charles! Get it over with!”
“I can’t, Goddamn your soul. You know that I’ve been defending you from Henry Vorona for years. Ever since CIA saddled me with him, in fact. If I tell the others just how royally you’ve fucked things up, I’m gonna end up sitting on a vote of no confidence, and guess who’s gonna join you in hell? No, Mike, I’d like to see you good and dead, I have to admit that, but I damn well can’t, because the bullet that goes through your head goes through mine, too.”
“Charles, I’m going to fix this.”
“You’d better, because you are talking about the entire human species being enslaved, Mike. Because that is what this is about. Somewhere out there, they’re coming. And they will do this. They will do this, Mike. Just remember one thing, we have to get that child before they change him, because if we don’t, God only knows what kind of abilities and powers he’s going to have.”
“I need people. I need backup.”
“You can’t have a damn soul!”
“Charles—”
“I can give you equipment and I can give you money, but not people. The second I do that, Vorona finds out and both of our throats get cut.”
Mike had assumed that he’d have a trained team of experts. But he could see Charles’s point all too clearly. Unless he fixed this, and did it quietly, they were both dead men.
“What’s your plan, Mike? I want to know your exact plan.”
“Forget Adam, forget Glass, Langford, all of them. Go for the kid now, fast, next twenty-four hours. Then worry about everything else. Use the TR to get me into Wilton with absolutely no chance of detection.”
“The grays will know you’re there.”
“Not right away. Remember, I’ve seen this mind-reading business up close for years. Distance is a big issue. They’re not going to find me until I’m physically near the kid. But that’s the one place I’ll never be.”
“You’re a sniper or what?”
“There will be no direct approach to him whatsoever. But he will be killed, Charles. Coming from me, I know it’s not worth much to you, but I do guarantee it.”
To his credit, Charles made no comment, but the expression on his face eloquently communicated his contempt for what he undoubtedly regarded as outrageous braggadocio on the part of a proven incompetent. “You know how to access the TR?”
“Yes, sir. You’ll recall that I set up the security.”
Charles turned around in his chair. The Capitol glowed in the distance, the Washington Monument beyond. “What do you think this’ll be like in a thousand years, Mike?”
“In a thousand years? If we succeed, it’ll be the holy city, the center of heaven.”
Charles said nothing more, and Mike took that as a signal to leave, for which he was very damned grateful.
He had a good plan, and if he acted quickly enough, he thought there was a reasonable chance that it would work. The important thing was to push all consequences out of his mind. His life being at stake was bad enough, but looking at the larger picture was enough to freeze a man’s soul.
As he drove to National Airport, he called his personal travel agency and booked the next civilian flight he could, which was Delta to Atlanta. He parked in long-term parking, then went to the ticket counter and got his ticket. He bought a newspaper and went to the gate to wait until the agent arrived. He did nothing out of the ordinary.
When the agent appeared, he checked in and selected his seat.
Having set up this false trail, he then left the airport and hailed a cab, which he took to a small office building a short distance from his house. He descended into the garage, took out some keys, and started another car. This one was a Buick from the mid-eighties, nondescript compared to the Mercedes he kept here in Washington.
He drove to the Beltway, then took 95 up to Baltimore, exiting onto 695 toward Owings Mills. An hour and a half after he left the garage, he was exiting onto Painters’ Mills Road. As he drove up Caves Road, he entered a more isolated area. He turned off onto an unmarked road and soon came to what appeared to be a construction zone. From here, the road appeared to be impassable. He took a right, and it turned out that what looked like brush was something quite different. The car moved through the brush and trees as if they weren’t there—which, indeed, they weren’t. This was a state-of-the-art holographic projection, one of the most advanced camouflage devices in the Pentagon’s arsenal. The design had come from Adam. It was deployed sparingly, out of fear that the press would get wind of it. If the origin of any of these technologies was discovered, the whole deception would become unglued.
The result of this was that certain select areas of military technology were stunningly ahead of public understanding. To accomplish his purpose, he would use an array of that technology.
Central to his plan was a device that lay in a large underground hangar in these woods. Its development had taken forty years. It had cost perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars, paid for by misuse of the gigantic criminal enterprise known officially as the “black budget” which was really a cover for making select people rich at the expense of the American taxpayer, by using national security to conceal the theft.
The TR, or Triangular Aircraft, officially designated TR-A1, had also cost the lives of scientists who had come to a fatal eureka moment. When they realized that they were working on alien technology, they became too dangerous to be allowed to live. Test pilots had died, too, perfecting its capabilities, as had engineers who had suffered mercury poisoning in the fabrication of its extraordinarily toxic power plant.
The reason for the extreme secrecy was twofold. Not only did they have to protect this device from the public, they had to protect it from the grays. They had gotten every kind of lie from Adam and Bob, most of them infinitely subtle, and as a result had gone down a thousand blind alleys and consumed literally vast wealth, indeed, so much wealth that every American citizen, for the past fifty years, had worked a fourth of his life in support of the development of technologies he wasn’t even allowed to know existed, let alone gain any benefit from.
He came to a certain spot in the narrow roadway where the radio, which he had tuned to an unused frequency, suddenly began to make a faint, high-pitched sound. He stopped the car, got out, pulled back a stone that lay at the roadside, and pressed his hand against a silver disk that had been concealed beneath it. A moment later, the small hill before him opened. He drove the car in.
Inside, it was absolutely dark and silent. The only light came from a single red bulb, glowing softly. As Mike strode toward it, the outlines of an enormous object became visible immediately above his head. It was a triangle, totally black, measuring hundreds of feet on a side.
Its power plant involved the rotation of a ring of a coherent mercury plasma at extremely high speed, reducing the overall weight of the craft by 40 percent. The rest of the weight reduction was accomplished with a very old technology. The triangle had to be as large as it was because, for the rest of its lift, it relied on helium. It contained the most sophisticated surveillance and camouflage technology known, but it was not much faster than an old-fashioned dirigible.
Years ago, it had become obvious from Eamon Glass’s talks with Adam and the stories told by Mr. Crew, that mankind had lost a very sophisticated civilization to a ferocious war that was fought some time around fifteen thousand years ago. The combination of the use of devastating weaponry and the rise in sea levels that had taken place when the last ice age ended twelve thousand years ago, had first pulverized and then drowned this civilization.
It lived on only in myth, most notably in the Vedas of ancient India. But there was almost enough information there, in the descriptions of Vimina aircraft, to reproduce the power plants of the distant past. Careful questioning of Adam and Bob had filled in the missing pieces of information.
Large though they were, the TRs, of which there were ten on the books and two off, were no more difficult to fly than a small general aviation
aircraft.
As Mike continued toward the faint red light, his head was just a few inches from the lower surface of the craft. The light marked the entrance, a simple hatch that was slid open by hand.
He withdrew the ladder, which gave a bit under his weight as he climbed aboard. He took the long tunnel to the flight deck, pulling himself along on a stretcher as the crew had in the old B-36 bomber.
This flight deck, though, was very different from what a bomber pilot from the fifties might have seen. It wasn’t even meant to be flown by a pilot, but rather flown in by a reconnaissance expert. The plane all but piloted itself.
Mike used a penlight to find the code panel, and input the thirty-three-digit code that activated the craft. A moment later, its amber control panel came to life. The basic aircraft instruments were there, of course, airspeed, bank and turn, altitude. There were others though, that were not so familiar. Most of these involved the craft’s extraordinary surveillance capabilities.
Mike keyed Wilton, Kentucky, into the autopilot. He pressed the three buttons that activated the plasma. Behind him, there was a distinct “pop,” the loudest sound the device would ever make. The altimeter began to wind up—but not far. It was a very unusual sort of altimeter, because it could measure anything from thousands of feet to inches. The plane’s operational altitude was, essentially, ground level. Unlike a cruise missile, it did not rely on comparing a picture of the terrain it was crossing to its memory. Instead, it had the intelligence and the instruments it needed to examine the terrain it was crossing, and adjust its altitude accordingly.
He watched the altimeter rise to 60 meters, then felt a slight shudder as the ship’s propulsion system, which used the Earth’s magnetic field, slowly began to impel it forward. It took ten minutes for him to reach top speed.
The craft sought out forests and mountains, only rarely slipping across a town, and never a city. From ten feet away, it made no sound at all.
The flight from Owings Mills to Wilton covered 433 kilometers and took just over two hours. As Mike flew, he prepared instrument after instrument, most of them gained from his own hard work managing the empaths, extracting bits and pieces of information from his grays.
Sound, in the craft, was as carefully managed as all other emissions. Even switches had been carefully damped so that pressing a button made nary a click. The fans that controlled the craft’s altitude were entirely silent, designed so that the air they emitted was always exactly the same temperature as the air they took in. Just as it had no sound signature, and at night essentially no visual signature, it also had no heat signature and no radar signature. Even the pilot’s body heat was dissipated by being used in production of electricity.
The TR could fail; if the mercury plasma malfunctioned, the craft would be incinerated inside of a second. During development it had happened many times. There was never anything left, only ash drifting in the sky. In 1980 in Texas, some civilians had been close-up witnesses to one of these failures. One of them got cancer and filed a suit against the U.S. government, but the judge was prevailed upon and the case went nowhere. The civilian died soon thereafter, thankfully.
He flew on. When he was within thirty miles of Wilton, he flipped another switch, and something happened that would have awed anyone who had not expected it.
This was a technology that they had developed by analyzing the stories of a close-encounter witness called Travis Walton, whom they had also discredited in every possible way, making a national joke out of him so that the public would never be convinced by his tale.
Why the grays had taken him on a ride was not clear. But they had, and on that ride, they had made their ship disappear around him, so that he appeared to be floating in the stars. Such a capability would be extremely useful for a reconnaissance craft, and Eamon had gradually obtained from Bob knowledge of how to design materials that would change their opacity by the simple application of heat. He pressed a button and was rewarded with the apparent complete disappearance of everything around him except the control panel itself. He floated now over the broad hills of eastern Kentucky, a man alone in the night sky.
The ship was on a course that would take it directly over Oak Road. He had only to watch the world slipping by fifty feet beneath his feet. He saw horses running in the moonlight, he passed over an elegant farmhouse and barns, so close that he felt as if he could have reached down and touched a weathervane. He smelled nothing of the night air and felt nothing of the cold, because the temperature within the ship was carefully controlled. There was a heat signature, of course, but it was no greater than that of the breath of a swooping owl.
The ship’s voice said in his earphone, “Two minutes.”
He turned on the camouflage. This drained electrical power, but also provided an additional level of protection from notice from above and below. It consisted of thousands of tiny light-emitting diodes served by cameras on the upper and lower surfaces of the ship. From below, an observer would see the night sky under which the ship was passing. From above, the image that was projected was of the ground.
“One minute.”
He saw light ahead, winking in among the trees. Soon a small neighborhood of tract houses appeared. He stopped the ship. Now he activated the infrared sensors, trained them on the first house in the tiny development. Two adults, one registering 98.6, the other 97.9. An infant, registering 99.1.
The ship was so low that it was buffeted by gas fumes coming out of the furnace chimney. He “opened” the house by activating the whole array of surveillance instruments.
An ultrasensitive receiver read the electroencephalograms of the occupants, and provided a readout of their state, whether awake or asleep, and a level-of-awareness index. One adult was fully awake. One adult was registering mostly Alpha. Dozing, according to the computer’s interpretation. The infant was profoundly asleep.
It seemed to him that he was not likely to be dealing with an infant, because this child would surely need to be at least fairly mature by 2012.
He went to the next house. In it, he saw two adults. Deeper in the structure was another person, perhaps a small adult, perhaps an older child. The two adults were physically motionless but their minds were alert. He deployed the microphone system. He heard a familiar voice, and for a moment was shocked. How could he know somebody in that house? Who would it be?
Then he realized that it was Grissom. They were watching CSI.
In the basement, there was another sound, a continuous noise identified as a small electric motor. Could it be a shaver? No, it was moving over too broad an area. He visualized the movement and immediately had his answer. The person in the basement was using a model train set. Therefore, it was not a small adult, but a child.
He moved to the other two houses, then, gathering the structural plans into the computer, identifying approximate ages and sexes of the occupants.
When he was finished, he had all the humans and all the animals. He then found the open space behind the houses that the grays had used on their revealing foray. He dropped down into it. He wanted to step on the actual ground, but he must not leave the ship unless necessary. It had been designed to allow the occupant to reconnoiter on the ground, and was intelligent enough to protect itself, even for extended periods, but still, no chances were to be taken unless they were essential.
He increased altitude to a thousand feet, then went online again. Using Expedia, he found motels in Wilton. He input the address of the local Days Inn and was carried there.
He then observed the local terrain for heights. It turned out that the top of a grain elevator was the highest point in the area. He flew until he found it, an enormous structure in the center of the small community.
He went close. There, on one of the silos, was where he would place his antenna. Nearby, he saw a field. He dropped down.
Putting the ship’s remote into his pocket, he slid back along the access tunnel and climbed out. The ship would find a hiding place on its own. It would
not go to altitude, but rather would hide just above the surface somewhere, probably back in the hills that surrounded the town. When he looked up, even though he knew that it was there, and not but a few feet overhead, he could not see it.
As it departed, he felt the brief wash of one of its altitude control fans.
He crossed the field, then walked into the lobby of the Days Inn.
“Hey,” he said to the sleepy clerk, “got a room?”
“Yes, sir,” the young man said, coming out of the tiny office where he had been watching TV. Mike had a dozen false identities to choose from. He checked in under the name of Harold A. Hill, salesman. It was one of his favorites, because nobody ever wants to talk to a salesman.
He went through the lobby and crossed a bleak courtyard to his room. He entered it, turned on the light, and used the bathroom. Naked now, he slipped into the bed.
Tomorrow morning, he would scout the town for a Radio Shack. To complete his mission, he needed a few commonly available items. He lay down and closed his eyes. He was deeply tired. Deeply, deeply tired. Curse Lauren and Andy, who were both out there in the wind doing God knew what. The grays were on the warpath and extremely dangerous.
He wished he was a damn fool salesman.
PART SIX
CHILD OF HALLOWS
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come . . .
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
“Ode on Intimations of Immortality Recollected from Early Childhood”
SEVENTEEN
CONNER HAD WAITED ON THE steps for Paulie to leave school. Usually, they would be carpooled home by Mom or Maggie, but that had obviously ended.
The Grays Page 18
