“I’ll check her out when I get there,” I said, “and give you an update.”
Top leaned into the cab and nodded for me to mute the call. “You might as well go, Cap’n,” he said. “The Farm Boy and me’ll stay here and secure the scene until the techs get here. Take the Betty Boop and get on your way.”
Bunny snorted. “Thought you weren’t going to call it Betty Boop.”
“Why don’t you keep your mouth shut when grown folks is talking?”
Bunny flipped him the bird.
I unmuted Doc Holliday and put her on speaker. “Okay, I’m heading out now.”
“You fit to drive?” she asked.
“Far as I know. Got some scratches and burns, but nothing major. But, listen, Doc … Church gave us a big speech about how outside the box you are when it comes to this kind of stuff. So, if you have any insights, maybe now might be a good time to start.”
She gave that a beat. “Fair enough. Okay, what do we have? Green blood, MPP pistols, and missing time. That builds a certain kind of case. Tell me, Joe, did you see anything in the sky before you blanked out?”
“No…”
“Really? Because you don’t sound like you’re sure.”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Actually, I’m nowhere near sure.”
“Then do me a favor,” said Doc. “Don’t ask questions, just do it, okay?”
“Sure. Whatever. Call it.”
“Close your eyes. Don’t ask why, just do it.” I sighed and closed my eyes and she immediately asked, “What color was the aircraft?”
“It was black,” I said. And then stopped. I opened my eyes and looked at Top, then Bunny. They wore expressions of astonishment that were probably a mirror of my own. We all glanced up at the sky. “I never said we saw an aircraft.”
“No,” she giggled. “Now, sweet cheeks, tell me what shape it was.”
I swallowed a lump the size of a regulation softball. “It was a triangle.”
I heard her give a gasp of pure delight. “Well, jumping june bugs, boys, you got yourself a gen-ewe-ine T-craft. Now how about that?”
Top closed his eyes. “Son of a bitch.”
INTERLUDE FIFTEEN
ROYAL PRINCE ALFRED HOSPITAL
CAMPERDOWN, AUSTRALIA
SIX YEARS AGO
Ari Kostas was in a coma for days, but gradually swam back to consciousness. Valen visited him every day, even when Ari was in a coma. He did not know why he did it, and wrestled with the questions through long bedside hours. He certainly did not like or trust Ari—the man was a psychopath and criminal devoid of any loyalties beyond his bankbook and his cock. And yet, Valen knew that if he were to sit down and make a list of his “friends,” there would be a few names, but most would be lies.
Valen kept in touch with some friends from Russia—the few who had been educated by Gadyuka on how to communicate with the man now officially known as Valen Oruraka. The fact that they had known him by his birth name, Oleg Sokolov, was something they had to erase from their minds. Access to certain jobs and other perks greased this process. And the e-mails that went back and forth were mostly coded messages about various aspects of work for the New Soviet.
The truth was, he had no actual friends. The closest thing to that definition was Ari Kostas. That was an ugly, disfiguring truth. Sometimes, as Valen sat beside the comatose man, he wept. Passing nurses were touched by the depth of feeling this nice-looking young man had for his injured friend.
Gadyuka was back in Russia, and Valen was under orders to sit tight and wait for further instructions. She’d taken the crystal gun and the hand with her, and refused to discuss them with Valen. It left him torn and confused and lost.
One bad evening at the hospital, Valen took a notepad and actually wrote down the names of everyone he had killed. In cases where he didn’t know the name, he assigned a unique nickname. When he got to eighteen names, he staggered to his feet and barely made it to the bathroom in time to throw up in the toilet. He washed his mouth out with handfuls of water, and then tore up the list and flushed the pieces. The following night he wrote the list again, this time adding the names of everyone who died at the dig site. And again the next night. Each time he flushed the ripped pieces away.
He closed his eyes as he sat beside Ari’s bed, but there was no escape even in personal darkness. It took him straight back to his hotel suite with Gadyuka and the cooler and those four dreadful, impossible words.
Oh, God. They’re back.
“Who are they?” he asked aloud. “Jesus Christ, who the hell are they?”
Gadyuka had refused to answer and quickly left, taking the gun and the hand with her.
“Valen…,” whispered a ghostly voice. His eyes snapped open to see Ari Kostas looking at him. Small, wasted, pale, and terrified.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
EN ROUTE IN MARYLAND
Ghost was happy enough to leave that freaky stretch of road, but he wasn’t actually happy. I sure as hell wasn’t laughing and singing all the way, either. My tension level dropped a small notch with every mile, but all that did was free my mind up to ask about ten million damn questions.
Like … T-craft? Holy shit. Far as I knew, all of those damn things had been reduced to rubble when the air force hit Howard Shelton’s secret base with a whole wave of AGM-65H/K Maverick air-to-ground missiles. DMS teams tore the rubble apart to make sure everything Majestic 3 built was destroyed. It was. We made damn sure of that. And yet …
That’s what had flown over the road in the microsecond before me and my guys blanked out. A T-craft. Now that I’d found that fragment of a memory, it was very clear and very real. However, I’d only gotten so brief a glimpse that I could never be sure if it was the Shelton model, the Chinese version that buzzed the Seventh Fleet, or one belonging to someone else. And by “someone else” I mean the holders of the original patent. My imagination kept trying to fill in the blanks, and I had to fight that. All I knew for sure was that it was big—maybe fifty feet per side, and perfectly triangular, with glowing white lights in each of its three symmetrical wings.
So, I had nowhere to go with that, but it opened up so many doors of speculation. Nothing coming through those doors made me a particularly happy guy. On one hand, if another country had managed to develop working T-craft, then we were back to the brink of another arms race, especially if they wanted to follow Shelton’s insane plan of using them as suicide bombers. On the other hand, if that ship came from somewhere else—off-planet, say, or sideways through a hole in dimensional reality—then how seriously screwed were we? Rhetorical question. We were bent over a barrel and the universe was about to have its way with us.
So, who was in the ship we saw?
The Cop and Modern Man in my head kept spinning theories, but the Killer wasn’t looking north or south, east or west. He was crouched in the tall grass watching the skies.
Green blood. Damn. I reached over to pet Ghost, telling myself I was comforting him. I lie to myself like that a lot. Ghost lets me.
INTERLUDE SIXTEEN
ROYAL PRINCE ALFRED HOSPITAL
CAMPERDOWN, AUSTRALIA
SIX YEARS AGO
“So, what are we talking about here,” croaked Ari a few nights later. He was getting stronger, but not yet able to leave the hospital. “Little green men from outer space?”
Valen, worn and unshaven, shook his head. “I … don’t know.”
Ari snorted. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You can lie to your scary little girlfriend, but I’ve known you too well and too long. You know something, don’t you?”
“Know? No, I don’t know. All I have are some theories, and some stuff I found on the Net, but before you tell me it’s all bullshit, I—”
“Valen,” said Ari in his raspy voice, “we found a lizard-man’s hand in a rock wall and then a machine made out of half-a-million-year-old quartz blew us up. Not sure about you, my friend, but I find that I’m open to all sorts of possibilities.”
Valen nodded. He went out into the hall and returned with two cold cans of Coke, opened them, and handed one to Ari. “Before all this,” he said slowly, “I believed I knew the shape of the world. Since we found that damn gun and that double-damned machine, I’ve been reassessing a lot of my long-standing beliefs. Maybe we’ve been looking at this wrong, Ari. I’m beginning to wonder if my uncle was talking about doorways between here and somewhere else.”
“Like where? Outer space?”
“No,” said Valen. “Within the UFO and ancient alien communities there’s one viewpoint that the distances between star systems is so great that it’s improbable to suggest that aliens were able to cross those light-years to come to Earth. Why would they? If they were somehow able to see our world and recognize it as habitable or interesting enough to want to visit, by the time they actually arrived, the world they viewed would have changed. Even if they were relatively close, the distances are too great and there is no workable theory for exceeding the speed of light.”
“Even if you build a big enough engine? Maybe that’s what the green machine was, have you thought about that?”
“Not a chance, Ari. Particles that have mass require energy to accelerate them. The closer to the speed of light you get a particle, the more energy is required to go faster. This is because the particles themselves get more massive in proportion to the increased velocity.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“It means that a spaceship can’t fly faster than the speed of light, and the exoplanets we’ve discovered in what they call the ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ meaning the habitable zone for life as we know it, are too far away. The closest one is Proxima Centauri, which is four light-years away.”
“That’s close.”
“No, it’s not. Look, if you break a light-year down to smaller units, the distance between the Earth and our sun is eight light-minutes away. It would take our fastest spacecraft months to travel that distance. Now do the math on a light-year. There are over five hundred thousand light minutes in each year. Now multiply that by four, and that’s just Proxima Centauri. Try to grasp how big space is.”
Ari nodded. “Okay, okay, so it would take a long time.”
“Centuries. Unless what people call aliens aren’t coming from other planets.”
“What’s the alternative?”
“Look, Ari, maybe the artifacts we’ve found don’t come from outer space but from there.” He pointed to the wall.
Ari looked confused and then understanding blossomed in his eyes.
“Doors?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“Doors,” agreed Valen.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE HOWELL RESIDENCE
ALDIE, VIRGINIA
When no one could reach the Speaker’s wife by phone, text, or e-mail, Holly Bellmeyer, a senior aide from his office, had two local police officers meet her outside of the Howell residence. No one answered the bell. No one answered when they knocked, nor even when the police loudly announced that they were on the doorstep.
“No one’s home,” suggested one of the officers.
Bellmeyer went and peered in through the small windows on the garage door. “Mrs. Howell’s car is still there. And her daughter’s rental.” She turned and pointed to a five-year-old Toyota parked in the shade under a maple tree. “That’s the cleaning lady’s car.”
“Tony,” said the older officer, “take a look at this.”
“Whatcha got, Al?” asked Tony, hurrying over.
Officer Al Costas was kneeling to peer at the welcome mat. The mat was made from indoor-outdoor carpet and had a pattern of fluttering birds. There were various colored dots woven into the pattern, but a few of them were very dark and glistened as if wet.
His partner, Tony Shapley, slowed to a walk and stared.
“Oh, God,” said Bellmeyer, taking a half step back. “Is that…?”
She didn’t finish the statement. The looks on the officers’ faces gave her the answer. Tony called it in, explaining that they had found what appeared to be bloodstains, and about the cars. He was advised to determine the status of the Speaker’s family.
The officers verified that their body cameras were on, then made Bellmeyer go stand behind their cruiser. They hammered on the door again and got the same empty response. Careful not to smudge any prints, Al tried the handle and found that it turned. The door wasn’t locked and it swung inward with an illusion of quiet invitation.
The officers stepped inside.
“Holy mother of God,” murmured Tony.
What they found was unspeakable. The bodycams recorded it all. The lake of blood that covered the expensive tiled floor and soaked the imported area rugs. The ragged islands that rose, large and small, throughout that crimson expanse. A piece of shoulder. A hand. Legs. Heads arranged in a row on the couch, with mouths opened as if screaming.
Screaming.
Screaming.
Without sound.
Above the heads, above the couch, painted in sloppy letters across the living room wall, were two words. Analysis would later show that the letters were written in mingled blood from all of the victims. The message was:
DEEP SILENCE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
BALTIMORE—WASHINGTON PARKWAY
MARYLAND
Church finally called me, and the first thing he said to me was, “Can you confirm that the men who attacked you were Closers?”
Not “Hey, Joe, you okay?” Not “Sorry you had such a shitty day.” No. Not him. If I had a crowbar stuck through my head he wouldn’t even express sympathy that my favorite Orioles cap would no longer fit. Mr. Warmth he is not.
“They were dressed in black suits,” I said, “wore some kind of bullet-resistant body armor under their clothes, they shot at us with MMPs, and I’m pretty sure their escape car was a T-craft. So, on the whole…? Yeah, there was a pretty good chance they were freaking Closers.”
He was quiet for a moment. “And the green blood…?”
“Was blood.”
“How sure are you?”
“Pretty damn.”
“Then go over it from the beginning. Omit no detail.”
His coldness and precision, and the demands those placed on his subordinates, often had a specific effect. You don’t want to disappoint Church. You want his approval, because that approval means something. He isn’t just our boss, he’s the kind of person whose personal standards are so high that his evaluation of you often helps define you. I know, that sounds a little needy on my part, but it’s not. He’s been in the fight longer than I have, and probably longer than I’ve been alive. He’s won the fights he’s been in, and the fact that the world still has its wheels on the rails has a lot to do with his being there to set things right. Do I exaggerate? No. I really don’t.
So, as I drove, I went over it all. Everything since Top picked up the follow car. Church listened without comment until I was done. Then he made me go over certain portions of it again, focusing on the things the agents said, to how they said them.
“Bug accessed the Calpurnia-MindReader Q1 substation in your vehicle, Captain,” he said. “The onboard cameras and mics did not record the incident. Apparently, from the moment the follow car crossed your spike net all onboard surveillance and telemetric systems in your car blanked out. We lost the signals from the drones, too.”
The drizzle had slowed to random spitting, so I adjusted the wipers to intermittent as I headed toward Washington.
“What kind of jammer can knock out everything including Calpurnia and the link to MindReader?”
“If there’s something on the market like that, Captain, let me know and I’ll buy out their warehouse. However, I seriously doubt we’re going to be able to order it from anyone’s catalog.”
Traffic was heavy and it slowed to a crawl. That was fine.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Let me ask this first,” Church said. “Is it your professional opinion
that the agents you dealt with at the cemetery and at Sellers Mansion were the same kind of Closers you encountered on the road?”
I had been expecting that question.
“No,” I said. “I thought so at first, but now…? No. They were completely different.”
“Do you believe these Closers were working toward the same goal as the Secret Service agents?”
“Hunh,” I said, and thought about it, trying to play it all back in widescreen and high definition. “They both tried to arrest me and—”
“Did they, Captain?” interrupted Church. “Did they say or do anything to validate that assumption? Can you say with certainty that this was an attempt to arrest you?”
I tried not to wince because Ghost was watching and I didn’t want him to lose confidence in the basic intelligence of his pack leader. That was already shaky ground.
“No,” I said.
“Tell me the difference,” said Church, as pedantic as a patient schoolteacher.
It was a measure of how rattled I was that I needed him to do this. Doc Holliday had done her trick with visualizing the T-craft, but this was a step deeper. Inside my head, the Cop squared his shoulders, cleared his throat, and came back to work.
“They identified our vehicle and followed at a practical distance,” I said slowly. “They didn’t attempt to close on us until we made it clear we were aware of them and attempting to elude. Calpurnia established that they were driving a government car obtained through illegal means using sophisticated computer hacking.”
“Ultrasophisticated,” corrected Church. “Bug has been studying the hack of the motor pool servers and he says that whoever did it used superior skills.”
“Superior to his?”
“He wouldn’t admit to that under torture, but yes.”
“Boss,” I said, “we’re talking about details here, but I think there’s a conversation neither of us wants to have.”
“Agreed.”
“Are these the same—what’s the word? Aliens? Beings? E.T.s?—who made us give them the Majestic Black Book?”
Deep Silence Page 16
