Scarborough had gleaned what information he could about Hoover Dam from a Nevada tourist manual he’d picked up at Kansas International. The irony of the location had not been lost upon him. Arizona was perhaps the number one state for UFOs—the mystical UFO people in particular, channelers, and such, fancied that the aliens favored the rugged landscape and desert of the state, and were attracted by power nodes of crystal buried in the earth or some such nonsense. As for the dam—well, a hell of a lot of hydroelectric power was generated at that dam. It powered much of Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California. UFOs were notoriously attracted to power sources. Nonetheless, Dr. Everett Scarborough did not for a moment consider that there was any truth to Diane’s story. He considered it merely coincidence. Other, more mundane powers were at work. There was proof enough of that.
He wished he had a gun, he thought as the cactus and the hills swept by along the unwinding road. But he couldn’t have taken one on board the plane and he didn’t have the faintest idea where to get one in Las Vegas. Not that he really knew how to use one. Mac had always been after him to learn, but he never had. Still, in this kind of situation, it would be nice to have some kind of effective weapon in his hand. He had his wits—his wits and his intelligence would just have to do.
The sun had not gone down by the time Scarborough reached the dam, but it was very close to setting. The light cast swatches of strange colors from the jagged rocks on either side, and danced into the depths of Lake Mead, swelled now with runoff from a snowy winter. The view of Arizona was quite spectacular, all reds and browns and shadows tilting toward sundown. The sound of the coursing water, where the base of the huge arched dam became a river again, mixed with the faint throb of the mighty engines hidden within the structure.
Scarborough parked in the lot for tourists and sightseers. He went to the Nevada Tourist Information booth, which was closed. A sign proclaimed hourly tours of the dam’s interior, but the last one had been at five o’clock. He bought a can of Pepsi at a soda machine, then he went back to his car. With the sun dipping over the horizon, the evening was cooling. He saw no sign of Diane, nor had he necessarily expected to yet. She’d said the meeting was supposed to be at nine, and it was only a little after eight.
Now that he was here, though, with the adrenaline of his efforts wearing off, he began to have doubts.
I should have brought somebody else. Anybody else. Here I am, unarmed and relatively defenseless, waiting for who knows what?
He’d jumped into this half-cocked, and now had the extra time to ruminate. Still, he didn’t know what else he could have done, and he had no time to veer from his course. So he stopped damning himself, and tried to concentrate on something else for the time being. He reread the material on Hoover Dam in the Nevada tourist booklet.
Hoover Dam, Scarborough had read, was 1,244 feet long and 725 feet high. Elevators descended forty-four stories into the dam, and stopped short of the base. The base itself was 660 feet thick, containing over 4,400,000 cubic yards of concrete; sufficient concrete to pave a two-lane highway from West Coast to East. The power it generated from the water running through the huge turbines could reach up to 1,344,800 kilowatts.
It was a big fella, all right, thought Scarborough.
He waited for the dusk to level off into night, then got out of his car. Sodium lamps along the top of the dam had faded on, lighting the two-lane concrete highway atop the dam. Scarborough pocketed the keys, but left the doors of his car open—a quick escape might be necessary. He took a deep breath of the dry, clean air, and strode toward the dam.
Okay, Diane, he thought. Now where the hell are you?
From where he was, he could see the entry port for the elevators, its lights standing sentinel in the bunker-like hub of concrete. He could see a security guard, sitting just inside the door, with a view of the whole top of the dam.
When he reached the door, he found it was locked. He knocked, and eventually a monotone answered from a speaker grate. “Yes?”
“Pardon me, I’m supposed to meet my daughter here. Have you seen an attractive blonde woman, twenty years old walking hereabouts?”
“Nope.”
“Are you positive? This is very important.”
“Your daughter, huh? Mister, we don’t get too many young blondes walking along Hoover Dam at night. This ain’t exactly a pickup spot, you know. If I’d seen her, I’d remember her. And I ain’t seen her.”
“Right. Thank you. By the way, is it okay if I walk along the sidewalk at night?”
“Free country, and that’s a national highway you’re lookin’ at. Just be careful, huh?”
“It’s a beautiful night.”
“Yeah. Nice view. Have fun.”
“If you see her, would you tell her that her father’s here?”
“Sure. But if she’s as pretty as you say, can I ask her for a date?”
“It’s a free country!”
The security guard laughed, and Scarborough stepped away and crossed the highway to the sidewalk. Traffic had slowed from moderate to a mere occasional car whooshing along, its sound dopplering as it passed, its wake kicking up the odd bit of litter. Scarborough walked out onto the dam. No one else was walking on the sidewalk. His steps clicked and echoed faintly against the concrete abutment to the right. There was a metal guardrail between the two-lane road and the sidewalk. A short metal railing overlooked the dam itself. Scarborough, a third of the way across, leaned against the rail and gazed down from the dizzying height onto the angled spillway. The bright moon reflected off of a sheen of moisture against the concrete. The dam’s operator must have let some of Lake Mead’s water go this way. Normally, in a hydroelectric dam, the penstocks—the pipes—conveyed the water from the reservoir on through the turbo-system, creating the electricity. Scarborough remembered he’d read that the main penstocks to Hoover at this point were thirty-foot diameter plate-steel pipes with a maximum thickness of almost three inches. Far below, at the base, he could see the white water churning out from the ends of these pipes.
He walked a little ways farther, to the middle of the bow of the arch. The dam was engineered in this manner so that much of the water-weight in the reservoir could be distributed to the abutments to the side and the base, which were anchored to hard bedrock. Still, as he walked on top of it, Everett Scarborough marveled at the technological wonder of this dam, and how it built so much upon the science of engineering throughout the ages.
He stared awhile at the moon with its attendant speckles of stars, rippling in the dark blue desert sky. He closed his eyes, and drank deep of the smell of the water and the power in the air, trying to calm himself. Peripherally, he noticed a car coming along the road. However, he was so wrapped up in his attempt at meditating, that he did not notice it stopping.
Scarborough opened his eyes, took one more deep breath, and was about to start back, when he heard steps. Puzzled he turned around. With the speed and skill of an athlete, a man wearing a grey suit leaped over the guardrail and was on Scarborough in a twinkling. Before Scarborough could do a thing, he was aware of the bore of a gun digging into his abdomen.
“Hello there, Mr. Scarborough,” the man said. He smelled of expensive cologne and sour sweat, and of the Juicy Fruit gum he chomped in his mouth. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you for a while, and what a spectacular staging for our meeting.”
They stood in a shadowy area between two lights, but enough illumination shone for Scarborough to see a portion of his attacker’s face. Short hair, chiseled features—and a cheek speckled with acne scars. Pockmarks.
Scarborough backed up against the cement behind him, and a breath of desert wind blew his hair. The jacket of the gunman flapped. “You’re the bastard who killed Eric MacKenzie!”
Woodrow Justine had been waiting on the Arizona side of the dam for over an hour. He had not noticed the car pull into the visitor’s parking lot on the Nevada side—he had been using the public toilets—and he did not know that S
carborough had arrived until he noticed the solitary walker approaching the elevator entrance during a sweep with his field glasses. By the time his car had navigated the road on the dam, Scarborough was already walking along the sidewalk.
Justine had turned off the road and considered. The other boys were following Diane Scarborough and her companion, and damn if they hadn’t shown up yet. Justine wanted to deal with Scarborough himself. It struck him as a move of elegance and economy—a gesture to Richards illustrating his competence. But then he had to decide whether to wait until the man came back to his car, or to just apprehend him in the middle of the dam.
At first, Justine opted to wait. Scarborough had to come back, and it would be a hell of a lot easier to take him in the parking lot. But then the bastard just squatted out there like he’d fallen asleep, so Justine had cursed, started his car and zoomed out. No real prob, he reasoned. Just a quick stop, a jump from the car with the engine idling, and then he would pull Scarborough in (or shoot the son-of-a-bitch if he resisted) and ride off toward Arizona.
And it was all working well enough until Scarborough started to talk to him. He’d pulled the car’s tires up along the curb enough so that there was plenty of right-lane left, and was out in a flash, his gun trained on the man leaning over the edge, as though he were contemplating a jump. But then, surprise! The man looked Justine square in the eye and told him that he’d killed Eric MacKenzie. Which was true enough, but how the hell did Scarborough know that? He’d left MacKenzie dead in a burning house. No one else in Iowa City had seen him come or go. The statement threw him for a loop.
“That’s right, Scarborough,” Justine said, hiding his surprise with admission. “And now it’s your turn. Hard to believe. You had such a good thing going, and you blew it. Shit, I protected your ass once. Now I’m going to blow it away—unless you cooperate.”
A car passed by on the other side.
Scarborough’s thoughts were unreadable. “Okay. I’ll cooperate. But who are you, and where do you come from?”
“None of your business, pal. Now I want you to get in the car!”
“Whoa. Just a moment here! Can’t we talk this over? Who do you work for, and how much are you paid? I’m sure we can make some kind of financial arrangement.”
“Get in the car, asshole, or I’m going to spray you all over the Colorado River!”
“You don’t want to do that here, not really. I’ll come. But first, do you have my daughter, Diane?”
“I’ve got a short temper, Scarborough. You’re right, this is not the best place and I want to get out of here. And if I have to drag your bleeding body in the car, that’s the way—”
A car approached them on their side of the road. It slowed and stopped directly behind Justine’s car. Jeez! thought Justine, who the hell is this? He couldn’t see who was behind the wheel, but he couldn’t take any chances. He moved closer to Scarborough, shielding his gun from the view of the newcomer. “Now keep your mouth shut, or you’ve had it,” Justine whispered.
He heard the door open and the sounds of a man getting out.
“Now move around so that your back faces the car.” Justine shoved the hard gun into Scarborough’s back to punctuate his demand. Scarborough obeyed. This way, Justine could watch them both. He directed his eyes to see who it was that was getting out of the car.
The car was large and black, with fins. An older model Cadillac. The man getting out seemed spotlighted by the lamp from the other side of the highway, revealing straggly hair and a face totally in shadow, unrecognizable. The man wore a suit that was a little too big for him, with baggy pants.
And the suit was entirely black.
“Hey, guys,” said the man. “Seen any UFOs hereabouts?”
Black. Black!
A violent seizure swept through Woodrow Justine’s brain.
“We’ve come for you, Justine,” said a voice inside his mind. “You must answer to us. You must join us!”
His arm where Klinghoffer had injected him with the hypo-dermic throbbed painfully.
Woodrow Justine lost his composure completely.
“No!” he cried. “Get away! Get away from me!”
He pulled the gun away from Scarborough and fired at the Man in Black.
Chapter 37
The man with the gun fired, his eyes wide with a wild, inexplicable fear.
The man who had just arrived yelped a surprised curse, grabbed his arm, and ducked behind his car. Everett Scarborough knew that he wouldn’t get a second chance—the gun was pointed away from him; the pockmarked man had let go his grip on Scarborough’s arm, and his right hand was extended in firing position. Almost instinctively, Scarborough swiveled, joined his hands together, and brought his linked fists down hard on the wrist. A grunt of pain. The man’s hand was shaken loose of the weapon. The gun dropped and skittered along the sidewalk into a large pool of shadow.
For whatever reason the new arrival had freaked the gunman, the man’s training took over at this point. With great strength and a savage cry, the pockmarked man hurled Scarborough back against the cement wall, then pummeled him with hard and determined fists. Scarborough scrunched himself into a ball to protect himself, but, finding the blows so fierce that his consciousness was threatened, he burst from his position and hurled himself upon his attacker. The man was driven back against the opposite railing. He slipped and fell down with a curse.
“Scarborough!” came a cry. “Scarborough, that is you, right? What the hell—”
Everett Scarborough recognized the voice. “Camden! Get the gun—”
Scarborough kicked at the man on the ground, striking him in the face and knocking him back. But on the second kick, the man caught his foot, his hands clamping onto it like the jaws of an alligator.
“I’m wounded! He’ll shoot me again!”
“I knocked the gun away. It’s over—” But the man in the grey suit twisted Scarborough’s foot, throwing him to the ground. Scarborough turned so that he landed knee-first in the man’s abdomen. There was a whoosh, an expulsion of air. But the man grabbed hold of Scarborough’s shirt and threw him down. They traded more blows, which made Scarborough acutely aware of just how much more powerful the man was.
The next thing he knew was that Camden was standing over them, bright blood on his shoulder, kicking the pockmarked man as hard as possible, trying to get a shot at the groin.
“No, Camden! The gun!”
“I don’t know where—” His foot connected with the attacker’s groin. The man on the ground cried out in pain, but in the same moment he also managed to lift himself off of Scarborough; he grabbed a fistful of Camden’s coat and hauled him off his feet.
“Shit!” cried Camden, but somehow, the wounded man managed to turn his fall into a hard blow against the pockmarked man. Scarborough scrabbled away from the man on the ground.
“Keep him down, Camden!”
Camden was clinging with all his might on top of the man, who was attempting to get up. “What do you want me to do? Drown him with my blood?”
Scarborough didn’t stop to answer. He scrambled back to where the gun had been dropped. That was their only hope—the gun. But where was it?
He fumbled about in the shadows, hands reaching for the gun, finding nothing but cement and empty air. Where the hell was it? Behind him, he could hear cursing and the sound of fists on flesh. The groans of pain seemed to be mostly Camden’s, but the man was hanging on for all he was worth, like some terrier on a postman’s pants leg.
His heart pounded in his ears. The gun! He had to find the gun. If he didn’t, Camden would be thrown off at any moment and then—
His foot struck something. Metal skidded on concrete. Something glinted in the light. He’d found the thing, but he’d kicked it away.
“Damn!” He heard Camden’s cry. “He’s shaken loose, Scarborough! He’s getting up. He’s—“
Scarborough looked around. The man was standing up, and reaching behind his back, for somet
hing stuck in his belt. He was going for another gun
His heart in his throat, Scarborough turned and leaped for where he hoped the gun had been kicked. There it was! He fell onto the ground, and fumbled it up into his hand, just as he heard a gunshot. A bullet tore a divot of concrete up just inches from Scarborough’s face. With the same motion he’d used for picking the gun up, Scarborough rolled under the metal barrier-fence and scurried behind one of the cars for cover.
He fitted the gun to his finger, and came up from behind the trunk of the car. The pockmarked man was running his way, gun out in front of him.
This was it! thought Everett Scarborough. His last chance. He aimed wildly and squeezed off a shot in the general direction of the assailant.
A splash of blood sprayed from the man, and he was kicked back hard against the metal fence, his gun clattering onto the ground. He was a tall man, and his back struck the barrier railing. So hard was the force of the bullet that struck him—apparently in the chest—that the man’s torso was flung over the railing, pulling his legs with him. The result was a spectacular somersault.
Somehow, though, the man was able to reach out and grab the edge of the concrete, where he clung precariously.
Scarborough took a quick deep breath and hurried over. The man dangled by one hand over the drop, his fingernails digging at the cement, scraped, bloody and raw.
Scarborough put the gun down on the ground and reached over to pull the man back over the railing before he fell. He was badly wounded and couldn’t hang there much longer—
maybe he had the information that Scarborough needed. He leaned out and grabbed the man’s wrist and was immediately struck with revulsion and vertigo over the depth of the dam spillway.
The man had swung in such a way that he had a grip with both hands, but he couldn’t last long. Scarborough was going to have to pull him up so that he could get a leg over. “Okay, you’re a strong bastard. You can do this.”
There was fear and panic in the man’s eyes, but he said nothing. Scarborough pulled on him, but it was hard going.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 37
