A volley of bullets pocked across them like invisible stones. Miquel was hit in the abdomen and chest. Johnny Plentenos was clipped in the shoulder, and then a bullet gouged out an unhealthy portion of his forehead.
They both went down spinning like dancing lawn-sprinklers of blood.
Silence.
Camden stopped whimpering, but he didn’t stop crawling toward the bushes, pain or no pain.
Then he heard the click of shoe soles against the road as the killers stepped around the car toward him.
The first thing he saw was the guns. Big, long, black things, still gripped in slender hands. There were two of them, stepping forward, weapons ready for any necessary coup de grace on their victims. They both wore jeans, black shirts, black linen jackets, and sunglasses. They looked as normal as a couple of guys just stepping out of some suburban mall in Tampa. They also looked white and waspy.
Camden figured they couldn’t miss him, so he stopped crawling and said, “I’m not in their gang, I swear it. They were going to kill me.”
The two men, seemingly satisfied that the Latins were dead, stepped forward toward Camden, stopping several yards short. “Yes, we know, Mr. Camden.”
Camden did the best double take he could manage, considering the way his body felt. “You guys know me! Who are you?”
“We suggest you get in your car and keep going, Jake Camden. We do not like this kind of nasty business, and we certainly don’t care to have to kill the government agents on your trail.”
Jake struggled up, astonished, but not about to turn the suggestion down. He wobbled off toward his car, but then turned.
The two men were walking back toward their car, and Jake could see that it was an early model Cadillac, and that there was another man, sitting behind the steering wheel.
“Jesus Christ. You’re from the group that’s following Everett Scarborough, aren’t you?”
The men kept on walking silently away.
One got into the Buick and moved it off to the side of the road. The other went and opened the door of the Cadillac.
Camden’s pain disappeared under a deluge of excitement. He hobbled toward the car, waving his one good arm and yelling. “Hey! Wait! I want to talk you! I can help you, for God’s sake! Just tell me who you are? What’s going on? What is this strange UFO conspiracy that’s going on? Gimme a break, guys. Let me show you what I can do for you.”
All the time he was thinking, Christ, layer upon layer, wheel within wheel—I’m sitting not on the story of the decade, it’s the story of the century!
The standing man turned toward Camden and took off his sunglasses.
His eyes were like ice—deathly cold with determination. Camden had to stop in his tracks, that stare was so effective.
The man strode forward and met Camden halfway. The journalist could see that though the man wasn’t any taller than he was, that jacket was hiding some pretty intense muscle, compact and wiry. Then the man grabbed Camden’s shirt and pulled him toward his face with his left hand. The right hand still held the gun, and the man lifted this and inserted the gun into Jake Camden’s mouth. Metal rattled against teeth, and a jolt of pure fear ran through Camden like high-wattage electricity.
Camden had a sudden flashback to Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. He half-expected the next words to be a gritty and rough “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”
Instead, the man’s words were soft and well enunciated.
“Mr. Camden. It truly grieves us to have to participate in this manner. Your present welfare is important. However, be advised, that if anyone is going to kill you, it’s going to be us. It would be very simple to pull this trigger and leave you along with these other bodies. Now, do you want us to do that?”
Camden shook his head.
“I didn’t think so. Now get in your car and drive away from here and be about your business. Immediately. No more questions, no more thoughts. Understood?”
Camden nodded.
The man withdrew the gun from between Camden’s jaws and walked back to his car. The guy who had driven the smashed Buick to the side of the road was already getting into the back seat. The man gave one more significant glance to Camden, put his sunglasses back on, and got back into the front seat.
They waited to make sure Camden was leaving.
A shiver raced up Camden’s back. He turned and ran back to his car, noting that his Escort bumper had only been dented slightly. He got in, turned the ignition key, and swung around the Cadillac and accelerated along Everglades Avenue, away from the fallen bodies of the men who had almost killed him, away from the men who had saved his life, but had threatened him with death.
It wasn’t until he hit Route 75 north that he permitted himself the luxury of thought. Or perhaps that was just when the all that adrenaline pumped into his system finally started leveling off.
Who were those guys?
What the luck was happening?
Camden noted that dusk was starting to settle down on the highway. When he reached over to turn on the lights, he realized that his hand was shaking.
He had to take three gulps from the flask of whiskey in the tape compartment before he got his hands under control.
Chapter 21
Dr. Julia Cunningham was not by nature a nervous person. At least, not on the exterior. However, it had not always been so. The young doctor who had gone to work at NIMH those years ago had been much more fragile, a smoker who bit her fingernails and had the peculiar tendency to fidget in classrooms; the product, she self-diagnosed later, of an attention deficit in her system. If she were a child, perhaps she would have been given Ritalin. But now, of course, there were other medications.
Doctor, heal thyself.
When Dr. Julia Cunningham woke up, she was bathed in a cold sweat. The sheets of her bed were snarled and knotted around her, and her teeth were clenched. Her heart was beating wildly and she felt a high level of anti-adenosine in her system. Of course, it took a full minute of wild terror and anxiety for her neocortex to reason out the situation and begin to get hold of the situation. Until then, the nervous disorder she had worked so hard to quash flared up full tilt, and waves of the nightmare’s aftershocks rocked her to near paralytic frenzy.
Julia Cunningham awoke with the taste of blood in her mouth, the bile of uncontrolled fear. It didn’t help much that the new quarters they’d given her were so spartan. Worse almost than a Holiday Inn. At least hotels and motels tended to have some comforting colors. This room was little more than part of a barracks, and Cunningham hated it. Back home in D.C., her own apartment was an interior decorator’s dream of streamlined furniture, tasteful Marc Chagall prints, along with the subtle roll of modem sculpture. Cool, perhaps, as visitors told her. Definitely controlled (she had a maid come in and clean twice a week). But ultimately elegant, soft, and feminine; ultimately comfortable. The subdued tones of the rug, the paint on the walls, had all been scientifically calibrated to slip her a visual Valium every time she looked at them. No such luck here.
What she slept on was little more than a cot. A desk with a cheap military-issue lamp. A rough dresser, a couple of chairs.
She’d spent a lot of time down here a couple of years ago, but they’d given her apartment to someone else. Now, it was start-from-scratch time. If she had a day off she would have flown up to Santa Fe and bought some nice Navaho Indian rugs and artwork to soften things a bit. But she didn’t have a day off. Not with the way things were working out.
Julia Cunningham lay in bed, getting her breathing back in check for a few long minutes.
The dream of her father...
She’d had the beating dream again.
She shivered. She thought she had purged herself of that nightmare. She hadn’t had it in years, so she had just assumed she had completely eradicated the neural network which contained that dream, that memory.
But of course, as a scientist, she knew that the human mind, and human memory, did not work like that.
; Still, she had tried. And would keep on trying.
Chemistry, she said to herself, like a mantra, over and over again. It’s all chemistry. Neuro-transmitters amidst the synapses, axons, and dendrites; recepting, blocking. Molecular processes—all explainable, all controllable, theoretically.
Then why hadn’t she destroyed her father?
Eventually, she was able to stagger from her bed. She wore comfortable cotton pajamas, and realized as she switched on the too-bright light in the bathroom that she was sopping with sweat. She went to the sink and stared into the mirror above it, feeling a thousand years old. The face that stared back at her wasn’t old, but it was getting there. Without her makeup, she could see the crow’s-feet wrinkles setting in about her eyes, the frown lines on her forehead, around her mouth. Chemical processes, surgery—all could deal easily enough with these signs of age. And of course makeup ... thank the cosmetic alchemists for makeup! She just wished she was as effective with her neuro-chemicals...
She clamped down on the thought immediately.
No, she couldn’t afford self-doubt. The dream memory of the child abuse her father had visited upon her was an aberration. There was a bit of root still buried deep in her subconscious, and it had grown back again. However, what had been beaten back by medication could be beaten back again-perhaps even destroyed this time. The experiments she had tried upon herself before had sometimes failed, driving her into the deepest depressions, but also to the highest highs. She was confident that she could deal with the problem, quite easily.
She just had to get through the next few minutes of total unmitigated and stripped-bare hell.
On the commode top was a large leather bag. With slightly shaking hands, she grasped it and pulled the zinc zipper. Under the flap was a collection of small cc bottles, hypodermics, and prescription boxes filled with pills from her personal mortar and pestle. She didn’t think a hypo was necessary now-that speedy treatment was only for true emergencies. No, just the right combination of the pills, ingested over the period of the next half hour, would do fine. According to the digital numbers on her alarm clock, it was only 5: 16 in the morning. She didn’t have her appointment until 10:00, although they expected to see her in the office at 8:30.
To hell with them. She deserved a good sleep-in.
That was, if she could get it.
She didn’t think much about it; she really didn’t have much choice. She needed the chemicals now, or she wouldn’t be able to make it through the day, much less her life.
Carefully, she selected the necessary number of each tablet from their individual boxes. Even with a shaky sense of panic hanging about her, Julia Cunningham was able to cope, mentally calibrating the exact dosage.
Control.
Control was all.
Above the chemicals she used, above everything else, there existed her intelligence, her will. This was the important thing; this was the paramount aspect of the situation.
She was no sad drug-addict, shaking out pills or grabbing for her needle in her bathroom in the middle of the night. No, of course not, she was a scientist, measuring out the dosage of enkephalins, serotonin, amino acids, and sundry other chemicals, some of which she had synthesized, designed herself, to create the necessary and comfortable parameters in which her intellect could properly operate. This was the ultimate triumph of science and research, that the mind could physically compensate for central-nervous-system deficiencies consciously. All human beings had natural opiates in their biochemistry-but heroin addicts and alcoholics were like people operating on themselves with axes and hammers. Not Doctor Julia Cunningham, no. She used only the finest and sharpest of scalpels, the thinnest of laser beams...
She turned on the faucet and watched water pour out a few moments before she filled her glass. She took the pills and caplets and tablets one by one, taking a small swallow of liquid after each. The water was brackish, and the pills tasted faintly bitter, but their annoyance was as nothing compared to the sandpaper scratching at her nerves.
When she was finished, she carefully placed the bottles back in the purple felt, and zippered the case closed. Then, she went back to her spartan bed, crawled under the covers, and assumed a warm, fetal position.
As peace slowly salved her ragged soul, and sleep closed in like tender waves of gauze, Julia Cunningham thought, He is coming today. My John the Baptist comes for instructions from his Master.
And then she fell asleep and dreamed of a sea of faces, lifted in adoration toward her.
Chapter 22
New Mexico is the fifth-largest state of the Union, a mostly rectangular, immense slab of land with Colorado and Mexico to the north and south, Texas and Arizona to the east and west. In many ways it is perhaps the most beautiful of the states—and the strangest. Everett Scarborough thought so. He’d been to New Mexico on at least five occasions, three for lectures and personal appearances on television shows, two for UFO investigative-purposes. Now, as he drove along Route 40 toward Albuquerque, he admired the mesas and the desert, the vast cerulean skies, the lonely stretches of gold and brown, along which rolled tumbleweeds and grew yucca, the state flower, and pinion, the nut pine. In between these were occasional majestic vistas of mountains, some still capped with winter’s snow. And Scarborough again felt that certain something he had noticed on his previous visits. That certain taste and smell in the air, that certain vibration of out-of-sync otherness. He’d tried to ignore it before, but now that he seemed to be coming more attuned to instinct and other, even less-familiar, feelings, the beautiful panoramas stretched out before him were full of an almost mystical sense.
Something important would happen here, Scarborough thought.
This indeed was where events would climax.
This was where his daughter was!
The rational part of him was now but a tool. He had turned into a being of pure desire, hell-bent upon his quest for his daughter and the truth.
The Ford was running well, as though its engine was in sync with him, purring under the ministrations of his will. He traveled the main highways. He was in a hurry. He would have taken a plane, but the small rational part of him warned him off. Plane passengers were too easy to monitor. So he made the trip back out west in his car, quickly, only stopping for short stretches of rest.
His destination was Albuquerque.
That wasn’t where Diane Scarborough was. That was where Walter Mashkin was.
Scarborough stopped at a Shell station just outside of the city and bought a map of the local area. The sun was bright and getting hot as it reached toward noon. Scarborough bought a cold Coca-Cola Classic and studied the map. After he found the road he was looking for, he filled his tank with gasoline and rode on.
He’d always found Albuquerque a pleasant town, but in the last decade it had grown so much that it had assumed much of the flavor of a generic American city—albeit without losing its roots. Scarborough passed through the Old Town Plaza, the oldest part of the city, dating back to 1706, when the place was founded by a Spanish farming community. Scarborough passed the National Atomic Museum, which he had seen on a previous, more relaxed visit, as well as the Pueblo Culture Center. Two miles farther, he made a tum onto a quiet boulevard lined with adobe style houses, and there found Number 1923, Walter Mashkin’s house.
In the driveway was a battered blue Dodge pick-up truck, labeled Mashkin’s Plumbing. Have Wrench, Will Travel! The back was filled with pipes, old valves, and odds-and-ends of equipment. From the garage issued a clanking sound. Scarborough shaded his eyes and made out the form of a man bent over a workbench, who was hammering on something.
He cleared his throat.
“Mr. Mashkin?”
The man stopped pounding. Scarborough could hear the tools being dropped onto wood, saw the form approaching.
“Hey, now. Would that be who I think it is?” said a lanky homespun drawl, reminiscent of Tennessee, but cut with several other accents.
“Yes, Mr. Mashkin, it’s m
e. Can we go inside? I don’t like to be out in the open.”
“Reckon not, reckon not,” said Mashkin. “Welcome, though. Good to meet you.”
The man stepped out into the sun, offering his hand. He was a sallow-faced fellow who wore oil-stained coveralls and scuffed brown work boots. He had a beard with no mustache, which made the friendly, blue-eyed face beneath his unruly thatch of straw-colored hair even more open. Scarborough judged him to be a man in his middle fifties.
“Good to meet you, too, Mr. Mashkin. I really appreciate your help and look forward to talking to you.”
Mashkin nodded, giving Scarborough an appraising look. Then, he gave a glance to either side, as though making sure they weren’t being watched, and ushered Scarborough into the house.
The inside of the house was cool and dark, and smelled faintly of old beer bottles and dirty socks. Scarborough recognized the effluvium—it was a bachelor’s abode, bereft of a housekeeper. Still, it was a pleasant smell, rather reminiscent of Mac MacKenzie’s place after his wife left him and before he hired himself a maid, and it made him comfortable.
“You look like a tired man, Mr. Scarborough. Can I get you a beer? After we jaw a bit, you can take yourself a nap in the guest room.”
“Yes. I’d like a beer. Thanks, Mr. Mashkin.”
“Call me Walter. Or Walt, if you like. Just for goddamn’s sake don’t call me Wally. I hate that name.”
Walter Mashkin opened the refrigerator door, revealing two shelves filled with nothing but long-necked bottles of Budweiser beer, a carton of eggs, some milk, and some bread. Mashkin took out two bottles of beer and closed the door. He gestured for Scarborough to sit in one of the kitchenette chairs. Gladly, Scarborough sat and watched as Mashkin took a church-key out of the drawer and opened the beer bottles .carefully, almost reverently.
“Never could take to those new-fangled twist-off higgagoodgies,” said Mashkin affably as he tossed the bottle caps into an open trash can and handed Scarborough one of the beers. “I like my beer cold and I like my beer old—fashioned, that is.” Mashkin winked at Scarborough. Then, holding a pinkie out as though he were a cockney sipping tea, he drank a long swallow of Budweiser. Realizing that his own throat was dry, Scarborough did the same. It was almost as though the two men were involved in some ancient ceremony.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 59
