He whirled, saw him running back the way they’d come.
“KULDEEP!”
Kuldeep didn’t slow down.
Lance sprinted after him. It had been a while since he ran, really ran. But the streets of Naples were easier terrain than the backwoods. He overhauled Kuldeep, was almost close enough to grab the back of his jacket when Kuldeep wrung out a spurt and darted out of the narrow canyon Lance had chased him down, into a piazza lined with open-air cafés and bars. If Lance lost track of him in the crowd, it was all over.
The world went into fast-forward. Lance slammed into Kuldeep and tackled him to the pavement. With his arms pinned, Kuldeep couldn’t catch himself. He hit the ground with a painful grunt. When Lance helped him up, his cheek was bleeding.
None of the people around them paid the least attention. Naples.
“You just screwed yourself so bad. Quit making it worse.” Lance dragged Kuldeep across the piazza, into an alley lined with overflowing dumpsters.
“It was a maser.”
They nestled together in the darkness between two of the dumpsters, Kuldeep’s face pressed to the wall, Lance grinding against him from behind, like they were fucking, except Lance was holding his gun to the side of Kuldeep’s neck.
“The Russian dude said it was probably a maser,” Lance grunted, wondering if Kuldeep was trying to walk back the inflammatory claims he’d made in his never-to-be-sent email. Praying he would. C’mon, Kul. Just deny everything.
“Not an astrophysical maser. Those come from stellar atmospheres or something else acting as a gain medium.” Kuldeep coughed. Lance pressed the gun harder into his neck. Kuldeep gasped, “This was the kind of maser we use right here on Earth for comms.”
Lance rested his forehead on the back of Kuldeep’s lank, greasy hair. “Don’t make me shoot you, man.”
“It touched off a cruise missile. We can’t sit on this.”
“You know why we got to go to Russia?” Lance had worked this out after he talked to the sailors. “Someone real high up told them either you share, or we tell the whole world the Black Sea Fleet flagship had to limp back to port with a hole in her belly. The purpose of getting the information was to cover it up. That’s what they want and that’s what we want. We’re finally on the same side with the Russians, and you’re gonna destroy that by writing to the New York Times?”
Kuldeep breathed heavily. “I heard them.”
“Aw no.”
“I swear I fucking heard them. Screaming for help.”
Kuldeep bucked and twisted. His teeth flashed white in his brown face, and Lance felt searing agony rip into his neck.
*
They buried Phyllis Hoskins at Arlington National Cemetery, because her second husband had been an Army officer who died in Vietnam.
The crowd was stupendous. Looked to Lance like Phyllis’s entire paramour network was there, with flotillas of greater and lesser government officials hovering around. He recognized the Secretary of State. He hung back at the fringe of the crowd. It was raining. He had his best suit on, but had forgotten to bring an umbrella, so he was getting wet from the head down. The scent of wet earth rose through the meticulously mown grass.
After the service, people milled around, reverting to D.C. networking mode.
Tom Flaherty trudged across the lawn, a African-American man in a cheap suit, under a cheap umbrella. Lance was standing under a tree in hopes of getting less wet. He waited, unmoving, for Flaherty to get within speaking distance.
“Good you made it,” Flaherty hailed him.
“I never knew she had so many friends,” Lance said. He had known it, but it was another thing to see the turnout.
Flaherty stood beside him under the tree. “Know what this is?”
“What?”
“The last hurrah of the old guard.” Flaherty was chewing gum. Lance could smell it. Mint. “If they knew their history, they would know pride comes before a fall. It’s just when you think you’re on top of the world that everything comes crashing down. You know about the Roman empire?”
“Some.”
“All empires fall. But what the historians generally get wrong, is they aren’t overwhelmed from outside. They are conquered from within.”
Flaherty offered Lance his pack of Orbit. Lance shook his head, staring at the few mourners still wandering around Phyllis’s grave site.
Wondering if he was imagining what he saw.
Praying Flaherty didn’t notice.
When he decided that he wasn’t imagining it, he started forward, desperate to try and salvage the situation.
Flaherty caught his arm. “It’s OK, Lance. I know you let him go. It’s OK.”
Lance shook him off and crossed the lawn, half-running. Kuldeep saw him coming and froze, in the act of reaching over the velvet rope to lay a bunch of roses on the grave.
Lance moved him physically away from the grave, arm around his shoulders. He smelled the familiar old Kuldeep smell of B.O. and Pringles. Nostalgia ripped through him, overridden quickly by anger. “Didn’t I tell you to run? I told you run and don’t come back.”
“It’s OK,” Kuldeep said, twisting away. “He knows I’m here.” Lance followed his gaze. Flaherty stood, half-hidden by the pendulous branches of that tree, watching them.
“He knows you’re here, but you’re not in jail? How’s that work?”
“They threatened my family, of course,” Kuldeep said. He walked with his head down. He still looked sick. Shouldn’t have been out in the rain. Shouldn’t be here.
Lance’s neck twinged where Kuldeep had bitten him. Not vampire style, but like an animal in a trap.
Kuldeep had a family?
They’d been as close as brothers, but they’d never exchanged a word about their families. In Lance’s case, there was nothing he wanted to say. His dad was dead, his mom was stuck in the revolving door of rehab, his brother was in jail for twenty to life. Mention any of that and the associated stereotypes would swallow him up beyond escape. But of course Kuldeep had a functional family. Lance pictured a warm, loving Hindu-American clan based somewhere like New Jersey.
The neck-biting thing had shocked Lance into dropping his gun. So much for his training. After he picked it up, there was no longer any question of going through with it.
“So I’m not gonna say anything,” Kuldeep said. “I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. No contact with anyone from the Agency.” He met Lance’s eyes for a second.
“Keep it tight,” Lance said.
“Will do.” Kuldeep hesitated, then stuck out his hand. “Might see you again afterwards. Who knows?”
“After what?”
“After all this is over. When the aliens come.”
They shook hands. Then Kuldeep walked away across the sorrowful green heart of the American Dream, without looking back.
*
“It was a once-off,” Lance summed up. “No one’s picked up anything similar since. It’s been almost a month. Even those fools at the Arecibo laboratory have pretty much given up looking.” This was his response to Flaherty’s question—do YOU think it was a genuine alien signal? He shrugged against his seatbelt. They were driving back across Virginia from the cemetery to Agency headquarters. “Most likely it was an astrophysical maser.”
“Bzzzt. Wrong answer.”
Lance slewed his eyes around.
Flaherty nodded along to Mary J. Blige, taking it easy at the wheel of his Crown Vic.
“The correct answer is it doesn’t matter,” Flaherty said, after a couple minutes, as if he had been waiting for Lance to speak. “Was it aliens, was it an astrophysical no-see-um, was it a collective hallucination? Who fucking cares?”
They drove a bit further in silence. Lance reflected, seething inside, how different this was from Phyllis’s day, when veracity mattered above all.
“Ambiguity is good,” Flaherty mentioned eventually. “Information is power … and no information is also power.”
L
ance chewed the inside of his cheek. He kind of saw what Flaherty was getting at, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. This put him in a bad mood as Flaherty parked in the main lot out front of the Old Headquarters Building.
They walked towards the building. Flaherty extended his umbrella sideways to keep the rain off of Lance, too. Lance began to turn aside to circle around to the New Headquarters Building. Flaherty said, “It’s raining. We’ll just cut through here.”
Friday afternoon. The historic foyer empty. Echoing.
Flaherty casually shook rain from his umbrella on the floor. He stopped in the center of the seal.
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Flaherty beckoned to Lance, pulled him close. “We are gonna own this bitch,” he whispered, grinning.
Lance understood then. He felt a thrill like nothing in his life before.
“Empires fall and empires rise,” Flaherty breathed. “What makes a successful coup? Information. And we now control the most important information on the planet.”
Lance looked down at the eagle under his feet, hiding his smile.
“Ten years from now,” Flaherty said, as if it was a foregone conclusion, “I am gonna be running this agency. Might even be running the country. Who knows? We’ll take it as it comes, play the cards we’re dealt. That’s why I figure I got lucky. I told you to kill Kuldeep Srivastava. You let him go. That was a judgement test, and you passed.”
Lance looked up. “I once called a guy a nigga.”
“I know about that.”
“That’s just how I used to talk.”
“You can call me nigga anytime, long as you call me boss,” Flaherty said.
Chuckling, they passed on out the back of the building. Lance felt a lightness he could not have imagined when he woke up this morning. It was like being back in Naples. The world shimmered, infinitely full of possibilities.
“My own opinion?” Flaherty said, “I agree with you. Aliens? Gimme a fucking break. C’mon, really? Smart people believe this shit? Aliens?”
“But they do believe it,” Lance said. He was climbing the infamous steps, right behind Flaherty. “Phyllis would have believed it. She was waiting all her life for a chance to believe.”
“Poor Phyllis,” Flaherty sighed. “Brilliant lady. Lovely lady. It’s a damn shame she wasn’t more careful on these steps.”
Lance froze. One foot picked up, like a cat on a roof, he watched Flaherty reach the top of the steps and vanish into the building.
A cold pang of suspicion snuck into his soul, and joined the coldness that was already there, and blended in until it didn’t matter anymore.
*
Aliens? No such thing as aliens.
It’s important to stay fully informed. After all, information is power, and you have to keep an open mind to use it.
But—remember this at night, when you’re twisting and turning, helplessly wakeful, like you got a permanent case of jet-lag, and the silence of the night sounds like an otherworldly whine—there are no aliens.
*
On a sunny afternoon in April, Lance’s phone rang.
“Help you?”
An aged voice gabbled, “Yeah, is Phyllis Hoskins there?”
“I’m sorry, she no longer works here. Can I help you?”
“Yeah, well, maybe. I guess you work for her. My name’s Pete Tamura. I work with NASA, at the Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. I’m the telescope operator. This happened yesterday, OK? An observing team from Harvard, they saw something really fucking weird …”
***
What did they see? Where did the mysterious signal came from? Find out in Freefall, the bestselling first contact technothriller from Felix R. Savage.
FREEFALL
SNEAK PREVIEW
CHAPTER 1
The final space shuttle flight in history lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a sunny afternoon in 2011. “Atlantis, Houston, you are go at throttle up.” Atlantis was flying like an angel. “Feel that mother go,” Jack said jubilantly. “I mean, roger, we are go at throttle up.” The gee-forces were insane! The vibration rattled the teeth in his head. Waiting for the SRBs to burn out and detach, he grinned. Nothing could prepare you for this. But he was prepared. He’d been preparing all his life.
The roaring stopped on cue. The vibration lessened as Atlantis climbed out of the atmosphere. Gravity released its hold on the astronauts, and Jack engaged the orbital maneuvering system (OMS) thrusters with a noise like an artillery barrage. Time to go to work.
Atlantis hadn’t been wheeled out one last time so that four astronauts could enjoy the view.
Oh, no.
STS-136—a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, one of the ‘big five’ US intelligence agencies—had a specific, secret goal. The Atlantis was a delivery truck, and their package was going to Keyhole-12a, aka Frostbite, a digital imaging satellite whose very existence was kept a secret from the public.
A year ago, Frostbite’s main mirror had cracked catastrophically. A huge flake of glass had spalled off, degrading its capacity to take high-resolution pictures of Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and other foreign military installations.
The DoD contractors couldn’t craft a replacement mirror in under a year, so they’d missed the cut-off for STS-135.
And so NASA’s partners, the United Space Alliance, had processed Atlantis for her absolutely definitely last flight.
When Jack heard he’d been selected as pilot, his shout of elation had brought people out of nearby offices in JSC’s Building 4 South, asking if he’d won the lottery. “Yes,” Jack had said. “I did!”
Now here he was, driving the world’s fastest delivery truck.
Thundering around Earth at orbital velocity of 17,500 miles an hour, the Atlantis first had to be inspected for any damage the heat shields might’ve sustained during launch. Everything checked out. “This bird could keep flying for decades if they’d let her,” said Mission Specialist Linda Moskowitz. Mission Commander Greg Howard shook his head at that. No political talk. Not when everything was being recorded. Jack kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t even American. British, dual nationality. He knew better than to say what he thought of Congress.
Anyway, they had this: Earth in the windows, streaky blue and white, the most stunning sight an astronaut would ever see. Jack admired the view in the sliver of time before the start of their sleep period. It fascinated him. He found Europe, shy of the terminator. A blanket of cloud hid Britain—of course—but he imagined he could see Nuneaton, where he’d grown up, and the Mach Loop in Wales, where he’d learned low level flying as a Tornado pilot. He imagined his parents standing in the garden, looking at the sky, knowing he was up there somewhere.
Something weird happened then. His headset made a pipping noise. The faint tones reminded him of the BBC radio pips—beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beeeep—and then they blended into a whine that flowed up and down the scale. Jack was in the pilot’s seat, just keeping an eye on things; he leant forward and checked his comms panel. Receiving on the S band. Automatic antenna selection enabled. Wheeeooooeeee.
He turned the antenna selection dial, cycling through all eight positions, forward and aft.
The tone went away when he limited reception to the aft antenna positions.
Came back when he selected the forward positions.
UL FWD—upper left forward—strongest of all.
Line of sight away from Earth.
Receiving from the outer solar system.
Jack drew breath to call to the others, get up here, you have to hear this, and then he grew abashed. His cheeks heated.
It’s just cosmic noise.
Or some clever-clogs hacker pranking the space shuttle.
Yet he kept listening, hunched tensely in his seat.
Wheeeooooeeewww …
The whine grew fainter, and then suddenly scaled up into a tone that stabbed his ears, loud, startling, and repugna
nt—nails on a blackboard, the electronic version, at 150 decibels.
Jack ripped his headset off with a startled cry. The sound shrieked from the earphones for another second, and then stopped.
“Everything OK up there?” Howard called up through the hatch.
“Fine,” Jack called, deciding to pretend it away. Pure instinct.
His headset swayed in the air on the end of its cord. Ears ringing, he eyed it like a poisonous snake.
Eventually he held it to one ear.
Nothing. Not a whine, beep, or pip.
He sat dissatisfiedly fiddling with the antennas for a few minutes, checking the other comms systems. Nothing.
It was just a glitch.
Seen too many science fiction films, Kildare.
Yeah.
No astronaut should watch Contact five times. Let alone Alien. (Jack’s favorite film in that franchise was actually Alien vs. Predator.)
Resolving to forget all about it, he tethered his sleeping-bag to the wall and closed his eyes.
I mean, who knows what’s out there? Who knows, eh? No one knows. And we’ll never find out, at this rate …
They woke to The Drifters crooning Up On the Roof, piped up from Mission Control.
“STS-135 got a special message and a song from Paul McCartney,” Mission Commander Howard said. “What are we, afterthoughts?”
“Is that your official statement, Greg?” said Mission Control.
“Aw, stick it up your ass. We are honored and proud to be the last astronauts who’ll ever have to endure Mission Control’s taste in music. And now, we’re switching to encrypted comms as we wipe the sleep out of our eyes and start prepping for EVA.”
Dipping lower towards Earth, Atlantis was overhauling Frostbite in its lower reconnaissance orbit. They caught up with it on Day Three. By that time they’d run successful tests of the Canadarm, using the OBSS camera system to check the heat shields, and the two mission specialists were enduring their ‘camp-out’ in the airlock in preparation for their EVA. Jack maneuvered the shuttle neatly into synchronization with the bus-sized, gossamer-winged satellite.
The Signal And The Boys: A Prequel to the Earth's Last Gambit Series of First Contact Technothrillers Page 4
