No two reports in any medium were exactly the same, save for one specific detail: everyone knew who to blame.
This only made matters worse for the people whose job it was to locate and secure Annie Collins, because she was being spotted all over the place. Saner heads might have come to the conclusion that, as the source of the current panic, Annie sightings could not be taken at face value. Certainly, most of the people attached to the military reached that conclusion very quickly. Others decided she was being seen all over the place because she actually was all over the place: She was a clone; she had the ability to bilocate; she was an army all by herself.
About thirty minutes after the second attack, Team Babysitter activated the GPS devices attached to agent Cora Blankenship, and determined that if Cora was still with Annie, they were traveling northbound on 128. The state police, quick to respond because they were, thankfully, just about the only local law enforcement that hadn’t sent everyone on their payroll in the direction of Wainwright College, dispatched a helicopter to hunt down the signal.
What they found was a pickup truck traveling in the direction of the New Hampshire border.
Nobody knew what to do about this. On the assumption that Annie was indeed on the loose, and not lying dead or unconscious in an impact crater somewhere at ground zero, most thought it would be dangerous to intercept the truck with anything less than the entire United States Army. At the same time, not stopping her seemed contrary to the whole point of locating her in the first place.
Compounding the problem was that nobody knew if Annie was even in the truck. It seemed unlikely. At the Pentagon, two staffers were going through the records of everyone they’d performed background checks on over the prior two years to see if any of them even owned a pickup truck. Three did, but only one—Sam Corning—was a likely candidate, and they already knew where he was.
Figuring out what to do about the pickup truck got a lot easier when the driver of the truck pulled over to the side of the road between exits, and got out. The driver was an extremely overweight man who was putting too much stress on the suspenders holding his pants up, the shocks on his truck, and, evidently, his bladder. The stop was to relieve himself in the woods.
They couldn’t tell if there was anyone else in the truck, but the consensus was that if Annie were in there, it probably wasn’t voluntary.
State troopers pulled the truck over a few minutes later, and the electronics they’d been tracking by air were discovered in the bed of the truck. The driver couldn’t say how long they’d been there, or how they got there. He was also not at all sober, so it ended up being a small victory for everyone concerned when he was taken into custody. It just wasn’t the victory they wanted.
Shortly before midnight, the team got a real break, when Agent Wendy Riviera regained consciousness in an ambulance that was trying to get from the campus to Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital. After getting updated on why she was there—a head injury—and whether she was expected to die from her wounds—no—she obtained a cell phone and called in.
“She’s in an armored camper with Oona Kozlowsky and Laura Lane,” she reported. “It was an ambush. I think Blankenship was in on it.”
This was a gross misrepresentation of the facts, but there was nobody around to dispute it.
With a proper description, a BOLO was put out, with local police instructed to report sightings but not engage, while Team Babysitter tried to work out their options once the camper was located.
Lieutenant Devlin reached out to Captain Braver at the Groton base, with some fresh orders straight from General Perlmutter. Braver was to get Edgar Somerville and Sam Corning onto a conference call, to provide everything they knew about the wildcards Oona Kozlowsky and Laura Lane, such as: where they had been for the past two years; how Annie managed to make contact with them without anybody realizing it was happening; what the devil they thought they were doing; and most importantly, where they were going.
Unfortunately, when the captain went to retrieve the two men, she discovered an empty room instead.
There was an uncomfortable silence in the trailer that lasted just long enough to serve as an answer. That wasn’t really a surprise, because Annie had plenty of evidence already that she was the only one who could see and hear Rick. But she was holding out hope that there was something different about this particular group of people. Like maybe Oona, Laura or Dobbs, having experienced some of the same things as Annie, would also be susceptible to visits from the ghosts of people who didn’t survive that night.
“Annie,” Cora said, in her I’m talking to a rabid dog right now voice, “who do you see standing there?”
“It’s Rick,” Annie said. “And cool, I didn’t think you would, but I wanted to check anyhow.”
“That was dumb,” Rick said. “Now they all think you’re nutso.”
“No, they do not,” she said. Annie looked over to Dobbs, who appeared incredibly uncomfortable. “He said, now you all think I’m nutso.”
“It’s a little weird, hon,” Laura said. Laura was a master of understatement, which offset Oona nicely.
“Who’s Rick?” Lindsey asked quietly.
Oona started laughing.
“Of course you’re nuts, Annie, that’s what we like about you. That psychic link of yours to the big gun in the sky just makes that a little scary.”
“All right,” Dobbs said, “maybe let’s… consider that you’re not like most people already. Why don’t you tell us everything you know about…”
“…the ghost of Rick Horton.”
“Yes. The ghost you’re seeing. Right now?”
“Hey chubby,” Rick said, waving.
“Don’t call him that,” Annie said. To Dobbs, she said, “He called you chubby. Totally unfair, you look great.”
“Um, yes. Thanks. So, you’re seeing a ghost, right now, over there.”
“Yep.”
“Ghosts,” Lindsey said. “That’s one of the things.”
“Sorry,” Laura said, “one of what things?”
“It’s what I was trying to explain, I think I know what the signal’s for, and I don’t think Annie’s doing it. It’s making people see stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Annie asked.
“Supernatural stuff, mostly, with extraterrestrials and zombies thrown in.” She pulled some papers out of a pocket. It looked like five or six pages, folded together. “Including ghosts.”
She smoothed out the papers and handed them down the cabin, where they only got as far as Dobbs.
“This looks like something the trailer park collective would have come up with,” he said, holding up a chart.
“Why were you bringing this to me?” Annie asked.
“Oh, because they all blame you for it. My point is, other people out there have been seeing ghosts lately, not just you. If you put that together with the signal these guys were tracking, it makes sense, right? If it’s concentrated around you. Not because you’re the source, but because you’re the target.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Annie said. “It also makes sense that I’m cracking up and sharing my nightmare with everybody, across the signal, and I don’t know I’m doing it.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Cora said.
“Can’t be sure, can we? I mean, clearly I’m losing my grip. Rick’s still standing right there, and none of you can see him.”
“Yeah, you’re bonkers,” Rick said.
“Shut up, Rick.”
“This is pretty neat,” Dobbs said, looking at Lindsey’s pages. “How’d you grade the severity, on this page here?”
Lindsey sat next to Dobbs to get a better look.
“Oh, that’s… yeah, that’s pure subjectivity. But it’s all my subjectivity, so I figured the math still had some value.”
“Yeah, you would have fit right in at the trailer collective,” Dobbs said.
“She measuring auras?” Oona asked.
“No, negativity,” Dobbs sai
d. “This is just general Annie-hatred going on here. On top of the… what does that say?”
“Werewolf.”
“Awesome. On top of the werewolf sightings and all that… people are just really mad at you for some reason.”
“Because I’m making them all crazy.”
“Nah, that’s not it,” Rick said. “It’d be funny, don’t get me wrong.”
“When did you start seeing the ghost?” Dobbs asked.
“Three months ago, just about?” Annie checked with Cora, who nodded.
“Looks like the increase started before that. Around the beginning of the year, just about. It jumped a lot in March, though.”
“So it could be me.”
“It’s not you,” Rick said. “Someone’s poisoned the well.”
“Hey, guys, the ghost is making sense, does anyone know what that means?”
“What it means when a ghost is making sense?” Cora asked, for clarification.
Laura said, “I don’t think I ever met Rick. He died, I assume?”
“Yeah, on the night,” Annie said.
“Was he a helpful person when he was alive?”
Annie laughed. So did Rick.
“God, no,” Annie said. “He’s not even a friend.”
“Well, all right, let’s… pretend for a minute that he’s actually there,” Laura said. “How would we know?”
“A whole lot of people have been seeing ghosts lately,” Dobbs said, still looking at Lindsey’s numbers. “And these are just the ones who put it on the Internet and blamed Annie for it.”
“Yes, fine, but let’s pretend anyway. If this Rick was a figment of Annie’s imagination, he would only tell her things she already knew, or suspected. Has that been the case?”
“No,” Annie said.
“Not that you listen,” Rick said.
“Just now, I was going to use the ship to get us more information, but Rick told me not to.”
“Then he’s the unfriendly kind of ghost,” Oona said, “because I would love to know if I’m about to drive into a hail of bullets up here.”
“That does sound unhelpful,” Laura said.
“But he’s been right before,” Annie said. “He warned me about Duke.”
“The university?” Dobbs asked.
“A person. He was… he tried to kill me at the party.”
Annie’s mouth went a little dry at the thought of it. She kind of wanted to throw up.
“What else?” Laura asked.
“He said something was coming. I guess this could be what he meant. Now he’s saying I’m not making people crazy, someone’s poisoned the well. Like what Lindsey’s saying.”
“Psy-ops,” Oona said.
“What’s that?”
“Psychological operation. Some secret government crap. Remember Jody, from the trailer park collective?”
Laura smiled. “I forgot about him.”
“Yeah, he was all about that. I didn’t believe a lick of it. Still don’t, not really. But this is what he was talking about, pretty much. Collective mood altering.”
“He was mostly talking about advertising,” Laura said. “Madison Avenue controls the world and all of that. He didn’t stick out the three years.”
“Government makes people crazy,” Oona said, “and sneaks in the hint that Annie’s the one doing it, giving them cover to assassinate her and get their hands on the ship. Tell me that doesn’t sound like what we’ve got going on here right now. Hell, we heard them talk about half of it.”
“They sounded like they believed Annie was doing it,” Laura said.
“You think the grunts are in on the deal? Agent lady on the couch didn’t know, right?”
Annie thought again about the concept of the membrane of ideas and realized that what they were talking about was actually possible.
“I don’t think I’m doing it,” Annie said. “And I have a hard time believing Oona’s theory. But I don’t know who else that leaves.”
“Except Violet,” Dobbs said.
“It isn’t Violet. Rick? Any thoughts?”
“Can’t help you,” he said.
“Great. So what’s the conclusion about Rick, everyone? We can at least settle that much.”
“If he’s providing you with information you didn’t already have,” Laura said, “my vote is, he’s real.”
“Mine too,” Oona said.
“Sure, why not?” Cora added. “Can’t be that much weirder than zombies, right?”
“I could have told you that,” Rick said.
“Thanks, guys. Rick thanks you too, I think.”
The drive from Groton, Connecticut, to Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, was over two hours, and they only had enough gasoline to get them halfway. Ed thought he could probably get away with using one of his credit cards to fill the tank—there was simply no way the military was capable of moving fast enough to get either a trace on his cards or a usage block on them—but it felt wrong doing that anyway. That was how fugitives got caught in the movies.
He could get by without, though, because whenever he traveled overseas he made sure he had a lot of cash on-hand. American dollars were good anywhere, and credit cards were not, so it was just a good idea, so long as he wasn’t mugged.
He wasn’t mugged in Latvia (or, not exactly) and he still had plenty of cash left over for gas and food.
And, even though it was well after midnight, they were both wide awake. In Ed’s case, it was mostly because his schedule was still on Eastern European time—a week at sea didn’t appear to have altered that—and Sam was just wired.
“Think they’ll chase us?” Sam asked.
Sam was behind the wheel, and making a conscious effort to keep the Jeep at the speed limit when he clearly wanted to floor it to get there sooner.
“They’ll want to. Not so sure they have the manpower to get something in place before we get where we’re going. The navy isn’t really known for their robust ground operations.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“I know.”
Getting off the base had been stupidly easy. They entered the code in the keypad at the time Annie indicated, and then opened the door to an empty hallway. An alarm was going off down the corridor to their left, which was probably what drew the guard away. An emergency exit was down the hall on their right, and that was where they were supposed to go. Ed and Sam debated the merits of hitting the crash bar on that door and setting off another alarm, before deciding it was best to just trust Annie and her magic spaceship.
The door alarm was disabled. On the other side of it, right at the curb, was a Jeep with the keys in the ignition.
Ed knew Annie could use the ship to tap into the security matrix for the base and use it to get them as far as the curb. It would take something else to compel the guard to leave his post for the alarm, and to convince somebody to leave a car with the keys still in it. He wanted to believe that the Jeep had been there for a while and she was only taking advantage of that fact, and further that she only hoped the guard would leave his post for the alarm. (This would mean relying on Sam to overpower him instead.) But Ed didn’t think that was what happened. For one thing, while the surveillance cameras could show her that a Jeep was sitting at the curb, none of them were precise enough to see the keys in the ignition.
To get the entire plan to work, Annie needed to manipulate the thoughts of at least one person, and probably two or more. (Maybe a lot more. After they got in the car, they drove it straight off the base through an unguarded open gate.) This was great for the fact that it worked, and they were free to meet up with her at—as she put it—‘home.’ But the implications were a little terrifying.
Sam seemed pretty unbothered by all of this. But maybe he just hadn’t thought the whole thing through.
“What did you figure out?” Sam asked. “Back there. I saw a eureka expression from you.”
“I have a eureka expression?”
“Yep. Seen
it a couple of times. Did you figure out your telescope problem?”
“I think so. Annie’s escape message helped.”
“How so?”
“You saw her message, and wrote down the code, but it kept repeating. Then I saw it, from end to end, and as soon as that happened the code changed to something else.”
“Sure.”
“How’d she know we both saw it? It was a one-way communication.”
“She didn’t. She ran it a bunch of times and then put the second half of the message through.”
“Yes. Twice. And then it stopped altogether. She had to be positive we saw it, before 11:35, or she’d have to put together a new plan. How did she know?”
“Faith? I dunno. I mean, obviously not, because you’ve got something else in mind here, I just don’t see it.”
“The transmission of that message to us included a receipt flag.”
“Like in my email box.”
“Exactly like in your email box. Only this mailbox is in your mind.”
“I get it,” Sam said. “It’s her whole sentient idea thing. As soon as the message became an idea in our heads, she sent the second half of it.”
“Right. So, about my telescope problem. We have a signal that was picked up by some Latvian university professor. He thinks it’s a non-random signal. More than that, he thinks he’s detected something sent by an alien civilization. He asks for confirmation from other facilities. Maybe he gets that confirmation, maybe he doesn’t, but either way, a few years pass. He keeps listening to the signal. At the same time, somebody in Algernon is doing the same thing. Now, here’s where I was getting stuck. Statistically speaking, that signal is probably older than we are.”
“We, meaning humans.”
“Yeah. A lot older. So, there’s no reason to think the signal changed from five or six years ago to today. But what if I’m wrong. What if there was something in there that recognized the receipt of the message?”
“Okay.” Sam was nodding. He looked like he was following, which was good because Ed wasn’t sure any of this made sense. It was nice to have someone to bounce this off of, to see if it came out as entirely crazy or just a little crazy.
The Frequency of Aliens Page 27
