“They had something in their favor. Some kind of protection. My bosses told me I was crazy, said I must have missed them. But the forensics boys told me the straight dope. They found all the rounds I’d fired that had ‘missed.’ They were lying in the middle of the street, flattened. No other obstacle to account for their collapse. Just flattened bullets lying there, like they’d hit an invisible wall and dropped to the ground. I knew something else had gone down. I knew that a whole ’nother career track had just opened up. Alphonse contacted me within a few weeks, and everything changed.”
“So you cut your dick off and wore scarves to hide your adam’s apple?” Vic said, grinning.
“Fuck you, ya dyke bitch,” Abe replied, knocking back another shot of bourbon and grimacing from the burn. He turned to Stephanie. “You better watch out for this rug-muncher, Steph. You’ll wake up and find—hey!” Vic had thrown a pillow at him. He caught it and started whacking Vic with it across the gap between the two beds.
“Pillow biter! Pillow biter!” she yelled between blows. Abe relented and laughed, pouring more bourbon once Vic stopped.
“Well,” Stephanie said, a little perturbed. “You guys get out much?”
Vic turned serious. “Look, Steph, this is it. From here on out, it’s blood and thunder and misery and heartbreak. That’s the way it always is. You gotta cut loose at the start and enjoy it while it lasts.”
“So what’s your story, Steph?” Abe asked. “What’s up with Darren, anyway? You two get it on?”
Stephanie took a slow drink of bourbon and stared at the floor. “You know, not everything is funny.”
The room got quiet for a moment. Vic broke the silence. “Steph, hon, the truth is that nothing is fuckin’ funny. It all sucks, up and down the line. But sometimes you gotta pretend.”
“Yeah, okay,” Stephanie said. “Okay, I thought that look on Larry’s face when they tore his guts out was pretty funny, don’t you?” She got up and stormed out of the motel room.
Vic looked at Abe once Stephanie was outside. “I told you she was kinda spooky.”
Abe sighed and ran his fingers through his thick red hair. “Shit, it’s her first op as a full agent. She can’t just up and join the Three Investigators Club right off the bat. It takes time to assimilate. She’ll get there.”
Vic took another shot of bourbon. “I hate this nickel-and-dime crap you buy. Why do I send you on liquor patrol, anyway?”
“It’s my charming smile.”
Vic grinned. “Starfucker.”
“Gutter mouth,” Abe said, pouring more bourbon into his cup.
“Speaking of what a starfucker you are,” Vic said, “how’s the wife?”
Abe emptied his cup and closed his eyes for a moment while he swallowed. “Well, she’s got a label again, finally. She’s been humping that tape around for months, and somebody at Virgin finally bit. They’re angling for a big comeback story—former teen sensation returns, that kinda crap. First thing they told her is lose twenty pounds.”
“I didn’t mean her career,” Vic said quietly.
“I know. I’m just ducking the issue.” Abe refilled his cup yet again. “The truth is, I don’t think we’ve got much left. We don’t really talk these days unless it’s a fight. I think the writing’s on the wall. We’re just waiting to see who calls a lawyer first. Carol’s already got one for this contract business, so maybe she’ll get the ball rolling.”
“Well, shit. What about Eric?”
“Hell if I know. Joint custody, if I’m lucky. Visitation rights if I’m not. He’s barely two. Probably be better off with her, if this Virgin thing goes big. At least she could really provide for him. I’m lucky to spend less than sixty hours a week at the office, not to mention that I could get my head blown off one of these days.”
“I’m sorry, Abe. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, I’m glad you did.” He finished his drink and winked at her. “You know, I’ve always had a thing for musicians.”
Vic took another sip, smiling behind the cup.
Outside the motel room, Stephanie leaned against the metal railing and looked out into the deeps of the night. Below her was a swimming pool. There was a good-looking blond guy paddling around, flirting with a dark hispanic woman who was also in the pool. They looked so normal, so real, and so happy; Stephanie hated them from first sight. Who were they to lounge around a motel, enjoying life without any sense of the shitstorm lurking over every horizon?
Stephanie had walked into that shitstorm, willingly, and returned to tell the tale. It wasn’t a pretty story, and she wished that she could be in that pool with that guy, laughing and touching each other from time to time, losing the world in a simple caress, denying the inevitable with a look and a smile.
But that was no longer an option, was it? She was up here on the second floor, gazing out at the whole wide world. She could see so much more than they could, that happy, lazy couple down there in the pool. Still, what good was knowledge if it didn’t bring happiness? She’d made a decision on the Roscoe op: she’d focus on the immediate problems of human suffering, and steer clear of the big picture, of the big questions. But up here on the second floor, gazing into the night, she saw nothing but big questions.
Somewhere, she knew, Forrest James—Agent Darren—was in a cell at Fort Leavenworth, the military prison in Kansas. He was the last man to reach inside her, to really give a damn about what she thought and how she felt. When they first met, she thought he was just being an asshole. Once she realized what he was trying to protect her from, she felt a sort of gratitude, mixed with resentment at his belief that she couldn’t handle it. Yet when push came to shove, she really couldn’t—in the face of the cosmos itself she wilted, retreated back across the line that demarcated reason and sanity. She’d left him alone out there in the cold and dark, at a time when he needed her more than she could then imagine.
She loved him still, with that doomed sort of passion that is no more than half-rooted in reality; James had become for her a sort of fantasy, a phantom protector who would do anything to save her. This phantom didn’t watch TV or read books or pass the time in any mundane way; it simply hovered nearby, ready to offer protection at a moment’s notice. Yet the reality of the phantom was that he was locked up in Fort Leavenworth for years and years to come. Stephanie was on her own.
Just thinking about these things made her head hurt. She knew she’d been a jerk just now, with Vic and Abe, but she resented their familiarity, their borderline intimacy, and she resented their attempts to get to know her. She just wanted to go to bed and get to work in the morning, when things might make more sense—and when that damned, happy, flirting couple in the pool would be gone.
Finally she turned and went back into the motel room. The lights were off, but Vic and Abe were chatting quietly in the dark, across the space that separated the beds. They stopped talking once Stephanie was inside. She stripped and climbed into the cot, then pulled the covers over her shoulders and eventually went to sleep. She dreamed troubled dreams.
The following afternoon, Cell T got off the plane in Knoxville. All three were listless and red-eyed from the night before, and they spoke only rarely. Departing the airport in their rental car, they headed straight to a gun store to buy another three hundred rounds of 9mm Parabellum. From there they went to the motel and checked in, where a package from Alphonse was waiting for them. Inside was a key to the Knoxville Green Box. Cell S had set up this box when they’d come back from Groversville a few years earlier; no DG teams had been through this neck of the woods since.
The storage facility was typical of the breed. Cell T drove up in their car, punched in a code at a box by the gate, and then drove into an indoor parking area. From there they took an elevator up to the third floor and found a door marked 323. The key fit smoothly. Inside were two boxes containing a variety of handgun ammunition calibers; three sets of XL cold-weather clothes; an instant camera with six unused packs of ten exposures e
ach; a microcassette recorder and three blank tapes; a half-dozen business cards from Groversville merchants and one from a TV news producer; and a Chamber of Commerce map of Groversville that had obviously been taken from a motel room, with some locations circled and annotated. Cell T took everything except for the clothes and the ammunition.
Returning to their hotel room, Cell T faced the prospect of a twenty-four-hour period of nothing to do. They had to wait in Knoxville until tomorrow, when they’d receive the fake Memphis Private Investigator ID’s from Alphonse, along with “something special” he’d promised to include. The three of them sat on the two beds. A cot was once again set up against a wall, though Abe had lost a rock-paper-scissors competition and been assigned to it this time.
“All I’m saying,” Abe said, “is that we’ve never been to Groversville before, and it’s a strange situation. As long as we’re sitting on our ass, we might as well send a canary into the coal mine, you know?”
Stephanie looked at the business card in her hand again and shook her head. “It’s too risky! I can’t believe you’d tip off the media before this op even starts.”
“First off, Phenomen-X hardly qualifies as the media,” Abe replied. “Second, those guys have experience in Groversville. They were there during Cell S’s original trip. And shit, if we’re right about this being some sort of trap, better them than us.”
Stephanie turned to Vic. “It’s your call, Vic. I don’t know these guys. I’ve never watched their show or seen them work. If you think they could be useful and not screw up the op, then I guess we might as well.”
Vic sat in silence for almost a minute. Abe lay back on the bed and folded his arms across his face. Stephanie tapped her foot rhythmically on the floor, softly betraying her anxiety at this discussion. Finally, Vic spoke.
“We’ll do it. They’ve been good lackeys in the past. We might as well turn them loose on this situation. If nothing else, they should serve as a good smokescreen—the bad guys might accept our activity as part of the Phenomen-X team’s meddling.”
Abe sat up, smiling. “You won’t regret this. Those guys make great Oswalds.”
Stephanie shrugged. “If you think so, Vic, then I’m okay with it. We’ll send them in and see what happens.” She clearly sounded unconvinced.
Vic took the business card back from Stephanie. Then she picked up the phone and started dialing numbers.
The floor manager was terse. “Would the talking head like some coffee?” David Carmichael, the aging and blandly telegenic host of Phenomen-X, bristled. “I have a fucking name, goddamnit!” he shouted. “Call me David, you cocksucker, or Mister Carmichael if you’re feeling formal!”
The floor manager paused for a moment, then spoke into his headset mike: “The talking head doesn’t want any coffee.”
Carmichael grumbled some more, but it was almost time to tape this week’s episode of the popular, syndicated, UFO/supernatural “news” show Phenomen-X. From their studio in Culver City, California, a staff of two dozen labored to bring the latest and greatest outré stories to a credulous public. Ratings were down. There were only so many UFO sightings to go around, and the networks had muscled into the action lately, buying up all the good vid.
The floor manager listened to his headset and then spoke to Carmichael as if he were addressing the Wailing Wall: “Go in five, four, three, two, one . . .”
“Can you handle the truth?” Carmichael said in a pleasantly nondescript voice. “Because we’re bringing it to you—right here on Phenomen-X!”
“Roll title,” said the director in the control room, and the opening montage and credits began. The show was recorded “live to tape,” which meant that there was no live audience, but that they produced each episode as if there was one—real time start to finish, hopefully with no need to go back and edit the footage later. Forty-four minutes and ten seconds from now, this week’s episode would be over. “Cue talking head,” the director said once the intro was done.
“Bigfoot surfaces in Madagascar, and a child’s doll turns deadly in Minnesota. But first, Sonja Dewey goes ghost-busting at a hotel in Port Townsend, Washington, in this Phenomen-X exclusive. Sonja?” Carmichael’s face was a mask of strangely distant enthusiasm. A pre-recorded video of Sonja’s report began to play.
In the control room, news director Frank Carincola sat back and watched the episode unfold through his thick bifocals. He had done everything he could up to this point, and now the show was in the hands of the production staff. Tommy Prendergast, an enthusiastic young gofer and general assistant, tapped Carincola on the shoulder. “Uh, you’ve got a call, sir.” Tommy held a cordless phone out to the news director, the smell of deodorant wafting off his portly body like steam from a hot tub. Tommy was, rather unwittingly, the show’s target market: an ill-adjusted, socially inept technogeek with a jones for the inexplicable. Carincola gave him a withering look which could be loosely translated as “beat it” and answered the call.
“Yeah?”
“Frank Carincola?” The voice on the phone was digitally processed to disguise its identity.
“Yeah?”
“You know who this is.”
“Uh—yeah, I do. This is the group, isn’t it?” Carincola said enthusiastically as he fumbled for a pen to take notes. “The group” was his term for the conspiracy that he believed pulled the strings of the federal government, particularly those agencies charged with dealing with extraterrestrials. From time to time, the group would contact him with leads for stories and cryptic clues.
“A couple years ago you went to Groversville, Tennessee, correct?”
“Yeah,” Carincola said again, his tone a little muted. “That was me.”
“You need to go back to Groversville, Frank. You need to go there tonight. Things have changed there.” The voice was electronic and buzzing.
“What?” Carincola bellowed. “What do you mean, changed? It’s abandoned!”
“You’ll find out,” the voice replied. “Just get on a plane. Now. We’ll be in touch.”
The caller hung up.
Shit, thought Carincola. Groversville. His trip to Groversville was his baptism by fire. The other three people on that trip had died soon after of Hantavirus, leaving him alone with the knowledge of what they’d seen. He was a health-food nut and a vegan, and during Phenomen-X’s trip to Groversville, Tennessee, to investigate UFO reports, cattle mutilations, and alien abductions, he was the only one to bring his own supply of food and water, just out of habit. The others had eaten locally and drank from the sink faucet, and they all died—at least, that was the connection that Carincola made afterwards. The Groversville trip convinced him that journalism was where he had to be, but it also convinced him that there was more in Heaven and Earth than humans dreamed of, and that under the right (or wrong?) circumstances, Heaven and Earth might conspire to kill good people. Like his fellow staffers who’d bought the farm.
The phone call rattled Carincola to his core. There hadn’t been a peep from Groversville since the incidents, and even the diaspora of town residents and the closing of the highway exit to the valley had failed to catch the national media’s eye. The fact that this situation was now coming to light surprised Carincola, but the associated risk did not dissuade him. By midnight, he was on a flight to Knoxville with his star reporter, Sonja Dewey, and his grizzled video-grapher Allen Eddington. They were bringing a lot of gear, but more importantly, they brought enough bottled water and pre-packaged food to last them a week. Sonja and Allen thought he was acting paranoid—that was nothing new, actually—but Carincola laid out the ground rules very clearly: “You eat nothing from there, you drink nothing from there. You assume everyone’s out to poison you at every opportunity.” His companions nodded mutely and swapped looks as soon as he looked away. Whatever they were heading into, their boss was taking it very, very seriously.
Dr. Camp stood in the breakfast nook off his kitchen, assembling a large cardboard shipping box that he’d be se
nding counter-to-counter on a plane to Knoxville first thing in the morning. There was a manila folder on the table containing three forged private investigator ID cards, allegedly issued by the city of Memphis. He’d picked them up from his usual forger on the way home from work. They were going into the box, along with some fluid containers that Agent Stan was bringing over sometime this evening. If all went well, Cell T would have the box in their hands tomorrow afternoon.
The fluid was something special. A DG friendly—a microbiologist—had knocked it together for him during the original Groversville op a couple years back. Cell S had found evidence of surgical tampering on some of the residents of the town, surgery that the victims weren’t aware of and that didn’t bear much resemblance to human medicine or procedures. In all cases, there were no scars. The wounds were closed with a strange substance that the friendly had called “neo-tissue,” because it could mimic most any form of human tissue on the fly—skin, muscle, lung, whatever was needed. It allowed surgery without scarring, and in some places the neo-tissue had been used to replace entire organs or limbs with new ones that were superior to the originals. The fluid—a compound called leucopararosaniline—was used in spray bottles. When it came in contact with the substance, a reactive dye in the fluid would turn a bright purple. Sprayed on a human body, or on anything else that contained neo-tissue, it made an obvious identification.
After the op, Cell S kept the concentrated powder that the friendly had supplied. Agent Stan was prepping a few bottles for Dr. Camp to send to Cell T in Knoxville, though Stan didn’t know where the material was going, to who, or for what purpose. He and Agent Susan had been kept in the dark about the investigation into Shasta’s disappearance.
There was a pounding at the front door. Dr. Camp put down the tape gun he was using to assemble the box and shuffled through the living room to the foyer. He checked through the peephole to verify that it was, indeed, Agent Stan, and was unsettled to see that the man appeared to be crying. Dr. Camp slipped his right hand into the pocket of his housecoat and opened the door with his left.
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 11
