Pyramid Lake

by Draker, Paul

  “Why are you so hard on yourself?” Cassie asked.

  I didn’t answer. I was actually happy, being here with her. Happy for the first time in years, probably, and I didn’t want to spoil that just yet. Reality would intrude soon enough.

  She tickled my ear. She wasn’t going to leave this alone. “You’re so hard on everyone around you—frankly, I’m surprised you’re still alive—but I think you’re hardest of all on yourself.”

  “Some people can get over being a failure,” I said. “I’m not one of them.”

  “A failure? Oh, come on!” She laughed. “You’re one of the most brilliant computer scientists of our generation. What you’ve done with Frankenstein and MADRID so far… I don’t think I could have even come close. I’m admitting that to you now.”

  She pushed herself up on her elbow and prodded at my temple with her finger, grinning. “There’s a Nobel Prize in your future. I’m sure of it.”

  “Our future,” I said, pushing her finger away. “But none of that shit means anything to me. It’s not important.”

  I stared up at the stars, feeling my stomach tighten again. “It doesn’t change the fact that I let down the two people who mattered most.”

  Seeing the expression on my face, Cassie’s grin faded. She lowered herself to lie on her back and stare at the sky, too.

  “I fucked up the only thing I ever really cared about,” I said. “I failed at being Amy’s father.”

  CHAPTER 41

  My eyes snapped open to the buzzing of the iPhone, accompanied by the annoying sound of Insane Clown Posse, singing “Mad Professor.” I groaned, raising a hand to block the bright light that streamed into the room through the window blinds. The custom ring tone meant it was Roger calling. What the hell did he want?

  The pleasant weight of a feminine head shifted on my chest. Soft black hair slid across my shoulder, tickling my skin, as Cassie pushed herself up onto one elbow and smiled sleepy-eyed down at me. I kissed her forehead, but a twinge of foreboding speared my gut. I leaned back and blinked at the ceiling.

  Consequences. Last night, I had let myself ignore them. Now, in the cold light of day, I had to face them, no matter how much they hurt. Even though Jen and I were divorced, I couldn’t hide from her what I had done. It felt wrong to. I would have to call her and tell her about Cassie. Very soon.

  I really wasn’t looking forward to that conversation.

  Insane Clown Posse started up again—Roger was being persistent. Cassie grimaced, shoved her fingers into her ears, and sat upright with a jingle of earrings and a rustle of sheets. She rolled her eyes at me and slid her legs out from under the covers, then padded naked toward the bathroom.

  Watching her go, I considered ignoring the phone and spending a little longer in our suspended-time bubble of no responsibilities and no consequences. But maybe Roger had heard something about McNulty’s murder.

  Snagging the phone off the floor, I checked the time—9:40 a.m. Friday—before raising it to my ear.

  “Dude.” Roger sounded excited. “You heading in today, or what? I got something in my lab I want to show you.”

  Thinking of the shipment of GPU-processor boards that would just sit useless all weekend because I wasn’t there to supervise their installation, I clenched a fistful of sheet in frustration.

  “You fucking moron,” I said. “The base is closed till Monday, remember?”

  Through the phone, I heard a loud metallic whirring, like the sound of an industrial-strength blender, and Roger laughed like an idiot. “Ho-leeee shee-it, you gotta see this thing!”

  I sat up straight. “You’re in your lab right now?”

  “Yeah. I had something cooking for the Navy, and it needed to come out of the oven today or we’d be looking at a two-week do-over.”

  “How’d you get past the gate?”

  “Base commander white-listed my badge. He intervened for me yesterday because of this Navy ship-armor thing I’m doing, so Bennett made an exception.”

  “Why the hell would I want to see some stupid ship armor?”

  “No, no, I want to show you something else. Trev, man, this thing is insane.” He sounded like a kid with a new bike—which, for Roger, could mean only one thing: a new gun. But I was already thinking about how well this might work out.

  “Nah, forget it,” I said. “Sounds boring, whatever it is. Besides, dumb-shit, they won’t let me past the gate. Not until Monday.”

  I let the silence hang, but Roger still didn’t bite. Looking at the closed bathroom door, I remembered how his gaze had slithered and crawled all over Cassie when he saw her in the cafeteria on Monday.

  “Besides, Cassie and I were going to meet up later, to do some release planning,” I said. “So I’m busy today.”

  Roger was silent for a moment. Then he cleared his throat. “Bring her with you, man. She’ll get a kick out of this, too. I can get you both past the gate.”

  The bathroom door opened, and Cassie shook her head at me, frowning a question at the phone in my hand. I muted it so we couldn’t be heard.

  “It’s Roger,” I told her. “He wants to show us something in his lab. The base is open now.”

  She grabbed her jeans and started pulling them on. “You’re lying, Trevor.”

  “Yeah. But he can get us in.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said. “But don’t lie to me. It’s insulting, I don’t like it, and I can tell when you’re doing it, so it’s pointless anyway.” She paused with one leg denim clad and the other bare, and gave me a sidelong glance. “Later on, we’re also going to talk about whatever it is you’re doing with Frankenstein that you’ve been hiding from me.”

  I nodded. “Soon. I promise.”

  Roger was still squawking in my ear, so I unmuted the phone.

  “She’s there, isn’t she?” Roger said. “You dog! You’re with her right now.”

  “Nah,” I said. “But your mother was just leaving. She’s mad at me because I can’t keep up my end of the bargain anymore, pretending to be your friend.”

  “That’s a messed-up thing to say. Seriously, who’s there with you?”

  “Charlton Heston. He wanted to kick your ass for making wacko gun nuts look bad, but I talked him out of it—told him you had a lot to compensate for.”

  Grimacing in annoyance, Cassie scooped up her blouse. Her bare feet slapped against the hardwood as she headed for the kitchen.

  “Come pick me up in two hours,” I said to Roger. “I’ll have Cassie meet us here.”

  The grinding whirr came through the phone again, trailing off into a steely rattle. “You two are gonna freak out,” he said.

  “‘Kay-thanks-bye,” I said, and hung up on him.

  I heard cupboards opening and closing and a pan sliding onto the stove. Then Cassie called out from the kitchen, “Don’t you have any bacon?”

  “Bad for you,” I yelled back, plugging in my earbuds to make another call. “There’s some spinach in the freezer if you want an omelet.”

  “Arrrgh. Remind me to bring groceries next time.”

  Next time. I smiled at that, dialed, and waited for it to ring through. “Get me Engineering.”

  After making the arrangements I needed, I hung up and wandered into the kitchen, where Cassie had a couple of omelets on plates on the bar. She had left in the yolks, but I didn’t complain. Instead, I cracked some raw egg whites into the Vitamix, poured in some grapefruit juice, and dropped in a banana, an apple, an orange, a carrot, and some celery—skins and seeds and greens and all. The high-speed three-horsepower blender whipped the mix into a smooth, creamy breakfast drink, and I poured us each a glass and sat at the bar to join her.

  Cassie took a sip of hers, grimaced, and took a bite of her omelet instead. “You don’t own a coffeemaker?”

  “We can stop at Starbucks on the way.”

  She waved a hand around us. “How can you live like this?”

  “Like what?” But I knew what she meant.

&nbs
p; “Like this,” she said. “Blank white walls, bare floors, no decor, no framed photos, no books, no TV or stereo, no personality. You barely even have furniture: a bed, a couch, and three bar stools—that’s it. After four years? Why?”

  Because I don’t want this to be my life. “I work a lot.”

  “What’s in there?” She slid off her stool and wandered toward a closed door in the hallway.

  I looked down at my plate. “Guest bedroom,” I said. “It doesn’t get used much.”

  After a moment, I slid off my bar stool and followed.

  She stood in the open doorway, one hand on the knob, taking in the pink walls, the white Pottery Barn twin bed with its flowery comforter, the pink iPad on the nightstand, the American Girl dolls and Disney princesses propped on the windowsill, and the little bookshelf lined with kids’ books: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie.

  The colorful hand-painted sign on the wall that read “Amy’s Room.”

  I reached past Cassie to grasp the knob and tugged the door gently shut. Whatever she saw on my face made her close her eyes and put her arms around me. She held me tight, the side of her cheek wet against mine, her jaw hard against my shoulder.

  CHAPTER 42

  The guy at the gate waved the Beast through without even really looking. Even if he had, I doubted he would have seen us through the smoked rear windows of Roger’s modified Humvee.

  From the parking lot, we could see a pair of MPs guarding the lab wing’s main doors. Roger led Cassie and me around the other side of the geothermal plant to the Navy buildings, and we cut across the railroad tracks and in between the huge half-round Quonset warehouses at the northeast end of the base.

  Roger used his key card at a small side door to the largest of the hangar-size warehouses and led us inside.

  I hadn’t had any reason to spend much time in this part of the base before, so I had never gone into any of these buildings. Roger stopped us just inside the door, alongside a thirty-foot-high wall of stacked, age-discolored wooden crates.

  “I might be a few minutes,” he said. “But you two stay right here. Don’t go wandering around.” He ducked between two rows of crates, and his footsteps receded into the distance.

  A row of caged fluorescent tubes ran along the highest part of the curved ceiling, fifty feet above, lighting the space around us. Row after row of dusty, stacked wooden crates and pallets receded into the distance in each direction.

  Cassie laughed and leaned close to my ear. “This is where they hid the Lost Ark at the end of Raiders.”

  I poked a finger through the dusty plastic shrink-wrapping on the nearest pallet of cardboard boxes, then wiped my finger on my pants. “Or the rest of Linebaugh’s missing eighteen billion.”

  “Not funny.”

  Ahead of us, the block-walled corridor of crates opened out into vacant floor space. Curious, I walked closer, emerging into a wide corridor of empty floor that ran down the middle of the warehouse. A pair of ankle-height steel rails—train tracks—were embedded in the concrete along the centerline, paralleling the lights above. The tracks ran the length of the building, continuing out the aircraft-hangar double doors at the far end. I looked up.

  A crane gantry rose overhead like a smaller version of a shipyard derrick, nearly reaching the ceiling.

  “What is that?” Cassie whispered.

  I followed her gaze to a massive cylinder twenty-five feet in diameter and half a football field long, draped in heavy canvas tarp that had been tied down with guy wires. Stretching a quarter of the length of the warehouse, it looked like a decommissioned subway train, only bigger.

  “It’s too big to be a missile,” I said, frowning. “An orbital booster rocket might be this size. But that makes no sense…”

  I went over to the nearest side, untwisted a guy wire, and grabbed a flap of canvas. Pulling the tarp with me, I walked around the cylinder’s flat end.

  The canvas slid away and fell, puddling on the far side, to reveal a vast circular end cap of scraped and battered metal, like a giant manhole cover almost four times my height.

  From dozens of holes in its face, dark circular blades jutted edge-on, each the size of a truck tire with a mesh of steel teeth for treads. The cutting blades formed a pattern like a giant asterisk.

  Now I knew what I was looking at.

  “TBM,” I said. “Tunnel-boring machine, left over from when they dug out the geothermal plant’s extraction and injection wells. Now mothballed.”

  Cassie stared at it, speechless.

  I couldn’t pull the tarp back over it again, so I turned and walked away. Stopping in the middle of the vast, echoing space, I turned in a circle, taking in the silence.

  Sixty years ago, when the Navy base and the Pyramid Lake bomb range had been in full swing, this part of the base would have bustled with activity. Now it stood eerily empty, like a shuttered steel mill. Used to store old stuff no one needed anymore.

  Still, I knew, supplies did still occasionally come in by train. Dropping to one knee, I slid a finger along one of the rails that ran through the center of the warehouse. The grease looked fresh.

  “Weird,” Cassie’s hushed voice breathed from nearby.

  Rising from my crouch, I walked over to join her, a hundred feet beyond the crane, in front of a pair of heavy armored-steel doors. The shiny new doors were big enough to drive a truck through. They fronted a windowless two-story concrete structure, which was set back into one of the walls of stacked crates. The crates rose high above it on all sides, so that it looked like a half-filled rack in the middle of a row of server cabinets.

  Stepping into the six-foot gap separating the wall of crates from the bizarre concrete building-inside-a-building, I quickly walked all the way around its fifty-by-fifty perimeter. It was a freestanding structure, unconnected to anything else. I slid my hand along the concrete wall, which was high-tensile-strength modern stuff without pocks or dings—clearly poured within the past few years.

  Coming out of the gap on the other side of the little building, I rejoined Cassie.

  “What the fuck?” I said. “This is brand-new. They built it here, inside the warehouse so no one would see it.”

  She walked over to the far side of the steel doors to inspect the access mechanism: a modern-looking combination of biometric sensors, numeric keypad, and card lock.

  Something else caught my eye: a row of black, gym-style metal lockers that ran alongside the wall near the steel door. I started toward them, but Cassie’s voice pulled me away.

  “I think we should go, Trevor.” She pointed to the corner of the small building, above my head, where a camera was angled down toward the steel doors. “Right now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We should go.”

  Following her back toward the side door, I heard a distant creaking, rolling sound from the row of crates Roger had disappeared into. Cassie and I took up our positions by the side door of the warehouse again.

  A moment later, Roger emerged, pushing a huge flatbed cart in front of him. The cart, riding high on thick, knobby tires, supported a single wooden packing crate the width of a refrigerator but longer.

  Sliding the top off the crate, Roger pointed at the empty interior. “Hop in.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Cassie said.

  “How else are we going to get into our own building?” I asked, holding out a hand to help her over the side. A minute later, the two of us were bracing ourselves against the crate’s plywood walls, hearing the cart wheels creak below us as we swayed in darkness lit only by the bright rectangle of joints running around the edges of the crate’s top.

  In my head, I tracked the turns we made and calculated distances, making sure we were actually headed to the lab. We heard Roger talking to the MPs briefly, then the swish of the lab building’s doors.

  I knew already that I would be going back into the big Quonset-hut warehouse, alone, for a closer look at that strange concrete building-inside-a-
building.

  Tonight.

  • • •

  Roger turned to face us, grinning through his goatee. The oversize round black lenses of his blast goggles hid his eyes, making him like the stereotypical mad scientist from a black-and-white 1930s monster movie. His lips moved, forming silent words.

  I couldn’t hear him because of my protective earmuffs. I yanked one of the oversize cans away from my ear. “What?”

  “Put on your goggles, man.”

  “I don’t need ’em.”

  “But they look cool.”

  I glanced at Cassie, standing beside me, wearing her own earmuffs and blast goggles. She seemed amused.

  “Just light it up,” I said, annoyed, letting the padded ear can snap into place against my head again.

  The three of us stood in front of a thick pane of tempered glass, staring into the auditorium-size inner chamber of Roger’s lab. The chamber’s sides were lined with twin rows of furnace chambers, melters, and sintering ovens, but we didn’t spare them a glance. It was impossible to look away from the black monstrosity that squatted in the center of the chamber, waist high, anchored to steel mounting-plates in the concrete floor.

  Roger’s new toy.

  Twin foot-wide, flexible-belted ammunition guides swooped like wings from the gun’s breech to a massive cylindrical ammunition drum mounted lengthwise behind it. An eight-foot-long rotating Gatling-style cannon—seven individual barrels in a tight cylinder, aimed down the length of the chamber. The whole thing looked like a giant black dragonfly.

  “Thirty-millimeter GAU-Eight Avenger,” Roger shouted, his voice muffled by our earmuffs. He handed Cassie a single round of blue-tipped ammunition, the size of a Corona bottle. “It can fire seventy of these a second at Mach three, and destroy a tank from two miles away.”

  Turning back to the waist-height console in front of him, he hit a button. On the other side of the glass, the barrels spun to life with a grinding metal whine we could hear even through our earmuffs. Cassie took a step back from the glass, and so did I.