“Green,” he whispered back immediately, to his credit not wasting time asking questions.
“Stay silent, Tom,” she said urgently, just as a fifth man entered the warehouse from outside. It was the thug named DeShawn Young, a towering tree of a man, even larger than he had appeared in the drone feed.
He walked over to the two prisoners and inspected them carefully. “Comfortable?” he said with a cruel smile. “I hope so. Because you’ll be staying put for a while. There are people coming to see you.”
“When?” asked Anna.
“Why don’t we let that be a surprise. In the meantime, you’re now inside a warehouse, which is all but soundproof. So if you’d like, feel free to scream your hearts out while you wait.”
“Thanks, DeShawn,” said Anna mockingly. “That’s very thoughtful.”
Young shrank back in surprise. “How do you know my name?”
Anna raised her eyebrows. “Why don’t we let that be a surprise,” she said, mirroring his earlier statement.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “I’ll never see either of you again. We’re going to leave you two alone until your, ah . . . company arrives. In the meantime, if you need anything, be sure not to call. Because we really don’t give a shit.”
“You’re just going to leave us unguarded?” said Anna. “What if we free ourselves?”
“You can’t,” replied Young. “But knock yourselves out. Neither of you have a phone or a weapon. Even if you do free yourselves, the doors are steel, and padlocked. And while none of us will be inside, each of the warehouse’s three exits will be guarded by one of my men, who will be carrying a machine gun.”
He gestured to the blue duffel bag on the table nearby. “And not to disappoint you,” he added, “but I’ll be taking your duffel outside, so you don’t have access to the weapons we took from you. And I know Neil Marshall wants his bag of hundreds back.”
“Why such a hurry to leave?”
“Because my current boss thinks you’re too dangerous for us to stay within reach of you,” replied Young. He shook his head and grinned. “Ridiculous, I know, but there you have it.”
The detective almost gasped as a wave of inspiration washed over her, and she suddenly knew exactly how she needed to proceed, and why she had asked Vega the question she had when she had awakened.
“Leaving us is a very bad idea, DeShawn,” she said. “Because here’s the thing, I need to tell you something. Something vital. Urgent. Information that will save your life.” She raised her eyebrows. “I promise you, you’ll be thanking me.”
“Good try,” he replied. “But I’m not falling for any distractions.”
“What am I distracting you from? Do you think I’m stalling until a tiny army hidden in my duffel bag has time to shoot themselves with a grow-ray?”
Young actually smiled. “You may have a point,” he acknowledged. “Okay. So tell us about this urgent information of yours.”
Anna shook her head. “Only you,” she insisted. “You’re the boss, DeShawn, so this is for your ears only. Have your comrades go outside and guard the exits until we’re done. Which won’t be for a while, since there’s a lot I have to cover.”
“Sorry,” he replied, turning toward the nearest exit, “I don’t have that much time to spare.”
“Wait!” shouted Anna. “Give me three minutes. If I haven’t convinced you that what I’m saying is worth a longer discussion, then you can run out of here like a scared little girl. You know, like you’ve been ordered to. But trust me,” she added emphatically, “you’re going to want to hear the rest.”
Young turned back toward her and shrugged. “I think I’ll take a pass,” he said.
“Why?” demanded Anna. “Because Shane Frey put the idea in your head that I’m too dangerous to even be in a room with? Even bound, unarmed, and wounded? Really?”
The detective shook her head in disgust. “You have to admit that sounds bonkers,” she said. “Have you considered that he’s insane? I mean, clinically insane. The kind of insane that you and Neil Marshall need to know about. What’s more likely, that he doesn’t want you near me because he’s worried I’ll overpower you? Or that he’s desperately afraid for you to hear what I might tell you?”
She paused to let this sink in. “But it’s your call, DeShawn. Just don’t blame me when it all blows up in your face.”
He frowned deeply. “Everybody out!” he ordered, reaching a decision. “I’m going to hear what she has to say. Guard the exits until further notice. I’ll join you when I join you. Wolfy,” he added, gesturing to his hairy second-in-command, “take the duffel bag with you on your way out.”
Young walked closer to the prisoners as the rest of his team exited the warehouse. Anna glanced reassuringly at Vega beside her, who had dutifully remained silent as she had instructed.
“Okay, Detective Abbott,” said the team’s leader, “what have you got? You have three minutes to make your case.”
“Shane Frey isn’t who you think he is,” began Anna immediately. “More importantly, he isn’t even what you think he is.” She gestured to Vega with her bound hands, and then returned them to her lap. “And neither is my fellow captive. Both are aliens from the center of our galaxy. Different species of alien.”
DeShawn laughed. “And you’re telling me that Frey is the crazy one,” he said. He turned to leave them. “You can keep the rest of your three minutes.”
“Wait!” said the detective. “Did your gas knock out my fellow captive?”
“What?”
“You heard me. You knocked me out. But my gut tells me the gas didn’t work on him. Am I right?”
Young turned back toward her once again. “So what?”
“So what? Have you ever known this gas to fail? Ever even heard stories of it failing?”
Young didn’t reply, but his expression spoke volumes.
“It failed this time because this guy isn’t human. He has a different metabolism. Different a lot of things.”
“There has to be another explanation,” said Young.
“There isn’t,” replied Anna, “and I can prove it to you. And when I do, I’ll tell you some things about Shane Frey you’re going to want to know. This is bigger than all of us. Are you really going to trust the motives of an alien being?”
Young studied Tom Vega carefully. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “He looks human enough. What’s your proof?”
“Do you have a knife?”
Young nodded.
“Then cut his arm. Just a little. His blood will run green rather than red. If it doesn’t, then turn us over to Frey, and I won’t say another word.”
Young’s eyes narrowed as he continued to study Vega from head to toe. Finally, he removed a switchblade knife from his pocket and snapped the razor-sharp blade into place. “You’re on,” he said, slowing approaching the alien, who shrank back, clearly not ecstatic about the prospect of being cut.
When Young bent down with his knife to cut Vega’s arm, Anna threw her bound hands to her right and drove a tranquilizer dart deep into Young’s massive thigh.
Young jumped from surprise more than pain, pulling out the offending item and inspecting it carefully, his confusion turning to rage. “You bitch!” he shouted at Anna, raising the knife, but this time with Anna as the intended target. “I’m going to gut you like a fish!”
Saying this, the mighty oak that was DeShawn Young collapsed to the floor at her feet, unconscious, as though a light switch had been thrown from on to off.
Anna allowed herself a brief sigh of relief. Just before surrendering, she had retrieved the dart she had put in her duffel bag at the high school, and used the gauze she was wrapping on her left wrist to hold and conceal it. While she was speaking to Young, she had carefully worked the small, needle-nosed pellet free, keeping her hands in her lap, and keeping all but the needle hidden between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand.
Her heart continued
to beat wildly in her chest as she tipped the chair over and slammed into the concrete floor. She ignored the jarring of her body and inched over to the fallen knife, less than a foot away. When she had it, she carefully reversed it so the blade was pointing backwards and sawed at the tough plastic between her wrists. Finally, after several minutes of concerted effort, unable to wield the knife as effectively as she would have had her hands not been bound, she severed the last strand of plastic. Once her right hand could operate independently, she was able to free herself and her alien companion in only a few minutes more, while a relieved Vega sang her praises.
With this complete, Anna helped herself to the fallen thug’s gun, and cracked the butt into his head, ensuring he wouldn’t awaken, even after the short-acting tranquilizer had worn off.
“Now what?” said Vega, as sober reality returned. “Even with a gun, I don’t see how we can breach these steel doors.” He spied Young’s automatic rifle leaning against one wall of the warehouse. “Even a machine gun won’t do it.”
“I have no intention of leaving just yet,” said Anna. “And it just became clear to me why my subconscious wanted me to surrender. It saw deeper than ever before. Had we run, I’d be wanted by every cop in America. But this way, I’ll have the chance to clear my name. Prove my innocence. Which will get one of many monkeys off my back, and give me more time to understand this intergalactic war thing—not to mention my clairvoyance.”
Vega raised his eyebrows. “Did you just acknowledge being clairvoyant?” he said in delight. “Does that mean you’ve finally accepted that your subconscious can do more than mere pattern recognition?”
“Yes,” said Anna. “You win. I seem to be weakly precognitive. And it does seem to be a handy trait to have.”
Vega opened his mouth to speak, but Anna held up a forestalling hand. “We’re in a major hurry here,” she said, frisking Young’s unconscious body as she did, removing a phone.
“The good news is that the clairvoyant part of my intuition is telling me that Frey and reinforcements won’t be arriving for an hour or more.”
She frowned. “The bad news is that the Cavalry won’t be arriving for a while, either.”
29
Anna glanced at her borrowed phone and noted that it was now five fifteen in the morning. It would still be pitch-black outside. She entered her captain’s number and sent him a text message. Captain Perez, she wrote, it’s Anna. Pick up.
She then called his cell and waited. The call ended after three rings, not unexpectedly.
She imagined the captain bleary-eyed and furious that a solicitor had awakened him from a deep sleep. He kept his phone on during the night in case of emergencies, but had let it be known in the precinct that no emergency was important enough to wake him unless LA was about to get hit with a nuke, and he was the only one who could stop it.
“Captain, this is Anna,” she said to his voice mail. “Pick up.”
She waited three minutes and dialed again. This time he answered on the first ring. “Anna! Is that you?”
“Sorry to wake you, but I’m surrendering, and I thought you might want to know.”
“Is this a joke, Anna? Or do you seriously want to come in?”
“Not a joke. But I don’t want to come in. I need you to come get me.”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t have a lot of time. I’m trapped inside a warehouse with six massive, stacked pallets of cocaine. I’ll get the GPS coordinates from my phone in a minute and text them to you. Outside there are four of Neil Marshall’s men with automatic weapons keeping me inside.”
“So how—”
“I’m not finished,” interrupted Anna. “I’m expecting an even larger hostile force to arrive here in an hour or two, so you need to haul ass. Put on your sirens and go a hundred and twenty, or get a few helicopters, but get your ass here! Everyone’s ass. You’ll need a big team. Bring an army of cops. Flash-bang grenades, bulletproof vests, the whole nine. I recommend SWAT if you’re willing. Try to take one or more of Marshall’s men alive, because they’ll be able to tell you about the elaborate frame Marshall pulled off. But don’t worry if you can’t. I have one of them alive in here with me, unconscious. I know someone used my gun to kill those four out-of-towners who were assassinated at the high school. I’d bet good money that one of the guys here pulled the trigger.”
“So this is about clearing your name?” said Perez.
“You’re damn right it is. Plus, we get a haul of bad guys in the process, and enough cocaine to fill a truck. Win-win. But the clock is ticking. The warehouse is steel, and I’m padlocked inside, so bring some heavy-duty bolt cutters along with you. There are three doors, so if your men can get one of them open early, I can help. I have an innocent friend in here with me. We’ll both need to be placed under police protection once we’ve been rescued. Which I’m sure you’ll want to do anyway, until you’ve cleared my name. I’ll send the GPS coordinates now.”
“How do I know you’re even there? How do I know this isn’t an ambush?”
“Come on, Captain. I know it looks like I assassinated helpless men at Salem Hills High. But in your heart, you know I don’t have that in me. And I’m not going to harm people I’ve worked with for years. You’ll have an army with you, so how big of an ambush could it be? Send a drone in first to confirm the four armed men and the warehouse if you want. But hurry! You need to be here yesterday.”
There was no immediate reply.
“Come on, Captain!” she snapped. “Worst case, you activate a team and it’s a hoax—which it isn’t. But that’s worst case. Even then, it serves as a great drill to see how quickly you can galvanize and move a large team in an emergency.”
“All right, Anna,” said the captain after a brief pause, “I’ll bite. You’re the best detective I’ve ever worked with, and seemingly the most honest. If that doesn’t buy you my trust in this situation, nothing ever will. Send the coordinates.”
“Roger that,” said the detective. “Get here soon,” she added, and then ended the connection.
“That seemed to go well,” said Vega tentatively.
“I think so too,” replied Anna. Then, with a frown, she added, “But this clairvoyance of mine is fickle. I really felt like it was clicking when you woke me up at the motel, but now I don’t feel any different than usual. Or any better able to see the future.”
“Not surprising. Your subconscious needs a lot of practice. Right now, I suspect that the higher the stakes, the more likely it is to perform. But until it’s been enhanced, and until you can forge such a strong bridge to your future visions that you’ll have much more of a conscious awareness of them, it will be spotty, at best.”
Anna nodded. She suspected that the more she strained, the more she reached for the future, the less likely it was to appear. She had to just let it come to her when it so chose.
In the meantime, they would be trapped inside for thirty to forty-five minutes, at minimum, with nothing really to do. It was time to return to the discussion she had been having with Vega when the urgent need for sleep had interrupted. Once they were under police protection, there was no telling how long it might be before they had the proper privacy to continue.
“So after you proposed that I command your fleet,” said Anna, “I asked for more background. You were going to tell me how the Tarts fit into all this. And what they’re doing on Earth—other than trying to kill the two of us.”
Vega looked around at their expansive steel prison, decorated with pallets of cocaine. “You want me to do that now? In here?”
Anna shrugged. “No time like the present,” she replied. “Besides,” she added with a grin, “since I can’t leave, I’m what you might call a captive audience.”
30
The alien named Tom Vega paused to gather his thoughts. “Thousands of years ago,” he began, “as I’ve said, the portal between Earth and Vor disappeared, and cut off our people. But about eight years after that happene
d, another portal opened. This time a portal between Earth and Tartar. And the Tartarians came through, just as we had.”
Anna’s eyes narrowed. This was an unexpected wrinkle. She knew that the Tarts were here now, but he had led her to believe they weren’t then.
“But the Tarts’ motives were very different than ours,” continued the alien. “They saw humanity as primitive, worthless, and decided this portal would give them a rare opportunity to expand their reach. Considerably. If they established a foothold here in the boonies, they’d be twenty-five thousand light-years removed from all the action. Untouchable except possibly through gates.
“On Tartar, expansion is all but impossible due to the war, and so many other intelligences straining to keep each other in check. There are gates between worlds, yes, but all are local. Nothing more than express lanes to where our starships could take us anyway.”
“I see,” said Anna thoughtfully. “So if they established a colony here, they could spread across this region of space unchecked.”
“Exactly. They weren’t big fans of Earth as a starting point, but they saw this as a chance too good to pass up.”
“What didn’t they like about Earth?” asked Anna.
“The same thing we Vorians don’t like, to be honest. It’s too dark during the day, and has a long night every single cycle. The sky is the wrong color. The atmosphere isn’t optimal. That sort of thing.”
He paused. “Still, this wasn’t a deterrent to the Tarts. Technology could brighten their personal space, brighten the entire planet eventually, and transform its atmosphere more to their liking. Eventually, their descendants would adapt. They would just need to wipe the planet clean of human life and bring as many of their people here as the gate would allow.”
Anna was horrified to hear these words, but her gut had known it was coming. “How do you even know this?” she asked. “You just said they didn’t arrive until after Vor was cut off from Earth?”
“I didn’t know it before I arrived here. In the twenty-eight hundred years since we were cut off, we on Vor had no idea the Tarts had been here too. I only learned of this three years ago.
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