Independence Day: Silent Zone (11 page)

"Mr. and Mrs.
Jones, my name is Bradley Kepnik. I'm with the Central Intelligence
Agency." He flashed them his credentials. "I was there when the girl
swallowed the object, and I'm positive she's not making this up. Could
I have a
word with the two of you in private?"

Bridget spent that
night at home in her own bed. Agent Kepnik was there with her, sleeping
on a
cot in the hallway. He'd installed a lock on the outside of the
bathroom door,
which only he could open. They were going to wait this thing out. In
the
morning, the girl defecated into a shallow plastic tub which it was
Kepnik's
job to search. To her delight, Bridget learned she wouldn't be going to
school
for the next day or two. She spent the day raiding the icebox and
watching soap
operas. About three o'clock, under the watchful eye of her chaperone,
she went
outside to play handball against the garage door in the driveway.
Despite her
many invitations, Kepnik declined to join her, claiming old football
injuries.
Bridget stopped playing when a large passenger plane flew overhead. She
watched
it intently for a minute.

"What's the
matter?" the fed asked.

"The guy who's
driving that plane is named Cassella. He's the pilot. The copilot is
named...
I can't read it, Tenashi, Tanashawsee, something like that. They're
eating
potato chips. And there's another guy sitting behind them with
head-phones
on."

"I see,"
Kepnik said smoothly. By now he knew all about the girl's mythomania.
"And
what's his name?"

"I
don't know," she hissed back at him, annoyed. She knew when she was
being
treated as a child. "He doesn't have a jacket on, so there's no name
tag.
If you don't believe me call the airport. The company's name is
Hartford Air.
It's written on the backs of the seats."

Kepnik was beginning
to get interested. By now the plane was nearly out of view. "Where's
the
plane going to land? And where's it coming from?"

"Well of course
it's going to land in Cleveland, the airport's right over that way. But
where
are they coming from?" She closed her eyes and concentrated as if she
were
hunting around the cockpit. "Denver. And they took off at 11:45. This
is
neato. I can see inside the plane. Let's call the airport and find out
if I'm
right."

Kepnik phoned the
Hartford Air arrivals desk and discovered there was indeed an 11:45
from
Denver. He confirmed that the pilot's name was Mark Cassella and the
copilot
was Peter Tanashian. He didn't ask about the potato chips.

Accompanied by her
mother and Agent Kepnik, Bridget was flown to Arlington, Virginia, and
taken to
the offices of Project Aquarius. Aquarius, its critics said, was proof
that the
Army had too much money and free time on its hands. It brought together
psychics, astrologers, mediums, and other practitioners of the
paranormal arts
and tried to channel their talents toward military goals.
Twelve-year-old
Bridget was what the people in the office complex referred to as an RV.
This
was not a reference to her weight. RV stood for Remote Visualizer, and
the Army
had six people with this special talent under full-time contract.

The
first
step was to test her powers. She was introduced to one of the project's
researchers, a forty-year-old woman with huge blue eyes, Dr. Joan
Sachville-West, who did everything she could to put the girl at ease.

"We're going to
try a simple experiment with these cards," she explained. "They're
called Zener cards, and each one has a design on it. There are five
different
designs," she said, showing the icons to the girl, "and I would like
for you to concentrate and try to guess which design is on the back of
the card
I hold up. Simple?"

"Wavy
lines!" the girl shouted the second Sachville-West lifted the first
card off
the deck.

"Very good.
You're right."

"Star."

"Right
again."

"Circle."

"Excellent."

When Bridget had gone
fifteen for fifteen, the woman took her hands away and asked what the
next card
was.

"I can't see it
until you pick it up."

"Guess."

"That's not how
it works," she whined. "I have to be able to see it."

"Give it a try.
Just for fun."

Unhappily, Bridget
guessed. "Another wavy lines card?"

Sachville-West turned
it over: star.

"See! I told
you!" Angry that the researcher's insistence had ruined her perfect
streak, she retaliated by telling everyone what color underwear the
scientist
was wearing.

The woman only
crossed her legs under the table and smiled. "You've got quite a
gift."

The rest of the
afternoon was devoted to giving the girl a crash course in geography.
When her
attention waned, and she refused to cooperate, her mother came to the
rescue by
opening her purse and pulling out a bag of candy bars. "My emergency
kit," she explained with an embarrassed smile.

When Bridget had
mastered the names of the seven continents and several bodies of water,
the
real work of Project Aquarius began. She was shown an aerial photograph
of a
Soviet Wolf-class submarine.

"Young
lady," a man in an Army uniform began, "there are two submarines like
this one in the water right now. Let's see if you can tell me where
they
are." The USSR had a total of four of these nuclear-powered subs. Two
of
them were in dry dock at that moment for repairs. One had been picked
up on
radar overnight off the Oregon coast and one was unaccounted for.

Bridget, working over
a wad of chocolate, studied the globe sitting on the desk beside her.
This
whole thing was starting to bore her. She plunked one finger down in
the
Pacific Ocean near the Oregon coastline, then pointed to the waters off
Cuba's
southern shore. "Cienfuegos," she read the tiny print on the globe
through a buildup of chocolate saliva.

"That's
amazing," said the man in the uniform.

"Don't speak
with your mouth full," said her mother.

For the next six
days, Bridget Jones was the most powerful weapon in the United States
military's arsenal. She located and described dozens of enemy positions
around
the world, many of them previously unknown. The girl loved being the
center of
attention, and she worked for peanuts—literally. Because of her
penchant for
prevaricating, each morning began with a series of new test questions.
The
researchers would ask her to remote-visualize locations they knew she
had never
visited, such as the Statue of Liberty, then ask her to count the
windows in
the observation deck. On the morning of her seventh day in Arlington,
when
asked about the leaning tower of Pisa, she answered that it was three
stories
tall. When asked what color socks the interviewer was wearing, she
tried to
sneak a look under the table. The experiment with the Zener cards was
repeated.
Her score was five out of twenty-five, the statistical average.
Although she
protested, it appeared that she had lost her powers. This seemed to be
confirmed when Agent Kepnik came into the room holding a clear plastic
evidence
bag. A search of the young lady's morning stool had turned up a small
metallic
object.

Confronted with this
evidence, Bridget told the truth. Her powers had deserted her. The BB,
she
said, looked different than it had when she swallowed it: it was half
the size
and was now completely bald, the fuzz of small bristles having
apparently been
eaten away by her digestive fluids. "So what happens to me now?"

There
was a
period of waiting while the proper officials
reviewed the case.
Eventually, they decided to follow a little-known government protocol,
MJ—
1949-04W/82. The family was relocated to an undisclosed location in
France,
where they were housed in a luxury villa owned by friends of the U.S.
government and guaranteed an income of approximately $100,000 per year
in
exchange for their cooperation in keeping the matter silent.

Unfortunately, six
months after moving to France, just as she was learning the language,
Bridget
and her family were killed when their car collided with a truck owned
by the French
postal authority.

Until he came to the
ending, Okun found the story amusing. Remembering Dr. Lenel's warning,
he
wondered how much of it was true. But more interesting to him than the
story of
the girl were the handwritten notes jotted in the margins of the
report. They
seemed to have been written at great speed and most of them were
absolutely
illegible. Only two were carefully printed, and both of them startled
the young
researcher. The first one read: "obj housed at AF Acad Colo Sprgs, evid
#PE—8323-MJ—1949-acc21,21a." Evidence number? Okun wondered if there
really were, somewhere in a
warehouse
at the Air Force Academy, a small plastic
bag holding a metallic pea recovered from the excrement of a bratty
twelve-year-old.

The other piece of
noteworthy marginalia was a doodled picture. On the last page of the
report,
someone had drawn a three-dimensional figure of the letter Y.

Every
time Okun had tried to
discuss the mysterious
and troubling image of the
Y, the scientists—normally so talkative, so eager to kick around
ideas—would
merely shrug their shoulders, agree it was very interesting, then go on
to say
they had no idea what to do with the information. After that, they
changed the
subject as quickly as possible. Up to that point, Okun had let them get
away
with it. But now that he'd seen the same image penciled into the margin
of the
Bridget Jones report, he was ready for a confrontation. His intuition
told him
the old men were hiding something, and he was determined to find out
what it
was.

The next morning, he
came into the kitchen and found Freiling counting money. Vegas had been
kind to
them once more, this time to the tune of $675. Dworkin was studying a
copy of
the
Los Angeles Times
he'd picked up in town.

"Ahem." The
young man cleared his throat. "Where's Radecker?"

"Working on his
tennis game, I suspect. He didn't come back last night."

"Then we can
talk."

Dworkin peered over
the top of his newspaper. "Talk?"

"You guys are
holding out on me. There's something you're not telling me."

Dworkin feigned
indignation. He began to rattle on about the ethics men of ideas must
adhere
to, but Okun cut him short by tossing the Jones report onto the table.
"What's this?" Dworkin asked.

"Something I
found in the stacks. It's about a girl who swallowed an object she
found in the
grass after a close encounter with a UFO." Dworkin thumbed through the
pages. He seemed more interested in the handwritten notes than in the
report itself.
Noticing this, Okun asked if he recognized the handwriting. After a
moment of
beard-stroking indecision, the old man admitted that he did.

"This seems to
be the chaotic penmanship of our dear friend Dr. Wells. Have 1 told you
the
interesting story of how he came to be named Director of Research for
this
project?"

Okun wasn't going to
let himself be sidetracked again. "Check the last page."

Sensing
he
would find something unpleasant there, Dworkin reluctantly obliged. The
sight
of the block-perspective sketch of the Y seemed to startle him
slightly. His
mind scrambled to find a cover story. If only his long-haired
coinvestigator
had confronted him with this evidence during a poker game! In that
situation,
Dworkin was a different man, capable of saying whatever the situation
required.
He would have been able to make something up on the spot. But in
matters of
work, he was accustomed to always speaking the truth. He crumpled
toward the
tabletop like a house of cards under Okun's stern glare.

"Brickman, some
stones are better left unturned," Freiling broke in. "None of us
knows anything about that darn Y message."

But it was too late
to back out now, and Dworkin knew it. He braced himself with a sip of
tea, then
explained. "Dr. Wells had a long obsession with this form, this shape.
He
claimed it was communicated to him by the alien shortly after the crash
at
Roswell. Like you, he said there was a feeling of urgent desperation
associated
with the transmission of the image. I believe you used the words 'doom'
and
'abandoned' to describe it. In his last years he became more and more
obsessed
with deciphering the meaning of the symbol, until it got to the point
of
blocking out other thoughts. It drove him to insanity. As this mania
progressed, he neglected more and more of his duties as director. We
were able
to mask the situation for several months, hoping he would make a
recovery, but
then he was called away to meetings in Washington. Apparently he
behaved
himself quite poorly and was not allowed to return to Area 51."

"Poor
dude."

"Yes, indeed.
The disintegration of his personality was a difficult thing to watch."

"Let's be
honest," Freiling said. "The man was loopy to begin with. Slightly
off-kilter."

"So what did he
figure out about the Y?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"
Okun asked, suspicious again. "He must have made
some
progress on
it if he worked for years. Didn't he even have a theory?"

With a worried look
on his face, the old man Finally came completely clean. "Wells
suspected a
second ship. He believed that the Y was a signal, the alien equivalent
of our
SOS. There! Now you know."

Okun nodded with
satisfaction. Once more, his gut instincts had proved to be correct—or,
at
least, he wasn't completely alone in having them. Someone else had
arrived
independently at the same conclusion, even if that someone was a mental
case.
There had to be a second ship.