Strangers (76 page)

Diana was the code word that meant Ginger Weiss had phoned Philip and needed to speak with Alex. The moment he had seen Ginger at Pablo’s funeral, her silver-blond hair a-shimmer as if with a light of its own, she had made him think of Diana, goddess of the moon.

After he said goodbye to Philip, he told his wife, Elena, that he intended to drive to the mall. “I want to stop at the bookstore and pick up a couple of novels that Philip recommended.”

He actually went to the mall, but before he bought the books, he found a public phone booth and, using his AT&T credit card, called Philip to get the number that Ginger Weiss had left.

“She says it’s a pay phone in Elko, Nevada,” Philip told him.

When Alex put the Nevada call through, Ginger Weiss did not answer until the fifth ring. “Sorry,” she said. “I was in the car, parked beside the booth. It was just too cold to stand here and wait.”

“What are you doing in Nevada?” Alex asked.

“If I understood you correctly at Pablo’s funeral, you really don’t want me to answer questions like that.”

“Right. Less I know, the better. What did you want to ask me?”

She explained, with a minimum of detail, that she had found others suffering from memory blocks similar to hers, some with different false memories covering the same time span. Since Alex was the expert on brainwashing, Ginger wanted to know if implanting fake memories that included threads of reality was more difficult than implanting entirely false recollections, and he was able to assure her that, indeed, it was.

“That’s what we figured,” Ginger said. “But it’s good to hear you confirm it. Shows we’re on the right track. Now, one more thing: I want you to get some information for us. We need to know whatever you can learn about a Colonel Leland Falkirk, an officer in one of the Army’s elite DERO companies. I also need—”

“Wait, wait,” Alex said, looking nervously through the glass door of the booth at shoppers walking past in the mall, as if he were already under observation or even targeted for removal. “At the cemetery, I said I’d provide advice or background on mind-control techniques. But I warned you I wouldn’t dig up information. I
explained
my position.”

“Well, even though you’ve been retired for years, you must still know people in many of the right places—”

“Didn’t you hear me, Doctor? I will not get actively involved in your problems. I simply can’t afford to. I’ve got too much to lose.”

“Now, don’t worry about digging up anything exotic or highly classified. We don’t expect that,” she said, as if she had not heard him. “Just the bare details of Falkirk’s service record might help us understand him and form an idea of what to expect from him.”

“Please, I—”

But she was indefatigable: “I also need to know about the Thunder Hill Depository, an Army facility here in Elko County.”

“No.”

“It’s supposed to be an underground storage facility, and maybe that’s all it was for a long time, or maybe it’s always been something else, but I know it’s not just an underground warehouse these days.”

“Doctor, I won’t do this for you.”

“Colonel Leland Falkirk and Thunder Hill Depository. It’s not so much to ask: no deep snooping, just what details you can glean. Talk to your old friends who’re still in the game. Then report to either Dr. George Hannaby there in Boston or to Father Stefan Wycazik, a priest in Chicago.” She gave him phone numbers. “I can get in touch with them, and they won’t mention your name when they tell me what you’ve
reported. That way you don’t have to call me direct, and you stay in the clear.”

He tried and failed to control the palsied shaking of his hands. “Doctor, I’m sorry I volunteered even limited assistance. I’m an old man who’s afraid to die.”

“You’re also worried about sins you might’ve committed in the name of duty,” she said, repeating what he’d told her at the cemetery. “And you’d probably like to do something to atone for some of those sins, real or imagined. This would be atonement of a sort, Mr. Christophson.” She repeated the telephone numbers for Hannaby and Wycazik.

“No. If you’re interrogated, remember I said no, emphatically no.”

With maddening good cheer, she said, “Oh, and it would help if you had something for me within the next six or eight hours. I know that’s a tall order. But then again, I’m only asking for basic information, whatever’s in the unclassified files.”

“Goodbye, Doctor,” he said pointedly.

“I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”

“You will
not
hear from me.”

“Toodle-oo,” she said, and hung up on him first.

“Christ!” he said, slamming the receiver down.

She was an attractive woman, personable, intelligent, appealing in so many ways. But her absolute conviction that she would always get what she wanted—this was a trait he sometimes admired in a man, seldom or never in a woman. Well, she’d be disappointed this time. This time, she’d not get what she wanted. Damned if she would.

Yet…with his Cross pen, he had made note of the telephone numbers for Hannaby and Wycazik, which she had given him.

•

Dom and Ernie set out early Tuesday morning to reconnoiter at least part of the perimeter of Thunder Hill Depository. They went in Jack Twist’s new Jeep Cherokee. Jack himself was sleeping back at the motel, having gone to bed only a few hours ago, after spending half the night driving around Elko, staying on the move with Brendan Cronin and Jorja Monatella. Both the Cherokee and the motel’s Dodge van had four-wheel drive, but the Jeep was tougher, more maneuverable. The foothill and mountain roads up toward Thunder Hill might be icy in spots, and as the day promised new snow, they wanted the most reliable transportation.

Dom did not like the look of the sky. Thick dark clouds hung low over the high plains, lower over the foothills, and obscured the tops of the mountains. The weather forecast called for the first big storm of the
year (later than usual this season), as much as fourteen inches of snow in the higher elevations. Not a single flake had fallen yet.

The raised and threatening lash of winter did not induce a pensive mood in Dom or Ernie; they were in high spirits upon setting out from the motel. They were finally
doing
something, acting not just reacting. In addition, there was the pleasant fellowship that exists when men who like each other set out on an adventure together—a fishing trip or an expedition to a ballpark. Or a scouting trip to explore the perimeter defenses of a military installation.

In no little measure, their excellent mood grew from the unexpected peacefulness of the night just past. For the first time in weeks, Dom’s sleep hadn’t been disturbed by nightmares or sleepwalking. He’d dreamed only of an undetailed chamber filled with golden light, evidently the same place that featured in Brendan’s dreams. Likewise, instead of lying awake in fear of the shadows beyond the glow of the bedside lamp, Ernie had drifted off to sleep at once. The others also said it was the most restful night in recent memory. Ginger’s theory, put forth over a quick cup of coffee this morning, was that their worst dreams had been related not to the mysterious events they’d witnessed on the night of July 6, but to the subsequent brainwashing. Therefore, now that they had an idea of what they’d endured at the hands of the mind-control experts, the subconscious pressure related to those experiences was relieved, eliminating the source of those particular bad dreams.

And Dom had a reason of his own to feel good about the day. This morning, no one had looked warily at him or treated him with deference because of his telekinetic power. At first he was baffled by their quick adjustment to his new status. Then he realized what must be going through their minds: Since they had shared his experiences of the summer before last, it was logical that they would also share his strange power sooner or later. They must believe their own development of paranormal abilities was merely lagging behind his. Eventually, if they did not acquire the power, they might build the emotional, intellectual, and psychological walls between them and him that would isolate him, as he feared. But for the moment, anyway, they were acting as if no gulf separated them from him, and he was grateful.

Now, humming softly, Ernie drove north on the two-lane county road, leaving the motel and the interstate behind them. They climbed some of the same rugged hills down which Jack Twist had come last night when making his clandestine approach to the Tranquility (although Jack had traveled overland), and Dom studied the changing terrain with interest. The rising land seemed leaner the higher it rose, revealing less flesh and more rocky bones that poked up everywhere in clavicles and scapulae
and stern urns of limestone, in fibulae and femurs of crumbling shale, in occasional ribs and spines of formidable granite. As if in awareness of the colder air of higher altitudes, the land wore more clothes: thicker petticoats of grass; more lavish skirts of sage and other bushes; then trees, trees, more trees—mountain mahogany, tall pines, cedar, quaking-aspen, and on eastern slopes, an occasional spruce or fir.

They’d gone only three miles when they reached the snow line. A thin mantle flanked the road at first, but in the next two miles it deepened to eight inches. Although a winter drought had held sway from September until early December, and although no major storm had swept the area yet this season, a few light snows had put down a respectable ground-cover, also frosting the bristled boughs of the evergreens.

But for a few small scattered patches of ice, the county road was cleared for easy travel. “They always keep it clean as far as Thunder Hill, even in killing weather,” Ernie explained. “But up beyond the Depository, the road crews don’t do as thorough a job.”

In no time they had gone ten miles, always following the crest of the valley that fell away on the east, and always with rising mountains on the west. They passed several dirt and gravel lanes leading to isolated homes and ranches in the eastward-sloping lands to their right, and at the ten-mile point they reached the guarded entrance road to Thunder Hill Depository, also on the right.

Ernie slowed the Cherokee but did not turn into the entranceway. “Haven’t been this far up here in a long time. They’ve made changes since I saw the place last. Didn’t used to look this formidable.”

A sign announced the Depository. Beside the sign another paved road branched off the county lane, leading away between towering pines of such a dark-green hue they seemed nearly black in the somber prestorm light. Fifteen feet in from the turnoff, the lane was blocked by long metal spikes that speared up from the pavement, precisely angled to puncture the tires of any vehicle that tried to proceed farther, but also large enough to catch on the axle of a hurtling truck or car and instantly arrest its progress. Twenty feet beyond the spikes, there was a massive steel gate, crowned with spears, painted red. A concrete-block guardhouse—twenty feet by ten—stood inside the gate, and its black metal door looked capable of withstanding a bazooka barrage.

Ernie pulled to the edge of the main road and slowed almost to a full stop as they eased past the entrance to Thunder Hill. He pointed to a yard-square post at the verge of the entrance lane, just this side of the wicked spikes. “Looks like an intercom to the guardhouse. Not just a voice link, either. One of those systems like they have in drive-in banks, with a video monitor so they can see you in your car. The man in the
guardhouse approves a visitor before the road spikes lower and the gate opens. Even then, I’ll bet there’re permanently emplaced machine guns to take you out if the guard decides he’s been duped after he’s already opened the gates.”

From each end of the gate, an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with a barbed-wire overhang disappeared into the trees, and Dom noted a white sign with red lettering that warned
DANGER
—
ELECTRIFIED.
Although the perimeter fence led into the forest, no trees overhung it; from the small sections that he could see flanking the main gate, there appeared to be a twenty-foot-wide no-man’s-land on each side.

Dom’s good mood faded. He’d thought that the security along the perimeter of the facility would be minimal. After all, once you got onto the grounds, the actual entrance to Thunder Hill was through eight-or ten-foot-thick blast doors set in the hillside. That barrier was so impregnable that it seemed wasteful to install maximum security around the entire outer edge of the property. Yet that was what they had done. Which meant the secret they were guarding was so important that they did not even trust nuclearproof doors and subterranean limestone vaults to keep it safe.

“The spikes in the road are new,” Ernie said. “And the gate they had a couple of years ago was pretty flimsy by comparison. The fence was always here, but it wasn’t electrified before.”

“We’ve no hope at all of getting a look inside.”

Although no one had said as much (for fear of sounding foolish), they all hoped they might get as far as the blast doors of the facility, have a look around the newly expanded grounds that had been taken from ranchers Brust and Dirkson, and be fortunate enough to stumble across another piece of the puzzle they were committed to solve. Dom had never imagined they would actually get
inside
the underground rooms of Thunder Hill. That was an improbable scenario. But from the comfort of the Tranquility Motel, getting onto the grounds and snooping around had not seemed like an impossible dream. Until now.

Dom wondered if his newly discovered telekinetic powers might be used to circumvent the Depository’s fortifications, but he dismissed that thought as quickly as it occurred to him. Until he could control the gift, it was of little use. It scared him. He sensed that the power was sufficient to cause tremendous destruction and death if he lost control of it, and he would not take the chance again—except under very tightly controlled conditions.

“Well,” Ernie said, “it was never our intention to try waltzing through the front gate. Let’s have a look along some of the perimeter fence.” He touched his foot lightly on the accelerator. Looking in the rearview mirror, he said, “Oh, and by the way, we’re being followed.”