Strangers (85 page)

Jorja followed along as well, and though she did not interrupt with questions, she was considerably more distracting than her daughter. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, but more importantly he
liked
her a lot. He thought she liked him, too, although he didn’t suppose she was attracted to him, not in the man-woman sense. After all, what would a woman like her see in a guy like him? He was an admitted criminal, and he had a face like an old battered shoe, not to mention one cast eye. But they could be friends, at least, and that was nice.

At the living room windows, he finally spotted what he was seeking: points of body heat out there in the cold barrens. Across the top of the image that filled the lens—Nevada plains and overlaid heat patterns—came a digital readout of data that told him there were two sources of heat, that they were due south of his position, and that they were approximately four-tenths of a mile away. That information was followed by numerals that represented an estimation of the size of each source’s radiant surface, which told him he had found two men. He switched off the HS101’s heat-analysis function and turned up the magnification, using the device as a simple telescope, zeroing in on the area in which the
heat had been detected. He had to search for a couple of minutes, for they were wearing camouflage suits.

“Bingo,” he said at last.

Jorja did not ask what he saw, for she had learned well the lesson he had taught them last night: Everything spoken in the apartment was sucked directly into the enemy’s electronic ears.

Out there on the barrens, the two observers were prone on the cold ground. Jack saw that one man had a pair of binoculars. But the guy was not using the glasses at the moment, so he was not aware of Jack watching him from the window.

He moved to the east windows and surveyed that landscape, as well, but it was uninhabited. They were being watched only from the south, which the enemy figured was sufficient because the front of the motel and the only road leading to it could be seen from that single post.

They were underestimating Jack. They knew his background, knew that he was good, but they didn’t realize
how
good.

At one-forty, the first snowflakes fell. For a while they came down only as scattered flurries, with no particular force.

At two o’clock, when Dom and Ernie returned from their scouting trip around the perimeter of the Thunder Hill Depository, Jack said, “You know, Ernie, when the storm really hits later, there might be some people on the interstate who’ll see our wheels out front and pull in here, looking for shelter, even if we leave the sign and other lights off. Better move my Cherokee, the Sarvers’ truck, and the cars around back. We don’t want a lot of people rapping at your door wanting to know why you’re giving rooms to some people and not to them.”

Actually, certain that the enemy was even now listening to them, Jack was using the specter of weary snow-bound motorists as a plausible excuse to move the pickup truck and the Cherokee, the two four-wheel-drive vehicles, out of sight of the observers south of I-80. Later, when heavier snow and the early darkness of the storm settled in, the entire Tranquility family would surreptitiously leave the motel from the rear, heading overland in the truck and the Cherokee.

Ernie sensed Jack’s real purpose; equally aware of eavesdroppers, he played along. He and Dom went outside again to move all the vehicles around back.

In the kitchen, Ned and Sandy had nearly finished preparing and packaging the sandwiches that everyone would be issued for dinner.

Now they had only to wait for Faye and Ginger.

The snow flurries intermittently surrendered to furious but short-lived squalls. The day dimmed. By two-forty, the squalls turned to steady snow that, in spite of a complete cessation of wind, reduced visibility to
a few hundred feet. Out on the barrens, the camouflaged observers were probably picking up their gear and moving closer to the motel.

Jack checked his watch more frequently. He knew time was running out. But he had no way of knowing how
fast
it might be running out.

•

While Lieutenant Horner repaired the sabotaged polygraph in the security office, Falkirk lectured the Depository’s chief of security and his assistant—Major Fugata and Lieutenant Helms—letting them know they were on his list of possible traitors. He made two enemies, but that didn’t matter. He did not want them to like him—only to respect and fear him.

He had not yet finished chewing out Fugata and Helms when General Alvarado arrived. The general was a lardass with a pot gut, fingers like sausages, and jowls. He stormed into the security office in a red-faced outrage, having just heard the bad news from Dr. Miles Bennell: “Is it true, Colonel Falkirk? By God, is it true? Have you actually taken control of
VIGILANT
and made prisoners of us all?”

Sternly but in a tone that could not be construed as disrespectful, Leland informed Alvarado that he had the authority to include the secret program in the security computer and to activate it at his discretion. Alvarado demanded to know whose authority, and Leland said, “General Maxwell D. Riddenhour, Chief of Staff of the Army and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.” Alvarado said he knew perfectly well who Riddenhour was, but he did not believe that the colonel’s mentor in this matter was the Chief of Staff himself. “Sir, why don’t you call him and ask?” Leland suggested. He took a card out of his wallet and gave it to Alvarado. “That’s General Riddenhour’s number.”

“I have the Staff HQ number,” Alvarado said scornfully.

“Sir, that’s not Staff HQ. That’s General Riddenhour’s unlisted home line. If he’s not in his office, he’d want you to contact him on the unlisted phone. After all, this is a deadly serious matter, sir.”

Burning a brighter red, Alvarado stalked out, the card pinched between thumb and forefinger and held away from his side as if it were an offensive object. He was back in fifteen minutes, no longer flushed but pale. “All right, Colonel, you have the authority you claim. So…I guess you’re in command of Thunder Hill for the time being.”

“Not at all, sir,” Leland said. “You’re still the CO.”

“But if I’m a prisoner—”

Leland interrupted. “Sir, your orders take precedence as long as they don’t directly conflict with my authority to guarantee that no dangerous persons—no dangerous creatures—escape from Thunder Hill.”

Alvarado shook his head in amazement. “According to Miles Bennell,
you have this crazy idea that we’re all…some kind of monsters.” The general had used the most melodramatic word he could think of, with the intent of belittling Leland’s position.

“Sir, as you know, one or more people in this facility attempted, by indirection, to bring some of the witnesses back to the Tranquility, evidently with the hope that the witnesses will remember what they’ve been made to forget and will create a media circus that’ll force us to reveal what we’ve hidden. Now, these traitors are probably just well-intentioned men, most likely members of Bennell’s staff, who simply believe the public should be informed. But the possibility also exists that they’ve got other and darker motives.”

“Monsters,” Alvarado repeated sourly.

When the polygraph was repaired, Leland charged Major Fugata and Lieutenant Helms with interrogating everyone in Thunder Hill who had knowledge of the special secret harbored there for more than eighteen months. “If you screw up again,” Leland warned them, “I’ll have your heads.” If they failed again to find the man who’d sent the Polaroids to the witnesses, he would view their failure as one more bit of evidence that rot had spread widely through the Thunder Hill staff, and that it was not ordinary human corruption but the result of an extraordinary and terrifying infection. Their failure would cost them their lives.

At one-forty-five, Leland and Lieutenant Horner returned to Shenkfield, leaving the Depository’s entire staff locked deep in the bosom of the earth. Upon his return to his windowless office in that other underground facility, the colonel received several doses of bad news, all courtesy of Foster Polnichev, the head of the Chicago office of the FBI.

First, Sharkle was dead out in Evanston, Illinois, which should have been good news, but he had taken his sister, brother-in-law, and an entire SWAT team with him. The siege of Sharkle’s house had become national news due to the extreme violence of its conclusion. The blood-hungry media would be focused on O’Bannon Lane until endless rehashing of the story drained it of thrills. Worse, among Sharkle’s mad ravings, there had been enough truth to lead a perceptive and aggressive reporter to Nevada, to the Tranquility, and perhaps all the way to Thunder Hill.

Worst of all, Foster Polnichev reported that “something almost…well…supernatural is happening here.” A stabbing and shooting in an Uptown apartment, involving a family named Mendoza, had caused such a sensation within the city’s police department that newspaper reporters and television crews had virtually set siege to the tenement house hours ago. Evidently, Winton Tolk, the officer whose life had been saved by Brendan Cronin, had brought a stabbed child back from near-death.

Incredibly, Brendan Cronin had passed his own amazing talents to
Tolk. But what
else
had he passed on to the black policeman? There might be only a wondrous new power in Winton Tolk…or something dark and dangerous, alive and inhuman, living within the cop.

The worst possible scenario was, after all, unfolding. Leland was half-sick with apprehension as he listened to Polnichev.

According to the FBI agent, Tolk was giving no interviews to the press and was, in fact, now in seclusion in his own house, where another mob of reporters had gathered. Sooner or later, however, Tolk would agree to speak with the press, and he would mention Brendan Cronin, and from there they would eventually find the link to the Halbourg girl.

The Halbourg girl. That was another nightmare. Upon receiving this morning’s news of Tolk’s unexpected healing powers, Polnichev had gone to the Halbourgs’ home to determine if Emmy had acquired unusual powers subsequent to her own miraculous recovery. What he found there beggared description, and he immediately isolated the entire Halbourg family from the press and public before their secret was discovered. Now all five Halbourgs were in an FBI safe-house, under the watchful eyes of six agents who’d been informed only that the family was as much to be feared as protected and that no agent was to be alone with any member of the family at any time. If the Halbourgs made threatening or unusual moves, they would all be killed instantly.

“But I think it’s all pointless now,” Polnichev said on the phone from Chicago. “I think we’ve lost control of it. It’s spread, and we’ve no hope of containing it again. So we might as well call an end to the cover-up, go public.”

“Are you mad?” Leland demanded.

“If it’s come to the point where we have to kill people, lots of people, like the Halbourgs and the Tolks and all the witnesses there in Nevada, in order just to keep the story contained, then the cost of containment has gotten too damn high.”

Leland Falkirk was furious. “You’ve lost sight of what’s at stake here. My God, man, we’re no longer merely trying to keep the news from the public. That’s almost immaterial now. Now, we’re trying to protect our entire species from obliteration. If we go public, and if then we decide to use violence to contain the infection, every goddamn politician and bleeding-heart will be second-guessing us, interfering, and before you know it, we’ll have lost the war!”

“But I think what’s being proven here is that the danger isn’t that great,” Polnichev said. “Sure, I’ve told the men guarding the Halbourgs to regard them as a threat, but I don’t really believe they’re a danger to us. That little Emmy…she’s a darling, not a monster. I don’t know how the power got in Cronin or how he conveyed it to the girl, but I’m almost
willing to bet my life that the power is the
only
thing inside the child. The only thing inside any of them. If you could meet Emmy and watch her, Colonel! She’s a delight. All evidence points to the fact that we should regard what’s happening as the greatest event in the history of mankind.”

“Of course,” Leland said coldly, “that’s what an enemy like this would want us to believe. If we can be convinced that accommodation and surrender are a great blessing, we’ll be conquered without a fight.”

“But Colonel, if Cronin and Corvaisis and Tolk and Emmy
have
been infected, if they’re no longer human, or at least no longer like you and me, they wouldn’t advertise by performing miraculous cures and feats of telekinesis. They’d keep their amazing abilities secret in order to spread their infection to more people without detection.”

Leland was unmoved by that argument. “We don’t know exactly how this thing works. Maybe a person, once infected, surrenders control to the parasite, becomes a slave. Or to answer the point you’ve just made, maybe the relationship between the host and parasite is benign, mutually supportive—and maybe the host doesn’t even know the parasite is inside him, which would explain why the Halbourg girl and the others don’t know where their power comes from. But in
either
case, that person is no longer strictly human. And in my estimation, Polnichev, that person can no longer be trusted. Not an inch. Now, for God’s sake, you’ve got to take the entire Tolk family into custody, too. Isolate them at once.”

“As I told you, Colonel, journalists surround the Tolk house. If I go in there with agents and take the Tolks into custody in front of a score of reporters, our cover-up is blown. And although I no longer believe in the cover-up, I’m not going to sabotage it. I know my duty.”

“You’ve at least got agents watching the house?”

“Yes.”

“What about the Mendozas? If Tolk infected the boy the way Cronin apparently infected
him…
”

“We’re watching the Mendozas,” Polnichev said. “Again, we can’t make a bold move because of the reporters.”

The other problem was Father Stefan Wycazik. The priest had been to the Mendozas’ apartment and then to the Halbourg house before Foster Polnichev had known what was going on at either location. Later, an FBI agent had seen Wycazik at barricades near the Sharkle house in Evanston, at the very moment when Sharkle had detonated his bomb. But no one knew where he had gone; no one had seen him in almost six hours. “Obviously he’s putting it together, piece by piece. One more reason to call off the cover-up and go public, before we’re all caught in the act anyway.”