The Grays (17 page)

“I’m too old to jump out a window,” Charles said. “Mike, you finish this. What’s your problem and what do you need from us?”

“Well, wait,” Tim said, “what about the scalar weapons program? We’re going to have eighty of those birds up by 2012. We’ll be able to induce the destruction of most of the species ourselves.” He sighed. “God help us, I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“You think they’ll sit back and let us kill their cattle?”

“They haven’t touched the scalar prototype.”

“Because its only one small weapon,” Charles said. “It doesn’t have the potential to affect their plans.”

Mike continued. “The grays are doing something very inventive. What they’ve apparently done is to breed a child so intelligent that he can process and use the contents of their knowledge.”

Vorona shook his head.

“You have a problem, Henry?”

“They’ve been preparing this from the beginning, then?”

“I found out about it early this morning.”

“Mike, we’ve known about them for fifty damn years, and you found out
today?”

“Look, let’s not argue about me.”

“I want to argue about you! This is not good enough!”

“Hold off!”

“You hold off! And you listen. Because this is urgent. Our whole damn program is in jeopardy. The freedom of the human species!”

“Because somebody didn’t do their job,” Alex murmured.

“Hold off, all of you,” Charles said softly. “Go on, Mike.”

“My expectation is that they’re going to install something in him that links him to their collective.”

“An implant does not a demon make.”

“In this case, it does. This child’s intelligence will enable him to use vastly more information than an average human being can.”

Silence fell. He watched each face as each man explored the implications of this.

“Gentlemen,” Mike said, “if this child survives, mankind survives. When the grays show up in 2012, dinner is served.”

“Now,” Tim Greenfield asked in his soft Georgia drawl, “we are absolutely sure that their coming is bad for us?”

“You cannot seriously entertain a question where we can’t know the answer until it’s too late. Good or bad, we can’t take the risk!”

“Why not approach the child, get him on our side?” Todd asked.

“When we approach him, we approach the grays,” Mike said acidly.

“So, do the child, Mike,” Charles said. “Shouldn’t be hard, not for a pro like you.”

“I might remind all of you that every life I took because of this damned thing, I took under orders.”

“I repeat, do the child.”

“Which is why I’m here.”

Charles slammed his hand down on the table. “You don’t need our permission! For God’s sake, Mike, this meeting is a waste of time. Do the damned child!”

“Charles, Goddamnit, will you please give me a chance to talk!”

Charles glared at him.

Mike continued. “My problem is that the grays are not alone in protecting this child. They have the help of some people within our own organization who appear to have come under mind control.” He took his iPod out of his briefcase, plugged in its tiny speaker, and played for them the conversation that had taken place on Lost Angel Road.

“It’s pitiful,” Henry said. “Those are good men, all of them.”

“The hard part is,” Mike said, “I can see where their choice is coming from. There’s a lot of life going to be lost doing it our way. A lot of life.”

“You’ve made no headway finding this child, I presume.”

“No, Henry, I have a description, obtained from Adam this morning. And I will undoubtedly find a child who fits it on Oak Road. And kill the wrong child.”

Todd said, “Unless they’ve given you a description of the right child in hope that you’ll assume that it must be the wrong one.”

“Kill all the children,” Henry said. “And what in the world are we going to do with Lewis and Rob and Dr. Simpson?”

“Tell you what,” Tim Greenfield said, “let’s suck them up in the terrorist thing and ship them to Saudi Arabia. That’ll do it.”

“It will also bring in the CIA, AFOSI, and the FBI, not to mention the Saudis. We need a plane crash, an auto accident, a fatal robbery attempt, a nice heart attack, stuff like that,” Charles said. “Take a year doing them. There’s no hurry.” He looked toward Mike. “The sort of thing you’re expert at.”

“The child is our urgent problem, and please let me repeat: the grays are protecting him—”

“—and so are our friends from Lost Angel Road, don’t forget that, Mike.”

Tim said, “Gentlemen—excuse me, Charles, but I think you’re panicking, here. We have years to deal with this child, and—”

“We do not have years,” Mike said. “Please get rid of that misconception.”

“I’m sorry, Mike, but we have until 2012.”

“WE DO NOT! GODDAMNIT! Let me tell you how this will work. The second they possess that kid or parasitize him or however you’d like to describe it, he is going to become invulnerable.”

“Oh, come on!”

“I have spent the last fifteen years of my career sparring with Bob and Adam, and I am warning you, if we let that kid go
even a day
, we’re done. They win. We will not be able to do a single thing to him. He will always outwit us. Good Christ, he’s going to be
smarter than they are.”

Alex said, “Let’s put a nuke on the damn town. Pick up the phone and call the president.”

“I can’t imagine him agreeing to that,” Charles said. “In any case, we need to keep this in-house if at all possible.”

“Which gets me to my next question,” Henry Vorona said. “Mike, you have a big rep. Given that you’ve been sitting at the bottom of a hole for fifteen years, may I know why we should believe you’re qualified to go operational again?”

Charles said, “Henry, you surprise me. Mike is my choice and that ought to be enough. But if it’s not, let me lay things out. Mike didn’t always spend his days licking the heinies of those damn gray bastards down in that hole. He did a lot of hard, sad, wet work in the early days.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“No! You’re questioning my authority, Henry. You’ve done it before and
you’ll do it again. That’s fine. You want to run the show. Very ambitious. Maybe, if they vote me out and vote you in, you’ll do okay.” He looked around the table. “Do we want a vote of confidence? Gentlemen?”

No hand was raised.

He went on. “Suffice to say that Mike here had the unfortunate need, back some years ago, to become a master of untraceable murder. He’s got quite a number of notches in his little cap pistol, am I right, Mike?”

“I’ve done a few,” he muttered.

“Using everything from a chemical that induces cancer to a mind-control technique that makes people kill themselves. And he’s never even come close to being caught.”

Vorona smiled at Mike. “Then I’m relieved,” the CIA representative said. “We can count on you.”

Todd spoke up. “Obviously, the nuclear option isn’t available to us, but I think Alex’s concept is a good one. We could do a training accident, say, compliments of Alfred AFB, which is out there in Kentucky, if I’m not mistaken. Blow away the neighborhood with a stray incendiary, say.”

“ ‘Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.’ ” Wilkes paused. “But, of course,” he added, “Herod missed. If we just do that one little cluster of houses, we might miss, too.”

“However we do it, we have to do it now,” Vorona said.

“Gentlemen,” Charles said, “I think we’ve heard enough. Mike, we need to find this child. Would it help if you had a TR?”

“A triangle is essential. It enables me to enter the community with minimal risk. The grays will inevitably discover me, but at least it can get me to the scene undetected. Once I’m there, I figure I have a couple of days.” He stood up, signaling that the meeting was ended. Vorona was right about one thing: there must be no delay now.

“Wait just a minute,” Vorona said. “You’re not walking out of here without telling us how you’re going to proceed.”

“I think we have mind-control capabilities of our own that can be brought to bear on the situation. We can do this without revealing to the grays that we’re responsible.
How
is my business.”

“There’s one system that works,” Greenfield said, “the violence wire.”

“Duty calls, gentlemen,” Mike said as they started to filter into his living room for drinks. “There’s no time, not tonight. There is no time at all.”

He left, then, heading down to the garage in his basement. He needed to get to Wilton—which, of course, would turn out to be a trap. The larger question was how, exactly, did the trap work, and how could it be defeated?

If it could.

AS DAN ENTERED MARCIE’S OFFICE
, he was enveloped in what he immediately perceived as an ominous silence. Behind her, the westering sun made a halo of her glowing russet hair. Her hands, holding what Dan presumed were his student evaluations, gleamed softly in the late light. Her skin was smooth and her features exotic, with large, frank eyes and lips that generally contained a hint of laughter—not the pleasantly sensual laughter that the face suggested, though. Marcie was first and foremost an administrator. She fired, gave bad news, and disciplined wayward professors for their crimes—drunkenness, sloth, and, of course, lechery.

He imagined her fingers touching him, and it was oddly thrilling. He blinked and shook the thought away.

She smiled, and he saw something unexpected: a sort of warmth.

“Given what I have here, it would have been useful to you,” she said, “if you could have gotten a little more support from faculty.”

“The student evaluations, ah—”

“I can’t give you details, Dan.”

“No, of course not.” Student evaluations at Bell were held secret from professors, so that they could be used as a tool and weapon of the administration. “But they’re bad, I assume.”

She laid the paper back in the file from which she’d taken it, aligned it with a long, deep red fingernail, and closed the manila folder.

From outside there came the distant strains of the Bell Ringers Band hammering away, improbably enough, at “Moon River,” the sound carried off on the stiff north wind that had come up around noon. Voices echoed along the hall, the comfortable laughter of some succulent coed making light, no doubt, of a flapping faculty admirer.

“Marcie,” he said. He stopped himself, astonished by a shocking and completely inappropriate sense of desire for her. She was doing nothing to seduce him. He looked at her right hand, lying there on the desk. If he reached across that two-foot space and laid his own hand on it, what would happen?

“Yes?” Her voice seemed almost to tremble. But why? Did she have to tell him no, and was she afraid to do that? But why should she be? He was no friend of hers and bad news was job one in this office. Poor student evaluations and no faculty support, open and shut case, toodle-oo.

“Marcie, look, we both know what’s going on here.”

She laughed a little, the nervous tinkle of a girl. “I think the problem is that your courses aren’t sexy.”

He had arrived at the edge of the cliff: poor evals, no support, now a negative on his courses. The next step would be, sorry, I cannot vote for tenure. “It’s physiological psychology,” he yammered. “Give me a couple of sections of abnorm, I’ll bring my comments way up.”

“That’s unlikely until you’re tenured.”

“But I can’t get tenured without good evals, and I can’t get those without good courses.”

“You’re Yossarianed, then. As we all are. Bell Yossarians us all.”

For a moment, he was at a loss. Then he remembered
Catch-22
. Yossarian was the character in the novel who was caught in a bureaucratic endless loop. Dan searched for something, anything, that might help him. He could drop a name. Pitiful, but it was what he had. “I knew a fellow when I was at Columbia—what was his name, Speed Vogel—who knew Heller.”

She made a note.

“What are you writing?”

“Knew friend of Heller.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not at all.”

He found himself watching her lips, the way she pressed them together, the slight and fascinating moisture at the corners of her mouth.

But why? Was he going mad? How could he feel this way for this woman who was about to wreck his life?

Did he want this so badly that he was willing to whore for it? Probably, but why would she want him? She had her pick of faculty masochists, eager to roll in the hay with their punisher. And yet, the only thing that was stopping him from leaping across that desk was the fear that any such action would backfire.

“Marcie,” he heard himself say, and he heard the roughness, the unmistakable sexuality in his tone. He almost slapped his hand over his mouth, but she looked up suddenly, blinking fast. Her eyebrows rose to the center of the forehead, her eyes filmed with tears that made them bright and awful.