The Grays (22 page)

She realized that he was laughing in her face, then that he was withdrawing a pistol from underneath his tunic. She was very quick of mind, which is one of the reasons that she was effective with Adam, and that quickness enabled her now to recall the rumors that people could get into lethal trouble in these deep black programs. Within perhaps three seconds of the weapon appearing—in fact, before he even had it fully out, she had turned and left the room.

Leaping down the stairs, she brought all of her considerable athleticism to bear. She hit the floor, staggered—and heard a gigantic roar. She knew what it was a shot. He was trying to kill her. She dashed across the hall as a second shot crashed into the wall beside the door. It was close, she could feel the heat of it on her cheek. He was a damned good shot, getting that close from that far away with a .45.

She got the door open and another shot rang out. She ran down the sidewalk
and out into the middle of the street. She had to get this out in public, that was her only hope, and keep enough distance between them to make a hit a matter of luck. Fifty feet, at least. Closer and he would not miss.

She ran down the middle of the street, zigzagging and not making the mistake of looking back. Damn this neighborhood, it was too damn
quiet!
Just one car, please, just one damn car—but there were none.

Maybe not all of Dad’s nightmares had been about the grays, maybe he had also feared this sort of thing happening to him one day.

Then, as she rounded the corner, a lovely Mustang with two coeds in it appeared. “Help!” She stood in front of them waving her arms. “Help! I need the police! Help me!”

As they swerved around her, she yelled into the car,
“Help me!”

They did not help her and she ran on. Almost immediately, she heard the growling of a powerful engine and the whine of tires. He was turning the corner.

She raced down the driveway of one of the large homes and threw herself down behind the garbage cans beside its garage. Hiding there, barely breathing, she heard a car stop. It was him, it had to be.

She dared not look, dared not move, found herself hardly able to breathe. She had never been this scared, never remotely. She could almost literally feel the sensation of the gun pointing at her.

She heard footsteps on the driveway, soft, quick . . . and then a loud click and some muttered words. A woman was there. Her remote control hadn’t worked.

She brought her car into the garage and the door began closing.

Lauren sobbed, stood up, started toward the house—and in that moment Wilkes’s Phaeton came snarling up the driveway.

She turned and ran, crashing past the garbage cans and down the side of the house, across the expansive backyard where an elderly man struggled with a broken gate. “Call the police,” she shouted as she darted into the alley.

Behind her, she heard Wilkes snap, “Official business,” to the old man. Curse him, the bastard was in uniform, too. She would get no help.

She moved to the end of the alley, darted across the street and into the next alley. She pressed herself back into a tangle of bare bushes, hoping that he would miss her.

A moment later, she saw him come out of the other alley. The gun was now concealed. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving. He looked up and
down the street, then toward this alley. He stared a long time at the big shrub. He was looking right at her, but apparently couldn’t see her.

Then he took out the gun. He went down on one knee and braced it toward the shrub. She got ready to run. He snapped the barrel—and she froze. She bared her teeth, fighting the urge to break cover like a terrified pheasant. You did not need to do what he’d just done to cock a .45 automatic. Therefore, he’d done it for effect, to frighten her into moving. He was guessing.

Finally, he stuffed the gun under his jacket and began hurrying away.

A moment later, she heard his car start. She moved deeper into the alley and crouched down behind the edge of a shed. She could not be seen from the street at all. She called Ted on her cell.

“Hey, bad girl.”

“Teddy, love, listen to me and listen close. Never go back to my apartment. Never, at all, for anything.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“Okay, Ted, I know how this sounds. But you’ll be in terrible danger if you go back there. Don’t even come in the neighborhood.”

“Lauren?”

“I’m not ditching you, I’m warning you. There’s terrible danger, Ted. It has to do with my work, and I am extremely serious. If you go back there, you will be tortured and you will be killed. You just forget it, you forget me, you go on with your life.”

She broke down, then, so badly that she held the cell phone away from her ear and gritted her teeth to keep from sobbing.

“Lauren, what’s going on?”

She forced back the tears. “Where are you now? No—don’t tell me! I shouldn’t have asked, not on this phone. Look, you can help us both. Go to the Air Police. Tell them that Colonel Wilkes threatened us with a gun. Both of us!”

“He didn’t.”

“He did, he threatened me, he shot at me.”

“Jesus!”

But the Air Police weren’t going to be able to help. They couldn’t reach into a black program like hers. He would end up confronting all kinds of questions he couldn’t answer, and probably confronting Wilkes into the bargain. “No, I’m not thinking straight. Don’t go near the Air Police. Move back on base and just go about your business. You’ll be left alone.”

“Lauren, I love you.”

“Oh, Ted, no you don’t. You were going to, but it hasn’t happened yet because I ditch guys before it does happen, and stuff like this is the damn reason. You obey me on this. You trust me and you obey me.”

Silence.

“Ted, promise!”

“You can’t tell me a thing, can you?”

“Not one thing.” She closed her cell phone, leaned against the wall of the shed for a moment, then continued on.

She went down the alley to the next street and crossed it quickly. She continued this process, going down one alley and then the next, until she arrived on North Meridian at the edge of University Park. She went into a Starbucks and moved about looking at the coffee machines and CDs, staying well away from the front of the store.

She thought that Colonel Wilkes might well have license to kill her as a security risk. In fact, he would never have pulled his gun if he hadn’t known for certain that he would get away with it.

She remembered, suddenly, a story Andy had told her. At the time, it had seemed like so much scuttlebutt, the kind of thing that went down over beers. Now she knew that the tale of the code experts who were lobotomized on retirement, as lurid as it was, had been a veiled warning.

Andy was gone because he’d understood the situation they were in the instant he found out what had happened. He was running, probably even had an escape plan all worked out for himself.

She had no such plan, and zero confidence that she could survive very long at all in this situation. She had no operational training at all. Beyond the basic attack-and-defense maneuvers and gun skills she’d learned at Lackland, she was not capable.

If she had Adam, though, things would be different. If she brought Adam back, instead of being a liability, she’d become an asset again.

If Adam wasn’t dead, and Wilkes had been certain that he wasn’t, then where was he? Given how fast he could move and his ability to make himself so hard to see, he must have escaped without her seeing him go. Left her behind to die.

No, not Adam. He was always ten moves ahead. He’d have known that she would escape on her own. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted her to, or hadn’t cared.

Nobody had ever told her much of anything about the way the grays
functioned, whether they had bases or satellites or even exactly what they were, for that matter. So how would she go about finding somebody that weird, who had all these special powers and abilities?

She could try remote viewing for him, but that only worked if you were completely calm, and anyway, she wasn’t much good at it. All she was good at was making pictures for Adam and seeing the ones he sent her.

She couldn’t reach him that way, either, because that only worked from a few feet away. Oh, she could sense things about Adam from a distance—sort of intuit them, but there was no mind connection over distance that she’d ever experienced.

So where did that leave her? She couldn’t very well go looking behind houses and in trash cans. There was no point at all trying to find Adam. Adam was lost to her.

She was at a loss, getting so frantic that tears were forming in her eyes. This feeling of being trapped was just hideous and it was panicking her and making it hard for her to think clearly.

She decided that there was only one real option open to her. She had to go in. She had to go straight to Wright-Pat and actually file a complaint against Wilkes. She was within her rights, the man had shot at her. If she was a liability, fine. The more public she became, the safer she’d be from the shot in the night.

When she saw a bus pull past and stop at the corner, she hurried out of the store and got on it. It would go downtown, she was fairly sure. “I need to get to the Greyhound station,” she told the driver.

“First stop on Illinois, walk two blocks, you’ll see the sign.”

“Thank you.” She took one of the seats in the very last row, because there were no windows beside it. She sat wondering what she might do, where she might go. She thought carefully.

She knew that there were other aspects to the operation. Somebody watched for violations of the agreement with the grays about who they could involve themselves with. But who? She had no idea and no way of finding out.

Again, though, she might find out more at Wright-Pat. Officially, she was stationed there, on detail to the facility. Given that the facility was now inoperable, she couldn’t be said to be violating any orders if she returned to base. In fact, that was likely her legal requirement.

She saw that they were passing her condo. She looked up toward her windows, thinking that all her stuff was there and maybe she would never
see it again, or her cute little car that was still parked at the facility or any of her old life, not Ted or any of her friends.

As she looked away, she felt a sudden shudder go through her body. And she was
in
the apartment. Vivid. Real. Her bed still unmade, yesterday’s skirt on the floor of the bedroom, a flat beer open on the kitchen counter. All of it, just as it was.

Then she was back in the bus.

She knew it immediately: Adam was there, Adam was in her apartment! She jumped up. “Let me off! Let me off the bus!” She hurried forward. “Driver, you have to stop!”

“Express to downtown,” he said.

Idiot!
She thought fast. They were a quarter of a mile away, the place was likely to be watched, she should not risk this. But it was her best shot, she was sure of it. “If you don’t stop this bus, I’ll throw up on your head!” She leaned over him and started gagging.

The bus was stopped and the door was open and she was running back up the street toward the condo. She was insane to be risking this, of course, but Adam was there, he must be, he had to be. That was Adam’s mind broadcasting to hers, it was totally and completely unmistakable.

As she ran, she looked for Mike’s Phaeton but didn’t spot it. Maybe she’d outrun him.

No, don’t be a fool, assume only the worst
. You didn’t need operational training to understand that.

She went into the cleaners next door. “Hi, Mr. Simmons,” she said.

“Hey, Lauren—”

She ducked behind the counter and headed to the back of the establishment.

“Lauren?”

“Hey, Mrs. Fink,” she said to the seamstress as she passed her sewing station and went out the back door.

She ran up the alley and then took the stairs down to the trash room, and opened the steel outer door with her passkey, which fit all the building’s outside locks. Going through into the basement, she hurried past Jake Silver, their handyman.

“Miss Glass!”

“Hey there, Jake, taking the back way today.” She went to the elevators and pressed the button.

“You ain’t supposed to come through there. That’s not a door, Miss Glass.”

The elevator opened and she got in without responding to him. She started to punch seven, thought better of it, and took the car to the top floor, nine. The corridor was silent, the air smelling faintly of cooking. She went down to the fire stairs and took them two flights.

Her own corridor was just as quiet. She formed a thought—Adam’s face, with a feeling of question attached to it.

Instantly, there came back another thought—an image of her own face. It wasn’t Adam’s usual signature, but it was certainly an image from him, she could tell by how it felt when it appeared, bursting out into her mind like a television picture.

She opened the door and went into her flat. She stood in the doorway with the door still open behind her. From many, many questions she had put to Adam, she knew that whoever she really worked for was attempting to understand and use the process of communication by mind. They had even had her test the range, which was about a quarter of a mile, and could pass through anything except a certain type of electrical field, which was used at times to isolate Adam in the cage.