The Grays (24 page)

She had avoided marriage, and now she regretted that. She’d never felt a child in her belly, nor the pain of giving birth. She regretted that, too. It was so very odd, this feeling. Not awful at all. The end of all responsibility, the end of the need to run.

Too bad the grays couldn’t help her now. She tried sending images of her with Langford’s gun in her face, but nothing came back. Too far away.

She wondered if he would kill her here at Wright-Pat, or take her somewhere else. Maybe it was even an official killing. Probably it was. So there’d be some stark room somewhere, and a steel coffin waiting. “I’m ready,” she said. If he was planning to move her, maybe there would be a chance to escape. She might feel oddly peaceful, but if she could get away, she sure as hell would.

“It’s going to be easy, then?”

“What choice do I have? You’ve got me.”

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

THE MOMENT HE HAD REALIZED
that he’d lost not only Adam, but also the two handlers, Mike had raced back to Washington. There was only one way to fire somebody in an organization this secret. Nobody was retired. You were either actively involved in the Trust or you were dead . . . and Mike understood and agreed completely. You could not risk even a rumor getting out that mankind was on a death watch, or that there was an organization that planned to save only a precious few, or that any part of the U.S. government was involved with aliens, not when there were such dire threats associated with revealing the secret of their presence.

Mike explained to Charles Gunn how Andy and Lauren had gotten away.

“That was damn stupid.”

“I don’t think—”

“Andy moved fast, you couldn’t help that. But we’ll pull him in. The empath is another matter, Mike. You were stupid to shoot, but an asshole to miss.”

“Charles—”

“Shut up, I’m thinking.”

“Charles, the gray is at large.”

His eyes fixed on Mike’s face. His lips opened, then he closed them. He suddenly grabbed a pen and a pad of paper and started writing.

“Charles?”

The writing became scratching, then trenching, then he rose up like a tower and ripped the pad to bits. He rushed around the desk and loomed over Mike. “Goddamn you.”

“Charles—”

“Goddamn you!”
He paced, then. “I have to think.”

“Do me, Charlie. Get it over with.”

“Boy, that would be a pleasant way to spend an hour or so, you stupid piece of shit. I’ve defended you, but you are fucking incompetent. You and that fancy house of yours, your theft that I’ve ignored all these years. Not to mention those special passes to the shelters that you’ve given your crook friends.”

That would wreck him, to withdraw those bribes that were also such superb blackmail. His every defense industry contact would turn against him. He’d be a ruined man. “Charles, those people—some of them are essential—”

“The hell they are. They’re gone. History. And so are you, Mike. There’s no way you’re getting anywhere near one of the shelters. When this planet’s environment collapses, you’re gonna be in the wind. You live with that, now. You live with that.”

By which Charles actually meant that he had just allowed Mike to live. He had expected to die in this room, right now.

Charles asked, “Do you think Glass could be hiding Adam?”

“I went to her apartment first thing. No sign of anyone there. I think Adam’s been recalled. The moment they realized that we were aware of the child, they pulled the plug.”

“Because you asked the wrong question.” Charles dropped down behind his desk. “They’ve got us in check, here.”

“They always have us in check.”

“We have to locate this child.”

“It’s in Wilton.”

“You know that?”

“Crew said they were signaling him. So he could play his role.”

“We’ve got to scorch the earth, then. Langford, Glass, Simpson, Crew—they’ve all got to be done. But first, find and kill that child.”

“We have this Oak Road group with a grand total of six residents under the age of eighteen, so that’s our target. But we can’t approach them directly or we get the grays on us like a bunch of infuriated hornets. The key is to identify the right child without getting so close to him that the grays become aware of us.”

“We have the children’s test scores? IQ tests?”

“Unfortunately, the school they all attend doesn’t do IQ tests. Too elitist
or too P.C. or some damn thing. They’re all bright kids. Professors’ children.”

“What about the public schools in the area?”

“Their gifted and talented programs have a hundred and sixty kids in them. Highest IQ is 160. We don’t know how smart the grays want their poster boy, so they’re a possibility that needs checking.”

“Let me ask you this, then. Do you have a plan?”

“I think the child will reveal himself to us.”

“How?”

“He’s got to be spectacularly bright. A freak, like.”

“What if he’s ordinary? We have only that tape to tell us he’s going to be some kind of a genius. Maybe Crew and Simpson knew you were listening. Maybe the tape is a lie.”

“Then we’re already defeated, Charles.”

“Do you think that?”

“I think they’re going to be mighty careful and mighty ferocious. Look what’s riding on him—their whole species. And ours.”

Charles shrugged. “Don’t tell me you’re disloyal, too.”

“I’ve been to India, I’ve been to Vietnam, I’ve see the brainless, gobbling hordes of human filth out there. No, I believe in what we’re doing with every cell in my body, Charles. This little band we call the Trust, is the most noble, the most courageous, and the most important organization in human history.”

Charles gave him a twinkle of a smile. “You know what Stalin did when his little commissars were too eloquent in their praise? He had them shot.”

“Then do it, Charles! Get it over with!”

“I can’t, Goddamn your soul. You know that I’ve been defending you from Henry Vorona for years. Ever since CIA saddled me with him, in fact. If I tell the others just how royally you’ve fucked things up, I’m gonna end up sitting on a vote of no confidence, and guess who’s gonna join you in hell? No, Mike, I’d like to see you good and dead, I have to admit that, but I damn well can’t, because the bullet that goes through your head goes through mine, too.”

“Charles, I’m going to fix this.”

“You’d better, because you are talking about the entire human species being enslaved, Mike. Because that is what this is about. Somewhere out there, they’re coming. And they will do this. They will do this, Mike. Just
remember one thing, we have to get that child before they change him, because if we don’t, God only knows what kind of abilities and powers he’s going to have.”

“I need people. I need backup.”

“You can’t have a damn soul!”

“Charles—”

“I can give you equipment and I can give you money, but
not people
. The second I do that, Vorona finds out and both of our throats get cut.”

Mike had assumed that he’d have a trained team of experts. But he could see Charles’s point all too clearly. Unless he fixed this, and did it quietly, they were both dead men.

“What’s your plan, Mike? I want to know your exact plan.”

“Forget Adam, forget Glass, Langford, all of them. Go for the kid now, fast, next twenty-four hours. Then worry about everything else. Use the TR to get me into Wilton with absolutely no chance of detection.”

“The grays will know you’re there.”

“Not right away. Remember, I’ve seen this mind-reading business up close for years. Distance is a big issue. They’re not going to find me until I’m physically near the kid. But that’s the one place I’ll never be.”

“You’re a sniper or what?”

“There will be no direct approach to him whatsoever. But he will be killed, Charles. Coming from me, I know it’s not worth much to you, but I do guarantee it.”

To his credit, Charles made no comment, but the expression on his face eloquently communicated his contempt for what he undoubtedly regarded as outrageous braggadocio on the part of a proven incompetent. “You know how to access the TR?”

“Yes, sir. You’ll recall that I set up the security.”

Charles turned around in his chair. The Capitol glowed in the distance, the Washington Monument beyond. “What do you think this’ll be like in a thousand years, Mike?”

“In a thousand years? If we succeed, it’ll be the holy city, the center of heaven.”

Charles said nothing more, and Mike took that as a signal to leave, for which he was very damned grateful.

He had a good plan, and if he acted quickly enough, he thought there was a reasonable chance that it would work. The important thing was to push all consequences out of his mind. His life being at stake was bad
enough, but looking at the larger picture was enough to freeze a man’s soul.

As he drove to National Airport, he called his personal travel agency and booked the next civilian flight he could, which was Delta to Atlanta. He parked in long-term parking, then went to the ticket counter and got his ticket. He bought a newspaper and went to the gate to wait until the agent arrived. He did nothing out of the ordinary.

When the agent appeared, he checked in and selected his seat.

Having set up this false trail, he then left the airport and hailed a cab, which he took to a small office building a short distance from his house. He descended into the garage, took out some keys, and started another car. This one was a Buick from the mid-eighties, nondescript compared to the Mercedes he kept here in Washington.

He drove to the Beltway, then took 95 up to Baltimore, exiting onto 695 toward Owings Mills. An hour and a half after he left the garage, he was exiting onto Painters’ Mills Road. As he drove up Caves Road, he entered a more isolated area. He turned off onto an unmarked road and soon came to what appeared to be a construction zone. From here, the road appeared to be impassable. He took a right, and it turned out that what looked like brush was something quite different. The car moved through the brush and trees as if they weren’t there—which, indeed, they weren’t. This was a state-of-the-art holographic projection, one of the most advanced camouflage devices in the Pentagon’s arsenal. The design had come from Adam. It was deployed sparingly, out of fear that the press would get wind of it. If the origin of any of these technologies was discovered, the whole deception would become unglued.

The result of this was that certain select areas of military technology were stunningly ahead of public understanding. To accomplish his purpose, he would use an array of that technology.

Central to his plan was a device that lay in a large underground hangar in these woods. Its development had taken forty years. It had cost perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars, paid for by misuse of the gigantic criminal enterprise known officially as the “black budget” which was really a cover for making select people rich at the expense of the American taxpayer, by using national security to conceal the theft.

The TR, or Triangular Aircraft, officially designated TR-A1, had also cost the lives of scientists who had come to a fatal eureka moment. When they realized that they were working on alien technology, they became
too dangerous to be allowed to live. Test pilots had died, too, perfecting its capabilities, as had engineers who had suffered mercury poisoning in the fabrication of its extraordinarily toxic power plant.

The reason for the extreme secrecy was twofold. Not only did they have to protect this device from the public, they had to protect it from the grays. They had gotten every kind of lie from Adam and Bob, most of them infinitely subtle, and as a result had gone down a thousand blind alleys and consumed literally vast wealth, indeed, so much wealth that every American citizen, for the past fifty years, had worked a fourth of his life in support of the development of technologies he wasn’t even allowed to know existed, let alone gain any benefit from.

He came to a certain spot in the narrow roadway where the radio, which he had tuned to an unused frequency, suddenly began to make a faint, high-pitched sound. He stopped the car, got out, pulled back a stone that lay at the roadside, and pressed his hand against a silver disk that had been concealed beneath it. A moment later, the small hill before him opened. He drove the car in.

Inside, it was absolutely dark and silent. The only light came from a single red bulb, glowing softly. As Mike strode toward it, the outlines of an enormous object became visible immediately above his head. It was a triangle, totally black, measuring hundreds of feet on a side.

Its power plant involved the rotation of a ring of a coherent mercury plasma at extremely high speed, reducing the overall weight of the craft by 40 percent. The rest of the weight reduction was accomplished with a very old technology. The triangle had to be as large as it was because, for the rest of its lift, it relied on helium. It contained the most sophisticated surveillance and camouflage technology known, but it was not much faster than an old-fashioned dirigible.

Years ago, it had become obvious from Eamon Glass’s talks with Adam and the stories told by Mr. Crew, that mankind had lost a very sophisticated civilization to a ferocious war that was fought some time around fifteen thousand years ago. The combination of the use of devastating weaponry and the rise in sea levels that had taken place when the last ice age ended twelve thousand years ago, had first pulverized and then drowned this civilization.