CHAPTER TWO
Silence.
Blackness. Then—
The little boy’s name is Danny, and Danny is walking up a long hill from a distance. Dull red and yellow lights seem to be throbbing from the other side of the hill. Is that what Danny is walking toward? The lights?
Yes.
The night-time has no sound at first, no crickets, no peepers, none of the sounds he’s used to on summer nights. As his pace up the hill breaks into a trot, his footfalls make no sound. There’s a funny smell drifting around him, like burning metal, like last summer when they’d had that big storm and lightning had hit the neighbor’s TV dish.
Now, the red and yellow blobs of light appear to be leaking smoke, or steam, and their patterns change, almost as if the lights have somehow been able to sense Danny’s approach.
Once he’s made it to the top of the hill, he just stands there, staring.
Staring down at—
Danny doesn’t know what it is.
Trapezoid, he thinks. He knows the word from math class, when the teacher was talking about geometry. Basic shapes and angles. It’s stuff he’ll learn more about when he’s older and gets into higher grades. Circles, squares, triangles. Parallelograms.
Trapezoids.
The trapezoid is made of blinding white light that seems to be sitting on top of the other red and yellow lights. And now Danny can hear a sound: the sound of his own rapid, terrified breathing.
All the colors churn over his face. He can feel each separate color—the white, the yellow, and the red—as though each is a hand rubbing over him.
Suddenly, then, something moves. It’s inside the trapezoid.
A shape, a thin figure.
Looking back at him—
—and—
—everything turns black—
—and—
“No! No! No!”
—and then Danny woke up.
He jerked bolt upright in bed.
“No,” he whispered to himself.
His rapid breathing continued, the same breathing he’d heard in the nightmare. His heart felt like a little fist trying to beat its way out of his chest.
The nightmare again, he realized. The nightmare…
Only now did his heart pace down; he glanced around and saw with relief that he was not on the weird hill at all, and there were no funny lights and no trapezoid. Instead he lay in the safety of his own bedroom.
It took a few more moments for the shock to run out of his eyes.
“The trapezoid,” he whispered to himself.
He sat up in bed, catching his breath. His pajamas were damp with sweat. He looked at the clock on his nightstand, right beside his Hercules and Xena figures. The clock read: 6:00 A.M.
He remembered the funny smell from the dream, the smell like burning metal, which somehow seemed to linger even though the dream was over. But then the smell was replaced by something much more familiar—the aroma of bacon frying.
“Danny!” his mother called to him from downstairs. “Time to get up! Breakfast is ready!”
««—»»
Garrett frowned in the bookstore window, and the sign that read: “Meet Best-selling Author Arron Matthews, and Buy His New Autographed Book, THE ALIEN ANTENNA NETWORK OF THE GREAT PYRAMIDS!”
Blow me, Garrett thought. It should be me on a damn book tour, not this idiot.
What Garrett hated most were the theory-predators: the phony “autopsies” sanctioned by prime-time tv, the bullshit tabloid and even Penthouse magazine “extraterrestrial” photos, the Joe Scully UFO book that was underwritten by the Air Force as disinformation, etc., etc. More than half of Garrett’s battle wasn’t with the government cells that strove to rape his constitutional rights and discredit him to preposterous degrees, it was the simple assemblage of cash-grubbers out there—like this nimrod Matthews—who would go to the most creative lengths to profit from the work of Garrett and his vilified coterie with everything from snapshots of “faeries” to toy submarines masquerading as the monster of Loch Ness to British bumpkins with nothing better to with their time than elaborately manufacture “crop circle” landing sites.
And with just the right camera angle, an altered gorilla suit made for a great Bigfoot.
The field Garrett had given up so much potential for to put all of his belief into was truly a three-ring circus of fakes, schmucks, scumbags, and greed-laden boneheads. It only made Garrett’s true calling that much more difficult, because for every scintilla of truth he legitimately exposed, there was an avalanche of fraud he had to sift through first like straining lumps of feces from a box of cat litter with his bare hands.
Even when he persevered to meet his most honest objectives, he still wound up smelling like shit.
The tentacles of sham stretched far, yet those same tentacles happily encircled Garrett’s neck on a daily basis. He had no choice but to simply live with it—just as a ditch-digger lived with calluses and a street prostitute lived with subjugation—because it was part of Garrett’s turf, and nobody was putting a gun to his head to walk on it. He walked it because he chose to, because he chose to pursue the truth behind the Big Lie. The shammers were just mosquitoes on a hot, humid day. Garrett didn’t like them, but he swatted them off just the same.
Garrett’s mother had died when he was ten—spinal meningitis. It took Garrett five years to get over it…and then, when he was fifteen, his father had died—heart attack tumor. Just like that, that fast. Good quality middle-class life in Wheaton, Maryland, good schools, good upbringing, never wanted for anything—then poof! It was all gone.
And it had all happened so fast, the young Garrett didn’t know which end of the world was up. His father’s only brother had taken him in for the high school years, and Garrett’s constant honor-roll status had gotten him a scholarship. Four more years of close to a 4.0 average had set Garrett up right—or should have. He’d done everything right, in spite of losing his parents. Since his parents had died, he’d always felt a deepening hole in his heart, but then he looked around and saw the schizos on the street picking cigarette butts out of gutter cracks, all the people in motorized wheelchairs who drooled uncontrollably and couldn’t even hold their heads up straight, and the typical “bums” who sat in alleys like piles of human rot.
All Garret had to do was look at those poor, destitute people to realize that his life, in spite of its traumas, was too bad at all. Sure, his mother and died and his father had died, but some force of fate or God or luck had kept him whole and sane and walking. Garrett felt like the luckiest guy on earth when he saw what life had bestowed upon certain others. Earthquakes wiped out tens of thousands in a single minute. Genocidal wars claimed millions in months. Weighed against all of those brutal truths, Garrett knew that he’d been dealt some damn good cards.
In college, he’d hung in there and made it. Hard work, focus, studying when everyone else was slamming beers at the Student Union (Garrett had only slammed them on weekends). His major in computer engineering opened an influx of doors. But then Garrett had done the least logical thing.
He’d enlisted.
He’d joined the Air Force.
He needed more experience. He needed more life. For him, the standard pattern of high school, college, and solid mainstream job didn’t make it. There’d always been something missing. He didn’t know what but he just knew.
And that’s when he’d started hacking into encrypted databases…
That’s what had put the match to the fuse of his current plight, and made him what he was today…
It was just that some days were better than others.
He left his sour grapes at the bookstore window, and now, in jeans, and a crumpled black t-shirt that read SYSTEMS BRANCH: USAF, paused on Connecticut Avenue to light a cigarette, frowning at its stale taste. With the feds raising tobacco taxes every other month, Garrett was forced to buy generics made with tobacco from Indonesia. Twenty-five bucks a carton for this crap, he sputtered to himself. Pretty soon I won’t even able to afford to light a match. But at least he knew his taxes were going to a good cause: J-STAR targeting satellites and the B-3 Bomber.
The downtown lunch-hour rush packed the sidewalks and streets. Well-dressed men and women hustled through the crowds for their power lunches. Car horns from slogged traffic brayed like irate mechanical beasts. At the corner Garrett passed an x-rated movie house and at the same time could see the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. Skin flicks and politics all wrapped up in the same charming city. He wondered if Abe was ever tempted to get off his chair and check out the video selection.
After two more blocks, Garrett ducked into his favorite watering hole, Benny’s Rebel Room. It used to be a strip joint until the city counsel had revoked all their licenses for a new business district. Stepping off the hot, humid street into the tavern’s cool darkness felt like walking into a nicer world.
“Harlan,” greeted Craig, the Rebel Room’s co-owner and main barkeep. “Damn, I knew I should’ve locked the door.”
“Good to see you too,” Garrett replied and pulled up a stool.
Craig was proverbially polishing glasses behind the long dark-wood bar top. “Isn’t it a little early to be drinking even? Even for an AA reject like you?”
“I didn’t come here to drink, but since you offered, gimme a beer.” Garrett stubbed out his cigarette, wincing. “And how about a real cigarette? These generic things are killing me.”
Craig slid him a beer and a cigarette. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, the phone.”
“What, don’t you have a phone in that gorilla cage you call an apartment?”
“Oh, there’s a phone there, all right,” Garrett elaborated, “but it’s not much good when you don’t pay the phone bill.”
“That’ll do it.” Craig sniffed. “You forget to take a shower today?”
“Couldn’t pay the water bill either.”
“That’ll do it.” Craig slid Garrett the bar phone. “Local calls only, my friend. You
tip like you pay your bills.”
Garrett dialed the number, waited, then heard Jessica’s voice over the line:
“Hi, this is Jessica. I can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave a message and I’ll return your call. Unless this is Harlan, in which case I won’t return your call even if you have suddenly become the last man on earth.”
Garrett frowned through the beep. “Honey, please pick up. I know you’re there. We’ll work this out, I promise. I miss you, I— I…you know, I love you—”
He hung up and the line went dead.
Craig was shaking his head, aligning half-yard beer funnels in wooden racks. “Don’t tell me. The redhead give you the heave-ho again?”
“Yeah, but she loves me,” Garrett assured. “Give her a few days and she’ll be back on my doorstep, you wait.”
“I’ll wait but I won’t hold my breath. You ever think maybe she wants a guy with, you know, motivation, responsibility, a solid career and direction in his life?”
Garrett looked up after his next sip of beer which left a foamy mustache. “What am I, Santa Claus?” Then he glanced despondently at the phone. “Look, Craig, how about break? Just one long distance call to New York. I gotta really good job cooking. No lie.”
“All right,” Craig groaned.
Garrett anxiously punched in the number that he’d scrawled onto the back of a parking ticket, waited for the line to connect.
“They Are Among Us Magazine,” a male voice answered. “John Peters, Editor-in-Chief.”
Garrett perked up at once. I got him! Finally I got him! “Mr. Peters, I’m sorry to disturb you, but you may not remember me, we spoke at the Roswell Convention last July?”
“Who is this?” the editor asked.
“Mr. Peters, I won the 1997 MUFON Award for Best Investigative Series, and, sir, have I got a story for you. Three interviews, with names and pictures, of former Army Science and Research Command employees. I’ve got the full scoop, the whole tamale, nailed. These three guys have agreed to go public with their knowledge of black-funding research at Fort Meade and NSA. They were all hired as channelers for remote-viewing missions against Russian intelligence vaults in the mid-Eighties.”
“Wow, that sounds very interesting,” the editor remarked. “But…who is this?”
“Sir, these guys actually psychically penetrated a Russian defense mainframe and the records safe at the Moscow Academy of Sciences, not to mention—”
“Great, great, but who are you?”
“—not to mention ECM codes on a Soviet Whiskey-Class sub, plus they’ve got actual hardcopy documents of their Army protocol orders, and—”
The editor interrupted a final time. “This wouldn’t be Harlan Garrett, would it?”
Garrett’s shoulders slumped. “Uh, yes, uh, sir, it is I won the 1997 and I have three commendations from the Northwest Geological Survey for assistance during their search for—”
“Let me ask you something, Mr. Garrett,” the editor posed. “Does the word ‘blackballed’ mean anything to you? Or how about the phrase ‘your name is mud’? I wouldn’t touch an article of yours with a ten-foot pole. You’re a walking libel action. Any publication you write for winds up getting sued.”
“Hold on now, Mr. Peters,” Garrett stammered. “I don’t think you realize the impact of my most recent research. I’ve got it lock, stock, and barrel, sir: the tracking photos, the names and the actual codes, the docu—”
click
Garrett hung up and let out a long sigh. “Who needs your rag anyway?” he tried to justify. “They make up more of their features than the damned Weekly World News.”
Craig was screwing on a Scheidmantel Silber Bock tap-head onto one of the keg levers. “Hey, Harlan, you want some friendly advice?”
“No,” Garrett said.
“Get yourself squared away.”
“You sound just like Jessica… Too bad you don’t look like Jessica.”
“You’re a smart guy, you’ve got marketable skills. But…writing about all this ESP and UFO bunk? Come on.”
“It’s not bunk,” Garrett objected.
“Oh, sorry. I meant poop. It’s stuff in tabloids, Harlan. It’s fiction for gullible people who’ve got nothing better to do with the lives that God gave them than worry about government conspiracies and abominable goddamn snowmen. All this poop you write about is nothing but a bunch of modernized folklore.”
Garrett glared. “These guys I interviewed last week used to be psychic technicians—”
Craig grinned. “Psychic technicians. That’s rich.”
“—for the Army. By using telethesic perceptions, they can read files locked up in vaults 10,000 miles away.”
“Telethesic perceptions. Every time you walk in here, you’ve got a new one. And you really believe that? You don’t, do you? Please tell me you don’t honestly believe that psychic technicians can see through vaults ten thousand miles away by using their telethesic perceptions. Tell me, Harlan.”
“Of course I believe it. When General Dossier was kidnapped by the Red Brigade, these techs were the same guys who used their minds to get the address of the house he was being held hostage at. I know it’s true. I saw the D-O-D documents verifying it.”
Craig began to chuckle outright. “Yeah? And today in the Globe I saw a photo of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse…in Arizona. Harlan, you’re losing it. You’re getting too caught up in this stuff. Jesus, last month you were telling me that ‘government operatives’ were tapping your phones.”
“They were, and camphoring my mail too, and tailing me. They put a direction-finder on my car, for Christ’s sake!”
Craig just kept chuckling, just kept shaking his head. “You know, Harlan, it’s really easy to see why the redhead dumped you and your wife divorced your butt. I mean, no offense, but…you’re crazier than a shit-house rat.”
Garrett winced over his beer. “No offense taken, Craig, good buddy old pal. Oh, and fuck you very much. No offense.”
««—»»
The maid’s name was Lynn but she wasn’t really a maid. She looked like one, though, in the short black gathered skirt with white trim, the serving apron, and the puffed laced-cuffed sleeves. She was dressed exactly like the real maids at this four-star hotel, and she’d even taken an occupational familiarization class back at the Center. Well, at least I know I’ll be able to get a job here if Clinton cuts the C.I.R. budget again. She opened the door to Room 3112 and called out:
“Housekeeping! Anyone here?”
Several moments passed, and her inquiry was not answered.
Thank God. She closed the door, then touched the tiny wireless earphone.
Myers’ gruff voice instantly responded. “Thermograph’s clear. You’re the only one in the room—”
“Jack the nanos to 365 and start a lateral cross-matrix sweep,” Lynn whispered. “The clock’s ticking.”
“Relax. The apex should find this baby in about two seconds.”
Officially, Myers was brass, a SCD—Senior Case Director—but when he got bored, which was most of the time, he’d go on field assignments and run tech duties. Right now he was communicating to Lynn from a loaded surveillance van parked thirty stories down across the street. Parlance referred to these vans as “Junk Boxes,” and the junk they contained were devices such as cadmium thermographic processors, acoustic noise generators, tri-point ultra-low-frequency radar, UV, IR, and passive zero-light scopes, and about $10,000,000 worth of assorted other covert and privacy-violating government trinkets.
At this moment, Lynn was walking around the room in a manner that would appear normal in the event that hotel security had a video in the room; she was dusting, in fact. Pinned to her white-lace collar, however, was a 22mm digital wide-angle lens which piped half-second digitizations back to Myers in the van.
“Got it, Lynn,” Myers confirmed into her earphone. “Check the night stand. Under that…thingie there.”
Thingie, she thought. He meant the doily. Lynn approached the nightstand, leaned over, and flipped up the doily. That’s about the worst hiding job I’ve ever seen. Beneath the doily lay a silver-dollar-sized optical computer disk in a plastic sheath. Lynn slipped it into her maid’s apron and quickly replaced it with an identical disk, all the while still pretending to dust. I’m out of here, she thought. Thank you, Mr. Scammell.
She began to wheel her cart toward the door, but stopped, alarmed. The doorknob began to rattle; an instant later the door swung wide. Standing there facing her now was their target: one J.M. Scammell, a bald fat pock-marked scumbag in a Brooks Brothers suit. Scammell was a simple private-sector courier but these days couriers were paid very well considering the potential worth of their deliveries.
“Oh, hello, sir,” Lynn managed without a start. “I was just finishing up cleaning your room.”
“Well, thank you very much,” Scammell said.
“I’ll just be on my way now.”
Scammell nodded and proceeded into the room just as Lynn would push her cart out and leave. God, that was close, she thought. “I hope you enjoy your stay, sir,” she added.
“Stop!” Scammell said.
Lynn froze in the doorway, behind the cleaning cart. He must’ve made me! Did I forget to fold the doily back over? As she slowly turned back around, her hand crept for her apron pocket, for her 4mm flechette pistol.
“What kind of a maid are you?” Scammell griped. “Did you even look in the bathroom? How about some fresh towels? How about cleaning the mirror? And—
come on! You didn’t even empty the wastebaskets!”
“Sorry, sir,” Lynn peeped back, relieved. “I’ll get right on it.”
Scammell stood tapping his foot for the next twenty minutes, his arms crossed as he sternly watched Lynn clean the room. Lynn felt humiliated…but at least she hadn’t been “made.” Over her earphone, she could hear Myers laughing: “Looks like Scammell’s pillows could use a fluffing too. Yeah, and Lynn? How about giving the toilet a quick scrub, huh? We want our customers to come back, don’t we?”
That’s real funny, Myers, she thought, bending over to grab some fresh towels.
««—»»
Lynn, now wearing an overcoat, approached the WASHINGTON GAS & ELECTRIC truck on the other side of P Street. She entered through the back door into the hardware bay where Myers sat in his padded chair before ranks of display terminals and surveillance apparatus. He was pink in the face from laughing.
“Real funny,” Lynn said.
“See all the great things you get to do in this job?” Myers said. He looked more like an over-the-hill high school principal than a decorated technistics chief. Mid-50s, cheap suit and tie, gray hair and a perennially bad haircut. “You get to plant bugs, blackmail double-agents, put spies away for life…and wipe toothpaste specks off mirrors!” Myers, then, broke into more laughter.
Lynn frowned. “Laugh it up, Myers, but I’ll bet I made more money than you did today.”
“How’s that?”
Lynn whipped out two fifty-dollar bills. “I did such a good job cleaning the room, Scammell tipped me.” She waved the bills in front of Myers.
“That’s an unauthorized gratuity,” Myers reminded. “You have to turn it in to the finance-control office.”
Lynn gave one of the fifties to Myers.
“Like I just said,” Myers commented. “Fuck the finance-control office.”
“I thought that’s what you said.” Next, Lynn gave him the tiny optical disk she’d swiped from Scammell’s hotel room.
“Good work. You make the switch all right?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“Can’t wait for our friend Saddam to recalibrate his anti-aircraft radar now. Those old frequencies on the snowflake will guide our AMRAMs right to target.”
“We’re getting a lot of mileage out of Scammell.” Lynn grinned. “The moron thinks he’s selling his country out, but doesn’t have a clue that every page of classified defense data he’s giving the Iraqis is fake. I’ll bet we can use Scammell several more
times before they get wise. Men are just so stupid.”
“I hear that,” Myers said. “Come on, let’s go get lunch.” He smiled at the newly acquired $50 bill. “With this kind of money—hell—we might even be able to afford sushi.”
Lynn rolled her eyes. “In this town.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Denny’s, here we come. Oh, say, I’ve been meaning to ask you. How’s your crackpot ex-husband?”
Lynn rolled her eyes again. “Harlan? I don’t know and could care even less.”