Ultimately they tied the pair up and left them locked in the bathroom. They took the shotguns with them and ended up at a truck stop a dozen miles away. Their minivan was blocked by several big rigs and couldn’t be seen from the road.
Ethan slept fitfully and finally gave up on sleep at 5:00 a.m. After he went to empty his bladder, the others did the same. Soon, they were on the road, heading south on Arizona State Highway 90.
“The bones we’re going to see today were excavated from the Grand Canyon around 1860 by a renowned entomologist and paleontologist,” Matt said, driving the minivan south toward the Huachuca Mountain Range. “He was well published and well received. He belonged to all the appropriate clubs and organizations for someone of his ilk. Then one day he discovered a pair of giant bones on the floor of the Grand Canyon. A male and a female, eighteen feet and fifteen feet respectively.”
Ethan sat behind the driver’s seat. He’d changed into shorts and a T-shirt but wore hiking boots. “So a known scientist found these bones. Then what?”
Matt wore jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that read, You can take away my home and my car, but you’ll never take away my freedom. “Then nothing. He was believed, the bones were kept in a museum, and he went on to have a successful career.”
“I don’t get it,” Shanny said. She was dressed almost identically to Ethan, except she wore a yellow shirt and his was blue, both sporting the REI logo.
“There used to be no issue discovering giant bones. They were found all the time and were frequently reported in the newspapers. It was only around the turn of the nineteenth century when it became a problem. The Smithsonian destroyed thousands of giant bones, as evidenced in the release of official records by order of the Supreme Court.”
“What changed?” Ethan asked.
“The ability to aggregate information. Newspaper, radio, then television. Now the internet. So much information is available, it had to be acted on. Back then a report here and a report there, who cared? Who’d know? Even if it was in the newspaper, as this was, folks were more concerned about the next war, the weather, and the price of corn and hog futures.”
“So now that we have access to the information, it makes it dangerous.”
Matt nodded. “Albert Einstein thought so. He said, ‘A little knowledge is dangerous. So is a lot.’ ”
“So we’re going to see these giant bones?” Ethan asked.
Matt nodded again. “Yes, and something really special.”
“I thought a pair of giants was special already,” Shanny said. “What could be more special than that?”
“A bone from one of the original giants.”
“By original, you mean…” Ethan’s eyes widened. “Like from the Bible?”
“Yep. Supposed to be a femur from a male giant. And get this, the femur is as large as the smallest of the other two giants.”
“Fifteen feet long,” Ethan said in a hushed voice.
“Yep.”
They drove for another quarter hour, passing a border-patrol checkpoint on the northbound side of the highway.
“How do you know it’s there?” Ethan asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, is there a place where it’s advertised? A billboard? A secret network?”
“Yep. Facebook.”
Ethan chuckled. “No, really.”
“Really. There’s a closed group called Real Giants. It’s mostly filled with folk who are interested in the conspiracy of it all but not really keyed into what’s actually going on. They like the idea that there’s something deeper, but in their heart of hearts, they don’t really believe. I think that’s how I got the box sent to me. There are a few hard-core believers. We talk in private from time to time. I met Freivald there, and he indicated that should I ever want to see the bones of an original in person, I could come down and he’d give me a private showing.”
Shanny leaned forward in her seat. “Is this legit or was he pulling your leg? And what kind of name is Freivald, anyway?”
Matt glanced in the rearview mirror. “German maybe? What’s it matter? And as far as being legit, there’s no reason to pull my leg.”
“And he knows we’re coming?”
“I logged onto your laptop this morning and pinged him on Facebook. He knows.” Seeing Ethan’s sudden blossom of worry, Matt added, “And don’t worry about the box rules. Remember, I used to be a box holder, too.” He chuckled. “I guess I still am.”
They drove past the entrance to Fort Huachuca, with the statue of an African American buffalo soldier standing proud. Then they hit Sierra Vista, a small desert town in the shadow of the Huachucas. A white blimp was attached to the ground by a cable. Another twenty miles south, and then Matt turned the minivan into the entrance to Coronado National Memorial. This was a higher desert, so instead of the mightily multiarmed saguaro, clumps of tall thin ocotillo stood like collections of spears sticking from the earth. It was so different from the foliage of eastern Colorado that Ethan found himself mesmerized by the many different plant species.
To their right rose the Huachuca Mountain chain, with Coronado Pass up ahead. Fewer than three miles to the left, the black scar of the border wall physically separated Mexico from the United States.
They drove another ten minutes before Matt turned onto a dirt road on the right. He pulled up to a security gate made from high-grade steel and cables attached to poles set in concrete. He rolled down the window and spoke into an access pad with a speaker and a camera.
“Rumpelstiltskin.”
Five seconds later, the gate pulled aside.
Matt put the minivan in gear and followed a single dirt track. Ocotillo rose on both sides like a hedgerow. Ethan spied video cameras mounted on ten-foot poles every twenty feet.
They’d passed the sixteenth camera when Shanny said, “Think this guy’s concerned about security?”
Another four cameras brought them around a turn and to an immense steel building resting in a slight depression. The building was low enough that they could see the roof and note that it had been painted the color of the desert around it, even including what looked like cacti scattered here and there for realism.
The dirt track ran into the side of the building. Just before Ethan was about to comment on it, a part of the wall slid up, revealing a parking space. Matt drove straight into it. Once inside, he stopped the minivan and turned off the ignition. The wall closed behind them, leaving them in darkness.
They sat for a moment before Shanny whispered, “Is it automated or is someone there?”
Ethan felt his anxiety begin to rise as they sat in the pitch blackness of the minivan, their breathing and the occasional ticking of the engine the only sounds in the ominous silence. They’d been so careful to keep their location secret. They’d checked for surveillance. They’d even stopped once, just to see if any vehicles had stopped with them. Now here they were, driving into a mysterious camouflaged building in the middle of nowhere on the Mexican border to meet a man none of them had ever met. Maybe, just maybe, they needed to rethink their judgment.
Overhead lights abruptly snapped on, momentarily blinding them. One failed to come on all the way, instead winking and buzzing. When their vision returned, the light revealed a room painted entirely white, including the floor and ceiling. A small mirrored piece of glass stood before them.
Ethan went to open the door, but a voice from a hidden speaker made him pause.
“Stay in the vehicle. Don’t attempt to move again.”
Shanny slouched back in her seat and stared daggers at Matt. “Way to go. You’ve just driven us into someone’s idea of a bad B movie. Feels like we just entered the universe of Hostel, The Hills Have Eyes, Saw, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
“Take it easy,” Matt said calmly. “I’m sure he’s just checking us out.”
Ethan breathed through his nose to calm himself, but it wasn’t working. So instead of sitting back and trying to relax, he took it to the next level. “And the rest of the building is a maze we have to make it through with ax-wielding maniacs at every turn. One thing’s for sure, Matt, you’re going first. That you can count on.”
“Jesus, kid. Take a Valium.”
“I’m not a kid.”
“Whatever. Ethan. Relax.”
At that moment, the voice came back. “You may get out of the vehicle.”
“See?” Matt said. “Piece of cake.”
Ethan eyed Shanny. She seemed as uncertain as he was, but her gaze was steady. She offered him her hand. He took it, and she squeezed tightly. They got out of the minivan together.
Ten, fifty, or a hundred seconds later—Ethan didn’t know because he’d been too busy calculating how they were about to die—a section of wall slid to the side. No one waited for them with a handgun or a handshake. The area beyond the door was empty.
Matt glanced at them, shrugged, and stepped through.
Ethan gritted his teeth, squeezed Shanny’s hand a little tighter, and followed.
Soon they were in a cool hallway. Gone was the metal and stark white. The floor was made from slate tile. The walls looked like regular tan painted wood. Recessed lights ran every ten feet in the center of the ceiling. The hall ended at a door affixed to the right-hand wall.
Matt tried the knob, and the door was unlocked. They entered into a larger room with thirty-foot ceilings. The concrete floors gave it the feeling of a garage. Standing ten feet away was a man who had to be at least six foot six and weighed around three hundred well-distributed pounds. He was so big, the pistol he held on them was almost lost in his hand.
“Freivald?” Matt asked.
“Dornecker?” the man asked in response. He wore a set of black military fatigues and black combat boots. He had a black mustache and a goatee that came to a point.
Who the hell is Dornecker? Ethan wondered. Then he realized that it was probably a fake name, just like Freivald was.
Matt nodded. “That’s me.”
“Who are your friends?”
“They’re on the chase, too.” Matt lowered his voice. “The Six-Fingered Man is after them.”
The man’s eyes went wide as his mouth slammed into a frown. “And you brought them here? What the hell were you thinking?”
“Easy, big guy,” Matt said. “We’ve done everything right. We’re not carrying any cells. We don’t have any surveillance on us. No one knows where we are, much less where you are.”
Freivald shook his bald head. “Amateurs. Everyone’s an amateur.”
Ethan felt Shanny stiffen. She pulled her hand from his. “Not everyone can be a professional, Mr. Freivald,” she said, voice cold. “I’m a physics grad student and Ethan here is a high school math teacher. We’re no black-suited militia hiding bones in the middle of the desert. We’re just two regular people who got sucked into this damned giant conspiracy and are trying to get to the end of it before the Six-Fingered Man or another soccer mom with a shotgun kills us. So if you don’t mind, I’d certainly appreciate it if you’d stop pointing a gun at us, then we can all get down to the business of admiring your bone.” As soon as the final words left her mouth, she reddened and added, “You know what I mean.”
Ethan and Matt, who’d been staring at her through her entire speech, turned to see the effect on Freivald.
He grinned a bit, then nodded as he lowered his gun. “It’s Freivald. Just Freivald. No mister.” He turned and stepped over to a circular workstation with several computer terminals and large flat-screen monitors. “Anyway, your vehicle checked out. As did the personal scanners you walked through. You’re clean.”
“Then why the pistol?” Ethan managed to ask, breaking his silence.
“I did ECM. It didn’t mean you were who you said you were. The Six-Fingered Man has a lot of folks undercover. You’d never guess some of them. So I wasn’t sure until this lady opened up her mouth.”
“ECM?” Ethan asked.
“Electronic countermeasures. I’ve spent a small fortune making this place invisible, and the last thing I need is for some amateur to make me visible.” He gestured to a refrigerator with the pistol, right before he secured it in a holster in the small of his back. “There’s water in the fridge. Anything you see in there, you can have.” When no one moved, he pointed again. “This is the desert. Drink water.”
He sat on a chair and began typing into one of several keyboards arrayed on the 270-degree workstation. The setup dominated the center of the room. Off to the left of the refrigerator was a seating area with a long black leather couch and two leather chairs. A coffee table with magazines rested between them, making the whole affair oddly domestic, or at least more akin to a doctor’s waiting room than a survivalist’s hideout. The magazines were all about guns and ammo and electronics. Along the adjoining wall was a row of seven metal cabinets and a closed steel door that was ten feet wide. On top of each of the cabinets sat a black duffel bag. A tool bench took up most of the other wall with several projects in mid-work, such as a metal box with mesh being applied to it as well as a remote-controlled helicopter being fitted with what looked like a small machine gun.
If Ethan hadn’t figured it out before, this guy Freivald was on a completely different level. He was all in and prepared to defend himself and his bones.
Matt had worked his way to the workstation and was sitting in the other chair. He pointed to one of the screens and asked, “What’s this one?”
“Feed from the heliostat you passed on the way here.”
“Heliostat?”
“Did you see the white blimp tethered to the ground-control station?”
“We saw the blimp.”
“Good. Otherwise, I would have wondered if you were blind or not. You can’t miss it.” He zoomed the image out so that there were more than a hundred small green dots moving across the map with several red dots moving much faster back and forth. “The heliostat was originally owned by DEA. It contains ground-surveillance radar that can monitor the border area for narco-traffickers. After Nine Eleven, ownership and management fell to DHS.”
Matt came up behind Freivald. “How large of an area?”
“From Douglas, which is in the southeast corner of the county, to Kino Springs on the border. The radar can penetrate Mexico on a line bisecting the San Pedro Mountain. These green dots are persons on the ground. I don’t have the security software that distinguishes between border patrol and illegal border crossers, but as far as I’m concerned, they are all threats to me.”
“And the red ones?” Shanny asked, scooting in beside Ethan. She held a water bottle.
“Aircraft. Either UAVs or helicopters. CBP uses the occasional small plane as well.”
Shanny pointed. “Looks like one is flying overhead.”
“They do that frequently. I was interviewed once. They just think I’m some crazy gun nut who wants his privacy, which is pretty common for a lot of the off-grid buildings you’ll find in Arizona valleys.”
“Either that or meth labs,” Matt said.
“Either way, CBP doesn’t care about me, nor did I give them the impression I’d be interested in harboring illegals.”
“Sure are a lot of dots,” Ethan said.
“A 2002 report indicated that CBP captured and/or tracked and failed to capture around seven hundred fifty thousand illegal border crossers in this county alone in 2001.”
Matt whistled. “We hear about the border issue in Phoenix, but we’re far enough away that we see it as OPP,” he said, pronouncing each letter.
When Shanny flashed him a questioning look, he said, “Other people’s problems.”
“Seems like with that many border crossers it would be considerably dangerous to live here,” Ethan said.
Freivald switched keyboards and began responding to several Facebook posts. “You’d think that, but it’s rather safe in Cochise County. Our crime rate is lower than the national average, as is our poverty rate. We notice the border and the checkpoints, but they don’t dominate our lives.”
He saw the doubt in Ethan’s eyes and added, “It’s like this. With more than five hundred border patrol agents swarming southern Arizona, the very last thing an illegal or a coyote wants is to hang out here.”
“Coyote?” Shanny asked.
“It’s a name for a particular type of human trafficker. Violent. Ruthless. Anyway, as I was saying, they pass right through here. There’s even an unwritten rule not to steal or hurt anyone near the border. Once a mother and daughter were beaten up and their car was stolen. The CBP caught the illegals who did it, and within forty-eight hours they were found dead in the detention facility, killed by other inmates. The rule is not to mess with the border inhabitants, and in exchange they believe we won’t actively try to stop them, which is true for the most part.”
Matt nodded, then shuffled his feet. He glanced at Shanny and Ethan, then finally put it out there.
“So, what about those bones?”