‘You wanna do it now?’ Reilly asked.
‘No,’ Hunter said. ‘Let’s go and grab a bite somewhere. Once we start this, I’ve no idea when we’ll get a chance to stop and eat again. And the longer a team’s on surveillance, the less alert they are. In a couple of hours there’ll be a lot less of a risk of our little operation being spotted. And we need to change cars,’ Hunter added. ‘I doubt if details of this one are out on the street yet, but we need something a bit more conventional for the next stage.’
‘OK with me,’ Reilly said. ‘And I sure could do with a change from beer ’n’ coke ’n’ chocolate.’
Fifty-five minutes later the two men drove out of a diner parking lot, threaded through the light early afternoon traffic and headed northwest on US95. A few minutes out of Vegas, Hunter pulled off the highway into the North Las Vegas Air Terminal, and turned into the passenger parking area.
They cruised slowly up and down the lanes, scanning the parked cars and looking for an anonymous, late model vehicle, preferably one that looked as if it had been parked for a while. They found the dark blue Ford compact in the far corner of the parking lot, and Reilly had the doors open and the engine started inside three minutes.
Back in Vegas, they cruised past McCarran again, Hunter driving, Reilly crouched low on the back seat. The Lincoln was still there, two dark figures visible behind the tinted glass windows.
‘That confirms it, I guess,’ Reilly said.
‘Yes. They shouldn’t be a problem, though.’
Hunter pulled the Ford into a parking bay at the side of the road around a quarter of a mile from the main gates of McCarran. They were far enough away that the Roland Oliver surveillance team wouldn’t be likely to spot them, and would have a good, but distant, view of vehicles entering or leaving the base. They weren’t close enough to identify individuals, even with the compact binoculars Reilly had produced from his bag, but that didn’t matter. All Hunter was looking for was one, particularly distinctive, vehicle.
‘Anything?’ Harris asked into the two-radio radio.
‘Nothing.’ Templeton’s voice was crackly and slightly distorted, but even that couldn’t hide his boredom.
Hunter had been right. Of all the work undertaken by police and security forces, surveillance – and especially long-term surveillance – is probably the least liked and certainly the most tedious.
Templeton and Grant had been sitting in the Lincoln since eight that morning. It was a hot day, and every twenty minutes or so Templeton had to start the engine and give the interior a blast from the air conditioning, just to keep the temperature inside the car bearable. There were cans of soda and packets of sandwiches in a cardboard box on the back seat: both had eaten, but neither man had drunk much. Quite apart from anything else, there was nowhere nearby where they could conveniently take a leak.
Pictures of Reilly and Hunter were taped to the dashboard, and every time a vehicle approached the main gate the two men peered through binoculars at the driver and any other occupants, seeking a match with their quarry.
Harris and Morgan were sitting in a motel bedroom about a block away. In fact, Morgan was asleep, stretched out on one of the twin beds, while Harris sat at the table by the window, which offered a reasonable view of the road outside. As well as the two-way radio and his Smith and Wesson automatic pistol, he had a street map of Las Vegas in front of him, plus pictures and biographies of Reilly and Hunter, which he had been studying for the last hour. The team’s other car, a maroon Chevrolet, was parked directly outside the door of the room, fully fuelled and ready to roll.
‘OK. Stay alert,’ Harris warned. ‘Morgan and I will relieve you at about three.’
‘Heads up,’ Hunter said. ‘That could be it.’
He peered intently through the binoculars at the McCarran main gate, then handed them to Reilly.
‘Yup,’ Reilly muttered. ‘Looks like our boy. Now we just wait.’
The barrier opened in front of him, and Randy Douglas accelerated steadily down the access road. At the first junction he turned towards the main runway, then turned again to parallel it. Close beside an aircraft parking area, he braked the ambulance to a stop and backed it up to the double entrance doors of an unmarked building.
Bill Robbins climbed out of the passenger side of the ambulance, opened the vehicle’s rear doors and then pressed the buzzer on the wall of the building. After a few moments the door was unlocked from the inside, and a man in a white coat appeared.
Eight minutes later, Douglas swung the vehicle out through the main gate at McCarran while Robbins checked the schedule sheet for details of the next pickup – their last that day.
‘That’s it,’ Reilly said, lowering the binoculars. ‘The show’s about to start. They’ve turned away from us, so you’d best get moving.’
‘Right,’ Hunter said, putting the Ford into drive and easing it away from the curb. ‘At least we don’t have to make a U-turn to follow them.’
As they passed the Lincoln, Reilly ducked down below the level of the passenger window, and Hunter pulled the Stetson a little lower over his face, but they needn’t have bothered. Templeton was looking straight at the McCarran gate, and stifling a yawn, while Grant rummaged around in the box on the back seat, looking for a beef sandwich. Neither of them even noticed the dark blue Ford.
Douglas and Robbins hadn’t noticed it either, until Hunter pulled alongside the ambulance and sounded the horn. Douglas looked to his right and saw Reilly staring straight at him, holding up Wilson’s FBI identification.
‘Shit,’ Douglas muttered. ‘What’s the fucking FBI want with us?’
‘Only one way to find out,’ Robbins replied. ‘Best you pull over and we’ll ask them.’
Douglas pulled the ambulance smoothly in to the side of the road, and Hunter stopped the Ford ten feet behind it. Reilly and Hunter climbed out at the same time as Douglas and Robbins. Hunter glanced at the rear doors of the ambulance, at the small black-painted logo ‘RMS,’ the letters intertwined, and at the legend ‘Rolver Medical Services’ directly below it.
‘Afternoon,’ Douglas said. ‘And how can we help the FBI?’
‘We’re not FBI,’ Hunter said. ‘That’s just a cover.’
The puzzled look on Douglas’s face was turning slowly to alarm. He and Robbins were unarmed and he had already seen the butt of the Glock at Hunter’s belt.
‘It’s OK,’ Reilly added. ‘We work for the same people you do.’
He and Hunter displayed the ‘Ω’ cards Reilly had liberated from the bodies of Rogers and Wilson. Hunter didn’t look unlike Rogers, but Reilly bore no resemblance at all to Wilson, so he carefully kept his forefinger partially obscuring the photograph on the card.
Douglas peered at the cards and relaxed visibly. ‘So what do you want with us?’
‘With you, almost nothing,’ Hunter said, ‘and you’ll be on your way in less than ten minutes. We’re running a security check on the Roland Oliver system here at McCarran, and we need to speak to the medical officer on duty. Who is it today?’
Neither Douglas nor Robbins reacted to the name ‘Roland Oliver.’
‘It’s Dr. Evans,’ Douglas said. ‘Why don’t you just go inside and talk to him?’
‘No can do,’ Hunter said. ‘Our instructions are to remain outside McCarran. There’s another team inside handling matters there. Didn’t you notice the increased security around the building?’
Douglas paused for a second, then nodded his head. Hunter would have been amazed if he’d done anything else.
‘OK. Can we just see your pickup schedule for this week?’
‘Sure.’ Robbins walked back to the ambulance and returned with a clipboard on which half a dozen or so sheets of paper were clipped. Hunter took the clipboard, barely glanced at the forms, and handed it to Reilly, who walked back to the Ford compact.
On the back seat was the portable photocopier they’d had some difficulty buying earlier that morning, powered from the car’s cigar lighter. Reilly unclipped the sheets and ran them, one at a time, through the copier. The whole process took less than three minutes. When he returned the clipboard to Robbins, Hunter was still talking to Douglas.
‘How many do you collect each day?’ he asked.
‘Depends,’ Douglas said. ‘We mainly cover Nevada, but sometimes we have to go out of state. If they’re all local – all from the Vegas area, say – we might collect five or six. If they’re out of state, we might only manage one or two. Sometimes we do real long trips, like this week. We’ve only collected two since Wednesday, and we’ve only got one more this afternoon, then we’re off-duty for five days.’
‘How long have you been doing this?’
‘Me – a bit over three years. Bill here has only been working with us for about six months.’
Hunter nodded. ‘You ever see any of the patients again? I mean – do you ever get to transport them from McCarran back to their homes?’
‘Nope,’ Douglas said. ‘I guess there’s a different crew that handles the return transport. We just ship ’em out. They’re all out of it, you know.’
‘What do you mean – ‘out of it’?’ Hunter asked.
‘In comas. Deep unconscious. I guess this program’s the last hope any of them have.’
Hunter nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s all we need from you. Now we have to get Doctor Evans to come out here and meet with us. You have a radio to contact him, right?’
‘Yes,’ Douglas said. ‘We have to call the duty doctor when we’re about ten minutes away from McCarran to let him know we’re about to arrive, and to give him the case number.’
‘Right. Get on the radio, call Evans and tell him two Roland Oliver senior security staff need to talk to him immediately, outside the base.’
Douglas walked over to the cab of the ambulance, picked up the radio, contacted Evans and relayed Hunter’s instructions.
There was a pause before Evans replied. ‘I can’t,’ he said, at last, his voice tinny and distant through the tiny speaker. ‘I’m not permitted to leave the base. Can’t they wait until tomorrow when I’m off-duty?’
Douglas looked over at Hunter and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Tell him,’ Hunter said, ‘that this is a Priority One instruction, which overrides all Roland Oliver Standing Orders. Compliance is mandatory. We need to see him immediately.’
‘OK,’ Evans said, his voice crackling and fading. ‘I’ll have to check over everything in here first. Where and when?’
Roger Ketch was getting nervous. He’d berated the Cobra pilot for abandoning the search for the two men when the police car and fire truck had appeared, which had served to relieve his irritation, but hadn’t achieved anything else. At least the crop-duster had been destroyed, which meant that Hunter and Reilly couldn’t fly it anywhere else, and also confirmed that they were definitely in the Las Vegas area.
And that was what worried Ketch. The two men had obviously been somewhere nearby for almost six hours. So why hadn’t they tried to get into McCarran?
He’d called Harris three times, but nobody on the clean-up team had seen the two men. Harris was adamant that if they tried to effect an entry through the main gate, his people would see them. Therefore, they hadn’t tried – yet.
Harris figured that they were just lying low for a while, checking out the opposition and working out what they were going to do next, but Ketch was beginning to wonder if they’d all missed something.
Hunter and Reilly were sitting in the blue Ford in the restaurant parking lot when Evans appeared, driving a cobalt blue Jaguar XJ6.
‘Looks like Roland Oliver pays pretty good,’ Reilly said, as he and Hunter climbed out of the Ford.
‘Doctor Evans?’ Hunter asked, as they approached the tall, spindly man wearing black-rimmed spectacles who emerged from the Jaguar. His white coat lay over the back of the passenger seat, and Hunter could see the ‘Evans’ nametag through the car’s side window.
Evans nodded. ‘Yes. And you would be?’
Hunter let the question hang in the air between them. ‘Let’s go inside, shall we?’ he said, took Evans’s elbow in a firm grasp and led the way into the restaurant. Lunch had finished over an hour ago. Almost every table was vacant and there were only four or five people at the bar. Hunter shepherded Evans to a large round table in the corner of the room next to the window and the three of them sat down, Reilly and Hunter flanking Evans.
A waiter appeared, and Reilly ordered coffee all round.
‘What’s all this about?’ Evans asked, as the waiter moved out of earshot. ‘I’ve never seen either of you before. Let me see some identification, please.’
Hunter reached into his jacket pocket, deliberately letting Evans see the butt of the Glock, and pulled out Rogers’ FBI ID.
‘We apologize for deceiving you, doctor. We’re not actually from Roland Oliver.’
Out of the corner of his eye Hunter saw Reilly’s eyebrows climb up his forehead. They hadn’t discussed the details of what they were going to say to either the ambulance staff or the Roland Oliver doctor, but Reilly was already wondering just who the hell Hunter was going to claim to be next.
‘In fact,’ Hunter continued, ‘we’re not only not from Roland Oliver, we’re part of a special FBI task force which is investigating Roland Oliver’s operations.’
Evans leaned back in his chair and sighed, apparently with relief, then sat forward. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘I’ve been praying somebody, somewhere, would take some notice and do something about it.’
Hunter glanced across at Reilly, who gave him a puzzled frown.
‘Can you guarantee me full immunity?’ Evans asked.
‘That depends, doctor,’ Hunter said smoothly, ‘on what information you can give us. Start at the beginning, please. What’s your involvement with Roland Oliver?’
Evans looked up as the waiter appeared with cups and coffee pots. When they all had drinks in front of them, Evans started talking.
‘I thought it was just a regular job, to start with. The qualifications they required were minimal – a medical degree was about all they wanted – but the salary was excellent. I thought it was just additional pay because of the long hours involved, you know, being in the building for twelve hours at a time. Twelve on, twelve off, for six days, then a three day break. There are three of us working shifts at McCarran.’
‘But you found out differently?’ Hunter asked.
Evans nodded.
‘OK,’ Hunter said. ‘We’ll get to that later. What does your job consist of?’
‘Almost nothing,’ Evans said. ‘All I do is monitor the subjects. They breathe a special oxygen-nitrous oxide mixture to keep them unconscious. I’m responsible for monitoring their respiration, body temperature, pulse and so on, and make any changes necessary to maintain them in a stable, but unconscious, state. In fact, I don’t even really need to be there – there’s an automated monitoring system that reacts a lot faster than I can to any change in a patient’s condition – so I’m really there just in case the automated system falls over. That’s it, until their transport arrives.’
Hunter nodded, as if Evans was just confirming what they already knew. ‘Tell us in general terms what you know about Roland Oliver’s subjects,’ he asked.
‘I asked that when I was first recruited. What they told me was that most of the subjects are what you might call “lost souls”. They’re young women, aged between eighteen and thirty, usually without family or close friends. A lot of them, they told me, are prostitutes or drug addicts. That’s more or less it.’
‘What medical research is Roland Oliver involved in?’
‘Medical research?’ Evans asked, a puzzled frown appearing. ‘What do you mean – “medical research”?’
‘We know from other sources that the subjects who are processed through McCarran are used in some kind of medical research program,’ Hunter replied. ‘We know they’re shipped out to a secure clinic somewhere.’
‘Groom Lake,’ Evans interrupted. ‘It’s out at Groom Lake.’
‘OK, Groom Lake,’ Hunter said, noting down the name in his notebook. ‘Now, what we need to know is what sort of research is done with them, and why the people running it are apparently prepared to kill anybody who gets close enough to find out anything about it.’
Evans turned noticeably pale at Hunter’s words. ‘It’s not medical research,’ he said, looking nervously from Hunter to Reilly. ‘If you’ve been investigating Roland Oliver, surely you must know that?’
Hunter recalled the explanation of Roland Oliver’s functions that they’d forced out of George Donahue.
‘OK, perhaps that’s not the right way to put it,’ he said. ‘Maybe medical experimentation would be a more accurate description?’
‘No, it’s not,’ Evans said, shaking his head, and Hunter noticed a slight tremor in the hand holding the doctor’s coffee cup. ‘It’s not research or experimentation.’
‘So what is it? What does Roland Oliver do?’
Evans shook his head again. ‘I don’t know what the purpose of the facility actually is,’ he said. ‘But I do know that none of the subjects of the program ever come back from Nevada.’
‘What do you mean, they never come back?’
‘What is done to them is terminal.’
‘Terminal?’
‘Terminal,’ Evans said. ‘The subjects are taken out there to be killed.’
A long silence followed. Hunter didn’t take his eyes off Evans. ‘How do you know that?’ he asked.
‘I know what happens to them, because when I tried to get out of the program, they flew me out to Groom Lake and they showed me.’
Evans swallowed twice before continuing, and his hand was shaking so badly that hot coffee slopped over his fingers. But he didn’t seem to notice as his eyes bored into Hunter’s face.
‘They told me that if I ever told anyone what really happens there, or if I tried to leave the program again, they’d put me through the same process.’
Straight-line or logical thought patterns suffer from one significant disadvantage – because the problem being tackled has to be clearly defined from the start, certain facts or assumptions have to be taken as givens, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at a solution which ignores these givens.
The classic example is what might be termed the ‘pebble in the bag’ problem. The scenario is simple enough: an evil landlord has a tenant with a beautiful daughter. The tenant falls well behind with his rent payments and finally the landlord faces him and offers him a stark choice – pay the back rent in full, immediately (which he knows the tenant cannot do), or let him sleep with the tenant’s daughter for one night and he’ll forget about the back rent.
The tenant protests, but under increasing pressure from the landlord he eventually asks his daughter. She agrees, but with the caveat that the final outcome will be determined by chance, by her picking one of two coloured pebbles from a bag. If she picks the black pebble, the back rent will be forgotten and she’ll spend the night with the landlord, but if she picks the white pebble, the rent will still be forgotten but she won’t have to sleep with him. The landlord agrees to this, but the girl sees that he actually puts two black pebbles into the bag.
Conventional thinking doesn’t help solve this problem, and normally offers only two possible solutions. Either the girl can cry foul, but that still leaves the problem of the rent to be paid, or she can bite the bullet, pick a black pebble and simply sleep with the landlord and get it over with.
Lateral thinking provides the ideal solution immediately, by approaching the problem from the ‘wrong end,’ by imagining the best possible result and working backwards from there. If the landlord had played fair and put one white and one black pebble in the bag, and the girl had picked the white pebble, there would be a black pebble left in the bag. That is the ideal result – either a white pebble in the hand or a black pebble in the bag, and it doesn’t actually matter which. So all the girl does is pick either one of the pebbles, and then drop it. That leaves a black pebble in the bag so, logically, the girl must have picked the white one.
Roger Ketch had never heard of the ‘pebble in the bag’ problem, but he had occasionally unconsciously employed lateral thinking with marked success.
With Reilly and Hunter still refusing to show themselves anywhere near McCarran, he had tried to put himself in Hunter’s shoes and work out what he would do.
‘Oh, shit,’ he said suddenly, and reached for the telephone.
All the monitoring systems were on automatic, as usual. What wasn’t usual was the state of the telephone system, which Evans had switched over to answering machine before he left the building. He hadn’t left a new message saying where he was going, so Roger Ketch was none the wiser when he angrily replaced his receiver.
Roland Oliver standing orders were quite clear. The duty doctor was never to leave the building, except for overseeing the reception of new subjects, during his shift. That meant, Ketch realized, that somehow Hunter and Reilly had got into the base and might even then be in the Roland Oliver building.
He reached for the telephone and had actually begun dialling the number of Harris’s mobile phone when he suddenly stopped and replaced the handset.
‘That’s not it,’ he muttered to himself. ‘If Hunter and Reilly were in there, why would the answering machine be switched on?’
After another few seconds, he pulled a telephone directory off a shelf next to his desk and flicked through the pages. Then he dialled a different number at McCarran, and within moments was talking to one of the main gate guards.
‘Has Doctor Evans left the base?’ he demanded, after identifying himself as a senior USAF officer – one of several cover identities he held.
‘Wait, please,’ the guard replied, and ran his finger down a list on a clipboard. ‘Yes, sir. He was checked through the gate at fourteen twelve local time.’
‘By himself?’ Ketch demanded.
‘We can’t tell. He was driving his own car, according to the log, but there’s no record of a passenger with him. We normally only record passengers coming into the base,’ the guard added.
‘Great,’ Ketch grated, and slammed his hand on the phone cradle.
The moment he got a dial tone he called Harris’s mobile phone number.
‘What process? What do they do to them?’ Hunter asked, again.
‘I won’t tell you,’ Evans said, shaking his head. ‘I won’t tell you unless you can guarantee me full immunity, officially and in writing. And give me a guarantee that I can just walk away from this – never go back there. Maybe even put me in the witness protection program.’
Hunter looked at Reilly. They’d both noticed the trembling in Evans’s hands and realized that he was absolutely terrified. Probably no matter what they did to him, or threatened to do to him, he wouldn’t tell them much more.
‘OK, Doctor Evans,’ Hunter said. ‘We can’t give you any guarantees right now, but if you cooperate fully I’m sure we can work something out. Now,’ he added, ‘we have a more immediate problem. We need to trace one particular subject who may have been fed into the Roland Oliver program.’
‘When?’ Evans asked.
‘This week,’ Hunter said.
‘No problem. I’ve got copies of the last week’s admissions in the trunk of the car. I’ll go and get them,’ Evans said, and stood.
Hunter reached up and pulled him firmly back into the seat. ‘My colleague will do that, doctor,’ he said. ‘Just give him the keys, please.’
‘It’s a grey folder labelled “Admissions”,’ Evans said, as he passed Reilly a leather key fob. ‘On the left hand side of the trunk, next to my medical bag.’
‘Why do you keep copies of the records, doctor?’ Hunter asked, as Reilly left.
‘For a situation exactly like this,’ Evans said. ‘Ever since I found out what Roland Oliver actually does, I’ve kept copies of the admission sheets. I thought that if the operation was ever going to be shut down, knowing exactly who had been through the system might help bring those responsible to justice.’
Hunter smiled for the first time since he’d walked into the restaurant. ‘That was good thinking, doctor. Can you give us access to those records? Where are they?’
‘At my bank,’ Evans replied, ‘in a safe deposit box. Here, I’ll give you the details.’
He handed Hunter a slip of paper bearing the name of the bank and the safety deposit box number and passed it over as Reilly walked back in. Evans took the folder, opened it and spread the sheets of paper across the table.
Hunter and Reilly looked at them. The pages were ruled into five columns, containing the subject’s name, date of birth, address, social security number and Roland Oliver number. Several of the columns held blank spaces. Evans caught his glance.
‘The documentation for lots of the subjects is poor. You must understand that Roland Oliver harvests –’ Hunter grimaced at Evans’s use of that particular word ‘–subjects from a wide variety of sources and locations. Sometimes we have little more than a name, and sometimes not even that.’
‘Why do they record these details at all?’ Hunter asked.
‘In case there’s ever any need for a denial about one of them. We need to know if that person was ever processed by us.’
Reilly had taken the list and had scanned through it, looking for the name Christy-Lee Kaufmann. He got to the last page, checked it and looked up at Hunter, shaking his head. A gust of relief swept over the Englishman. Wherever Christy-Lee was, at least she wasn’t on her way out to Groom Lake.
Hunter took the pages from Reilly and flipped through them, just for confirmation. He turned the second to last page, then skipped back to the previous sheet. Something had caught his eye. The fourth name from the bottom was ‘Maria Slade.’