Hunter pulled the car to a halt but ignored the notice on the front of the guard house and kept the headlights of the Chevrolet switched on. As the guard leaned out of his booth, Hunter wound his window down and passed up the Omega cards he’d taken from the two dead men.
‘We’re Harris and Morgan,’ he said. ‘You should be expecting us, and can you make in snappy – they’re holding a Janet flight for us.’
The guard took his time looking down at the list on his clipboard, but eventually appeared satisfied and handed the cards back to Hunter.
‘Know where the Janet Terminal is?’ he asked.
‘Nope,’ Hunter said, quite truthfully. ‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘OK,’ the guard said, reached into a drawer on the desk in front of him and handed down a simple photocopied map of McCarran Air Base. ‘Just follow the route marked in red,’ he said, pointing at a section of the map with a pencil. ‘I’ll tell the Terminal staff you’re on the base and on your way.’
Templeton pulled the Lincoln into an all-night gas station, stuck the pump nozzle in the tank filler and squeezed the lever. Grant climbed out of the passenger seat and walked slowly round the car, finally stopping next to Templeton.
‘Something on your mind?’
‘Yup,’ Grant said, ‘I dunno, but to me there’s something about all this that doesn’t smell right.’
‘Like what?’
Grant shrugged. ‘Like, well, like Harris and Morgan taking the guy they’d found to the hospital. That sound like Harris to you? I’d have figured he’d just question him and leave him where he was. The most I’d expect him to do is maybe call for a paramedic unit. Harris just ain’t the compassionate type.’
The flow of fuel stopped as the safety valve cut in. Templeton glanced at the figures on the pump, squeezed the lever again to get an extra half gallon into the tank, then replaced the pump nozzle. He bent down and put the cap back on the Lincoln’s fuel tank.
‘No, maybe he isn’t,’ Templeton conceded.
‘And why send us up to Rachel?’ Grant continued. ‘Why would the two perps pick there to start from? I know the access road from Route 375 begins near the town, but they could try to cross the boundary anywhere.’
‘So what do you think?’ Templeton asked, opening his wallet and selecting a credit card to pay for the fuel.
‘I think Harris was telling us what the perps wanted him to tell us, because they were sitting looking at him over the barrels of their pistols. I think we’re being sent out into the desert to get us out of the way, and I think Reilly and Hunter are calling the shots.’
Templeton tapped the credit card on his teeth, then came to a decision. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I agree with what you’re saying, but it’ll do no harm to check it out. We’ll go take another look at that Lincoln, and see what else we can find at the parking lot. Get on the horn to the Las Vegas PD and put the APB back on Harris’s Chevy.’
Reilly called the directions as Hunter drove, as quickly as he could, along the almost deserted network of roads inside McCarran Air Base. Within a matter of minutes, Hunter braked the Chevrolet to a stop outside the Janet Terminal and the two men climbed out.
‘I’ll do the talking,’ Reilly said. ‘Don’t want nobody wondering why a Brit’s on his way out to this here Groom Lake place.’
‘Fine by me,’ Hunter replied.
Reilly was moving easier, thanks to the second bandage Hunter had applied, and there were only two or three small red discolorations on the front of his shirt where blood had seeped through. They were both wearing lightweight jackets, and as long as Reilly kept his zipped up, the stains couldn’t be seen.
Reilly couldn’t carry anything because of the torn muscles on his chest, so Hunter took Reilly’s black leather bag from the Chevrolet. They’d already stopped to check the contents, and had removed all the clothes in favour of Reilly’s choice of hardware. This included half a dozen packages wrapped in brown paper, a long bundle wrapped in a blanket, which contained Reilly’s SPAS-12 shotgun and AR-15 assault rifle, and several boxes of ammunition. Hunter had put in the Smith and Wesson pistol he’d taken from Harris, plus a silencer, the spare magazines he and Morgan had been carrying, the two-way radio from the Chevrolet, and Harris’s mobile phone, both of which were switched off.
A bulky man wearing a dark blue suit was waiting at the terminal entrance, and held up a hand as Reilly and Hunter approached.
‘You Harris and Morgan?’ he demanded.
‘Yup,’ Reilly said, and proffered the two Omega cards.
The man barely glanced at them, just turned and led the way through the building. ‘You got any idea how long we’ve been holding this aircraft for you two?’
Attack, Reilly thought, was usually the best form of defence. ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘but it ain’t our problem. Until about an hour ago, we didn’t even know we was supposed to be on the flight. You got a problem with that, mister, you’d better take it up with Groom Lake, not us.’
The man grunted in disapproval, then pulled open one half of a set of double doors and simply pointed out into the night. Hunter looked down a short flight of steps and across a concrete parking area where a white Boeing 737 with a red horizontal stripe running along the fuselage waited, the starboard engine already running.
‘Guess that’s our ride,’ Reilly muttered, as they walked across to the single set of access stairs just behind the cockpit.
Nine minutes later, the 737 taxied past the holding point, swung off the taxiway and straightened up on the main runway at McCarran. The pilot ran the engines up to full power, released the brakes, and the Boeing lifted smoothly off the ground, then swung northwest for Groom Lake.
Templeton had stopped the Lincoln to fill it with fuel on the northeast outskirts of Las Vegas, and the late-evening traffic was heavy and slow-moving. The diner where Hunter had abandoned the Lincoln was only about fifteen miles from the gas station, but it took them nearly fifty minutes to make it back there.
‘Should I call Ketch?’ Grant asked, as they accelerated away from a set of traffic lights.
‘No, not yet,’ Templeton replied. ‘If we find something at the diner, then we’ll set the wheels in motion. I’m not convinced,’ he added, ‘and even if you’re right, Hunter and Reilly have still got to get into Groom Lake, which they won’t find easy. What I don’t want to do is set a hare running and then have Harris draining all over me when it turns out that he was right and you were wrong. OK?’
‘OK,’ Grant agreed, somewhat grudgingly.
In his office, Roger Ketch had consumed almost a pint of strong black coffee, and was feeling more awake. He sat behind his desk, mentally rehearsing the dressing-down he was going to give Harris when he and Morgan eventually arrived.
The combined weight of the entire United States of America’s law enforcement machinery had been directed against two men – only two, for Christ’s sake – and they’d just walked into wherever they wanted to go, and done whatever they wanted to do. Hunter’s ability to avoid detection he could maybe understand if he was, as McGrath at the FBI suspected, some kind of a British spook, but Dick Reilly, sheriff of Hicksville, Nowhere U.S.A.? That was something else. Heads, Ketch had already promised himself, were going to roll. Lots of heads.
He glanced at the clock at the front of the desk. He calculated that the 737 should land in about ten minutes or so. Then he noticed that the amber light on the grey console on the left hand side of his desk was glowing again.
‘OK, OK,’ he murmured. ‘We’ll get the system running in a few minutes.’ Then he smiled, remembering the identity of one of the occupants of the caskets downstairs. ‘And we’ll have a little fun as well,’ he added.
Two minutes later, Ketch closed his office door behind him and walked down the staircase towards the large room located in the middle of the building. He took a key from his pocket, opened the access door and stepped inside.
He walked first to the table positioned in the centre of the room, and looked closely at the equipment which was located on and around it. Knowing exactly what the system was designed to do, he always experienced a thrill of almost sexual excitement when he stood close to the table.
The very first time he’d been present in the building when a processing run was carried out, he’d actually stood beside the table and watched the operation, but he’d found it just too much to take. Then he’d begun watching it on the monitor screen in his office, but after a while he found he couldn’t stomach even that. But he still occasionally turned the monitor on and watched for a few minutes, and he always looked at the occupants of at least some of the caskets before each run.
Ketch walked around the room, looking in through the faceplates of some of the caskets. His progress appeared random, but actually he knew exactly where he was going, and precisely at which casket his inspection was going to finish. He’d left very specific instructions about the placement of that one casket.
A little over twenty minutes into the flight, the co-pilot left the cockpit and began walking slowly up the centre aisle towards the rear of the Boeing, scanning faces as he did so. The aircraft was far from full – only about a third of the seats were occupied.
He stopped beside Reilly and looked down at him. ‘You Harris?’ he asked.
‘Nope,’ Reilly said. ‘I’m Morgan. He’s Harris,’ and he jerked a thumb to his left, where Hunter sprawled in his seat, apparently asleep.
‘OK, whatever,’ the pilot said. ‘Got a message for the two of you from Groom Lake. There’ll be a car waiting for you at the dispersal to take you down to –’ he looked at a piece of paper in his hand ‘– Rolver Systems, wherever the hell that is.’
‘Mighty civil of them,’ Reilly said. ‘Much obliged.’
With one exception, all the caskets were lying horizontal on the complex conveyor belt system that ran around almost the whole floor area, and the occupants were deeply unconscious.
The single exception was a casket supported by a frame which held it upright against the left-hand wall. The occupant was conscious, breathing normal air, and the front of the casket was placed so that the faceplate looked directly at the vivisection table. Ketch had also instructed that two small speakers and a simple amplifier were to be placed within the monitoring equipment section at the head of the casket, and a microphone had been taped to the front of it, directly above the faceplate.
Ketch was quite determined that Doctor Richard Evans would both see and hear every subject go through the processing system before his turn came around.
‘Good evening, doctor,’ Ketch said, as he walked up to the casket and peered in through the faceplate, an ironic smile on his face. ‘I hope you’re not too uncomfortable. Still, if you are, at least you know it won’t be for too much longer. We’ll be starting the processing run in a few minutes.’
At these words, the sides of the casket began vibrating as Evans made further futile efforts to break out.
‘It’s no good,’ Ketch said. ‘The casket’s virtually soundproof, and it’s certainly strong enough to hold you. We had a conversation, if you remember. Last year, I think it was. Your principles got the better of you, and you wanted out of the program. I told you then what would happen to you if you talked to anybody about Roland Oliver, and I even let you watch the processing so you’d know what we’d do to you if you tried to leave.
‘And now,’ Ketch swung his arm expansively to indicate the whole room, ‘you’re here, an hour or so from death, simply because you couldn’t keep your fucking mouth shut.’ Ketch’s voice rose steeply as he enunciated the last three words, and in the casket Evans actually flinched.
‘It might interest you to know,’ Ketch went on, his voice returning to normal, ‘that the people you talked to aren’t FBI or CIA or whatever they claimed to be. They’re just a couple of bums who’ve been lucky so far, but their luck is just about to run out. So, if you were expecting some kind of eleventh hour rescue, forget it.’
Ketch turned away, then swung back for a final jibe. ‘Once the doors close, we’ll start the processing,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be thinking of you. In fact, I’m even going to watch your last couple of minutes in my office, on the monitor. Pleasant dreams.’
Evans suddenly stopped struggling. His body, limp from his exertions and covered in sweat, seemed to sag, and he closed his eyes. There was, he realized at last, no hope, no hope at all.
Ketch closed and locked the door behind him, then walked over to the grey box fastened to the wall at about eye level to the right of the door. The box was secured with a combination lock and a keyhole. Ketch inserted the key he always wore around his neck in the lock and turned it counter-clockwise for half a turn to unlock the guard on the combination lock wheel.
He seized it and swiftly ran through the sequence of numbers which released the door lock. Then he turned the key fully counter-clockwise, listened for the click as the lock released, seized the handle on the left hand side of the door and pulled it open.
The three green lights met his gaze, each located above a gated switch. The three had to be activated in sequence, and were the last actions that had to be performed before the processing began. Ketch flicked the first switch and waited for the red light to illuminate, showing that the sound-proof wall shutters were in place. Then he activated the second switch that controlled the ceiling shutters and switched on the floodlights inside the room.
Once the second red light switched on he tripped the third and final switch. The red light illuminated almost instantaneously and transferred control of the room away from Ketch and allowed processing to commence.
Ketch shut the door of the grey box, turned the key clockwise one turn and removed it from the lock, spun the wheel to scramble the combination, and walked back towards the staircase and his office.
Inside the processing room, the gas mixture being breathed by the subjects closest to the processing table began to change, as the concentration of nitrous oxide was gradually reduced to zero and was replaced by nitrogen. Within fifteen to twenty minutes, the first subject would have regained consciousness, and processing could start.
The Boeing 737 touched down with barely a bump, and pulled off the runway having used only a fraction of its six-mile length. Five minutes later, the Boeing was parked on the hardstanding to the south of the Flight Operations Centre building. As the noise of the engines died away, the front and rear passenger doors were opened and sets of steps were positioned outside the aircraft.
When Hunter and Reilly reached the bottom of the forward steps, they looked around and noticed a USAF van parked about fifty yards away.
‘Not a car,’ Reilly said, ‘but it could be our transport.’
The two men walked over to the van and knocked on the driver’s window. ‘We’re Harris and Morgan,’ Reilly said. ‘You waitin’ for us?’
‘You going to Rolver Systems, right?’ the driver asked.
‘Yup,’ Reilly said, and he and Hunter clambered into the rear compartment of the van.
Three minutes later, the van drew up outside a secure compound, and both men got out. As they walked towards the closed and locked gate in the perimeter fence, the USAF van drove away.
‘Here we go,’ Reilly muttered. ‘Sure hope Harris was giving us a true bill.’
‘I’ve just remembered something,’ Templeton said. ‘There is one thing we could do to check this out. Harris gave us the number of a car – a Dodge – that Hunter and Reilly are supposed to have stolen. Run the number through the Las Vegas PD and see what you get. I’ll take another look around the perimeter.
Templeton was making his way through the undergrowth at the back of the parking lot, his flashlight swinging steadily from side to side, when he stumbled over something long and dark. He pointed the beam of the flashlight downwards and followed the cone of light with his eyes.
A couple of minutes later Grant looked up from his mobile phone as Templeton came jogging back to the Lincoln.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Morgan,’ Templeton said, panting slightly, ‘shot to death and dumped back there. They must have dragged him into the undergrowth so he wouldn’t be found too quickly. I guess you were right after all.’
‘Damn right I was,’ Grant said, and held up the mobile phone. ‘Las Vegas PD just got back to me. That Dodge that Hunter and Reilly are supposed to have stolen? According to Motor Vehicle Records, the registered owner is one Richard Reilly, resident of Beaver Creek, Montana. These bastards have just been playing with us.’
Templeton reached over, took the mobile phone from Grant, and searched in his pocket for the piece of card on which he’d written Roger Ketch’s telephone number at Groom Lake.
Hunter reached out and pressed the button on the communications panel. After a few seconds, the speaker grille crackled and a voice asked him his name.
‘Harris and Morgan,’ Reilly said.
‘OK. Insert your ID card.’
Hunter fed Harris’s Omega card into the slot below the speaker grille, and watched as electric lock clicked open and the gate swung wide. He retrieved the card and they walked the twenty yards or so to the Roland Oliver building itself. As they got to the access door it swung open. A man dressed in a dark grey coverall beckoned them inside.
‘Best you hurry,’ he said. ‘Mr. Ketch, he don’t like to be kept waitin’. His office’s on the second floor. There ain’t no lift, and the stairs are round the corner.’
Reilly and Hunter climbed the broad staircase side by side, up to the second and top floor of the building. A short corridor opened in front of them, at the end of which was an office door, standing slightly ajar. The sign on the door read ‘Officer In Charge,’ and underneath that ‘Roger Ketch.’
Through the door they could hear the sound of somebody talking on the telephone, then heard the receiver being slammed down into its cradle.
‘Fuck,’ the same voice said, as Reilly eased his Colt Commander from his shoulder holster, and pushed open the door and walked in.
Ketch was sitting behind his desk, his face black with fury. He had the internal telephone in his hand and was in the act of dialling the number of the Flight Operations building when he heard the door open and Reilly’s footsteps.
‘You’re not Harris,’ Ketch said, looking up.
Hunter walked in immediately behind Reilly, Morgan’s Smith and Wesson, with the bulbous black silencer fitted, held steadily in his right hand, and Reilly’s black leather bag in his left.
‘No,’ Hunter said, ‘and I’m not Morgan, either.’