Gordon Maxwell pushed through the swinging doors of the old bar in the corner of the Strater Hotel in downtown Durango. The Strater maintained its nineteenth-century flavor with the barmaids dressed in brightly colored long, frilly dresses and bartenders with bowlers, vests, and handlebar mustaches. Maxwell found a corner table, a momentary refuge from his mounting worries.
He glanced at his watch. Ten to three. Steve Ritter would come down from his room in exactly ten minutes. No sooner. No later. He always required one mug of beer in the bar before he would invite Maxwell up to his room to begin the session. If Maxwell didn't follow the routine, Ritter simply refused to work.
If he wasn't so damn good, Maxwell wouldn't bother with him. About two years ago, Ritter had started refusing to work over the phone and he wouldn't fly or drive to Denver. He'd become a recluse, rarely going out except for his weekly trip to Silverton and back on the old steam-powered train. So Maxwell had been forced to deal with him in Durango.
Fortunately, Maxwell enjoyed driving his new Corvette and visiting the historic town, especially since he'd started seeing Marlys Simms, a barmaid at the Strater. He watched Marlys as she moved about in the purple, low-cut, ankle-length dress and her auburn wig with its abundant, flowing curls.
A decade younger than him, she had maintained herself well, and carried a youthful air about her. Separated from her husband, she'd made it clear she wasn't looking for a new one, which was fine with him. Pursuing Marlys gave him something to do between sessions with Ritter, and it helped him deal with the male menopause thing. He'd even created fantasies about reversing the process.
The muffled ring of his cell phone caught his attention and he reached into his leather briefcase. He fumbled for the phone and answered on the third ring. "You want to talk to him? Take down this number," a raspy voice said.
He jotted down the area code and phone number. "Got it. I'll call in twenty minutes."
At least George Wiley had returned to his cautious approach in communicating with him. As the hunt for Wiley intensified, Maxwell had gotten more and more concerned. If the FBI ever found out that Wiley employed remote viewers to protect him, Maxwell's rising star would crash hard, especially if Wiley was linked to the plan to nuke Washington as he suspected. It was one thing to provide protection for the recalcitrant general, who'd become a folk hero in the West. But Maxwell certainly wouldn't stick with him if he planned to single-handedly destroy the country.
"A beer there, guy?" Marlys asked.
He looked up and smiled as he slipped his phone back into the briefcase. "I'll wait for Ritter. How ya doing?”
"I'm fine, but your friend. . ." She shook her head and pointed toward the ceiling. "He gets weirder and weirder all the time."
Marlys knew that Maxwell called himself a futurist and that he visited Ritter to obtain psychic impressions. Other than once asking about Ritter's accuracy, she expressed no interest in finding out about what he predicted. She had enough to deal with in the present, she said.
"What did he do now?"
"After eating all of his meals in his room for the past two months, he started coming down for lunch last week. But instead of getting his own table, he would sit right down with strangers and start telling them about their lives as if he'd known them forever. He scared people, so the manager told him to stop it or we wouldn't serve him anymore."
"Was he accurate?" He smiled, thinking that he was asking Marlys the same thing she'd asked him about Ritter.
She considered his question. "I heard one of the waitresses say that he picked up on everyone's secrets, things they thought no one else knew, and that's what he told them."
Maxwell was convinced that virtually anyone who made the effort and practiced could learn to remote view to some degree. But Ritter possessed something extra. A natural psychic, born with the talent, he could not only work remote targets, like other trained remote viewers, but he could read people as if he'd known them all their lives, as if he knew their futures.
Marlys looked up. "Oops, here he comes now. I'll go get the beers."
Maxwell glanced at his watch. Exactly three o'clock. He heard the annoying clatter of Ritter's steel taps scraping against the tile floor. Ritter, thin and angular with bulging eyes and the gaunt face of an ascetic, approached the table. As usual, he wore black corduroy pants and a black shirt. He extended a hand with spidery fingers and greeted Maxwell.
"I saw you on CNN, Max. Very impressive." He sat down next to him and leaned toward him. Too close. Too intense. "Glad to see you had the guts to stand up there and tell the bastards that their old world wasn't going to last. They listened to you, too. They listened good."
"Thanks, Steve."
Maxwell leaned back and wondered what the comments prefaced. Ritter rarely offered a compliment without following it up with some sort of criticism.
"You better thank me. After all, I nudged the governor into inviting you to speak. Harmon finds your work very interesting, but without me he would never had made the effort. Never."
He hated the way Ritter repeated himself, like a goddamn verbal hiccup.
"You did your part. But why did Dustin spill his gut last night? We've been working on him for weeks without him saying anything. Why then? Why on the day of my speech. I should be on the front page of the papers today, not buried inside."
Ritter grinned. "Because I pushed him, too. I pushed hard."
"You what? I hope you're joking."
"Nope. I did it because your head is getting too fucking big. You don't understand the consequences, colonel. The consequences."
He felt like strangling the bastard. "What are you talking about?"
"I took a peek into your future, something you don't like to do because you're so goddamned afraid of getting old and impotent. If you would've gotten all the publicity you wanted, you would've paid a big price. You would've been linked to Wiley in no time, and you wouldn't like the results. You both would've gotten nailed. Yeah, nailed."
Maxwell considered what he'd just heard. Maybe Ritter was right. Or maybe he just didn't want to see him gaining wide recognition and becoming independent of Wiley. Ritter, in his own way, admired Wiley, sympathized with him and his cause, and liked working for him.
Ritter watched Maxwell for several seconds as if he were studying a strange bug through a magnifying glass. "You know, you work closely with General Wiley, but I don't get any sense that you really favor Wiley's goals. Why is that, Max? Why?"
"We're not part of his army, Steve. You know that. We work on a project-by-project basis."
Ritter grinned. "Ah, like merrr-cen-arrr-ies."
"My interests are different than Wiley's. I'm a scientist. I'm interested in man's relationship with his future, how he can predict it and how he can alter it, and George Wiley has given me a great opportunity to test that hypothesis."
"And a chance to make a lot of money. A whole lot of loot."
"That helps," Maxwell responded. "And I pay you and the others well."
Two mugs of beer arrived and when Marlys moved away, Ritter rephrased his question. "Just by the act of working for Wiley you, Maxwell, are involved in helping create Wiley's version of the future."
"I think it's pretty well understood now that the experimenter always affects the data by simply carrying out the experiment. But Wiley is helping me, too. He's allowing us to explore the far reaches of remote viewing and the results, as you well know, have been phenomenal."
Ritter smiled and flashed his uneven row of teeth. "I'm glad you noticed, Max. Glad you noticed. When me and the boys put our heads together, we can go far. Real far."
Maxwell glanced at his watch, remembering that he'd promised Wiley he'd call him. "Let's drink up. I've got a call to make before we start."
"What is it tonight, another Wiley job?"
"Not exactly." He wished Ritter wouldn't use Wiley's name in public. "I don't want to tell you any more about it."
Ritter gazed off. "You don't have to." He laughed. "You're going to send me to Wiley, right into him." He nodded, telling himself that he was right. "That's an interesting twist, Max. I like it, like it a lot. You're such a control freak."
"You're not always right, Steve. I'm going to call him, that's all."
Ritter sipped his beer and watched Maxwell over the rim of the mug. "So you have something else to worry about now, something besides your boring preoccupation with getting old."
Maxwell ignored the comment. He finished his beer, put a ten-dollar bill on the table, then slung the strap on his leather briefcase over his shoulder. He crossed his arms and waited.
Ritter got the hint, finished his beer. They trudged through the bar toward the hotel lobby. Maxwell waved to Marlys and signaled her that he would see her later. They climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and walked down the hall to the room. Ritter unlocked the door and they moved into the room.
Maxwell wouldn't care to stay in the room more than a night or two, but he'd given up asking Ritter why he didn't move into an apartment or a house. Other than a few books and his clothes strewn about, the room lacked any personal touches. Maxwell didn't like to think of his own past very much—his failed marriage, his son who never spoke to him—but Ritter appeared to have no past. No pictures, no memorabilia, the guy could pack up and leave in ten minutes. Except he preferred to stay here, as if it were a permanent residence.
He'd come to realize that all his viewers had developed quirks, odd patterns of behavior that might be related to their work, or to the Z-Factor, the hypnotic drug that had enhanced their abilities, or to both. He didn't know anything about the side effects when he'd first begun discreetly administering the drug. But he conceded that the remote viewers had changed. They'd gotten better, amazingly better. Meanwhile, they'd all slipped into a realm that made them borderline sociopaths.
Even the three outsiders. He'd known about Calloway's obsessiveness, his instability, and Eduardo Perez's burrowing paranoia, and now he'd found out about Doc’s crippling fear of crowds. The three remained unwilling to work with him, so they'd have to pay. He couldn't allow any loose cannons to remain at large. Especially not since they were all so closely linked together and that link seemed to be intensifying along with their abilities.
But right now he faced a more pressing matter. He sat on the edge of Ritter's bed and called the number that Wiley had given him. The general answered on the second ring. "What is it, Max?"
He told Wiley about Calloway and what had happened at the Brown Palace Hotel. When he finished, the silence stretched out so long that Maxwell asked if Wiley was still there.
"I'm here. What you say is interesting. But it's pure fiction, Max. If anyone associated with Freedom Nation were involved in such a deadly matter, I'd definitely be aware of it. This Calloway fellow sounds out of control. He's picking up on his own fantasies."
"So there's nothing to it?" Stunned, Maxwell couldn't think of anything else to say.
"Absolutely not."
Maxwell nervously adjusted the phone. "What about the dinosaur and the ice caves?"
"What about it? Calloway probably stopped there once on his travels. That's no proof of anything."
Maxwell didn't believe him, but he didn't know why Wiley would lie to him.
"Don't call me with any more wild conjecture, Max. Don't call me at all unless you're responding to my call, or you have something of substance and extreme importance. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir." He hadn't meant to call Wiley "sir," as if he were one of his troops, but the word had just spilled out.
"By the way, nice job at the conference." Wiley's voice softened. "But what do you make of this alien stuff?"
Maxwell smiled to himself. "I don't know what to think about it. Maybe he's losing his mind."
"It sounds like it. You don't have anything to do with any of it, do you?"
"Me?" Maxwell laughed. "Not a thing."
Several seconds passed. "No, of course not." With that, Wiley hung up.
Let him keep wondering. Maxwell had planned to tell Wiley about his little experiments with the president as soon as they produced results. But now that Wiley was lying to him, he didn't feel compelled to tell him anything about his own projects, even though some of them worked to Wiley's advantage.
Ritter watched him from a comfortable chair in the corner of the room where he'd listened to one side of the conversation. He grinned and saluted. "Yes, sir." He grinned. "I liked that. Like it a lot."
Maxwell ignored him. He had planned to send Ritter after Calloway, to interfere, if necessary, with his remote viewing. But now he wanted to confirm that Wiley was lying. He'd send Ritter into him. Ironically, it was exactly what Ritter had said he would do.
Without another word, Ritter put on a headphone set and pressed the play button on a tape recorder. He liked to listen to electronic sound waves that moved him quickly into a receptive state. Maxwell sat down at the small table a few feet away and prepared to record the session. A couple of minutes later, Ritter took off his headphones, letting Maxwell know he was ready.
"Okay, I'm giving you a target that I'm identifying by the following numbers 540-921. Your target is a person. You'll be going inside."
Ritter sighed. Thirty seconds passed. "I smell food. I'm in a kitchen."
"What are you eating? How does it taste?"
Maxwell didn't care what the target was eating, but he wanted to affirm that Ritter had dropped into Wiley rather than simply observing the scene. In years past, it had taken hours of repeated efforts to reach the point of merging with a target, but Ritter now moved easily into his subject.
"Not eating. Just drinking coffee."
"Identify yourself?"
"George Wiley, of course."
"Can you tell me what I want to know?"
"All about the bomb."
Maxwell wished that he hadn't called Wiley from the room. If he were performing a scientific test on Ritter, the entire session would be seriously tainted. But Ritter had proved himself over and over again. It shouldn't matter that he'd heard him questioning Wiley about the bomb, he decided. Especially since Wiley had denied any knowledge of it.
"What do you know about it?"
He answered in a monotone, speaking from Wiley's point of view. "I want it delivered. We're going to speed things up now. We'll put the federal government out of business. It's the only way to stop them from destroying us. We need to get Freedom Nation established."
"When will the bomb arrive in Washington?"
"Less than seventy-two hours now."
"Where's the weak point in the mission?"
Ritter's silence extended so long that Maxwell figured that Wiley had refused to divulge anything further. Finally, he spoke, his tone surprisingly angry. "One of my commanders wants to call off the fucking mission, but I'm standing firm. We're going through with it."
"Why does he want to call it off?"
"The Secret Service is on to it, and they've got the FBI looking for the kids. One of them is his daughter. But I just reminded him that they switched vehicles. The feds don't know what they're driving. Now he's concerned about what will happen to his daughter after it's over. I told him not to worry, we'll take care of her and the boyfriend. They'll get new identities, if necessary. But I'm getting tired of his whining. He may have to disappear soon. Real soon. I don't like his insubordination. It's not the first time."
Maxwell felt as if he'd just stepped into a cold shower. After all he'd done for Wiley, the bastard didn't trust him. "Steve, move outside of the target now, but stay with him."
Ritter raised a finger. "Okay. Watching now."
"Can you tell if any other remote viewer has been there ahead of you?"
"You mean, Calloway? Let me clean house. I'll check for his droppings."
Ritter remained quiet for nearly two minutes. "No sign of Trent. He hasn't been here, either inside the target or in the safe house."
"Are you sure?"
"He's busy looking for the bomb. But he'll come after Wiley in no time. No time at all. Count on it. I'm hooked in with him. Hooked in good." Ritter laughed.
A shudder rippled through Maxwell. Once Calloway got to Wiley, he'd find out everything. They had to deal with him. Doc too. Just like they'd dealt with a couple of the FBI agents on Wiley's trail.
"Okay. Come back now. Leave him alone."
Bitter took a couple of breaths, blinked his eyes. "Wow! He's really going to nuke Washington!"
"We've got to stop them."
Ritter frowned. "Hey, who's side are you on?"
"I don't want to see Washington destroyed. I wouldn't want to live with the result, and I don't think you would, either."
Ritter snorted. "I could do without the big Washington shithouse." "You're on the government dole, Ritter. So am I."
Ritter grinned. "Who needs it."
"The point is that bomb will never make it to its destination."
"Why not? You think our old buddy Calloway is going to find it?" Ritter asked.
"No, you are. You and the boys. We'll get the bomb, then deal with Calloway and company."