IT WAS 370 MILES FROM COLORADO SPRINGS TO Albuquerque, but DeLuca didn’t like to fly, and the point was moot because a snowstorm dumping twelve to eighteen inches in Colorado along the eastern slope of the Rockies had closed the airport anyway, so he drove, sometimes in near white-out conditions, following Interstate 25 south through towns like Pueblo and Walsenburg and Trinidad, the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe freight trains on the tracks parallel to the freeway reminding him of the Polar Express from the classic children’s book. The way he saw it, if he could drive thousands of miles across the back country of Iraq, getting shot at by Hadjis wielding Kalishnikovs and RPGs, and come through safely on the other side, then a little snow wasn’t going to deter him. He checked in with the other members of Team Red as he drove, calling Sgts. Colleen MacKenzie, Dan Sykes, and Julio Vasquez on his mobile but getting through to none of them, so he left messages, telling them to enjoy their vacations and to check their voice mail—it was possible, he said, that he was going to need them. He called Walter Ford and Sami Jambazian as well, both former partners of his on the Boston P.D. and both working for him in their retirements, and left similar messages, noting again how, now that everyone had cell phones and voice mail, you never actually talked to people anymore. He called his wife from the road and learned his son Scott would be coming home from Iraq on extended leave, which was good news. DeLuca told Bonnie he’d check in with her when he found a motel. She said it was late (he’d forgotten he was in the Mountain time zone) and to call in the morning.
He told her he missed her.
She said she missed him, too.
He was having dinner in a truck stop in Las Vegas, New Mexico, when his telephone rang. He’d just watched an obese four-hundred-pound trucker polish off four pancakes, each the equivalent of a loaf of bread, in a room full of giant truckers eating giant pancakes, and he idly wondered how much extra diesel fuel was consumed, hauling their fat asses up and over the Rockies—it was a thought he kept to himself.
“Mr. David?” the voice said, the accent thick but not impenetrable.
“Theresa, how are you?” he asked.
“You said I would call you if I thought anything,” she said.
“What’s happened? Are you okay?”
“I am fine,” she said. “I wanted to tell you a man called, for Cheryl. I don’t know what.”
“What man?”
“I will play it for you if you will wait,” Theresa Davidova said. He heard some fumbling with buttons, and then a man’s voice, saying: “This is Brother Antonionus calling for Cheryl Escavedo, returning your call. I’m sorry I missed you, but feel free to call me back at the same number you called before, and I look forward to speaking with you.”
“Is that good?” she asked. “You heard?”
“Thank you, I did,” he told her. “I’m heading for Albuquerque now, so maybe tomorrow I can stop by and listen to it in person—are you going to be around?”
“Yes, I will be here,” she said. “I also found a note. Just two words. Sometimes Cheryl would make notes to write down telephone numbers on whatever she finds near the telephone. I found this on one of my notebooks this way, in her handwriting.”
“What did she write?” DeLuca asked.
“Tom never,” Theresa said.
“Tom never what? Who’s Tom? And what didn’t he do?”
“I don’t know this,” Theresa said. “This is all it says.”
“I’ll have a look tomorrow,” DeLuca said. “I don’t know what time, but I’ll call first. So just sit tight until I see you tomorrow, how’s that?”
“I will sit tight and hang loose,” she said.
He found a motel near the airport in Albuquerque around midnight. The next morning, he went online at www.UNM.edu and learned that Dr. Penelope Burgess would be holding office hours between ten and noon.
Burgess looked up when he knocked on her door, glancing over the wire-rimmed reading glasses that rested on the end of her upturned nose. She was around forty, attractive, petite, brunette, her hair in a kind of Martha Stewart cut, though the glasses gave her a sort of Mother Hubbardish look, which was also a thought he kept to himself. She was marking the paper she was reading with a red pen. She asked if she could help him.
“Dr. Burgess?” DeLuca said. “I hope I’m not interrupting—I know these are office hours.”
“I haven’t had a student visit me during office hours in five years,” she said. “I think they think if they do, I’m going to give them extra work. How can I help you?”
“David DeLuca,” he said, extending his hand, “U.S. Army counterintelligence. I was hoping I could have about fifteen minutes of your time.”
She shook his hand, exhibiting palpably less enthusiasm when she heard the words “U.S. Army.”
“Sit down, Mr. DeLuca,” she said coolly. “Do you have a rank or do I just call you ‘Mr. DeLuca’?”
“Chief warrant officer. You can call me David, or Mr. DeLuca, or Agent if you’d prefer,” he said.
“You don’t wear uniforms?” she asked.
“Counterintelligence is the one part of the Army where we’re allowed to go pretty much outside the box. Probably the best way to explain it is that what the FBI is to your local police, counterintelligence is to the military police. Who, I gather, have already questioned you.”
“About that girl,” Dr. Burgess said. “The one who said she had information for me.”
“Cheryl Escavedo,” DeLuca said. “We found her Jeep abandoned about ten miles north of the Mexican border, in Arizona, but we still haven’t found her.”
“I told the CID people I’d call them if I heard from her,” Dr. Burgess said. “And I haven’t. I don’t know what else I can tell you. I’m being honest with you and I’m trying to cooperate, but I’m not sure I appreciate all this attention. All I know is that someone I never met supposedly wrote me a letter I never received, and now everyone is acting like that’s enough to send me to Guantanamo with a bag over my head.”
DeLuca took her to be a sensible woman, in which case he needed only to wait for her to realize what an extreme statement that was. She didn’t disappoint him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was out of line. I’ve been up since five o’clock grading papers and each one is worse than the next. Maybe if you told me what sort of information she was going to give me, we could make some sense out of this. But I suppose that’s going to be classified, right?”
“I’m supposing that, too,” he said, “once we figure out what it was she took. I can tell you that she worked in the archives at Cheyenne Mountain, so she had access to pretty much everything that went through there. It could have been brand new or it could have been forty years old. We just don’t know.”
“And she smuggled it out of Fort CMAFS?” she said, pronouncing it “sea-maffs.” “She must have been a very clever girl.”
“You’re familiar with the facility?”
“I used to know someone who worked there,” she said.
“You work underground, too, do you not?” DeLuca asked. He’d had MacKenzie pull out what she could find on Dr. Penelope Burgess and e-mail it to him, but he’d only had time to skim the report.
“Primarily,” she said. “That and other extreme environments. And in the lab.”
“And this is for the Mars program? I’m asking because maybe she had something she thought you could use.”
“It is for the Mars program,” she said. “My work is primarily designing toward a Mars mission in 2008.”
“In what way?”
“We go into places like the caves at Lechugilla or Carlsbad or the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean and look at the life forms we find there. Non-carbon based. Chemosynthetic. Things that don’t fit the usual definitions, so if they don’t fit our definition of life, then what definitions do they fit? How do we distinguish between life and nonlife, and how do you build a machine that can do that? We know that at one time, Mars had water, so if some of that water was trapped underground, in aquifers and in caves, where ultraviolet radiation can’t reach, then that’s where we might find life.”
“I wonder if Cheryl Escavedo was interested in that,” DeLuca said. “Is there any overlap between what you’re working on and what they might be doing at Space Command?”
“Overlap?” she asked. “Well, I’m sure there are people at Cheyenne or Kirtland who would love it if we did find life on Mars and they could turn it into a weapon of some kind. I just saw that little bow-tied White House Nazi, Carter Bowen, on Meet the Press the other day talking about plans to triple the defense budget. They spend money just to find other things to spend money on. But other than sharing the same launch platforms, we don’t have much to do with Defense. I’ve been thinking, since I last spoke with the military police, that your Miss Escavedo might have been trying to reach me in my capacity as a member of UCS.”
“Union of Concerned Scientists,” DeLuca said.
“I’ve given some talks and added my name to some petitions against the weaponization of space,” she said. “And since that’s all they do at Space Command, maybe she had something she thought we needed to know. All she would have had to do was Google and my name would have come up. Or my husband’s.”
“What does he do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was going to say I know what he used to do, but that wouldn’t be true either. My husband was a physicist with the Directed Energy Lab at Kirtland. Dr. Gary Burgess. Ph.D. at sixteen. I haven’t seen or heard from him in over three years. And he couldn’t talk about his work when we were together, which was part of what…”
“Part of what what?” DeLuca asked.
“I was going to say part of what drove him crazy, but I was afraid you’d think of John Forbes Nash, and that wouldn’t be right.”
“The guy from A Beautiful Mind?”
She nodded.
“There are no analogies to be drawn,” she said. “Beyond that they were equally brilliant. And lacking in certain social skills.”
“The letter is addressed to simply ‘Dr. Burgess,’” DeLuca said. “Is it possible that Cheryl Escavedo was trying to contact your husband?”
“It’s possible,” Penelope Burgess said.
“Would I be able to find him at Kirtland then?” DeLuca asked. “At the Directed Energy Lab?”
She shook her head.
“My husband disappeared, Mr. DeLuca,” she said. “Quite intentionally—I didn’t mean to imply foul play. He disappeared himself.”
It was evident that she didn’t want to talk about it, but the reasons why were less apparent.
“I don’t want to press,” DeLuca said, “but the problem is that I never know exactly what’s relevant to my investigation and what isn’t until I fill my head with more than I need and let it all sift down. I realize this may be personally difficult for you…”
“It’s not as difficult as you might think,” she said. “Our marriage had been over, or all over but the shouting, for a long time before he left. And the reasons he left had little to do with me, I think. Do you know who Arthur Bartok was?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” DeLuca said.
“Arthur Bartok was the boy genius of the Manhattan Project, sort of Oppenheimer’s protégé, until they had a falling out. At first, Bartok was completely caught up in the purely scientific quest and all jazzed up when he considered the huge amounts of energy he was controlling. Or releasing. It is apparently a thoroughly seductive experience, in many ways. Bartok’s work involved making the hydrogen bombs he was working with smaller and smaller. People are afraid of suitcase nukes these days, but Bartok essentially built one in 1960. Then in the mid-sixties, he had a conversion experience, when he realized that proliferation was unavoidable, and that his work making bombs smaller and simpler and easier to build had contributed to that. He was one of the founding fathers of the UCS. I think Gary’s circumstances were similar. At first he was caught up in the challenge and the romance, if you could call it that, just a twenty-year-old kid, walking around inside Cheyenne Mountain with all the bells and whistles and a security badge on his chest that let him go where other people weren’t allowed. It was a pretty heady experience.”
“What was his area of expertise, specifically?” DeLuca wanted to know.
“Electromagnetism,” she said. “Field generation. But that’s a general answer, not a specific one. We had an understanding, early on, that the work he was doing was top secret and that he couldn’t talk about it. I knew it was important, and that he had a huge budget and a lot of people working for him, and I started to sense, oh, God, six years ago, that something was bothering him. I mean, really worrying him. I knew the Clinton people were defunding space defense so I thought it might have had something to do with that. I could see the stress of keeping so many secrets start to destroy him. And us, probably. At any rate, something changed, after 9/11. I don’t know if he had a conversion experience, too, but he said after that, the handwriting was on the wall. He said 9/11 was going to do for space defense what Sputnik did for the space program in the fifties and sixties. We were ramping up, he said, and the only thing he could do, personally, to stop it, was to take himself out of it. So that’s what he did.”
“Ramping up?” DeLuca said.
“He was a student of World War I. And II. He said the thing about world wars was that everybody could see them coming, for years, and nobody could stop them.”
“So he saw one coming, and the only way to stop it was to disappear?” DeLuca said. “That sounds pretty self-dramatizing, if you ask me.”
She nodded.
“If you want my opinion, I think he’d been working for years on a particular problem, his team was, and then he solved it. But I don’t think he told anybody. I think he saw where it was going to lead and then he kept the solution to himself.”
“Maybe those were the files Cheryl Escavedo had,” DeLuca said. “Do you think that’s possible?”
Penelope Burgess shrugged.
“He didn’t keep the important stuff in his computer,” she said. “He would have kept it all in his head. He had a tendency to internalize things. I know after he left, some of the people who’d worked for him tried to carry on without him, and they couldn’t, and they probably could have if there had been anything in his files they could use. He knew the Army wasn’t going to let him delete anything, so I’m guessing he never wrote down whatever it was he learned. That’s not to say other people wouldn’t have figured it out. I think he just thought that if he left, he could set his program back a few years, probably not that he could kill it altogether.”
“So you have no idea where he is?”
She reached behind her and took down a postcard that had been held to her bulletin board with a thumbtack. On one side was a picture of a twelve-foot-tall fiberglass kachina doll outside a convenience store, with the words WELCOME TO CHLORIDE, NEW MEXICO in yellow. On the reverse side, handwritten, were the words: “There’s only 10 kinds of people in this world, and I’m not going to be either. Be good. Gary.” It was postmarked from Chloride, New Mexico, October 12, 2001.
“That’s all I’ve gotten from him,” she said, “about a week after he left. He could be anywhere, really. Though it’s hard to picture him sitting on a beach in the Caribbean, sipping piña coladas.”
“I don’t get it,” DeLuca said, reading the card.
“It’s an old math joke. There are only 10 kinds of people in this world, those who understand base two and those who don’t. A one and a zero is how the number two is described in base two.”
“Good one,” DeLuca said. “Do you think Space Command would have let him walk away from his job like that?”
“You tell me,” she said. “Do you think they would have?”
“Not unless he had something to use for leverage,” DeLuca said. “He’s the friend you said you knew who’d worked at Cheyenne?”
She nodded.
“Do you think he might have met Cheryl Escavedo there?”
Again she shrugged.
“It’s possible,” she said. “Though if you’re thinking they might have been having an affair, I suppose that’s also possible, but Gary was never a very sexual person. At least not with me. Are you married, Mr. DeLuca?”
“I am,” he said.
“Then I imagine in your line of work, you probably understand the sort of toll it takes when you can’t talk to your spouse about what you do.”
“More than I wish I did,” DeLuca said. “I suspect your reasons for speaking out against space defense are more than just the personal.”
“Don’t get me started,” she said.
“I am interested,” he said. “But if you don’t want to go there, that’s all right, too.”
“Where do I begin?” she said. “I’ve heard somebody say if we took a mere 1 percent of the DOD space budget and put it into teaching history, we’d eventually be smart enough to avoid war and not have to spend the other 99 percent on weapons. I do understand the strategic advantages of weapons in space, but it seems like the people at Space Command find them so appealing that they ignore the disadvantages. Suppose you blind an enemy by taking out all his satellites and communication—do you think he’s going to sit back and wait for what comes next, or is he going to come at you with everything he has while he still can? Not to mention that if we take war into space, we could so easily make space unusable—they told you at Cheyenne they’re tracking seventy-five hundred objects, didn’t they? Bigger than a baseball. There’s another hundred thousand smaller than a baseball but big enough to take out the space shuttle. These things are traveling at twenty-seven thousand miles an hour, ten times faster than a high-powered rifle bullet. A marble at that speed has the impact of a one-ton safe dropped off a three-story building. A BB has the impact of a bowling ball hitting you at one hundred miles an hour. My friend Sally Ride told me after her last Space Shuttle mission, they found one of the windows was pitted by a paint fleck—a paint fleck was almost enough to knock them out of the sky. You watch all these science-fiction movies where they blow something up in space and poof, there’s a ball of fire and the whole thing disappears and leaves a big empty void behind—that’s not the way it actually works, if you think about it. Blow up one satellite and you have another 100,000 fragments. One of those hits another satellite or one of the 3,000 discarded rocket boosters out there, and you have another 100,000 fragments. And don’t think space is so big that it couldn’t happen, because we tend to orbit our satellites in altitude bands. Some are out there at 25,000 kilometers, some are at 7,000, some at 700, most are at 900 to 1,000 and the 1,500- to 1,700-kilometer range, and there are more going up all the time, ever since we abrogated the 1972 ABM Treaty in June 2002—the chances of initiating a cascading chain reaction billiard ball sort of effect have gone up. If that happens, no more Hubble Telescope, no more International Space Station, no Cosmic Background Explorer…”
“And no Mars program?”
“If you think I’m only thinking of my own self-interest, you couldn’t be more wrong,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re not—I regret the implication.”
“And then someday it starts to fall back to earth, hardened uranium, plutonium for satellites powered by nuclear reactors—it boggles the mind.”
“It boggled Gary’s, I gather,” DeLuca said.
“I told you not to get me started,” she said. “The hardest part is that nobody can see what’s going on out there, so Space Command and STRATCOM and everybody else is free to do as they please, with unlimited black budgets and all the best intentions, I suppose, and it’s all kicked into overdrive since 9/11. That’s what Gary meant by ‘the handwriting’s on the wall.’ Sometimes I get angry because he didn’t take me with him.”
“Would you have wanted to go with him?” DeLuca asked.
“No,” she said, giving it some thought. “I don’t think so. I’ve never been able to put my head in the sand. What do you think? Do you think I’m a pessimist? Do you think the glass is half full or half empty?”
“I think the glass is twice as big as it used to be,” DeLuca said. “I appreciate your talking to me, but I know you have papers to grade.” He rose to his feet. “Do you know a guy named Josh Truitt, by any chance? Photographer?”
“I’ve seen his pictures, but I don’t think I’ve ever caved with him,” she said. “Why?”
“Just curious,” DeLuca said. “When I talk to people, sometimes the most useful question I can ask is if they know each other. How about somebody named Brother Antonionus?”
“The Star Trek guy?” she said. “Brethren of the Light?”
“I don’t know anything about him,” DeLuca said. “His voice was on Cheryl Escavedo’s answering machine. What are the ‘Brethren of the Light’?”
“They’re waiting for somebody in a space ship to come pick them up and carry them away,” she said. “And no, I’ve never met him, but they’re in the local newspaper every once in a while because their headquarters are in Albuquerque.”
“I hope I get there before the space ship comes,” DeLuca said.
“Be careful,” she told him, walking him to the door. “I hear he’s mighty darn persuasive at getting people to join his cult.”
“I’m already a Red Sox fan,” DeLuca said. “That’s enough of a cult for one person.”
The walled compound occupied by the Brethren of the Light was in the foothills east of town, in an exclusive neighborhood of gated compounds and long driveways. He’d been told, by whoever had answered the phone when he called, that he wouldn’t need an appointment but that no one could guarantee when Brother Antonionus was going to be receptive. “Well if he’s not, I guess I could come back,” he’d replied, to which the woman on the phone answered, “Oh, no—he only sees people when he’s not receptive.”
A long circular driveway, made of two-toned stone pavers, led to the house, a mansion in the Spanish mission style, with decorative wrought-iron bars over the windows and red tiles on the roof, the grounds landscaped in junipers and potted grasses, aloe and century plants, groomed to perfection and currently being attended to by a crew of people wearing red jumpsuits, clipping and raking and weeding and sweeping, though DeLuca didn’t see any landscapers’ trucks in the driveway. He parked behind a Toyota Prius with a decal on the rear window that said “Starfleet Academy.” The only other car was a white Rolls-Royce, polished and detailed to perfection. The snow that had fallen the night before, leaving eighteen inches in Colorado but only a dusting in Albuquerque, had already melted, the sun bright overhead in a cloudless sky.
There was a large open-air porch and a set of carved wooden doors, the knocker a brass angel. After a moment, DeLuca was met by a young woman, also in a red jumpsuit but with an apron over it, her smile beaming, if that was the word, and from what he’d read about the Brethren of the Light, it was.
“I’m David DeLuca,” he said. “Here to see Brother Antonionus.”
“I’m God’s Miracle,” she said. “Welcome welcome welcome. I’m pretty sure he’s unavailable right now but you’re welcome to wait. Do you like cinnamon rolls? There should be some hot out of the oven in a few minutes. With pecans or without?”
“With,” he said. “When you say unavailable…”
“I mean he’s receptive,” she said. DeLuca must have had a puzzled expression on his face. “He’s receiving instructions. The downloads usually don’t take all that long.” He suspected she didn’t mean that Brother Antonionus was online. “Would you like a cup of coffee or tea? Or would you like to focus for a few minutes while you wait?”
“Focus?” he said.
“Good Attentions,” she said (though it was possible he hadn’t heard her correctly), pointing to what probably would have been a large dining room, in a normal house, converted here into a computer room where he saw two people, in red jumpsuits, wearing what looked like bicycle helmets with wires coming out the back, staring at computer screens. “There’s a pod open if you want it.”
“I’m good,” he said. “Thank you.”
He took a seat in a leather chair, one of two facing a large fireplace where a small warming fire burned. God’s Miracle took a sprig of sage from a large basket and tossed it on the fire before returning to her kitchen duties. On the coffee table between the chairs were a few magazines, including UFOlogy Today, Extra-Terrestrial Journal, Maxi-Brain, and Redbook. He picked up a copy of Maxi-Brain where, just inside the cover, he found a full-page advertisement for AlphaWare, with a picture of its president and spokesperson, Brother Antonionus, wearing a beatific smile, his eyes twinkling behind his round wire-rimmed glasses. The products being offered included serenity-inducing audiotapes of ocean waves and loons oodling in the twilight; a Good Attentions software kit (“The road to heaven is indeed paved with Good Attentions…”) with a bicycle helmet wired to a black box that could interface with a Mac or PC, technology proven to help children and adults with attention deficit disorder; an Optico-Aural Stimulator that looked something like a jet pilot’s helmet with flashing/blinking lights inside and multiphasing white noise lavations guaranteed to deliver deep-relaxing alpha-wave brain activity; and finally a room Ionic Aromatizer that could project a variety of therapeutic fragrances, with a set of free refills if you ordered now. There was a Website with a full catalogue of other products as well.
DeLuca reviewed what he knew of Brother Antonionus, based on what Dan Sykes had managed to dig up and e-mail him the night before. He’d been born Malcolm Percy, in Milwaukee, in 1944, ordained as an Episcopal minister in 1968 but asked to leave the ministry after falling under the influence of Dr. John C. Lilly, whose early work studying dolphin intelligence had led him down a path that ended with his taking hallucinogens and sitting in sensory deprivation tanks for days at a time, a practice Reverend Malcolm Percy had recommended to his congregation. After being homeless for the better part of the seventies, with a few arrests up and down the West Coast for disorderly conduct, credit card fraud, and shoplifting here and there, Malcolm Percy had resurfaced as Brother Antonionus, founder of a company called Maxi-Brain that sold home sensory deprivation tanks and other bliss-generating mechanical devices, all intended to deliver “natural” highs by artificially inducing the autonomic release of pleasure-producing organic chemicals such as endorphins, adrenaline, and dopamine, though according to Dan Sykes, most people who used Maxi-Brain devices were usually stoned or tripping on something else first. Brother Antonionus had opened a chain of Maxi-Brain Spas across the country where people who couldn’t afford to own his equipment could stop in for a brain tune-up, selling franchises to true believers at a time when the New Age movement was at its peak. As far as Dan Sykes could learn, Antonionus still owned a controlling share in the spa business, though most of them had shifted away from the brain-machine business and into massages and acupuncture, and he owned a business called AlphaWare that produced the devices, software, and educational tapes and DVDs DeLuca had seen advertised in the magazine, but somewhere in the 1990s, Antonionus’s focus had shifted to leading a group of people who believed UFOs were going to come and carry them away, to heaven or outer space or another planet, Sykes couldn’t be certain, “The Next Condition,” they called it. Dan’s e-mail had said:
In a nutshell, Percy has managed to convince his followers (100+?) that he’s from another planet and that the body he now occupies is just a shell he has to wear, like a deep-sea diver’s dive suit, and that if his followers do what he says (which includes giving him all their worldly possessions), they can shed their own bodies and transcend this ol’ world. He says all the ideas he gets for brain machines and whatever were sent to him by his home planet, Rigel, I believe. Funny—he doesn’t look Rigelian. It’s mostly old technology that he repackages, but he’s got some tech connections somewhere, to be sure. Now they go out into the desert and hold “Ascensions” and wait for UFOs with signal fires/drums/chanting, etc., based on Revelations 11:12, “Then they heard a loud voice from heaven saying to them, ‘Come up hither.’ And in the sight of their foes, they went up to heaven in a cloud.”
One report I read, written by someone who dropped out of the program, said he’s been spiking the punch at his “Ascensions” with Viagra and Ecstasy, then the Maxi-Brain goggles produce maxiboners and the party turns into an orgy (theologically speaking, a kind of Adamism, meaning an effort to return to the innocence of a pre-lapsarian Garden of Eden when sex was guilt-free and plentiful—or so they say). This might explain why no one is disappointed when the UFOs don’t show up. But this is unconfirmed. Good luck. Keep your nose clean. Dan.
After about ten minutes, a young man in a red jumpsuit asked DeLuca to follow him. Brother Antonionus was seated at a glass-topped table with a Macintosh G5 on one corner and a cordless telephone at the other. Six crystals were arranged in an arc on the table directly in front of him, the largest the size of a banana. The walls of the room were painted white and empty of all adornment, with a matched pair of floor lamps in the far corners, bracketing the table. The man seated at the table was also dressed in a red jumpsuit, though his had quilted padding sewn into it that made him resemble a racetrack pit-crew member in fire-retardant coveralls, minus the sponsor decals. He also wore a white turtleneck that, with his bald head, made him look something like a light bulb in a socket, lacking only the lampshade to complete the image.
“You’re David DeLuca,” the man said. “I’m Brother Antonionus. How can I help you? You’re with the Air Force, is that right?”
“Army,” DeLuca said, showing Malcolm Percy his badge and credentials. “Counterintelligence. Thank you for giving me a few minutes of your time—I gather you have a pretty full schedule.”
“I’m due to receive my midmorning reports in a few minutes, but I think I can squeeze you in,” he said.
“Reports from whom?”
“From all my waiters and waitresses,” he said. “That’s a bit of an in-joke, but that’s what we call ourselves because we’re all waiting. You must be busy, too.”
“I’m looking for a girl who seems to be missing,” he said. “My information says she apparently called you, because you called back and left a message on her machine.”
“And her name is?”
“Cheryl Escavedo,” DeLuca said. “Sergeant Cheryl Escavedo. Arizona Army National Guard.”
Brother Antonionus tapped a few keys on his keyboard, reading from his monitor.
“She called here… February seventeenth. Would that make sense?”
She’d disappeared on the nineteenth.
“Does it say there what she might have called about?” DeLuca asked.
“Nnnnnnope,” Antonionus said, manipulating his mouse until he was satisfied with his answer.
“And you called her back when?”
“Well,” he said, clicking again, “it’s on my to-do list for four days ago, but I’m not sure when I got around to it. What’s today? Saturday? I think I called her back Thursday. I could check my phone records.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “We could check them, too, if we needed to. I’m just mainly interested in why she might have been calling you.”
“Is she in some sort of trouble?” Antonionus asked. “You have a very disturbed aura right now.”
“We’re not sure,” DeLuca said. “We’d like to talk to her before we reach any conclusions. And I apologize for my aura.”
“We get a lot of calls, Detective. Is it Detective? We get calls from people all over the world, every day, inquiring about either our products or the Metamorphosis System. I’d say at least once a week someone shows up on our doorstep, seeking one thing or another.”
“What do you do with them,” DeLuca asked. “The people who show up?”
“Well, we try to accommodate them, if we can,” Antonionus said. “We don’t want anyone going away disappointed. Some seekers are ready and others need more preparation, so we give them a program kit to take home, and sometimes we refer them to one of our satellite campuses. That probably sounds like a pun, doesn’t it? I wish I’d thought of it. How is your marriage, Detective? My sense is that your wife wishes you’d change something. Your line of work, I think. Forgive me for intruding but when I hear things whispering in my ear, it’s hard to ignore them.”
“I appreciate your concern,” DeLuca said. “Can you think of any reason why Sergeant Escavedo might have called you on the seventeenth? Anything going on, on or around that date?”
“Not around here,” Antonionus said. “We had an Ascension ceremony on the nineteenth, but that was in Arizona.”
“Whereabouts?” DeLuca asked.
“A place called Spirit Mountain,” Antonionus said. “I’d received instructions that a ship would be using a meteor shower that night to conceal a landing. Unfortunately, in my current condition, I’m a bit aphasic at times. I think I understand things, but I don’t.”
“Did a ship in fact come that night?” DeLuca asked. He wasn’t really interested in the answer, except that Antonionus had been in proximity to the disappearance, and that meant he might have seen something. It was also more than a coincidence, and that meant something, too. Somewhere in the bullshit, there could be information DeLuca could use.
“One did, but it wasn’t Rigelian,” Antonionus said, rather matter-of-factly, as if ships arrived all the time.
“What was it?”
“I’m not sure,” Antonionus said. “They signed a trade alliance with a collective from the Sega quadrant but I wasn’t aware that it had gone into effect yet. My understanding was that they’d be stopping for hydrogen only. Do you want me to find out what kind of ship it was?”
“That won’t be necessary,” DeLuca said. “I’m sure my friends at CMAF can tell me that.”
Antonionus snickered.
“Oh, yes, I’m sure they can,” he said. “They’ll be very helpful.”
“How did you know where the Ascension was going to take place?” DeLuca asked.
“How?” Antonionus said. “How do monarch butterflies know which way is Mexico? Or more to the point, how do they know they know? I’m not trying to be deliberately elusive, Detective. There are simply things I know, but I have a harder time saying how I know them. The body you see is a shell I’ve been forced to wear. The angel inside of me is my true self, from somewhere quite different from this world. Yet the shell is what I have to work with here, to speak and to understand. A big part of its job is to interpret the wisdom of its truer self. We all have angels inside of us, Detective, yourself included. In which sense, describing freeing our angels as the next condition is a bit of a misnomer, because they are already with us. The next expression might be a better term, but, you know, too late now.”
“I guess what I’m really wondering is, how would Cheryl Escavedo have known about your Ascension?” DeLuca said. “We found her Jeep at the base of Spirit Mountain, so it makes me wonder if she was coming to join you, for whatever reason.”
“Some people are drawn to them,” Antonionus said. “People wander in all the time simply because they’ve been called. Other people might have seen our ads in the popular magazines. Ascensions are also posted on our Website. Whenever possible. I usually know months in advance, but not always. One time I recall I was given about fifteen minutes’ notice, but fortunately, we were nearby. You say you found her Jeep—I take it then that you’re unable to account for Sergeant Escavedo’s whereabouts?”
“That’s right,” DeLuca said.
“Have you taken into account the possibility that she was taken?” Antonionus asked. “I suppose for someone like you, this is still beyond the realm of possibility, but there was a ship that night. They all have the technology. Probably a third of the people here today have been abducted and most of the others know someone who was. It’s all been well documented and supported by authorities as well respected as Harvard psychology professor Hilton Jaynes. I don’t expect to change your mind here and now, Detective, but if you’re looking for someone who went missing at Spirit Mountain that night, it is the most logical explanation. Don’t they say the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the one most likely to be true?”
“That is what they say,” DeLuca said. “But it’s really more a question of quality than quantity. I’d rather have an explanation with ten small reasonable assumptions than one big dubious one.”
“Dubious is one of the nicer things I’ve been called,” Antonionus said, smiling again. What was with all the smiling? “Do you really think, with over a hundred thousand other planets in the cosmos, just like earth, just as inhabitable, that we’re alone in the universe?”
“Do you really think I’m going to believe a grown man who’s dressed like a cross between Santa’s helper and Pee-wee Herman didn’t just pull that number out of his ass?” DeLuca wanted to say, but he held his tongue.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve found a lot of missing people over the years, and of all the reasons that they’ve been missing, that’s never been one of them,” he said instead. “I try to be open to new ideas, but I can’t help but base my decisions and hunches on past experience. But if you could get the name of the ship, we’ll throw it into the system and see what happens.”
“I’d love to see how you’d do with a Good Attention program,” Antonionus said, clasping his hands together over his heart. DeLuca was still waiting for the charisma he’d heard of to kick in, but so far, all he was seeing was the same sort of bemused confidence he’d seen in a hundred other deluded morons, with a random meting out of benevolence that probably made his followers feel good about themselves. “The technology allows the player to control the images on the screen with his mind. You might think that’s dubious, too, but they’re using it in schools to help children with attention deficit disorder learn to focus. I think you’d be absolutely off the charts. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with such a perfect blend of convergent and divergent thinking.”
“Where do you get your crystals, by the way?” DeLuca said. “I think I’d like to get one for my wife.”
“My advisers,” Antonionus said. “A variety of places, really. Some were gifts. This one spoke to me in the desert and asked me to pick it up. Her up—she doesn’t like it when I call her an ‘it.’” He put his finger on it. DeLuca half-expected it to light up.
“Do you ever buy crystals from a kid named Marvin Yutahay?” DeLuca asked. “Native American kid. Gem hunter.”
“Not to my knowledge, but then I never buy crystals, period. Others here may know about him. Would you like me to ask?”
“That’s all right,” DeLuca said.
They were interrupted by a knock on the door. God’s Miracle entered and said they were ready with their midmorning reports. DeLuca rose to leave, laying his card down on Brother Antonionus’s table.
“Thanks for the help,” he said, “and for the kind words. Time I took my divergent thinking elsewhere.”
“Miracle will see you to your car,” Antonionus said.
“Thanks, but I can find it. Do call me if you hear from Sergeant Escavedo.”
“I will,” Antonionus said. “I promise I will.”
When he got to his car, he discovered it had been washed and waxed by a young woman in the requisite red jumpsuit who was putting a few finishing strokes to polishing the hood. She looked at him, then glanced nervously over his shoulder to see if someone was behind him.
“Are you a police officer?” she asked him.
“Not exactly, but something like that,” he replied.
“Can you help me find my daughter?” the woman said, panic rising in her voice. “My name is Rainbow. My daughter’s name is Ruby. I think they have her, but I don’t know where she is. They won’t let me talk to her.”
“Who has her?” DeLuca said. “Who won’t let you talk to her?” But the woman calling herself Rainbow rushed off, fearful that her pleas had been overheard, and disappeared into the house to make her midmorning report.
Because of Posse Comitatus laws, there were strict limitations preventing military interference in matters of civilian justice—nobody wanted America resembling some South American banana republic where the army and the police were the same thing. At the same time, the Patriot Act gave law enforcement and intelligence agencies more leeway these days. DeLuca had two options, regarding the woman named Rainbow’s request. He could (and probably should) relay her plea to the local authorities and let them handle it. They were no doubt accustomed to a whole slew of wacky statements and claims coming out of the Brethren of the Light compound. He certainly didn’t have time to look into it personally, but he could assign someone to it if it took on any greater significance. If two girls had disappeared at the same time, on or around the same time and place, that was certainly significant.
He had two more stops to make, first at the Military Entry Processing Station where Escavedo had worked. It was a dead end, a nondescript beige federal building where no one had anything really helpful to contribute. Cheryl had seemed disgruntled and unhappy in her work, DeLuca learned, but then again, everybody there seemed disgruntled and unhappy in their work. She hadn’t made any close friends, and in fact seemed aloof and distant, as if she didn’t want to make any close friends. She didn’t talk to anybody, and kept to herself, mostly, did her job and went home, no overtime, no self-initiated projects—it didn’t sound like the Cheryl Escavedo DeLuca had read about in her 201 file. One coworker recalled Escavedo receiving a bouquet of flowers on Valentine’s Day, but she didn’t tell anybody whom they were from. When DeLuca called all the local florists in the Yellow Pages, none of them had any record of delivering flowers to the MEPS building on Valentine’s Day.
His last stop of the day was the apartment Cheryl Escavedo shared with Theresa Davidova, the ground floor of a two-story house with a large porch in the front and a smaller one in the back. He’d hoped to listen to the message on her answering machine and read the note Cheryl had left, the words “Tom never…” When he got there, he knocked on the front door and rang the bell, but no one was home. When he called the number Theresa had given him, it rang and rang. He wondered why the machine didn’t pick up. When he walked around the house, he saw that the back door was open a crack. When he opened it, he was suddenly startled when a cat darted past him. According to the writing on the litterbox, the cat’s name was “Boo.” There was a half-empty bowl of cereal on the table (Boo had drunk all the milk) and a box of Honey Nut Cheerios in front of it, the top open, next to a glass of orange juice, untouched. The answering machine was gone from the kitchen counter, the telephone wire and power source unplugged. The case of power bars on the kitchen counter was overturned and empty. A search of the rest of the house turned up little, though there were clothes strewn on the bed as if someone had packed very quickly.
He was in the kitchen again when a red International Harvester pickup with a black camper on the back pulled into the driveway. A young man got out, late twenties, fit-looking in jeans and work boots and an unzipped gray hooded sweatshirt over a black T-shirt, his longish black hair swept back but unruly, his beard closely trimmed. DeLuca stepped out on the porch to meet him.
“Who are you?” the young man asked, stopping in his tracks.
“David DeLuca, Army counterintelligence,” he replied, flashing his B’s and C’s. “Who are you?”
“Josh Truitt,” the young man said. “My girlfriend lives here. What are you doing here?”
“I’m looking for Cheryl,” DeLuca said. “She your girlfriend?”
“Theresa,” Josh Truitt said. “Is she here?”
“She’s not,” DeLuca said. “Were you expecting her?”
“We were supposed to have dinner,” Truitt said. “I called all day but she didn’t answer and the machine didn’t pick up.”
“Were you here earlier?” DeLuca asked.
“Just got here,” Truitt said.
“It looks either like she left in a hurry or she was expecting to be right back,” DeLuca said. “Her answering machine is missing. I’m guessing she usually doesn’t take her answering machine with her when she leaves the house.”
“We were supposed to go camping,” Truitt said. “Tomorrow morning.”
“Where were you going?”
“A canyon I know in the Gila Wilderness,” Truitt said. “Near Silver City. I was going to surprise her.”
“Does she have any friends she might have contacted?”
“I just spoke to both of them and they haven’t heard from her,” Truitt said. “Her boss from the bar and a woman from church.”
“Did she have any enemies I should know about?” DeLuca asked.
“Why?” the other man asked. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m investigating her roommate’s disappearance,” DeLuca said. “I spoke to Theresa on the phone once, and then she called me back. We were supposed to get together. She said she was going to be around. You gave Cheryl a copy of your book.”
“For her birthday,” Truitt said.
“How long had you known Cheryl?”
“Just for a few months. Maybe six months. Since she got transferred to Albuquerque.”
“How did she meet Theresa?”
“She saw a sign at the laundromat that Theresa put up, looking for a roommate,” Truitt said. “But they really hit it off.”
“Did she have a boyfriend?” DeLuca asked.
“She had friends,” Truitt said. “I don’t know if they were boyfriends. She’d go away for weekends. Either back to Colorado Springs or to Arizona. She didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about it.”
“About boyfriends?”
“Yeah.”
“Any idea why not?” DeLuca asked.
“Not really,” Truitt said. “When someone asks you to respect their privacy, you don’t say, ‘And why exactly is it that you want me to respect your privacy?’ You just back off.”
“How about Theresa?” DeLuca said. “In my business, coincidence is something you learn not to believe in. Was there somebody she might have been running from? I need to know, Josh.”
The younger man hesitated.
“Yeah, there was,” he said at last. “A guy named Leon Lev. He’d been saying she owed him money.”
“How much?”
“Twelve thousand dollars,” Josh Truitt said.
“And that would be because… ?” DeLuca suspected he knew the answer.
“Lev was her pimp,” Truitt said. “The guy is… I was going to say evil, but I don’t want to sound like George Bush. She moved here from El Paso to get away from him. I guess she thought if she came here, he’d leave her alone.”
“Where does he live?”
“Juarez,” DeLuca said. “You don’t want to go there, and you don’t want to meet him, trust me.”
“If I only met the people I wanted to meet,” DeLuca said, “I wouldn’t have anything to do. Hang tight and call me if you hear from her. She’ll probably turn up on her own. There’s safety in numbers. It’s how we work. I’m sure she’ll call you. Nobody stays underground for long.” DeLuca laughed. “I forgot who I’m talking to. You probably know people who stay underground for months.”
“Beware ‘The Mole,’” Truitt said.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s sort of an urban legend, except that it’s not,” Truitt said. “Cavers are notoriously secretive. Finding a new cave that hasn’t been disturbed for ten or fifteen million years is like finding a new planet in the solar system. And the more beautiful it is, the sooner it’s going to be turned into a tourist show cave with a McDonald’s in the entry chamber, so when we find something, we keep it to ourselves, as long as we can, and we shun the guy who lets the word out. But if you do find a cave, you get to tag it. Mark it, with your personal tag…”
“That’s not despoiling it? Leaving graffiti, after fifteen million years?”
“You don’t spray paint ‘Class of 2004’ in six-foot letters,” Truitt said. “You do it in a way that honors the cave, somewhere inconspicuous, like signing a painting in the lower-right-hand corner. So The Mole is a guy who tags caves that nobody else has ever heard of before, so people get all excited and rope to the bottom of a thousand-foot tube, and there’s his tag. People say he lives underground. Or that he was born without eyes. He’s an albino who can’t expose himself to sunlight. It’s more than just a story. I’ve seen the tags myself.”
DeLuca looked at him. Josh Truitt was babbling because he was scared.
“All I’m saying is that some people stay underground,” he said. “Theresa was afraid of Lev. She said she paid him the money she owed him, but he kept claiming there was interest due. He’s a complete pig. And a true psychopath. If your bombs are as smart as people say they are, one of them would have found Leon Lev a long time ago.”
DeLuca headed back to his hotel. He felt like he knew less now than he had when he woke up, but that wasn’t quite true. The day had raised a thousand new questions, and he wasn’t going to have time to answer all of them by himself. He had a number of calls to make, to Colleen MacKenzie and Dan Sykes and Julio Vasquez and Walter Ford and to Sami Jambazian, and maybe a couple of other people he wanted to add to his team. Before he did that, he needed to talk to Colonel Oswald, and Phil LeDoux too. Friend or not, DeLuca was angry. He was angry because it was becoming apparent to him that he’d been lied to. He wasn’t going to do anything more until somebody told him what he was really looking for.
As he approached Noshaq Pass, in the Hindu Kush mountain range, on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Army counterintelligence agent Sergeant Frank Pickett was growing frustrated. They were at sixteen thousand feet, working their way northeast across the Qadzi Deh glacier, and he needed to make a phone call. He’d given the battery to his SATphone to Amal, Ali Abu-Muhammed’s chief lieutenant, for safekeeping, but Amal didn’t know that the phone, developed by DARPA, had a second battery and was still usable. Pickett had been feigning altitude sickness as an excuse to lag behind, but Amal had stayed with him. Posing as a Russian arms dealer, Pickett had been working in the FATA along the Durand line for six months, selling SAM-7s and SAM-7As to Pashtun maliks in Khost and Bajorr and Miran Shah, each weapon he sold encoded with a concealed DARPA-installed GPS transponder, but the missiles were armed—he would have lost credibility had the test firings been less than effective. As a result, he’d gained access to a Talibani named Abdul Sahibzada who offered to introduce him to a Waziri chieftain who might be interested in buying antiaircraft weapons. That offer proved to have been a ruse. Instead, Pickett had been taken to meet Abu-Muhammed, currently considered second or third in command of Al Qaeda forces in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and someone believed to meet regularly with Osama Bin Laden. Pickett had worked for a month to win Abu-Muhammed’s trust, brokering minor arms deals elsewhere, and it now looked like his hard work had paid off. He had reason to believe, based on what he’d learned at the campfire the night before, eavesdropping on people who were unaware that he was as fluent in Arabic as he was in Russian, that he was being taken to Razmak to meet with Al Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden himself. It was information he wanted to pass along to U.S. Central Command in Kabul, but unless he could shake Amal somehow, he wouldn’t be able to.
“You catch up with the others,” he told Amal in Russian. Amal had been a student in Moscow. His Russian was poor, but he was the only one who spoke it, which was why he’d been assigned to accompany the man he believed to be a Russian arms dealer.
“I will wait,” Amal said. “It is good.”
There were a dozen Talibani and Al Qaeda soldiers traveling in the group, accompanied by eight regular Pakistani army troops from the Balochistan regiment with Pashtun loyalities, the group’s supplies carried by mules also bearing perhaps half a ton of raw opium in burlap saddlebags flung across their backs. Pickett had little doubt that IMINT was following the caravan’s progress via satellite, the images from their body heat registering clearly to any infrared camera against the cold backdrop of the glacier, but knowing where they were wouldn’t matter unless CENTCOM also knew what they were doing.
Pickett was considering how the presence of Pakistani troops precluded calling in an airstrike when he saw, up ahead, a flash of light, and then a second, joined by the sound of men firing their rifles, but at what? He looked up, as did Amal, listening for the drone of airplanes overhead. He heard nothing. He understood that Predators and G-Hawks could fly in virtual silence, but they fired missiles, and he hadn’t seen or heard any explosions. Ahead, he saw a third flash of light, then a fourth, and with each flash, the sound of rifles firing abated. Amal sent tracer rounds into the sky, firing blindly and running ahead to join the others. Pickett saw a lone mule racing across the glacier, and then it, too, disappeared in a flash of light. A hundred yards in front of him, Amal stopped and fired his weapon into the sky two more times. Then he was gone.
When he reached the spot where Amal had stood, Frank Pickett saw only a perfectly round hole in the ice, burned down into the glacier as far as the beam from his flashlight could reach.
He ran ahead until he arrived at the place where the caravan had been. There, he found a single backpack, a kaffiyeh, and the hindquarters of a mule that appeared to have been sawed in half, as well as a half dozen deep holes in the ice identical to the one where Amal had disappeared, each hole perfectly round and perhaps twenty feet across. Pickett had seen similarly round potholes worn into solid rock by eons of erosion, but nothing he understood could explain how such holes could appear instantaneously.
It took him a minute to gather his wits, and then he turned on his satellite phone and called in to CENTCOM, giving his name and identification code.
“How can I help you, Agent Pickett?” the lieutenant he spoke with asked.
“What do you mean, how can you help me? You can start by telling me what just happened,” Pickett said.
“What just happened where, exactly?” the lieutenant asked.
“Right here,” Pickett said. “36° 26.03' north and 71° 53.84' east. Just now.”
“One minute,” the lieutenant said, coming back a few moments later.
“Not quite sure what you’re referring to, Pickett,” the lieutenant said. “We’ve got nothing on our screens. Agent Pickett? Are you still with me? Pickett?”
But Pickett was gone, and where he stood, a final hole. By the time Central Command in Kabul was able to scramble a pair of Warthogs the next morning to overfly and surveil the site at 36° 26.03'N and 71° 53.84'E, the previously symmetrical round holes had been carved and blended into the glacial landscape and there was nothing to be seen, save for a lone mule, six miles away and still shaking. When the SOCOM was able to put men on the ground, flying in a Pavehawk HH-60 stripped of all excess weight to allow it to fly at that altitude, they found evidence that suggested a party of men had fallen into a bergschrund that had evidently been concealed by a snow bridge that collapsed—such was the danger of traveling on glaciers. The body of Sergeant Frank Pickett of Army counterintelligence was written in the report as unrecoverable, along with a recommendation that he be given a Bronze Star for valor, posthumous.