DELUCA WAS IN THE PARKING LOT BEHIND THE motel the next morning, stretching after his run, when a middle-aged woman stepped out of her shiny stainless-steel Jet Stream motor home to yawn and squint at the rising sun. The name on the back of the motor home, painted in an elaborate pink scroll outlined in gold, was “Ms. Kitty.” The woman was dressed in a gray hooded sweatshirt, shorts that fell well below her knees, flip-flops, and a red plaid flannel bathrobe over it all, untied at the waist. She was about five-foot-two, with short salt-and-pepper curly hair tumbling in disarray above her ears, square black-rimmed glasses, and freckles across the bridge of her nose. She had a stainless-steel travel mug in her hand, which she raised in greeting as she smiled broadly.
“Hello,” she said. “Do they have coffee in the lobby? Or sweet rolls?”
She had an East Coast accent.
“I believe they do, but I think it’s for guests only,” DeLuca said.
“Oh, that’s okay—I always pay slippage for using the parking lot,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
DeLuca didn’t feel obliged to wait for her, but he was nevertheless still there when she returned.
“Good run?” she asked cheerfully, sipping her coffee, a baked good in her other hand and a copy of USA Today tucked under her arm. She had a slow and deliberate walk, almost a shuffle, barely lifting her feet as she moved.
“Pretty good,” he said. “I don’t know what the altitude is here, but it feels like I’m not quite acclimated.”
“It’s 5,314 feet,” she said. “Hold on—I’ve got something for you.”
She disappeared into her RV, then returned with a paper bag in her hand, and in the bag, a bottle of beer. DeLuca thanked her but said it was a little early for drinking beer.
“Look at the label,” she said. “I’m told there are only twelve bottles of this stuff in existence.”
DeLuca did a brief double take. The label read “Herr Totenbrau,” with a crude line drawing of a skeleton passed out in an alley with a beer in his hand. “Herr Totenbrau” translated as “Mr. Death-Beer,” and it was a homebrew that DeLuca and Phil LeDoux had made in their off-duty hours, years ago when the two of them were stationed in Germany, manning listening posts along the East German frontier. Phil still had one sixpack, and DeLuca had the other, with the understanding that some day when they’d both retired and the world was at peace, they’d get together and have a drink.
“With General LeDoux’s compliments,” the woman said. “I would have knocked on your door when I got in at four o’clock this morning, but I was driving all night and I was just wiped. Peggy Romano.” She extended her hand.
“David DeLuca,” he said, shaking her hand, which she then wiped on her bathrobe.
“I know,” she said. “You wanna step into the RV? Tell you what—why don’t you take a shower first, and then you can see my RV.”
He was back in fifteen minutes, a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the lobby in his hand. Peggy Romano was at the dining table, reading the sports pages. There was a signed photograph of WNBA player Sue Bird, framed and hung on the wall by the sink, and a Diana Taurasi bobble-head propped on the dashboard, next to a small stuffed teddy bear wearing a red Christmas scarf.
“You follow women’s basketball?” DeLuca asked.
“Do I follow it?” the woman said. “I’m obsessed. I dream about it. I get all the games on dish. I’m obsessed. My entire goal in life is to sleep with one WNBA player. I think it’s because I’m short. You want a tour?”
“Sure,” he said. “Why ‘Ms. Kitty’?”
“Mobile Secure Combined Intelligence Tactical Telecommunications and Yada-yada-yada. But I couldn’t use a C for ‘combined’ or people would call it ‘Ms. City.’ Come on. It won’t take long,” she said. In addition to a kitchen/dining area, shower, and sleeping compartment in the rear, the motor home was packed floor to ceiling with enough technology to give the operations center at Cheyenne Mountain a run for its money. There were four computer stations in the central section, each with its own flat-screen monitor, a plasma screen that folded down from the ceiling above the dining area for briefings, and the tabletop, which appeared to be smoked glass, converted to a full-color touch-screen LED display as well, with a virtual keyboard embedded but repositionable and a graphics support that let the user draw on the screen in color.
“I don’t know why, but I like looking at maps when they’re flat and not on the wall,” she said. “It’s up to you. Don’t worry about what’s in the closets, because I’ll take care of that stuff, but it’s mostly servers and processors and communications stuff. All you really need to know is that we’re fully firewalled, shielded, encrypted, scrambled, armored, and the glass is bulletproof to withstand an RPG. All your calls and your wireless goes through here, uplinked to a satellite not even NSA knows about—they know about it, but they think it’s something else.”
“I assumed you were NSA,” DeLuca said.
“Not anymore, I’m not,” Peggy Romano said. “I’m a private contractor now—I’m the guy they call when they don’t want anybody to know they’re calling the guy. Like in those old movies, where the blonde takes off and says, ‘I’ll send someone for my things.’ Send who? I could never figure out who that would be, but that’s who I am, in a way—I’m the techno-fixer they use when they can’t call the super.”
“Who’s they?”
She laughed.
“Like I’m going to tell you?” she said. “If you want to check my credentials, you can talk to LeDoux, and I’m fully read on to Darkstar, so you tell me how you want to play it.”
“I haven’t told my people about that part,” he said.
“Probably wise. Just keep me posted. I just want to reassure you that nothing comes in here that you don’t want, and nothing goes out that you don’t want. I’ll do all your tech support, and I imagine your people are trying to figure out the PDAs we gave you, right about now, so please tell them I’ll be happy to walk them through the setup protocols. The rest of this is just like what you’re used to using, but call if you need me. I’ve got printers and graphics to cook up any IDs you need—all I ask is that this is a $35-million vehicle, so please use coasters and restock what you use from the minibar. Which is gratis. And no cats because I’m allergic to them. I’ll write down the code for you to get in and out. I’m going to get a room at the Red Roof so that you people can have some privacy in here, and if I’m not there, I’ll be at the pool. One last thing…” She handed him a paper bag full of keys on assorted keychains. “These are for all the cars in the back row.” She pointed out the window to a row of vehicles of various makes and models, ranging from a new Mercedes to a beat-up fifteen-year-old Toyota pickup. “You tell me how you want these things registered and I’ll take care of it. I can also fix parking tickets. I’ll check back in an hour.”
“Okay,” DeLuca said. “Peggy?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s not your real name, is it? Peggy Romano?”
“Not even close,” she said. “By the way, I read the report you sent LeDoux, so you might be interested to know—Hilton Jaynes is speaking tomorrow night at the university. Room 103, Regener Hall, North Campus. Toodles.”
When she was gone, he logged on and sent Walter Ford an e-mail:
Walter,
Get on SIPERNET and tell me what you can find out about girls disappearing in the desert along the U.S./Mexican border, let’s say Yuma to El Paso, going back 25 years. Don’t ask me what I’m looking for because I don’t know. Patterns, anomalies, etc. I recall things from when I was with Yuma PD but I’m not up to date, beyond what I read in the papers. Also, tell me what you learn about Koenig/Huston ASAP. I want to talk to them again but I need more info first. Personal stuff, to push their buttons a little. Thanks.
David
MacKenzie and Vasquez drove south to meet in El Paso with an old friend of DeLuca’s, a man named Wes Vogel who’d been an instructor at Fort Huachuca before joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Vogel would take them across the border and introduce them to Colonel Martine Guzman, head of the Chihuahuan State Anti-Drug Joint Task Force. Sami took the Mercedes for the short drive to the Brethren of the Light compound, with the intention of giving them the car and all his other worldly possessions if they’d let him join. He’d spent five years undercover in Boston playing the part of a Mafia-connected drug dealer, taking down various Colombian and Jamaican gang members venturing north out of Brooklyn and Central Falls, Rhode Island, to peddle their wares. It had been a while since he’d had to get over on anybody, “But hey, what are they gonna do to me if I fuck it up—shoot me with their phasers?” He spent the morning in preparation, Googling the Brethren and chatting on the phone with a reporter from the local paper who covered the UFO beat, pretending he was writing a book on UFO cults.
DeLuca managed to reach Cheryl Escavedo’s uncle on the phone and asked if he could see him. When the uncle, a man named Henry Soto, said he’d be flying to Atlantic City that evening and would be out of town for the next two weeks, DeLuca grabbed a flight out of Albuquerque International on Southwest and was in Las Vegas by lunch.
Soto’s office was in a downtown building on the corner of Fremont and Fourth, across the street from the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino. A Native American receptionist, a woman about fifty in a floral dress with gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, asked him to wait a moment, picked up the phone, and called to make sure her boss was free, then showed DeLuca in. Soto stood to greet his visitor, offering him his hand and nodding as he shook.
“Please sit down,” he said. “Can I tell Louise to get you anything? Coffee or tea?”
“I’m fine,” DeLuca said. Soto was in his midsixties, DeLuca guessed, heavy, his hair black with a touch of gray, brushed straight back and worn long over his collar. He was dressed in a black suit, a white shirt, a red tie held in place with a tie clasp that featured a tasteful sampling of the kind of beadwork DeLuca associated with the Cocopah. The horn-rimmed reading glasses on the end of his nose added a professorial note to his appearance. On the walls of the office were large framed color photographs of various Indian casinos around the country, Mystic Lake in Minnesota, Foxwoods in Connecticut, sometimes with an inset of Soto shaking hands with officials DeLuca presumed were the owners. Soto’s job involved recruiting, training, and supervising Native American employees for positions within the gaming industry, with the goal of making Indian casinos 100 percent Indian-operated, even at the highest executive levels where currently non-Indian industry professionals drew salaries. “We do everything except the entertainment,” Soto had explained on the phone. DeLuca saw photographs of Soto shaking hands with Wayne Newton, Siegfried and Roy, Celine Dion, Sinbad, even one of him standing between George Burns and Bob Hope. DeLuca made sure not to admire anything he saw too much or let his gaze linger, because the Cocopah were such a generous people that they often gave you something if you were careless enough to comment that you liked it. A plaque on Soto’s desk read “Xawitt Kunyavaei—Sovereign Nation of the Cocopahs.”
“You flew Southwest?” Soto said. DeLuca nodded. “You must be hungry—they’re so cheap they don’t even give you peanuts. Come on—I’ll buy you lunch. Louise? Mr. DeLuca and I are going to be across the street. I’m leaving my cell here but if there’s an emergency, you know where to find me.” He turned to DeLuca. “I always leave my cell phone when I’m having lunch with somebody. Do you know there are people who will take a cell phone call in the middle of talking to you? My people had a way of dealing with such rude sorts.”
“What was that?”
“Usually we crossed the river to get away from them,” Soto said, grabbing DeLuca gently by the arm. “Come on.”
Traffic on Fremont at midday was light, the neon struggling to hold on until nightfall. The floor of the Golden Gate was surprisingly crowded, Soto explaining that at this hour, the older casinos downtown did better business, per square foot, than the giant ones out on the strip, “mostly old people who came here years ago when this was ground zero. You win one time in a place and you get sentimentally attached to it, even though none of these places bears much resemblance to what they used to be. The steak is okay but stay away from the Mexican food—it’s not as good as one might hope.”
The waitress who took their order wore a skimpy uniform, spilling out of her low-cut top when she bent over to clean the table. Soto noticed that DeLuca noticed. He smiled.
“Just so you know, she used to be a man,” Soto said. “I told her I thought she overdid it with the implants but I guess she was trying to make up for lost time. Anyway, you said you wanted to talk about Cheryl. I’ve already spoken to Ben Yutahay, but I wondered if you had anything more to tell me.”
“Not much,” DeLuca said. “I found some people who may have been in the area, but I haven’t found anyone who saw anything. Yet. And I talked to her roommate, who said she left a note—I shouldn’t say she left a note, but the roommate found a piece of paper, a scrap, with the words ‘Tom never…’ on it. Do you know if she knew anybody named Tom?”
Soto shook his head.
“I don’t think so, but she was never much into sharing her personal life with me. I’m just the old fuddy-duddy, to her. We talked, but not so much about that sort of thing.”
“You raised her, right?” DeLuca asked. “I’m a little unclear on how that was.”
“Her father was driving drunk with her mother, my sister,” Soto said. “I was raised for the first part of my life by my grandparents after I lost my folks when I was six, so it wasn’t so unusual for us.”
“In Somerton?” DeLuca asked. “I used to be a policeman in Yuma, so I know U.S. 95 pretty good.”
“I know,” Soto said. “Your name rang a bell when I heard it so I made a phone call. You testified against my cousin’s boy at one of my first trials. I was a property lawyer but they asked me to speak for him anyway. It was for vandalism. He was guilty, but what I remembered was that you told the truth. There were other cops in Yuma who would have lied on the stand. Testi-lying, they call it. Especially against an Indian.”
“I know,” DeLuca said. “Where did you study law?”
“Billy Mitchell in Minnesota,” Henry Soto said. “After my grandmother died, I became an orphan, and the BIA had a program to place Native American orphans in the homes of white people, to help us assimilate. I was raised by a Lutheran family in South Minneapolis. A minister and his wife. They were very nice. Some people tell me I still have a Minnesota accent.”
DeLuca had noticed something odd about the way Henry Soto spoke but hadn’t been able to place it.
“It must have been difficult to go from a place as hot as Yuma to a place as cold as Minnesota,” he said.
“Actually I loved it,” Soto said. “I learned how to skate and went to the U of M on a hockey scholarship. I was small but fast, and I think the white boys were scared of me. We didn’t have goons or enforcers, back then, but we wouldn’t back down from anybody. I came back after I got my degree and studied for the Arizona bar, and I think maybe that inspired Cheryl a little bit, because I was the first person in our family, one of the first in our whole band, to go to college. I told her she could do anything she set her mind to.”
“Ben said you kept the Jeep at your trailer, ” DeLuca said. “Is that a family place she might have gone to for comfort?”
“I think so,” Soto said. “Though it might not be the kind of comfort you’re thinking of. It’s up in Pai Pai country. It’s just a trailer, but I used to take her there, just to get away from things. I kept the Jeep there for hauling things and doing chores.”
“Have you been there lately?” DeLuca asked. Soto shook his head. “Would you mind if I went and had a look around?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Soto said. “It’s not locked. I’ll have to draw you a map. It’s not easy to find.”
“Do you know of any reason why she might have headed from there for Spirit Mountain?” DeLuca asked.
“Why Cheryl would have?” Soto said. “I don’t really know. She didn’t care much for the traditional things. Religion and so on. I know sometimes Cocopahs go to Spirit Mountain when they’re on a vision quest. There are Hohokum places there that are very old, but few know about them. I don’t think Cheryl did. Maybe she did. Sometimes the younger people become disillusioned and come home to get religion. Maybe she was headed for Mexico?”
“Maybe, but the road she was on dead-ended a few miles from where we found the car. She wouldn’t have made it.”
“Well, it’s easy to get lost,” Henry Soto said.
“Did she say anything was bothering her?” DeLuca said. “Anything that made you think she was in trouble of any kind?”
“I don’t think so,” Soto said. “I’ve been racking my brain. She didn’t like being transferred, but she knew the Army did that sort of thing.”
Huston had told DeLuca she’d asked to be transferred.
“Can I ask you one last question?” DeLuca said. “This might be a bit difficult for you. One of her coworkers said she thought Cheryl was gay. Do you have any reason to think that might be true?”
Soto thought.
“Hmmm. I don’t think so, but how would I know?” he said. “Was her roommate… ?”
“No. She had a boyfriend,” DeLuca said.
“Maybe she’d be a better person to ask,” Soto said.
“She might be,” DeLuca said, “but we don’t know where she is.”
DeLuca rented a Hummer2 at the Yuma airport, a beefy yellow and black model that looked like a Checker cab that had lost its temper and turned into the Hulk. The hole in the roof where the SAW gunner sat, in the military version, had been replaced with a sliding glass moon roof, and without the extra two thousand pounds of armoring, the vehicle was much more responsive, but it was still a beast. He liked the air-conditioning, the power windows, and the CD player. Ben Yutahay said, when DeLuca picked him up, that he knew families of four that lived in smaller quarters. DeLuca handed him the map Henry Soto had drawn and asked Yutahay if he knew the area.
“I’ve been up there hunting,” Yutahay said. “It’s pretty rough country, and it’s going to be dark by the time we get there. If Cheryl Escavedo went there to hide, it would have been pretty hard to find her.”
“That depends on what you’ve got looking,” DeLuca said. “My son works with satellite image intelligence and he tells me they’ve got cameras that could measure Fidel Castro’s bald spot. And Sergeant Escavedo certainly knew that.”
“They can’t watch everywhere, can they?” Yutahay asked. “They would have to know what to look for, I would guess.”
“I think you’re right,” DeLuca said.
The road took them east, then south toward a place called Sheep Mountain, in the Sierra Juarez range, the blacktop rolling in roller-coaster fashion for several miles until it turned to gravel, the desert flora of jumping cholla and creosote bushes and prickly pear. He’d brought along a pair of five-gallon gas cans, just in case the H2 ran low, and it seemed to be consuming a gallon every thirty or forty feet. They stopped at one point at a fork in the road that Henry Soto had failed to include on the map, but a brief consultation with Peggy Romano and a check of his GPS receiver put them back on course. While they were stopped, Yutahay scrutinized the tire tracks in the road, but it had rained enough in the interval to wash out any useful information. They drove for another hour, never making better than fifteen or twenty miles per, stopping occasionally for Ben to get out and examine the road, squatting to touch the ruts and grooves with his fingertips. He said he couldn’t be certain of the timing, as it was hard to determine the rate of sign decay without knowing exactly what the weather had done, but he recognized the tire prints left by the Jeep, heading out, and he thought he saw the narrower tracks of a smaller car, headed in, something with fifteen-inch tires with about thirty-five thousand miles on them.
“I think she was going pretty fast, and then she slowed down,” Yutahay said. “Her right front tire went out of alignment since the last time we stopped. That happens sometimes when you hit a pothole at fifty or sixty miles an hour.”
They found the trailer another five miles down the road, parked in a hollow with a grove of cottonwoods for shade and a small mountain stream trickling behind it for drinking water. Escavedo’s Honda Civic was parked in the trees beside the trailer. The sun had set, an early star twinkling on the horizon that Yutahay identified as Venus, but there was still enough light to have a look around. They examined the car first. Yutahay took the backseat, where he found an article of clothing on the floor.
“What’s this?” he said, holding it up to the light.
“Thong underwear,” DeLuca said. “Something that fell out of a suitcase?”
“Maybe,” Yutahay said. “My wife used to wear these but they gave her a rash so she got rid of them, but she still has the rash. I guess you could say the thong is gone but the malady lingers on.”
“You could say that,” DeLuca replied.
He’d hoped to pop open the glove compartment and find a stack of diskettes held together with a rubber band, but no such luck. The keys were in the ignition. A quick turn revealed that the car was nearly out of gas. She’d gone past the point of no return. The radio was tuned to 1190 AM. In the trunk, he found a receipt from a supermarket in Yuma. DeLuca showed it to Yutahay.
“What do you think?” he said. “Two weeks’ worth of food?”
“Maybe three,” Yutahay said, looking at the list. “Nothing perishable. That means she knew when she bought the food that she was coming here, since there’s no refrigerator, without electricity.”
“Let’s have a look inside,” DeLuca said. “I’ll grab the flashlights.”
A canopy of corrugated green fiberglass extended from the side of the trailer, propped on a frame of two-by-fours, and beneath it, two lawn chairs and a table. Yutahay said that judging from the footprints in the dust, there was only one person occupying the trailer, wearing size eight Army-issue desert combat boots.
“Are those dog prints?” DeLuca asked.
“Coyote,” Yutahay said. “Cleaning up the table scraps. I think she ate a meal out here.”
DeLuca found a kerosene lantern on the table inside the trailer and lit it. Yutahay searched the bedroom end of the trailer while DeLuca searched the kitchen. There was a pair of binoculars on the table, focused at infinity, beside an ashtray with three cigarette butts in it. He examined what was in the trash, compared that to what was in the cupboards, using the grocery list as a guide, and determined she’d been in the trailer no more than two days. There were no cigarette butts in the trash—who smoked three cigarettes in two days? Someone trying to quit, or someone trying not to start again. The only other thing of interest in the trash was a rubber band she’d used to pull back her hair, with a few hairs entangled in the knot. He put the rubber band in a plastic Ziploc evidence bag, to have the hair tested—it would tell him if she’d done any drugs in the last six months, but he doubted he was going to find any such indicators. Ben showed him where she’d laid two uniforms out on the bed, her dress blues and her forest green camos, as if she were choosing between them to decide what to wear.
“Guess she couldn’t make up her mind,” Ben said.
“No,” DeLuca said. “It means she’s wearing her DCUs. She probably picked the desert camo because she knew when she left that she was headed south.”
“Do you think it means she was hoping to come back?”
DeLuca shrugged.
“Would you wear thong underwear with a camo uniform?” Yutahay said.
“I’m sure it’s more common than anybody knows,” DeLuca said.
The Winchester rifle mounted above the door was unloaded and hadn’t been fired. There were no diskettes or CDs anywhere. DeLuca stood in the doorway, gazing out at the darkening landscape.
“It’s probably not going to be worth it, but do you think you could come back with some men and really go over the grounds here and make sure she didn’t hide anything under a rock?” he asked. “Maybe she walked out and dug a hole somewhere.”
“I could do that,” Yutahay said, opening the door to the wood stove. “Though it looks to me like she pretty much kept to the trailer. This might be of interest to you.”
He’d fished three scraps of paper from the wood stove, computer printouts, partially burned but with enough text on them to discern the subjects. Yutahay spread the scraps out on the table while DeLuca shone his flashlight on them. Escavedo had evidently Googled for the words “Shijingshan,” “Qadzi Deh,” and “Congressman Bob Fowler.”
“They didn’t burn completely because she forgot to open the flue,” Yutahay said.
“Destroying evidence?”
“Maybe she was just trying to start a fire,” Yutahay said. “It gets pretty cold up here. There was kindling on top of the paper, but that didn’t burn either.”
On their way back to Yuma, DeLuca tuned the Hummer’s radio to 1190 AM, where he found an all-night phone-in show, hosted by a man with a very calm and soothing voice named Ed Clark. The in-studio guest had an interesting theory about the Kennedy assassination, one he’d recently published in a book called Angry Are the Gods.
“…there was no invasion being planned, per se. And in fact, a review of some of the best telescopic imagery we had of the moon at the time will show you that the base the Travelers were building in the Sea of Tranquility was at a rudimentary level, we think for a simple lack of funding, but of course we can’t know that. What we do know is that shortly after President Kennedy promised we were going to put a man on the moon, activity at the aliens’ lunar base increased tenfold. But as the last caller correctly pointed out, the Travelers’ own way of experiencing the uni-mind ultimately misled them because they projected that paradigm onto a terrestrial governmental system that was anything but. It was quite reasonable, from their point of view, to believe that killing President Kennedy would have been an effective way of stopping the space program to protect their base on the moon, because the command to go there originated with him.”
The author spoke very deliberately, authoritatively, as if the things he was saying were things anybody in their right mind would of course know and/or agree with.
“Now, as to the caller’s second question, why, if the Travelers were able to effect a soul-transference with Lee Harvey Oswald, which by the way is a one-way street, sort of like a kamikaze suicide mission, because once you cross, you can’t cross back, so why, if they could occupy Oswald’s body, why couldn’t they just occupy President Kennedy’s body and then have him call off the space program? That question is somewhat simpler to answer, because we know that perhaps the most reliable way to identify the Travelers living among us, intuitively, is by their charisma. Though few of us trust our intuition. That’s the one thing they can’t hide, and in fact it often becomes amplified, depending on the type of individual they possess and occupy. But what they can’t do is occupy someone who already has charisma, and I think most Democrats over the age of fifty or sixty will recall that perhaps no human being in modern American recollection had more charisma than John Kennedy. Human charisma is toxic to them. In other words, it wouldn’t have worked. And you can see, watch the old videotapes, and compare the aura that Kennedy projected to the one that exited from Lee Harvey Oswald’s body when Jack Ruby shot him, Sunday morning, 11:21 A.M., November 24, 1963, at police headquarters, and they are measurably different. Measurably different.”
“Is he trying to say aliens from outer space killed Kennedy?” Ben Yutahay asked. He’d been riding with his eyes closed. DeLuca had assumed he was asleep.
“You don’t buy it?” DeLuca said.
“I always thought it was the wife,” Yutahay said. “It usually is in domestic cases. It sounds kind of Hopi to me. They believe in star-people.”
“You’re listening to the Ed Clark show, Sea to Shining Sea, 1190 AM, WROZ, out of Roswell, New Mexico,” the host sang out. “Back to the show after this. Did you know that interest rates for home equity loans…”
“I listen to this guy sometimes when I’m on patrol at night,” Yutahay said. “It can be quite amusing, I have to say. Some of the people who call in are out of their minds. One night a woman called and said the aliens had replaced her husband with someone who was much better, but sleeping with him would have meant she was being unfaithful—what should she do?”
“What’d Ed say?”
“His advice was to go ahead because when they brought her husband back, they’d wipe his memory. She said it wasn’t his memory she was worried about, it was hers. People that night thought that was a fairly interesting moral dilemma.”
“What was the conclusion?”
“I think people said it wasn’t cheating if your lover was in another dimension. Then they started talking about cross-dimensional marriage and polygamy. They were against that.”
DeLuca checked his watch. It was too late to give Bonnie a call. They passed a curve in the road where three white crosses staked into the ground, decorated with plastic flowers, marked the spot as dangerous. Yutahay closed his eyes again. DeLuca nudged the volume on the radio down a notch.
“We’ve got Bartleby in Chloride, New Mexico. You’re on the air.”
“Hi, Ed—how you doing tonight? Love your show,” Bartleby said.
“I’m quite well, quite well indeed,” Ed Clark said placidly.
“Listen, I’m just calling to correct the caller before last, Warren from Illinois.”
“Yes,” Ed Clark said. “Go ahead.”
“He was saying that the Helstaff site at White Sands was an anti-UFO battery…”
“For our listeners,” Clark interrupted, “Helstaff is no relation to Flagstaff. Helstaff is…”
“H-E-L-S-T-F,” Bartleby said. “High-Energy Laser System Test Facility. And calling it ‘The Miracle Program’ sounds like your caller was missing the acronym there, too. It’s not ‘M-i-r-a-c-l-e,’ as in virgin births or gas for under a dollar fifty a gallon. It’s ‘M-I-R-A-C-L.’ Mid-Infra-Red Advanced Chemical Laser. The Russians were building one in Tajikistan, their version of Helstaff, at a place called Dushanbe, before they ran out of money. At any rate, I doubt that MIRACL or anything ground-based that the Russians have would pose much of a threat to an alien vessel. They can give a sitting unshielded bird in close-earth orbit a pretty good sunburn, but they’re not going to do much to the kind of ships you’re talking about, assuming they could acquire the target in the first place.”
“I would think any aggression on our part would also invite retaliation,” Ed Clark said.
“Well,” Bartleby said, “you might be right, though that’s a pretty terrestrial mindset you’re talking about. Even supposing that were true, we’d have to pose a much more significant threat than we do, at least at present. MIRACL just can’t generate enough power to be much more than annoying. Though maybe that posits a terrestrial mindset too.”
“How does it work?” Ed Clark asked. “The MIRACL laser?”
“Well,” the caller said, “it’s basically a megawatt laser with a continuous wavelength between 3.8 and 4.2 microns. You burn C2H4ethylene and NFnitrogen fluoride in something like a rocket engine and then catch the excited fluorine atoms and mix them with deuterium in the exhaust cavity to make deuterium-fluoride, stabilized and cooled with helium. The resounder mirrors extract energy in the exhaust cavity and reroute it into a fourteen-square-centimeter beam, which is a nice little bit of directed energy, but the drawbacks are multiple. It takes tons and tons of fuel, it’s slow to power, hard to retarget, and it’s a sitting duck on the ground. It’s just not the weapon of the future that some people say it is.”
“Would that future weapon involve antimatter technologies, then?” Ed Clark asked.
“It would,” the caller said. DeLuca felt a bit disappointed. Up to that point, the caller had sounded rather reasonable and informed, but now he was venturing into pure woo-woo land. Antimatter? He thought of the episode of the old Star Trek, where the good Captain Kirk somehow slipped into the parallel universe where everyone including Spock was immoral and scheming—was that a sly dig at the Nixon White House at the time?
“Do you know the history of antimatter research?” Ed Clark asked.
“I do,” Bartleby said. “We probably can’t really limn it here, but you go back to a colleague of Einstein’s named Paul Dirac, who theorized in 1929 that electrons and protons had mirrored counterparts with reversed charges, which he called antielectrons, or positrons, and antiprotons. Those theories were confirmed in 1936 when a Caltech scientist named Carl Anderson saw a positron fly through his lab, and then antiprotons were detected at Berkeley in the fifties, the point being that this is stuff that has been with us and studied for a long time.”
“And the energy potential of antimatter is phenomenal, as I understand it,” Clark said.
“Oh yeah,” Bartleby said. “It’s maybe ten billion times the power of dynamite. One gram, which is about a fifth of a teaspoon, would equal twenty-three space shuttle fuel tanks as a propellant. As an explosive, fifty millionths of a gram would have been enough to take down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—colliding positrons and antielectrons is probably the ultimate energy source in the universe. It’s kind of hard to imagine another, but then our imaginations have always limited us, so who knows.”
“And this is a fairly rare substance?” Ed Clark said.
“Antimatter?” Bartleby said. “Well, it is in this universe, by definition, but in the larger cosmos, there’s just as much antimatter as matter, so I guess I’d have to say no, it’s not rare. One of the concerns scientists working with this stuff have had has been that a man-made collision of significant size might create a cataclysmic chain reaction in which all the matter in this universe would collide with all the antimatter in the mirrored universe, which would mean the largest energy release since the original big bang.”
“And me with only four more payments to go on my dinning-room table set,” DeLuca said, but now Yutahay really was asleep, snoring softly with his head against the window.
“But that’s what they said about splitting the atom,” Ed Clark said.
“That’s true,” Bartleby agreed. “And thank goodness we didn’t listen, or we wouldn’t be blessed with the ten-thousand-plus nuclear bombs we have today. They’re talking about suitcase nukes today, but tomorrow, we could have antimatter superbombs a thousand times more powerful, the size of maybe a small transistor radio. And the scientists are big on the idea of antimatter bombs because after the initial burst of gamma radiation, there wouldn’t be any residual contaminants, so they’re thinking of them as ‘clean’ bombs. It’s sort of insane.”
“And what exactly is stopping this technology, at present?” Ed Clark asked. “I’m assuming, because all indications suggest an alien invasion by the Lizaurian Second Wave some time before 2011, that DARPA and some of the other agencies are proceeding apace… ?”
“Well,” Bartleby said, “DARPA is certainly involved, but most of the research, the black-budget stuff, is going on at the DEL at Kirtland, the Directed Energy Lab, and at the Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts in Virginia, and various programs at places like the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, and Livermore, MIT, Cornell, Nellis, Wright-Patterson…”
“Area 51?” Clark interrupted.
“Except that Area 51 is like cyberspace,” Bartleby said. “I had a friend that somebody years ago wanted to hire to be their Los Angeles presence on the Internet, and he had to explain to them, there is no Los Angeles in cyberspace. There’s no California and no United States either—it’s one world now. As for your question as to what’s stopping it, the technology always stopped before at creating a perfect penning field, because you obviously can’t grab a bit of antimatter and stick it in a glass jar like catching a ladybug. You have to store it in something it can’t collide with, which means you have to trap and pen it in an electromagnetic field, but that field has to be perfect or the particles escape, and once you generate it, you have to maintain 100 percent integrity or you lose containment, which means at least a nuclear power source, and maybe something else.”
“And this is being developed to power warp-drives, munitions?” Ed Clark asked. “Where’s the priority right now?”
“Right now, I couldn’t tell you,” Bartleby said. “There was a guy working on an antimatter drive for a trip to Alpha Centauri, a few years ago anyway, but he’s a complete idiot. And weapons, yeah, but I think the most attractive application is as a power source for a space-based laser system. And that actually just might work as a weapon to use against alien craft, but as we said earlier, once we become an actual threat, we invite retaliation or more likely preemptive strikes. The Israelis blew up an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1984 to stop Saddam from developing his nuclear weapons program. My point is that power invites power. Power begets power. Power assimilates and corrupts and coopts the people who deploy it. Power protects itself. Where it ends is anybody’s guess, but the handwriting is on the wall.”
“So what you’re saying is that the invasion of the Lizaurian Second Wave could come much earlier than 2011 as a preemptive strike?” Ed Clark asked.
“I’m saying the handwriting is on the wall,” Bartleby replied. “I’d personally be more worried about us accidentally shooting ourselves in the foot than any sort of external threat. I’m sure the government encourages people to focus on things like alien invasions instead of what’s really going on. When a program reaches a certain size, the only way to conceal it is with disinformation. No offense to your listeners. The problem is that with this kind of power, you can’t just shoot yourself in the foot. You’ll blow your whole leg off. Metaphorically speaking.”
“Interesting interesting stuff,” the host said mellifluously. “This is Ed Clark, Sea to Shining Sea, WROZ 1190 AM from Roswell, New Mexico. When we come back, was Frank Sinatra a Traveler? With that kind of charisma, it’s hard to deny, but what does your intuition tell you? But first, is your mattress too firm? Too soft… ?”
DeLuca turned the radio off.
It was crazy, of course, to pay any attention whatsoever to such nonsense. Yet there was something about the way the caller identifying himself as Bartleby spoke that was undeniably credible. He was obviously educated, or at least well read. He wasn’t defensive, he didn’t name the people who were doubting or persecuting him for his ideas, and he hadn’t felt the need to reinforce his statements by naming authorities who believed him or friends who supported him, either, which was how DeLuca usually knew somebody was bullshitting or lying to him.
He made a mental note to have somebody get Ed Clark’s call list for him. As strange as it was going to sound, he kept coming back to a single question—where was Cheryl Escavedo going when she vanished, and why was she going there—what did she want? He knew enough now to know she was running from somebody, frightened, smoking cigarettes and watching with binoculars focused at infinity, but at the same time, as far as he could tell, she hadn’t left a note for anybody, either in the trailer or in the Jeep. People who thought they were going to die left notes. She believed she was going to be all right. Did she believe in UFOs? If she did, did she believe she was going to meet one? In which case, it didn’t matter what DeLuca believed. It only mattered what Cheryl Escavedo might have been thinking. So far, he couldn’t tell if she was running away from something or toward something. Or both. Why Shijingshan? Why Qadzi Deh, whatever that was? And why Bob Fowler?