DELUCA’S PHONE RANG THE FOLLOWING MORNing. He’d risen early to read through the scientific papers Dr. Penelope Burgess had given him. The morning news programs were reporting the crash of a helicopter believed to have been carrying Mexican drug lord Cipriano Cabrera, an attack believed to have been led by rival narcotraficantes hoping to take over the cartel. Mitch Pasternak sounded like he had a cold. DeLuca told him maybe he should see a doctor.
“For a cold?” he said. “With the doctors around here, I’ll end up on my own table. Don’t worry about it—I wear a mask half the day anyway, so when I need to, I can blow my nose without using my hands. I got the results back on the items you sent me. What do you want first?”
“Maybe the hair sample,” DeLuca said.
“Not much there,” Pasternak said. “Female, young, used conditioner. What else do you want to know? No sign of drug use of any kind. Clean as a whistle. Was this person from some sort of ethnic group?”
“Isn’t everyone?” DeLuca asked. “She was Native American.”
“I thought she might be,” Pasternak said. “The piece of beach glass you sent me is a bit more interesting.”
“Because?”
“My first thought was that you were wasting my time. It was a rock, and it was clean, no blood, no hair, not used as a weapon. But it was a strange sort of rock—I had a rock collection as a child. I won first place in my second-grade science fair with it, as a matter of fact. I had a piece of obsidian I used to carry in my pocket that the sample you sent reminded me of. At any rate, I chipped off a piece and ground it into powder to run a spectrographic analysis.”
DeLuca wasn’t sure he liked the way Pasternak teased him along. Gillian just gave it to you straight. On the other hand, Pasternak was much droller, his sense of humor even darker than Gillian’s, if that were possible.
“Can we skip the ‘I’m-so-clever-you-have-to-guess-what-I-know’ part?” DeLuca asked. “I’m kind of on a schedule here.”
“What fun is that?” Pasternak said. “Well okay. My second thought was that you’d sent me a bouillon cube from the primordial soup. It was full of DNA.”
“Can we say whose?”
“We can’t,” Pasternak said. “There’s no point in sending it along to the FBI because it’s not in any sequence. You need intact strands to identify someone. This stuff was scrambled to where an ordinary pathologist might say, ‘Well, it’s organic, but beyond that, we can’t tell.’ You think this was a lightning strike?”
“Something like that,” DeLuca said.
“Well, your lightning bolt or something like that definitely hit something,” Pasternak said. “Using what I have in my lab, it would be hard for an ordinary pathologist to say if the DNA we’ve got came from a cactus or a coyote. Fortunately…”
“You’re not an ordinary pathologist?” DeLuca guessed.
“Exactly,” Pasternak said. “I took another sample and sent it to a friend of mine at Helixa who said he’d run it through one of his amplifiers…”
“That’s the genome project lab in Cambridge?” DeLuca said.
“One of two in the race,” Pasternak said. “NIH was the other, but NIH had a much slower approach, taking the thing in order and moving from one end to the other. The thing Carl Schiffler at Helixa came up with was a way of breaking the chromosome down into its one hundred thousand separate parts, much like the scrambled DNA in the sample you sent me, and then they’d amplify each gene a million times or whatever and then put the whole sequence back together. Anyway, my friend was able to narrow it down a bit. This came from the Sonora Desert, correct, and not from the jungles of Borneo or the Congo?”
“Correct,” DeLuca said. “Near the Mexican border.”
“Well then it’s probably not an orangutan or great ape of some sort,” Pasternak said, “which means it’s human.”
“And this Carl Schiffler guy is certain?” DeLuca asked.
“Carl Schiffler is 100 percent certain of everything he thinks he knows, but he’s not the person I asked,” Pasternak said. “He owns Helixa, but he’s not who I talked to. Carl Schiffler wouldn’t give me the time of day. Or he would, but he’d lie. But yes, my friend is certain.”
“Male or female?”
“Absolutely.”
“So how did it get in the glass?” DeLuca asked. “Could lightning do that?”
“Lightning can do anything,” Pasternak said. “I don’t know if you’re going to remember this, but a couple years ago in South Africa, there was a soccer game, and one of the teams hired a witch doctor to put a hex on the other team, so during the game, the sky clouded over and there was a lightning strike, and all the players on one team got hit. And it’s not like they were all standing in a group—they were spread out all across the field, mixed in with the other players. That’s an absolutely true story. You can look it up.”
“I imagine the witch doctor didn’t have much trouble finding work after that,” DeLuca said.
“He’s probably got his own infomercial,” Pasternak said. “So could lightning fuse sand into glass? Sure. Could that fusion incorporate genetic material? I suppose, though it doesn’t seem likely. I did some research on lightning strikes. We don’t get a lot of those in Boston, so I have no personal experience with lightning victims. Only 10 percent or so are fatal. There’s a guy in Italy who’s been hit six times and he’s still an atheist.”
“You’d think he’d learn to stay indoors anyway,” DeLuca said.
“You would,” Pasternak said. “Maybe he likes it. Maybe he works for the railroads and he’s never had any money.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he’s a poor conductor,” Pasternak said. “Anyway, you get a huge range of variables, depending upon the strength of the strike and the proximity, if it’s a direct hit or a side flash, lots of things. There’ve been cases where the victim suffers first- or second- or even third-degree burns, and others where the victim himself is relatively untouched, but his clothes are burned right off of him. Or her. If I’d have known that was possible in junior high school, I could not have stopped praying for lightning to strike Stephanie Goldbaum. As a rule, burning is minimal, or maybe not minimal, but it’s not like the janitors at the power plants who get fried when their keys get caught in the transformers. Lightning is a current and currents travel on the outer surfaces of things. Burns tend to be associated with the things people are wearing, jewelry, belts, piercings, hats, wet clothing. The air surrounding the bolt heats up to around fifty thousand degrees, which then expands and causes the thunder you hear, but an average stroke of say a million volts, or just under a thousand times what comes out of your sockets at home, and maybe thirty thousand amperes, only lasts .0002 second. They think some bolts get as high as three hundred thousand amps and ten or fifteen million volts, which is probably going to sting, but that’s more the exception than the rule. That’s on the ground. There are discharges of megalightning above the clouds in the form of sprites and blue jets that reach fifty miles into space and carry billions of volts. Somebody who’s hit on the ground, you get heart failure, respiratory paralysis, hearing loss, vision problems, EKG abnormalities, and a whole lot of psychological sequela including memory loss, confusion, inattentiveness, and irritability, which may all come from thinking God hates you, but burns are, well, they’re a part of it, but they’re not the biggest part.”
“So you couldn’t, for example, vaporize a person with a lightning bolt?”
“Vaporize somebody?” Pasternak said, laughing. “My God, who are we worried about—Zeus? I guess my best answer is, I don’t know, but I really don’t think so. You could maybe vaporize a mouse or a rat. I don’t think anybody’s gone out in a lightning storm with a kite and tied the other end to a rat to find out.”
“You don’t know DOD,” DeLuca said. “I can almost guarantee you, someone has.”
He’d just called the radio station WROZ and left a message to ask to speak to Ed Clark, of Sea to Shining Sea, when a chartreuse Neon pulled into the motel parking lot and Sami Jambazian got out, dressed in his own clothes again. DeLuca greeted him warmly and invited him in, handing him a cup of coffee, black with two sugars, the way he knew Sami liked it.
“Thanks, but we’re not allowed to drink caffeine,” Sami said. DeLuca shot him a questioning look. “I’ve been trying to decaffeinate myself for a long time anyway, so I figured I’d go with it. I had a headache for a day but it went away. It’s the not eating meat part that’s hard—I’m so constipated I think I’m gonna blow up. Don’t worry—I’m taking something for it.”
“Welcome back to Earth,” DeLuca said. “You traded the Mercedes for a Neon?”
“It’s the group car,” Sami said. He looked around at all the technology inside the Jet Stream. “Jesus. Nice place you got.”
“We also have Playstation 2 and TiVo. So what do you think? What’s up with the Brethren?”
“It’s interesting,” Sami said. “They’re not stupid. They look like they are, but they’re not. They just really want somebody to lead them. They’re tired, and probably a little naïve. I think for a lot of them, the best part is being told what to wear and eat and drink and think and say, and then they get jobs trimming the rose bushes and it’s like the best vacation they ever had. Something like that. They all really support each other, which maybe looks weird from the outside, but from the inside, it’s all they want. They hug a lot.”
“Don’t forget we love you, too. You have any trouble getting over?”
Sami shrugged and changed his mind about the coffee, filling a cup from the thermos on the table.
“I just told them the story I told you and the guys at poker,” Sami said. “It’s easy when you don’t have to make anything up.”
“How about Rainbow?” DeLuca asked. “What’s the line on her daughter?”
“Rainbow’s a sweet woman,” Sami said. “I like her. What you see is exactly what you get. It’s kind of refreshing, after all the bullshit Carolyn put me through. Whatever. Rainbow literally couldn’t hurt a fly. She stepped on a ladybug yesterday and I thought she was going to commit suicide over it. Her ex-husband treated her pretty bad, and the way she grew up, this is like the first place where she’s really felt loved and accepted. Other than by her daughter.”
“You were trying to tell me something at the lecture,” DeLuca said. “Rainbow was trying to convince me everything was all right. Why was that?”
“I think she was trying to convince herself,” Sami said, pausing as if he was considering what he would say next carefully, or as if he felt uncomfortable continuing. “The best I can tell, Ruby may have been abducted.”
“Did the kidnappers ask for ransom?” DeLuca said. “Whatever it is, I’m sure we have enough in the discretionary fund to pay it, and if we don’t, I can call Captain Martin. What? What’s with the look on your face?”
“I don’t mean that kind of abduction,” Sami said. “I mean she was taken. In a ship. And then they brought her back, but she was so shook up about it that they have her somewhere to debrief her. They told Rain she could see her daughter soon, but they didn’t say when.”
“Just so we’re clear here,” DeLuca said, “when you say taken by a ship, are you talking about a UFO?”
Sami looked at him. DeLuca was surprised. Sami was one of the gruffest, most cynical people he’d ever met—DeLuca knew his friend would not become so emotional unless something serious was on his mind.
“It’s really not easy to talk about some of this shit, you know,” Sami said. “I’m here to help you in any way that I can, David, but it would be nice to think you could be here for me a little bit. I don’t think that’s asking for too much.”
“Jesus, Sami, that goes without saying,” DeLuca said. “Just take your time. I’ll listen to whatever you have to say.”
“It was hard enough, telling you guys at the poker table what I saw that night,” Sami said. “I mean, I knew you were going to give me shit about it, but I thought somebody was going to be maybe the least bit curious. Something really phenomenal happens to you, that’s never happened before, you expect a little more from your friends.”
“It’s not a very sensitive group,” DeLuca said of his weekly poker game. “I think everybody felt maybe a little threatened by what you were saying. Like maybe we were losing you, so giving you shit was everybody’s way of pulling you back toward us.”
DeLuca saw Peggy Romano out the window, walking toward the pool in her bathrobe with a towel over her arm. She waved to them. Sami sipped his coffee.
“What you told us was that the… thing you saw… hung above the road for about a minute and then took off,” DeLuca said. “Was there more to it than that?”
“Yeah, there was,” Sami said. “These guys with the Anguilo crew were driving around in tanker trucks, dumping toxic waste on the dirt roads up south of Monadnock. I had to hang pretty far back because of how empty the roads were, but I had some NVGs to drive with my lights off if I had to. So I see him hit his brakes, and I come up in the dark, and I see him pulled over, he opens his valves, he gets back in and drives away, so I gotta stop and get a sample from the ditch first, and then I can pop him. And if he gets away, it’s okay because I got the license for the truck. So I’m alone in the woods, with my engine off, and it’s really quiet, until I hear this humming sound, and then all of a sudden, I see this bright light, and I look up and there’s a ship right over my head. And… they take me up…”
His voice was shaking, and he had to struggle to slow his breathing.
“It’s all right, Sami,” DeLuca said. “You take your time.”
Sami wiped the corners of his eyes with the folded paper towel DeLuca had given him to use as a coaster.
“This whole deal has been a bit overwhelming for me, I gotta tell ya, David. For the longest time, I thought I was just crazy, and then I thought maybe I wasn’t, but either way, nobody would ever understand. I never heard of this Hilton Jaynes guy until the other night, and I never met anybody else who went through what I did until I met Rainbow and the others. Not all of ’em but a lot of ’em. I can’t really tell you why, but it was a big part of what drove Carolyn and me apart, me knowing something I couldn’t talk to her about. I tried once and she wouldn’t hear it.”
“It must be quite a relief, knowing you’re not alone,” DeLuca said.
“Oh, God,” Sami said, looking as if he was going to cry again. “Yeah. It’s quite a relief.” He took a deep breath and sat up straight in his chair.
“So what happened?” DeLuca asked. “In the ship?”
“Just the usual stuff you hear about,” Sami said. “I know you’re going to think this is nuts, but what they told me was that they were breeding a better race to take over, once we fuck our planet up to where nobody can live here anymore, which they said was about a hundred years off, on the outside, and maybe twenty years on the inside. The way we’re polluting everything.”
“And you’d know,” DeLuca said, “given how you just saw a guy dumping by the side of the road.”
“Yeah,” Sami said. “Exactly.”
“Was that how they put it?” DeLuca asked. “Did they use the phrase, ‘fuck up our planet’? I’m not doubting you, I’m just curious.”
“That’s how they put it,” Sami said. “It seemed kind of funny, at the time. You don’t expect extraterrestrials to curse. I didn’t see anybody because it was too bright, but I heard the voices. Like, inside my head, I heard them. So they did the probes and they took some sperm and then they sent me back. And my memory was like, wow, was that real or did I fall asleep and dream it? Because it was sort of halfway between something you know for real and something you only think you know for real. So I wrote everything down in the car, before I started to lose it. I mean, it was so real, but it was also so strange that you think it can’t be real.”
“So you think Ruby was taken, you said? But she’s back?”
“I was able to star-six-nine Malcolm Percy’s personal phone after Rainbow talked to him and he told her everything was all right, and he’d called his sister in San Antonio, Alexandra, so I had your brother-in-law Tom at Homeland Security pull her recent purchases and whatever—all of a sudden, three days after Ruby disappears, she’s buying American Girl dolls and Lucky Charm cereal and renting Hilary Duff videos. Antonionus won’t tell Rain anything, but I got the address, so we’re driving there tomorrow. I gotta ask you, David—do you believe me? Be honest.”
“I don’t know what I believe,” DeLuca said, though that wasn’t quite true. “I know we all have a things-that-can’t-be-explained category. I thought what Hilton Jaynes said was really interesting, and I know you wouldn’t lie to me, so yeah, I believe you.”
“Okay,” Sami said. “I should get back. If you’re gone too long, they send a tractor beam after you. I’m kidding.”
“I know,” DeLuca said.
“Just so you know,” Sami said, “I can deal with this on my own. I only told you because it’s relevant to the investigation. Otherwise, I’m fine, keeping it to myself.”
DeLuca knew what Sami was trying to tell him.
“Just so you know,” DeLuca said, “this whole conversation is classified, so nobody is going to know except you and me.”
“Walter knows,” Sami said. “You can talk about it with him if you need to. I told him back when it happened. He never said anything, did he?”
“Not a word,” DeLuca said.
“I didn’t think he would,” Sami said. “Do you think maybe Cheryl Escavedo was abducted?”
“Right now I’m thinking she was killed,” DeLuca said. “That’s the way I’m going with this.”
“You said the tracks stopped in the middle of nowhere,” Sami said. “That’s consistent with an abduction.”
“I know,” DeLuca said. “I’m not rejecting the idea of abduction out of hand. I just think there were more reasons why somebody would want to kill her than there were reasons why somebody would want to abduct her. All the usual crap we had to deal with when we worked homicide.”
“Maybe they wanted it to look like an abduction?”
“Or maybe they wanted to lead us toward a conclusion that no one else would believe, as a way of dead-ending us,” DeLuca said.
“Anyway,” Sami said, “I’ll let you know what we find out when we’re in San Antonio.”
When DeLuca opened his e-mail, two messages were of interest. The first was from his son, Scott.
Hey Pops. Hope you’re using sunscreen. It snowed again here today.
By the way, I cleaned up your disk and defragmented your hard drive for you—this thing was running dog slow.
Anyway, to answer your question, sorry, but we had nothing in the sky at three minutes after midnight, a thumb from Orion’s buckle towards five o’clock, or a fist, or an arm, or anywhere close to that. We had a KH-11 in that area about an hour later—are you sure of the time? Maybe you forgot to reset your watch. But even then, there’s no reason why you’d see it and then not see it. My best guess is that you saw some sort of commercial airplane, but I don’t have that data. Maybe Albuquerque air traffic control or Kirtland would have records. Or maybe it was somebody else’s bird, though I tracked all the satellites we know about and came up with zilch there also. Sorry I can’t be of more help.
Coincidentally, I got some news that we lost a Predator over El Paso (approx) just after the drug lord’s helicopter went down, though, of course, that part wasn’t in the papers. I was curious so I logged into IMINT and saw that there was a third helicopter, so I asked about it and a buddy over at SIGINT said one of our milsats picked up a ping from a transponder on the third helicopter, definitely government issue but not coded to any particular carrier, ten seconds before the other two choppers were targeted. Is that interesting? FYI.
Mom says hello. She says to tell you the desert getaway vacation is sounding better and better but she needs a few days’ notice if you still want to do that. A week. She just yelled that to me from the living room. Let me know what else I can do.
Scott
He immediately called Wes Vogel and asked him if he’d managed to get any agents aboard Sergelin’s helicopter, or if perhaps Galiano Diega had somehow managed to attach a GPS transponder to the aircraft. Vogel said no, not to his knowledge, anyway. DeLuca thanked him, then sent Captain Martin an e-mail asking him to poll all the other relevant intelligence agencies ASAP and find out if the CIA or anybody else had an agent on the Russian’s Twinstar.
The other message he’d received was from Walter Ford, an e-mail containing a list of General Koenig’s classmates from prep school. DeLuca recognized three names. One was a famous movie actor. Another was a congressman from California, a representative from the San Diego district named Richard Benson. The third name was that of Malcolm S. Percy. In a postscript, Ford added that the building lost in the earthquake in Beijing was the home of Shijingshan Entertainment, a business that was in the middle of an international intellectual properties lawsuit.
DeLuca wrote a quick e-mail to Dan Sykes, who was due to return some time that afternoon:
Dan,
Here’s a quick one for you, when you have time. Koenig, Brother Antonionus (aka Malcolm Percy) and Rep. Richard Benson (R. Cal.) all went to prep school together. I’m guessing your dad and Benson must be tight. Do you know him? Would you call Benson and chat him up about Koenig/Percy/Decatur Academy? Was there a relationship, etc. Also, what’s the relationship between Benson and Fowler? Just connecting the dots. No picture yet. It would help if the dots were numbered, wouldn’t it?
David
He drove to the University of New Mexico campus after being told by the department secretary who’d answered the phone that Dr. Burgess would be finished teaching at two o’clock. He walked discreetly behind her as a student, an earnest young fellow with a crewcut, followed her from class, pestering her with questions all the way to her office door. When DeLuca knocked, she opened it quickly and said, exasperatedly, “What? Oh. It’s you.”
“Your student left,” DeLuca said. “The coast is clear. I thought you said students avoided you during office hours.”
“Come on in,” Burgess said, smiling and rolling her eyes. “These aren’t my office hours. It’s the goddamn GI Bill. These guys get out of the service and come to school for free, and they’re the best students I have because they’re so disciplined and motivated, but they won’t leave me alone. I had one follow me all the way to my car.”
“Isn’t that what the GI Bill was supposed to be for?” DeLuca said.
“It is,” she agreed. “I just need time to catch my breath once in a while. What can I do for you?”
She was dressed in a white turtleneck sweater and a denim skirt that fell just to the top of the knee-high suede boots she was wearing. She had, DeLuca thought, an interesting way of getting more attractive each time he saw her, not that it meant anything to him—just an observation.
“I read the papers you gave me,” he said. “I was hoping we could talk about them a little bit.”
“All right,” she said, “but I didn’t get a chance to eat before class and I’m starving. Do you eat pizza?”
“I’m Italian,” DeLuca said. “I eat pizza.”
She walked him to a place called Dinardo’s, off-campus but full of students eating slices and pecking away on their laptops or reading books while they ate. DeLuca and Burgess got a booth by the window. Outside, across the street, a group of protesters marched carrying signs saying, US TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ and STOP THE OCCUPATION. After they ordered, Burgess asked him what he thought of the protesters.
“They remind me of myself,” he said. “I marched against Vietnam. I was really young and the war was practically over, but I guess I felt a small sense of accomplishment when it ended. Actually, not when it ended—when Nixon resigned. Which was sort of the same thing, in my mind.”
“You marched against the war but you enlisted anyway?”
“Later,” he said. “It’s a long story.”
“What about now?” she said. “What about the signs?”
“Do I think the Army should get out?” he said. “Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, Doctor…”
“Penny,” she said.
“Penny,” he agreed. “And I’m David. I was saying, don’t get me wrong about one thing—I have a lot of good friends in the Army and they’re good men who do the toughest job on earth extremely well. My only problem is that the Army is really good at one thing, and that’s blowing stuff up, but after you conquer a country, you don’t want the Army anymore. War’s a mess and it’s a bitch to straighten everything out afterward, and I know because that’s exactly what I was doing over there, but it just seems to me that once we kicked Saddam out, we didn’t know what to do next. It seemed like every time I helped rebuild a school or get a hospital’s generator restarted, some insurgent would blow up a car and then the Army would come in and level the building. And how else do you respond? Maybe I don’t know how you win hearts and minds, but I don’t think you do it by blowing stuff up. The Army fights fire with fire. I think you fight fire with water. I think maybe if we had a civil reconstruction corps that was as well trained and equipped as the Fourth Army and maybe with as many numbers to do the job, we could avoid what we’ve got now. But what do I know.”
“You were there,” she said. “You know more than I do.” She gestured out the window. “And more than they do. I have wondered if farming out the reconstruction jobs to the lowest bidders was such a good idea.”
“Halliburton was the lowest bidder?” DeLuca said. “That’s news to me.”
“You wanted to talk about my work?” she said.
“Mostly I want to ask a whole lot of stupid questions,” he said. “Just to clear some things up in my head.” He’d meant to talk with her even before his conversation with Sami, but the talk with Sami had added a few new dimensions to his line of inquiry. “I promise I won’t follow you to your car.”
“You, I’d welcome,” she said. “Ask away.”
“Well,” he said, “from what I understand, this probe you’re developing to detect life on Mars is sort of like an electronic sniffer. Is that a fair categorization? I say that because when I was in Iraq, actually, we had recon teams with sniffers to look for biologicals and chemical agents—my understanding of how they worked was that they collect the chemical elements in the air, all the spores and bacteria and viral particles, and then they break them down into their molecular parts and give each molecular building block an electrical charge so that it can be read, and then they compare that signature against the ones stored in the onboard computer. And from reading your paper, it sounded to me like the probe you’re building is something more sophisticated but similar. Is that right?”
She smiled.
“You’re very perceptive,” she said. “My husband told me ten years ago that I should have patented the work I did on that. Yes, the sniffers you used in Iraq were more or less developed from work a number of us started as graduate students, actually. I never expected my work would ever have a defense application…”
“Given that it could save millions of lives some day,” DeLuca said, “I think you should be pleased. But that’s essentially what you’re sending to Mars?”
“Essentially,” she said. “Although after we compare the particles we find to what we already know, we’re going to have to compare them to what we don’t already know, because life there may not fit the definitions we have of life here. The program is going to have to be adaptable.”
He noticed that the girl at the booth next to them was crying while the boy she was with held her hands. She was getting dumped, apparently. The girl looked like a sorority sweetheart. The boy had Elvis sideburns, pierced eyebrows, and a tattoo on the back of his neck of some Chinese character. DeLuca suspected she’d land on her feet.
“And you use lasers to read the molecular particles,” he said.
“That’s right,” Burgess said.
“I’m interested in what lasers can do,” he said. “Just sort of generally speaking. How they can measure things and affect things.”
“Okay,” she said. “I suppose I know a little bit about that.”
“Your husband was working with lasers, too, right?” DeLuca said.
“Rather different kinds of lasers, but yes,” she said. “He was.”
“So let me just ask you,” he said. “So I can get a picture in my head. Generally speaking. Energy is energy, and it takes different forms at different wavelengths, but it’s all the same thing, right? Microwaves, infrared, X-rays, radio signals, they can all be lased, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“And at low power levels, like what you’re talking about, you can read the feedback you get from a molecular building block and tell what it is, right?”
“You can measure certain properties of the electrical field surrounding it,” she said.
“And everybody generates an electrical field, right?” he said. “That’s what sharks have in their noses to detect prey in the water. They can read the electrical field of an injured fish, or something like that, right?”
“You probably know more about sharks than I do,” she said. “All I know is what I see on the Discovery channel. But yes to your question about electrical fields.”
“And CAT scans and PET scans measure the electrical activity of various tissues and parts of the body,” he said. “Isn’t that how they work?”
“I believe it is,” she said. “If you want to drastically simplify it.”
“Drastically simple is the best I can do,” DeLuca said. “And to read something, lasers send a pulse and then they measure how that pulse is modified by the return. That’s how the scanners at the supermarket work, reading the bar code.”
“Again, to drastically simplify, I suppose the answer is yes. You can also phase the signals from one or more lasers to watch what happens at the interface.”
“That’s good,” DeLuca said. “And the lasers in your Mars probe can adjust the wavelength to send different pulses to measure different things, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“So in theory, just in theory,” he said, “could you use a laser to identify a person by his electrical field?”
“In theory, you could,” she said, “though he’d have to be isolated from surrounding fields. That’s why we’ve been doing the work we’ve been doing in caves, and at Sinkhole. Past tense. Sinkhole was a government neutrino lab deep underground, connected to the Carlsbad system. Shut down now. You need to work in places like that. Though I suppose the bigger the computers get, the more easily we’ll be able to pull discrete data from a larger field of conflicting information. It’s kind of like hearing one voice in a roaring crowd.”
“But in theory, you could do it,” he said. “Say, with a person standing all alone in the desert, as opposed to us sitting here in this restaurant?”
“In theory, yes.”
“You know, the Army is working with a tactical microwave beam for crowd control,” he said, “part of the nonlethal initiative, where they can use a dish mounted on top of a truck to zap a crowd with microwaves to get it to disperse. Apparently people feel like their skin is burning and it’s quite uncomfortable, so they run away. Have you heard of this?”
“I think I read about it in the paper,” she said. “I remember wondering, if they had such a thing to deliver energy at nonlethal doses to disperse crowds, what was stopping them from increasing the power until they were working with lethal doses?”
“I wouldn’t think anything is stopping them,” DeLuca said. “My understanding was that at the tested power level, it only affects the target’s skin. So, in theory, you could develop a laser, or tune a laser, to only affect a particular kind of body tissue. The way they use ultrasound to break up kidney stones but leave the kidneys alone.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it might be possible.”
“So in theory,” he said, “suppose the target was a cornstalk—could you focus or tune or phase a laser to destroy or denature the cell walls in a cornstalk, without hurting the rest of the plant?”
“You mean, could you use a laser to make crop circles?”
“Yes.”
“I think you could.”
“Burn the lips and udders off a cow?”
“Yes.”
“Could you hit a person with an energy beam that might affect only the rectal or vaginal tissues, to give him a warm feeling that makes him feel like he’s been probed?” he asked her. She looked him in the eye for a moment.
“I guess you could,” she said. “You could probably even project the image of the Virgin Mary onto the side of a building.”
“But why would you want to do that?” he said. “Why would you want to use technology to mislead people?”
“Maybe just because you can,” she said.
“Could a laser cause an earthquake?”
“No,” she said. “At least I don’t think so. Earthquakes are caused by the release of subterranean pressures. Lasers can’t cause subterranean pressures. Or release them. I don’t see how.
“One last question,” he said. “The lasers in your probe work at very close range. What limits the range?”
“There are a number of variables,” she said. “One is the amount of power you need to generate and sustain. And the sensitivity of the measuring instruments. The dosages of the X-rays you get at the dentist or in a hospital are vastly smaller than what they were twenty years ago. ”
“That’s interesting,” DeLuca said. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“I don’t see how,” she said. “The last I knew, you were looking for a missing girl. What does any of this have to do with that?”
He couldn’t tell her what he was really thinking—he was really thinking that Cheryl Escavedo had been zapped, vaporized, erased from the planet by a powerful weapon that no one knew was up there, one that could, at any instant, zap and/or vaporize anybody Darkstar deemed a threat.
“I don’t know,” he lied. “Like I said, I just ask a lot of stupid questions and then wait for the answers to become less stupid in my head. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.”
“I think you could have been a good scientist,” she told him. “Do you mind if I take the leftover pizza home? I can always zap it in the microwave for a midnight snack. Unless you think using the microwave is too dangerous.”
“It’s all yours,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”
When he checked his messages, he learned that Ed Clark had called him back, saying only that he’d be on the air tonight and could possibly talk tomorrow. DeLuca decided that tomorrow would be too late. It was two hundred miles to Roswell, but it was only four in the afternoon—he could be there by seven, he estimated, or earlier if the roads were as straight and as bleak and empty as he expected they’d be.
They were. He made Roswell by seven-fifteen, delayed by a speeding ticket he picked up along the way. He passed a number of UFO-related tourist traps on his way into town, including a place claiming to have an exact replica of the alien body taken from the UFO crash in 1947, as well as a motel called the Ali-Inn and, of course, the International UFO Museum and Research Center. There was a fantasy bookstore and a place selling telescopes and related material to help you spot the visitors from other planets before they spotted you. He picked up a sandwich at an Albertsons and headed for the radio station, a small single-story white building in the middle of nowhere, at a crossroads in the desert that was technically in the town of Dexter. The radio tower reached high into the starlit sky, its red warning light blinking a thousand feet above the ground, which explained how WROZ was able to broadcast from “sea to shining sea.” An awning protruded from the side of the building to form a carport, and beneath it, two lawn chairs. No one answered when DeLuca knocked on the front door of the radio station. When he went around the side, he found a second door that was open. He knocked again and didn’t get an answer, so he let himself in.
The hallway was lined with metal shelving overflowing with books and tapes and paperwork, with a light coming from a room at the end of the hall. There, he saw an empty office, one wall to the office a large glass window, and beyond that, the broadcast booth, where a sixtyish gentleman in a white cowboy hat was talking into a vintage microphone, earphones covering his ears, which was why he hadn’t heard when DeLuca knocked. When DeLuca waved to him, the man held up a single finger and continued talking into the microphone. The radio feed was playing over a loudspeaker, a commercial Clark was reading for an Indian art gallery in downtown Roswell. When he was finished, he plugged a tape cartridge into the player. DeLuca heard a conversation going on between Clark and a caller. The man in the cowboy hat rose from his chair and opened the door to the office. He was wearing a khaki safari jacket over a denim shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots.
“Ed Clark,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
DeLuca noticed that the man had a small pistol in a holster that snapped onto his belt, the weapon worn at the hip. He could understand why someone might want protection, working all alone in the middle of nowhere.
“I thought your show was live,” DeLuca said. “I don’t know why, but I guess I’m surprised.”
“If Garrison Keillor can do reruns, why can’t I?” Clark said.
“I’m David DeLuca,” DeLuca said. “I left you a message.”
“Ah yes,” Clark said gruffly. “Mr. DeLuca. I know who you are, and I know who you work for.”
DeLuca had worked with deluded people before, particularly in his capacity investigating crimes in eldercare homes when he was attached to the state police in Massachusetts. Sometimes you could get more useful information from them if you just played along. Antagonism, on the other hand, rarely got you anywhere.
“Well in that case, you know why I’m here,” he said.
“I think I do, but why don’t you tell me?” Clark said.
“Why don’t you tell me?” DeLuca said. “I told them if anybody was going to know about this, it would be Ed Clark. They said you’re just guessing.”
“And what’d you say to that?” Clark asked.
“I said if he’s guessing, then I wanted to know who was doing the math because the odds of being right so many times had to be astronomical.”
Ed Clark eyed him suspiciously for a moment, then took a briar pipe from one of his jacket pockets and a plastic pouch of tobacco from the other, filling the pipe with coarsely cut tobacco and tamping it in with his finger.
“This is about the robots, isn’t it?” he said. DeLuca nodded solemnly. “Let’s talk outside.”
DeLuca followed him. Under the carport, Clark struck a kitchen match against the cinderblock wall of the station and lit his pipe, exhaling several large clouds of smoke before drawing one he could savor. He gazed at the sky.
“See anything interesting up there?” DeLuca asked him.
“If I did, I wouldn’t have to tell you, now would I?” Clark said.
“I suppose not,” DeLuca said.
“Is it what I think it is?” Clark said. “One got loose, didn’t it?”
“I think you know why I can neither confirm nor deny that,” DeLuca said.
“And you’re the animal catcher,” Clark said. “Is that it?”
“I can’t confirm that either,” DeLuca said, “but if I was, and you were in a position to help me, would you?”
“Hypothetically?” Clark said.
“Hypothetically,” DeLuca said.
“And why would I help you?” Clark asked.
“I think you know why,” DeLuca said. “There’s always a quid pro quo, isn’t there? And it’s not like it’s the first time, is it?”
“No, it isn’t,” Clark said. “What can I do for you?”
DeLuca stared up into the sky.
“Just supposing I was the ‘animal catcher’?”
“Just supposing,” Clark said, drawing thoughtfully on his pipe.
“We were monitoring your show the other night,” he said. “As we always do.”
Clark nodded, saying nothing.
“We think he called you. He identified himself as ‘Bartleby.’ By now you must have developed a sixth sense about whether your callers are human or not.”
“I’m pretty good,” Clark said. “Though I suppose every now and then somebody slips past me. Mostly it’s in the diction and the word choice. Some people still think androids can’t use contractions.”
DeLuca laughed.
“I thought he sounded pretty darn smart for a human,” Clark said. “Not that aliens aren’t free to call my show. Or robots. I just like them to identify themselves. I don’t like getting jacked around.”
“Of course. No one does,” DeLuca said. “The problem is that he rerouted the matrix so that we couldn’t trace the call.”
“As you programmed him to do,” Clark said. “And now the chickens are coming home to roost.”
“Go ahead and tell me you told me so,” DeLuca said. “But when you’re done, I need your call logs from the show. Or was that a tape, too?”
“That was live,” Clark said. “I’ll get you the logs. Just answer me one question.”
“What is it?”
“How’d he get loose?”
“If we knew that, I probably wouldn’t be here,” DeLuca said. “Right now he’s fighting his homing program. We think he learned the budget was being cut, so he acted out of pure self-preservation and ran off. If he manages to recode his homing program, there’s no telling where he’ll go.”
“I’ll tell you where he’ll go,” Clark said.
“Where?” DeLuca said.
“Where else? Washington, D.C. To blend in with all the other robots. And maybe to take down the president. Or whoever is cutting his budget.”
“If you’re right,” DeLuca said, “then that’s a chance we can’t afford to take.”
Clark ambled back into the station, limping slightly, favoring his right side. When he returned, he handed DeLuca a pink phone message memo with the name Bartleby written on it and a number. DeLuca looked at it.
“That number’s from Chloride, New Mexico,” Ed Clark said, pointing with his pipe stem. “’Bout two hundred miles due west. But you gotta go around White Sands.”
“I know where Chloride is,” DeLuca said. “And I think I know where Bartleby is. Thanks for all your help.”
The old man looked at him expectantly. DeLuca wondered what he could possibly be expecting.
“Well?” the old man said at last.
“Well what?” DeLuca said.
“Aren’t you going to wipe my memory?”
“Oh, that,” DeLuca said. “Not until the mission is over. Until then, this conversation never took place. There’s a chance he’ll call back or even… pay you a visit, in which case that pea gun on your hip isn’t going to do a damn thing. If he calls again or if you see anything, I want you to be fully aware, and I want you to call me.” He gave Clark his phone number, but for his personal satellite phone and not for the encrypted one. It was just a hunch.
“What do you mean, if I see anything?” Clark said. “You don’t think he’d come here, do you?”
“Hey—this is just a hypothetical conversation, Ed,” DeLuca said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“But as long as I carry the memory of it,” Clark said, “I’m not safe, am I? Because now I’m a threat. And you guys are just going to leave me here for bait, aren’t you?”
“Oh, come on, Ed,” DeLuca said with an exaggerated wink as he headed for his car. “You know we don’t work that way.”
At the intersection of Routes 380 and 70, DeLuca stopped to look at the map. It was too late to head back to Albuquerque, and he was tired, and Chloride wasn’t exactly on the way but it wasn’t entirely out of the way either, so he headed west on 70. As he drove, he called Peggy Romano and had her reverse-search the phone number Ed Clark had given him. She told him it was for a Circle K convenience store on Route 52, at the edge of the Gila Wilderness. He also asked her to set up another appointment for him with General Koenig—it was time for another visit, but this time, he had enough information to make the conversation interesting. “What am I—your receptionist, now?” Romano asked him. “By the way, Ben Yutahay called. He didn’t say what it was about but I gave him your direct number, so check your voice mail.”
When he checked, Yutahay sounded hoarse.
“Hello, David,” he said. “Listen, I was wondering if you could do me a favor. My son, Marvin, was supposed to come to dinner two days ago, but he never showed up and he didn’t call and I can’t seem to reach him on his phone. He usually checks in, but not always. I know you can find out if he’s used his phone and things like that, so I was hoping you could look into it, if you have time. It’s probably nothing, but he’s all I’ve got, so I guess I get a little more worried than I probably should. Thanks.”
DeLuca called Peggy Romano back and asked her to run an electronic search for Marvin Yutahay. If he’d used his phone or a credit card or an ATM card in the last forty-eight hours, she’d know.
He drove into the darkness of the high desert, the sky above him an enormous canopy of stars, and no moon anywhere to wash them out. The night was beautiful, and yet after a few minutes, driving into utter nowhere, the landscape a big blank as far as the eye could see, he started to feel just a bit paranoid—maybe it was the coffee he’d drunk, but he caught himself wishing he had more than just his police .38 and his Army-issue Beretta. He wished he had somebody in the car with him, or somebody to talk to on the phone. He kept thinking that he was being watched, followed, tracked, measured, analyzed, and that at any moment or second, in a flash of light so sudden he’d never even see it, he could vanish without a trace, like the sailor who gets knocked overboard and sinks into the middle of the wine-dark sea.
Marvin Yutahay was probably camped out somewhere beyond the reach of cell phones and satellite dishes, but he was a big boy who could take care of himself. Maybe he’d had car trouble, or maybe he’d met a girl who’d taken him back to her place and wasn’t finished with him yet.
DeLuca turned on the radio, just for company, and found 1190 on the dial.
“I had an interesting visitor tonight,” Ed Clark was saying calmly. “Of course I can’t tell you who it was or what planet he was from, but in case anything should happen to me, I’ve written…”
He turned the radio off—he’d given Ed Clark all the time and attention he intended to give him for one night.
The weather turned as he headed into the high country, the sky clouding over, which made him feel no more secure—the best surveillance satellites had been able to image through clouds for some time. When it started to snow, he turned on his wipers and let up on the gas, slowing down when the road began to slip beneath his wheels. He was dog-tired. He wondered if a town the size of Chloride even had a motel. He considered calling Peggy Romano and asking her to find out, but he knew she’d probably chew his head off for using her as a travel agent. He hoped he was close, because a quick check of the gas gauge told him he was down to a quarter of a tank. He’d just stifled his third prolonged yawn in a row when something suddenly loomed in his headlights.
He slammed on his brakes, but his tires failed to bite, the car fishtailing, the shape directly ahead of him motionless, an image caught in his headlights for a split second, two large eyes reflecting back the light from his headlights, before he struck it with his right front fender just as it appeared to leap, the thing flying over the hood of the car and bouncing off the windshield to land somewhere behind him.
He stopped.
He got out, leaving the car idling by the side of the road.
About twenty feet behind the car, illuminated in the red of the Taurus’s taillights, he found a large female mule deer lying on its side, breathing heavily, its big brown eyes full of fear as it lifted its head. It tried to move but couldn’t. DeLuca knelt next to it. It was a doe, her antlers having molted, in their place only soft fuzzy stubs. He felt her legs for broken bones, but she didn’t seem to feel pain when he touched her. He felt her ribs and noticed something else—she was pregnant, her belly distended, with something kicking inside.
“Shhh,” he said in a soothing voice, trying to quiet the animal. “You’re going to be all right. I don’t know any first aid for deer, but I’m going to call somebody who does.”
His words seemed to have an effect. For a moment, all seemed calm. He heard only the car running, and the delicate sibilance of snowflakes falling on pine needles.
Using his personal SATphone, he was dialing directory assistance with the intention of calling the state police when he noticed something odd, a disturbance in the air overhead, as if he were looking at the northern lights shimmering, but closer—and how was it that the aurora borealis might penetrate the cloud cover?
He heard a buzzing sound, and then a disk of brilliant white light descended from the clouds, the ship (for there was really no other way to describe it) perhaps fifty feet across, hovering above the road, maybe two hundred yards in front of the car. In brief bursts, beams of light shot from the saucer to the ground, scanned a moment, then stopped, as if the ship were searching for something with a spotlight. It was moving away, at first, then reversed direction, moving toward him, just as the deer struggled to its feet. DeLuca held it tight, his arms around the animal’s neck.
The ship continued its search. DeLuca had no time to think of a better plan, so he took the chain bearing his dog tags from around his neck, used the strap attached to his cell phone to tie the phone to the chain, dialed the first number from his contact list and looped the chain around the deer’s neck. As the ship drew closer, he dived under his car, concealing as much of his body as possible beneath the still-running engine, even though it was a tight fit and the exhaust manifold burned his leg. The heat from the engine would mask his infrared signature, and the electrical field would mask his own. The deer stood fixed in the roadway.
“Go!” DeLuca shouted.
The animal didn’t move.
He grabbed a handful of snow and gravel and threw it at the animal. This time it took off, running into the woods, limping heavily on its right front leg. It had gotten perhaps thirty or forty yards from the road when a beam of light caught it, and then, in a flash, the animal was gone, leaving behind only a cloud of steam that quickly dissipated. DeLuca was reminded of the old magician acts where the guy would throw down a smoke bomb and vanish into thin air.
He watched from beneath the car. He dared not move, holding his ground. The saucer scanned the area where the deer had been, drawing closer. When it was directly overhead, a circle of light surrounded the car, melting the snow that had fallen on the road. The ship lingered a moment longer, then, apparently satisfied, moved on, continuing to scan the road in brief bursts of light.
Another hundred yards down the road, the saucer turned off its lights and lifted suddenly into the sky.
DeLuca waited a long time beneath the car. The temptation was to get into the car and drive away as quickly as possible, but it was a temptation he couldn’t afford to give in to. Two hours was the approximate dwell window of the milsats that overflew Iraq, but he couldn’t wait that long. His other problem was that if the car ran out of gas, he could find himself in trouble of a different sort. He still had his encrypted phone, but he didn’t dare use it until he’d talked with Peggy Romano to make sure it was still safe to do so. Finally, after perhaps thirty minutes, he crawled out.
He dusted himself off and stood motionless beside the car, sniffing the air, listening, watching the sky, the light snow still falling. He grabbed a flashlight from the car and went to where he’d last seen the deer, but there was nothing, no deer, no phone, and only the faintest smell of burned hair in the air. If the ground had been scorched, the falling snow had already covered it up.
He shut off his flashlight and walked back to the car. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen. He knew what he was supposed to believe he’d seen, but that and what had actually transpired were often two very different things.