“Send him in.”
Marsh rose from his chair, turning toward an elegant section of wood-paneled wall as it parted into a doorway, allowing a huge man dressed in black 5.11 tactical gear to enter. Rathman stood as close to seven feet as six, even without combat boots. He was strangely and utterly hairless, not from birth, Marsh had read in his dossier, but from the heat wave loosed from a terrorist bomb. He had no eyebrows or hair and his arms bared beneath a tight short-sleeve T-shirt looked slathered in oil. The heat had been so intense that it had burned off Rathman’s tattoos as well, something Marsh hadn’t thought possible, leaving a patchwork of embroidered scars behind.
Then again, Marsh’s entire life’s work was based around what nobody thought possible.
“A pleasure to meet you, Colonel.”
Rathman came to a rigid halt ten feet before Marsh, virtually standing at attention. “And you, sir.”
“You saw duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“I did, sir. Eight tours.”
“Which ended rather unceremoniously in your discharge. What was the procedure called again?”
“It was called an Article Thirty-Two hearing,” Rathman explained routinely, no trace of embarrassment or indignation in his voice. “I accepted a nonjudicial punishment in exchange for agreeing to resign my commission.”
“And this was over the alleged murder of civilians.”
“There was nothing alleged about it, sir. But ‘civilian’ is a variable term. My superiors didn’t see them the same way I did.”
“But, then, your superiors weren’t there, were they?”
“No, Mr. Marsh, they were not. The rules of engagement, apparently, had changed, while I didn’t.”
Marsh followed Rathman’s gaze as it swept the office, his eyes flashing like a camera, seeming to record everything he saw.
“Anything strike you as odd, Colonel?”
Rathman looked toward the sprawling window offering a majestic view of the sea and waves beyond. “We’re inland, sir. The Pacific Ocean is hundreds of miles away.”
Marsh waved a hand before an unseen sensor. Instantly the seascape vanished, replaced by a tranquil mountain scene with mist riding the peak.
“Is this more to your liking? You see, Colonel, I don’t believe in windows. The ability to see out brings with it the ability to see in. Windows create vulnerability, and against the enemy we face there can be no vulnerability.”
Rathman stiffened a bit at that, his expression flirting with a smile.
“How much do you know about what you’re doing here, Colonel?” Marsh continued.
“I know you’re building a private army.”
“And its purpose?”
The big man shrugged. “Armies only have one purpose.”
“You believe we’re going to war.”
“You wouldn’t be talking to a man like me, sir, if that wasn’t your intention. War is what I do and I do it well.”
“As your experience in black ops would definitely attest to. You haven’t asked about our enemy.”
“Because I don’t care. You point me toward them and I do as I’m told. That means people are going to die, since that’s what I do.”
“You’re only partially correct, Colonel.”
Rathman’s expression narrowed, self-assurance replaced by sudden uncertainty.
“We’re going to war, all right,” Marsh continued, “but not against people. They may act like us, even look like us but, make no mistake about it, they are not us. Would you like to see how I know that, where it all began? Come, allow me to show you.…”
34
GUARDIAN
“ANOTHER?” THE BARTENDER ASKED, tipping the whiskey bottle forward as a prod.
Raiff eased his glass out to meet it halfway, a sign of concession as well as necessity. Nothing stood out more than a man not drinking in a bar like this, which was short on swank but long on atmosphere. That is, if you considered atmosphere to include warped floors, dim lighting, and the residue of too much hopelessness hanging in the hazy air in the form of a musty combination of odors.
Raiff sipped his drink, thinking maybe he should add some ice this round. The bar featured a mirror back with several cracks denoting a whole bunch of years of bad luck for somebody. A thick layer of grime coated the glass, obscuring the reflections of those caught to the point of muddling their features into unrecognizable. But it was enough for Raiff to track motion, and motion was a better giveaway and predictor of intentions anyway, especially bad ones.
Raiff was a Guardian, or what the Trackers who made it their life’s work to find him called Zarim. He’d taken the name Raiff, first name Clay, from a gravestone years before in a town whose name he couldn’t recall. The deceased was about his age and clearly in no position to protest. Back then it had been much easier to build entire identities around little more than that; a trip to the local town hall to obtain a duplicate birth certificate was normally all it took. A thing of the past. Computers had changed the world, all right, making it just about impossible to live off the grid because the grid encompassed everything these days.
Raiff had learned that places like this were the best in which to hide in plain sight. He’d watched the way the regulars regarded him, studying and memorizing it so he’d have a match with any similar looks cast by other strangers who may have come here on his tail. His own personal early-warning system.
Raiff cared little about place and only slightly more about time. As a Guardian, he had one task to perform and one task only. Whether he’d ever actually be called upon and, if so, when and under what circumstances, remained the quandary confronting him every day. He knew only that his mission was crucial to the survival of two worlds, not one, but it was this one that was currently facing the most jeopardy.
Raiff took another sip of whiskey and felt the cell phone vibrate in his pocket. The Watchers were the only ones who had his number and checked in normally on a regular basis. So he thought little of it, as he eased the phone out and up, ready to text back the standard reply when he saw the message was anything but standard.
THE DANCER’S IN THE LIGHT
The code was birthed by a Bruce Springsteen song, “Dancing in the Dark.” For more days and nights than Raiff chose to count, the Watchers would send him the same message, indicating the subject the Guardians were charged with protecting was safe:
THE DANCER’S IN THE DARK
Of course, it hadn’t been a text message at first; that had come later, not quite a decade in the past around the time the Dancer celebrated his eighth birthday. The Watchers didn’t watch him all the time; that would be too risky, given the chance they themselves were being watched. But they watched the boy enough to be certain he was safe, the truth of his being and identity secure. Anytime when they weren’t certain, a Guardian got the call. Not always Raiff, not even most of the time. Back then there hadn’t been any Trackers yet. Or, if there were, they’d yet to begin their murderous purge.
Raiff knew the crazed man who was their leader, at least from sight. All crazy men were dangerous, but the ones with the resources to back up their twisted thoughts and visions promised the worst peril. When the Trackers first surfaced, and both Guardians and Watchers found themselves targeted for summary execution, it quickly became clear that they had a new and equally dangerous enemy. A man committed to eradicating them at all costs, with no sense that he might well be laying the groundwork for the destruction of his own world in the process.
Langston Marsh.
And now the work of Marsh’s minions had left Raiff as the only Guardian still standing, placing the responsibility for Dancer’s continued well-being squarely with him.
THE DANCER’S IN THE LIGHT
Raiff was regarding that message again when he spotted the figures in the mirror glass.
35
THE MEMORY ROOM
“I CALL THIS MY Memory Room,” Langston Marsh told Rathman, his voice echoing slightly in the larger confines of
the sprawling space that looked like an exhibit hall.
He noticed that the big man had a round, soft-looking face. A baby’s face riding atop a hulk’s body, save for neat, thin red lines crisscrossing both cheeks that looked like nail impressions. Four on each side as if someone had dug all their fingers home at once, clawing at him
“The place where I keep all my pain to remind me of the task at hand,” Marsh continued.
Overhead lights had snapped on upon their entry, cued by some sensor. The floor before them, looking to be about half a football field in size and stretching up two stories, was lined with regularly spaced museum-like objects, one of which was instantly identifiable: the wreckage of what looked like an aircraft, a sleek fighter of a kind he’d never seen before. Its reassembled remnants looked similar to a much scaled down version of the old B-52 Flying Fortress, the massive sentinels that had protected the U. S. against surprise attack for generations.
“Recognize it, Colonel?” Marsh asked as they approached the display, which resembled a funeral pyre more than an artifact of military history.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
“That’s because there’s no record of its existence. This is one of only three prototypes of the design ever manufactured as part of Project Blue Book.”
“Project Blue Book?”
“Goes back to 1947, Colonel. My father was a World War Two fighter pilot assigned to an experimental division in White Sands, New Mexico.” Marsh stretched a hand out as if to touch the wreckage, then pulled it back sharply. “He was flying this craft when it was shot down.”
“In 1947? Two years after the war was over?” asked a befuddled Rathman.
“Only that war,” Marsh told him. “My father’s division was scrambled. Three of these went up and one managed to shoot down the craft that destroyed my father’s plane with a kind of pulse weapon that would still be cutting-edge today.”
“I’ve never heard of any of this, sir.”
“Of course you haven’t. It took place in July of 1947 over Roswell, not far from the site of what would become Area Fifty-one.” Marsh hesitated, holding Rathman’s tightly focused stare. “My father wasn’t killed by the Germans or Japanese, Colonel. His plane was shot down by aliens.”
* * *
“That’s who the war I’ve been fighting for years is against,” Marsh resumed. “If you don’t believe in the cause, then you’re the wrong man for the job.” He hesitated. “I know that the enemy is among us, impossible to identify visually because they look exactly like us. Do you believe me?”
“I don’t need to believe you or in anything, sir. I just need to be given something to kill.”
Marsh’s lips flirted with a smile. Yes, Rathman was the right man for the job, all right, carefully culled from dozens of candidates. The one common denominator those candidates held was death, lots of it by their own making. Men who were not only no strangers to killing but had become intimately familiar with the act to the point where no degree of it would trouble them.
Like Rathman.
Marsh stopped before the remnants of his father’s plane and ran his hand in tender fashion along it. The steel wasn’t just cold, it was frigid. Though Marsh knew this always to be a trick of imagination, he let that same imagination conjure up visions of some alien weapon leaving its icy residue forever embedded in the jagged wreckage.
Explosions were traditionally thought of as hot, searing. But maybe alien explosions were the exact opposite, icy cold. Who knew what their air was like, after all? Their entire world could, likely did, operate on different principles.
“They’ve been among us since the very dawn of civilization,” Marsh told Rathman, not bothering to gauge the level of the man’s skepticism. All his troops started out that way and each arrived at their ultimate moment of realization in their own time. “But there is reason to believe plans are being laid for an invasion. Call it a surprise attack, an intergalactic Pearl Harbor.”
Marsh held on to the tip of what was left of a single wing of the fighter in which his father had died. It felt like the bottom of an ice cube tray. He thought for an instant if he squeezed his hand, the steel would compress in his grasp, all spongy and soft, the molecular composition altered by whatever weapon the aliens had used to down it. But he shook off the illusion as quickly as it had formed in his mind.
“I call them Zarim,” Marsh said, exaggerating the reem syllable as he swung around abruptly enough to almost draw a rise from Rathman. “Have you heard the term before?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s biblical. The general translation is ‘outsiders’ or ‘strangers.’ But another interpretation refers to the Zarim more like creditors or criminals known for seizing the possessions of others. Usurping their worlds, swallowing their identities. That’s what will happen to us, to our world, Colonel, if we don’t act. So we hunt them down. We hunt the Zarim down and kill them before they can kill us. Does that concern you at all? Do my words make you rethink your presence here?”
Rathman seemed to ponder that briefly. “These Zarem—”
“Za-reem.”
“—do they bleed when you kill them?”
“They do indeed. Just like us. Strangely. They look just as we do. It’s how they’ve managed to walk among us undetected for so long.”
“Then how do you—”
Marsh felt his phone vibrating and jerked it from the clip on his belt, the rest of the big man’s question lost to him as he read the text message on his screen.
“Ah, it appears one of my teams is closing on the latest target now.”
36
A BIG STICK
THEY’D JUST ENTERED THE bar, dragging the night’s chill in with them, something all wrong about their eyes. Not their actual eyes, more the way they looked about. Raiff was a firm believer in patterns, the comfort zones in which the behaviors of people nestled. You walked into a bar, you looked for a table, booth, or stool to do your drinking, and you made a beeline for it.
But the men who entered this bar swept their gazes about without that priority in mind. The four of them were big and broad and wore long, dark coats baggy enough to conceal any weapons held beneath. Trackers for sure, then, as opposed to the other enemy committed to Raiff’s destruction. Flesh and blood as opposed to steel and cable, dispatched by Langston Marsh with no clue about the war into which he had inserted himself. If the modern-day Fifth Column commanded by that madman succeeded, they would effectively be ensuring the demise of their own world.
Raiff was considering that irony when he spotted the first pair of eyes falling upon him, lingering there. The man started toward him, the three others quickly falling into step. Raiff was proficient, expert, even, in the use of any weapon, all manner of guns and knives included, but he most preferred the one that had accompanied him here eighteen years before.
Speak softly and carry a big stick.
Teddy Roosevelt had said that, one of Raiff’s all-time favorite characters lifted from this world’s history. He read a lot, especially loved reading about men he considered heroes for one reason or another. Raiff’s stick, meanwhile, was nothing like the one Teddy had been thinking of when he coined his famous phrase. It had been formed of subatomic, programmable particles based on nanotechnological principles. The particles responded to his thinking on command, first lengthening into baton size and then either hardening to the texture and weight of titanium steel or softening to be more like a whip. Raiff’s mind could sharpen the stick to a razor’s edge capable of cutting a man, or drone, in half.
For now he left it dull and hard, like a cop’s nightstick. He continued to follow the Trackers in the mirror, their approach slowing when he failed to respond as uncertainty entered the picture. He was just baiting them, of course, but the Trackers could just as easily have thought they were closing in on the wrong target, in which case the right one could be getting them in his sights right now.
Raiff sprung in the moment frozen between action and do
ubt. He came off the stool in a blur, stick whipping from left to right and impacting the lead Tracker square in the temple. Taking out the leader first always made for the best strategy. Rudderless, the others would hesitate for the mere seconds Raiff needed to overcome their advantage in numbers.
The second man fell quickly to a lashing blow to the back of a knee that followed a deft feint. Still enough time for Trackers three and four to draw their weapons. Before they could fire, though, Raiff’s blur of motion became a whirlwind. Barely any pause before a blow against the ribs of one and a lighter blow across the face of the other that turned his nose into a bloody memory. The one he’d slammed in the ribs with his stick was trying to right himself, all bent over to one side, while the other, still-conscious Tracker lurched toward him.
Dealing with that one was as simple as kicking the stool over in his path. The Tracker’s foot caught within its spokes and he went flying, literally, straight past Raiff. This as the Tracker all bent to one side from his fractured ribs managed to get his pistol out and half steadied. Raiff snapped his stick outward, its composite softening to something like pudding held in a flexible tube. Then he lashed it out in whip-like fashion and spun his hand to twirl it around the man’s wrist. He pulled and the pistol came free, a single errant shot taking out one of the cheap light fixtures held to the ceiling by a rod.
The air was raining tiny glass shards and Raiff felt them settle in his hair. The edge of his consciousness recorded the fact that the Tracker he’d used the stool on was lumbering back to his feet, while the final Tracker stood at the far end of the bar. He had a broken bottle pressed against a woman’s throat, her head jerked back by the hair to expose her jugular.
“Right there!” the man screamed at him. “Don’t move!”
Raiff did as he was told, let his stick that had morphed into a whip dangle by his side.
The Tracker started backpedaling for the door, dragging the woman with him. Raiff had never seen her before but he’d seen a thousand like her in bars like this. Single or long divorced, wearing too much makeup and perfume and letting her gaze drift toward the door every time someone new entered in the hope it would be a familiar face, which it never was.