Strangers

  Taking that as very bad news, Father Wycazik said, “Trouble? What trouble? What’s wrong?”

  “Well, sir, I suppose the storm. We’re getting really gusty wind.”

  But Stefan was not as certain as she was. The storm had hardly begun. He could not believe telephone lines had already succumbed to the first tentative gusts, which he had experienced on his way into the terminal. The isolation of the Tranquility was an ominous development, more likely to be the handiwork of men than of the impending blizzard.

  He placed a call to St. Bette’s rectory in Chicago, and Father Gerrano answered on the second ring. “Michael, I’ve arrived safely in Elko. But I haven’t gotten Brendan. Their phone isn’t working.”

  “Yes,” Michael Gerrano said, “I know.”

  “You know? How could you possibly know?”

  “Just minutes ago,” Michael said, “I received a call from a man who refused to identify himself but who said he was a friend of this Ginger Weiss, one of those people out there with Brendan. He said she called him this morning and asked him to dig up some information for her. He found what she wanted, but he couldn’t get through to the Tranquility. She’d apparently foreseen that problem, so she’d given him our number and the number of friends of hers in Boston, told him to tell us what he’d found, and she’d call us at her convenience.”

  “Refused to give his name?” Father Wycazik said, puzzled. “And you say she asked him to dig up information?”

  “Yes,” Michael said. “About two things. First, this place called the Thunder Hill Depository. He says to tell her that, as far as he could determine, the Depository is what it’s always been: an elaborate blastproof storage depot, one of eight virtually identical underground facilities situated across the country, and not the largest one. She also asked him to get her some background on an army officer, Colonel Leland Falkirk, who’s with something called the Domestic Emergency Response Organization....”

  As he stared at one glimmering and bejeweled moment of the storm framed in the terminal window, Father Wycazik listened to Michael rattle off a service biography of the colonel. Just as Stefan was beginning to sweat with the strain of remembering all the details, his curate told him none of that was important. Michael said, “Mr. X seemed to feel that only one part of Colonel Falkirk’s background might have a bearing on what’s happened to the people at the Tranquility Motel.”

  “Mr. X?” Father Wycazik said.

  “Since he wouldn’t give me his name, X will have to do.”

  “Go on,” Father Wycazik said.

  “Well, Mr. X believes the key fact here is that Colonel Falkirk was the military’s representative to a government committee, the CISG, that undertook some important think-tank-type research starting about nine years ago. The reason Mr. X thinks the key is CISG is because, while poking around, he discovered two odd things. First, many of the same scientists who served on that committee are now—or have recently been—on long and unusual vacations, leaves of absence, or unexplained furloughs. Second, a new level of security restrictions was put on the CISG files on July eighth, two summers ago, exactly two days after Brendan and the others had trouble out there in Nevada.”

  “What does CISG stand for? What was that committee studying?”

  Michael Gerrano told him.

  Father Wycazik said, “My God, I thought that might be it!”

  “You did? Father, you’re hard to surprise. But this! Surely you can’t have foreseen this was what lay behind Brendan’s problems. And ... you mean ... that’s really ... really what might’ve happened out there?”

  “Could still be happening, but I must admit I can’t claim to have deduced it sheerly by the application of my gigantic intellect. This is part of what Calvin Sharkle was shouting at the police just this morning, before he blew himself to smithereens.”

  Michael said, “Dear God.”

  Father Wycazik said, “We may be teetering on the brink of a whole new world, Michael. Are you ready for it?”

  “I ... I don’t know,” Michael said. “Are you ready, Father?”

  “Oh, yes!” Stefan said. “Oh, yes, very ready. But the way to it might be filled with danger.”

  Ginger was aware of Jack Twist’s growing agitation as the minutes passed. He was operating on a hunch that told him the last few grains of sand were dribbling through the neck of the hourglass. As Jack assisted with the tasks required for their departure, he kept glancing at windows and doors, as if he expected to see hostile faces.

  They needed almost half an hour to suit up for the bitter winter night ahead, load all the guns and spare ammunition clips, and transfer the gear to the Sarvers’ pickup and to Jack’s Cherokee behind the motel. They did not work in silence, for that might have given warning of their imminent departure to the eavesdroppers. Instead, they chatted about inconsequential things as they hurried through their preparations.

  Finally, at four-ten, turning on a radio very loud, hoping to cover their absence for a while, they left by the rear door of the maintenance room. They milled around in the wind and snow, hugging one another and saying, “goodbye,” and “take care of yourself,” and “I’ll pray for you,” and “it’s going to be all right,” and “we’ll beat the bastards.” Ginger noticed that Jack and Jorja spent an especially long time together, embracing, and when he kissed Marcie and hugged her goodbye, it was as if she were his own child. It was worse than the end of a family reunion, for in spite of protestations to the contrary, the members of this family were more than half-convinced that some of them would not survive to attend another gathering.

  Squeezing back her tears, Ginger said, “All right, enough already, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  With Ned driving, the seven who would go to Chicago and Boston left first, crammed in the Cherokee. The fine snow was falling so fast and heavy that the Cherokee was half-lost to sight within a hundred feet and became only a ghostly form within a hundred and fifty. Nevertheless, it did not head straight up the hills, for fear of being spotted by the observers Jack had located with his heat-reading device. Instead, the Cherokee entered the sloping folds of land by way of a narrow glen. Ned would stay in glens, vails, and gulleys as long as he could. The sound of the engine was swallowed up in the greater howl of the wind even before the Jeep began to vanish in the snow.

  Ginger, Dom, and Jack climbed into the cab of the Sarvers’ pickup and followed in the tracks of the Cherokee. But with its headstart, the Jeep soon disappeared into the white turmoil that claimed the land. As they thumped, jolted, tilted, and rocked upward through the glen, Ginger sat between Jack and Dom, looking through the windshield and past the beating wipers, wondering if she would ever see those in the Jeep again. In a few days, Ginger had come to love them all. She was afraid for them.

  We care. That is what differentiates us from the beasts of the field. That’s what Jacob had always said. Intellect, courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy—each of those qualities was as important to the human species as all the others, Jacob had said. Some people thought only intellect counted: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize it. All were important factors that had contributed to the ascendancy and supremacy of humankind, yes, but the many functions of intellect were insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy. We care. It is our curse. It is our blessing.

  At first Parker Faine was afraid that the pilot of the ten-seat feeder flight would not descend through the storm front and attempt a landing but would instead divert to another airfield farther south in Nevada. When, after all, the plane descended through the leading edge of the storm, Parker almost wished they had diverted. The buffeting wind and blinding snow seemed too hazardous even for a veteran pilot accustomed to instrument landings. Then they were safely on the ground, one of the last planes in before the Elko County Airport shut down.

  The small airport provided no covered ramp for debarkation. Parker hurried across
the snow-patched macadam toward the door of the small terminal, wincing as his bare face was stung by wind-driven snow like thousands of tiny cold needles.

  After his Air West flight from Monterey had landed in San Francisco earlier today, he bought scissors and an electric razor at an airport gift shop and hastily shaved off his beard in the men’s room. He had not seen his own unadorned visage in a decade. It was much prettier than he had expected. He trimmed his hair, too. When he was in the midst of this transformation, another guy in the men’s room, washing his hands at the next sink, said jokingly, “On the run from the cops, huh?” And Parker said, “No, from my wife.” And the guy said, “Yeah, me, too,” as if he meant it.

  To avoid leaving a credit-card trail, he paid cash for a ticket on an Air Cal jet to Reno. After a forty-five-minute trip over the Sierra Nevada to the Biggest Little City in the World, he had the good fortune to find a feeder line with a single empty seat on a flight departing for Elko in twelve minutes. He paid cash again, leaving only twenty-one dollars in his wallet. For two hours and fifteen minutes, he endured a frequently turbulent journey east across the Great Basin, toward the higher country of northeastern Nevada, where he sensed his friend was in desperate trouble.

  By the time he pushed through the doors into the humble but clean little building that served as the Elko County Airport’s offices and public terminal, Parker should have felt wrung-out both because of the horrible experience in Monterey and because of his hectic travels. Strangely, however, he felt vital, energetic, brimming with purpose and overflowing with determination. He saw himself as a bull, storming into a field to deal with a fox that had been frightening the herd.

  He found the two public telephones, only one of which was in use. He looked up the number of the Tranquility, tried to call Dom, but the motel’s phones were out of service. He supposed the storm might have something to do with it, but he was suspicious and worried. He had to get out there where he was needed, and fast.

  In two minutes flat, he discovered there were no rental cars and that the town’s taxi company, equipped with only three vehicles, was so busy because of the storm that he would have to wait ninety minutes to get a cab. So he looked around the terminal at a couple of stragglers from his own flight and at a few others who evidently had landed in private craft just as the airport was closing down, and he accosted them one by one, seeking a ride without success. Turning from one of them, Parker literally collided with a distinguished gray-haired man. The guy looked as frantic as Parker felt. He had pulled his coat open to reveal a Roman collar. To Parker, he said, “Excuse me, please, I’m a priest with urgent business, a matter of life or death, and I’m desperately in need of a ride to the Tranquility Motel. Do you have a car?”

  Dom Corvaisis sat tensely in the Sarvers’ pickup truck, with the passenger-side door on his right and Ginger Weiss on his left, squinting ahead into a snowfall so heavy that it seemed as if they were driving through countless barriers of gauzy white curtains. He peered forward as though an incredible revelation lay just beyond the next curtain. But when each parted without resistance, it revealed only an infinite array of additional curtains blowing-rippling-fluttering beyond.

  After a while he realized what he was so tensely anticipating: a recurrence of the memory-flash that had stricken him when he had walked out of the Tranquility Grille. Jets ... What had happened after the third jet swooped over, driving him to the pavement in terror?

  Although the streaming snowflakes made the winter day appear to be a tapestry of millions of randomly arranged white threads, they did not help illuminate the glen. The false twilight of the storm brought a deep-gray gloom to the land three-quarters of an hour ahead of the real twilight. Gnarled, toothy rock formations and an occasional cottonwood loomed suddenly out of the murkiness like prehistoric beasts out of a primeval mist, never failing to startle. However, Dom knew that Jack dared not risk turning on the headlights yet. Though the truck itself was hidden by the snow and by the steep walls of the hollow in which they were sheltered, the lights would reflect up through the falling mega-trillion bits of ice crystals, and the glow would certainly be visible to the observers below.

  They came to a place where the fading tire tracks of the Cherokee, like the trails of huge twin serpents, turned east into a branching glen that led off the main hollow. Jack did not follow Ned Sarver and the others, for the plan required them to head in a different direction. Instead, he pressed the pickup steadily north, relying on Dom’s reading of a compass for guidance.

  In another hundred yards, they reached the head of the glen, where it narrowed to—and finally terminated in—a steep upward slope. Dom thought they would have to turn back and follow Ned, after all, but Jack shifted gears, accelerated, and the four-wheel-drive pickup started to climb. The slope was rocky and rutted. The pickup progressed with many a jounce and sway and lurch that repeatedly threw Ginger Weiss against Dom in a series of collisions that were not without a pleasant aspect.

  In the dreary gray storm light of the waning day, and in the dull and well-worn interior of the pickup, Ginger looked, by contrast, more beautiful than ever. Compared to her lustrous silver-blond hair, the white snow appeared soiled.

  With a leap and a crash that bumped Dom’s head against the roof, the truck crested the long hill. They drove down a brief incline, then across a level strip of land. As they started up another slope, Jack suddenly slammed on the brakes and cried, “Jets!”

  Dom gasped, looked up into the seething snowstorm, expecting to see an aircraft plummeting at them, then realized that Jack was speaking of jets from the past. He had remembered the same thing that had come back to Dom less than an hour ago. Judging by Jack’s sure-handed control of the pickup, however, he had not seen the memory as vividly as Dom had seen it, but had merely recalled it.

  “Jets,” Jack said again, keeping one foot on the brake and one on the clutch, gripping the steering wheel hard with both hands, staring out at the snow but trying to look back into time. “One, two, roaring high up, the way you said, Dom. And then another, low over the diner, and right after that one ... a fourth....”

  “I didn’t remember a fourth,” Dom said excitedly.

  Hunching over the wheel, Jack said, “The fourth jet came just as I rushed out of the motel. I wasn’t over there in the diner with you. There was this tremendous shaking and roaring, and I rushed out of my room in time to see the third fighter—an F-16, I think. It virtually exploded out of nowhere, out of the darkness, over the roof of the diner. You’re right: Its altitude couldn’t have been more than forty or fifty feet. And while I was still taking that in, a fourth came straight over the motel, from behind the place, and it was even lower. Maybe ten feet lower than the other one, and the window behind me burst when it passed....”

  “And then?” Ginger asked in a whisper, as if a louder tone would shake the emerging memory back down into Jack’s subconscious.

  Jack said, “The third and fourth fighters, the low ones, roared down toward the interstate, about twenty feet above the goddamn power lines, you could see right into the red-hot intakes of their engines, and they went screaming out over the plains beyond I-80, one of them peeling up and out to the east, the other to the west, both swinging around and coming back ... and I started running toward you ... toward the group of you who’d come out of the diner over there ... ’cause I thought maybe you’d know what was going on....”

  Snow tapped on the windshield.

  The wind whispered susurrant secrets at the tightly shut windows. At last Jack Twist said, “That’s all. I can’t remember any more.”

  “You will,” Dom said. “We all will. The blocks are crumbling.”

  Jack slipped the pickup into gear again and started up the next slope, continuing their roundabout trek to Thunder Hill. Colonel Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Horner, accompanied by two heavily armed DERO corporals, took one of Shenkfield’s Jeep Wagoneers to the roadblock at the western end of the quarantine zone. Two large Army trans
ports had been parked across the wide eastbound lanes of 1-80, effectively blocking them. (The westbound lanes were blocked on the other side of the Tranquility, ten miles from this point.) Emergency beacons mounted on sawhorses flashed in profusion. Half a dozen DERO men were in sight, dressed in Arctic-issue. Three of them were leaning down to the open windows of halted automobiles, talking to motorists, courteously explaining the situation.

  Telling Horner and the two corporals to wait in the car, Leland got out and walked to the center of the blockade, to have a brief word with Sergeant Vince Bidakian, who was in charge of this aspect of the operation. “How’s it going so far?” Leland asked.

  “Good, sir,” Bidakian said, raising his voice slightly to compete with the wind. “Not too many people on the road. The storm hit to the west of here earlier, so most motorists with any common sense at all stopped earlier at Battle Mountain or even back at Winnemucca, until things clear. And it looks like virtually all the truckers decided to hole up rather than try to make it through to Elko. It’ll take us an hour, I bet, before we’ve got even two hundred vehicles in line.”

  They were not turning the motorists back to Battle Mountain. They were telling everyone that the closure was expected to last only an hour and that the wait would not be insufferable.

  A longer closure would have meant a massive backup even with the reduction in traffic brought by the storm. To deal with that larger number of inconvenienced travelers and to enforce a longer quarantine, Leland would have had to alert the Nevada State Police and the county sheriff by now. But he did not want to bring the police into it until that was unavoidable, for they would quickly seek confirmation of his authority from higher Army officials—and would soon learn that he had gone rogue. If the cops could be kept in the dark about the closure for just half an hour, and if they could be stalled for another few minutes once they did find out about it, no one would discover Leland’s perfidy until it was too late. He needed only an hour to scoop up the witnesses at the motel and convey them into the deep vaults of Thunder Hill.

  To Bidakian, Leland said, “Sergeant, make sure all the motorists have sufficient gasoline, and if any of them are running on low tanks, pump them ten gallons from that emergency supply you’ve brought.”

  “Yes, sir. That was my understanding, sir.”

  “No sign of any cops or snow plows?”

  “Not yet, sir,” Bidakian said, glancing beyond the short line of cars, where two new pairs of headlights appeared in the distant snow-swaddled dusk. “But we’ll see one or the other within ten minutes.”

  “You know the story to give them?”

  “Yes, sir. Truck bound for Shenkfield sprung a small leak. It’s carrying harmless and toxic fluids, so we don’t—”

  “Colonel!” Lieutenant Horner was hurrying from the Wagoneer. He was wearing so many bulky clothes he looked half-again as large as usual. “Message from Sergeant Fixx at Shenkfield, sir. Something’s wrong at the motel. He hasn’t heard a voice in fifteen minutes. Just a radio, playing real loud. He doesn’t think anyone’s there.”

  “They go back into the damn diner?”

  “No, sir. Fixx thinks they’re just—gone, sir.”

  “Gone? Gone where?” Leland demanded, neither expecting an answer nor waiting for one. Heart pounding, he ran back to the Wagoneer.

  Her name was Talia Ervy, and she looked like Marie Dressler, who’d played Tugboat Annie in those wonderful old movies with Wallace Beery. Talia was even larger than Dressler, who’d been far from petite: big bones, broad face, wide mouth, strong chin. But she was the prettiest woman Parker Faine had seen in days, for she not only offered him and Father Wycazik a ride from the airport to the Tranquility, but refused to take any money for it. “Hell, I don’t mind,” she said, sounding a little like Marie Dressler, too. “I wasn’t going anywheres much special anyway. Just home to cook dinner for myself. I’m a flat-out horrible cook, so this’ll just put off the punishment for a bit. Fact is, when I think of my meatloaf, I figure maybe you’re doing me a big favor.”

  Talia had a ten-year-old Cadillac, a big boat of a car, with winter-tread tires and snow chains. She claimed it would take her anywhere she wanted to go, regardless of the weather, and she called it “Old Paint.” Parker sat up front with her, and Father Wycazik sat in back.

  They had gone less than a mile when they heard the emergency radio bulletin about the purported toxic spill and the closure of I-80 west of Elko. “Those muddle-headed, fumble-fingered damn goofballs!” Talia said, turning the volume louder but raising her voice to talk over it. “Dangerous stuff like that, you’d think they’d treat it like a load of babies in glass cradles, but this here’s twice in two years.”

  Neither Parker nor Father Wycazik was capable of commenting. They both knew that their worst fears for their friends were now coming true.

  Talia Ervy said, “Well, gentlemen, what do we do now?” Parker said, “Is there anyplace that rents cars? Four-wheel-drive is what we’ll need. A Jeep, something like that.”

  “There’s a Jeep dealer,” Talia said.

  “Can you take us there?” Parker asked.

  “Me and Old Paint can take you anywheres, even if it starts putting down snowflakes big as dogs.”

  The salesman at the Jeep dealership, Felix Schellenhof, was far less colorful than Talia Ervy. Schellenhof wore a gray suit, gray tie, and pale-gray shirt, and spoke in a gray voice. No, he told Parker, they didn’t rent vehicles by the day. Yes, they had many for sale. No, they couldn’t complete a deal in just twenty minutes. The salesman said if Parker intended to finance, that would take until tomorrow. Even a check would not clinch the deal quickly because Parker was from out of state. “No checks,” Parker said. Schellenhof raised gray eyebrows at the prospect of cash. Parker said, “I’ll put it on my American Express Gold Card,” and Schellenhof looked grayly amused. They took American Express, he said, but in payment for accessories, repairs; no one had ever bought an entire vehicle with plastic. Parker said, “There’s no purchase limit on the card. Listen, I was in Paris, saw a gorgeous Dali oil in a gallery, thirty thousand bucks, and they took my American Express!” With deliberate, plodding diplomacy, Schellenhof began to turn them away.

  “For the love of God, man, move your tired butt!” Father Wycazik roared, slamming one fist into the top of Schellenhof’s desk. He was flushed from his hairline to his backwards collar. “This is a matter of life or death for us. Call American Express.” He raised his hand high, and the salesman’s shocked gray eyes followed its swift upward arc. “Find out if they’ll authorize the purchase. For the love of God, hurry!” the priest shouted, slamming his fist down again.

  The sight of such fury in a clergyman put some speed into the salesman at last. He took Parker’s card and nearly sprinted out of his small office, across the showroom to the manager’s glass-walled domain.

  “Good grief, Father,” Parker said, “if you were a Protestant, you’d be a famous fire-and-brimstone evangelist by now.”

  “Oh, Catholic or not, I’ve made a few sinners quake in my time.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Parker assured him.

  American Express approved the purchase. With hasty repentance, Schellenhof produced a sheaf of forms and showed Parker where to sign. “Quite a week!” the salesman said, though he was still drab and gray in spite of his new enthusiasm. “Late Monday a fella walks in, buys a new Cherokee with cash—bundles of twenty-dollar bills. Must’ve hit it big in a casino. Now this. And the week’s hardly started. Something, eh?”

  “Fascinating,” Parker said.