“I believe those are chicken wings,” Evans said.
“From what planet?”
Flynn remembered what he’d eaten the last time he was here. In the hope that reenactment would release more memory, he got the same meal again, a quarter chicken, green beans, baked potato, and pineapple yogurt for dessert. He, Caruthers, Evans, and Mac sat together. The others had gone to a table of their own.
“I enjoyed my time here,” he said. “When I was working with Dr. Miller.” Mac gave him a sharp look, but the other two didn’t react. It wasn’t a good sign, but he continued anyway. “I thought maybe we could go down to the Biology section and have a look around.”
Both Caruthers and Evans stopped eating.
“I mean, I was there. That’s where my physical enhancement was done. I’d like to look the place over again.”
Laughing, Evans said, “I think I need to consult Legal.”
The cavalier reply made him so mad, it was all he could do not to reach across the table and splatter the guy’s face against the far wall.
He put his anger firmly in a drawer and smiled. “Well,” he said affably, “that’s probably the best thing. On the other hand, I have a cop out there in Texas who could at any time get picked up and have his eyes cut out of his head, not to mention what will happen to his family. But you consult Legal. However, know this, all of you: If they die, I am liable to become very damn irrational, and that’s not going to be comfortable for you.”
He reached over and tapped Evans on the ear, moving so fast that the gesture couldn’t be seen by normal eyes.
Evans shot out of his chair and sprawled on the floor, holding his head and crying out.
The buzz of conversation in the room died away.
As Evans sputtered and gagged and struggled to his feet, Flynn stood up. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, is anybody here from the Biology unit?”
Nobody reacted. Here and there, people began leaving the room.
“I was there. Some of you probably worked with me.”
The trickle of people leaving became a flood.
“You did good,” he said. “I’m quite a piece of work, folks. Fastest gun in the West.” He drew the Bull and reholstered it. “Anybody see that? No?”
The flood surged toward the doors.
“Okay, folks, don’t have a heart attack—I’m harmless. At the moment.”
The only table still populated was theirs. A couple of security guards, one of them with a stun gun, stood in the doorway. Flynn returned to his seat. “I’d advise you to tell those guys not to make any sudden moves,” he said to Evans and Caruthers. “I don’t care for sudden moves. Frankly, you know what I do when I see childish bullshit like guards with Tasers? I just think to myself, ‘Bullshit. Empty, childish bullshit.’”
Flynn picked up his table knife and tossed it into the wall. There was a crash, the window above the point of impact cracked, and nothing could be seen of the knife except the hole where it had entered. He reached over and took Evans’s knife, and began doing surgery on his chicken.
“You people have been at this what—sixty, sixty-five years? And look at you, four guys nursing a piece of equipment you can’t even begin to understand. Where’s the massive scientific effort? Where’s the billion-dollar budget?”
“The parade’s gone by. Twenty, thirty years ago at Wright-Pat, it was a different story. Some of the best minds in the world worked on this. The best. For years and years and years, Flynn. And we learned basically nothing. We lost. Now we’re what’s left, four trudging bureaucrats protecting the secret of the ages.”
“I want to go to the Biology section. I want to meet the people who worked on me.”
“As I said—”
“Let’s roll. Right now.” Flynn stood up.
“You’re not cleared to go down there, Flynn,” Caruthers said.
“Then get me cleared!”
“You can be. No question. But we have to go through channels, and you know that.”
“Diana Glass cuts red tape like butter.”
“So call her,” Evans said. “Right now. The second she gets you cleared, off we go.”
Flynn said, “Give me a phone. I lost mine.”
“No cell coverage on the island. In any case, if classified matters are to be discussed, we need to go to my office and use the secure phone.”
Flynn followed Evans down a hallway and up two flights to the sort of small office that defined the reality of the middle-level bureaucrat in the federal system. There was a picture of the president on the wall, one of Evans with a high-ranking but nameless air force officer, and an engineering diploma from Ohio State. On the desk were two photographs of which Flynn could see only the backs. There was an in-box with a great deal of paperwork in it and an equally busy out-box. For a man who had portrayed himself as basically a caretaker, he seemed to have a lot of work to do. But these days, when so much was done in digital media, the busy boxes could have been there just for show.
There were two telephones: one an old-style landline secure phone, the other a cheap wireless model. Flynn strode over to the secure phone and called Diana.
She said, “Complaint line.”
“I’m laughing. Now I’m not. They’re insisting that I need further clearance to go to Biology.”
“I really don’t know how to say this, but going down there could reduce your abilities. Put a level of awareness between you and your new skills that could affect your speed.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
“It’s dangerous for you to see your records—too much self-awareness could compromise your skills.”
“I want to appeal to your superior officer.”
“I have no superior officer.”
“Sure you do.”
“You can’t appeal, and you can’t know who he is or where he is or anything about him.”
He hung up the phone.
Evans said, “You heard the same thing from her that we got in this command. Show you the disk, then show you the door.”
Flynn spread his hands. “Okay, I lose. No contest.”
Mac blinked, but said nothing.
They were due to be returned to the mainland at first light, in time to catch the dawn patrol commuter back to LaGuardia. From there, it was a nonstop to Dallas, then another commuter to Menard.
They were assigned two rooms in the small visiting quarters. Flynn had no further reason to spend his time talking to the locals, so he went to his billet and threw himself onto the bed. He assumed that there would be cameras and audio, so he did nothing to reveal his real intentions.
He closed his eyes and began mentally, and very carefully, reviewing the map of the island he’d made in his mind as they landed.
Mac followed him in. “What’s the plan?”
“No plan, Mac. The long and short of it is, we busted out.”
“So what happens next?”
He hated to lie to Mac, but right now, the two of them were certainly onstage. Caruthers was listening. His security team was listening. Diana was listening and probably whomever she worked for as well.
“We’re due on the helipad at six sharp,” he said. “From there, I think we need to go back to Menard.”
“Menard? Why not Washington?”
“Because they’ve got their heads so far up their asses, they can see—”
“Oh, yeah, there is that.”
“We need to do what we can to protect Eddie and his family. Just leaving Menard isn’t enough to save them. If they even left.”
“You think we’re gonna die out there?”
He thought he was going to probably die, but not in Texas. If what he was about to do went wrong in any way, that was going to happen right here, tonight.
“We might as well get some sleep,” he said.
Mac lingered. “Flynn, what was it like in that thing? I mean, that must have been amazing.”
“What it was like is, we’re never going to have anythi
ng remotely similar, not in our lifetimes or many lifetimes. As you move around inside, the entire interior of the thing changes, depending on what you want to do. It looks about twelve feet high at the center, am I right?”
“Yeah, I’d say so.”
“When you first go in, you find yourself in the motor room. Counterrotating magnets, but we can’t make them turn. We don’t know exactly what they’re made of or what kind of power needs to be applied. Then, say, you want to go to the control room. You just stand up, and it kind of appears around you. Nothing morphs or changes—you’re just in another place. It’s the most incredible experience I’ve ever had. The control room is not complicated. Two chairs before consoles with nothing but a couple of handprints embedded in them. Little chairs, but sit in one and it fits you, just like that.”
“Put your hands in the handprints?”
“I did. Nothing happened. I felt like a monkey fooling around in a car. Not only did I have no idea how it worked, but I had no idea how even to learn to make it work.”
“A monkey could be trained to drive a car. It’d be hard, but it’s doable.”
“Maybe, but he’d never learn to fix a car, or why it runs, nothing like that.”
“Flynn, a fighter pilot can’t begin to understand his aircraft. He knows the general principles. That’s all. But I say again, he could be trained.”
“They’re telling me nobody knows how it works. They’ve had it for sixty years—more—and they haven’t gotten to square one. What’s worse, I can believe it. The thing is just amazing. And that feeling that we both had, that it was somehow alive—” He shook his head. There was nothing more to say.
“I gotta tell you, some asshole with a gun is not gonna pull down one of those things, no matter how much skill he has.”
“Remember, we’re not dealing with state of the art.”
Flynn offered no sign to Mac of what he intended to do, but, as always, his old friend sensed something. He probed a bit, but thankfully in the wrong direction, asking him if there was any way to get the disk out of its containment.
“It’s hundreds of feet underground. Access tunnel’s filled in.”
Mac seemed to look into himself. Flynn waited, watching him as he sank deeper and deeper into the truth. He said, “We’ve lost.”
“Looks like it.”
“We’ll all move. We’ll run.”
Again, Flynn waited for him to realize what would actually happen if that scenario was played out.
“Goddamnit, Flynn!”
“I don’t have a choice, Mac. It’s me or it’s you and Eddie, and his little family. That baby, Mac.”
“You can’t throw yourself at this thing, Flynn.”
Flynn could not look at his friend. He said no more.
“I’ve never been a coward, Flynn. But I don’t see what purpose is served by us going back to Menard, especially you. You already told Eddie to get the hell out. He said he would get out immediately. If he didn’t, it’s his problem. If he went to New York, tell him to stay there. Buy him an apartment there or in London or anywhere. You can afford it. Me, I’ll live on the run. I’m good at that.”
“Morris can be satisfied.”
“Flynn, no.”
“What the hell else can I do?”
“No!”
“I’m gonna go back to Menard, and I’m gonna take it from there. But you’re right about New York. You stay there. Bury yourself in it. If Eddie’s there, you’ll have some company. When I come face-to-face with Morris, I’ll bargain for your lives.”
Mac stood up. “I’ve been mad at you a lotta times in my life. You’re a person who’s good at making people mad. I’d like to be mad at you now. But I’m gonna leave it. See if you start to make some sense in the morning. Because you’re not making sense now.”
“Mac—”
“No, don’t talk. It is time to cut and run. Spend a little of that damn cash of yours to stay alive. Who knows, the longer you live, the more chance you have that Morris will slip up and give you the opening you don’t have right now.”
Flynn said nothing.
Mac left, slamming the door hard behind him. Flynn hated to see him go like that, but there was no choice. He stayed quiet, listening to the building. He’d already spotted all the visual surveillance. There was a good deal of it, typical of a facility that housed classified records and materials. Most of what was here had to do with biological warfare, though, not with the even more secret alien materials.
He turned out the light and then lay on his back in the dark again, waiting. He’d already planned his moves. He had a reasonable assurance that they would work. But care had to be taken. The least misstep, and this would all be over.
Before he made a move, he was going to need to figure out the cameras. While he was talking to Mac, he’d spotted both of them, fish-eye pinhole jobs—one in the back wall, one in the wall near the door. He could safely assume that the setup would be the same in all the rooms.
He was sure the surveillance team just saw a man who was waiting, hands behind his head, seemingly staring bleakly at the ceiling, wallowing in his defeat.
He noted that the edges of the two-square-foot ceiling tiles did not end above the closet door. Useful information. Because the roof was peaked and there were vents at each end, he knew that there was an attic above the tiles. To reach it, he would need to go through the hatch at the far end of the corridor outside.
The drop out of one of the vents was survivable, but only barely. Somebody using that escape route would need to land exactly right to avoid a sprain or worse.
Still, it was doable. He could get out of this place without alerting security. But how would he manage to take Mac along with him? Without Mac, there was no point in going. In fact, leaving Mac behind would mean defeat.
It was time to test security. He got up off the bed, paused to open the closet and put his jacket in it. Leaving the closet door open, he strolled out of the room. There was a guard station beside the only stairway, manned by no fewer than three armed guards. Their careful eyes followed him as he crossed the hall and knocked on Mac’s door.
“Want to take a walk?”
“Outside? Are you kidding?”
“Just down to the vending machines. Get a Coke.” He nodded, communicating necessity.
“Why not?”
As they walked down the hallway, one of the guards spoke into a walkie-talkie.
“Evening,” Flynn said as they stepped around the desk.
“You’re restricted to the structure,” the guard lieutenant said.
“Not a problem. We’re going to get some food.”
There was another guard station at the foot of the stairs. Three more guards, all now on their feet, all with their holsters open, their hands on their weapons.
Had he wished, Flynn could have taken their weapons and knocked them all cold before they could take a breath. Whoever had set these guards knew it, too, because stations at both ends of the building were in sight of this one, meaning that anything he did to these men would be seen by six more pairs of eyes, and dealt with accordingly.
He knew exactly who had placed these guard stations in this way. The only person who knew enough about his skills to be able to thwart them.
“Hey, Diana,” he said, “you’ll be watching this little charade, so listen up. I’m gonna get a Coke and go to bed to cry my eyes out. Tomorrow morning I’m going to New York and I’m going to disappear. So this is good-bye, love.”
Until they entered the small space of the basement vending machine room, he said nothing more. There was a Pepsi machine, a water machine, and a machine dispensing microwavable food. A microwave on the chipped white counter nearby.
He bought a burrito and put it in the microwave and turned it on. The machine wasn’t so noisy as he had hoped, but it would have to do.
He spoke softly. “You willing to try it?” He waved his hands across his lips, indicating that Mac was to nod or shake his head.
Mac paused. His brows knitted. A question came into his face.
Flynn said, “Do a bedbug like when we were kids. Go out through the closet ceiling. We’ll be dealing with a forty-foot drop to the ground. Is that okay?”
Mac’s face, lips tight, eyes full of edge, said that he wasn’t at all sure.
“Me, neither,” Flynn said. The microwave turned off, and he added in a normal tone, “Like I said to Diana, I’ve decided to take your advice. Right now, I don’t have an implant, so the longer I wait, the more danger I’m in. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to start running while I still have the chance.”
Mac opened his arms and embraced him. “You oughta be in the movies,” he whispered.
“See you on the other side.”
Mac bought a Diet Pepsi, and they returned to the second floor.
The making of what they used to call a “bedbug” was a matter of getting in the bed and leaving it with the sheets arranged in such a way that a parent peeking into the room would—hopefully—think that it still contained a boy.
Would a subterfuge this simple actually work? Not for long, but hopefully for long enough.
To minimize the effectiveness of the cameras, he drew his blinds and turned out his lights. It would actually help a bit with the tiny nailhead units. You weren’t talking all that many pixels. The best of them used computers equipped with sophisticated algorithms to supply the data that the lenses would be missing. With just a few pixels to work with, a good system could provide crystal-clear images in full light, but only adequate ones in the dark.
He sat on the side of the bed and took off his socks. They would form the “head” of the bedbug. Leaving his shoes on the floor, he got under the blanket and sheet. In fact, he got under both the top and bottom sheets. More bulk for the bedbug. He turned on his side with his back facing into the room and pushed the sheets until they formed a long wad sufficient to lift the blanket. Then he slipped the socks onto the pillow in front of his face and went deep into the blanket, until all but the top of his head was covered.
He slid backwards out of the bed and down to the floor. Remaining low, he slid on his stomach into the closet. Then he rose up, pressing himself against the back wall.