He pulled into the first guard post and flashed his badge.
Nothing happened.
The guard leaned into the car. “Sir, are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay, but I have a legitimate ID, so please let me through.”
“Would you like an escort to the base hospital, sir?”
“Open the gate, please.”
Flynn took back his secure ID. It didn’t appear any different from any other USGS Identification Card. On the surface. As it was run through readers in ever-more-secure areas, though, it would grant deeper and deeper access, into places that not even presidents knew about.
The gate went up and Flynn drove through. Wright-Pat was a big base, the U.S. Air Force’s largest repair and refitting facility, among other things. Among those “other things” was the Air Force Materiel Command, which controlled the warehouse where he was headed.
It was a low building no different from dozens of others on the base. Thousands of people passed it every day without realizing that, two hundred feet beneath the warehouse’s dull exterior, a supercooled morgue held fourteen alien bodies—including two from Roswell, New Mexico—that had been brought here in the fall of 1947 and had remained here ever since. The bodies were kept at near absolute zero, and were tended remotely by technicians who had no idea what they were keeping cold. Their training informed them that this was a storage area for unstable chemicals, and that if they failed in their duty, a massive explosion could result.
The building also contained a furnace designed to burn “special materials” at extremely high temperatures. Contrary to popular opinion, classified papers were not burned, but reduced to pulp and recycled. Still, the presence of the burn facility meant there would be plenty of normal traffic, and lots of ordinary material like classified electronics. This would be mixed with any ash that might contain evidence, such as bits of the alien bodies Flynn was about to consign to the flames.
He pulled the front of the car up to a tall corrugated metal door, then went to the identification pad and punched in his code. A moment later, the door began to clatter up on its chains.
He backed up to the furnace and waited in the car while airmen put up screens around the vehicle. As soon as he had slid his card through the pad, the facility manager was automatically informed of the security level he required.
Finally, hidden behind seven-foot-tall flats covered with gray canvas, he got out and went to the intercom. He picked up the handset and asked, “Is it up to temp?”
The answer was immediate. “Yes, sir.”
Flynn never took chances. “Are all personnel accounted for?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The entire floor is clear at this time?”
“Sir, there’s a work crew repairing the exhaust fan housing on one of the ventilator systems.”
“Pull them.”
“Yes, sir. Give me a minute, sir.”
While Flynn was waiting, he went to the furnace and tested the mechanism. An interlock prevented direct contact with the interior. Heat like that would incinerate you in an instant.
The intercom buzzed.
“Yes?”
“The facility is clear. No eyes on your position.”
He replaced the receiver and pressed the ready button on the furnace housing. A green light appeared on the black surface of the control panel, and the door slid open. Despite the thickness of the interlock, the heat was so intense that the interior shimmered with it.
Flynn opened his jacket, lifted his pistol to a looser position in his holster, then walked to the back of the car. He unlocked the trunk and pulled it open.
The three bags lay just as he had left them. When he put them in, he’d noted their positions carefully. Also carefully, he touched the nearest of them. No responding movement. He touched the one behind it. Nothing. He reached deeper into the trunk and touched the third bag. Again, nothing inside reacted.
He lifted the first bag out of the trunk. The aliens were light, weighing only ten or twelve pounds. Careful not to let any claws cut through and scratch him, he carried the bag to the furnace and laid it in the open receptacle. Immediately, it began to smoke. He pressed the red activation button and the door closed. He repeated the process with the second bag.
As he turned back toward the car, he heard a loud click overhead. Angry, thinking that some airman was still working up there, he looked up. He saw only the shadowy girders. An instant later, though, when he directed his gaze back to the trunk, he saw that the last bag had been torn open and was now empty.
He stepped quickly back to the intercom. “This is on lockdown. I want the entire facility evacuated at once. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” He could hear the question in the voice. He didn’t care.
A red light began circulating overhead and a Klaxon sounded. He drew aside one of the screens and stepped into the center of the large open space.
Methodically, he scanned the floor. Empty. So the thing had jumped into the girders.
Now there came another sound—the echoing creak of hinges.
Flynn turned toward it, and was horrified to see an airman enter through a side door and begin walking toward him.
“Get out of here!”
“Sir?”
“Out! Now!”
The airman stopped. His smile froze.
“Move!”
From overhead, there came a flutter. Flynn looked up. The airman kept smiling.
A figure dropped down, looking for all the world like a dark gigantic demon sliding down an invisible wall.
Then it stood before the young man, five narrow feet of spindly arms and legs to the airman’s solid six-foot bulk.
The next instant, the creature leaped back into the rafters.
The airman had entirely changed. His uniform was gone, nothing left of it but shreds on the floor. Blood gushed out of his eye sockets and from the hole where his mouth and tongue had been. It went sluicing down his legs, pumping from the crater that was all that was left of his genitals. From overhead, there came a whirring sound, a noise of bees or busy flies.
As Flynn watched, the streams of blood stopped. They hung, frozen like candle wax, then, slowly at first, changed direction. They began to travel upward, racing across the man’s body as he crumpled to his knees. An orb of blood, dark red, hung in the air six feet above where he had stood.
As Flynn was drawing his gun, the creature dropped back down.
It connected with the vibrating mass of blood.
There was a blur and a high crackling sound like something being dipped in hot grease. The bubble of blood disappeared into a new form entirely, and what landed with a light step on the room’s floor was not an alien. Neither was it a human being, not quite. It was covered with pink gel, like something that had come out of a chrysalis or burst from some malignant egg. The eyes opened. They were sky blue, set in a blurred but unmistakably human face.
As he watched, another version of the airman took shape before him.
The boy’s smile returned. As if surprised, he blinked his eyes.
It was astonishing, but Flynn was not deceived. This was not a hallucination, and it was not the airman. It made an impossible leap back into the rafters. Flynn fired at it, but no blood returned.
He began hunting the thing, but the room was complex with shadows, the ceiling fifty feet overhead, and he soon recognized that the thing could hide up there for hours. So he decided to try another strategy.
He walked out into the middle of the space. Holding his pistol, he looked around the room. Then he took out his small LED flashlight and shone it into the rafters. Three girders down, a slight thickening of the shadow along its upper surface.
His target.
“Shit,” he said into the room’s echo. He holstered his gun and walked directly under the creature. Hands on hips, he shone his light into a dark area under the stairs that led down from the office level at the far end of the room, the same stairs the airman had co
me down.
Above him, he heard the slightest sound, a bare whisper.
He drew and fired into the biorobot as it dropped down on him.
The bullets blew its guts out, and it fell at his feet with a nasty splat.
He looked down at it, then at the actual remains of the boy—a husk, his youth destroyed in an instant—his promise and the hopes of those who loved him, all gone. He choked back his heart and his hate, and the anger that gnawed his core—if only he’d been quicker to see him coming, faster to react, this poor kid would still have his life.
Teeth bared, he sucked the blood-reeking air and, with it, sucked deep into himself the sorrow and the shame of his failure. He kicked the hell out of the dead alien, its incredible disguise already fading and melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.
He turned away from the mess and, walking with the excessive care of a man confronting the gallows, crossed the echoing concrete chamber to the black intercom hanging on the wall.
“Yes, sir, do you need assistance?”
He said, “There’s been an accident. You are to seal the building. I repeat, seal it. It is to be guarded. A team will be here tomorrow to restore it.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“There is a man down.”
“Sir?”
“I repeat, there is a man down. He is dead. Our team will inform the authorities here of his identity after their inspection is complete.”
“One of my men is in there?”
“There was a man here. I don’t know why and it’s not my issue. He is dead.”
“He got shot?”
“No, sir. He was killed in another manner. He died in the line of duty.”
Flynn replaced the receiver in its cradle. As he walked away, the intercom began ringing and kept ringing. He did not turn back.
How in hell had this happened? Somehow, the thing had survived. What had enabled it to do that was yet another question that could not be answered. The purpose was clear: he had observed the predator in the process of camouflaging itself as its prey, like an Indian covering himself with a buffalo hide in order to get close to a herd.
They had thrown away two of their lives and sent this third being on a suicide mission, because the real ambush was not intended to happen at the Miller house at all, but here, in this room, where Flynn would least expect it.
The place suddenly felt cold, freezing. The stink of the room, blood and cordite, was sickening. Moving fast, he snatched his duffel out of the car and dug out his cell phone.
He punched in the numbers that would take him to a scrambled signal, then called Diana.
“Jesus God, what have you been doing for seven hours?”
“I pulled the battery on my phone.”
“I thought you were a goner. Give me a heads-up next time.”
“I’m at Wright-Pat. There’s been an incident. I’ve ordered our facility here sealed.”
“An incident? What kind of an incident?”
“You need a team out here to clean up some atypical remains. Plus there’s a casualty. An airman.”
“Shit!”
“The body’s been mutilated. You’ll need to commandeer it. Our eyes only.”
“What are you telling me?”
“What you need to do! And I need a plane.” He would have preferred to drive to Washington, but there was no time for that now.
He left the facility, closed the access door, and listened as the locks clicked into place on the other side. The cleanup team from their unit were now the only people on the planet with the code needed to open this door.
He wondered whom she would choose. Things had gone wrong before, but this was the only time anything remotely this messy had happened.
An airman pulled up in a big SUV. He got out to open the door, but Flynn let himself in. He sat in silence as he was driven to the flight line. When they arrived, a jet was just being positioned on the apron. It was the full dinner: a general officer’s plane complete with a cabin crew of two.
“You don’t need to stay on board,” he said as he stooped to enter the plane.
“Sir?”
“Leave the aircraft, please. You’re not needed today.” There was no reason to put anybody in harm’s way who didn’t absolutely need to be there.
The two stewards looked at each other.
“Do it!”
Slowly, they went to the rear of the cabin. When the crew were down on the apron, he activated the steps. The steps came up, the door closed, and he locked it down. He signaled the pilots. “Get this thing cleared and get it moving.”
There was some sort of a reply, but he didn’t listen. As always, he had work to do. He’d been away from his unending records search for over thirty hours, and he didn’t like that. He pulled out his iPad and hooked into the secure network, then began once again searching police reports—town by town, and city by city.
He looked at murders, disappearances, accidents, anything that might lead to the dark place that was his beat. He worked for an hour. For two. He stopped only when he had assured himself that his beat was for the moment quiet.
He wouldn’t allow himself to hope, but maybe—just maybe—he had indeed gotten the last of them. Maybe it was just him and Morris now.
He listened to the roar of the wind speeding past the airframe and to the noise of the engines. He let his eyes close and was immediately asleep, or as asleep as he ever got. The doctors called it “guarded sleep,” the sleep of men in combat. He dreamed of Abby on a blue day on the beach, watching the gulls wheel. The sweet smell of her cornsilk hair filled his memory, and he sighed and turned as if toward somebody in the seat beside him.
His eyes opened. He had become aware of a change in the pitch of the engines. He evaluated it. Normal. They were landing.
New rules: Be faster on the scene than ever before. When the aliens are apparently dead, cut the remains to pieces.
It was an air force plane, but it landed him in the general aviation section at Dulles.
He left without a word, not looking back. The mystified pilots watched him cross the tarmac and disappear into the terminal. They had never even seen his face.
CHAPTER SIX
WHILE HE was away, Flynn’s personal car had been moved into the general aviation parking lot. He walked over to it, a black Audi R8 GT. To a man with his reflexes, most cars drove like buses. The R8 did not.
There was a bag from Wagshal’s on the passenger seat, which, as his standing order with Transportation instructed, contained a pastrami on rye and a Brooklyn Lager. As a Southwest 737 screamed past not a hundred feet overhead, he opened the bag, cracked the can of beer, started the car, and headed out.
He had no idea how long it had been since he ate, but the sandwich did not last until the Beltway. He got an hour of sleep on the flight, so he felt fairly rested. It had been uneasy sleep, though. Things were spinning out of control, and he knew it.
He took the exit off the GW Parkway and stopped in the guard station at CIA headquarters. He drove around the back of the main building and then into the underground facility, over to where cars that couldn’t be exposed to passing satellites were parked. He sat in his car with the windows down, just listening to the space. He got out. Nobody else here, the parking spots mostly empty. Even as he was walking through the facility’s relative safety, his extreme sense of caution did not change. They might have failed on this day, and they might all be dead, but he still worried about ambush anywhere, anytime.
In the long, clean corridors of the CIA, people gave him the usual glances. In his patrolman days, his uniforms had always been sharp. As a detective, he’d worn a suit with a string tie and a Stetson, an outfit intended to make him disappear into the north Texas woodwork. No more. Now he was too fixated on his job to worry about appearances. As long as his clothes were street legal, that was all that mattered to him.
As he was approaching their section, another text came in. This time, it was the number 676, once again from
a blocked line.
He stopped in his tracks, staring down at the screen.
He was looking at what had been Dan Miller’s full employee number at Deer Island.
No way this could be a coincidence, and somebody certainly wanted him to know that.
He got to the numbered door that concealed headquarters. He paused. This time, it could be seriously argued that he’d screwed up on every possible level. He set his jaw, paused for a moment, then went in.
The same kids were at the same consoles, working at the same intractable problems of translation and communication. As he passed silently among them, he could feel their uneasy disapproval like a sour smoke.
“Anybody wants a head for their den, let me know.”
It was his standard joke, but this time there was no ripple of laughter.
He pushed through into Diana’s sleek lair. She was not sitting at her desk, not exactly. She was poised there.
“Don’t hit me,” he said, cringing back and raising his hands.
“Flynn, why?”
“He got in the line of fire.”
“You killed four people!”
Had there been anybody else in there? No. “Wrong body count, and I didn’t kill anybody. A kid got killed. Big difference, Diana.”
“If you’d done your job right, nobody would be dead.”
“I ordered the facility evacuated. Maybe he was deaf, I don’t know. An airman died, and I’m sad about it. But it was one. Not four.”
“We consider the aliens you killed people.”
“Not legally, they aren’t.”
“Flynn, that’s the last time you throw that in my face, okay? You’ve gotten yourself into huge trouble, and us along with you. Hell, the whole planet, Flynn! What if they could just push a button and we’re history?”
“I’ve gained a lot of intelligence on this mission.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“The exsanguinations are explained. What I saw was one of those monsters—”
“Please.”
“What am I supposed to call them? What’s the politically correct term? Tell me, because I want to know.”