were none.
Maybe not all of Dad’s nightmares had been about the grays, maybe he had also feared this sort of thing happening to him one day.
Then, as she rounded the corner, a lovely Mustang with two coeds in it appeared. “Help!” She stood in front of them waving her arms. “Help! I need the police! Help me!”
As they swerved around her, she yelled into the car,
They did not help her and she ran on. Almost immediately, she heard the growling of a powerful engine and the whine of tires. He was turning the corner.
She raced down the driveway of one of the large homes and threw herself down behind the garbage cans beside its garage. Hiding there, barely breathing, she heard a car stop. It was him, it had to be.
She dared not look, dared not move, found herself hardly able to breathe. She had never been this scared, never remotely. She could almost literally feel the sensation of the gun pointing at her.
She heard footsteps on the driveway, soft, quick… and then a loud click and some muttered words. A woman was there. Her remote control hadn’t worked.
She brought her car into the garage and the door began closing.
Lauren sobbed, stood up, started toward the house—and in that moment Wilkes’s Phaeton came snarling up the driveway.
She turned and ran, crashing past the garbage cans and down the side of the house, across the expansive backyard where an elderly man struggled with a broken gate. “Call the police,” she shouted as she darted into the alley.
Behind her, she heard Wilkes snap, “Official business,” to the old man. Curse him, the bastard was in uniform, too. She would get no help.
She moved to the end of the alley, darted across the street and into the next alley. She pressed herself back into a tangle of bare bushes, hoping that he would miss her.
A moment later, she saw him come out of the other alley. The gun was now concealed. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving. He looked up and down the street, then toward this alley. He stared a long time at the big shrub. He was looking right at her, but apparently couldn’t see her.
Then he took out the gun. He went down on one knee and braced it toward the shrub. She got ready to run. He snapped the barrel—and she froze. She bared her teeth, fighting the urge to break cover like a terrified pheasant. You did not need to do what he’d just done to cock a .45 automatic. Therefore, he’d done it for effect, to frighten her into moving. He was guessing.
Finally, he stuffed the gun under his jacket and began hurrying away.
A moment later, she heard his car start. She moved deeper into the alley and crouched down behind the edge of a shed. She could not be seen from the street at all. She called Ted on her cell.
“Hey, bad girl.”
“Teddy, love, listen to me and listen close. Never go back to my apartment. Never, at all, for anything.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
“Okay, Ted, I know how this sounds. But you’ll be in terrible danger if you go back there. Don’t even come in the neighborhood.”
“Lauren?”
“I’m not ditching you, I’m warning you. There’s terrible danger, Ted. It has to do with my work, and I am extremely serious. If you go back there, you will be tortured and you will be killed. You just forget it, you forget me, you go on with your life.”
She broke down, then, so badly that she held the cell phone away from her ear and gritted her teeth to keep from sobbing.
“Lauren, what’s going on?”
She forced back the tears. “Where are you now? No—don’t tell me! I shouldn’t have asked, not on this phone. Look, you can help us both. Go to the Air Police. Tell them that Colonel Wilkes threatened us with a gun. Both of us!”
“He didn’t.”
“He did, he threatened me, he shot at me.”
“Jesus!”
But the Air Police weren’t going to be able to help. They couldn’t reach into a black program like hers. He would end up confronting all kinds of questions he couldn’t answer, and probably confronting Wilkes into the bargain. “No, I’m not thinking straight. Don’t go near the Air Police. Move back on base and just go about your business. You’ll be left alone.”
“Lauren, I love you.”
“Oh, Ted, no you don’t. You were going to, but it hasn’t happened yet because I ditch guys before it does happen, and stuff like this is the damn reason. You obey me on this. You trust me and you obey me.”
Silence.
“Ted, promise!”
“You can’t tell me a thing, can you?”
“Not one thing.” She closed her cell phone, leaned against the wall of the shed for a moment, then continued on.
She went down the alley to the next street and crossed it quickly. She continued this process, going down one alley and then the next, until she arrived on North Meridian at the edge of University Park. She went into a Starbucks and moved about looking at the coffee machines and CDs, staying well away from the front of the store.
She thought that Colonel Wilkes might well have license to kill her as a security risk. In fact, he would never have pulled his gun if he hadn’t known for certain that he would get away with it.
She remembered, suddenly, a story Andy had told her. At the time, it had seemed like so much scuttlebutt, the kind of thing that went down over beers. Now she knew that the tale of the code experts who were lobotomized on retirement, as lurid as it was, had been a veiled warning.
Andy was gone because he’d understood the situation they were in the instant he found out what had happened. He was running, probably even had an escape plan all worked out for himself.
She had no such plan, and zero confidence that she could survive very long at all in this situation. She had no operational training at all. Beyond the basic attack-and-defense maneuvers and gun skills she’d learned at Lackland, she was not capable.
If she had Adam, though, things would be different. If she brought Adam back, instead of being a liability, she’d become an asset again.
If Adam wasn’t dead, and Wilkes had been certain that he wasn’t, then where was he? Given how fast he could move and his ability to make himself so hard to see, he must have escaped without her seeing him go. Left her behind to die.
No, not Adam. He was always ten moves ahead. He’d have known that she would escape on her own. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted her to, or hadn’t cared.
Nobody had ever told her much of anything about the way the grays functioned, whether they had bases or satellites or even exactly what they were, for that matter. So how would she go about finding somebody that weird, who had all these special powers and abilities?
She could try remote viewing for him, but that only worked if you were completely calm, and anyway, she wasn’t much good at it. All she was good at was making pictures for Adam and seeing the ones he sent her.
She couldn’t reach him that way, either, because that only worked from a few feet away. Oh, she could sense things about Adam from a distance—sort of intuit them, but there was no mind connection over distance that she’d ever experienced.
So where did that leave her? She couldn’t very well go looking behind houses and in trash cans. There was no point at all trying to find Adam. Adam was lost to her.
She was at a loss, getting so frantic that tears were forming in her eyes. This feeling of being trapped was just hideous and it was panicking her and making it hard for her to think clearly.
She decided that there was only one real option open to her. She had to go in. She had to go straight to Wright-Pat and actually file a complaint against Wilkes. She was within her rights, the man had shot at her. If she
