“What if he’s ordinary? We have only that tape to tell us he’s going to be some kind of a genius. Maybe Crew and Simpson knew you were listening. Maybe the tape is a lie.”
“Then we’re already defeated, Charles.”
“Do you think that?”
“I think they’re going to be mighty careful and mighty ferocious. Look what’s riding on him—their whole species. And ours.”
Charles shrugged. “Don’t tell me you’re disloyal, too.”
“I’ve been to India, I’ve been to Vietnam, I’ve see the brainless, gobbling hordes of human filth out there. No, I believe in what we’re doing with every cell in my body, Charles. This little band we call the Trust, is the most noble, the most courageous, and the most important organization in human history.”
Charles gave him a twinkle of a smile. “You know what Stalin did when his little commissars were too eloquent in their praise? He had them shot.”
“Then do it, Charles! Get it over with!”
“I can’t, Goddamn your soul. You know that I’ve been defending you from Henry Vorona for years. Ever since CIA saddled me with him, in fact. If I tell the others just how royally you’ve fucked things up, I’m gonna end up sitting on a vote of no confidence, and guess who’s gonna join you in hell? No, Mike, I’d like to see you good and dead, I have to admit that, but I damn well can’t, because the bullet that goes through your head goes through mine, too.”
“Charles, I’m going to fix this.”
“You’d better, because you are talking about the entire human species being enslaved, Mike. Because that is what this is about. Somewhere out there, they’re coming. And they will do this. They will do this, Mike. Just remember one thing, we have to get that child before they change him, because if we don’t, God only knows what kind of abilities and powers he’s going to have.”
“I need people. I need backup.”
“You can’t have a damn soul!”
“Charles—”
“I can give you equipment and I can give you money, but
Mike had assumed that he’d have a trained team of experts. But he could see Charles’s point all too clearly. Unless he fixed this, and did it quietly, they were both dead men.
“What’s your plan, Mike? I want to know your exact plan.”
“Forget Adam, forget Glass, Langford, all of them. Go for the kid now, fast, next twenty-four hours. Then worry about everything else. Use the TR to get me into Wilton with absolutely no chance of detection.”
“The grays will know you’re there.”
“Not right away. Remember, I’ve seen this mind-reading business up close for years. Distance is a big issue. They’re not going to find me until I’m physically near the kid. But that’s the one place I’ll never be.”
“You’re a sniper or what?”
“There will be no direct approach to him whatsoever. But he will be killed, Charles. Coming from me, I know it’s not worth much to you, but I do guarantee it.”
To his credit, Charles made no comment, but the expression on his face eloquently communicated his contempt for what he undoubtedly regarded as outrageous braggadocio on the part of a proven incompetent. “You know how to access the TR?”
“Yes, sir. You’ll recall that I set up the security.”
Charles turned around in his chair. The Capitol glowed in the distance, the Washington Monument beyond. “What do you think this’ll be like in a thousand years, Mike?”
“In a thousand years? If we succeed, it’ll be the holy city, the center of heaven.”
Charles said nothing more, and Mike took that as a signal to leave, for which he was very damned grateful.
He had a good plan, and if he acted quickly enough, he thought there was a reasonable chance that it would work. The important thing was to push all consequences out of his mind. His life being at stake was bad enough, but looking at the larger picture was enough to freeze a man’s soul.
As he drove to National Airport, he called his personal travel agency and booked the next civilian flight he could, which was Delta to Atlanta. He parked in long-term parking, then went to the ticket counter and got his ticket. He bought a newspaper and went to the gate to wait until the agent arrived. He did nothing out of the ordinary.
When the agent appeared, he checked in and selected his seat.
Having set up this false trail, he then left the airport and hailed a cab, which he took to a small office building a short distance from his house. He descended into the garage, took out some keys, and started another car. This one was a Buick from the mid-eighties, nondescript compared to the Mercedes he kept here in Washington.
He drove to the Beltway, then took 95 up to Baltimore, exiting onto 695 toward Owings Mills. An hour and a half after he left the garage, he was exiting onto Painters’ Mills Road. As he drove up Caves Road, he entered a more isolated area. He turned off onto an unmarked road and soon came to what appeared to be a construction zone. From here, the road appeared to be impassable. He took a right, and it turned out that what looked like brush was something quite different. The car moved through the brush and trees as if they weren’t there—which, indeed, they weren’t. This was a state-of-the-art holographic projection, one of the most advanced camouflage devices in the Pentagon’s arsenal. The design had come from Adam. It was deployed sparingly, out of fear that the press would get wind of it. If the origin of any of these technologies was discovered, the whole deception would become unglued.
The result of this was that certain select areas of military technology were stunningly ahead of public understanding. To accomplish his purpose, he would use an array of that technology.
Central to his plan was a device that lay in a large underground hangar in these woods. Its development had taken forty years. It had cost perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars, paid for by misuse of the gigantic criminal enterprise known officially as the “black budget” which was really a cover for making select people rich at the expense of the American taxpayer, by using national security to conceal the theft.
The TR, or Triangular Aircraft, officially designated TR-A1, had also cost the lives of scientists who had come to a fatal eureka moment. When they realized that they were working on alien technology, they became too dangerous to be allowed to live. Test pilots had died, too, perfecting its capabilities, as had engineers who had suffered mercury poisoning in the fabrication of its extraordinarily toxic power plant.
The reason for the extreme secrecy was twofold. Not only did they have to protect this device from the public, they had to protect it from the grays. They had gotten every kind of lie from Adam and Bob, most of them infinitely subtle, and as a result had gone down a thousand blind alleys and consumed literally vast wealth, indeed, so much wealth that every American citizen, for the past fifty years, had worked a fourth of his life in support of the development of technologies he wasn’t even allowed to know existed, let alone gain any benefit from.
He came to a certain spot in the narrow roadway where the radio, which he had tuned to an unused frequency, suddenly began to make a faint, high-pitched sound. He stopped the car, got out, pulled back a stone that lay at the roadside, and pressed his hand against a silver disk that had been concealed beneath it. A moment later, the small hill before him opened. He drove the car in.
Inside, it was absolutely dark and silent. The only light came from a single red bulb, glowing softly. As Mike strode toward it, the outlines of an enormous object became visible immediately above his head. It was a triangle, totally black, measuring hundreds of feet on a side.
Its power plant involved the rotation of a ring of a coherent mercury plasma at extremely high speed, reducing the overall weight of the craft by 40 percent. The rest of the weight reduction was accomplished with a very old technology. The triangle had to be as large as it was because, for the rest of its lift, it relied on helium. It contained the most sophisticated surveillance and camouflage technology known, but it was not much faster than an old-fashioned dirigible.
Years ago, it had become obvious from Eamon Glass’s talks with Adam and the stories told by Mr. Crew, that mankind had lost a very sophisticated civilization to a ferocious war that was fought some time around fifteen thousand years ago. The combination of the use of devastating weaponry and the rise in sea levels that had taken place when the last ice age ended twelve thousand years ago, had first pulverized and then drowned this
