The Grays

“Maybe I made a mistake.”

“Maybe you didn’t.”

They left it there, and soon Paulie was asleep. Conner watched the night, listened to the snow whispering on the windowpanes, and wondered how the world really worked.

There came that voice again, very quick, trembling with something like fear and something that, oddly enough, sounded to Conner like a sort of awe: Soon you will know.

NINETEEN

CHARLES GUNN PULLED UP TO the presidential safe house on Embassy Row. The mansion had been acquired during World War II when the Roosevelt Administration was concerned that Hitler might develop a long- range bomber and attack the White House. Successive administrations had continued to use it, and during the cold war, tunnel access had been added across the mile that separates it from the White House. Now it functioned as a very private presidential enclave, at present ostensibly owned by Washington insider Larry Prince, but actually under the control of the Secret Service.

He walked quickly to the door, which was opened as he approached. A young man in a dark suit, with an earbud in his ear and the bulge of a small machine gun under his jacket, stepped aside and let him through the metal detector. Another young man fell in ahead of them, and the three of them proceeded silently down the hall, then turned right into the president’s ornate office.

The president didn’t know it yet, but he was going to provide a diversion that would, hopefully, deceive the grays into looking in the wrong direction for the source of danger to their evil little child. It might well mean that the president would himself be killed, but to Charles this was of little consequence.

He was watching the news and paging through a speech. “Hey there, Chester,” he said without looking up, “just give me a second, here.” Then, a moment later, “Pull up a chair.”

“It’s Charles, sir,” Charles said as he sat down.

On the wall of this office there were paintings chosen by FDR, the most spectacular being a Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos. As Charles knew, and as FDR had certainly known, the geometry of the painting resolved into a date: 2012. That this was the year of tribulation had been known by the secret societies that had created western civilization literally from the very beginning. The date had been handed down through the Masonic community from the ancient Egyptian priesthood who had divined it by looking through the last, clear glass of man’s old, lost science: a window into the future. This had been at Abydos in Egypt, and some of the other things they had seen had been commemorated on beams that held up the temple’s roof to this day.

“So,” the president finally said, “how are you gonna make me miserable today, Charles?”

“Mr. President—”

“You never come here with good news. All your good news is secret. So, hit me.”

“The grays are acting against us in a major and very bizarre way.”

“The grays are acting bizarre? You’re kidding. I sit here astonished.”

Charles had constructed his lie carefully. “Sir, they’re going to do something that will reveal to the public the fact that the government’s been concealing their presence for sixty years. They’re going to destroy our credibility.”

The president pointed a finger at his own temple.

“Exactly. They’re trying to undermine the government. First, the public becomes aware that they’re real. Second, people tell about their abductions. Third, it’s discovered that we’re helpless. Chaos follows.”

The president was silent for a moment. “And, for some reason, you can’t get control of this situation, which is why you’re here. First, tell me why it’s out of control. Second, tell me what you need.”

“It’s not out of control.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Sir, I need a TR-A. I need to surveil in the area where this disclosure event took place.”

“You have TR-A1.”

“Mike Wilkes is using it. He’s on detail out there now, but he needs backup.”

“Okay, you’ve got another TR. I’ll cut orders for you to have access to one. What else?”

“I need some people killed, toute suite.”

“Just do what you gotta do.”

“You need to be aware that one of them is Mr. Crew.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Exactly. Our friend from the beyond is not our friend.”

“He’s—what’s he done?”

“He’s giving the grays support.”

“Next.”

“I need one other thing.”

“Hit me.”

Charles smiled. “I don’t want to hit you. I want you to hit Wilton, Kentucky, with an earthquake. Enough to disrupt the place and reduce the college that’s there to rubble.”

The president stared at him for some little time. “Why?” he asked at last.

“We need a diversion so that we can clean up all the principles. We need it to look accidental. All the folks who were present during the disclosure event.”

“I see.” He looked down at the top of his desk. This time, his silence extended even longer. When he spoke, his voice was soft with what Charles knew must be pain. “You know, it feels like the best day in your life when you walk for the first time into the White House as president. President of the United States—wow, and wow again. Then you find out the secrets, and you spend the rest of your life in mourning.”

“Mr. President, this will be a very localized hit. It’s not going to activate any fault lines, nothing like that. We’ll see significant disruption and a few deaths, obviously. It will be a cover for us to sterilize the area. We’ll confiscate all original video, and deal with the people who were firsthand witnesses. We have assets already at work who will get a local physics professor who saw the thing to debunk it. Our media people will see to it that his message gets spread far and wide. But the damage and the deaths will be the minimum necessary, let me assure you of that. I feel the same way you do about the American people, of course.”

“You’re assuring me that this will not do any more than the minimum damage necessary?”

“Absolutely. It will be very precisely contained. We’ll have a TR directing the pulses from the immediate vicinity of the target.”

“And the grays are not going to react adversely? That is one limb I sure as hell don’t want to go out on.”

“Sir, again, there is no way. They are not going to be able to connect the dots, as it were.”

“I’ll redeploy the scalar weapon.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll call you when I need it fired.”

God only knew what the grays would do to the president after he unleashed a scalar pulse that devastated the whole center of the United States and threw all of their plans awry. One thing was certain, Charles planned to stay far, far away from this particular moron after he pulled that particular trigger.

“I have a state dinner in an hour. I gotta go over to the rathole and put on my monkey suit, and spend the evening with the prime minister of Thailand—whose name I will never, ever learn to pronounce—who is here to whine at me about some damn thing or other.”

He stood up. The interview was at an end.

MIKE WILKES LAY IN HIS motel room trying to do anything except worry about the next few days. He had a difficult, complex task, and if the grays detected him, he was going to be something worse than dead meat. Over the years, they’d found bodies of people who had been attacked by the grays, mostly airmen who’d gone too close in the early days, when Truman was still trying to shoot them out of the sky.