So far, her mother’s advice had never been wrong.
AT THE DAYS INN, LAUREN Glass was awakened by a tapping on her door. She was shocked, then frightened. Then she remembered the code that Rob had given her, and recognized the pattern of taps. As if a motel room door would keep out Mike Wilkes or whatever goons he might send.
She still had no clothes but what she’d been wearing when Mike had attacked her, so she went into the bathroom and wrapped herself in a towel before cracking the door.
“What time is it?”
“Six-fifty. We’ve got to get started.”
“What are we doing?”
“Trying to figure out where the kid is, if he’s really here, or if this is some kind of a feint designed to throw Wilkes off, in which case we can concentrate on the issue of you. But we need to solve the child question first.”
His life before hers, that was clear enough. “The grays aren’t protecting this child?”
“We’re not in communication with the grays anymore. As you know.”
“I do indeed. And I have to tell you, I just don’t see them as really understanding how jeopardy functions in our society. They know how the brain works, but I don’t think they understand reality the same way we do. We need to assume that they’re going to be blindsided if this child is attacked.”
MIKE WILKES WAS RETURNING TO the motel from the early run he took every day when he saw, from a distance of about a quarter of a mile, two people get into a USAF motor pool car in the parking lot and drive away. A man and a woman, but too far away to see their faces. He noted that they’d been parked directly in front of his room.
He decided that some sort of Air Force investigative unit must have been activated, no doubt because of what had happened last night, when Lauren Glass had appeared at Wright-Pat after he’d listed her as KIA.
He put in a cell phone call to Charles. “Hey there, sorry I’m so early. Yeah, it went fine—at least, the trip was fine. Look, there are a couple of officers in mufti sniffing around. I haven’t gotten a close look at them, but I have the feeling that they’re an arrest team. I need that handled, Charles.”
He hung up quickly and did what he now had to do with his cell phone, which was to take out the battery and throw the whole instrument in a ditch. You might as well paint yourself purple as carry one of these things. If you had a cell phone, turned on or turned off, they could track you from twenty-five thousand miles overhead with the WatchStar satellite.
He had probably a dozen cover identities. He didn’t even remember them all. Some of them were essentially perfect, provided to him by the Defense Intelligence Agency. They would stand up to the most rigorous scrutiny. Others, thrown together as needed over the years, were less reliable. But all except two of them were on file somewhere within the U.S. government.
So, at the moment, he had only the two to choose from. He decided to stay with the salesman he’d used last night. He found a gas station, went in, and asked the attendant for directions to the nearest rental car agency. He had about twelve hours to perform a whole complex sequence of actions, then the night to do the really challenging work.
The Three Thieves watched Conner leave home and be driven to school. So far, there had been no threat against him. They wanted to be closer to Conner even than the collective demanded. He was their creation, too, and his mind was like a garden of jewels. They wanted to partake of his rich feelings, but they dared not, he was too precious to disturb in any way.
Because, as a species, they were so close to death, the grays were particularly terrified of it. Their main body was alone in the immensity of space, no longer protected by a home planet and a parent star, their own having long since perished as victims to time. They traveled now in an engineered world on what many considered a hopeless quest, and their collective mind dreamed of oblivion, and worried about it, and clung.
The Thieves had spent much of the night hanging over the town, listening to the people they could hear through implants, trying to ascertain if any of them might seek to harm their treasure.
Last night, they had carried out the instructions of the collective and prepared Conner to receive the extraordinary implant that was going to be given to him.
The fragment of the collective the humans called Adam had been assigned to man some years ago, with the hope that Adam, through exposure to them, would evolve structures in his mind that would enable him to do something that no gray had ever done before—indeed, that was only an idea, a theory, perhaps a hope and maybe a forlorn one. They wanted him to meld into the boy, in effect, to implant his entire being into Conner and become part of him.
Now Adam lay waiting in an empty barn, on the floor of a disused horse stall. Later, when darkness fell, he would complete his mission. Death was in this for him, but a very strange sort of death. It would not be the oblivion that was at the center of the long, complicated drama that obsessed the collective, but rather the surrender of self in a sort of living death. Once his thoughts and knowledge became part of Conner, he believed that he would disappear entirely.
He listened to the dripping of the old barn and the rustle of beetles in the hay, and dreamed formless, uneasy dreams.
The Three Thieves were fascinated and horrified by what Adam was being called upon to do. Like every gray, in the privacy of the self, they regarded it with horror. Superficially, though, they were grateful both that he was trying and that they didn’t have to.
The grays in the scout group had various human genes, this and that, whatever they’d been able to use, and were much healthier than the ones in the main body. The Three Thieves, for example, had human blood, vivid with life, not the dank artificial goo that sustained most of those in the main body. They had taken this blood and adapted their bodies to it, and used it now as their own. It made them quicker, smarter, and also, they thought, more able to understand man.
The Three Thieves watched Conner from above as he moved about in his school. They wanted to get closer, but could not go into a crowd and remain invisible. They could lock their movements to no more than two or three pairs of eyes. So they could not enter his school, they could only watch. This was why grays worked at night, when people were alone.
CONNER HAD SLEPT A RESTLESS, frightened night, and now sat in history class bored senseless because he had realized that his teacher did not understand the events in the Napoleonic Wars that he was teaching. The French loss of the Battle of Borodino in 1812 had led inevitably to the political structure of modern Europe, and discussing the way that had happened would have been interesting. Instead, he had to listen to stupefying trivia about General Kutuzov’s bad feet and Napoleon’s good lunch.
His chest hurt. He remembered some kind of fire, but he had not been burned. He knew he had seen the grays, but it all now seemed curiously unreal, like it had happened to somebody else, or not happened at all.
This disturbed him. He knew that he had seen them. He remembered them, though, in the unstable way that you remember a dream. He understood that this was because the experience had been so strange, but it still troubled him. He wanted these memories. He knew that the grays were here for a reason and they were obviously interested in him. But what was the reason, and why him?
At the ten-fifteen break, he caught up with Paulie before he had reached the protection of Kevin and Will. “Do you still remember?” he asked.
Paulie stopped opening the combination on his locker. He stared down at his feet. “Yeah,” he said in a low voice.
“Paulie, I’m scared.”
“I wasn’t when we got up, but I am now.”
“Yeah, the same thing’s happening to me. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be there at night.”
Paulie looked at him, his eyes hollow. “I was gonna restart the busters,” he said, “but I’m not. You’re having too rough a time. But I don’t want us to be together again, Conner. I don’t want ever to see those things again, not ever.”
“I can’t handle it, either!”
