security and a pair of blast-doors built to take a nuclear hit."
Dom said, "Well, it's like Ernie told us ... we'll have to just stay
loose and search for their weaknesses until we find a way."
"But it looks like they don't have any weaknesses," Sandy said.
"Their cover-up has been falling apart ever since they brainwashed us
and let us go," Ginger said. "Each time one of us remembers another
detail, that's another gaping hole in their cover-up."
"Yeah," Ned said, "but seems to me they're in a better position to keep
patching the holes than we are to keep poking new ones."
"Let's can the goddamn negative thinking," Ernie said gruffly.
Smiling beatifically, Brendan Cronin said, "He's right. We must not be
negative. We need not be negative because we're meant to win." His
voice was again infused with the eerie serenity and certitude which
arose from his belief that the revelation of their special fate was
inevitable. At moments like this, however, the priest's tone and manner
did not comfort Dom, as they were meant to but, for some odd reason,
stirred up a sediment of fear and muddied his emotions with anxiety.
"How many men are stationed at Thunder Hill?" Jorjia asked.
Before Dom or Ginger could respond with information they'd gleaned from
the Sentinel, a stranger appeared in the doorway at the head of the
stairs that led up from the motel office. He was in his late thirties,
lean and tough-looking, dark-haired, dark-complexioned, with a crooked
left eye that was not coordinated with his right. Though the downstairs
door was locked, and although the linoleum on the stairs did nothing to
quiet ascending footsteps, the intruder appeared with magical silence,
as if he were not a real man but an ectoplasmic visitation.
"For God's sake, shut up," he said, sounding every bit as real as anyone
else in the room. "If you think you can plot in privacy here, you're
badly mistaken."
Eighteen miles southwest of the Tranquility Motel, at Shenkfield Army
Testing Grounds, all the buildings-laboratories, administration offices,
security command center, cafeteria, recreation lounge, and living
quarters-were underground. In the blazing summers on the edge of the
high desert and in the occasionally bitter winters, it was easier and
more economical to maintain a comfortable temperature and humidity level
in underground rooms than in structures erected on the
less-than-hospitable Nevada barrens. But a more important consideration
was the frequent open-air testing of chemicaland occasionally even
biological-weapons. The tests were conducted to study the effects of
sunlight, wind, and other natural forces on the distribution patterns
and potency of those deadly gases, powders, and superdiffusible mists.
If the buildings were aboveground, any unexpected shift in the wind
would contaminate them, making unwilling guinea pigs of base personnel.
No matter how involved they became in work or leisure, the staff of
Shenkfield never forgot they were beneath the earth, for they had two
constant reminders of their condition: the lack of windows; plus the
susurration of the piped-in air coming through the wall vents, and the
echoing hum of the motors that fanned the air along the pipes.
Sitting alone at a metal desk in the office to which he had been
temporarily assigned, waiting impatiently and worriedly for the phone to
ring, Colonel Leland Falkirk thought: God, I hate this place!
The never-ending whine and hiss of the air-supply system gave him a
headache. Since his arrival on Saturday, Falkirk had been eating
aspirin as though they were candy. Now he tipped two more out of a
small bottle. He poured a glass of ice-water from the metal carafe that
stood on the desk, but he did not use it to wash down the pills.
Instead, he popped the dry aspirin into his mouth and chewed them.
The taste was bitter, disgusting, and he almost gagged. But he did not
reach for the water.
He did not spit out the aspirin, either. He persevered.
by an even worse adolescence, had taught Leland Falkirk that life was
hard, cruel, and utterly unjust, that only fools believed in hope or
salvation, and that only the tough survived. From an early age, he had
forced himself to do things that were emotionally, mentally, and
physically painful, for he had decided that self-inflicted pain would
toughen him and make him less vulnerable. He tempered the steel of his
will with challenges that ranged from chewing dry aspirin to major tests
like the outings that he called "desperation survival treks." Those
expeditions lasted two weeks or longer, and they put him face-to-face
with death. He parachuted into a forest or jungle wilderness, far from
the nearest outpost, without supplies, with only the clothes on his
back. He carried no compass or matches. His only weapons were his bare
hands and what he could fashion with them. The goal: reach civilization
alive. He spent many vacations in that self-imposed suffering, which he
judged worthwhile because he came back a harder and more self-reliant
man than he'd been at the start of each adventure.
Now he crunched dry aspirin. The tablets were reduced to powder, and
the powder turned his saliva to an acidic paste.
"Ring, damn you," he said to the telephone on the desk. He was hoping
for news that would get him out of this hole in the ground.
In DERO, the Domestic Emergency Response Organization, a colonel was
less a desk-jockey and more a field officer than in any other branch of
the Army. Falkirk's home base was in Grand Junction, Colorado, not
Shenkfield, but even in Colorado, he spent little time in his office. He
thrived on the physical demands of the job, so the low-ceilinged,
windowless rooms of Shenkfield felt like a many-chambered coffin.
If he had been engaged upon any mission but this one, he might have
established temporary unit headquarters up at Thunder Hill Depository.
That place was also underground but its caves were huge, high-ceilinged,
not like these tombsized rooms.
But there were two reasons he had to keep his men away from Thunder
Hill. First, he dared not draw attention to the place because of the
secret it harbored. Several ranchers lived in the highlands along the
road leading to the gated Thunder Hill turnoff. If they spotted a fully
equipped DERO company moving into the Depository, they'd speculate about
it. Locals must not start wondering about Thunder Hill. Two summers
ago, he'd used Shenkfield as a red herring to divert attention from the
Depository. Now, with another crisis building, he would stay here at
Shenkfield again, so he would be in position to spread the same kind of
disinformation to the press and public that he'd spread before. The
second reason he set up HQ at Shenkfield was because he had certain dark
suspicions about everyone in the Depository: He trusted none of them,
would not feel safe among them. They might be . . . changed.
The residue of crushed aspirin had been in his mouth so lo
ng that he had
adjusted to the bitter taste. He was no longer sickened, no longer had
to struggle against the gag reflex, so it was all right to drink the
water now. He drained the glass in four swallows.
Leland Falkirk suddenly wondered if he had crossed the line that
separated the constructive use of pain from the enjoyment of it. Even
as he asked the question, he knew the answer: Yes, to some degree, he
had become a masochist. Years ago. He was a very well-disciplined
masochist, one who benefited from the pain he inflicted on himself, one
who controlled the pain instead of letting it control him, but a
masochist nonetheless. At first he subjected himself to pain strictly
to make himself tough. But along the way, he began to enjoy it, too.
That insight left him blinking in surprise at the empty water-glass.
An outrageous image formed in his mind: himself more than a decade from
now, a sixty-,year-old pervert sticking bamboo shoots under his
fingernails every morning for the thrill and to get his heart running.
That grotesque picture was grim. It was also funny, and he laughed.
As recently as a year ago, Leland would not have been capable of
self-critical insights of this nature. He had never been much of a
laugher, either. Until recently. Lately, he was not merely
noticing-and being amused by-traits in himself that he had never noticed
before, but he was also becoming aware that he could and should change
some of his attitudes and habits. He saw that he could become a better
and more satisfied person, without losing the toughness he prized. This
was a strange state of mind for him, but he knew the cause of it. After
what had happened to him two summers ago, after all the things that he
had seen, and considering what was happening right now up at Thunder
Hill, he could not possibly go on with his life exactly as before.
The telephone rang. He grabbed it, hoping it was news about the
situation in Chicago. But it was Henderson from Monterey, California,
reporting that the operation at the Salcoe house was going smoothly.
The summer before last, Gerald Salcoe, with his wife and two daughters,
rented a pair of rooms at the Tranquility Motel. On the wrong night.
Recently, all of the Salcoes had experienced marked deterioration of
their memory blocks.
The CIA's experts in brainwashing, who were usually used only in covert
foreign operations, had been borrowed for the Tranquility job that July
and had promised to repress witnesses' memories without fail; now they
were embarrassed by the number of subjects whose conditioning was
breaking down. The experience these people had undergone was too
profound and shattering to be easily repressed; the forbidden memories
possessed mythopoeic power and exerted relentless pressure on the memory
blocks. The mind-control experts now claimed that another three-day
session with the subjects would guarantee their eternal silence.
In fact, the FBI and CIA, working in conjunction, were illegally holding
the Salcoe family incommunicado in Monterey at this very moment, putting
them through another intricate program of memory repression and
alteration. Although Cory Henderson, the FBI agent on the phone,
claimed it was going well, Leland decided it was a lost cause. This was
one secret that could not be kept.
Besides, too many agencies were involved: FBI, CIA, one entire DERO
company, others. Which made too many chiefs and not enough Indians.
But Leland was a good soldier. In charge of the military side of the
operation, he'd carry out his assignment even if it was hopeless.
In Monterey, Henderson said, "When are you moving in on the other
witnesses at the motel?"
That was the word they used for everyone who had been brainwashed that
July-witnesses. Leland thought it was apt, for in addition to its
obvious meaning, it also embodied mystical and religious overtones. He
remembered, as a child, being taken to tent revivals at which scores of
Holy Rollers writhed upon the floor while the raving minister screamed
at them to "be a witness to the miraculous, be a heartfelt witness for
the Lord!" Well, what the witnesses at the Tranquility Motel had seen
was every bit as paralyzing, amazing, humbling, and terrifying as the
face of God that those spasming Pentecostals had longed to see.
To Henderson, Leland said, "We're standing by, ready to seal off the
motel with half an hour's notice. But I'm not giving the go-ahead until
someone straightens out the mess in Chicago with Calvin Sharkle. Not
until I know for sure what's going on out in Illinois."
"What a screwup! Why was the situation with Sharkle allowed to
deteriorate so far? He should've been grabbed, put into a new
memory-repression program days ago, like we've done with the Salcoes
here."
"Wasn't my screwup," Leland said. "Your Bureau is in charge of
monitoring the witnesses. I only come in and mop up after you."
Henderson sighed. "I wasn't trying to shift the blame to your men,
Colonel. And hell, you can't blame us, either. The trouble is, even
though we're only doing visual surveillance of each witness four days a
month and listening to only about half the tapes of their phone calls,
we need twenty-five agents. But we only have twenty. Besides, the damn
case is so highly classified that only three of the twenty know why the
witnesses have to be watched. A good agent doesn't like being kept in
the dark like that. Makes him feel he's not trusted. Makes him sloppy.
So you get a situation like this Sharkle: The witness starts breaking
through his memory block, and nobody notices until it's at crisis stage.
Why'd we ever think we could maintain such an elaborate deception for an
unlimited length of time? Nuts. I'll tell you what our problem was: We
believed the CIA's brain-scrubbers. We believed those motherfuckers
could do what they said they could do. That was our mistake, Colonel."
"I always said there was a simpler solution," Leland reminded him.
"Kill them all? Kill thirty-one of our own citizens just because they
were in the wrong place at the wrong time?"
"I wasn't proposing it seriously. My point was that, short of
barbarism, we couldn't contain the secret and shouldn't have tried."
Henderson's silence made it clear he did not believe Leland's
disclaimer. Finally: "You will move on the motel tonight?"
"If the Chicago situation clears up, if I can figure what's going on
there, we'll move tonight. But there're questions need answers. These
strange . . . psychic phenomena. What's it mean? We both have
ideas, don't we? And we're scared pukesick. No, sir, I'm not moving
against the motel and jeopardizing my men until I understand the
situation."
Leland hung up.
Thunder Hill. He wanted to believe that what was happening up in the
mountains would lead to a better future than mankind deserved. But in
his heart he was afraid it was, instead, the end of the world.
When Jack stepped into the living room-which they had converted to a
dining room-and spoke to the group, som
e gasped in surprise and started
to rise, bumping the table in their eagerness to turn around, sending up
a clatter of dishes and flatware. Others flinched in their chairs as if
they thought he had been sent to kill them. He'd left the Uzi
downstairs to avoid causing just such a panic, but his unexpected
arrival still scared them. Good. They needed a nasty shock to make
them more cautious. Only the little girl, playing in her gravysmeared
plate with a spoon, did not react to his arrival.
"All right, okay, be calm. Sit down, sit," Jack said, gesturing
impatiently. "I'm one of you. That night, I registered at the motel as
Thornton Wainwright. Which is how you've probably been looking for me.
But that's not my real name. We'll get into that later. For now-"
Suddenly, everyone was excitedly pitching questions at him.
"Where did you-"
-scared the bejesus-"
"How did you-"
"-tell us if-"
Raising his voice enough to silence them, Jack said, "This isn't the
place to discuss these things. You can be heard here, for God's sake.
I've been eavesdropping for nearly an hour. And if I can listen in on
everything you say, then so can the people you're pitted against."
They stared dumbly at him, startled by his assertion that their privacy
was an illusion. Then a big, blocky man with gray brush-cut hair said,
"Are you telling us these rooms are bugged? 'Cause I find that hard to
believe. I mean, I've searched, you know; I've checked, found nothing.
And I've had some experience in these matters."
"You must be Ernie," Jack said, speaking in a sharp cold tone of voice