The Last American Wizard (5 page)

There were two marines in full combat gear at the front door. Steve could feel their eyes behind their mirrored
ballistic sunglasses as they ruminated on the question of killing him immediately or waiting until he presented just a bit more of a threat. Ace showed them a blizzard of passes, IDs, and papers covered with stamps and signatures that she pulled from an apparently inexhaustible supply in one of her leg pockets. Finally, one of them must have worked because both guards stiffened slightly, saluted, and waved them
through.

As he walked by, Steve imagined that they looked slightly disappointed, but he decided that they could always kill him on the way out, so they should just suck it up. There are small disappointments in everyone’s
life.

He followed Ace’s baseball cap up two crumbling concrete steps and through a door whose hinges looked as if they hadn’t been oiled since the Battle of the Bulge. He almost went right over a two-by-four railing at the end of a three-foot platform on the
other side of the door. When he recovered, he realized that, instead of a floor, there was only this small platform of raw wood, evidently placed to keep visitors from plunging headfirst to the ground, and bathed in full sunlight. There was a short two-step wooden staircase scabbed in on the left
side.

As he looked around, Steve realized that the entire building was a stage set–a tent constructed over a section of striped pavement no different from the parking lot outside. The walls were ‘flats,’ a single layer of wood and canvas with two-by-four braces at regular intervals. The outside had been painstakingly crafted to look like real wood and peeling paint, certainly well enough to fool anything but the closest inspection. On the inside, the walls were just bare tan canvas with random streaks and dribbles of tan and green
paint.

At the far end, about a dozen military types in the usual camouflaged work uniforms and leather tool belts were using pulleys to raise a triangular set piece with painted-on shingles– apparently the roof–up onto three large wooden poles. It reminded Steve of the time he’d seen a real three-ring circus tent go up. Once that was finished, Steve thought, there’d be no way to tell this from a dozen other 1940s-era barracks or office buildings that sat within a few hundred yards of their
location.

“This wasn’t prepared this morning. What else did the NSA want to conceal?” Steve smiled at an idle thought. “Keggers? Good-bye parties with strippers bursting out of a cake?” Then he looked at the serious, nerdy faces of the men and women around him and decided a way to hide all-night cram sessions was a lot more
likely.

Ace moved briskly down the steps and headed for a milling crowd of about twenty men and women. Steve could see that they were wearing everything from full battle dress to white smocks and pocket protectors to the head-to-toe Plexiglas protection suits that the sexy doctor on
The Last Ship
always wore when she was working with the virus that had killed off the rest of mankind. Suddenly, Steve stopped thinking that any of this was terribly funny–except perhaps for the air purification units that made cute humming and puffing noises as they trailed behind the suited scientists on tiny red
wagons.

Steve reached forward and–after a moment’s thought–lightly tapped his bodyguard on the shoulder. “Chief, I’m seeing people in bio-suits. Shouldn’t we take some sort of
precautions?”

“I don’t think so. Their primary responsibility is to drag the rest of us out if something turns out to be toxic. They’re still here, so we’re probably good to
go.”

Steve silently mouthed the word
“Probably?”

A tall woman in full Army dress uniform was being briefed by a circle of men and one woman who all wore identical short- sleeved shirts with pocket protectors. The woman’s shirt was pink and matched her glasses as well as her pocket protector. Steve figured they were either dorky scientists or actors hired and costumed to play dorky scientists. After witnessing the fake building, he felt he shouldn’t be taking anything for
granted.

Ace pointed at the woman in the center and said quietly, “Anyway, the colonel isn’t wearing protective gear. Of course, I suspect that even an Ebola virus would probably be afraid to disturb Trinidad Tataka. And rightly so.” The colonel was tall and thin with what appeared to be a mix of African and Asian–possibly Indian–features. As soon as Steve and Ace walked up, she dismissed the scientists and turned to Steve. After a long, searching inspection that terminated with a rather dismissive sigh, she extended a hand. “Mr. Rowan. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Tataka. What can you tell me about the
Portal?”

As a journalist, Steve had been dealing with this sort of
attitude from most members of the military for most of his career. The game she was playing was meant to knock the other person off-balance in the very beginning of a relationship and establish a long-lasting position of
power.

“I don’t know a damn thing, Trinidad.” He could see her stiffen at the use of her first name. “But I’m sure with all these smart guys you’ve got running around, you should know enough to brief me on it by now.” Actually, he was sure the military had no idea what was happening, but she’d pushed him hard and now he was pushing
back.

The colonel’s face hardened and Steve could actually
feel
the power of the stare she was giving him. He smiled, cocked his head, and raised a single eyebrow to indicate that he could wait just as long as she
could.

Then he deliberately turned away and began to study the center of the enclosed space. Four long tables had been hastily pushed together into a square and held a motley assemblage of scientific equipment. In addition, he suspected, the tables were there to keep people from accidentally walking into whatever was in the center. The only problem with that concept was that there didn’t appear to be anything in the
center.

To his surprise, Colonel Tataka did not explode in a standard- issue military snit fit. Instead, she gave a long sigh that turned into a tuneless whistle. “You’ve got it pegged. We don’t know shit.” Steve turned back around, interested by this unexpected
honesty.

Tataka gave him a rueful smile and said, “So, why don’t we stop trying to prove whose metaphorical dick is longer and share what we do know? I am not quite sure why you’re here, but I was given orders to render you my complete
support.”

She looked thoughtful. “I’m also unclear where those orders originated, but they came down through my chain of command so fast, you would have thought they’d been issued by God’s grandmother.”

Steve smiled–he was starting to like this woman. “Colonel, I’ve had one hell of a strange morning–frankly, I don’t really understand why I’m here, either–so why don’t you start, and we’ll see if we can help each other
out?”

Tataka clasped her hands behind her back and looked around– over on the other side, the crew was finishing the placement of the false roof, and big floodlight rigs were replacing the sunlight. “We have...” she paused and then started again.” We have a fact set
that simply doesn’t make sense.” Another pause. “Which I suppose makes it cease to be a fact set in the classic
sense.”

She began to walk slowly over to the four tables and used her fingers to tick off her data points. “One, we have a 747-400 with several hundred passengers missing. American International’s
flight 1143 to Los Angeles declared a Mayday at 0843 hours today. The pilots said the flight controls were moving, quote, on their own, unquote. They also reported that they were ‘fighting
someone’ for control. We have no idea what that means; they had the post-9/11 standard heavy-duty steel door, which according to remote telemetry was closed and locked, and the first officer was armed.”

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and continued. “The radar showed it losing altitude and vectoring towards Washington. Fighters were scrambled from Naval Air Station Patuxent River and Andrews Air Force Base, but the commercial jet swung to the east and eventually vectored away from DC.” She waved vaguely to the west. “It came in low over the apartments on the other side
of the Baltimore-Washington
Parkway–”

“I know.” Steve interrupted. “The noise almost blew my head off.”

Tataka gave him a sharp look. “You heard it?”

“Yep.”

“Odd, we’ve had no other reports of people hearing or seeing the plane as it came in over populated areas. Even more astonishing, phone camera videos haven’t started to pop up on CNN." She sighed, shook her head, and continued her briefing. “We could still follow AI 1143 on radar, but as far as we can tell, it was both unheard and unseen by anyone on the ground by the time it dropped below 10,000 feet.” She sighed. “Now comes the part I really can’t believe I’m saying, but I have to play the hand I've
been
dealt.”

Steve said. “You and me both. It’s been a very strange morning.”

She nodded slowly, her eyes focused on a blinking green light on a small piece of equipment on the closest table. “You have no idea. The facts as we know them indicate the flight ended here. I won’t say it crashed here because there isn’t any debris and a 747 does not crash without a mountain of wreckage. On the other hand, it was this point that the radar lost track of it as it merged with the ground clutter in an almost vertical trajectory. Command declared
it a possible Level 2 OTN Incident, so we inserted a false radar
trail into the air traffic computers so that they now show it going down in the middle of the Chesapeake
Bay.”

Steve looked blankly at Ace. She explained. “A Level 5 Incident would be lights in the sky, crop circles, and that sort of thing. Level 1 is an alien spaceship on the White House South Lawn.”

Tataka nodded. “So, a Level 2 is serious but containable. There is a substantial search-and-rescue mission going on over the Chesapeake as we
speak.”

“But they won’t find
anything.”

“Well, eventually, we’ll sink a physical misdirection package so that plane and passengers can be identified. Just like that TWA Flight over Long Island
Sound–”

“Flight 800?” Steve interrupted. “What happened
there?”

“The captain of the USS
Albuquerque
spilled coffee on the launch controls.” Tataka shook her head. “We would have hung
the bastard out to dry, except that there was conclusive evidence that his elbow was jostled by a previously certified
poltergeist.”

Ace nodded. “Yeah, that was Skippy,
right?”

“Right. OTN entity 465 slash 14p.” Tataka said absently. “The little bastard thinks he’s a gremlin. Keeps calling himself ‘Adolf.’ He got tired of busting people’s chops during the investigation and switched over to the
USS
Ronald Reagan. Driving them crazy, from what I’ve heard, but enough of that. Let’s get back to the incident at hand. Flight 1143 got to this point and vanished.” She gestured at the mock-up of a building that surrounded them. “We got this old Cold War deception kit out of storage to block the area from any unfriendly
eyes.”

Steve looked up at the open sky. “You worried about satellites?”

Tataka shook her head. “No, the most likely observers would be crows. Possibly
hawks.”

Steve kept looking up. “Well, I think you should assume hawks. They were the first things that struck me. You weren’t worried about
eagles?”

“No, we know that almost all of the eagles are on our side.” Steve slowly lowered his eyes to meet her intense brown
ones.

“I thought I was just playing along with the
joke.”

“Nope. You think all those strikes in Pakistan were done with Predator drones? Hell, probably half of them were just a couple of African Martial Eagles with an M183 satchel charge slung with a talon-activated quick release. Those war gamers turned pilots over at Nellis have way too much time lag to do anything precise. Damn, those birds are beautiful. Ten-foot wingspan and smart as a whip. Hell, three of ’em are officers
now.”

She clearly realized she’d said too much. “Well. Um. You are hereby directed to forget the last ten minutes of conversation under emergency restrictions laid out in the Secret Annex to the Patriot Act under Crimes Punishable by
Death.”

Tataka stared at Steve, who nodded in complete confidence that no editor in the country would believe him if he tried to turn it into a story. When the tall woman saw his agreement, she continued. “That’s all I’m going to say until we can confirm that this area is secure. I’ve been told to give you a full briefing.” She laughed bitterly. “Or at least a recounting of the timeline as reported. I don’t know how it can be a ‘briefing’ when I don’t buy one damn word of
it.”

She returned to her usual brisk manner. “OK, the first thing is to show you the Anomaly. Follow me but don’t go past the tables. We are working on the assumption that it’s dangerous even though we have no idea in what
manner.”