The Shimmer (14 page)

Near the observation platform, a crowd faced barricades and the police officers who guarded them. Someone sold food from a van marked BEST TACOS IN TEXAS. Reporters stood in front of cameras next to news trucks with broadcast dishes on top. Page recognized the reporter he'd seen on the television at the motel office, the one with the rumpled suit.

"Tori, don't stop," he warned. "The TV people know a woman shot the killer. Sooner or later, they'll find out it was you. They'll never let you alone."

But she didn't seem to hear. All she did was stare toward the field where she'd seen the lights.

"They're ruining it," she said.

Chapter 27.

As the sun began its descent, the Black Hawk helicopter sped through the sky at 160 miles per hour. Ignoring the muffled vibration of the engines, Col. Warren Raleigh glanced to the left toward where the Davis Mountains stretched along the horizon. A moment later, he peered ahead toward clouds drifting in from the direction of the Gulf of Mexico.

Below, cattle grazed on sparse grassland that seemed to go on forever.

"Big country." The pilot's voice came through Raleigh's headset.

"Some ranchers down there own a half-million acres," Raleigh said into his microphone. "Lots of privacy."

At 6 that morning, Raleigh and his team had flown from Glen Burnie Airport near the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Their aircraft had been a Falcon 2000 owned by INSCOM but registered to a fictitious civilian corporation. It flew them two-thirds of the way across the continent to the Army airbase at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. There they'd picked up equipment that Raleigh had ordered to be ready for them. They'd also added two members to their team. One was human--an Army dog handler. The other was a German shepherd.

The helicopter they'd transferred to was unarmed. In its cargotransport configuration, without the dramatic-looking missile launchers and Gatling guns, it wouldn't attract any more attention than most other helicopters, Raleigh thought, especially in an area where the majority of eyes that would see it belonged to cattle and coyotes.

He glanced at his watch. "We should be there just about now."

"Exactly on schedule, sir." The pilot gestured ahead toward a gleam of white.

The ten radio dishes grew rapidly larger. It had been three years since Raleigh had visited this facility. He'd personally supervised the installation of the new equipment and arranged for one of the dishes to be aimed toward an area near Rostov. Now he was impatient to return.

Through his headset, he heard Sergeant Lockhart telling the men, "One minute to touchdown."

Raleigh watched the dishes get closer. Each was so huge that it dwarfed the combat helicopter. As an array, though, they were beyond huge. The only word that occurred to Raleigh was "monumental." Not easily impressed, he found their intense whiteness to be awesome.

When the helicopter descended past the three concentric rows of fences, its whirling blades created a dust storm. He felt the skids touch down and the helicopter's weight settle. Then the speed of the blades diminished, their sound becoming a whistle, and Lockhart opened the rear hatch, motioning the men to grab their packs and hurry out.

Raleigh returned the pilot's salute and jumped to the ground, joining his team a safe distance from the swirling dust. As the chopper lifted off and headed back toward Fort Bliss, a second Black Hawk appeared on the horizon.

The eight men were in their midtwenties. Their hair was short but not to the extent that they seemed obviously military. Each wore sturdy shoes, slightly oversized jeans, a T-shirt, and a loose outdoor shirt that hung over his belt, concealing a Beretta 9-millimeter pistol.

That handgun wasn't a match for Raleigh's beloved M4, but until somebody figured out a practical way to conceal a carbine, the pistol would have to do. Besides, there were several M4s in the crates of equipment he'd ordered.

Apart from the magnificent observatory dishes, the only aboveground structure was a concrete-block shed from which two guards wearing khaki uniforms emerged into the sunlight. They held their carbines in a deceptively casual way, but Raleigh noted that they could make the weapons operational in an instant.

One of the guards had strained features, as if he were in pain.

"'I hear a voice you cannot hear,'" the man said.

Under other circumstances, his seemingly deranged statement would have made Raleigh frown, but instead he immediately replied, "'Which says I must not stay.'"

The guard continued, "'I see a hand you cannot see.'"

"'Which beckons me away,'" Raleigh said.

With the code recognition completed, the guard saluted. "Welcome to the facility, Colonel."

"Your name is . . . ?"

"Earl Halloway, sir."

Raleigh remembered the name from documents he'd read en route.

"Saw combat in Iraq. Former Army Ranger. Correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then there's no need to salute me any longer."

"It's a good habit, sir."

"Indeed it is. In case you're curious, those lines come from an eighteenth-century English poet: Thomas Tickell."

"I'm afraid I never heard of him, sir."

"Nobody has. Posterity wasn't kind to him." But it'll be kind to me, Raleigh thought. "You look uncomfortable, Earl. Is anything wrong?"

"Just a headache, sir. It's nothing. I took some aspirin. It's going away."

But the tight expression on his face made Raleigh think the headache was doing anything but fading.

The second chopper interrupted them, roaring over the fences and setting down where the first had been. The moment the dust settled, the trainer got out with the German shepherd. Staying clear of the dog, the team hurried to unload wooden crates.

"Earl," the colonel said.

"Yes, sir?"

"When I radioed ahead, I gave instructions for the two Suburbans in the underground garage to be ready to go."

"It's been taken care of, sir," Halloway responded. "They're out back."

"Then all we need is for you to give us the keys."

Halloway hesitated. "You might want to come inside first, sir."

"Oh?" Raleigh frowned. "Why would I want to do that?"

"There's something you should know about." He looked even more pained. "If I'm right, sir, you're here because of the music."

"The music?" Raleigh was astonished. "You actually know about the music?" How bad has security gotten out here? he wondered.

"I heard it last night, sir."

"You heard it?"

"And not long afterward, you contacted us to say you were coming, so I figured there was a connection. The radio dish that's angled toward Rostov."

"Make your point, Halloway."

"I'm guessing it's aimed toward whatever caused the music."

Raleigh was stunned. One of the military's most secret projects and this former Army sergeant was talking about it as if it were common knowledge.

He tried not to reveal how disturbed he felt.

"All right, Earl, show me what you think I should see."

Leaving the team outside to prepare the vehicles, Raleigh followed the guard into the small concrete-block building. After passing through the two security doors, they went down an echoing metal stairwell into the glowing lights and the filtered, cool air of the underground facility.

As they entered a surveillance room, Raleigh heard a voice that he at first suspected belonged to another guard. But then he scanned the numerous monitors that showed the area around the dishes, and to his surprise, one of the screens turned out to be a television set.

"You watch TV in here?" He made no attempt to hide his displeasure.

The screen showed a crowd in front of police barricades. In the foreground, a reporter in a rumpled suit held a microphone and faced a camera.

"What the hell is going on?" Raleigh demanded.

"They started broadcasting this on the early-morning news. You were probably in the air by then, so you didn't hear about it. Twenty people were shot to death last night."

"Bad things happen all the time. Why should it concern me?"

Earl pointed toward the reporter on the television. "This guy was the first reporter on the scene. He kept talking about the lights, whatever they are."

"The lights?" Raleigh stepped closer to the television. "Wait a minute. You're telling me the shootings happened in Rostov?"

"Five miles away from it at what they call the observation platform. Apparently the gunman went crazy because of the lights. He started screaming, 'You're all going to hell,' and opened fire on a bunch of tourists."

Raleigh's muscles tightened. It's happening again, he thought.

"That reporter made a big deal about the lights being the reason for the killings, and all the other reporters followed his lead," Halloway went on. "Now people are coming from every direction to try to see them. The town's turned into a zoo. If you're headed over there, I thought you'd want to know."

Staring at the chaos on the television, Raleigh felt his pulse race as if he were headed into combat.

Just like in 1945.

My God, it's really happening again.

Chapter 28.

The Rostov County hospital was a modest-sized two-story building, its stucco tinted the harsh orange of the late-afternoon sun. Heat radiated off the front steps. Even so, Tori hesitated on them.

Page watched her with concern. "Are you okay?"

"Just thinking about next Tuesday. San Antonio. The hospital."

Page kept remembering that his mother had died from breast cancer. Numbness spread through him. "I'll be there with you."

"I never doubted that. But what happens if life gets back to normal and I'm alone again, even when you're with me?"

"I can change."

"Hard to do."

"For you, I'll do anything. I'll quit being a cop."

Tori looked surprised.

"The job's what makes me shut down my feelings," Page said. "To make things better between us, quitting's an obvious start."

"But what would you do?"

"What my father did. Be an airplane mechanic."

Tori considered him a moment longer, then drew a long breath and approached the hospital's front doors. They opened automatically.

Inside a lobby, Page walked past a row of plastic chairs and stopped before a spectacled woman at a desk.

"We're here to check on someone. He was admitted last night with a gunshot wound. Chief Costigan."

"He's not receiving visitors."

"Well, can you tell us how he's doing?"

"Are you family?"

"No, we're--"

"Edith, it's okay," a voice said. "They're not reporters."

Page turned and saw Captain Medrano standing at an elevator, its door closing behind him. He held his Stetson. Each of the upper sleeves on his tan uniform had a red Highway Patrol patch.

"In fact, they're trying to avoid reporters," Medrano said. He pushed the elevator's up button, and the doors immediately reopened. "Come on, I'll take you to him."

In the elevator, Medrano looked apologetic. "I finally had to give the media your names. Believe me, I held off as long as I could, but I was starting to look as if I wasn't in control of the investigation."

"If they find out we're at that motel . . . ," Tori said.

"The clerk promised to deny you're staying there."

"I hope he keeps his word. Do you know who the shooter was?"

Page asked.

"Edward Mullen. One of the survivors remembered seeing him on the tour bus. We contacted the company that owns the bus. It's based in Austin. The lights are only a brief part of the tour--it also goes to the big ranch house that was built for that James Deacon movie, Birthright."

Page nodded. "Last night at the viewing area, someone mentioned that movie set."

"Mostly, though, it's a nature tour that goes through the Davis Mountains. The company gave us a list of everyone who signed up for that particular tour. All the victims had ID on them. We compared their names and those of the survivors to the names on the list.

Edward Mullen was the only person we couldn't account for. You were right--according to one of the survivors from the bus, he had a guitar case. The guy remembered because Mullen had a lot of trouble finding a place to put it. That must be where he hid the rifle."

"A lucky guess."

"No. I told you last night, you have the instincts of a good cop."

Page glanced at Tori and found that she was looking at him.

The elevator doors opened. As they stepped into a hospital corridor, Page's nostrils felt pinched by the smell of antiseptic.

"This was the ninth time Mullen had taken the same tour,"

Medrano continued.

Page stopped walking and frowned at him. "The ninth?"

"The tour company gave us the credit-card number he used. The credit-card company gave us his address. The Austin police went to his apartment."