The Shimmer (36 page)

Medrano was taken by surprise. "Grenade?"

"He'd already used one to shoot down a helicopter. Then he fired one at our van."

"Why was he firing grenades?"

"I have no idea, any more than I know why he piled all those corpses onto the back of a truck."

"Corpses . . . in a truck?"

"A lot of them. Enough to fill it. He kept babbling about wanting to listen to music." Loft continued aiming the camera. "Something bad is going on over there, Captain. You need to get your men to that observatory before God knows what else happens."

Medrano opened his mouth to say something, then decided against it. He hurried to his cruiser, where he reached for the microphone on his police radio and spoke urgently into it.

Loft lowered the camera and aimed it toward the ambulance attendants as they lifted the woman onto the gurney.

"How's she doing?" Page asked.

"Lost plenty of blood," an attendant answered.

"She'd have lost more if it weren't for the guy with the camera."

"I'll use that quote when I edit this," Loft said.

He stepped quickly over to the ambulance and began talking to the attendants at the open doors. He used his free hand to gesture persuasively. The next thing, he climbed into the back.

Page shook his head. "I hate to say this, but I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of him on television."

Siren blaring, the ambulance rushed away.

The man in the frayed coveralls came over to them. "I'll help you push your plane to a tie-down spot."

"Actually, we're going up again," Page told him.

The man frowned toward the dimming sky. "Never liked flying at night."

"We still have something to settle. Am I right, Tori? Or maybe you don't feel the need any longer."

"More than ever," Tori said. "Let's finish this."

Chapter 62.

The hum had become so intense that it felt like a drill boring into Halloway's skull.

Soon, he thought. Soon I won't hear it any longer. Soon the only thing I'll hear will be the music.

But despite his determination, he needed all of his willpower not to be distracted while he finished rigging the booby trap. The design--learned in Iraq--consisted of two trip wires. The first was stretched across the upper part of the stairs. If an assault team somehow managed to force the door open up there, they'd respond to their training and check for traps. After they spotted the wire and the grenades it was attached to, they'd disengage it, then proceed down the stairs. The second wire--in shadows, stretched across a lower part of the stairs--was the killer.

As he worked, the hum made Halloway's hands want to shake, but he refused to let that happen. Grinding his teeth, he tied the wire to a cluster of concealed grenades. Satisfied that the work had been done correctly, he carefully descended the remainder of the stairs.

At the bottom, he increased speed along the hallway and entered the surveillance room, where he saw that even more screens had gone blank. One of the few that was working showed the man who'd shot at him as he raised his M4 and fired.

Another screen went dead.

Well, that's okay, Halloway thought. I wasn't going to be watching the monitors anyhow.

He picked up his reloaded M4 and went down the hallway to the door marked DATA ANALYSIS. Inside, he'd already placed five other M4s on a table, along with numerous hundred-round magazines and a small stack of grenades. If an assault team tried to stop him from listening to the music, he planned to show them just how furious that would make him.

The room still smelled of death, mostly because of the dried blood that covered the floor. But Halloway didn't have time to clean it. Anyway, when the music started, the scent of cinnamon would replace the stench of the blood. Because he didn't know how to manipulate the electronic instruments, he'd kept all of them on, their panels glowing continuously.

The only switch he felt confident using was the one that activated either the speakers or the headphones, and the only knob he knew how to control was for the volume. While he'd prepared the booby trap, he'd kept the sound coming from the speakers. It had been loud enough that he could hear the static from a distance. More important, he'd been able to hear growing hints of music emerging from the static. Those half-heard alluring echoes were what had made him capable of working despite the agony of his headache.

Now the music was more than just hints and echoes. Strengthening, it drifted and floated. Halloway felt its eerie tones lifting him. The pain of the drill boring into his brain mercifully receded. The hum diminished, overcome by the sensual melody that again brought the taste of orange juice and vodka.

He closed his eyes. The woman he danced with whispered into each of his ears. Kissed them. Drew her tongue along them.

It left his ears wet. He put his hands to them and opened his eyes long enough to see what was on them.

Blood was dripping from his ears.

Chapter 63.

Raleigh finished yet another phone call in a successful effort to keep law enforcement away from the observatory. The voices in the urgent conversation had sounded distant because he couldn't take the risk of removing his earplugs now that it was almost dark outside and the static on the audio monitors was beginning to resolve itself into music.

The words "national security" were a powerful invocation. With the cooperation of the FBI, Raleigh had again stopped the Highway Patrol from entering the restricted area. He'd arranged for equipment to be delivered that would allow an assault team to break into the observatory. After they eliminated the guard and cleaned the facility so that outside agencies couldn't question its true purpose, Raleigh would make sure the bastard's autopsy revealed a high blood level of crack cocaine, explaining his psychotic behavior.

With one crisis dealt with, but anticipating more, he set down the phone, stepped from the command center, and surveyed the eight men poised in front of the numerous electronic consoles. Their faces reflecting the glow of instruments, they turned dials, refining and adjusting the incoming signals. In response to his orders, they'd turned off the audio capability of their monitors. Their earplugs were firmly in place.

Raleigh thought about his great-grandfather, who in 1919 had flown toward the lights and never been seen again. His great-grandmother had taken her two-year-old son and moved to Boston, but despite the distance that she'd put between herself and the lights, she hadn't been able to keep them out of her thoughts. Her memories of the lights and her husband became the bedtime stories she told her son, who grew up dreaming about them. When he was twenty and skin cancer finally killed his mother, he hitchhiked all the way to Texas. He needed to hitchhike because the Great Depression continued to ravage the nation. Using his legs and his thumb was the only way he could afford to make the trip.

His name was Edward. His mother's story about his father's disappearance had so obsessed him from when he was a child that he was drawn to Rostov the way religious people are drawn to holy places. It took him three months to get there. When he finally arrived, his belt was cinched so tightly that it barely kept his pants up. His shoes had holes in them. His shirt was tattered. His face was browned by the sun.

The dry-goods store that Edward's mother had told him about was still in business--although barely, judging from the meager samples in the front window. A bell rang when he opened the door. A tiredlooking, gray-haired man and woman looked questioningly at him from behind a counter. Despite their age, he could see the resemblance immediately.

"I'm your grandson," he announced.

They gaped. Before they could ask any questions, he said the thing he had wanted to say all his life.

"Tell me where to go to see the lights."

They gaped even more.

Edward helped at the dry-goods store. He also found part-time jobs, painting barns and repairing wooden sidewalks in exchange for new shoes, clothes, and the extra food his grandmother needed to prepare. In Boston, meat had been a luxury, but not in cattle country.

His grandmother's beef and potatoes helped him regain the weight he'd lost on his trek.

Every night Edward borrowed his grandfather's battered Chevrolet pickup truck and drove out to see the lights--or to try to see them, because they didn't appear.

"Are you sure they're real?" he asked his grandparents. "Have you ever seen them?"

"Yes," his grandmother said, and his grandfather nodded in agreement. "It's been a while since we tried, though."

"My mother swore she saw them a lot."

"At first she couldn't see them, either," his grandfather explained.

"It took quite a while."

"My father believed in them enough to risk his life," Edward said, beginning to feel angry, as if something were being hidden from him.

"So where are they? Why can't I see them?"

"Some people just can't," his grandmother said matter-of-factly.

"Why not?"

"No one knows."

That left him feeling more exasperated than ever.

On the days when he couldn't find work, he hiked through the area where the lights were said to appear. He stood where his father had built the airfield during World War I. Weeds and grass filled the unpaved runway, the length of which was just barely visible. The adobe buildings that had functioned as hangars were piles of dirt. He studied the distant rim of black boulders that looked like huge cinders-the aptly named Badlands.

He stared to the south toward Mexico.

"No one ever found the wreckage of an airplane?" he asked his grandparents.

"Some of his former students tried. They flew fifty miles--all the way to Mexico. A couple of them actually flew into Mexico. They went back and forth in what they called grids, but no one ever found your father or his plane."

"But nobody just disappears."

"The wings were covered with linen and hardened by shellac. If the plane crashed and burned, the debris could have been blown away by the wind."

"And his body?"

"Coyotes. God bless him, John's bones could have been carried off."

"I want to see the lights."

"Maybe you're trying too hard."

The next day, Edward dug postholes on a ranch until he earned enough to buy a bottle of whiskey--something that wasn't easy to locate because even though Prohibition had ended four years earlier, Rostov had voted to remain "dry."

At dark Edward drove out to the old airfield, sat on the ground, opened the bottle, and began sipping. Until then the only alcohol he'd ever sampled was beer, but the chance of obtaining beer in Rostov turned out to be even slimmer than that of finding whiskey. Besides, he wanted something strong.

It burned his throat. He felt its heat go all the way to his stomach.

He gagged and almost threw it up.

At least it acted more quickly than beer would have. Because he wasn't used to it, he didn't need much before he felt off balance, as if something in his skull were tilting. Soon his tongue felt thick. His eyes became heavy. The moon and stars went out of focus.

"Come on!" Edward shouted. "Let me see you!" His words were slurred. "I'm not trying hard anymore! I'm relaxed! More than relaxed!" He laughed giddily and took another sip. "Hell, I'm drunk. . . .

"Drunk as a . . . skunk . . .

"Damned . . . stinkin' . . . drunk."

He closed his eyes. Fought to open them. Closed them again.

And passed out.

The night brought a cool breeze that wavered Edward's hair and caressed his cheeks. He dreamed of being on a boat, floating on a current. His mind drifted, rising and falling.

He woke to the glare of the rising sun. But when he managed to lift his heavy eyelids, he saw darkness off to his right. The stars and the moon were still there, but mostly he saw darkness.

On his right.

On his left, the rising sun persisted, and when Edward lifted his painful head from the dirt on which he lay, he saw that the sun was, in fact, a floating ball of light.

Groggy, he watched it divide, becoming red and yellow. The two orbs dissolved into four, adding blue and green. They split into eight, adding orange, purple, brown, and a blinding silver. Pulsing closer, they grew larger, their shimmer more intense.

There was something else, some kind of sound he couldn't identify, a hiss or hum or possibly distant music, as if from a radio station that had faded almost beyond hearing.

Even though his mother had said that the lights had frightened her the first time she'd seen them, Edward hadn't expected to have the same reaction. After all, the lights had caused his mother and father to fall in love. If it hadn't been for the lights, Edward would never have been born. His father had been so mesmerized by the lights that he'd done everything possible to try to find where they came from.

But as the colors of the lights increased before him, dispelling the darkness, what Edward felt wasn't the fear his mother had described.

It was worse than that.