The Shimmer (6 page)

As a teenager, he'd dreamed about becoming a rock star. He'd had a garage band and still played an electric guitar damned well. He knew about major and minor keys and four-four and three-four beat patterns. But this music didn't have any key he'd ever heard, and it sure didn't have any beat pattern that he recognized. Faint as it was, the music floated and dipped, glided and sank. The notes merged and separated in a rhythm that was almost like the way he breathed if he were on R & R, lying on a beach in Mexico, enjoying the salt smell of the air, absorbing the warmth of the sun.

"I don't know what that is, but it's the most beautiful thing I ever heard."

Gordon took off his glasses, and to Halloway's surprise, he didn't protest again. Instead, when he spoke, it seemed as if he felt relieved to do so, to share his discovery with someone.

"It is beautiful," he said.

"Why didn't we hear it this afternoon?" Halloway asked.

"I have no idea. Whatever this is, it happens only after the sun goes down."

"And you hear that every night?"

"No. Not like that. Until two nights ago, it was always faint and fuzzy, sort of hovering behind the static. I needed to do a lot of electronic filtering to get a sense of what it sounded like."

"What happened two nights ago?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. But all of a sudden, that's what I started hearing."

"I can't hear it very well," Halloway said. "Why don't you turn on the speakers?"

Gordon hesitated, evidently concerned that doing so would violate his orders. But then he shrugged as if to say, What the hell; I can't keep this to myself any longer, and flicked a switch.

Instantly the floating, gliding, sailing music filled the room, making Halloway feel as if he were standing on a cushion of air. The instruments--whatever they were--had a synthesizer quality that made them impossible to identify. Perhaps it was only his imagination, but the wave-like tones seemed to drift into his ears like the arousing whisper of a woman pressed against him.

"My God, that's beautiful," he repeated. "What's causing it?"

"We've been trying to figure that out since this place was built."

Gordon paused, then added, "And apparently a lot longer than that."

Those last words were cryptic, but before Halloway could ask about them, Taggard appeared in the doorway.

"What kind of radio station is that? I've never heard anything like it. Is it on the Internet? How do I download that music?"

"If you tried to record it, somebody would have to shoot you,"

Gordon said.

Taggard looked surprised.

"That's not a joke," Gordon told him.

Halloway barely paid attention to what they were saying. He felt the music drifting around him and then inside him, becoming part of him. The cushion of air on which he seemed to float became even softer. At the same time, the headache he'd been struggling with finally emerged from the hole where he'd managed to suppress it, like something that had festered until it couldn't be denied.

The pain was beautiful.

Chapter 15.

The U. S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, known as INSCOM, is one of the few branches of the U. S. military that is also a branch of a civilian organization, specifically the National Security Agency, the world's largest electronic intelligence-gathering service.

Although INSCOM maintains several bases, the one affiliated with the NSA is located at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the NSA is headquartered.

From his office window, Col. Warren Raleigh could see a mile away to the NSA's headquarters, a tall complex of buildings topped by a vast array of antennae and microwave dishes. Two massive black structures dominated the group. During the day, their shiny dark windows reflected the five thousand cars that sat in the sprawling parking lots that surrounded them.

Raleigh thought that the reflection was appropriate. While the NSA's occupants could see out, no one could see in. And the clandestine nature of the agency was represented in another way--although the buildings were huge, there were even more acres of space concealed underground.

His own office was located in a three-story building designed to look bland and unimposing. A metal plaque next to the entrance read, ENVIRONMENTAL WIND AND SOLAR DEVELOPMENT FACILITY, suggesting that the work inside was devoted to finding cheap, renewable sources of energy for the government and the military. In actuality, the plaque was one of Raleigh's jokes. The idea that the government and the military would be interested in cost-cutting or ecological issues was laughable. To him, the E, W, and S of Environmental Wind and Solar actually stood for Experimental Weapons Strategy.

Many of the projects under development in the building were only tangentially related to the NSA's task of gathering intelligence via electronic means, but some--such as the efforts to create lethal rays derived from the microwave beams that transmitted cell-phone messages--were logical extensions of the NSA's tools. So were the experiments to develop communications satellites capable of firing laser beams toward enemy positions.

But when it came to his personal choice of weapons, as far as Raleigh was concerned, nothing equaled the feel of a firearm. The second of the building's five underground levels featured an extensive gun range, part of which was a so-called shooting house with a maze designed to look like corridors and rooms in an ordinary apartment complex or office building. Along each corridor and within each room, potential threats lurked unseen. As life-sized targets popped up unexpectedly, the objective was to identify them correctly and eliminate armed opponents without injuring innocent bystanders. And the goal was to do so in the shortest possible time, usually no more than two minutes.

On this Thursday in early June, at 9 in the evening, Raleigh was prepared to beat his own record.

"With your permission, Colonel."

"Do your job, Sergeant Lockhart."

"Yes, sir."

Lockhart, a bull of a man, shook Raleigh violently, then spun him.

"You can do better than that, Sergeant!"

"Yes, sir!"

The sergeant shook Raleigh so hard that the colonel's teeth knocked together. Then Lockhart spun him so forcefully that the colonel had the sense of being in a centrifuge. For a moment, he wondered if the sergeant might be enjoying his work too much.

Abruptly Lockhart let go of him, thrust an M4 into his hands, and shoved him into the shooting house.

The sergeant had, indeed, done his job. Raleigh felt so disoriented that the floor seemed to ripple and the walls to tilt. His heart rushed, and his vision wavered.

Each time Raleigh tested himself in the shooting house, Lockhart reconfigured the partitions, arranging the layout in a new and unpredictable design. The one thing Raleigh could be sure of was the familiarity of the weapon in his hands. During his twenty-five-year career, he'd used its forerunner--the M16--in numerous conflicts around the world. He knew how to field-strip and reassemble an M16 in absolute darkness and with amazing speed. He'd learned to appreciate its contours and secret places as he would those of a lover. He could shoot that venerable assault rifle with remarkable accuracy, even when it was switched to full auto.

Still, the M16 had drawbacks, particularly the length of its barrel in the close environments of urban warfare, so the shorter, lighter M4 carbine had been developed. As an officer in the Army, Raleigh had his differences with the Marines, but he definitely agreed with their wisdom in requiring all officers to replace their sidearms with M4s.

At heart, we're all riflemen, Raleigh thought.

Moving warily along a dim hallway, he checked that the M4's selector was set for three-shot bursts. He willed his mind to stop swirling and his legs to become steady. With long-practiced biofeedback techniques, he worked to control his respiratory rate and subdue his pulse.

A target sped out of a doorway ahead.

Raleigh aimed and held his fire. The target was an old man holding up his hands in surrender.

Raleigh peered into the room, saw that it was empty, and continued down the hallway, but at once, a noise behind him made him pivot. Another target sped from the room. Somehow it had been concealed from him. It was a man with a rifle, but before it stopped, Raleigh pulled the trigger, sending three rounds into the opponent's head. He blew another three rounds into the old man's head on the assumption that he was in league with the assailant and that in an actual firefight, the old bastard would probably pick up the dead man's gun the moment Raleigh's back was turned.

Raleigh quickly scanned the rest of the corridor. Ready to shoot, he moved forward through growing shadows. The trick was to keep his weight balanced, never placing one foot too far ahead of the other.

Sliding his feet, he progressed in an efficient shuffle, always capable of adjusting to the M4's recoil.

Another target popped from a doorway. Raleigh almost fired before he saw that it was a woman holding a child. But then he realized that the child was actually a doll and that the grip of a pistol projected from behind it. He pulled the trigger and sent three bullets into the woman's brain.

The smell of gun smoke was thick in the corridor now. Although Raleigh wore protective earplugs, his awareness was at such a level that he swore he could hear the clinking sound of his empty shells hitting the concrete floor.

How much time had gone by? How long had he been there?

Don't think about it! Just get the job done!

The corridor went to the right. Raleigh entered an area that had a receptionist's desk and wooden chairs in front of it. Without warning, a target surged up from behind the desk. A man with a handgun!

As Raleigh fired, a figure rushed from an office doorway--a woman in a white medical coat. She held up her hands as yet another target sped into view, this one from another doorway, a man about to throw a grenade.

Raleigh shot him, then shot a target that hurried from a farther doorway, a woman with a rifle, then shot two gunmen who rushed from the corridor on the opposite side of the reception area.

He pivoted, scanning everything that lay before him, on guard against more attacks.

His mouth was dry. His hands sweated on the M4.

The rush of his heart was so powerful that he felt pressure in the veins of his neck. Breathing deeply but not quickly, he assessed the scene before him. Were all the threats eliminated?

No.

The woman in the white medical coat continued to stand before him. Weaponless, her hands were raised.

Is the sergeant setting me up? Raleigh wondered. Is that a weapon in the pocket of her medical coat?

He twisted the M4's selector to full auto and emptied the remainder of the magazine into her, the powerful burst blowing the plywood figure apart.

Through his earplugs, he heard a sharp electronic whistle, the signal that the exercise had ended. He pulled out the earplugs and turned toward Sergeant Lockhart, who approached along the corridor.

"I finished before the ninety-second time limit," Raleigh said.

"Beat my own record, didn't I?"

"Yes, sir," Lockhart said, but there was doubt in his voice. He glanced behind him, and Raleigh knew he was thinking of the bullet holes in the target that portrayed the old man. Then Lockhart peered ahead toward the disintegrated target of the woman in the white medical coat.

"Collaborators," Raleigh explained. "They'd have moved against me the first chance they had."

"Of course, sir." Lockhart still sounded doubtful.

"Sergeant, don't you like this assignment?"

"Sir, I'm very happy with it."

"I could arrange to have you sent someplace that offers you more of a challenge. Perhaps a war zone."

"I'd prefer you didn't, sir."

"Combat builds character, you know."

"Sir, I've been in combat. With all due respect, I don't think I need any more character."

"Then I'll spare you a repeat of the experience. But since you've been in firefights, there's one relevant thing I'd expect you to have learned."

"Yes, sir. And what is that?"

The colonel gestured toward the disintegrated target of the woman in the white medical coat.

"You don't stay alive long if you take the time to worry about innocent bystanders, especially in a firefight. Sure, maybe some pussy reporter'll accuse you of a war crime, and maybe the Army'll cave in to the grumbling of a bunch of politicians and put you on trial. But you'll still be alive, and ten years of hard labor is better than getting shot to death by a supposed innocent bystander who thinks you're a fool for not killing him. Or her. There could easily have been a suicide bomb under her medical coat."

"Yes, sir."

"It's going to be hard for anyone to outdo my new record."

"Yes, sir," the sergeant assured him emphatically.

Raleigh's cell phone buzzed. He pulled it from his belt and spoke into it with authority. "Raleigh here."

What he heard made his jaw tighten.

"I'm on my way."