Extinction Machine (25 page)

“‘Ordinary’? Why would an ordinary helicopter have—and this is just a guess off the top of my head—a pair of GAU-19/A Gatling guns, seventy millimeter Hydra rockets, probably a round dozen AGM-114 Hellfire laser-guided missiles, and thirty millimeter M230 gun pods?”

“Geese are a hazard to air traffic,” I said. “We’re being proactive.”

Junie Flynn laughed.

I laughed with her. Ghost wagged his tail.

Not sure in what proportions our laughter was constructed of false and honest humor. In the background, the Black Hawk crouched on her lawn like a giant insect from a Godzilla flick. She glanced down at Ghost, who, despite extensive and costly training, was wagging his tail like a puppy. She held out her hand to him.

“Don’t,” I warned quickly. “He’s a trained combat dog.”

My trained combat dog licked her fingers and then flopped on the ground to show his belly, tongue lolling and tail thumping. Junie squatted down and began rubbing his tummy while Ghost’s eyes rolled up and one leg started kicking.

“Who’s a good little combat dog? Who’s a good little combat dog?” cooed Junie Flynn in a singsong voice.

“Um … he’s not usually like that with people.”

“Dogs understand me.”

Ghost was apparently understanding that her clever fingers on his fur was the equivalent of a crack pipe.

“Why did you think I was here to kill you?” I asked.

Junie stood up and shrugged.

“That’s it?” I said. “Shouldn’t there be a whole ’nother part to this conversation?”

“You haven’t read a single one of my books, have you?”

I said, “Um…”

“If you had, you’d know that I am not a cheerleader for any part of the government that employs bullies and thugs. And you’d know that I’ve had my share of bullying and thuggish behavior.”

“I’m not here to bully you, and I am seldom thuggish to total strangers.”

“Just close friends, then?”

“Cute, but no. Look, Ms. Flynn, I’ll admit that I haven’t read your books, watched your videos, or listened to your podcast. In fact, until this morning I’d never even heard of you.”

“Oh?” Her blues eyes flashed with challenge. “Do you know
anything
about me?”

“Just basic stuff. You were an orphan who was adopted at age five by Jericho and Amanda Flynn. Your foster dad was a physicist, your mom was a developmental psychologist. They were killed in a car accident when you were in your senior year of college. They had no other children, no family except for you, so you inherited. You finished college, but you switched your major from art history to political science. After college you went to grad school at the University of Pennsylvania, but dropped out a year later after you were injured in a car bombing while on vacation in Egypt. After you returned to the States, you began to write articles about conspiracy theories, UFOs, alien abductions, shadow governments, and the Majestic Black Book. You’ve published twenty-three books, four of which were
New York Times
bestsellers and two of which were
USA Today
bestsellers. You are on the UFO and conspiracy theory lecture circuit, which means that you travel at least half the year. You are the go-to expert for several topics related to UFOs, though the real basis of your celebrity is the Black Book. You wrote the first books on it—which, I admit, I haven’t read—and you’ve filed over one hundred requests via the Freedom of Information Act in an attempt to have the contents of the book released.” I paused. “Did I leave anything out?”

Her face remained bland through my recitation, with only a momentary tightening of her mouth when I mentioned the death of her parents and her own injuries in Egypt. “You didn’t mention my arrest record.”

“Eleven arrests in seven years, all related to organized protests to humanitarian issues. You’ve been on talk shows with Martin Sheen, Don Cheadle, and George Clooney following various arrests.”

“What does that tell you?”

“That you’re a social activist and I probably agree with some of your politics.”

“Says the man with the gun, the helicopter, and the combat dog.”

“Being a patriot isn’t the same thing as being a radical. Right or left.”

She digested that. “You left out that I’m a freak. That shows up in a lot of field reports. I’ve seen some of them, so I know.”

“‘Freak’? I wouldn’t use that word.”

“What word would you use?”

“Gifted?” I suggested. “Maybe uniquely gifted. In middle school you demonstrated qualities consistent with eidetic memory—photographic memory—but later that diagnosis was modified to include hyperthymesia, which I believe is what they call a superior autobiographic memory. In short, you don’t forget anything.”

“Can’t forget,” she corrected. “And … it’s not very much fun.”

“I’ll bet. There are whole years of my life I’d like to forget.”

“Me, too.”

We looked at each other for a moment, letting all of that sink in.

“What do they call you?” she asked, shifting topics abruptly enough to strip the gears.

I offered my hand. “Captain Joseph Ledger.”

She didn’t immediately take my hand. “Captain of…?”

“You won’t have heard the name of the organization I’m actually with. We don’t have badges.”

“Let me guess. It’s one of those ‘we’re so secret that if you told me the name you’d have to kill me’ things?”

I laughed. “That’s almost exactly what I said to my boss the first time I met him.”

“He didn’t kill you.”

“Not so far. Guy’s twitchy, though, so we’ll see what my retirement plan looks like.”

“A gold watch and two in the back of the head?”

I liked this Junie Flynn. She was a civilian and I could have stood there and sold her some kind of bullshit, but with some people deception is like lying in church.

“The name isn’t really important,” I said. “You wouldn’t have heard of it and to tell you I’d probably have to make you sign a mountain of nondisclosure papers. Do you really want to do that?”

“No.”

“Then let’s leave it at this: I’m not with the IRS, so that means I’m not pure evil. I am definitely not here to kill you. And I consider myself to be one of the good guys.”

“The American flag and mom’s apple pie?” she asked skeptically.

“My mom’s dead. She died of cancer. And … I don’t really know why I told you that.”

“People talk to me,” she said.

“I guess they do.” I offered my hand again. “The name’s Joe.”

Junie considered that, her smile wavering only a little. Then she took my proffered hand.

“Junie,” she said. Her hand was slender but strong, with long fingers and interesting calluses. Yard work, maybe. No shooter’s calluses, though.

She looked into my eyes and something happened. There was a very sudden and very weird bit of chemistry between us that created a connection I didn’t really understand. In one split second it felt as if a door opened in my mind and Junie Flynn stepped through. Just like that she seemed to know who and what I was. I’d known other people who had a similar gift. Some of them were screeners who worked for the CIA and FBI. They didn’t need a polygraph machine because for whatever reason they were wired differently than the rest of us. Maybe they could smell subtle changes in body chemistry, maybe they could feel the vibrations of other human hearts. I didn’t know how it worked, but they were human lie detectors. And then there were some who had an even deeper level, a second and separate gift. They could look into your eyes and see who you were, your real self, down deep behind the artifice and affectation. Junie was that kind of person. I didn’t know it until we touched hands and looked into each other’s eyes. It was all so immediate, so fast. And it was like having an X-ray focused on my soul.

There are so many things about me that I don’t show people. I am not, by any clinical definition, entirely sane. I am functionally warped as a result of the brutal attack on my girlfriend and me when we were fourteen. We both lost ourselves that day. Neither of us ever really came back. After I healed from the physical trauma I found every way possible to make myself tough. Martial arts, boxing, weights, endless reading about psychology, warfare, the physics and physiology of the destruction of the human body. As the corny saying goes, I became a weapon. My mind, though, was not something that could be sweated back to fitness in the gym any more than it was something the docs could stitch back together. My personality had become splintered and over the years a number of unique personality fragments emerged, some quite self-destructive. Others were shockingly violent. Through endless hours working with Rudy Sanchez—a doctor who became my best friend—I learned to exert control over them. I edited out most of the bad ones, but three aspects still remain. One is the Modern Man—the Civilized Man—and he’s the one who still carries the last cracked pieces of my idealism and innocence. In recent years he has taken a serious beating.

Then there’s the Cop, and he’s the closest thing I have to a central personality. The Cop is frequently in charge. He drives the bus most of the time and that’s a good thing because he’s smart, calm, passive, sensitive, and intuitive. He’d rather solve a problem than pull a trigger.

But the third part of me is the Warrior. Or, as he prefers to be called, the Killer. That part of me was born on that terrible day. With each stomping foot, with each punch and bash and crack he fought his way into the world. He is the skull-cracker, the neck-breaker, the eye-gouger. He is not evil, but he is not nice. The Warrior paints himself with camouflage greasepaint and crouches in the tall grass waiting for the bad guys to come by, and then he hunts them with a cruel and savage delight.

Helen became lost in that carnival funhouse of the damaged mind, where all images of her destruction and violation were reflected in twisted and deformed mirrors. And in that darkness she became so utterly without hope that she needed to find a permanent way out.

Which she did.

I found her—too late. The Warrior in me rose up and screamed so loud that it broke the fragile shell of mercy that hung around his neck. There is no mercy left in him now.

As Junie Flynn looked into my eyes I tried not to let her see any of this, but I knew that she did. Somehow, impossibly, she did.

All in one tiny moment.

I saw it register in her eyes. They widened a bit, and her face went death pale. I expected her to yank her hand back. To at least turn away in disgust. Instead she reached up with her other hand and touched my cheek. Despite the fact that we were strangers it was an oddly personal gesture, intimate and familiar, as if she and I shared some history beyond a few seconds of banter and verbal sparring.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I closed my eyes.

Her fingertips lingered for a moment and the connection was gone. When I opened my eyes, she had indeed stepped back. But it was not a retreat from me. Instead she’d stepped back into a neutral space, which was the only way we could both move forward from this moment.

“So why are you here, Joe?” she asked in a tone that held no trace of what had just happened.

It took me a second to find my footing, and my voice. “I … need your help to find a copy of the Majestic Black Book.”

Her eyes flicked to the parked helicopter and back. “I don’t have it.”

“I know.”

“Then—”

“I need to get a copy of it. Any copy. Today.”

Her eyes were thoughtful, her mouth formed into a half smile, and I waited her out.

She said, “Then I’d better make some tea.”

With that Junie Flynn turned and went back inside, leaving the door open for me to follow. I glanced down at Ghost. He gave me a “hey, you’re the super secret agent guy; I’m just a dog” look.

We followed her inside.

Chapter Forty-eight

Turkey Point Lighthouse, Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 10:14 a.m.

The inside of the cottage was a wonderful mess. It was clean but a long way from neat, and the way in which the living room was arranged seemed to suggest that there were at least two distinct sides to Junie Flynn. One half of the room was given over to big squashy armchairs, comfortably lumpy couches, brightly colored throw rugs, endless decorative pillows, tables piled high with art and craft magazines, a half-finished macramé bedspread, and hardwood stacked haphazardly by a massive stone fireplace still cluttered with cold ashes. Christmas lights framed the windows and ran along the edges of the walls even though this was still October. Or perhaps they were last year’s lights never taken down. The floors were polished wood covered by overlapping rugs with Navajo and Turkish weaves. A guitar stood against the hearth and various handmade instruments—a buffalo horn, a tube zither, reed pipes, tongue drums, and several brightly colored BaTonga Budima Drums. In one small glass-fronted cabinet were dozens of packs of tarot cards, some new and some very old. The decks were interspersed with crystals and semiprecious stones. Deep purple amethyst, yellow citrine, dark blue lapis lazuli that was flecked with red, golden tiger eye, watermelon tourmaline, and sky-blue turquoise. These were quality pieces and even though they were indoors they seemed to radiate light that was as rich as the bright sunshine outside.

If that was all that I saw of this woman’s home I would not have been surprised. It was in keeping with her garden, her manner of dress, and her apparent lifestyle. A dull and unimaginative person might dismiss her as one of those soft, fringe people, a latter-day hippie, a child of the New Age.

The other half of the room showed a different aspect of Junie Flynn; a separation so dramatic that it suggested a true dichotomy, or perhaps a mind in schism. Still too early to tell. There was a functional desk on which was a high-end ruggedized laptop, laser printer, scanner, podcasting equipment that included a good camera on a tripod and a quality microphone. There were six steel file cabinets in a neat row, and a side table on which was a wire sorting rack filled with neatly arranged papers. The chair tucked into the desk was a leather business model similar to the kind I had in my own office. Everything was neat and precise and functional.