Sigma One (39 page)

Debbie left the bedroom and went into the kitchen while he dressed. She was standing next to the refrigerator pulling out a Coke when he arrived.

"Here, want one?" she asked holding out the can.

"All right," Burt said and took the can while he pulled out the chair to the kitchen table and snapped on the light.

It was dark outside now. Crickets were softly sawing away and the air was filled with the musky damp smell of the ocean which was only blocks from the house. Fog was creeping in giving an eerie glow to the street light that was out front. It hid the lights of the dark sedan that parked a block away. Intermittently, passing cars could be heard down on highway which ran next to the beach, and somewhere off in the distance two cats could be heard yelling and spitting at one another. Two car doors were closed softly and went unnoticed.

Debbie sat down next to him and held his hand. She tried to be as direct as she could. "Okay, Burt. You feel you're changing. What exactly do you think you're becoming? And more importantly, why do you think these things are happening?"

Burt let go of her hand and got up without answering. He turned and went outside, returning momentarily with a rolled up stack of papers which he handed to her. While she opened Jerome's report and began to thumb through it, he started to outline to her what had happened at the NSF carefully leaving out the experiment he was asked to perform and the reasons behind it, deciding it was best she didn't know everything. When he reached the part where he physically attacked Huxley and Simmons, he stopped in mid-sentence, unwilling to verbalize what he had done, as if saying it would strengthen the fabric of the unwanted reality he had been through.

"Go on!" Debbie prompted him, caught up in his tale.

"I can't. I don't want to!" Burt protested.

"Why not?"

Burt vividly remembered Huxley and Simmon's bleeding faces. He suspected he had killed them, and to continue to discuss it wouldn't change it. He looked away and wondered how long it would take the authorities to track him down.

Suddenly Burt and Debbie heard the unmistakable sound of glass being broken. It came from the living room.

They quickly turned to one another and without speaking, simultaneously put their sodas on the counter and followed the sound.

Burt entered the living room first, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The Andrew's living room was immaculate. Each piece of early American furniture was neatly in place. Back issues of Architectural Digest lay neatly stacked on the oak coffee table. Next to them was a picture of Debbie taken years earlier when she was only twelve, and her younger sister eight or nine. They were standing on the docks at Morrow Bay, the ocean in the background.

Burt stepped into the room and picked up the picture forcing a smile while he alternately looked at it and slowly turned his head side to side to listen. The house was silent.

"Seems like everything's in order here," he said. "The sound must have come from another part of the house."

Debbie replied. "I could have sworn it came from in here."

"Me, too." Burt replied as he put the picture down.

Neither noticed the missing pane of glass in the window next to the door. Agent Joe Stearns was clumsy. He had let the suction cup he used to hold the pane while he cut around it with a diamond cutter, slip. Fortunately for him and his partner, Sam Gunter, they had been able to duck quickly behind the hedges lining the house and to work their way around to the back door leading to the kitchen without being spotted.

While Debbie and Burt were still in the living room deciding what, if anything they should do, Stearns tried the door. It opened.

"Looks like the girls roommate was right," Gunter whispered as he followed Stearns inside. He was referring to Susan. She had given them directions to the Andrew's house after a boy at Burt's dorm said they might find him with Debbie at her dorm.

Stearns turned and glowered at his partner and put his right index finger up to his lips signaling for Gunter to be quiet. Gunter nodded. Be wasn't used to field work. Stearns then reached inside his coat and produced his 357 magnum. His action was swift and fluid like a sidewinder striking. Gunter fumbled for his own weapon and fell in behind Stearns as he crept toward the living room where Debbie and Burt were still talking.

Stearns was the more experienced of the two FBI agents and went into the living room first. He stood six four and, at forty-eight, was in far better shape than many of his younger counterparts, including Gunter. Next to him, Gunter looked like an over-stuffed pillow. Stearns befit his name. He was quiet and a loner. He had chiseled features and cold, deep-set dark brown eyes which hid under the stone shelf of his pronounced forehead. He was massive and not the type one would feel comfortable meeting alone in a dark alley, much less unexpectedly in one's home.

When Stearns entered, gun drawn and pointing directly at him, Burt immediately stopped his idle banter with Debbie.

Gunter waddled into the room behind his slimmer counterpart and took his place at his side and looked at Debbie. His hand shook as he raised his weapon toward her. Gunter was an atypical agent. He was thirty-eight, balding and pudgy. He had bulging cheeks and a tight little mouth making him look more like he belonged in an elf costume helping Santa Clause than behind a weapon. Had he entered the room first, Burt would have probably laughed. People often did when first meeting him. But he didn't go first, and as Burt saw both guns, he wasn't about to.

Stearns stepped forward and spoke. His voice was gravelly and deep.

"Mr. Burt Grayson," he said.

"Uh, huh              I mean, yes sir," Burt replied weakly frozen in one spot, afraid to move lest either stranger mistake his movement as an attack.

"You'll have to come with us!" Stearns announced with finality, leaving no room for negotiation.

Burt winced. His fears of being caught for the murders of Huxley and Simmons had come true. All the fight drained from him and he paled.

Stearns motioned with his gun toward the front door, but before Burt could move, Gunter interjected. He pointed to Debbie. "What about her?"

"She'll have to come too. We were instructed to keep this thing quiet. We can't leave her behind. Follow us." Stearns and Burt moved toward the door, but when Gunter motioned for her to follow, Debbie balked. She had had enough.

She had said nothing before, but wasn't about to follow orders from anyone, much less a plump "Pillsbury Dough Boy", without a protest. Her eyes turned toward Burt, already walking down the hallway toward the kitchen. She called to him. "Burt,who are these men?" Her voice was trembling with fear.

He turned slowly to her and spoke. "Better do as he says. They won't hurt you. It's me they want."

"Why?" She pleaded for an answer.

He didn't want to tell her, but under the circumstances, he had no other choice. He answered. "I've hurt some people. I may have even killed them. That's why they're here and that's why I have to go."

Burt looked back at Stearns who was nudging him forward with his gun. The barrel was pressed hard against his ribs and hurt, but Burt held his ground. "It's Huxley, isn't it? That's why you're here. He's dead isn't he? So if he's dead why not just take me and leave her here. She hasn't done anything. You don't even need to tell her where we're going. You can trust her to be quiet." He wasn't convincing. The shack of seeing the two strangers in his living room had crystallized his memory of his trip to Washington. What had been partially fuzzy before, was locked in focus. He knew the stakes were high. He also knew Debbie. She was a fighter, and he knew if they left her she wouldn't sit still. Hell, the minute they left, she'd find some way of interceding on his behalf and not quietly either. She'd probably go to the press. He felt sure of it and he knew the strangers had considered that a possibility, too, which is why they insisted on taking them both. He felt bad for having dragged her into his mess, but his feelings didn't matter. No amount of talking was going to dissuade Streams. That point was made perfectly clear when Stearns shoved the gun harder against Burt's ribs.

"Let's go! Now!" the agent ordered.

Burt stumbled forward. Gunter and Debbie followed quietly outside until they reached the non-descript Ford Tempo parked under the street lamp. When they arrived, Debbie slid in the back seat next to Burt and they both stared through the clear Plexiglas separating them from their two captors. Neither knew where they were going and both were afraid to talk.

The fog was a silent shroud and enveloped the car as it slowly drove away.

Seven and a half hours later Burt, Debbie and the agents arrived in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand where Huxley had been waiting for nearly an hour. He had been lucky and had caught a connecting flight in LA after phoning the LA FBI headquarters and now knew the agents had Burt and Debbie. He hadn't been so lucky with Kamarov. His preliminary interview with the Soviet had given him no more information about how the Soviets had perfected thought programming than he had when he started. The Soviet had been totally non
-cooperative.

Huxley hoped he'd have better luck with Grayson, but that's all it was, a hope. He knew in less than a day Kamarov would die and his secrets would be buried with him. Shortly after that, unless he could convince Grayson otherwise, he would die just like the Soviet. Then it would be only a matter of time until the house of cards he had built at the NSF would crumble around him. Without Burt or the information needed to train a successor to accomplish what he had, there would be no reason to continue his organization's research, in spite of what Radcliff said. Huxley knew the committee would never stand for another project extension based on the belief that the Soviets had developed what his team could not. And he knew they probably wouldn't buy the story that more Kamarov's existed no matter how much trumped up evidence Radcliff could produce to back his claims. The environment just wasn't right anymore.

In the past two days, there were already numerous actions being taken to denude the entire Department of Defense budget as a result of the rapidly occurring dramatic changes in Europe; changes which were shaping up to alter the entire course of human history. He knew his organization would fall victim to the budget axe in short order as a result. The NSF would be yet another "peace dividend" brought about by the perception that the threat of war was no longer as great now as it had been just days earlier. That's what scared him.

Pat knew the changes brought with them an even greater motivation for the research at the NSF to continue. In spite of Europe's changing face, there were still thousands of warheads held by each side that could be instantly unleashed and end mankind's existence in a series of fiery flashes. The world was still poised on the brink of nuclear annihilation. The atomic sword of Damocles still remained just as sharp as it had been for nearly forty-five years. If anything, Pat knew the world situation was even less stable now than it had been before the changes took place. Soviet domestic troubles paralleled those in pre-World War II Nazi Germany, and Gorbachev's popularity offered his people a similar hope as Hitler did to his some fifty years earlier; but this time, instead of promising world domination thorough military strength as Hitler had, Gorbachev appeared to be moving toward democracy, a move much more palatable to the West, but equally unpredictable.

Pat hoped the Soviet leader's reforms would succeed. Then in all good conscience, he could support dismantling SIGMA ONE. But in spite of that hope, Pat knew the dramatically changing world situation brought with it instability to a previously stable equation where the two superpowers held each other in nuclear stalemate. It was this instability which made his work on SIGMA ONE even more valuable. The fact that the Soviets seemed to be moving toward democracy wouldn't necessarily mean they would destroy any of their massive inventory of nuclear weapons in the near term. Neither would it mean we would unilaterally destroy any of ours. Certainly, it might signal that bilateral arms negotiations would proceed more smoothly than before and that perhaps complete nuclear disarmament would become a reality. But, Pat knew until the details could be worked out to both side's satisfaction, such progress toward world peace would proceed slowly and deliberately. It wouldn't happen overnight. Until such agreements could be reached, unilateral moves on either government's part would be extremely dangerous.