The Alarmists (6 page)

Canfield looked down at his Dolce and Gabbanas. He lifted his right foot off the floor and gave it a few rolls. “Feels fine,” he said. “Thanks to you.”

In reality, the ankle hurt a great deal. It took more effort to keep the grimace from his face as he demonstrated the positive effects of his wife’s care than it had required to keep him from limping in front of his boss. The last thing he needed right now, though, was Phyllis seizing on an opportunity to demonstrate her usefulness.

Soon afterward she left to see about dinner. Canfield continued packing and it didn’t occur to him for a while—until after the customary ten-minute exercise had turned into thirty—what, beyond the regular stresses of his job, was the true source of his disquiet. As he adjusted the items in the suitcase for the tenth time, it came to him that in regard to Project: Night House, little separated him from Dabir in terms of his usefulness after December 21. He wondered if his boss would consider him just another loose string to tie up once that fateful date passed.

Canfield considered that for a time, until the smell of steak found its way to him from the kitchen. Then he shut and zipped the suitcase, filed this new line of thought away for future consideration, and went to help his wife finish fixing dinner. He was careful not to limp.

December 6, 2012, 9:11 A.M.

Brent thought that after forty-eight hours a person could make just about any place feel like home. However, in the case of his current job, he didn’t consider his temporary office a home so much as a refuge. Once one stepped into the hallway, anything could happen. While he didn’t have sufficient clearance to grant him access to every area under the investigative unit’s control, he’d walked into three different rooms in which things he couldn’t begin to understand were transpiring. And while the strange nature of this team and their interesting pursuits teased the researcher in him, he knew that going off task would keep him in Washington longer than necessary. Abby couldn’t arrange coverage for his classes forever.

Brent had papers spread out over the desk, copies of the originals so he could mar them with his own notes or draw lines between different sheets. For the last couple of hours—after a handful of parameter-building questions to Captain Madigan—he’d bounced between the growing stacks of papers and a computer model with ever-increasing data.

That left Madigan doing next to nothing. The part of Brent that loved to dive into a complex problem didn’t realize he’d shut her out until, after entering some numbers into a proprietary computer program, he glanced up to see her with her chair tilted back, eyes on the ceiling. He thought that if he gave her a few more minutes, she would either fall asleep or the chair would tip too far back for her to catch it.

“You have time for a question?” he asked.

“You’re kind of catching me at a bad time,” she answered without moving. “Lots going on over here. Really busy.”

“We were talking about Ethiopia—about the satellite readings that drew you there.”

She nodded. “Like I said, the disturbances we saw didn’t seem to have a seismic signature, which is why we went to investigate.”

“And got shot at.”

“And got shot at,” she confirmed.

Brent leaned back, thinking.

“What’s on your mind?” Madigan asked.

“How do you hear about most of the incidents you investigate? At least the ones you’ve included in the data set.”

“We get some off the wires,” she answered, righting the chair. “Some we hear about on CNN or MSNBC. Some of them we don’t hear about until the colonel gets one tossed down the chain.” She paused for a moment. “Of course, the colonel has at least one friend just about anywhere you could name. So he might get a hint of something before it blows containment.”

“Okay,” Brent said.

“What?” Madigan asked.

“I’m not really sure.” He shuffled the papers on the desk, his handwritten notes marking every page. After a few seconds he gestured to the laptop. “This computer program is designed to look for those patterns we talked about—those things that could account for changes across a wide region. To see things that someone might miss because the connecting pieces seem incidental.”

“You do realize,” she said, “that with all the data you’re putting in there, we’re going to have to confiscate your computer once your consult is done, right?”

The question stopped him cold. He hadn’t considered that understandably delicate issue. But to take his laptop? He tried to determine if Madigan was joking with him, but her face remained impassive. And so, because he could do nothing else, he chose to believe things would work themselves out.

“What’s interesting,” he said, “is that well over ninety percent of the incidents your team has investigated have been covered by one media outlet or another.”

Madigan seemed to parse that before saying, “You know there are only about five people in the world without a cell phone, right? And seeing as most of those phones have cameras, just about anything that goes on in the world winds up on the Internet. And from there it’s a quick walk down the hallway to a legitimate news outlet.”

Brent smiled even as he shook his head. “Believe me, this is a pretty high number. You have to factor in that some of the things you and your team have researched barely have even local significance, much less national or worldwide. Which is why I asked how you decide what to investigate. If you’re pulling your list from existing news sources, then the number would be skewed high.”

“But if a lot of these incidents come to our attention via other sources, then your number needs another causal factor?”

“My thought exactly,” he said. “So what do you think the percentage is?”

Madigan frowned as she considered the question.

“If I had to make a guess,” she ventured, “I’d say at least forty percent of our workload—or at least the stuff we thought was connected enough to include in the data set—comes from either internal referral or through one of the colonel’s contacts.”

“And if you tack on an additional, let’s say, twenty percent of leads that came in outside of any news outlets but that were big enough stories to get there anyway, you still have a lot of stuff that didn’t deserve coverage but got it anyway.”

“Which means?” she prodded.

“I have no idea,” Brent said with a shrug. “Just thought it was interesting.”

His response produced a smile from Madigan. “We say that around here a lot.”

“From what I’ve seen already,” he said with a chuckle, “I believe it.”

A silence fell over the room as Brent’s eyes returned to the computer screen.

“I’m still finding this all a bit weird,” he said. “Yet there doesn’t seem to be anything about it that I would describe as paranormal. It’s all percentages and connections.”

“And the rest of it isn’t?”

“Well, I suppose you’re in a better position to know that,” Brent said. “But cars that won’t start when they’re parked in front of a hardware store? Strange things floating around in jars? I heard Rawlings say that your team investigated a haunting at a base in New Mexico last year—and the results were inconclusive? Doesn’t sound like legit science, Captain.”

“I defy anyone to define
legit
science,” Madigan said. “Believe it or not, Dr. Michaels, almost everything we investigate ends up having a rational, scientific explanation.”

“And the stuff that doesn’t?”

“That’s the fun stuff,” she answered with a grin, one that was impossible for him to keep from mirroring.

“How do you reconcile the ‘fun stuff’ with your belief in God?” he asked, pointing to the tiny cross that hung from a chain around her neck. “Aren’t you supposed to reject anything that seems to have a paranormal connection?”

Madigan sighed, shifting in her chair. “There’s a lot to unpack there, Professor. First, you keep using the word
paranormal
. Just because we can’t explain something right now doesn’t mean it has anything to do with the supernatural. Yes, we investigate some strange things, but weren’t most things that we now accept as legitimate science once looked upon as maybe something just short of magic?”

He conceded the point with a nod, yet she wasn’t finished.

“I’ve been with this team for five years, and in all that time I haven’t seen anything—not one thing—that I don’t think can be explained. Eventually.”

“What about the others?” he asked. “Do any of them approach things from the other perspective?”

“A few,” she said. “Rawlings more than the others. Of course, he’s convinced he has latent telekinetic abilities, so I’m not sure I’d put much faith in his opinion.”

“What about Richards?”

“The colonel?” Madigan said. “I think with the colonel it depends on the day.”

“And what kind of day do you think I’m having today?” came the man’s voice from the doorway.

Brent saw Madigan’s eyes widen but also witnessed a hint of a smile.

“That depends, Colonel,” she said, “on whether or not you’ve seen what Addison has going on in the lab right now.”

The colonel opened his mouth to respond, but instead he turned on his heel and started off in the direction of the lab. Brent thought he caught a look of worry on the man’s face before he disappeared.

—

When Colonel Richards had popped into Brent’s office, and before Madigan’s warning had sent the man hurrying to check on Addison, he’d intended to let the professor know that as luck would have it, Brent would have the chance to witness the team at work in the field. Even more important was the possibility that the thing requiring investigation would soon be included in the team’s data set.

As a general rule, explosions and fires at a Texas oil field—even those bearing the hallmarks of domestic terrorism—did not attract NIIU attention. Such an event lacked the strangeness—and there was no better term—associated with most of the team’s assignments. But the investigative unit had come to understand that within the province of this investigation, seemingly normal events seemed poised to gather up into some abnormal whole.

They’d taken
a plane to Lamesa
, then loaded into two black SUVs for the trip across the scrubland. Brent had been impressed with the C-250, which came complete with a small room outfitted as a field forensics lab. It added yet another layer to his increasingly complicated understanding of this team: soldiers, ghost hunters, scientists, and cops. And at this point, he had no idea which role they embraced most.

The SUV in which he sat was trailing the other one, and Brent wondered how the driver could see through the cloud of dust kicked up by the lead vehicle. Still, even if they’d gone off the narrow asphalt road that cut through the flat terrain, the professor knew that little but grassland stretched out for miles in any direction, which made him feel relatively safe. Colonel Richards occupied the front passenger seat, with Rawlings behind the wheel. Sitting next to Brent in the middle seat was Madigan, whom Brent decided had been assigned to him. The third seat, as well as the space behind it, was filled with a variety of equipment, most of which the professor couldn’t have hazarded a guess as to its purpose. The only piece of info he knew for sure was that the large spiky thing that Rawlings had wrestled into the back amid a stream of curses was named Spike.

They’d been driving for perhaps a half hour and Brent was about to engage Madigan in conversation, if only to break the military-style silence, when the dust cleared enough for him to spot their destination.

According to the briefing he’d listened to on the plane, Hickson Petroleum was a small oil field among the giants spreading their claims over the Trend, where more than ten billion recoverable barrels of oil waited beneath a surface spanning twenty-five hundred square miles. In fact, it was one of the smaller companies with a claim to drilling rights, which to Brent made it an odd choice as a terrorist target.

Soon they’d passed through the security checkpoint at the main gate—a checkpoint that included Homeland Security personnel—and were exiting the vehicle. When Brent stepped from the air-conditioned cab, the outside air felt more like Houston than Washington, only more arid, as if the brown grass of the Llano Estacado had sucked all the moisture from the air. But any attention he might have given the climate vanished when his eyes found the husk of melted, blackened metal that rose like a sore from the scarred earth. Had he not known what it had been, he doubted he could have posited a guess that came close. Now it looked like some avant-garde sculpture, or a Greek column that some giant had hurled in a fit of rage.

“My guess is the fire burned somewhere near two thousand degrees,” Rawlings said. Brent hadn’t heard the man come up beside him.

“That’s nothing,” Petros remarked. “Remember that Russian submarine that went down in the Bering Strait in 2004? The fire in the engine room reached twelve thousand degrees.” The man studied the disfigured oil rig, impressive in its own right. “Talk about a difficult body recovery,” he said, and it took Brent a while to figure out that he was still talking about the doomed Russian sub.

Despite the fact that Brent had been with this unit for three days, it occurred to him that he knew little about anyone besides Madigan and Richards. Most of what he’d gleaned about the others had come from the mission reports, which vacillated in detail depending on who wrote them. Still, what he’d witnessed firsthand seemed to verify his impressions from the reports—namely that Petros was the team’s facts man, and Rawlings was the guy who believed that if he did this job long enough, he’d finally find something interesting. A thrill seeker. A man who had witnessed things that would sate the adventuresome appetites of most men but who himself remained dissatisfied. Of the two, Brent couldn’t figure out with whom he connected most.

Brent moved away from the men, his feet kicking up dust as he made his way closer to the drill rig. The fire must have been impressive; he could imagine the thick black smoke it must have produced, the confusion it caused for the men trying to find safe passage to the gate, the ones searching for friends who were close by when it exploded.

An occurrence like this one still bothered him despite everything he’d learned about tribal behavior. For regardless of societal advances over the last several thousand years—advances which had established rules of law and the recognition of individual rights—humans could still revert to actions indistinguishable from mob rule or predator behavior. Under normal circumstances it would have been an academic exercise, but in the face of mangled metal that was once an oil rig, theory became something else entirely.