The Man From Taured (22 page)

"How do we stop that?"

"I don't know," Shaw replied. "That's another reason that we need you with us, Noble. We have to find the rest of the people who were there that day. Anyone who was on that flight is in danger of hearing from Void via his creepy avatars. When that happens, they will touch those people and the people will vanish."

Noble thought of Eveline Paulson, terrified, in a hotel somewhere waiting for his phone call and hoping that he would have something to tell her. What the fuck was he going to tell her? How the hell was he going to explain this so she could stay safe? There was no safety now.

"There's a woman," Noble said, "Eveline Paulson. She was working at the passport counter in customs that night. She was the first person to talk to Duveen. I was at her house just last night and she was visited by a whole bunch of those freaky kids with no eyes. We got out of there and I got her a hotel room. I told her I would call her and tell her something. What am I supposed to tell her?"

"We know about Ms. Paulson," Shaw replied. "You were being watched last night."

"Why didn't anyone help us?" Noble said, getting agitated again. "Why the hell did no one step up and help us?"

"Because we couldn't!" Shaw yelled. "There are times when we can step in and help and times when we cannot and when Void is there doing that, with the people we had watching you, it was not proper for us to step in. We would have weakened the barriers around her house and Void himself might have come pouring in. There are rules, Noble. It's time you start learning them."

"Fuck you, Shaw!" Noble yelled back, standing up. "Fuck you and fuck Dash and everyone else around here. You at least had a choice about which way your life was going to go. Apparently I didn't! Apparently everything I did or was going to do with the rest of my fucking life was being planned out by a bunch of people who were not even from the same goddamn dimension I'm from! My wife is in danger. My friends and family are in danger. There are people out there who have no idea what the fuck is going on and they might be vanishing, being touched by those creepy fucking kids. You act like this is some great thing you have me involved in here. Let me tell you, partner, this whole deal sucks and you can shove your sanctimonious attitude up your ass!"

There was silence in the room, those words ringing off the walls. Shaw’s expression had not changed a bit. The old man was standing there staring at Noble with a bemused, tired, frustrated look on his face. Dash, meanwhile, was still doing his very best not to look at Noble at all.

"I'm going back to the hotel," Noble said. "I am going to call my wife. I am also going to call Eveline Paulson. Shaw, I am going to suggest that someone with IDEA or Homeland get over to where she is, provided she is not already gone, and provide her some kind of protection. Is that too much to ask? Is that breaking the rules?"

"What about the rest of the people who were there?" Dash asked. "Are we supposed to provide protection for them, too?"

"I don't know!" Noble said, throwing up his hands for emphasis. "Right now I know that I made a promise to Eveline that she would be safe. I know that at least one person, someone named Whitlock, is already gone. I know that you, Dr. Shaw, tried to get hold of him. Am I right to assume that you also tried to contact a lot of the other people who were there that night? What are you doing for them? What did you want to do with Whitlock?"

Shaw held up his hand to calm Noble. "Yes," Shaw said, "you are correct. I was going to try and help Whitlock. We were too late to do so. Yes, we have reached out to others. We can do some things to protect Ms. Paulson, Noble. I can see to that. I cannot promise that we can stop the black-eyed children."

Noble wasn’t sure what to say to that. At least it was something.

"There is real danger here, Noble," Shaw said.

"So you keep telling me," Noble said.

"I want you to understand that we may not be able to stop Void," Shaw said. "Even if we provide some kind of protection for Ms. Paulson and some of the others at the airport, it will mean nothing if we cannot stop it. If we cannot stop Whitten and whoever is doing these experiments with the dimensional barriers, then all of our protection will be for naught.”

"I get it," Noble said quietly. He was too tired to fight anymore. "Can I go now? You've turned my entire world and my life upside down.”

Shaw and Dash looked at each other. Dash also looked exhausted, but Shaw just had that statue-like mask on his face. They both shrugged.

"Go," Dash said, at last.

Noble had never felt so tired. His head was still spinning, as if the top of his skull had been removed, his brain also removed, and then stuffed with cotton and other material.

He shuffled out of the office, feeling defeated, deflated. Last night, he thought he would have answers. Today, two people had given him what they said were answers, but he felt betrayed, tired, sad. More than anything else, he felt confused.

For years Noble had had dreams that he would go home to the house where he grew up and find his parents and family there, but that they would not recognize him. They would be robots or aliens and they would not recognize him at all. He always awoke terrified, screaming, sure that he was lost somewhere. Now he felt like that was actually the case.

How many others knew? How many others had been aware of what he was and what Shaw told him that he could do? Had any choice he made in his life been of his own free will? It was too much to consider.

Noble pushed through the doors and walked out into the darkening night.

***

The sun was going down, the sky still blue, but very rapidly turning to purple and darker colors. The horizon was a spectacular array of colors. Noble admired it, wondering what the sunsets looked like in other dimension, but glad that he was where he was and seeing what he was seeing. The shadows were growing, but he now knew that the shadow men were not to be feared. In some ways, they were protectors, even if they had insect faces.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and began shuffling his way toward his hotel room. He had never felt so unsure of himself. Throughout his life he had always been confident about what he was and what he wanted to do. He had always wanted to help people. When he was a kid he would pretend that he was a cop or a fireman. How had he ended up at Homeland? Right now, he couldn't even remember.

Noble could remember other strange times when he had felt that tingling feeling in his gut, as if he had suddenly gone down a steep hill on a roller coaster. He remembered times when he had looked around and seen strange things, strange people, weird vehicles. Funny, he thought, how he had been able to push those thoughts aside, get on with his life, convince himself that he had been drunk, tired, or dreaming. Other times he had just pushed it away into some compartment in his brain and only now had the thoughts and memories come back to him.

"Jesus," Noble muttered.

When he was a child he had a complete police outfit including a hat and a gun and a holster. He had run around pretending to arrest people for various crimes. He sat in front of the television and watched cop TV shows and ate them up.

When Noble went off to college, he had picked a relatively small university in Missouri. He studied psychology and then law and criminology. After he graduated he had headed off to the East coast and law school. There he also studied criminology and applied, after he graduated, to join the FBI. One day, out of the blue Dash showed up at his apartment and asked if he could talk to him about opportunities with Homeland Security.

Now that Noble thought about it, the whole interaction was weird and probably not the standard way that Homeland approached someone. Dash, standing there, at night, in a dark suit and asking if he could come in and talk. At the time he had thought nothing of it, it just seemed like something that Homeland would do. Dash sat in his living room and drank the bad coffee that Noble made and told him that he had great opportunities to protect the country, the entire country, if he would consider joining up with Homeland. Dash had used just the right words to appeal to Noble's sense of justice and helping people and it was a no-brainer after that.

How had he thought that was normal? Why had Noble never asked any of his co-workers how they had been recruited? Had they been recruited or had they applied and had they taken rigorous tests to get where they were? Given the relatively secret nature of the organization, had everyone just learned to shut up and not ask questions of each other?

Noble ran a hand through his hair. Looking back it all looked obvious. Just like that, any delusion he carried that he was a brilliant detective vanished. The biggest mystery of his life had been his own existence, his own career, and all of the warning signs had been right in front of him and he hadn't noticed a goddamn thing.

He looked up and saw that the sun had now descended behind the trees and buildings. There was still a bit of light near the horizon, but the sky over his head was dark and there were stars. Noble wondered if there were other planets out there in addition to the multitudes of dimensions that he now knew existed. Were there people up there that knew about those dimensions? What were UFOs? Were they really people from alternate realities that punched through into our dimension?

So many questions.

So few answers.

The shadows were longer and deeper and still menacing. Each bit of red was a potential red eye and another shadow man. Had they always been there? They must have. How had he not seen them? Perhaps you only saw these shadow men once you had been exposed to the reality of alternate dimensions. The uniforms must have allowed the men in them to vibrate at a different frequency and that allowed them to jump into the in-between worlds. Could Noble do that automatically?

Questions.

Questions.

Noble took a left. The streets were relatively barren at the moment. He looked up and saw a couple walking hand-in-hand across the street. There were restaurants and, down the road, a small grocery store. Everyone looked normal. They were all blissfully unaware that, just a hair's breadth away, was another world with people that may or may not have looked just like them. Perhaps there was a couple in that alternate dimension also walking-hand-in-hand. Maybe they were even the doppelgangers of the people he was looking at right now.

The mind boggled at the possibilities.

Noble could see the hotel up ahead. It was a tall one and he had lucked out and gotten a room near the top. He always liked being up high, able to look down on the world and see the people down there. When he was a kid and growing up in Chicago he loved to go downtown and to the observatories of the various buildings like the John Hancock or the Sears Tower. He loved flying places and got window seats and watched the cars become toy-sized and then smaller.

Now he felt small. Very, very small.

Noble reached the hotel minutes later. He reached into his pocket and fished out his key card. His nostrils filled with that familiar hotel-smell of cleaning products, the bodies of hundreds of guests over the years, and the dim scent of food from the hotel restaurant. There was also a bar off to the right, but Noble did not feel like drinking. His mind was filled with the thought of the king-sized bed upstairs.

Oh, and he was going to have to call his wife and Eveline.

Noble headed for the elevator, his head down, looking at his reflection in the shiny marble floor. He was little more than a shadow, which felt ironic to him right now. The elevator dinged and he stepped inside without noticing anything. He hit the floor he needed and the doors shushed closed, then he leaned back against the cool metal wall and closed his eyes while the floors dinged up and up.

"Noble, so glad to meet you."

Noble nearly jumped right out of his pants. He immediately went into a defensive crouch that was probably not a true maneuver for any martial arts, his hands out in front of him, his left hand in a karate-chop pose, his right lower and closer to his body with a closed fist. The voice was right to his left, in the corner of the elevator. He hadn't noticed anyone there when he got in, but these days he wasn't sure that people couldn't routinely just appear anywhere they wanted in any dimensions, consequences be damned.

It was Whitten. There was no mistaking him.

Although Noble had never seen the man, hadn't even been shown a photo, he knew right away. Whitten had this power about him that just wafted off of him and something in his eyes that made Noble’s stomach quiver. The man was just a hair taller than he was and his head was mostly bald, with the remaining hair around his head a dark brown. He wore the thin wire-framed glasses that made circles around his deep green eyes. He had a thin mustache across his upper lip and a pointed goatee off of his chin and wore a dark green three-piece suit, complete with a vest that bore a watch-chain. Although he could not see it, Noble would have bet anything the man still carried a pocket watch.

"Dr. Whitten," Noble said flatly, a statement, not a question.

"Ah, I am flattered to see that you know who I am," the man said. "I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get to you. Years, in fact. I am guessing that much of your life is turned upside down right now. You did just leave a conversation with my old friend Dr. Shaw, correct?"

There seemed to be little gained by denying it. "Yes, what the fuck are you doing in this elevator and what the fuck do you want with me?"