Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (4 page)

It’s easier to kill someone you aren’t buddy-buddy with.

But today the guard guard wasn’t there and for the first time, perhaps too late, Edith felt a sense of alarm.

She tugged the raincoat with the files in the secret compartments closer around her and held her briefcase with both arms in front of her chest. Her first thought was that someone was in trouble, and she was happy it wasn’t her. She did notice some flecks of red on the wall to the right above the guard station, as if someone had squirted a can of spray paint at a distance, but her focus was now directly ahead at the ponderous steel door that blocked her way, her anxiety pushing her forward. There was also a strange odor in the air, one she couldn’t place.

Taking charge, Edith leaned over and placed her face against the scanner. She was rewarded with a green light, and the steel door at the end of the corridor slid open. Edith walked down to the end and paused. A second steel door awaited. As she stepped past the first, it slid down, enclosing her in a small space, with just a single lightbulb flickering above.

This time she placed her hand over a sensor. There was a slight prick. Her DNA was checked, and approved. The inner door went up, revealing a cavern, a void in the bedrock on which Manhattan rested. Two hundred meters long by a hundred meters wide and over thirty meters high.

Except there was only darkness facing her where there should be a spotlight focused on the HUB.

It was an absolute blackness, one which the scant light coming from above her couldn’t penetrate. In fact, like a black hole, the light was sucked in and absorbed completely. Edith swallowed, because there was a palpable sense of evil emanating from the darkness. As soon as she felt it, and then thought it, she felt foolish, because how can one sense evil?

But she could.

Edith reached to her left, fingers fumbling on the wall, searching for the master switch. Maybe they were playing a prank? A surprise party?

As soon as she thought that, she knew it wasn’t true. The Patrol didn’t do pranks, and it wasn’t her birthday. And the sense of dread she was experiencing was unprecedented. While she logically knew one could not “feel” evil, she knew that knowledge was wrong.

The Administrator had told her one time that there were things in the universe the human brain could not comprehend, but the body did.

Trust the body, he’d told her, but for someone like Edith, that wasn’t acceptable.

Later she would wonder why she tried several times to turn on lights that didn’t exist with a switch that didn’t exist into a darkness that she intuitively knew couldn’t be breached. And why she stood so long staring into that darkness, mesmerized. She’d always known something like this was a possibility, but after so many years of the HUB being there, the absence didn’t quite register. She looked left and right and then back the way she’d come, seeing only the steel door, as if she’d made a wrong turn and missed the place she knew better than anywhere else.

Finally she accepted that the HUB wasn’t here. Edith had absolutely no desire to move forward and try to touch or penetrate that darkness. The thought never even occurred to her. She dropped the briefcase from her arms, files tumbling out, and ran her fingers over the stone next to her, trying to ground herself in something real.

She’d been briefed on this, but it was like so many briefings about so many possibilities: It had been endured as part of the process of becoming part of this organization and assuming her position. Edith turned and hit the switch, opening the steel door behind her. It slid up as the one into the cavern slid down; the two could never be open at the same time; another Protocol.

Edith took a step back into the corridor, turned to her left, and saw the “fire” alarm. She’d passed it for so many years, aware of its existence and its real purpose, but never really thinking of it. But it was still there. As per Protocol, she broke the glass and pulled the small lever as she wondered if there was anyone to hear it. For a moment there was nothing, and she felt a surge of pure fear.

Then a light flashed at the top of the alarm, but there was no screech of a siren or klaxon. Apparently this emergency was registering somewhere else.

Then an alarm sounded, undulating up and down, for ten seconds. It pierced into Edith Frobish’s brain, and she screamed in concert with it, before collapsing to the floor.

After a minute or so she came to, her head throbbing. She peered about, confused as to where she was. She had no clue at the moment, as if her brain had been covered by a mudslide.

But some things stick with you through the mud.

Edith bent down and picked up the files and rearranged the papers and put them back in the briefcase. She stood straight and tall and waited patiently for the people she knew should come.

She hoped.

She had no idea who they were and could only grab the vaguest of memories as to where she was. Then Edith did remember something. She walked back to the start of the corridor and stood close to the wall. She looked inside the guard station. There was a pile of expended brass on the floor. She realized the odor was from gunfire.

She reached out and tentatively touched her finger to one of the flecks of red.

The blood was still warm.

When it changed, Roland, stone-cold killer, otherwise nice guy, and weapons man for the Nightstalkers, had the stock of a sniper rifle tucked tight in to his shoulder with a righteous target approaching, and that made him happy. Neeley, a usually stone-cold killer from the Cellar, was in overwatch, with her own sniper rifle, and she was acting wonky. That made Roland unhappy since he liked her, and
like
for Roland was the equivalent of rabid devotion in a well-trained attack dog. However, it all balanced out and mattered little since he was in combat mode, and feelings were of no consequence to him in that mode. There was only the mission.

Roland was a man who could live and flourish in the here and now.

That’s a rare, and valuable, trait.

It was going to get a lot more valuable.

The problem with hiding off the grid was that sometimes you went off the grid.

Jane Eyre led to Wuthering Heights. The names of the trails comforted Teri Stevens, not her real name, as she settled into her nine-minute-per-mile pace as verified by the GPS program on her iPhone. She wondered who had come up with the names, while noting that she had no cell phone signal in this old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest. She was very conscious of the pace, a means to use time to push herself. People approach time differently, as if it were something they could control or use.

Teri was running in Putney Woods on the south end of Whidbey Island, Washington, which was in the middle of Puget Sound not far from Seattle. She was dressed for the weather, with long black Gore-Tex pants and a yellow rain jacket. She skirted the puddles as best she could, but mud seemed to be an integral part of negotiating these trails, and after her first week running in the woods, she’d surrendered to that fact.

She was a striking young woman, just past thirty, who cursed those genetic gifts every time she looked in the mirror because she was aware on a fundamental level those had been the first thing that had attracted
him
.

It was something she ruminated on often, going back in her memory, looking at all those choices and non-choices as paths, much like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, with many branches spinning off. She wished she could go back in time and make a decision at times when she’d simply let fate push her down a path, and perhaps change a decision or two or three.

One for certain. And that was the decision to marry him.

But things were as they were, and there was no changing it.

Such is the way most people view time. She had little idea that there were some who viewed it quite differently.

Towering pines and moss-covered trunks lined the trail and her eyes darted into the dark green shadows, on the nervous edge between believing the trees were an enveloping protection or a dark hole for her fear to lurk.

Sixty-two meters down Wuthering Heights from the intersection, Roland wouldn’t have liked the word “lurked.” He was in what was technically called a hide site and had been in the same position for twenty-eight hours, plus fourteen minutes, give or take some seconds. He’d cut back eating a week ago, so the only calls of nature were a slight roll to the left to urinate. The rain cleansed the mud he lay in, if one could be considered clean in four inches of mud, but Roland had been in worse spots, which tells most of what one needs to know about Roland’s past. He was hungry, but that wasn’t important. He was covered by a ghillie suit he’d spent three days preparing for just this forest, for just this weather. The outfit made him indistinguishable from the rotting log four feet to his right. Roland, in the flesh, was an imposing figure—six and one-third feet tall, solidly muscled, and sporting a scar along the right side of his head—a scar that was now poorly masked with a barbed wire tattoo.

Neeley hadn’t commented on the tattoo when she saw it for a first time and, although Roland would never admit it, that omission hurt his feelings. It also made him wonder if the tattoo had been a mistake. Roland pretended otherwise, but he cared very much what the women around him thought, especially Moms and Neeley.

He had a CamelBak of water tucked under the suit and the nozzle was an inch from the right side of his mouth. He’d been sipping it on a schedule that allowed a one-quarter reserve past the time he planned on being out of the hide site because plans sometimes went wrong and one always planned on that. Anyway, given the damp weather of the Pacific Northwest, dying of dehydration wasn’t high on Roland’s concerns for this mission. There were so many other likelier possibilities.

It was Protocol and Roland knew Nada, the team sergeant of the Nightstalkers, would have approved. When he had time, and he’d had time on this op, Roland always ran his actions through the Nada filter. It was useful in little things, and little things added up to big things, like staying alive. Roland had every Nada Yada memorized, the rules by which his team sergeant ruled his life and that of the team.

Roland wasn’t off the grid from the Nightstalkers on this op working with Neeley, like he’d been on the last one in South America. This was a mutually approved operation, Moms slapping Roland on the shoulder as he headed out for the airstrip at Area 51, wishing him good hunting. Nightstalker and Cellar operative working side by side.

What was the world coming to? Cats and dogs . . .

Even though he liked (perhaps not exactly the right word) Neeley, he missed his team. Most of all, he missed Moms, to whom he owed the deep and abiding allegiance of a blood debt since she saved his life in Iraq years ago.

For a man like Roland, there was no greater bond.

His left cheek rested lightly on the stock of the sniper rifle, but that eye was closed as he used his open right to scan the trail. He had that sixty-two meters’ line of fire to the intersection, which made the sniper rifle seem like overkill, but Roland never minded stacking the odds in his favor. Better to over-, rather than underkill. Roland never understood those movies where the bad guy walked away from the supposedly mortally wounded good guy only to end up on the wrong end of the good guy’s gun by the end of the movie. Bad guy deserved to die then, not particularly for being bad, but for being stupid.