Strangers

Page 64

No matter how involved they became in work or leisure, the staff of Shenkfield never forgot they were beneath the earth, for they had two constant reminders of their condition: the lack of windows; plus the susurration of the pipedin air coming through the wall vents, and the echoing hum of the motors that fanned the air along the pipes.
Sitting alone at a metal desk in the office to which he had been temporarily assigned, waiting impatiently and worriedly for the phone to ring, Colonel Leland Falkirk thought: God, I hate this place!
The neverending whine and hiss of the airsupply system gave him a headache. Since his arrival on Saturday, Falkirk had been eating aspirin as though they were candy. Now he tipped two more out of a small bottle. He poured a glass of icewater from the metal carafe that stood on the desk, but he did not use it to wash down the pills. Instead, he popped the dry aspirin into his mouth and chewed them.
The taste was bitter, disgusting, and he almost gagged. But he did not reach for the water.
He did not spit out the aspirin, either. He persevered.
A lonely, miserable childhood filled with uncertainty and pain, followed by an even worse adolescence, had taught Leland Falkirk that life was hard, cruel, and utterly unjust, that only fools believed in hope or salvation, and that only the tough survived. From an early age, he had forced himself to do things that were emotionally, mentally, and physically painful, for he had decided that selfinflicted pain would toughen him and make him less vulnerable. He tempered the steel of his will with challenges that ranged from chewing dry aspirin to major tests like the outings that he called “desperation survival treks.” Those expeditions lasted two weeks or longer, and they put him facetoface with death. He parachuted into a forest or jungle wilderness, far from the nearest outpost, without supplies, with only the clothes on his back. He carried no compass or matches. His only weapons were his bare hands and what he could fashion with them. The goal: reach civilization alive. He spent many vacations in that selfimposed suffering, which he judged worthwhile because he came back a harder and more selfreliant man than he'd been at the start of each adventure.
Now he crunched dry aspirin. The tablets were reduced to powder, and the powder turned his saliva to an acidic paste.
“Ring, damn you,” he said to the telephone on the desk. He was hoping for news that would get him out of this hole in the ground.
In DERO, the Domestic Emergency Response Organization, a colonel was less a deskjockey and more a field officer than in any other branch of the Army. Falkirk's home base was in Grand Junction, Colorado, not Shenkfield, but even in Colorado, he spent little time in his office. He thrived on the physical demands of the job, so the lowceilinged, windowless rooms of Shenkfield felt like a manychambered coffin.
If he had been engaged upon any mission but this one, he might have established temporary unit headquarters up at Thunder Hill Depository. That place was also underground but its caves were huge, highceilinged, not like these tombsized rooms.
But there were two reasons he had to keep his men away from Thunder Hill. First, he dared not draw attention to the place because of the secret it harbored. Several ranchers lived in the highlands along the road leading to the gated Thunder Hill turnoff. If they spotted a fully equipped DERO company moving into the Depository, they'd speculate about it. Locals must not start wondering about Thunder Hill. Two summers ago, he'd used Shenkfield as a red herring to divert attention from the Depository. Now, with another crisis building, he would stay here at Shenkfield again, so he would be in position to spread the same kind of disinformation to the press and public that he'd spread before. The second reason he set up HQ at Shenkfield was because he had certain dark suspicions about everyone in the Depository: He trusted none of them, would not feel safe among them. They might be . . . changed.
The residue of crushed aspirin had been in his mouth so long that he had adjusted to the bitter taste. He was no longer sickened, no longer had to struggle against the gag reflex, so it was all right to drink the water now. He drained the glass in four swallows.
Leland Falkirk suddenly wondered if he had crossed the line that separated the constructive use of pain from the enjoyment of it. Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer: Yes, to some degree, he had become a masochist. Years ago. He was a very welldisciplined masochist, one who benefited from the pain he inflicted on himself, one who controlled the pain instead of letting it control him, but a masochist nonetheless. At first he subjected himself to pain strictly to make himself tough. But along the way, he began to enjoy it, too. That insight left him blinking in surprise at the empty waterglass.
An outrageous image formed in his mind: himself more than a decade from now, a sixty-,yearold pervert sticking bamboo shoots under his fingernails every morning for the thrill and to get his heart running. That grotesque picture was grim. It was also funny, and he laughed.
As recently as a year ago, Leland would not have been capable of selfcritical insights of this nature. He had never been much of a laugher, either. Until recently. Lately, he was not merely noticingand being amused bytraits in himself that he had never noticed before, but he was also becoming aware that he could and should change some of his attitudes and habits. He saw that he could become a better and more satisfied person, without losing the toughness he prized. This was a strange state of mind for him, but he knew the cause of it. After what had happened to him two summers ago, after all the things that he had seen, and considering what was happening right now up at Thunder Hill, he could not possibly go on with his life exactly as before.
The telephone rang. He grabbed it, hoping it was news about the situation in Chicago. But it was Henderson from Monterey, California, reporting that the operation at the Salcoe house was going smoothly.
The summer before last, Gerald Salcoe, with his wife and two daughters, rented a pair of rooms at the Tranquility Motel. On the wrong night. Recently, all of the Salcoes had experienced marked deterioration of their memory blocks.
The CIA's experts in brainwashing, who were usually used only in covert foreign operations, had been borrowed for the Tranquility job that July and had promised to repress witnesses' memories without fail; now they were embarrassed by the number of subjects whose conditioning was breaking down. The experience these people had undergone was too profound and shattering to be easily repressed; the forbidden memories possessed mythopoeic power and exerted relentless pressure on the memory blocks. The mindcontrol experts now claimed that another threeday session with the subjects would guarantee their eternal silence.
In fact, the FBI and CIA, working in conjunction, were illegally holding the Salcoe family incommunicado in Monterey at this very moment, putting them through another intricate program of memory repression and alteration. Although Cory Henderson, the FBI agent on the phone, claimed it was going well, Leland decided it was a lost cause. This was one secret that could not be kept.
Besides, too many agencies were involved: FBI, CIA, one entire DERO company, others. Which made too many chiefs and not enough Indians.
But Leland was a good soldier. In charge of the military side of the operation, he'd carry out his assignment even if it was hopeless.
In Monterey, Henderson said, "When are you moving in on the other witnesses at the motel?"
That was the word they used for everyone who had been brainwashed that Julywitnesses. Leland thought it was apt, for in addition to its obvious meaning, it also embodied mystical and religious overtones. He remembered, as a child, being taken to tent revivals at which scores of Holy Rollers writhed upon the floor while the raving minister screamed at them to "be a witness to the miraculous, be a heartfelt witness for the Lord!" Well, what the witnesses at the Tranquility Motel had seen was every bit as paralyzing, amazing, humbling, and terrifying as the face of God that those spasming Pentecostals had longed to see.
To Henderson, Leland said, "We're standing by, ready to seal off the motel with half an hour's notice. But I'm not giving the goahead until someone straightens out the mess in Chicago with Calvin Sharkle. Not until I know for sure what's going on out in Illinois."
"What a screwup! Why was the situation with Sharkle allowed to deteriorate so far? He should've been grabbed, put into a new memoryrepression program days ago, like we've done with the Salcoes here."
“Wasn't my screwup,” Leland said. "Your Bureau is in charge of monitoring the witnesses. I only come in and mop up after you."
Henderson sighed. "I wasn't trying to shift the blame to your men, Colonel. And hell, you can't blame us, either. The trouble is, even though we're only doing visual surveillance of each witness four days a month and listening to only about half the tapes of their phone calls, we need twentyfive agents. But we only have twenty. Besides, the damn case is so highly classified that only three of the twenty know why the witnesses have to be watched. A good agent doesn't like being kept in the dark like that. Makes him feel he's not trusted. Makes him sloppy. So you get a situation like this Sharkle: The witness starts breaking through his memory block, and nobody notices until it's at crisis stage. Why'd we ever think we could maintain such an elaborate deception for an unlimited length of time? Nuts. I'll tell you what our problem was: We believed the CIA's brainscrubbers. We believed those motherfuckers could do what they said they could do. That was our mistake, Colonel."
“I always said there was a simpler solution,” Leland reminded him.
"Kill them all? Kill thirtyone of our own citizens just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time?"
"I wasn't proposing it seriously. My point was that, short of barbarism, we couldn't contain the secret and shouldn't have tried."
Henderson's silence made it clear he did not believe Leland's disclaimer. Finally: “You will move on the motel tonight?”
"If the Chicago situation clears up, if I can figure what's going on there, we'll move tonight. But there're questions need answers. These strange . . . psychic phenomena. What's it mean? We both have ideas, don't we? And we're scared pukesick. No, sir, I'm not moving against the motel and jeopardizing my men until I understand the situation."
Leland hung up.
Thunder Hill. He wanted to believe that what was happening up in the mountains would lead to a better future than mankind deserved. But in his heart he was afraid it was, instead, the end of the world.
When Jack stepped into the living roomwhich they had converted to a dining roomand spoke to the group, some gasped in surprise and started to rise, bumping the table in their eagerness to turn around, sending up a clatter of dishes and flatware. Others flinched in their chairs as if they thought he had been sent to kill them. He'd left the Uzi downstairs to avoid causing just such a panic, but his unexpected arrival still scared them. Good. They needed a nasty shock to make them more cautious. Only the little girl, playing in her gravysmeared plate with a spoon, did not react to his arrival.
“All right, okay, be calm. Sit down, sit,” Jack said, gesturing impatiently. "I'm one of you. That night, I registered at the motel as Thornton Wainwright. Which is how you've probably been looking for me. But that's not my real name. We'll get into that later. For now-"
Suddenly, everyone was excitedly pitching questions at him.
“Where did you-”
-scared the bejesus-"
“How did you-”
“-tell us if-”
Raising his voice enough to silence them, Jack said, "This isn't the place to discuss these things. You can be heard here, for God's sake. I've been eavesdropping for nearly an hour. And if I can listen in on everything you say, then so can the people you're pitted against."
They stared dumbly at him, startled by his assertion that their privacy was an illusion. Then a big, blocky man with gray brushcut hair said, "Are you telling us these rooms are bugged? 'Cause I find that hard to believe. I mean, I've searched, you know; I've checked, found nothing. And I've had some experience in these matters."
“You must be Ernie,” Jack said, speaking in a sharp cold tone of voice meant to keep them on edge and get his message through to them. They had to understand, right away, that their conversations must be far better guarded, and the lesson had to be driven into them so hard and deep that they would not forget it. "I heard you mention your years in Marine Intelligence, Ernie. Christ, how long ago was that? Better part of a decade, I'll bet. Things have changed since then, man. Haven't you heard about the hightech revolution? Shit, they don't need to come in here and physically plant listening devices. Rifle mikes are a hell of a lot better than they used to be. Or they can just hook up an infinity transmitter to their phone and dial your number." Jack pushed rudely past Ernie and stepped to the living room extension, which stood on a table by the sofa. He put his hand on the phone. "You know what an infinity transmitter is, Ernie? When they dial your number here, an electric tone oscillator deactivates the bell while it simultaneously opens the microphone in your telephone handset. There's no ringing for you to hear; you've no way of knowing you've been called, that your line's wide open. But they can monitor you in any room where you've got an extension." He plucked up the handset and held it toward them with a calculated look of scorn. "Here's your bug. You had it installed yourself.“ He slammed the handset back into the cradle. ”You can bet your ass they've been tuning in on you a lot lately. Probably listened all through dinner. You people keep this up, you might as well just cut your own throats and save everybody a lot of trouble."
Jack's caustic performance had been effective. They were stunned. He said, "Now, is there a room without windows,
big enough to hold a war council? Doesn't matter if there's a phone; we'll just unplug it."
An attractive middleaged woman, apparently Ernie's wife, whom Jack vaguely remembered from checking into the motel two summers ago, thought for a moment and said, “There's the restaurant, the diner, next door.”
“Your restaurant doesn't have any windows?” Jack asked.
“They were . . . broken,” Ernie said. "Right now they're boarded up."
“Then let's go,” Jack said. "Let's work out our strategy in privacy, then come back here for some of that pumpkin pie I heard you talking about. I had a lousy dinner while you people were in here eating yourselves into a stupor."
Jack went quickly down the stairs, confident they would follow.
Ernie loathed the crookedeyed bastard for five minutes. But slowly, the hatred turned to grudging respect.