The Grays Read online

  She looked at Langford. His face was bland. A dentist’s face—that is to say, a mask. She read aloud, “Any commentary or discussion or unauthorized record of any subject or meeting or action carried out within the context of the project is prohibited conduct and subject to prosecution under provisions of the National Security Act of 1947 as amended.” She tried to laugh. They remained silent. “This is very heavy stuff.” Still nothing. “Excuse me, but this is a very serious document, here.” She pushed the paper back toward Crew’s side of the desk.

  “We can’t bargain with you,” Langford said, “and we can’t talk until you sign.”

  “Volunteer or be shot, in other words.”

  Langford pushed the paper back toward her. “Don’t miss this,” he said. “You’re first in line, Lieutenant Glass, but there is a line.”

  “If I sign and don’t like what I hear, can I walk away?”

  Langford turned toward Crew, who didn’t so much as blink. “I’m sorry, but the agreement is binding,” Langford said.

  “It commits me to something I can’t learn about until I’m in it? And then I can’t get out?”

  “I know it sounds unreasonable.”

  “Unreasonable? It’s downright scary. More than scary. I mean, the Air Force doesn’t handle things this way.” She wondered if that was actually true.

  “Sign it. It would be very helpful.”

  Maybe her dad was looking down on her right now. Probably was, assuming there was anything left of him, any sort of a soul.

  She picked up a pen off the desk . . . and had the odd feeling that these two guys were waiting, but in a funny way . . . like they were hungry, almost, and she was lunch.

  “So, I don’t think I need to do this,” she said. “No.” And she was more than a little ashamed. Sorry, Dad, but this does not feel right.

  Crew unfolded his long legs and leaned forward. She expected him to speak. But he did not speak. He just looked at her. It wasn’t a special expression, not at all. But it moved her. It did, definitely. A very serious, very important moment.

  “I can’t very well jump off a cliff without knowing what’s at the bottom, can I?”

  Crew sighed. Was it anger? Suppressed impatience? Boy, she could not read this guy. You thought saint, then you thought—well, something else.

  “We want you to continue your father’s work,” Crew said. “If you pass this small test.”

  “It’s urgent,” Langford added. “You’ll need to start this afternoon.”

  Crew pushed the agreement back at her.

  “But . . . what did he do?”

  “Please help us,” Crew said. His voice was still as soft as ever, but the desperation in it was somehow terrifying.

  “What if I . . . can’t?”

  He smiled then, very slightly.

  Suddenly she knew that she would not walk away from this. She could not live the rest of her life in ignorance of what her dad had done, knowing that she had passed up this chance.

  He had been killed, though.

  She grabbed the paper, signed, then thrust it back.

  Colonel Langford took it, folded it once, and slipped it into a manila envelope. “You’ll get a copy countersigned by the Secretary of Defense,” he said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Lauren, you have a very unique ability,” the big man said, “inherited, we believe. That first test you took, you passed. You were the only person to have done so in the forty years it has been administered, in one form or another, to every military recruit in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. The only one who even came close. But we weren’t surprised, given who your father is.”

  That sort of sounded . . . whoa. “Did you say, uh—what’s that?”

  “You are one in many millions, Lauren. You have inherited an absolutely unique skill from your dad.”

  What in the world could this be? “I have to tell you honestly, I have no unusual skills.”

  “I want to warn you, you’re going to have a very extraordinary experience. I want you to understand that it will not be in any way pleasant or easy. I won’t pretend that there is no danger, because it must be obvious to you that there is great danger. What’s more, we’re not going to be able to help you. You have to do it on your own. And you are on your own.”

  “But, uh, you said there was a list, Colonel Langford. And you were going to . . . you were going to the next person if I didn’t sign.”

  “I lied. And you will, too, many times. It will be a big part of your job.”

  “If I’d said no—despite Dad, absolutely and finally no—what then?”

  Crew said, “We would have had to say something dramatic, like the survival of the human race might depend on you.”

  The words hung in the air. Unbelievable. Crazy, even. She didn’t know whether she should be scared or what. Finally, the whole idea just seemed so overblown that she burst out laughing—and it was the only sound in the room, and it stayed the only sound in the room. She looked from one deadly serious face to the other. They actually were not in any way kidding.

  But she was a girl, she was twenty-two, and, while she liked being both things, neither suggested that she had any sort of amazing mission in life. “This is too weird,” she said slowly. “I mean, are you telling me I’m some kind of outrageous, like, freak?”

  Langford cleared his throat. “You know nothing about your father’s work?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re what we call an empath. You can hear thought and you can transmit it to others who can hear it.”

  “Yeah, Dad used to say that. He read science fiction, too. Arthur C. Clarke kind of thing.”

  Crew handed her a yellow pad. “Write down the first thing that comes to mind.”

  She took the pad, thought for a moment, then scrawled the first word that came to mind. “The name of my dad’s barber,” she said. “Adam.”

  Now Langford pulled an envelope out of his pocket. “The person you will be working with cannot speak. His brain is so entirely different that, without a person like you, we can only exchange the most rudimentary ideas. At present he is terribly upset, but we have succeeded in getting him to transmit the name we call him to you.”

  He handed her the envelope.

  In it was a note scrawled on a piece of paper that smelled oddly of what she thought might be Lysol. The single word written there was “Adam.”

  She looked at it. She looked back up at the two men. “Who . . . who is this guy, anyway?”

  “That’s part of what we’ve been trying to understand, Lieutenant Glass. What your father spent his career working on.”

  “His name is Adam but you don’t understand . . . what?”

  “They don’t have a naming convention in their culture. Adam and Bob are really just our labels.”

  “Bob?”

  “Died.”

  Another death. She noted that. But who in the world would communicate via thought and not use names?

  “Our next step will be to send you to meet the head of your part of the project. He operates a very small unit and runs a very, very tight ship,” Colonel Langford said. “You have to understand, you are never to speak to him about your background, about your meeting with us, about anything that you do not absolutely need to talk to him about in order to do your work. Do you understand that?”

  This was sounding crazier and crazier. “So I just walk up to the guy—my commanding officer—and I say—what?”

  The colonel handed her an envelope. “You don’t say anything. You give him this. He’ll take it from there.”

  She recognized the envelope, of course: it carried orders. She started to open it.

  “No.”

  “No? I don’t open my own orders?” She shook her head. “Why am I not surprised?”

  He gave her a card with an address in Indianapolis on it. “You’ll drive to your new assignment. Colonel Michael Wilkes will be expecting you. You
saw Mike at the funeral. You will receive further orders from him verbally.” He paused for a moment. “Lauren,” he continued, “I want you to understand that there is an extremely good reason for all this secrecy. In time, you’ll come to know this reason, and you will find yourself in the same position we are—it’s a secret that you won’t hesitate to defend with your life.”

  She found herself walking toward the parking lot with this weird verbal order to report to an address in University Heights in Indianapolis, and to be there by six this evening. Not impossible, given that it was a little over a hundred miles and she had five hours. Typical of the Air Force, though, she’d been sitting in procurement for two years and then, with barely time to go back to the apartment and grab her toothbrush, she was on the move to, of all places, Indianapolis, and not even a USAF facility as far as she could tell.

  “You just get your belongings out of your billet and go,” Langford had said. “No good-byes, no e-mails, no cell calls.”

  She had friends, a life, at least something of a life. No, hell, there was Molly at the office who was going to wonder, there was Charlie Fellowes who was getting to be more than just a friend, but he was out on a refueling mission and wouldn’t be back for forty-eight hours—so he was just going to find her apartment empty, her cell phone disconnected, and her e-mail bouncing everything back.

  She worried that she’d run into a familiar face on her way home, but all was quiet. She knew the Air Force: her current commanding officer, General Winters, would have been duly informed of her transfer, etc., but nothing would run smoothly. Undoubtedly, the next thing she’d get from her current unit would be a notice that she was AWOL.

  She spent three quarters of an hour packing. At the last, she put their small photo album in a suitcase. Her and Dad through the years. She staggered down to the parking lot under her bags, and got the Focus pretty much stuffed to the roof liner.

  Then she was gone, outta here, no looking back.

  It was not until she was sailing west on 70 and WTUE was rocking into her past that she began to think again about Dad’s dreams.

  As a little girl, she’d covered her head with her pillow and begged God to help him. Later, she’d gone into his bedroom to try to provide him with whatever support a daughter could. She would find him with his eyes wide open, screaming and shaking his head from side to side, and you could not wake him up.

  He’d said it was ’Nam coming back to haunt him. He’d flown Hueys in ’Nam, and he had two Hearts for his trouble. Also a scar down his back where he’d been wounded. His story was that a lot of guys had burned alive in a hospital tent that had been torched by the V.C. Helpless guys, guys with no faces, guys with no legs. He’d had a broken arm and a bad infection, but he could run, at least.

  There was, of course, a problem with this. It was that, as she knew, her father had not served in Vietnam. She’d seen his duty book, and he just had never served there.

  In fact, her father had served at White Sands, then at an army base in Arizona called Fort Huachuca. Her earliest memories were of the wonderful rocks around Fort Huachuca. After that, they’d come to Wright-Pat, where he’d been connected with the Air Materiel Command. She knew that because his unit was attached to the Behavioral Research Directorate, which was a division of AMC. She knew that behavioral research was about understanding things like pilot alertness and endurance. Also, muddier stuff, nonlethal weapons and such.

  It was a nice drive, once you got out of Dayton traffic—which was, truth be told, pretty minor.

  Farms, midsummer corn, a different way of life out here. She’d like to run tractors and combines and things. She liked big machines.

  She’d been around the Midwest for a while now, so Indy was no stranger to her. Back before Mom moved home to Glasgow, they’d gone to the 500 here practically every year. Mom was into fast cars—or rather, the drivers, the mechanics, and just about anybody connected with racing. Actually, just about anybody else at all, as long as it wasn’t Dad.

  She was expecting an office building at least, or maybe some kind of lab facility tucked away next to the university. But this was pure residential around here. Wide streets, big old houses, quiet in the late afternoon.

  She drove past 101 Hamilton and was, frankly, confused. It was a house. Looked like it had been built around 1910 in the Craftsman style. Beautiful place, for sure. But a house? An Air Force facility was in a house in a neighborhood?

  Okay, so be it. She pulled into the driveway behind a very sweet-looking SLK convertible, that was, no, not your usual Air Force colonel’s automobile. It was possible, of course, that the car belonged to somebody else, but she’d been told that the chilly Colonel Wilkes ran the place and this car was in a special little chunk of tarmac all its own. Commanding officer’s privilege, for sure; she knew her Air Force.

  There was only one other vehicle there, though, and the garage was padlocked. The other car was an Acura, not too young. So there was Colonel Wilkes with a fast car and a flunkie to be named later. Not the lowest of the low, they’d be in your Focus or your Echo like her, trying to make ends meet on just enough money to make that impossible.

  As she mounted the stairs to the porch she noticed, of all things, a pair of longhorns over the front door. She stood looking at this incredibly improbable choice of decoration for Indianapolis, Indiana.

  The front door had one of those old-fashioned bells on it that you twisted. She turned it and was rewarded by a dry crunching sound, not loud. In fact, hardly audible. So she did it again, a couple of times.

  She was still doing it when the door swept open and Colonel Wilkes, looking shockingly older than this morning, stood there staring at her out of bloodshot eyes. “Please come in,” he said, stepping aside.

  His voice sounded sad, and she had the odd impression that he might have actually been crying. She noticed that there were boxes against the wall.

  “They’re yours,” Wilkes said. “Eamon’s things.”

  “Colonel, nobody has told me yet what happened to my dad. I’ve been ordered to come to this place and I have no idea why, beyond reasons that sound like some sort of science fiction crap to me, and I have to tell you that this is not being done right. Couldn’t someone have at least warned me that I’d come here and see Dad’s stuff in damn boxes!”

  “Who sent you here?”

  She could not believe that he actually didn’t know. “I’ve been ordered not to tell you.”

  He nodded, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. She followed him into an office that had clearly been carved out of what was once the master bedroom.

  “This place was built in 1908 by Indy’s only cattle baron,” he said as he dropped down behind his desk.

  There had been no exchange of salutes. But he was her superior officer, so she brought her hand to her forehead and said, “Lieutenant Lauren Glass reporting as ordered, sir.”

  He looked up at her. “Obviously. Please go to the scrub room and get prepped.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The scrub room. You’ll find it at the base of the shaft.”

  “Sir, I have to explain to you, I have no idea what’s going on here. I would like a little more information, sir.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it.”

  “Uh, look, what is this scrub room? What do I have to scrub for?”

  “Listen, I know you don’t understand any of this. We were planning to bring you along as your dad reached retirement. Nobody thought it would be like this. But we have a desperate situation, Lauren.”

  She found a chair. “Sir, I’m sorry to disabuse you, but I have not been on any training program in any way, shape, or form. I am not prepared for whatever this is. I basically have no idea what you’re doing here at all, but whatever it is, it killed—” She had to stop. Her grief, appearing suddenly, had choked her on her own words.

  “Lauren, I knew your dad for a long time. So you’ll know that what I’m about to say is not meant to be hard or
callous. It is what your dad would say to you if he could talk right now. Your dad would say to you, ‘Soldier, you have a duty. Do your duty.’ ”

  “Sir, respectfully, you tell me in one breath that my predecessor is a KIA, then you tell me to proceed into whatever situation he was in with no training or prep whatsoever. Sir, I would like to understand this order a little better. I know that I am dealing with somebody called Adam, and my father dealt with him and with somebody called Bob, and my father died as a result. That is the extent of my knowledge.”

  He stood up so suddenly that she did, too. He turned his back on her and strode to the window. “There is no training, and there is no time. I want you down there now, because we have a situation, Lieutenant, and I believe—no, I know—that you are the only person remotely available to us who might be able to help.”

  When he attempted to smile at her, she saw that coldness again, this time more clearly than she had at the grave. This was a driven man, she thought, a fanatic. And she wondered, should she trust a fanatic?

  Well, Dad had. This was his commanding officer, this frosty man with his carefully decorated office and his fabulous car.

  He showed her to a small elevator that opened under the front stairs. “There’s a very skilled man at the other end who will be there to help you.”

  She stepped into the dim interior and descended. It felt as if it was moving fast, and continued for more than a minute. When the doors opened, she found a chunky young man in a white sterile suit waiting for her . . . and saw that he had been the fourth man at the funeral.

  “I’m Andy Morgan,” he said. “Welcome to the facility.”

  “This place is deep.”

  “We’re two hundred and eighty feet down. Deep in the bedrock.” He tapped a foot on the floor. “Basalt.”

  Faintly, she could hear another voice. It was groaning and sounded tired. Also angry. She looked around but saw nobody.

  “Who is that?”

  Andy Morgan shook his head. “You’re good,” he said.

  “Who’s moaning? What’s going on in here?”