Denton, still furious and upset, put his hands on his hips with untypical defiance. “Um, could you move your car, please?”
They came over to him at once. Both had dark hair, dark eyes. The taller man, the one in the sports coat, spoke English with a slight accent.
“Who are you?”
He debated telling them the truth. “The people you want are inside the farmhouse. Now if you’d just move your car…”
The man in the sports coat motioned toward the farmhouse with his head, and black leather coat man went to the door.
“I really have to be somewhere,” Denton said, looking at his watch. He was trying to place these guys in his head. Antique dealers? Thugs hired by Schwartz? Cops? He cleared his throat. The man in the sports coat stared blankly.
Frau Kroll, who’d been peeking from the kitchen window, answered the door and had a brief exchange with the man. She pointed several times at Denton, waved her hand as though asking them to be gone. The man in black returned.
“This is Mr. Wyle. He purchased the manuscript.”
“Ah! Mr. Wyle, I’m Mr. Edwards and this is Mr. Smith. Would you be so kind as to speak with us? We can offer you a lift back to Stuttgart.”
Denton looked at them incredulously. “I do have a car.”
“Mr. Smith can drive your car. That will give us more time to chat.”
“But… !” Denton was growing deeply confused. First that freak Neumann—he was still in shock over that one—now these two men were standing in his way like an unmovable wall. It began to dawn on him that something was very wrong. “Look, guys,” he said, sighing now more with fear than exasperation. “If you’re after the manuscript, I don’t even have it anymore.”
They stared.
“Really! The old guy took it—Neumann. The one who just drove off.” He gestured down the road. “You saw him. He just grabbed it out of my hand and took off.”
The two men exchanged unreadable glances.
“So why don’t you go after him? Do us both a favor.” Denton put his hands back on his hips in an angry gesture, but those hands were shaking.
“I think we should look into this together,” Mr. Edwards suggested. He took Denton’s arm. “We’d hate to see you get cheated, Mr. Wyle. And of course, we’d all benefit from a discussion about the manuscript.”
“But…”
Mr. Edwards had a relentless grip. He was pulling Denton without real violence yet inexorably toward their sedan. “It won’t take long—an hour at the most.” Edwards’s sincerity stank like rotten meat.
This, bizarrely, was really happening. Denton shot a panicked look at the farmhouse. The Krolls, who were peeking out the kitchen window again, disappeared at his glance. They wouldn’t help. These thugs could burn him alive in the driveway and the Krolls would probably come out with marshmallows on sticks and Hefeweizen.
“Come on! Neumann has it—why don’t you go after him?”
Mr. Smith opened the front passenger door of the sedan and stood there waiting, like a chauffeur. Mr. Edwards, Denton in tow, paused at the door and put out his palm. “Mr. Smith will need your keys, Mr. Wyle.”
It was all too fast. Denton wanted to stop it, but he didn’t know how. He looked at the interior of that car and drew back hard, like a man resisting his coffin.
“Why can’t I drive my own car, you guys? Come on! What is this?”
The smile on Mr. Edwards’s face slipped away. “Mr. Wyle, get in the car. Now. We only want to talk to you. You have my word.”
Denton looked from Mr. Edwards to Mr. Smith, standing implacably a few feet away.
“We only want to talk,” Mr. Smith agreed, in a warmer tone. Denton gave him the keys.
As he settled into his seat, Denton turned to them, eyes tearing up. “You guys are from the Jewish League, aren’t you?”
Mr. Edwards and Mr. Smith looked at each other and laughed out loud.
“That’s right, Mr. Wyle,” said Mr. Edwards. “We’re from the Jewish League.”
8
The universe has two tendencies: a reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself. The one is life. The other is matter which is opposed to life.
8.1. Calder Farris
The black Lincoln Towncar slid smoothly through military security at the gate and pulled up in front of the main entrance. The driver got out and opened the rear door for Calder Farris. Calder stood still for a moment, his uniform crisping in the chill. It was a clear day in Alaska, but he could smell snow in the air the way he could smell war, even when it was dozens of miles away. He breathed in the scent, his senses on full alert.
A private emerged from the main building. He saluted. “Lieutenant Farris?”
Calder gave a single nod of confirmation. “Take me to it, Private.”
Calder was led through the building and out the back, speaking to no one. He had seen the antennae while driving up, but his view here was closer and unobstructed. A long, wide field of dipole antennae made up the Planar Array. The antennae looked like aluminum crosses—long vertical poles with a horizontal tube and wire mesh at the top. There were 180 towers, spaced out in a grid on a thirty-three-acre gravel pad, and each tower held four antennae. A fence surrounded the entire pad, to prevent animals from wandering into the array, animals being plentiful here in Alaska.
Calder had read through the specifications on his flight. Now his eyes focused narrowly on the scene, trying to find the salient…
There. As they walked closer to the gated array, Calder began to see them, brown lumps on the gravel ground. His gaze swept along the scene. There were more dark shapes here and there in the grass outside the fence’s perimeter. And now he could see a few of the bodies skewered on the tops of antennae and on the fence.
“Who’s in charge here?”
“Colonel Ingram, sir. He’s the site supervisor.”
They passed through the open gate and into the array. There were a dozen or so men standing around, most of them civilian. They had softer faces and the occasional beard or glasses. Their dress was pure Northern Exposure: jeans, flannel shirts or sweatshirts, and bomber jackets. The HAARP scientists, Calder surmised. He decided they could wait and turned his focus on the brown lumps. He could make out the forms now. They were dead birds, hundreds of them. A murder of crows. He felt a kick as his adrenaline level went up a notch.
The private made the introductions. Colonel Ingram was Air Force. He looked at Calder’s ID carefully. This particular ID had his name and Department of Defense, United States on it, the DoD seal, and nothing else; did not, for example, give a job title or branch. Ingram shook Calder’s hand after a moment’s hesitation. “I was told you were coming, Lieutenant Farris, but I’m not sure why you’re here. Perhaps you can fill me in.”
“I’m here to observe, Colonel. Just that.”
Ingram seemed to be debating the wisdom of probing more deeply. He clearly was the kind of man who liked to know everything, and he did outrank Calder. But the DoD owned this land, not to mention Ingram. And he would have been telephoned by someone mysteriously high up in DARPA. Ingram decided against further questions.
“As you can see, we’ve had a little problem with a flock of migrating birds.”
“When did it begin?”
“In the night. It was first noticed at about oh five hundred this morning.”
“You were told not to touch them. Have you?”
“No, sir,” Ingram said coolly.
“How many birds are there?”
“We’re not sure. There’re a lot of ’em out in those fields.” Ingram waved his hand beyond the confines of the fence where tall wild grasses awaited the first snowfall of the year. “There are about four dozen within the array itself.”