“No,” she giggled. “Now, sweet cheeks, tell me what shape it was.”
I swallowed a lump the size of a regulation softball. “It was a triangle.”
I heard her give a gasp of pure delight. “Well, jumping june bugs, boys, you got yourself a gen-ewe-ine T-craft. Now how about that?”
Top closed his eyes. “Son of a bitch.”
INTERLUDE FIFTEEN
Ari Kostas was in a coma for days, but gradually swam back to consciousness. Valen visited him every day, even when Ari was in a coma. He did not know why he did it, and wrestled with the questions through long bedside hours. He certainly did not like or trust Ari — the man was a psychopath and criminal devoid of any loyalties beyond his bankbook and his cock. And yet, Valen knew that if he were to sit down and make a list of his “friends,” there would be a few names, but most would be lies.
Valen kept in touch with some friends from Russia — the few who had been educated by Gadyuka on how to communicate with the man now officially known as Valen Oruraka. The fact that they had known him by his birth name, Oleg Sokolov, was something they had to erase from their minds. Access to certain jobs and other perks greased this process. And the e-mails that went back and forth were mostly coded messages about various aspects of work for the New Soviet.
The truth was, he had no actual friends. The closest thing to that definition was Ari Kostas. That was an ugly, disfiguring truth. Sometimes, as Valen sat beside the comatose man, he wept. Passing nurses were touched by the depth of feeling this nice-looking young man had for his injured friend.
Gadyuka was back in Russia, and Valen was under orders to sit tight and wait for further instructions. She’d taken the crystal gun and the hand with her, and refused to discuss them with Valen. It left him torn and confused and lost.
One bad evening at the hospital, Valen took a notepad and actually wrote down the names of everyone he had killed. In cases where he didn’t know the name, he assigned a unique nickname. When he got to eighteen names, he staggered to his feet and barely made it to the bathroom in time to throw up in the toilet. He washed his mouth out with handfuls of water, and then tore up the list and flushed the pieces. The following night he wrote the list again, this time adding the names of everyone who died at the dig site. And again the next night. Each time he flushed the ripped pieces away.
He closed his eyes as he sat beside Ari’s bed, but there was no escape even in personal darkness. It took him straight back to his hotel suite with Gadyuka and the cooler and those four dreadful, impossible words.
Oh, God. They’re back.
“Who are they?” he asked aloud. “Jesus Christ, who the hell are they?”
Gadyuka had refused to answer and quickly left, taking the gun and the hand with her.
“Valen…,” whispered a ghostly voice. His eyes snapped open to see Ari Kostas looking at him. Small, wasted, pale, and terrified.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Ghost was happy enough to leave that freaky stretch of road, but he wasn’t actually happy. I sure as hell wasn’t laughing and singing all the way, either. My tension level dropped a small notch with every mile, but all that did was free my mind up to ask about ten million damn questions.
Like… T-craft? Holy shit. Far as I knew, all of those damn things had been reduced to rubble when the air force hit Howard Shelton’s secret base with a whole wave of AGM-65H/K Maverick air-to-ground missiles. DMS teams tore the rubble apart to make sure everything Majestic 3 built was destroyed. It was. We made damn sure of that. And yet…
That’s what had flown over the road in the microsecond before me and my guys blanked out. A T-craft. Now that I’d found that fragment of a memory, it was very clear and very real. However, I’d only gotten so brief a glimpse that I could never be sure if it was the Shelton model, the Chinese version that buzzed the Seventh Fleet, or one belonging to someone else. And by “someone else” I mean the holders of the original patent. My imagination kept trying to fill in the blanks, and I had to fight that. All I knew for sure was that it was big — maybe fifty feet per side, and perfectly triangular, with glowing white lights in each of its three symmetrical wings.
So, I had nowhere to go with that, but it opened up so many doors of speculation. Nothing coming through those doors made me a particularly happy guy. On one hand, if another country had managed to develop working T-craft, then we were back to the brink of another arms race, especially if they wanted to follow Shelton’s insane plan of using them as suicide bombers. On the other hand, if that ship came from somewhere else — off-planet, say, or sideways through a hole in dimensional reality — then how seriously screwed were we? Rhetorical question. We were bent over a barrel and the universe was about to have its way with us.
So, who was in the ship we saw?
The Cop and Modern Man in my head kept spinning theories, but the Killer wasn’t looking north or south, east or west. He was crouched in the tall grass watching the skies.
Green blood. Damn. I reached over to pet Ghost, telling myself I was comforting him. I lie to myself like that a lot. Ghost lets me.
INTERLUDE SIXTEEN
“So, what are we talking about here,” croaked Ari a few nights later. He was getting stronger, but not yet able to leave the hospital. “Little green men from outer space?”
Valen, worn and unshaven, shook his head. “I… don’t know.”
Ari snorted. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You can lie to your scary little girlfriend, but I’ve known you too well and too long. You know something, don’t you?”
“Know? No, I don’t know. All I have are some theories, and some stuff I found on the Net, but before you tell me it’s all bullshit, I—”
“Valen,” said Ari in his raspy voice, “we found a lizard-man’s hand in a rock wall and then a machine made out of half-a-million-year-old quartz blew us up. Not sure about you, my friend, but I find that I’m open to all sorts of possibilities.”
Valen nodded. He went out into the hall and returned with two cold cans of Coke, opened them, and handed one to Ari. “Before all this,” he said slowly, “I believed I knew the shape of the world. Since we found that damn gun and that double-damned machine, I’ve been reassessing a lot of my long-standing beliefs. Maybe we’ve been looking at this wrong, Ari. I’m beginning to wonder if my uncle was talking about doorways between here and somewhere else.”
“Like where? Outer space?”
“No,” said Valen. “Within the UFO and ancient alien communities there’s one viewpoint that the distances between star systems is so great that it’s improbable to suggest that aliens were able to cross those light-years to come to Earth. Why would they? If they were somehow able to see our world and recognize it as habitable or interesting enough to want to visit, by the time they actually arrived, the world they viewed would have changed. Even if they were relatively close, the distances are too great and there is no workable theory for exceeding the speed of light.”
“Even if you build a big enough engine? Maybe that’s what the green machine was, have you thought about that?”
“Not a chance, Ari. Particles that have mass require energy to accelerate them. The closer to the speed of light you get a particle, the more energy is required to go faster. This is because the particles themselves get more massive in proportion to the increased velocity.”