“Wait’ll I turn the van around.”
“So we’ll be ready to make a getaway?”
“Don’t mock a cholla,” she warned.
As the dust settled, they got out and squinted in the bright sun to- ward the towering white dishes.
“This’ll look great.” Anita pulled the camera from the side door of the van and attached a fresh battery pack. “Stand by the gate. I’ll angle up toward the dishes, then pan down toward the ‘high voltage’ signs on the interior fences and finally over to you.”
“Sounds as if you should be a director, not a cameraman.”
“Camerawoman. Have you figured out what you’re going to say this time?”
“The dish that’s tilted sideways…”
“What about it?”
“It seems pointed in the general direction of Rostov.”
“So?”
“Maybe I’ll suggest that it’s aimed at the lights.”
“As if it’s receiving a signal from them? You think CNN’s going to buy that?” But she glanced at the dish as if intrigued by the idea.
“It’s the best I can come up with right now.”
“In that case, I’m not the only one who won’t be going to Atlanta.” But Anita hefted the camera to her shoulder.
“Trust me. As we keep going, I’ll think of something better. Just get some shots of the dish that’s tilted toward Rostov. I can always dub a voiceover later if I need to.”
Abruptly Brent heard a noise behind him. He lowered the micro- phone to his side, turned, and gazed through the three fences toward a door that opened in a concrete-block shed.
A man appeared. Emerging from the darkness inside, he came out backward, bending over, tugging something that Brent couldn’t see. His khaki uniform left no doubt that he was a guard.
The man glanced behind him to make sure of his footing and stopped when he noticed the van. Immediately he set down whatever he was dragging. The darkness beyond the door still concealed it.
He turned and straightened. His hair was extremely short. His features were stern. His chest was muscled, his shoulders broad.
He stepped forward and halted at the front of the truck. “I guess you can’t read.”
“Excuse me?” Brent asked. He kept the microphone down, concealed behind his right leg.
“The sign at the road. How’d you get through the locked gate?”
“It was off its hinges,” Brent replied. “With all the weird things happening, we got suspicious and decided to make sure nothing’s wrong.”
“Everything’s fine. I’ll arrange for the gate to be fixed. Why do you suppose it was off its hinges?”
“Kids maybe.”
“Kids. Of course.”
“My name’s Brent Loft. I’m a television reporter.” Brent used his left hand-the one that wasn’t concealing the microphone-to point toward the station’s letters on the side of the van.
“Yeah, I saw you on TV, talking about the shootings.”
“Thanks.”
The guard’s sour expression suggested that his comment hadn’t been a compliment. Even so, Brent pressed on. “As long as we’re here, this place looks so fascinating, is there someone I can talk to about doing a feature about it?”
He hoped Anita had the camera rolling. He didn’t know where this conversation was going, but he had a suspicion he’d be able to use footage from it. The guard was too far away for Brent’s microphone to pick up his voice, but Brent was speaking loudly enough that his own portion of the conversation would be recorded.
He expected the guard to say that the person to talk to was gone for the weekend-some sort of polite brush-off.
The guard’s curt “no” caught him by surprise.
“No?”
“Like the sign says, this is government property. If you want to get prosecuted, just hang around while I call the cops. But if you want to end this with no hard feelings, get in that van and drive back to the road. Now.”
Brent’s gaze focused on the open door behind the man. The object he’d been dragging lay in the shadows inside the shed. Part of it was round, resembling a soccer ball.
“Well, maybe I could interview you,” Brent offered. “How does it feel to work here? Is it exciting to be part of a project this big, or, like most jobs, does it get boring after a while?”
The guard squinted harshly.
Brent kept trying. “Does the observatory study only stars and comets and black holes, or is it also part of the SETI project?”
The guard’s squint became more pronounced.
“You know, SETI,” Brent said. “The Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence.”
Now the guard scowled. “I know what SETI means.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”
“The joke I heard is we ought to be searching for intelligent life on Earth.”
Brent focused again on the door that stood open behind the guard. The soccer ball in the shadows beyond it seemed to have hair.
Oh, shit.
Brent tried not to show a reaction.
“Do you live on-site?” Brent managed to keep talking and prayed that Anita did indeed have the camera rolling. “What’s that like, being out here away from everything?”
The guard’s hands were at his side. He bunched his fingers into fists. Opened them. Closed them. Opened them.
“Tell you what. I’ll give you exactly a minute to get out of here. If you don’t want to be prosecuted, just get in your truck and drive back to the road.”
Brent tried to be subtle when he switched his gaze toward the truck next to the guard. Several objects were piled in the back. They came up only slightly higher than the sides, making it difficult to tell what they were. But one of them looked a lot like it might be part of a shirt-still on someone’s arm.
“Fine,” he said, finding it hard to remain calm. “I’m sorry if we bothered you.” The sudden rapid pounding of his heart sickened him. “I just figured this place would make an interesting story. But I can see I was wrong.”
The guard was noticing things also. He stared past Brent toward Anita, presumably toward her camera. Then he appeared to realize that Brent was hiding a microphone next to his leg.
“We don’t want any trouble,” Brent said.
“Of course not. You’re right. This place is really fascinating. Why don’t you stay right where you are. I’ll go find the guy you need to talk to about permission to do a story.”
He motioned for them not to move, then turned and went into the small building, where he shifted the object he’d been dragging so it couldn’t be seen any longer. Then he disappeared into the darkness.
“Anita, let’s go,” Brent said urgently. He pivoted and saw that she held the camera at her side, a seemingly innocent position.
But the camera’s red light was conspicuous. Regardless of how frightened Brent felt, he was elated that she seemed to have recorded everything.
The van was pointed away from the observatory. Anita rushed to the vehicle’s side hatch and shoved the camera onto a seat.
“There are bodies in that truck,” she said starkly.
“Yes, and he was dragging another body from that shed. What the hell happened here?” Brent hurried toward the van’s passenger door. His lungs felt starved for air, as if he was running a hundred-yard dash.
Anita rushed toward the front of the van, desperate to reach the driver’s door as quickly as she could.
Blood spurted from her left arm.
She dropped.
Brent gaped, suddenly aware of shots-loud and rapid, as if from a string of huge firecrackers. Something zipped past him. Metal clanged repeatedly. He swung toward the observatory and saw that the guard was standing in the open door of the shed, firing an assault rifle. The three rows of fences acted like screens, the chain links and wire deflecting a lot of the bullets. Chunks rose from disintegrating metal. High-voltage sparks flew.
Feeling the heat of a bullet nicking his ear, Brent rushed to Anita and dragged her to the front of the van, out of the guard’s sight. A month earlier, he’d done a story about a gunfight between three bank robbers and a solitary policeman. The policeman had survived be- cause he’d taken cover behind the front of his cruiser, behind the engine, which-Brent was told-could stop just about any bullet.