nted the gun at him, gripping it in both hands. «I'd suggest you give up," Valenti said. The man complied, and lifted his arms into the air. «Turn around," Valenti said, and the man did. Valenti wasn't wild about hitting a man who had already surrendered, but he knew he couldn't risk letting the man flee or raise an alarm. He swung his right arm again, smacking the back of the man's head with the full force of the sap glove. The Man in Black crumpled to the floor, unconscious. Elsewhere in the house, Valenti heard a sharp crackle of electricity, and then another thud, as if a sack of potatoes had been dropped. «One down," he heard Duff say on the earpiece. «I got one too," Valenti said. «But where are the others?» Valenti heard the sound of footsteps coming up from the basement, and he sprinted down the hall to figure out where the person coming up would emerge. Duff arrived at the spot at the same time he did, the black mask covering her face. The basement door opened, and a young Hispanic man stepped forward out of the brightly lit stairwell. «Vohland? Goldberg? Is everything all " He stopped short as he saw the barrel of two guns pointed at him. Duff silently gestured toward the floor, and the man quickly took the hint, lying flat, with his hands behind his head. Duff squatted beside him and whispered, «How many in the house?» «Just three," the man said. «The others left.» Duff gestured to Valenti to watch the captive. «I'm gonna check it out," she said. «I don't think he's lying, but I'll do a quick recon to make sure.» As Duff began to search the house, the man said, «Who are you?» «Let's just say that your actions in Roswell this morning ticked off the wrong people," Valenti said. «Now shut up. We're the ones who'll be asking the questions.» Duff returned a minute later. «Nobody upstairs, and nobody else on this level. I'm going down.» She stepped over the supine man and descended the wide stairway into the basement. Shortly afterward, Valenti heard her on the earpiece. «All clear. But it looks like someone was recently held down here.» «How can you tell?» Valenti wanted to know. «There are still ropes tied to some of the chairs down here, among other things.» He heard a tinge of disgust in her voice. «My guess is the people they grabbed in Roswell were held and interrogated here, but have since been taken someplace else. I'm coming back up.» Duff reappeared from below, and quickly cuffed the Hispanic agent's arms behind his back. «Secure the others, and drag them over here," she said. Valenti went and got the unconscious man and cuffed him, then dragged him down the hall by the back of his heavy-duty field jacket. He winced a bit to see a smear of blood on the floor, but he saw that most of it seemed to be coming from a split lip. «The other ones in there," Duff said, gesturing. Valenti went to retrieve the second man, and saw that he was conscious and starting to rise from the floor. «Freeze," Valenti said. The man didn't. Instead he reached for something in one of the pockets of his paramilitary vest. Valenti fired a shot over the man's head. The bullet ripped into the drywall, sending a spray of fine white powder into the air. This apparently convinced him to stop moving, and to lay his hands on the ground. «You okay?» Duff asked over the earpiece. «Yeah," Valenti replied. «Just had to fire a warning shot. Somebody didn't listen very well.» He pushed a knee into the man's powder-covered neck, and yanked one arm up to cuff it, then the other. «You don't know who you're crossing," the man said, his words still slurred from the stun-gun zapping he'd received from Duff. But the venom behind his words was unmistakable. «I know exactly who I'm crossing," Valenti said. «And I know exactly who we're going to take down. You guys screwed with the wrong town.» Valenti grabbed the man's collar and dragged him into the hallway, depositing him beside the man he'd knocked unconscious. Then he got down and frisked them both, removing anything that either of them could possibly use as a weapon or as a tool to escape the cuffs. «What happened in there?» Duff asked. «Apparently your stun gun wasn't set high enough. He was coming to.» «I can fix that," Duff said, standing up. She crossed over to the second man and stuck the stun gun to the side of his chest, zapping him a second time. He convulsed once, then fell into unconsciousness. «Get him on his feet," Duff ordered, pointing to the Hispanic man. Valenti did as he was told. «We're headed back down," Duff said. «Give him a taste of his own medicine.» «Hey, I'm just part of the cleaning crew," the man protested as Valenti dragged him down the stairs. «I'm not even a full member of the Unit yet!» Duff followed them, and Valenti looked back to see a hint of a smile on her face. «See, now I know you're telling the truth. Because if you were a member of the Unit, you wouldn't have just said that there was a Unit.» She pointed to a room far to the left of the stairs. «Take him in there.» Valenti took the man down a hallway and inside the room. He was surprised that the room was mostly bare, except for a pair of chairs, a table in the center, and a Tshaped post against one wall. The lighting was bright, though the cream-colored walls muted the effect somewhat. «Strap him up to the post," Duff said, gesturing. Valenti took the struggling «cleaner» over to the post and removed his cuffs. As he prepared to put him into the heavy straps, the man said, «Look, I don't know anything. I can't tell you what I don't know.» «Even if you are just a junior agent with the scut job of cleaning up afterward, you know what came before the cleanup," Duff said as she walked over to the now-shackled man. She held the stun gun in one hand and manipulated its intensity dial with her other. «Here's how it's going to work.» She pointed to Valenti. «This man here is going to go upstairs and try to search through the files and computers I saw up there. You want to know why he's going up and not me? Because he's got more of a temper than me. If he questioned you first, I might not get the opportunity.» The captive agent apparently wasn't as green as he'd seemed, though he still seemed frightened. «Oh," he said. «This is where you do the good cop/bad cop routine, right? Listen, I " She steamrolled over him, brandishing the stun gun. «No, you listen, punk. You saw that other man bleeding, and you heard the gunshot. I think you'll count yourself lucky that it's just going to be you, me, and ol' Sparky here.» She toggled the stun gun's trigger, and a jagged sapphire bolt of electricity arced between its tips. «Save me some," Valenti said, smiling the most evil smile he could summon, though the thought of torturing anyone even someone who hosed the decks after the Special Unit conducted its «interviews» made him extremely queasy. He left the room quickly, aware that although they seemed to have the upper hand now, that could change at any moment. They had no time to waste. Moving quickly through the other basement-level rooms, he saw that one of them was outfitted similarly to the interrogation room where Duff was grilling their captive. This room had been in the process of being cleaned up when he and Duff had arrived. Two rooms. One far the Evanses, and one far the Parkers, he thought, now convinced that Duff's analysis had been right. Imagining what might have happened to them there and since filled him with dread. And rage. He considered the fate that awaited Kyle and the others if the Special Unit caught up with them. These bastards are going to pay. He went back up to the ground-level floor and checked on the two men who lay there, both apparently still unconscious. He closed and locked the front door and backdoor, just in case anyone else showed up unexpectedly, then sprinted upstairs. In one of the rooms were several boxes of files, as well as a couple of computers. He sat in a rolling chair and toggled one screen on. A muffled male scream came from two floors below, but Valenti ignored it. Whatever she's doing to him can't be any worse than what they did to my friends, he thought. Or what they will do to Kyle and Max and the others ij they get their bloody hands on them. Fifteen minutes later, Duff came upstairs. «He's told me everything he knows," she said, pulling off her mask. «Damn these things are hot.» Valenti grinned, but didn't feel the least bit of humor. «I don't even want to know what you did to him.» «Let's just say that he won't be fathering any kids for quite a while," Duff said. «Meanwhile, his kidneys will remind him about what happened here today every time he takes a leak.» Valenti winced. «A little too much information.» She shrugged. «Anyway, he confirmed that the Parkers and the Evanses were still alive and in relatively good shape when they were taken from here.» Thank God, Valenti thought, breathing a heartfelt sigh of relief. «So where were they taken?» «Some place near Los Angeles," Duff said. «He didn't know the location.» «Can you find it?» «We'll get going to L.A. very shortly," she said. «I'll find it. But how we get them out is gonna be another issue entirely. Sounds like where they got taken might be the main West Coast stronghold of the Special Unit.» She came over to his side. «Speaking of which, what have you found?» He gestured toward the computer screen. «Most of it's encrypted. I can't break it, and I'm afraid to try anything that might damage the files.» Duff studied the screen. «You think one of the kids could give it the alien whammy and get in?» «Maybe," Valenti said. He pointed over to the boxes of hard-copy files. «There are some records in there of some of their operations, but most of it is surveillance reports. You wouldn't believe how many laws they've broken in this county alone.» Duff snorted. «Sure I would. I work for the FBI, remember? I know what government groups are capable of doing in pursuit of their goals… good and bad.» She gestured around the room. «We need to get all this outside. We're taking it with us.» «Where?» «Back to that Brody Davis guy. Can you think of a better place?» Valenti grinned. «Nope. This stuff will fit right in with the rest of the files Brody keeps at the UFO Center.» He started to shut down the computers, then turned toward her. «You know, I don't mean to nag, but I've noticed you can be a mite bossy.» «Oh, really?» Duff put her hand on one hip and raised her eyebrow at him. «You wouldn't be forgetting that federal police powers supersede a local deputy's authority?» He hoisted a hard drive into the air. «Does it matter? It's not as though either one of us is going strictly by the book here.» He looked over at her and smiled a tired smile. «Still, I think we've made a helluva team. If I weren't already involved with Amy DeLuca, I might just come calling on you, Agent Duff.» She laughed. «If you were a full-figured woman who could cook a mean pot of jambalaya, you'd have a much better chance at me. But you'd have to go through my wife first.» She grabbed a stack of file boxes and headed out the door. Fifteen minutes later, they had finished loading all of the file boxes and hard drives onto a Jeep they had found in one of the exterior buildings, and were ready to drive all of it back to the copter. «Let's get the three goons out here where it's safe," Duff said, gesturing toward a wide expanse of lawn, shadowy and dark in the night. «Why?» «Come on, Jim. You really want to leave this place standing?» Another twenty minutes had passed by the time they got back to the copter, loaded it, and were airborne. Duff looked over toward Valenti. «Let's do a fly-over.» Moments later, they were over the Special Unit safe house. Smoke curled out of its windows, and Valenti could see flames licking up one of the side walls of the structure. The nearby outbuildings were on fire as well. Sitting safely out on the lawn, trussed up and completely naked, were the three Special Unit agents. Valenti looked over at Duff. «You scare me some," he said. «Imagine how you'd feel if you had really done something wrong?» Duff said, looking at the scene below. Valenti was glad Duff was on his side. She rolled the copter to the left and headed toward Roswell. Valenti knew that after having witnessed a Special Unit raid, Brody wouldn't much care to see a black helicopter landing on the street right in front of the UFO Center. But he knew that Brody would get over it quickly once he got a look at the chopper's cargo. 12. Above California I hings had gone as well as could be expected in Chicago. The tumultuous events of the past few days aside, Kyle thought things had actually gone exceedingly well. Kyle sat back in his seat aboard the private airplane Brody had chartered. Nevertheless, he remained tense. He tried yet again to clear his mind, waiting for the comforting ritual of meditation to carry him away. Once again, he found that he just couldn't focus, and abandoned the attempt. He looked to the seats ahead of him, where Jesse and Isabel snuggled, their long-delayed reunion still underway hours into the Los Angeles-bound flight. Though he felt happy for Isabel, he found it difficult to set aside the attraction he felt for her. He averted his gaze to the right, where Shelby was busy studying some documents, peering over a pair of glasses that perched on the very tip of her nose. She was drinking a cup of coffee at least her fifth one since Chicago, Kyle thought, prompting him to wonder if there was such a thing as a caffeine-based life-form and he realized that, for Shelby, this must have been a very long day indeed. Samejor all of us, he thought. Somewhere along the line, I must have just gotten used to days like this. Shelby turned, looked up from her papers, and noticed him watching her. «How are you doing, Kyle?» He shrugged. «Meditation doesn't appear to be an option right now. I'm too wound up. Can't meditate, can't nap…» She held up a sheaf of papers. «I'd offer to let you read some of these legal papers to put yourself to sleep, but somehow I don't think they'd really help.» Kyle smiled. «So, you seem to be handling this whole affair rather well. Is it just because you've known about the Evans family secret for a while? Or is something else keeping you calm?» Considering how much caffeine she'd ingested, Kyle wondered if she was secretly taking tranquilizers. Shelby removed her glasses, slipped them into a blouse pocket, and returned the smile. «Probably a bit of both. I read a lot of science fiction when I was a kid. Hung out with sort of an alternative crowd. Fat girls usually aren't firstdraft choices for high school friendships, so we loners and outcasts tended to gravitate toward one another. Maybe that gave me a wider perspective on life than the 'in crowd' had. So here I am, on the road with an alien fugitive and actually kind of cool with the whole idea.» She shuffled her papers into a neat pile and set them on the seat beside her. «My church had always taught me that we were the only beings in the universe, but that never made any sense to me. It seemed the height of pride and hubris to believe that of all the billions of planets out there even if one did believe in an all-knowing, all-seeing God that we would be the only planet with life.» «I never really went to church," Kyle said. «At least not after Mom left us. These days, I follow the Buddhist philosophy. At least as best as I can under the current circumstances.» «Philosophy beats dogma, at least in my book," Shelby said. «Philosophy is about asking questions and coming to understand the answers. You aren't spoon-fed somebody else's idea of the truth via dogma. You're not told what to think. Science fiction taught me a lot about possibilities, and to compare what is against what could be.» She pointed forward, toward Isabel. «I've known Isabel and Max since Phillip and Diane first adopted them. These days, I know something about them that I didn't know before. But they're still the same Isabel and Max, and I still love them. Were they hiding the truth about their secret lives for all these years? Are they part alien? Do they have powers and memories I don't understand?» She laughed. «Yeah. And I've got lots of questions about those things, believe me. But I'm not going to he frightened by the fact that they're different. The possibilities they offer me the possibilities they offer the world are limitless. They represent what could be.» «That's a pretty Zen-like view of things," Kyle said, finding Shelby's optimism oddly infectious. Shelby spread her hands apart and shrugged. «What good does it do me to fear them because they're different, because they're something I'm not? It's fear that makes people hate fat people, or gay people, or peo